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Notes -
"I prefer the hands-on touch you only get with hired goons."
or
"'Abstinence for abundance' is like 'fighting for peace'"
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There's a Harper's article making the rounds, and before I link it, I'll let you know what it's about lest anyone click through to a level of detail they'd rather not get. It's about an online subculture ("gooners") who not only watch pornography, but veritably worship it: reveling in how addicted they are to it, often communally. If you want much, much, much more detail than that, here's the link.
I'm not here to dig into any lurid details, myself. (The biggest thought that comes to mind is how, though Abrahamic proscriptions against pornography usually fall under "thou shalt not commit adultery," this behavior seems to be edging
[ahem]its way under the prohibition against worshiping images, as that seems more literally what's happening.) I'm not so much interested in meta-voyeuristically gawking at the porn-viewers--Instead I am here to point a finger at Ezra Klein.
Now, the author of the Harper's article (who is not Ezra) muses at the end on what brought about this porn-obssession subculture in terms of the pull-factors of modern technology. Is this not just another example of algorithm-driven addiction? Are we not all gooners these days? But he only briefly touches upon push-factors driving people away from the healthy alternatives he laments, such as:
And that evokes this article of Ezra Klein's. Pull-quote:
Well, here we are.
And is this not better, from that point of view? Aren't we better off, from the perspective of preventing rape, for each could-be rapist neutralized somehow? Doesn't each man taken off the street and holed up in a cave, never to be met in real life again, give women less to fear? I doubt it. For one, it's not the right kind of neutralization: male sexuality being indulged in any way at all (much less this extremely) without supervision always keeps the fear alive that it might one day burst its banks and turn into real rape. For two, the hoped-for outcome was clearly to scare men into being appropriately respectful of consent while still being willing. Unfortunately, there turned out to be a path of lesser resistance.
All this leads to the question of What Is To Be Done. To venture a very safe prediction, I predict that, if self-proclaimed decent human beings have their shot at fixing this gender-relations mess, they'll use the only method they know for such problems: turning some weapon against male behavior. (It's a patriarchal world, after all, which means that women are suffering more than they deserve and men are suffering less, so it would be unjust to use anything other than the carrot on women and anything other than the stick on men.) Blocking off this path-of-least-resistance to try to herd them back where they're wanted. Of course, that could very well just open up a new path-of-least-resistance other than what they want, and who knows what new horrors that will unleash.
If I had to make some suggestion - and this is always harder than making some complaint - all I would say is that perhaps some tactic other than inflicting fear or shame or pain might be called for at some point. (It is also probably a bad idea to use such tactics if they disproportionally work on the conscientious, like threats of long-term consequences always do. Discouraging the conscientious from sex and reproduction will have bad consequences, evolutionarily.)
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For a topic like this, I know that disclaimers are necessary:
Do I think that Ezra Klein or other feminists are primarily or even substantially responsible for a subculture of porn addicts? No, but the force they apply does push in that direction.
Am I recommending "men being allowed to rape" as being better than this or that social ill? No! But the thinking that supposes that that's the only alternative is going to be increasingly destructive.
Do I think that "gooning" as a subculture or practice has any redeeming qualities that should spare it from destruction? No, but rather: I think, for the would-be destroyers' own sake, and the sake of what they're trying to preserve, that they might not want to be so destruction-minded.
Do I think that "Spishak" motives can't really have anything to do with conscientiousness/neurosis, because anybody who'd engage in such disgusting practices can't possibly have any possibly-sympathetic motives, and so he must be lying? I do think it's possible that such feelings are real, though I of course know nothing more about the individual in question.
Do I think it's fair to hold that article against Ezra Klein's modern agenda of technocratic growth-seeking, even though 2014 was an eternity ago in the culture wars? Well- I admit I do.
Do I think that I've throat-cleared enough here? Of course not! Do I think that it's possible to throat-clear enough here? Of course not!
Very interesting article! Thanks for sharing.
I think his conclusion at the end of the article is pretty reasonable- people who get obsessed with porn are not that different from people who get obsessed with any other sort of internet content. If you spend 6 hours watching tik tok or K-dramas or twitch streams, you'll also end up feeling physically drained and kind of gross.
But then it sounds like the people he talked to are not just passively consuming the content, they're actually producing it, by putting a lot of effort into editing and curating it. And they're a community, actively talking to each other, encouraging (?) each other, or competing for status. Pushing each other to new extremes. This might be the only community these peop have, since most people are disgusted by this stuff, and their lifestyle doesn't lead to making friends easily.
It often seems that any kind of hetero mens' sexuality is taboo in polite society. LGBT people can have their pride displays, women can "own their sexuality" as a form of feminism, and everyone encourages. But when men talk about theirs, it's considered gross or threatening.
And like... it is. I get it. i really don't want to hear other guys talk about their sex fantasies, even if it's the same as mine.
But maybe that's something we can all get used to. Spend enough time on places like 4chan or certain discords and you do get used to it, even in its most extreme forms. Maybe there's room in polite society to allow men to express their sexuality a bit more, but still restrained. A middle ground, so that we can express ourselves without resorting to these unlimited anything-goes online spaces of depravity.
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From the original article:
Whatever conversation needs to be had about little boys getting traumatized by hardcore images at 10 and proceeding to spend 20-30h/ week frantically rubbing themselves to 27 windows' worth of simultaneous pumping penis images... the need for more tradwives is not at the heart of that conversation. If anything, tradwives are the shadow selves of egirls and thots: the two reciprocally determine each other within the same memetic system, and that system doesn't make a lot of sense beyond online porn.
Plenty of people have thought they could escape tedious self-loathing by using/ controlling/ hating/ destroying another person instead, but I don't think it ever really works that way.
Could you explain this? I don’t follow. Also, it would help if you could clarify what you mean by tradwives here; there are several very different ways the word is used, and I can’t figure out which you mean from context.
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Are they wanted? Men who get sucked into bizarre online cultures usually aren't just normal guys who tragically got corrupted by exposure to some electronic vice; they tend to be weird in a lot of other ways, too. Gooner culture probably just takes defective men who would never have amounted to much off the market.
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I tend to think that this is more or less inevitable, and Ezra Klein and feminists have essentially no responsibility for this. Even if there were no feminists and we were living in a tradwife paradise, the problem is that what a real relationship offers is pretty-well static. The woman available to the average man is a 5/10 and while gyms, plastic surgery and cosmetics have perhaps improved the sex-appeal of a 5/10 somewhat over the past hundred years, there is only so much you can do. Meanwhile technology is pushing the pleasure of porn to ever-greater heights. At some point in the future (if we aren't there already) AI VR porn, fleshlights and sex bots will so-surpass the thrill of real sex so dramatically it will be hard to deny. Even the most attractive woman on earth doesn't come with a literal motor in her pussy.
Everyone surely has some tipping point where the appeal of tech-assisted masturbation outweighs the appeal of real-life sex and any attendant social status. For men that are more anxious, have access solely to less attractive women or are more socially isolated and less affected by shaming their intersection point will come earlier. In a sense these men are just the canaries in the coal-mine, but as long as the technology continues to improve, it will come for all of us one day.
I think this is a real social problem beyond just porn and sex, tech-assisted super-stimuli generally. As I said, the offerings of real life relationships and activities are mostly static while the offerings of virtual ones are growing daily. Real life friendships vs AI chatbots/twitch streamers, video game achievements vs career achievements, pets (both virtual and real) vs children.
It took me a long time, but I eventually realized that the feminists were right all along. Sex (for men) isn’t about sex, it’s about power.
The motorized pussy might feel good. But you’ll know that you didn’t make another soul submit to you.
That isn't true, and your analysis of why someone might find that experience hollow misses the mark. Men don't want a mechanical vagina because they are not just sex machines and have a desire to be loved. You can pay a prostitute or buy a female simulacrum, but neither will ever love you and the experience will be hollow as a result.
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The feminists weren't right and Oscar Wilde only said the things he said because saying them made him sound clever.
I think a better model is that women find power desirable while conversely men find desire powerful.
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I wonder if the transhumanists will ever make that sort of thing happen. It kinda stands to reason, one would think - if you are gonna enhance your body why not get genitals that are super pleasurable for you and your partner?
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I think that the real trouble with fear and shame is not that it doesn't work in principle but that it can't be effectively wielded today.
Just imagine the amount of shaming and bullying that the 1950s guys would've been deploying against this stuff, against even the tamer /d/ threads. Metric tonnes of shaming! And that largely worked. But shaming is not something modern society is actually good at anymore. Huge resources are thrown into shaming racists yet there are a lot of racists around. Nobody cares so much anymore. In the 70's and 80's, shaming didn't stop gays from buggering eachother anonymously in bathhouses, making a human petri dish for diseases that would then kill so many of them (and others besides). If you read the infamous Salo thread, you can see the attitude of the scientists and doctors, how limpwristed and weak they felt in the face of an obvious public health emergency, like they'd be like 'please stop having sex and killing all these people' and then gays would bitch and complain that closing their sex/drugs bathhouses was like the Holocaust: 'Today the baths; tomorrow the ovens'. Ironically the would-be shamers felt more ashamed for even trying to shame than the ones who ought to be ashamed. As far as I know, the gays decisively won, Reagan is considered somehow at fault for HIV/AIDs and they continue on doing their thing now with expensive state-funded Prep drugs to hold off the consequences.
(rather confronting but since we're on the topic of confronting material) https://web.archive.org/web/20200618004225/https://salo-forum.com/index.php?threads/patient-zero-and-the-early-days-of-hiv-aids.3167/
And I see the same thing here. The Harpers journalist staring in at these people feels way more ashamed than the actual men involved. Total mismatch in willpower and determination.
Trying to use shame in the modern Western world today is extremely difficult.
To achieve success, you have to make a 'normal relationship' more cost-efficient than 'gooning'. Odds of success? Realistically, nil. What new relationship technologies have been developed in the last 100 years? No-fault divorce is scarcely even technology so much as relationship-sabotage.
Whereas in the techno-sexual sphere there are endless innovations! Television! Internet browsing! Photoshop! Livestreaming! Japanese weirdness! VR! AI waifus and chatbots!
If one side in a conflict is innovating while the other remains static, the former is sure to win. Even if the latter has all the good-coded stuff like 'having a normal one' and 'the power of love', then that only affects timelines, not the end result.
Because it isn't aimed at actual racists.
People of the type who are really being shamed have lost a lot of influence as a result.
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This sort of limp-wristedness/ losing slowly with dignity kind of stuff has been on my mind lately. What is it about the boomer and pre-boomer culture that lended itself to that, was it the post WW2 mythos? Christian blank slatism? Some sort of innate fear of being labeled fascist/totalitarian what have you?
They could have yes-chadded, but they literally gave in to being shamed by people who shouldn't have any job dispensing moral judgment.
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I have to ask, what's the problem here? To society, a problem is only a problem if it's a problem for women. Women still get their stud guys who will fuck them, and their nice guys who will marry them - not every man in the world will become neutered at all ages, there will still be outliers. No one cares enough about men, especially not... INCELS <gasp!> to want to change this situation in any way. There's far more then enough men around to ensure the human population keeps going and even if we have a bit of an Idiocracy effect, I'm sure it's mostly self correcting.
The left-liberal consensus is schizophrenic about pornography on a number of axes. Women producing it is good / empowering / entrepreneurial… but men consuming it is icky / pathetic / sexist, and you best not point out the logical contradiction in lauding suppliers while condemning consumers.
Scott wrote an article once about good personal evopsych behaviours in the ancestral environment (e.g. I shouldn’t marry a non-virgin woman because I’ll get STDs and questionable paternity) become enshrined as global cultural mores once civilization develops (e.g. all female purity is morally virtuous, even in women I have no intention of marrying, yay chivalry). My suspicion is that the low status of pornography consumption stems from a similar trajectory: (A) women don’t want their own mate-providers to abandon them for a younger prettier more fertile upstart, and this mutates over millenia into (B) a cultural more that coveting thy neighbours’ wife is morally wrong, and further into (C) that (any) male’s lust for anyone but their long term partner is evil, even if the man is an incel she personally would never touch, who doesn’t have a partner, and is lusting over a CGI woman who doesn't even exist.
The general heuristic is a lossy telephone-game from the actual evopsych concern, but false positives are better than false negatives from the XX POV.
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No there aren't. South Koreans will be an endangered species by 2100 if the 100% gynocentric sexual culture continues.
South Korea, Japan, and, yes, Poland have a serious fertility crisis right now. Maybe these women want to be with “chad”,[1] but those women contributing to Poland’s fertility crisis sure seem to complain when men from other countries, i.e. “Passport Bros” come to Poland and get together with them
[1] I have posted on my blog that the notion that 20% of the men are having sex with 80% of the women is not true
You've got a rather bad typo in that heading.
Fixed.
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