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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!
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.
I think in the memetic sense the tradwife is just LARP of an of 1950ies image of a wife - looking sexy while baking cookies and cleaning the house. It absolutely misses the point for surface level aesthetics. You could probably pay Aella or any other whore enough to wrap them in 50ies garb and have them bake you cookies or clean the floor before sucking your dick. In fact various maid or stepmom porn tropes are working with that theme.
Traditional wife in real sense is a wife who is virtuous, embodying female virtues of humility, nurturing, dignified in purity etc. It is absolutely okay for instance for traditional wife to go and work while caring for her sick husband. The actual virtues have almost no connection to the image provided by this new tradwife movement, which I'd characterize as some attempt of entrapment of men by wicked women just using different means. A horsehoe theory of certain strains of feminism and conservativism meeting at the same point if you will.
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Independently of whether women hypergamy should be celebrated or socially repressed and shamed, a lot of the obsession you see in the crowd that say they want nothing but a virgin tradwife has very clear parallels with other sexual fixations. If it was really just about worrying about how it affects their chance at a good relationship, they could just, you know, get to know a woman' personality before committing, for sure a better indicator of compatibility and relationship potential than any reading the tea leaves in her sexual past. But the point is that a lot of the "trad or bust" crowd really have a purity fetish, with exactly all the same implications that the word 'fetish' has in porn.
Do you just mean that they find purity a sexually appealing trait? If so, that's not surprising, and I don't see how that would cast doubt on their other reasons. Or do you mean something more than that?
Edit: If you could give a relatively SFW example, that would be helpful.
Well, innocence of personality can be endearing. And chastity, continence, fidelity, strength, self-control are admirable character features in both men and women.
But purity isn't any attribute of the beloved themselves, it's just an imagined state of non-contamination by sex: for instance, feeling that a woman is pure when no cocks have ever touched her but impure when 1,000 cocks have touched her, whatever. That's a clear setup for a fetish-based arousal, i.e. arousal by a thing itself separated from the person, because the energy of the appeal comes from one's feelings toward the contaminant, not toward the partner themselves.
For some folks, it appears to be impulse of underlying disgust for one's own sexuality, the virginal submissive tradwife envisioned as a retreat from all those dirty whores and your uncomfortable desire/repulsion toward them. For others, it seems more motivated by aggression/dominance and the appeal of getting to be the one whose sexual contact destroys the pure thing. Either way, the big complex feelings driving that attraction would be between the guy and his own self-image, not actually between the guy and his partner.
Which is a point the article also makes, actually, when the writer realizes that all the gooners' cave photos seem to center on their own erect penis standing up in the middle.
If a man married a virgin and then lost sexual interest in her after the wedding night, when she was no longer a virgin, it would be fair to say that he suffered from a virginity fetish. But as a practical matter I've never heard of that happening, which suggests that something else is going on.
Seriously? Stories of guys eagerly pursuing naive virgins, seducing them with promises of marriage, then becoming becoming disgusted and rejecting them once they succumb ("I could never marry such a slut") are commonplace to the point of cliché through most of Western history. If you don't hear as much about the dynamic in the context of marriage, it's because (a) people generally have more serious reasons than pure arousal for entering or maintaining a binding economic contract, and (b) the SOP for a man who's less aroused by his wife has not been to shout it from the rooftops but just to pursue alternative options elsewhere.
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