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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32157 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Porn is not oriented around vanilla sex in the missionary position leading to pregnancy and babies within wedlock. There may be breeding fetish stuff out there but that's not the same thing. Porn is part of the wider cultural shift on sex and marriage, but the model of porn is freely available sex of any and every kind, where everyone is enthusiastic, and no act is too degrading (unless the degradation is part of the whole kink). And as sexual acts become liberalised and introduced into real life (heterosexual sodomy, anyone?) then porn has to look for more and more extreme taboos to tickle the jaded palate looking for novelty. Jokes about incest aside, why else is this a category that comes up? Barely legal? Other stuff that I have no idea what it is, but it's surely out there?

Porn is not a safety valve, it's a sign of a culture that suffers like the Baudelaire poem:

I am like the king of a rainy land,

Wealthy but powerless, both young and very old,

Who contemns the fawning manners of his tutors

And is bored with his dogs and other animals.

Nothing can cheer him, neither the chase nor falcons,

Nor his people dying before his balcony.

The ludicrous ballads of his favorite clown

No longer smooth the brow of this cruel invalid;

His bed, adorned with fleurs-de-lis, becomes a grave;

The lady's maids, to whom every prince is handsome,

No longer can find gowns shameless enough

To wring a smile from this young skeleton.

The alchemist who makes his gold was never able

To extract from him the tainted element,

And in those baths of blood come down from Roman times,

And which in their old age the powerful recall,

He failed to warm this dazed cadaver in whose veins

Flows the green water of Lethe in place of blood.

Porn is a natural enough part of every culture and society, but when part of the entire package of divorcing sex, pleasure and gratification from reproduction and family formation and all the other challenges to conventional or traditional set-ups, then it also becomes corrosive, its own form of wire-heading.

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