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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.
Definitely, and sadly, true. And really, it's so much more ridiculous than even that. Women producing it is good and empowering in theory, or maybe sometimes it is, but most of the time she is doing it because the patriarchy is making her do it, maybe because she has no power and thus has to sell her flesh, or maybe just because of internalized misogyny. The determining factor seems to be vibes and aesthetics more than anything coherent: an OnlyFans model with a carefully curated brand charging $30/month for "spicy content" is an entrepreneur and girlboss. A woman doing similar content for a traditional porn studio is a victim of exploitation. She needs rent money and thus is being coerced by capitalism to go to the traditional studio. Does she genuinely enjoy it? Well, she's been conditioned by the patriarchy since childhood to derive her self-worth from male attention and validation, so her enjoyment is itself evidence of oppression. The fact that she insists she's making a free choice just proves how thoroughly she's internalized patriarchal values - she can't even see her own exploitation. The theorist knows her real interests better than she does. There's no conceivable evidence that could disprove "patriarchy made her do it" because patriarchy is an invisible, all-pervasive force that operates through internalized beliefs. It's kafkaesque.
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