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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29345 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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To Revive Sex, Ban Porn (paywalled, but it's very short, and I'll quote the relevant bits):

To date, 21 US states have enacted legislation requiring pornography websites (websites with over one-third explicit content) to use stringent age verification systems. Yet minors can easily find their way around such age-walls with the use of a virtual private network (VPN), as well as by searching around the seedier corners of the internet. But a new bill introduced to Michigan’s senate by Rep. Josh Schriver on September 11 far surpasses any previous porn bans.

House Bill 4938 would ban access to any “depiction, description, or simulation” of sexual acts, and to punish the distribution of any such content as a felony, punishable up to 20 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. This far-reaching ban includes content designed “to sexually arouse or gratify” (including erotic writing, AI, ASMR, and manga), transgender content, as well as the creation of VPNs.

It goes without saying that this bill, and any equivalent legislation, will not pass, even at the state level (at least not without some more shifting of the Overton window). But given the coordinated attack that is currently being launched on pornography (via payment processors and age verification laws) throughout the Western world, there are clearly a number of individuals who wish they could simply ban porn entirely.

Though the bill is unlikely to be passed, the responses to it have proved revealing. In the eyes of critics, it represents a revival of Victorian-era puritanism. But the idea that these bans will suppress eros is misplaced, because pornography consumption leads not to oversexualization but to de-sexualization. Porn bans are therefore more likely to revive eros than to suppress it.

Revive what, exactly? And suppress what?

To take one of the most basic consequences of a blanket ban on all content designed "to sexually arouse or gratify": pornographic art depicts a number of scenarios and ideas which are impossible to physically realize. These include but are not limited to: mind control, body swapping, magical gender transformations, transformation into animals, transformation into inanimate objects, inflation and shrinking, petrification, nullification (of the entire excretory and digestive system), exotic anatomy (authentic male pregnancy and birth, people with far more limbs than would ever be practical, etc), aliens, angels and demons, and undoubtedly many more that I'm forgetting.

Plainly, all of these concepts (insofar as they are presented in such a way that their sexual dimension is made manifest) would be straightforwardly suppressed by any blanket ban on pornography. We would end up with the curious consequence that they could find no expression in material reality whatsoever: neither through the act itself, nor through fiction. Which raises the obvious question as to why people would be so afraid of something that's impossible to begin with.

Pornography kills the subtlety needed to maintain erotic tension. “A lot of people are now learning about sex from porn,” Anne says. When they enter into a sexual encounter, “they already have a set of ideas and moves that are ‘hot,’ and are what they think they want in bed.” Porn teaches people to follow a predetermined script rather than to read the cues of their partner.

Man.

I gotta teach these kids about subtlety. They know nothing.

"Subtlety" is when you're sitting in front of the fireplace with your girl on a brisk Autumn afternoon, her head resting gently on your shoulder, everything going perfectly right with the world, the demonic forces that are constantly threatening to tear you apart have finally abated for once. But you realize -- and "realize" isn't even the right word for it honestly, because "realize" implies a definite instant where something leaps forward into consciousness and makes itself manifest for the first time, whereas the phenomenon we're dealing with here is a lot more indeterminate, it's something that's "always-already" (I hate that word but it is useful sometimes) hovering on the border between consciousness and unconsciousness, caught between two modalities, but we'll still use "realize" because it's the best word we've got -- you realize that as much as you love this girl, she will never be a 100 ft tall dragon who will take you into her dragon womb, connect an umbilical cord to you, and genetically rewrite your body so that you too become a dragon. And you have to live with that. It's something that you'll just have to deal with going forward. One day at a time. This is, we can hypothesize, if not a "subtle" feeling itself, then at least something that could aspire to be a gateway to subtle feelings.

It’s worse for porn actors, a class that is expanding as more people create pornographic content. Erica, a former porn actress, told me that the process of filming porn is “mechanical and exhausting”—and hard to forget. Even after she gave up acting in porn films, the memory of recording porn became “a barrier to being present” while having sex with her partner. She ended up having to force herself “to conjure up sexual images in her head” because she was unable to respond to the sexual stimuli presented by her partner.

If someone is experiencing physical sexual dysfunction, then they should of course address that.

But if you're feeling moral guilt over not being fully present, then my good ol' fashioned practical advice would be: stop. I give you permission to stop beating yourself up over it. "Full presence" is a mythological construct, a yearning for an unmediated pre-linguistic experience that can never be realized. So just don't worry about it anymore. (Perhaps dissolving some of these worries will dissolve some of the animus against pornography as well.)

Mystery has been further steamrolled by the imperative to select from a pre-packaged array of sexual identity labels on offer today. Their increasingly mimetic, cookie-cutter-like quality spares one the drama of having to wrestle with the complexity of sexual desire.

Sure. But that's wokeism's fault, not the fault of pornography as such.

We might go so far as to suggest that the complexity of desire as such is best brought to the foreground in art, and not in "reality".

There lies the paradox of our society, which celebrates porn while being anxious to prove we are on the right side of history. We are averse to confronting the gray areas of human nature, which are precisely what make life fascinating. The chances are slim that House Bill 4938, even in the unlikely event it is signed into law, will stop Michiganders from consuming porn. But if there is any hope for making America sexy—and a little less boring and predictable—again, we need the imposition of restraints that force us to revive our collective imagination.

Yes, the gray areas of human nature, like bizarre and objectionable pornographic content, so why are you trying to ban it?

Pornography is a great example of my favourite question for politicians, "What is a real problem in society that you don't believe the government should do anything about?"

The law is trying to change culture, when culture must change before the law does. I think porn is too normalized in today's culture, owing to sexual liberation and the toaster fucker problem. Trying to ban it won't work when people still want porn. The problem is that it's acceptable to talk about jerking off to porn as if it's something that should be encouraged rather than getting it on with a real person.

I'd argue the social normalization of the porn industry reached a peak in the West about 20 or 30 years ago, and a reversal has been palpable since then. I mentioned it before here. So the article is probably correct about the overall trend.

I think it's too early to tell. It's more acceptable now to criticise porn and masturbation, sure. But there are still many communities on the Internet where porn consumption is not shamed. Maybe you wouldn't talk about porn in polite society, but that's not a problem if you only socialize in these bubbles, and nobody can force you to talk to other people. Will the broader culture shift to be anti-porn enough for a porn ban to be successful? Hard to say.

I'm against this law because, even ignoring moral policing (and I'm against moral policing), how will it be enforced? Will Michigan set up their own GFW? Round up everyone and force them to install spyware? Install hypersensitive mics in every neighborhood and use ML to detect porn sounds? Imagine the money, resources, and time needed to prevent people from doing something in private that, right now, is widely accepted and extremely common. Money that could've been spent on, for example, lowering taxes or improving infrastructure.

This is different than CSAM, which is widely condemned and already illegal. There are no multibillion dollar websites distributing CSAM, you can't get easy access to it just by crossing state lines or using a VPN, and almost nobody is defending it (people defending basic rights like encryption and control over their own devices, e.g. opposition to ChatControl, aren't defending CSAM; those things would lower CSAM but have much worse consequences).

If this were to ever become law (and fortunately I doubt it), I bet it will be selectively enforced. Politicians in office and their families will watch whatever porn they desire and brag about it, but their opposition and "enemy tribe" celebrities will be charged on the smallest suspicion. Even if they genuinely don't watch porn, they could be indicted on fake evidence, and considering people thought "Shut up and Dance" was plausible, maybe even convicted.

Moreover, if cops have any incentive to prosecute this besides lawfare, lots of stupid but harmless people will be wasting their lives and taxpayer dollars in prison (as opposed to, worst case, wasting their lives more comfortably and wasting less taxpayer dollars at home). I can't imagine Michigan implementing anything that isn't trivial for anyone with the most basic technical knowledge, or basic ability to read and follow instructions, to bypass. But there are a lot of people who are very dumb, very tech illiterate, very unaware of current events, and very horny.

This is just another instance of americans forgetting that other countries exist. There are places that ban porn. South korea is one such nation and as we can see south koreans are having lots of hot sex as the author of this article would predict. Gender relations are at an all time high too. While rates of sexual assault are at an all time low. With results like these I can't see why anyone would oppose a porn ban!

In what practical sense of the word is porn banned in South Korea?

In the sense porn is illegal to own, make or distribute.

Does that practically bar South Koreans from watching porn?

Can you please state clearly what you're arguing for? Cause "Porn bans decrease the amount of sex people have, exacerbate the gender divide, increase sexual assault rates and don't even prevent people from accessing porn" is not a very compelling case in favor of porn bans.

If you argue that porn was banned in the USSR or is banned in Iran for example, than my cursory knowledge of the matter will compel me to agree with you, because in these cases state control of the media and the country’s borders was sufficiently thorough that whatever level of cultural presence illegal pornography had was bound to be marginal. If your argument is that it’s banned in South Korea, a late-stage capitalist cyberpunk hellscape where I imagine a large segment of the population is addicted to the internet, a society that is usually said to be overall conservative but where the cultural heritage of ancient Korea has zero significance, I’ll not assume that whatever law it is that is technically on the books regarding this matter will limit porn use to any significant degree.

I assure you, porn was no less difficult to acquire in the ussr or iran than south korea.

It's interesting to see how porn has become somewhat of an obsession not only at opposite sides of the political/cultural spectrum, but all across it. Depending on the group, it's an issue of free speech even if it is kind of icky, it's sexual expression, it's destroying the family and the children, it's an unavoidable by product of digital technology, it may be consenting adults - but also inextricably linked to human trafficking, and on and on and on.

My idea for why porn keeps occupying this position is because it forces a question that individualism doesn't resolve well. "Two consenting adults with a camera" paired with "a private person in their own home" should be a pretty cut and dry issue of personal privacy within the liberal tradition (as in philosophical-political liberal tradition - not the generally center left of left political movement of the post WW2 USA).

But it isn't. It has been, and always will be, more weighty than that. This is because sex is something significant. We've all heard some version of the joke about when the little kid accidentally walks in on his Mom and Dad and the quick thinking father pulls the covers up and informs the wayward youth that he and Mommy were just "wrestling." This is because wrestling is something that can easily occur in public. And people of wildly different ages and genders can wrestle with one another without causing alarm, until that "wrestling" goes too far or seems to be less than innocent (side note: avoid and Sandusky references in the comments, it's too obvious of a joke). There's some sort of hard-to-define "line" about physical touch that isn't necessarily sexual but could be. This is where we get to use the famous line of "I can't necessarily define pornography, but I know it when I see it".

Individualism can't demarcate that line effectively because we all have an innate sense that sex is something more than wrestling, more than shaking hands, more than a hug, more than laughing together. But how much more and to who / whom and in what context will be defined an infinite number of ways by billions of different subjects. To use an complementary example; define "horny." We all feel it (okay, I guess Scott doesn't. Whatever, nerd) but we don't feel it like we do heat, cold, wind, or wet (settle down). There's no danger in feeling horny for an extended period of time (no four hour dick jokes, please) and it pretty much self resolves one way or another (seriously, no dick jokes here!). But define "horny" for me. Don't cop out and say "The imminent feeling of sexual desire and arousal." I mean quantify and specific define it in general for all people. You can't. And you can't define porn either.

Even worse, the inability to define porn doesn't mean we can agree to disagree. One man's hot fetish is another man's "eww who the fuck looks at this shit?!" It can, and does, trigger a disgust reaction. All of a sudden, a subjective taste is catapulted, potentially, into an object sense of not only moral outrage but hostility to a private and vulnerable act (sex).

And so people try to bridge this gap with all of those secondary arguments; free speech / expression etc. Where non-individualists have at least much more cohesive and simple argumentative advantage is in plainly stating "Sex is special. No one person or even a group of people get's to say it isn't special. We should make special rules to protect the special things." It doesn't matter who finds what inherently "sexual" in nature. All that matters is that, should such a circumstance occur, we all agree that it is handled with a strict sense of decorum, discretion, respect, and sensitivity -- we keep "it" sacred.

So the problem with porn isn't what constitutes porn or the subject evaluation of pornographic content, it's that such content exists in ways that betray and lower its conceptual weight in society. Having a nudey mag stashed under your mattress in 1979 was to be in possession of a talisman of great power. That conceptual weight is no longer the case when every person with a cell phone has, in a Schoredinger's cat sort of way, unlimited insane-o porn in their pocket at all times.

I don't have a solution - in a legal sense - to the porn-free speech tension. I could see a kind of "Canadian Prostitution" paradoxical structure where having porn and acting in porn is legal but producing or facilitating the production of porn is not. Then, with a lot of prosecutorial discretion, amateurs who want to get weird all of the internet aren't targeted, but scammy/scummy bro-dude production studios are.

In a conceptual or philosophical sense, the solution to porn is realizing that is is significant inherently because of it's inherent sexual nature and then making the personal and active choice to avoid it in order to better preserve the better nature of sex in and of itself.

It's interesting to see how porn has become somewhat of an obsession not only at opposite sides of the political/cultural spectrum, but all across it.

To the extent that this is true, and I think it largely is, it mainly is so in my view because it's interpreted as another male problem in general. Take note that the female consumption of pornographic literature is reaching unprecedented levels at the same time but without inviting any negative reactions from the mainstream media.

Sorry for taking so long to respond to this. These are the kinds of replies that still make TheMotte worthwhile, so I appreciate it, I truly do.

we keep "it" sacred.

No arguments there.

We should make special rules to protect the special things.

Perhaps. But, what kinds of rules?

The Bible is special too. But Christians don't think we should ban the Bible in order to protect it. They think we should disseminate it as widely as possible precisely because it's sacred and it brings people into contact with the sacred. (In fact they arrange regular mass public gatherings where they come together to worship that which is considered sacred. Apply the same logic to sexuality and...)

How do we demarcate the sacred things that need to be disseminated from the sacred things that need to be protected? Do we have a schema outlining the different modalities in which something may be sacred?

The Bible is special too. But Christians don't think we should ban the Bible in order to protect it. They think we should disseminate it as widely as possible precisely because it's sacred and it brings people into contact with the sacred.

Maybe Protestant Christians, perhaps, but I know plenty of Catholics, at least, who think the Bible should have been kept in Latin and read in whole only by priests.

Fair enough! Catholics have always been very tolerant of iconography of Jesus though.

The Bible is special too. But Christians don't think we should ban the Bible in order to protect it. They think we should disseminate it as widely as possible precisely because it's sacred and it brings people into contact with the sacred. (In fact they arrange regular mass public gatherings where they come together to worship that which is considered sacred. Apply the same logic to sexuality and...)

I'll take this in good faith because I think you meant it that way. Obviously, there are different "special rules" for different things. Yes, the mass and general catchesis should be spread as far as possible. No, the same shouldn't be said for explicit sexual relations. Ha.

But I don't actually want to just drop a "This is what the Catholic Church says" style response here. THat wouldn't be helpful. I mean, as far as porn goes, the Catholic response is "100% pure evil, don't engage with it at all." Which I agree with. But I also live in America and do believe in free speech so, while on a personal level I am 100% anti porn, politically I can't just shout "perma ban!" and then walk away.

How do we demarcate the sacred things that need to be disseminated from the sacred things that need to be protected? Do we have a schema outlining the different modalities in which something may be sacred?

At the risk of channeling the spirit of Helen Lovejoy, I think we should think of the children. Meaning, as a rubric, is whatever the "thing" we're talking about something we would more or less be comfortable with in giving to children? So, right off the bat, this means that porn, booze, gambling, drugs, and guns have to have my ill-defined "special rules" consideration.

When I say "children" here I do literally mean minors. More conceptually, however, we can think of "children" to mean people who don't necessarily have the fully developed character or faculties to make generative decisions for themselves. To be clear, I'm not talking about the mentally incompetent or retarded here. I mean "normal" distribution IQ folks who have glaring inabilities to manage their own life.

Another possible rubric could be on "length of time it takes to fuck your life with x." You don't get addicted to porn after a single use. Smoking one pack of cigarettes won't give you lung cancer. On the other hand, you can go down to the liquor store right now and for $50 or less buy a quantity of alcohol that will 100% lead to death. Guns ... I mean, I don't even have to spell that out. I should probably point out here that "special rules" does not mean banning. In fact, "special rules" need not even be particular onerous. For example, I am as pro-gun as they get, but I do think purchasing a gun (from a business, not privately) should require 1) valid and current identification and 2) proof of no convictions for violent felonies (perhaps with some sort of age out provision - haven't thought it all the way through).

I am always suspicious of the State and think it should be as small as possible. I wish a lot more work of social management would be done by local culture. Bring back slut shaming, but don't make laws against being a slut. Bring back social condemnation for being a drunk, but don't make purchasing limits on the amount of booze I can get. Real freedom is preserving the ability to make choices, even bad ones, so long as there isn't an oversized risk of collateral damage to others. I'm not advocating for the freedom to drink and drive, for instance.

So I don't support a State level ban on porn or impossible-to-enforce-and-also-1984-style digital age verification attempts. But I do support the return to the common idea that porn is for weirdo perverts. Trevor Wallace, a comedian I sometimes have pop up on my nonsense YouTube account, often has porn "actors" on his podcast and in his comedic clips. This does make me sad and its made me shy away from his content more because it normalizes the "everyone uses porn" meme. That isn't true. It was never true. Furthermore, on the topic of cultural memes, I think it's pretty easy to draw a line from the sexual revolution of the late 1960s to the ridiculous sexualization of society today along with all of the mental gymnastic that accompany it.

I'll take this in good faith because I think you meant it that way.

Very much so, yes. It's important that we think clearly about what we mean when we talk about "the sacred". And the best way to clarify your concepts is to stretch them to their logical limits, so that you're forced to draw distinctions and clearly demarcate the boundaries of things.

But I don't actually want to just drop a "This is what the Catholic Church says" style response here. THat wouldn't be helpful.

It would be extremely helpful, if it were genuinely a part of your ultimate motivations. I'm less interested in debating policy and more interested in understanding why different people think the way they do, regardless of what those reasons turn out to be. (Sometimes people aren't honest about why they think what they think. Sometimes they genuinely don't know why they think what they think, or they're lying even to themselves. That makes it a difficult endeavor.)

At the risk of channeling the spirit of Helen Lovejoy, I think we should think of the children. Meaning, as a rubric, is whatever the "thing" we're talking about something we would more or less be comfortable with in giving to children?

Sure. But that doesn't really seem to be addressing my question, because this new criteria (about what's appropriate for children) seems totally orthogonal to the dimension of the sacred. The sacredness of the phenomenon or object in question is no longer relevant; we just have to look at whether it's safe for kids (or addictive or whatever other criteria you want to propose) and that will determine what types of prohibitions we need. But the reason I asked the question in the first place is specifically because I wanted to clarify what exactly the sacredness of sexual acts consists in.

I do believe that you (and not just you of course, but many people, both religious and non-religious) correctly perceive that there is a certain type of spiritual power in sexuality, and that this power can be dangerous if left unchecked, and this perception is what prompted you to use the word "sacred". A spiritual power that is not present in booze and guns and etc. We can quibble over whether "sacred" was the correct word choice, or if the category of the sacred needs to be subdivided further in order to account for different types of sacred phenomena, and so forth. But regardless, I think you were at least directionally correct.

Oh, cool! Yeah, that's my missing the point a little bit. Thanks for writing the clarification.

In that case then, my personal method of thinking about the sacred in the context of the sexual is pretty straightforward:

  1. God created everything with a purpose in mind. The Thomistic view on this is that everything has a 'telos' or properly ordered end (or goal) to it.
  2. In the context of man and woman and sex, the telos is eternal unification (marriage) and procreation. This is the Catholic view on not only sex, but marriage. The well ordered purpose and end of a marriage is to create children and then raise them in virtue (Side note: For couples who cannot conceive, a marriage is still good and valid so long as it results in a mutual support for sanctification - 'becoming a saint' - in the course of life. You don't divorce because of problems with conception).
  3. Sex is a sacred act because it results in the creation of life and is also a manifestation of true feelings of love between man and woman only so long as it is performed licitly in the context of the sanctioned sacrament of marriage.
  4. To have sex outside of marriage is to violate the laws governing sex.

To comment more specifically about porn:

  1. Porn is a disordered use of sex. It isn't done within the bounds of marriage with the intent of conception. Even in a strange edge case where two married people are filming themselves having sex with the expressed purpose of conceiving, this is still disordered because the specific character of sex reserves it exclusively to the participants - man and wife. Sex is never "shared" with spectators.

  2. Masturbation, likewise, is a disordered use of one's sexual organs for the purpose of self gratification rather than towards the well ordered end of procreating (again, within the context of marriage).

A lot of it comes down to what a thing of any kind is supposed to do - what I started with, it's "telos." When you misuses that thing, you're sinning because you're out of concert with the will of God. Of course, there are many different degrees of severity to this. Mortal vs venial sins and all that. But the underlying assumption is that there is a way to all things and that that way is defined by God and also totally knowable by man.

I am allowed to judge people who are having pre-marital sex and using porn because I want them to be in sync with God's natural law and ordering of the universe because it will be to their greater happiness, joy, and benefit.

Translated to the more secular, I don't like porn because I think it's bad for everyone involved - the porn viewer, the porn maker, the porn producer, etc. All of these people will be spiritually worse off for having engaged with what is an intrinsically disordered act.

I just wanted you to know that I’m not ignoring this, but I only have so much time in the day for typing long replies, and this thread is already buried. I’ll save my thoughts on this for the next time this topic recurs.

I appreciate you.

Finally Michigan is tackling all the mandatory porn viewing, which is the 2nd largest human rights issue after the mandatory gay furry sex in the state. Oh wait, both porn viewing and gay furry sex are entirely optional and voluntary.

We allow adults a lot of behaviors which are unlikely to lead to good life/health outcomes. A 21yo can drink, smoke, watch porn 8h per day, ride a motorcycle, join a gang, enlist with the marines, have a kid, buy a gun despite suicidal ideation, persist on a cyanide-rich diet, reject Jesus, get a swastika tattoo on the forehead, etc.

The basic concept of being an adult in a free country is that people are allowed to make decisions even if others think that they are bad decisions. Society should only become involved when your actions threaten others. This is why DUI is a crime -- if you want to drive blackout drunk on your own racetrack, we should just fine your estate for any emission violations if you burn down in your car. Sure, we have some unprincipled exceptions (drug criminalization) which went just fine (the War On Drugs will be won any day now), but mostly we let adults do their own thing.

--

The other thing which irks me is the presumption that porn leads to an inadequate equilibrium.

Before porn was widespread, a successful 30yo married guy who was into 19yo's had basically to suck it up. Just kidding, he would just woo some 19yo into being his lover. Because most 19yo women were very unwilling to just be his fuckbuddy, this would require extensive emotional manipulation, often leading to predictable heartache, unwanted pregnancies or the destruction of his family.

In general, I think the amount of suffering the average male sex drive has caused for either himself or the people near him has been quite high, historically. Most of the gender difference in sex drive was filled with coercive sex work, malicious seduction, rape, or else with sexually frustrated men -- which are not great for stability of society, generally.

Technology has solved this problem. Today, that 30yo married guy can just bookmark the teen category on pornhub and jerk off whenever he feels like it, with about zero of the negative externalities of having an affair. As a porn viewer, I have to say that as far as handling your sex drive goes, porn is pretty great. Sure, good sex would be better, but given gender preferences, the ability to have great sex with another human whenever you feel like it will not be available to most men, nor was it available historically. Basically, a world with porn is a world where sexual frustration is capped at some moderate level, even if you are into weird stuff which is infeasible in the real world.

While I am sure that the current dating market is a local equilibrium quite far from the Pareto frontier, banning porn to get people to have more good sex seems about as plausible as burning down the institutions of the bourgeois state in the hope that they will automatically be replaced with better communist institutions, which is to say, my hopes that a country will randomly stumble in a better equilibrium are very slim indeed.

Before porn was widespread, a successful 30yo married guy was (at least to the West of the Hajnal Line) typically someone who has been married for a few years already, to a woman 3-6 years his junior, plus he was probably someone with more or less ample experience in sex before marriage. Unless he had a specific penchant for 19-year-olds and nobody else, which doesn't seem likely, it's not like he experienced his situation as greatly frustrating.

On another note, I find it curious that you're not addressing all the negative externalities of the porn industry at all.

In general, I think the amount of suffering the average male sex drive has caused for either himself or the people near him has been quite high, historically. Most of the gender difference in sex drive was filled with coercive sex work, malicious seduction, rape, or else with sexually frustrated men -- which are not great for stability of society, generally.

Technology has solved this problem. Today, that 30yo married guy can just bookmark the teen category on pornhub and jerk off whenever he feels like it, with about zero of the negative externalities of having an affair.

This bit here just seems like a generalized argument against letting humans breed at all.

In any event I'm sure the Third Worlders who inherit your senile decrepit demographically-imploded civilization will deeply appreciate your commitment to individual liberty. The future is an 85 year old transhumanist babbling about how a dynamic forward-thinking society could have solved this problem through technology, while being beaten to death in a slum.

you realize that as much as you love this girl, she will never be a 100 ft tall dragon who will take you into her dragon womb, connect an umbilical cord to you, and genetically rewrite your body so that you too become a dragon.

Is, uh... is that something you are looking for in life?

But the difference here is that if I knew my wife had that fetish, I'd make an attempt to put on the dragon suit once in a while even if I found it boring. Yes, it's sex work (those things aren't exactly cheap, they're hard to clean, and I'd probably have to find some other way to finish myself off that night, and a lot of guys really despise having to do this), but it's in the contract.

This is just women bitching about having to do sex work, and they feel their negotiating position would be stronger if men could not say "but the women on my computer screen do that without much problem, why don't you?". Whether they're correct or not is irrelevant to how they feel.

"A lot of people are now learning about sex from porn,” Anne says.

Femcel complains about having to have the kind of sex men want in order to maintain a relationship, blames other women who show off the goods for free for making men want that kind of sex.
Hear now from Uncle Tom Aunt Tammy about how showing off the goods destroys your ability to please a man.
More news at 11.

It's always just frigid women trying to make sex rarer so they get paid more (read: have better chances of landing a man, as demanded by their biology) for putting out less. It's the distaff counterpart of the incel "state-mandated GF" thing, and just as fundamentally selfish.

I’ll not reject this interpretation but we can look at this more charitably even without subscribing to femcel views (whether femcels actually exist is highly debatable in itself, but that’s another subject). I think it’s entirely understandable that many bog standard women find it tiresome and cringey to live in a culture where they’re implicitly expected to engage in a sexual arms race for the attention of the men they find desirable, after the female sexual cartel has collapsed. It’s cringey in the same way normal men cringe at the sight of an army of simps competing for the social attention of e-thots.

blames other women who show off the goods for free for making men want that kind of sex.

Just wait a year or three until the free image and video models manage to combine decent prompt understanding with uncensored training material and stock up on popcorn.

If someone is experiencing physical sexual dysfunction, then they should of course address that.

But if you're feeling moral guilt over not being fully present, then my good ol' fashioned practical advice would be: stop.

YMMV and so forth, but I should think a suitably galaxy-brained anti-porn interlocutor would respond by saying that these aren't really two different things--perhaps "full presence" is an unnecessarily obscurantist way to describe whatever it is we're going for here, and by the same token "physical sexual dysfunction" obscures the existence of psychogenic sexual dysfunctions with physical manifestations, and "causes" in the following should be taken to read "reliably predisposes with reasonable probability in a reasonably large fraction of the relevant population", but porn causes lack of full presence which in turn causes sexual dysfunction, and sexual eufunction is more important than the enjoyment of porn. Do I, myself, actually believe this? Eh, not enough to bet my life on it, but enough to avoid watching porn.

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