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I’m really struggling to understand how having a hard time finding a girlfriend can make someone want to dress up as an anthropomorphic animal and have sex with other men in similar costumes. I can understand having those urges, getting into a relationship and it being too embarrassing to share so you just suppress it (although I’m sure many still explore them in porn), or being single because you have non-standard sexual interests and can’t find someone that fulfils you.
I do get that the internet/porn amplifies underlying fetishes and makes you seek more extreme stimuli, but I don’t think it can make a straight man gay or vice-versa, or a vanilla person interested in furry fandom.
“Girls don’t like me. Maybe I’m gay?”
This is unironically a thought I had in adolescence. I went to porn to test the hypothesis and it came back negative.
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Bisexual men are far more common than fully-gay men, so there is a substitution effect.
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I think the way that it works is that it provides an outlet for sexual frustration. Imagine that the old paradigm worked something like this:
Whereas the current framework is more like:
I think it's fairly easy for someone to be using a pornographic website to get their rocks off, and see something in the sidebar that is like, 90% of what they like, and something they don't know if they like or not; they 'try' it, and if it works, it starts featuring more and more in their sexual interests.
To take a (very) simple example; there are a large number of men who enjoy being dominant in bed; this is fairly normal. In a normal relationship, this looks like taking the lead, and a bit of dirty talk. In the world of internet pornography, this can involve things like semi-rape behaviour, inflicting pain, using bodily fluids to degrade, etc. The underlying desire is still the dominance; but the ways of seeking it are out of whack with what someone would do in real life. There's also a degree to which people aren't really that aware of their desires; they know they find it hot when the woman is in pain, but they don't necessarily get that the part they're fantasizing about is the woman submitting to their sexual desires.
You then run into the 'toaster fuckers' problem; whenever there is a large community online dedicated to a sexual fetish, it becomes easy to identify it as a legitimate orientation, which makes becoming involved in it much easier. If you aren't aware, the 'toaster fuckers' originated from an old meme (I want to say a 4chan greentext, but I'm actually not certain); the gist of it was that back in the day, if you wanted to fuck toasters, you were on your own; society would condemn it, and you'd never find another person who would admit to liking it. Nowadays, you can go online and find people who are telling you that it's okay and they're just another persecuted group. But say you're the person from my example: you go online and discover that there is a huge community dedicated specifically to inflicting pain as part of their sexual expression; and further, they actively want more members for their group. You now don't have to deal with lots of women rejecting you; you have a group that wants you, and your mind is already oriented towards the 'inflicting pain' as being the important part of the sexual experience. In that sense, it may matter less that you have a physical woman in front of you, as your brain is saying to you 'pain is sexual'.
So the reason that obtaining a girlfriend short circuits the whole process for a lot of people is that the original fetish is something that they can explore with a partner without getting all the weird extra stuff that the algorithm is pushing on them. Before I got a girlfriend, the above is actually super similar to what I went through; I didn't 'get' that my underlying desire was for a woman to submit to me, all I knew is that I found some of the more degrading pornography to be super hot. When I managed to get a girlfriend, what I realized was that I found her wanting me, and being willing to do whatever I wanted to be even hotter; it meant that paradoxically, all the things I thought were true about my sexuality were wrong, and what I really liked was just having someone who desired me.
If I'd been a bit less of an antisocial curmudgeon, I could easily have seen myself falling into this sort of community (probably the BDSM community instead of the furries, but I think it applies there). Sexual frustration can make you do weird things, because it's hard to be lonely.
Oh man, this reminds me of way back in the day, an infamous court case about a bunch of (I want to say gay but I'm not entirely sure) guys who got put up on charges for nailing their dicks to planks of wood, and the judge thought this was evidence of craziness, and there was some condemnation afterwards of him for being so judgemental towards adults doing consensual stuff in the privacy of their bedrooms. Because thinking that nailing your dick to a plank is not normal behaviour is so small-minded and homophobic, yes?
Yep, here's the case. Operation Spanner is even funnier when you know what spanner means in British/Irish slang:
EDIT: Oh my gosh, Keir Starmer was even involved back then, as one of the critics!
If he was running for election in the USA, I imagine the attack ads would write themselves: "So, Keir, you still in favour of guys nailing their dicks to planks of wood?" 'Unrepresentative makeup of the judiciary' - "Starmer wants more judges who are out-and-out perverts on the bench". It would make Kamala's "government-funded sex change ops for illegal immigrants" seem like small potatoes 🤣
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It was indeed a greentext:
Earliest I found was this 2017 pic, and a 2024 repost with slightly different wording.
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