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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27624 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Really feels like we managed to get the worst of both the sexual revolution AND the evangelical movement.

Sex is no longer taboo or 'sacred' in the slightest. Women will wear painted-on clothes at the gym and go around braless in public. Even if she isn't selling nudes on OF, she might be selling feet pics or is at least thirst trapping on Instagram.

BUT, you aren't allowed to stare at her ass or chest. Unless of course you go online and pay for a subscription, then you get to see ALL the goods. But only digital interaction allowed. Can't approach a woman in real life unless she approves, either.

Thanks to cell-phone cameras, women can send nudes to any guy they find attractive. This is not a big deal, "it's their body!" But thanks to cell-phone cameras, women are not as prone to whip out their boobs at a party on the off chance it gets posted online. Oh, and of course if you post a woman's nudes online you can often literally be prosecuted for revenge porn. Because sex and nudity are no longer a big deal, you see.

Of course you get the dating apps that make hookups much more frictionless. Yet you can't ever SAY you're just looking for FWB, and advertising that you're just there to bang as many people as possible is verboten. Unless you say you're polyamorous, then its somehow kosher.

There's like 30 different derogatory slang terms/innuendos to describe being in a noncommittal, ambiguous, and completely sex-based 'relationship,' just don't suggest to someone that they're making things harder for themselves and should try dating for marriage, what are you a prude?

You're allowed to complain about NOT getting sex, but if anyone hears you you're getting called an Incel.

If you try and convince a woman that she should pick a nice guy, settle down, and have kids with him as soon as possible, its exploitation and controlling womens' bodies. You convince her to become an online prostitute the very day she turns 18, though, putting her body out there for any given man to pay to see, you're just empowering her to be independent or whatever.

And now of course they're putting further legal restriction on the access to porn ANYWAY, right as we're getting Titty-based commercials on TV again.

I overstate, but its so annoying to live in a world where sex is both not a big deal thanks to contraceptives and the lifting of taboos... AND its jealously guarded by women (mostly), still stuck behind paywalls and used to extract resources, and people who aren't having it are still targeted with derision.

Its as if everyone knows that that's a critical component of human flourishing, but we're all required to politely agree that treating sex as anything other than a 'boring' commodity to be dispassionately traded makes you a weirdo fundamentalist or something.

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.
The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

-CS Lewis, Screwtape Letters

On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.

-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

-Rudyard Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings

It's a problem that was predicted well in advance.

My kingdom for something resembling 'authenticity' in a romantic relationship.

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