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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8878 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?

"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.

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.

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