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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   16489 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?

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.

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