site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32841 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

@Gillitrut @nomenym @faceh @HereAndGone2

I was following the discussion here on a recent scandal regarding AI-generated fake nudes with mild interest and went down into a bit of a rabbit hole in other earlier discussions that were linked. As a member of the he-man-woman-haters club and someone who used to follow Manosphere / Red Pill and dissident rightist sites, it appears to me that discussion on the wider context of this phenomenon is a bit lacking so I’ll offer a short overview myself.

It seems that there are multiple overlapping phenomena related to this issue:

#1 – High school boys creating fake nudes of their female classmates with or without AI and distributing them online among themselves; we can assume the individuals creating such content are a small minority and are usually of low social status, even practical outcasts otherwise

#2 – Some high school girls are sending real nudes of themselves to particular boys, which technically equals the production and distribution of child porn / CP; this is occurring in the larger context of a post-patriarchal, post-monogamist society where women are normally trying to out-slut one another in various ways to compete for the sexual attention of high-status men; sometimes such images get publicly distributed in the form of so-called revenge porn; obviously all of this is freaking out the adult women who are red-pilled enough to realize how self-defeating this entire sexual competition is

#1 and #2 are also occurring among college students and other adults but supposedly to a lesser degree, especially the fake nudes part; all this generates a relatively lower level of attention as the girls are all adults; it’s usually the revenge porn part that generates outrage, especially among feminists and their so-called male allies

#3 – there’s something that’s basically a subset of revenge porn, namely the private nudes of female celebrities getting publicized through hacking and content theft; fake nudes of them also obviously exist

#1, #2 and #3 are basically overlapping issues in the minds of normies, providing fodder for lipstick feminist and social conservative culture warriors.

We should look at the even wider social context of all this. What is the overall milieu that is shaping the attitudes of high school students?

#1 – Female sexuality itself has become a culture war issue in a particular way. What do I basically mean? Look at the usual preferences of anti-feminist toxic dudebros for a start: the women appearing in movies and video games to be smoking hot and scantily clad; their own girlfriends to be modest and demure in public but otherwise be their own personal sluts in private, while at the same time not even thinking about becoming OF/porn girls or “sex workers”. Culture-warring feminists look at all this with anger and naturally go on to loudly promote the exact opposite of all this by all means. This is basically a significant driver of the culture war altogether, and probably generates a level of resentment among young men towards feminists and feminist-adjacent women in general, a sort of resentment that never existed before feminism.

#2 – It has become completely normal for slop-creating female pop musicians, female celebrities altogether and female “influencers” to show their bare butts and thighs, cleavage, midriff etc. both online and offline; however, all of this is pointedly not done for the purposes that average men would prefer it all to have, namely a) providing simple entertainment / fanservice for dudebros and their male gaze without any feminist BS attached b) utilizing eroticism in order to attract high-value men into relationships with the promise of hot sex (which has basically been normal female behavior for thousands of years) c) showing off the goods as prostitutes if you are one. Instead, these women are normally open feminists, more or less loud ones, treating the “male gaze” and “unwanted attention” with disgust, loudly declaring that it’s not like they are trying to cater to icky men or anything, and are supposedly engaging in all this virtual whoring / thirst farming with a sort of weird irony in mind, where this is all simultaneously an act of female empowerment and a display of girlboss agency while at the same time some sort of critical commentary on the sad state of a shitty society that treats women like sex objects or whatever. Naturally, none of this is generating one ounce of male sympathy towards these women and their female fans.

#3 – Online porn has been normalized to such an extent that pretty much the only people receiving any unstated and limited social permission to complain about women engaging in it are the so-called sex negative feminists. Otherwise it’s all seen as another expression of female empowerment as long as the pretension is there that somehow none of it is done to please or benefit men. It has become an accepted social reality that average women will happily suck dick, swallow cum, do gangbangs online for the money, and it’s all normal, because it’s not like they are doing anything objectionable or whatever. We’re also seeing the spectacle of young women taking the usual route of doing hardcore porn, milking their career for all the money they can, then retiring and having some sort of fake-ass epiphany later, crying their butts off in online videos claiming regret, stating that they’re the victims of some evil patriarchal regime that ostracized them, appearing on anti-porn podcasts etc., demanding that their videos be removed from the internet, complaining about their young children being bullied etc.

Again, I leave it to your imagination to decide what attitudes towards women are all this driving among young men.

a) providing simple entertainment / fanservice for dudebros and their male gaze without any feminist BS attached

Instead, these women are normally open feminists, more or less loud ones, treating the “male gaze” and “unwanted attention” with disgust, loudly declaring that it’s not like they are trying to cater to icky men or anything[...]

(emphasis mine)

This is probably a lost battle at this point, but it's worth pointing out that "male gaze" as a term is not synonymous with "the gaze of males." The article where Laura Mulvey coined the term is full of Freudian academic bullshit, but it is pretty clear "male gaze" is related to film, and not just something men do:

To begin with (as an ending), the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience. Without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth. Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera's look is disavowed in order to create [a convincing] world in which the spectator's surrogate can perform with verisimilitude.

I don't blame you for this misuse. I think it is pretty common for academic jargon to be watered down as it reaches the masses, losing whatever small meaning it might have once had. This has affected a lot of terms in wider folk feminist discussions. Another big one that comes to mind is "toxic masculinity", which is notably not the thesis that all masculinity is toxic.

Mulvey never really says what she means by "male gaze" in that particular article. I've usually heard it as referring to the way the camera takes on the perspective of a (sexually interested) man; e.g. slowly panning up the figure of the provocatively-dressed femme fatale, perhaps pausing at her ass as she's walking with an exaggerated sway. It definitely has to do with the camera, not an actual man. Referring to actual men looking at actual women was an obvious extension though.

I think it is pretty common for academic jargon to be watered down as it reaches the masses, losing whatever small meaning it might have once had.

I think the issue isn't specific to academic jargon - it is more to do with negative terminology. Negative terminology is mostly used in phatic communication bashing the shared outgroup, and pointing out that Bad Person A may be Bad Word B but he is not in fact Bad Word C is a buzzkill.

Consider "Enshittification", which is definitely not academic jargon. Cory Doctorow only coined the term three years ago, and he used it to describe a specific process where the experience of a non-paying user of a platform like Facebook gets worse over time as the platform owner shifts from attracting users to monetization. The term is already debased to the point where it can be used to describe any case where a product or service gets worse over time, and the Wikipedia article says it is a synonym for "Crapification", which originally referred to the entirely different process where a product or service (most famously, US domestic airlines) gets worse because price competition is more vigorous than quality competition.

[caveat: Doctorow didn't coin the term, so much as popularize it.]

If I coined the term "black stealing" for shoplifting, nobody would be satisfied with my claim that it isn't talking about all black people.

I think the problem is that about 30 years earlier, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre coined the term "the gaze", and Laura Mulvey was understood to be developing an extension of the concept in her original essay about the "male gaze."

So it's not like you coining "black stealing" in isolation at all. It's more like if "stealing" had taken on a particular jargony meaning a few decades earlier, and you had further developed a concept called "black stealing", and then people unfamiliar with that history incorrectly and almost exclusively used it to refer to shoplifting by black people instead.

EDIT: As the Nybbler said elsewhere in this thread, "male gaze" is generally taken to be something the camera is doing. A female director can give a film a "male gaze" if she films a female subject in a particular way, and a male director can give a film a "female gaze" if he films his subjects in a particular way. This is part of what I meant when I said that a "male gaze" is not equal to "gaze of males." Using it to refer to "looks/gazes of males" is a bit like talking about "charmed quarks" like they're under a literal magical spell. Sometimes jargon takes on a very specific meaning, slightly disconnected from the words that compose the jargon.

It's more like if "stealing" had taken on a particular jargony meaning a few decades earlier, and you had further developed a concept called "black stealing", and then people unfamiliar with that history incorrectly and almost exclusively used it to refer to shoplifting by black people instead.

If this is what happens, it would be entirely predictable that "black stealing" would come to be interpreted that way, even if it's "incorrect". Jargon phrases whose straightforward meaning is something hostile will predictably result in a motte and bailey between the jargon meaning and the straightforward meaning, especially by hostile people.

"'Black fatigue' does not equal 'fatigue caused by blacks'! Trust me bro!" - an avid fan of Steve Sailer somewhere, probably

Look at the usual preferences of anti-feminist toxic dudebros for a start: ... their own girlfriends to be modest and demure in public but otherwise be their own personal sluts in private

Keeping sexuality within the relationship, and enjoying it to the fullest in private, is anti-feminist toxic dudebroism now?

The world continues to get crazier and crazier every time I look out the window of my church.

Always has been. Feminism exists to elevate women over men, part of which involves permitting women to use their sexuality as power over men. Constraining their sexuality to the privacy of their relationship is "oppressive" because their open display of their sexuality is a reminder of a grace they hold that men don't.

Back in the days it was 'possessiveness' that hippie chicks complained about, for example.

I've seen a number of comments below discussing porn. I initially planned to respond to these comments individually, but it's a substantial enough line of thinking that I figured a second-level comment on my part was appropriate.

It seems the commentariat here is fixated on the apparent contradiction between feminism and porn use - that porn clearly produces negative outcomes so it is ludicrous that modern feminists support it. How could pornography be "empowering" when it makes men sloppy lovers at best and dangerous sex pests at worst? I spent an inordinate amount of time with well-educated feminist women while at college, so I feel decently qualified to paraphrase what they've told me.

I'll preface with an important premise: pornography is not a single stimulus, but rather a diverse palette of erotic visuals that are lumped together under the umbrella term porn. The gap between studio produced porn and amateur content is as vast as the latest Marvel blockbuster and a limited run Criterion release. In high production porn, much like many professions, it is not uncommon to work under a domineering, unrealistic boss that overworks you and underpays you. These pornographic outlets are also the epicenter for most of the abuse in the industry. On the other hand, OF and amateur porn has a significantly flattened authority structure, and the performers no longer need to engage in unrealistic and demeaning sex acts to mold themselves into a male-gazey superstimulus. At least not to the degree of studio porn. This distinction is important: many of the women I spoke to advocated that studio content be eradicated, as the industry has problems. That does not implicate porn in general. This is also where the idea of empowerment begins to creep in. It is not empowering to be tossed around like a commodity by a profiteering pseudo-pimp. However, it is empowering in some sense to create your own erotic content because it represents a kind of authentic choice, especially when compared to traditional sexual norms and the prevailing idea that men can be sexually open with fewer social consequences. It is empowering precisely because of this contrast. In a world where men were not sowing their wild oats, I'm unsure if notions of empowerment would have really taken off.

Second, porn is not the be-all end all of sexual depiction. The thinking was that porn, much like alcohol, is clearly a vice that can be enjoyed responsibly when it is consumed in the appropriate quantity and with the appropriate precautions. Yes, alcohol (porn) can cause problems. Yes, alcohol (porn) is probably bad for you in excess. But the alternative of banning it is paternalistic and likely to produce its own crop of negative outcomes. This is another part of the empowerment angle: freedom to consume and choose. You could probably track down a gallon of Everclear and chug it, and few would come clamoring to ban alcohol. The relationship one has with alcohol is on them - some are teetotalers, some are social drinkers, some probably flirt a little close with alcoholism, but it's still a conclusion they came to. The same can be said with porn. It was often suggested that if porn was illegal, it would drive the industry underground and prompt even more abuse toward the women performing in it, as their employers would no longer be accountable to the legal system, per se. So porn ought to be at least tolerated. Bonnie Blue and those like her were considered unrepresentative morally questionable aberrations, more a product of our outrage-driven media landscape rather than exemplars of feminism in practice.

The last prong of this argument involves sex education. Some of the negative behavioral outcomes in porn, particularly the way it "teaches" men to have unhealthy sex, can be prevented by appropriate, candid sex ed. Their idea of sex ed wasn't simply putting a condom on a banana, but discussions about consent, love, and intimacy. Further, if porn use and sexuality in general are made to be more "normal," young adults could feel more comfortable discussing these topics with parents and trusted adults. I'm reminded of the perennial toaster-fucker greentext. I can imagine a world where /r/ToasterFuckers exists and a parent successfully guides their child away from it with the appropriate support. The mere existence of /r/ToasterFuckers is not the problem. While porn may be particularly tempting, I don't see how it is entirely immune to guidance. This is the classic "if you're going to drink, you're going to do it in my house." Is it effective? It's hard to say, and it's certainly a tall order compared to the status quo. But on its face it is at least logically coherent.

And, of course, there were plenty of discussions about age restrictions. It seems trivially true to me that a 21-year-old can handle porn better than a 12-year-old. Is there such a thing as an effective age restriction online? I'm not sure.

I think there are still problems with this argument - namely, that women choosing to make porn are often compelled to do so out of financial need which makes it unempowering at times. It also doesn't address moral arguments about porn's existence, like if porn is fundamentally immoral or disrespectful to human sexuality. It addresses most of the consequentialist points well, though, and I wanted to provide it the best I could to flesh out some of the positions that may not be as well-represented on this forum.

I think there are still problems with this argument - namely, that women choosing to make porn are often compelled to do so out of financial need which makes it unempowering at times.

Yes, and for Onlyfans in particular, only 1% of the women make 99% of the money (or a similar ratio), meaning the overwhelming majority of women on there are selling their dignity and trading away immeasurable respect and status for pennies on the dollar. I consider this exploitative.

That's just true of any kind of showbiz?

How many musicians make real money? How many starlets make it big in Hollywood? Are you going to bite the bullet and call those industries exploitative too? So exploitative that they deserve to be shut down? What is the competition ratio and Gini-coefficient worthy of concern?

How many musicians make real money?

Much, much, less than 1%.

The difference is that musicians aren't selling pictures of their genitals online, and if you stop being a musician there aren't lasting negative consequences from your past career as a musician.

Well Billy Squier will never be rid of that music video.

I lost a perfectly good draft because I tried to tab over to the Billboard 100. Apparently the bloated modern web is too much for my phone. Whatever.

I think your model is extremely autistic (non-derogatory) and also useless (derogatory). I’m not sure how you could come to half of these conclusions. It’s as if your experience of women is drawn entirely from thinkpieces and dubious IRC roulette.

obviously all of this is freaking out the adult women who are red-pilled enough to realize how self-defeating this entire sexual competition is

Could you think of any other reasons why people might object to teenage nudes?

Culture-warring feminists look at all this with anger and naturally go on to loudly promote the exact opposite of all this by all means.

Could you think of any other reasons why feminists might actually want some of those opposite things?

where this is all simultaneously an act of female empowerment and a display of girlboss agency while at the same time some sort of critical commentary on the sad state of a shitty society that treats women like sex objects or whatever

Could you think of any other reasons why a mass-media product might hold contradictory, even trite messages?

Each time, you stop at whatever reason is most convenient for your thesis. This is a terrible way to build a model. Your examples—if you can call them such—aren’t very convincing, either.

all of this is pointedly not done for the purposes that average men would prefer it all to have

none of this is generating one ounce of male sympathy towards these women and their female fans.

it’s all seen as another expression of female empowerment

If the plural of anecdotes is not data, surely your own solitary anecdote isn’t.

Stats or GTFO!

Instead, these women are normally open feminists, more or less loud ones, treating the “male gaze” and “unwanted attention” with disgust, loudly declaring that it’s not like they are trying to cater to icky men or anything, and are supposedly engaging in all this virtual whoring / thirst farming with a sort of weird irony in mind, where this is all simultaneously an act of female empowerment and a display of girlboss agency while at the same time some sort of critical commentary on the sad state of a shitty society that treats women like sex objects or whatever.

Indeed, it's basically a trope nowadays that female celebrities (or attractive young women in general) will complain about being sexualized and then post thirst-traps the next. Here's one example from Ariel Winter:

“It’s called being a woman in the industry,” said Winter, 18. “It’s complete sexism. It’s really degrading, annoying and sad that this is what the media puts out, it’s disgusting to me.”

Also Ariel Winter:

The Modern Family actress stripped to her bikini and hopped onto the wooden vessel with a pal.

Yet choosing not to smile for the camera against the backdrop of the glistening blue waters, they stuck out their derrieres instead as they lay on a towel with their backs facing the camera.

Teenage Ariel posted the cheeky snap with the words: “Your favourite wives in paradise.”

Some individual pop stars were mentioned elsewhere by various commenters elsewhere in this thread. These include Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter.

The simplest and most parsimonious explanation as to why such a range of popstars paint their faces, teehee around in skimpy outfits, and bask in the center of attention as sex objects is because they enjoy painting their faces, teeheeing around in skimpy outfits, and basking in the center of attention as sex objects and they're successful at it. The popstars' collective fanbases are wildly disproportionately heterosexual teenage girls and young women because they too enjoy painting their faces, teeheeing around in skimpy outfits, and basking in the center of attention as sex objects, and thus can relate to and live vicariously through such popstars.

When it comes to other entertainers such as male professional athletes, we generally automatically accept by default that they choose to play their sport as a profession because they enjoy doing so and are successful at it. In explaining why they do what they do, we usually don't start grasping for some Occam's Butterknife about them getting groomed, coerced, manipulated, or constrained by society. The fanbases of male professional athletes are predominantly male because they too enjoy(ed) playing that sport, wish they were that good at that sport, and/or can relate to and live vicariously through such athletes.

Yet when it comes to why female popstars choose to sexualize themselves—and why their fanbases tend to be wildly disproportionately heterosexual teenage girls and young women—out come the excuses about grooming, coercion, manipulation, Socialization, internalized misogyny, the male gaze, being sexualized against their will, etc., lest some women out there feel less Wonderful on behalf of the female gender. This could fit well into the "midwit" meme template, where the guy in the middle goes "nooo female popstars don't like being sex objects but if they do sexualize themselves it's only due to sleazy male managers and misogynistic marketing constraints and their female fans are just victims of marketing, socialization, conditioning, and internalized misogyny" while the guys on the left and the right go "female popstars and their female fans like being sex objects."

Another natural experiment is what these popstars do in their free-time and in private. While what they do in private is hard to come by (kind of by definition), that's where events like the Fappening come in handy (in more ways than one, perhaps). The Fappening shined a hilarious light into the lives of popstars such as Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, and Miley Cyrus, whose photos contained numerous nude selfies and ass, pussy, tit shots. So it's not just an act, a show they conduct, a persona they put on for marketing purposes. Sexualizing themselves is a hobby they enjoy doing; being a sex object is an aspiration and their past-time, consistent with the revealed preferences of young women in general.

Do what you love and you never have to work a day in your life. Just like retired NBA players such as Luke Walton and Jason Williams sometimes play or played men's league basketball in their spare time, Britney Spears spends her retirement days posting thirst traps and almost-nudes. I say "almost" since as far as I'm aware—being the modest woman that she is—she covers up her nipples, pussy, and/or asshole with her hands while in her birthday suit. Tellingly, a lot of female college and professional athletes, whether active or former, also spend a lot of their on-court and off-court efforts to being sex objects.

The Fappening shined a hilarious light into the lives of popstars such as Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, and Miley Cyrus, whose photos contained numerous nude selfies and ass, pussy, tit shots. So it's not just an act, a show they conduct, a persona they put on for marketing purposes. Sexualizing themselves is a hobby they enjoy doing; being a sex object is an aspiration and their past-time, consistent with the revealed preferences of young women in general.

I feel like some sort of equivocation is happening on the word "sexualizing (oneself)" here.

I don't think you need to be redpilled to believe that female celebrities in the social media era, love taking pictures that sexualize themselves and posting them online for the world to see. Who, male or female, doesn't like getting positive attention from people you're attracted to, or making your rivals for said attraction envious or respectful of you?

However, I think you're ignoring the idea of an intended audience and social context.

The pictures that surfaced during the Fappening were generally intended for intimate partners and no one else. Just as a Victorian era burglar who broke into a woman's house while she was wearing lingerie in anticipation of her husband's return would have very little grounds to claim that the woman was a loose hussy, a 21st century hacker who finds sexual photos on a female celebrity's phone that were only ever intended for intimate partners doesn't have much ground to claim that she "enjoys sexualizing herself" with no qualifications.

Sexualizing herself for whom? What level of sexualization and in what context?

(As an aside, I'm not actually sure that the Ariel Winters articles you linked demonstrate what you're trying to claim. In the first link, she's talking about "backlash" she received for a sexy graduation dress she wore, and a nude bathtub photo. In that context, her comments about sexism and the industry seem to be less about people sexualizing her in the first place, and more about people daring to say negative things about her choices of sexy attire and photos. This seems to make the first article continuous with the second one you linked, not contrary to it. I agree with aspects of your intended conclusion, but I don't think you picked a good example in this case.)

However, I think you're ignoring the idea of an intended audience and social context.

On the contrary, I’m specifically Noticing that for a wide variety of audiences (ranging from everyone, to their friends, to their boyfriends/husbands, to just themselves) and in a wide variety of settings (ranging from their performances, to their professional photoshoots, to their social media photos, to private and public photos with their friends, to their private selfies) such popstars love being sex objects in a way that is inconsistent with excuses such as that they’re only being coerced or putting on a persona, as I explained in the previous comment.

The diversity of audiences in front of and settings in which popstars sexualize themselves quickly starts sounding like a Dr. Seuss poem:

These popstars love being sex objects on stage or in a cage,
Wearing nylon or with a python,
In their homes or through their phones,
While on tours or on all fours,
Behind a closed door, sometimes even while licking the floor.

Yes, I didn't link it, but there’s a Miley Cyrus selfie (unsure if it was Fappening-related) out there of her topless, face down ass up, licking the floor.

In addition to Cyrus, at least Britney Spears and Taylor Swift also have performances/music videos where they're encaged. It's like a female kink or something; it'd be consistent with how many chicks love getting tied-up/handcuffed in bed.

The pictures that surfaced during the Fappening were generally intended for intimate partners and no one else. Just as a Victorian era burglar who broke into a woman's house while she was wearing lingerie in anticipation of her husband's return would have very little grounds to claim that the woman was a loose hussy

My comment wasn’t evaluating whether or not these pop stars are loose hussies (given hoeflation, the bar for inflation-adjusted loose hussy may be quite high), but discussing the “simplest and most parsimonious explanation” for why pop stars sexualize themselves. In the example of the burglar stumbling upon a wife in lingerie, if she were an entertainer she or anyone else would have little grounds—in light of the burglar’s discovery (if it weren't already the case before)—to claim that she only sexualizes herself on stage for performance or marketing reasons, or because she’s forced to by a sleazy manager. Thus pointing to “because she enjoys it” as to the parsimonious explanation for why she sexualizes herself both for everyone in public and for her husband in private.

a 21st century hacker who finds sexual photos on a female celebrity's phone that were only ever intended for intimate partners doesn't have much ground to claim that she "enjoys sexualizing herself" with no qualifications

Sexualizing herself for whom? What level of sexualization and in what context?

Even if as a hypothetical we accept that these popstars’ sexual selfies are only for intimate partners, we can use Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande as examples. Selena Gomez’s such photos would have possibly “only” been for at least Nick Jonas, Taylor Lautner, Orlando Bloom, Justin Bieber, Zedd, Niall Horan, Samuel Krost, Charlie Puth, The Weeknd, Andrea Iervolino, Drew Taggart, Benny Blanco. Ariana Grande’s such photos would have possibly “only” been for at least Graham Phillips, Jai Brooks, Nathan Sykes, Big Sean, Ricky Alvarez, Mac Miller, Pete Davidson, Mikey Foster, Dalton Gomez, Ethan Slater. Some of Ariana’s men may have even been single when she started bouncing up and down on them (not even rich, famous popstars are immune to female mate-choice copying).

And then there's the non-Fappening, professional and personal photoshoots of Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears intended for the public. So overall, considering audience again and considering additional qualification and context actually makes them sound less Wonderful from both a loose hussy and sexualization-exclusivity perspective, and reinforces "because they enjoy it" as the best explanation behind why they sexualize themselves.

(As an aside, I'm not actually sure that the Ariel Winters articles you linked demonstrate what you're trying to claim. In the first link, she's talking about "backlash" she received for a sexy graduation dress she wore, and a nude bathtub photo. In that context, her comments about sexism and the industry seem to be less about people sexualizing her in the first place, and more about people daring to say negative things about her choices of sexy attire and photos. This seems to make the first article continuous with the second one you linked, not contrary to it. I agree with aspects of your intended conclusion, but I don't think you picked a good example in this case.)

If one doesn’t find the first article sufficient, I also provided other examples elsewhere in this thread, including one where Winter says “as women in the industry, we are totally over sexualized and treated like objects,” one where she blames Trump for women getting objectified, a quote from Grande that popped up along the way, and some quotes from Winter-ally/enemy/frenemy Chloe Moretz. And to the extent the first article above is continuous with the second, it would only further support @Botond173’s point I was first responding to, that:

Instead, these women are normally open feminists, more or less loud ones, treating the “male gaze” and “unwanted attention” with disgust, loudly declaring that it’s not like they are trying to cater to icky men or anything, and are supposedly engaging in all this virtual whoring / thirst farming with a sort of weird irony in mind, where this is all simultaneously an act of female empowerment and a display of girlboss agency while at the same time some sort of critical commentary on the sad state of a shitty society that treats women like sex objects or whatever.

while the guys on the left and the right go "popstars and their female fans like being sex objects."

Yeah, you remind me of a (male) pro-wrestler or such who referred to himself as something like "the ultimate object of female desire." i.e. most people like being, in some sense, sex objects.

And you can bet that if it would give them sexual attention that was positive and female, a large percentage of guys would be prancing around in miniskirts and crop tops.

Funnily enough, when it comes to pro-wrestling, female pro-wrestlers provide additional data-points as to the female desire to be sex objects.

Despite being in the right tail of female wealth and physical strength, female pro-wrestlers still love teeheeing around in skimpy outfits.

And by their revealed preferences they also love being submissive sex objects in private, such as demonstrated by WWE Paige giggling as she takes a load on her face, splashing upon her Championship Belt.

Funnily enough, when it comes to pro-wrestling, female pro-wrestlers provide additional data-points as to the female desire to be sex objects.

If that was the only data point, I would be open to the feminist argument that these woman do it as a result of pressure from male leadership who want to titillate adolescent boys. But what really gives the game away is, as you point out, people like Taylor Swift who have a primarily female fan base.

That first Ariel Winter quote doesn't seem to be anti-sexualization, rather that she has received criticism/hate/thermonuclear online bile as a result of posting in a sexualized way. The "sexism" she points out is that people tell her to stop sexualizing herself or are mean about it. Even in that case, I don't see the issue with her being upset that others sexualize her. Obviously, sexualizing oneself is likely to produce an outsized degree of sexual attention and criticism. However, that doesn't automatically imply she's a hypocrite or stupid or what-not. To analogize: most famous people have to live with a security detail for the rest of their life, deal with stalkers, etc. I think it would be unreasonable to tell a celebrity that they should just stop being famous (even if that's a valid "solution" to the problem), otherwise they're a hypocrite. In an ideal world, they could be famous without those issues, but the whackos have to ruin it. The same goes for sexualization. People are allowed to complain about the negative consequences or risks of an act while still engaging in said act - there is nothing logically compromising in doing so, in my view.

One can always add more epicycles, carry more water, and find more ways to gerrymander as to why it doesn’t count, why there's not a disconnect between a given female celebrity's words and her actions.

Just off the top of my head, Brie Larson and Scarlett Johansson could serve as additional examples with regard to their public remarks, outfits they wear to events, their bodily displays on film, and the photos and/or videos they take of themselves privately.

I don't think it counts as an epicycle to point out "actually, she isn't complaining about being sexualized".

I don’t think it’s that hard to do a brief websearch for more quotes from Winter or other female celebrities before a contentless one sentence drive-by, if the previous example were insufficiently close to “hello, I am a female celebrity and I woud like to complain about being sexualized”:

“…As women in the industry, we are totally over-sexualized and treated like objects,” she [Winter] said in an interview with Glamour. "Every article that has to do with me on a red carpet had to do with ‘Ariel Winter’s Crazy Cleavage!’ or ‘Ariel Winter Shows Huge Boobs at an Event!’

There’s also a HuffPost article “Ariel Winter Wants To Remind You That Girls Are Not Sexual Objects” where Ariel’s IG caption is signal boosted:

When you interrupt a girl's school day to force her to change clothes, or send her home because her shorts are too short or her bra straps are visible, you are telling her that making sure boys have a "distraction free" learning environment is more important than her education.

Instead of shaming girls for their bodies, teach boys that girls are not sexual objects.

Or a People article:

But according to Winter, it’s not just the toxic self-talk and Internet shaming that women have to overcome, it’s also the lessons that are being passed down from our government directly. She says, “Our leadership is really anti-women right now. Thanks to Donald Trump, we’re being objectified and made to feel bad about ourselves, so I think it’s really important for women to stick together and do the opposite of that; to let their bodies be seen and be heard, and to empower each other; to remind each other that what they look like is not the only thing that’s important when it comes to who they are.”

Bolding above mine. Impressive Trump hyperagency.

A wild Ariana Grande quote that appeared somewhere along the way:

Grande admitted she thought the fan's urgency was "cute and exciting" until he exclaimed to Mac Miller, "Ariana is sexy as hell man. I see you, I see you hitting that!"

The pop star, who was sitting right beside Miller during the confrontation, told fans she felt "sick and objectified" and explained, "Things like this happen all the time and are the kinds of moments that contribute to women's sense of fear and inadequacy." Grande felt compelled to address this specific instance, knowing the shame women have similarly felt after being demeaned by men.

Even temporarily putting Winter, Larson, or Johansson aside, additional quotes from PopSugar by similarly aged Chloe Moretz to Winter who was reportedly at one time or different times an ally or enemy or frenemy of Winter for whatever reason:

The star called out the Miss Universe pageant for sexualizing women's bodies during the swimsuit competition, posting her inspiring points on Twitter:

Miss universe is still judging women walking around in bathing suits. If it's based on confidence, why r we zooming in on their bodies?.. — Chloë Grace Moretz (@ChloeGMoretz) December 21, 2015

It's a new time.. I think it's time we cut the swimsuit section from miss Universe .. — Chloë Grace Moretz (@ChloeGMoretz) December 21, 2015

On top of it all, the host keeps overtly sexualizing the young women. What is happening on tv right now .. — Chloë Grace Moretz (@ChloeGMoretz) December 21, 2015

Let's do a miss universe based on interviews and public speaking and philanthropic tenacity — Chloë Grace Moretz (@ChloeGMoretz) December 21, 2015

Whether historically Moretz can be commonly found in bikini or underwear in her public work and personal photos I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

we can assume the individuals creating such content are a small minority and are usually of low social status, even practical outcasts otherwise

I wouldn't assume that at all. All teenage boys are hormone factories, and all straight teenage boys fucking love women and fantasizing about them. When I was in school, it was not at all uncool to talk behind closed doors about the girls in your class you wanted to fuck, how hot they are, how much of a slut she is, how your totally gonna bang her one day, etc. I can't imagine that's changed, even considering the rampant feminist conditioning. Even adults do this, though they use whatever additional social grace that their developed brains afford them. Generating fake nudes and sharing them with your friends (privately, to whatever degree that can be considered private) seems like the logical extension of that.

I guess it's not clear to me what I'm supposed to do this this purported context. Are the factors identified here supposed to serve as justification? It's ok for men to generate and distribute nonconsensual nude images of women and girls because X and Y? Or an explanatory purpose? Men are doing this because of these factors, no comment on the permissibility? Either way I don't see how this is supposed to work. "Feminists complain about scantily clad women in video games so obviously middle school boys are going to generate nonconsensual pornography of their classmates" Huh?

An explanation does not equal a justification. I didn't disagree with the OP but again, it ignored the wider social context of all of this entirely. Which is fair, but I thought it'd be warranted to respond in a different comment.

What I was trying to get at is that your comment says this context is connected to the phenomena in my comment but it's not clear to me how.

I was describing the cultural milieu that present-day high schoolers have grown up in. It's also the only world they've ever known. For one thing, the idea that their female peers are capable of sexual shame, even if its source are images that don't exist in real life, isn't something many of them can grok.

Re: porn, I'm sorry but this just reads like boo stupid hypocritical bitches trying to take our fun away.

The number one complaint I hear from women about porn is that it gives men a very confused, one-sided view of sex. You could imagine how irritating it is to hear that men spend 30 minutes a day jerking off to porn for decades and then one of them finally gets to fuck you and has no idea how to bring you to orgasm and you leave the experience totally unsatisfied. Consistently!

This seems pretty valid to me, and is a separate issue from deciding to cash in on male appetites for porn.

You could imagine how irritating it is to hear that men spend 30 minutes a day jerking off to porn for decades and then one of them finally gets to fuck you and has no idea how to bring you to orgasm and you leave the experience totally unsatisfied.

Nowadays I have a simple principle: her pleasure, her responsibility.

Nowadays I have a simple principle: her pleasure, her responsibility.

So you get swiped left on the dating app and she gets the latest sex toy as reviewed in Cosmo. If you're happy with that bargain, then don't complain about it later.

Are you a Zizian? They believe that their decisions in the present can influence the past. Here in the real world my actions in bed cannot affect whether she has gotten into said bed with me.

I find I frequently get into bed with the same woman more than once. Do you, Sir?

Not anymore. These days I can barely muster the motivation to perform the exhausting routine required to get into bed with her the first time, when senses of accomplishment and novelty tip the scales. The second and further times? Hell no.

It's typically easier after the first time, though I think I understand why you've found it otherwise.

Cattiness doesn't suit you. And no, it doesn't get easier, it simply replaces one kind of suck with another kind of suck, and neither of them in the fun sense of the word.

That's all well and good, but female sexuality and the process of getting them to orgasm is inherently more complicated. It requires, generally, actual technique at a minimum (if not artistry).

A male lover certainly has some responsibility to understand different parts of female anatomy and sexual psychology.

Women can and do get by without really knowing or caring, because the genders are not symmetrical.

That's all well and good, but I fail to see how that's my problem.

If you're having a relationship with a woman rather than a one night stand, life will be a lot easier when she's satisfied and a lot worse when she's frustrated.

I'm certain you personally have used the famous reply on more culture warry topics here:

If.

  • It's far more effective per unit of time to have women sell you - they will brag about your sexual prowress
  • When a relationship ends, you reduce the possibility of negative outcomes
  • On an individual sexual encounter level, you'll get better performance out of your partner

If you're a bad lay, you may be able to get by through frequently cycling through friend groups, being highly attractive, and having a massive dick. Most people don't have all 3 of those luxuries on hand. Being purely selfish in bed as a male isn't a sustainable course of action, even if you don't care about anyone else.

Number 1 never happened while I cared, number 2 has never happened so far now that I don't, number 3 is the same violation of causality as in another comment, how will she know before the encounter ends?

To make point 3 tactical: there's an obvious difference in received blowjob quality pre- and post- partner orgasm.

It's obvious I'm not going to convince you, so... good luck!

The number one complaint I hear from women about porn is that it gives men a very confused, one-sided view of sex. You could imagine how irritating it is to hear that men spend 30 minutes a day jerking off to porn for decades and then one of them finally gets to fuck you and has no idea how to bring you to orgasm and you leave the experience totally unsatisfied. Consistently!

Women will complain about porn but these reasons are largely post-hoc fictions. They have a gut-level aversion to their partner experiencing lust towards other women that are typically younger and better-looking than them. But because of their vague sex-positive pop feminist beliefs they don’t know how to articulate that and will backfill a reason that sounds less jealous and more socially acceptable.

You would see the same if they found their partner was having sex with dogs. This would greatly upset them but they would state the reason is something to do with animals being unable to consent, which of course is not the real reason.

They have a gut-level aversion to their partner experiencing lust towards other women that are typically younger and better-looking than them.

That may well be part of it, but there's also the disconnect between male and female sexuality. Women can feel it as a rejection. I remember an anecdote by Nancy Friday from one of her Secret Garden books about how when she was young and in a relationship with an older man, she felt really hurt when she found him masturbating one day. I'm here, I'm available, he doesn't need to do that! I forget exactly how he explained things to her and got her to go "and now, gals, I'm telling you don't be upset if your guy does this, it isn't a reflection on you". Something along the lines of "sometimes men just want that orgasm without having to think of anyone's pleasure but their own, and without having to put up with another person".

I can't tell you what the equivalent of porn (not erotica, this is not about the written word content) is for women, but I can point you to a hit TV show, or I assume it's a hit, because I see it being raved over on social media by women. A Canadian (and part-funded by the Canadian government via arts grants, which is funny and ironic, because the Netflix gay show failed) show called Heated Rivalry.

It's about gay hockey players, and from what I understand, it is very gay indeed**. But it's not simply two hot guys having explicit (as you can get away with on TV) sex that has the girlies all hot and bothered, it's the relationships. I'm trying to avoid the show, because I'm not interested, but simply by osmosis I understand that the fans are invested in the main couple and their trials and tribulations. Will they become a couple, or will it stay at the level of frenemies to lovers? The emotionally distant father of one guy which has hurt him and stunted him emotionally. The commitment issues of the other guy. And so on - it's the relationship as much as the butt-humping that is the appeal.

Are they masturbating to the butt-humping? I dunno, they could be. But I think the main difference is that for men, they don't care if the 46DD blonde having cum sprayed on those tits is resolving her daddy issues by having sex with the older guy spraying cum on her tits. They care about the size of the tits. Women find that... alienating. How can you not care about the people involved? Uh, because they're not people? What, you don't think women are people??? That's not what I meant, I meant that the big-titted blonde slut taking it in all orifices from six guys is only there for the purposes of getting my dick hard, I'm not supposed to care about her or why she's doing this, I don't want to care about her or why she's doing this.

And then the fight starts 😁

** But gay in a way that seems coded to appeal to women, not gay men. I have a feeling a show by gay men for gay men about gay men and gay sexual life would be very different and much more like porn for straight guys.

It's about gay hockey players, and from what I understand, it is very gay indeed. But it's not simply two hot guys having explicit (as you can get away with on TV) sex that has the girlies all hot and bothered, it's the relationships. I'm trying to avoid the show, because I'm not interested, but simply by osmosis I understand that the fans are invested in the main couple and their trials and tribulations. Will they become a couple, or will it stay at the level of frenemies to lovers? The emotionally distant father of one guy which has hurt him and stunted him emotionally. The commitment issues of the other guy. And so on - it's the relationship as much as the butt-humping that is the appeal.

No, unfortunately Mrs. FiveHour watched it with one of her (horny, sad) friends who loved the books over the holidays, and there unless they were doing the lovey-dovey stuff every time I left the house, it was mostly just butt fucking and occasionally skating. The main characters fucked before they ever said more than five words to each other, and that's mostly all they did in between, saying as little as possible to each other (because they hate each other, they are rivals ya know?) and then meeting up in a hotel room to fuck. The show isn't really built around emotions beyond being gay, it's built around scenes of as much and as explicit of gay sex as can be done without showing an actual erect penis or an actual asshole. Which, honestly, is disappointing: if you're gonna make porn just go whole hog. But it is really focused on ripped abs and men groaning each other's names, the emotions are just kind of assumed to exist afterward.

My criticism of what I saw of the show is that it was clearly written by a woman/gay men, with nobody having any idea how heterosexual men functioned at the relevant times. While I've never played ice hockey, I was a hetero frat boy during most of the years the show is set, and the dynamic just doesn't make any sense, it's like they have the idea that straight men have no friends and no intimacy and don't hang out. The closet cases' strategy for staying closeted is to never, ever be seen together, seen talking to each other, seen being friends. When, frankly, in 2012 the most heterosexual thing you could do was have a best buddy you drank with and joke about being gay together. There's like a half dozen scenes where they have to, secretly, give each other their hotel room numbers and, secretly, sneak into each other's hotel rooms to, secretly, hang out. And it just feels odd, because when me and bunch of other 20 year olds had hotel rooms in the same hotel the most normal thing in the world would be to say to another guy "Hey I'm room 567 grab a case of beer and swing by." Shane is TREMBLING walking to Ilya's hotel room at the thought of anyone catching him, when if he just had a bottle of whiskey his cover is impenetrable. And frankly, if you're in love with a rival hockey star for YEARS, just get your agents on the line and try to get traded to the same team. A-Rod and Jeter it up! The sports media is still dopey enough that they'll publish puff pieces about how it's soooooooo funny that the two stars for Montreal are soooooo close that they have to live right next door to each other.

Ja’Marr Chase really wanted to live near Joe Burrow. The wide receiver and quarterback are best friends, college teammates, and are now set to play in Super Bowl 2022 together with the Bengals. So after Cincinnati drafted Chase last spring, it was only logical for the LSU product to do everything he could to live on the same street as Burrow. So he started knocking on doors and offering to buy houses. “He went down to the street that Joe Burrow lives on and went door to door, knocking on every door offering to buy their house,” The Athletic’s Bengals writer, Paul Dehner Jr. said on “Hear that Podcast Growlin’” this week.

“And guess what? He bought one. Somebody sold him their house, so he lives next to Joe Burrow now on their little street and they’re like one happy family. “He basically went around and was like, ‘Hi, I’m Ja’Marr Chase. I have lots of money and I want to buy the house.’ Eventually he found somebody that he bought it from and now they’re neighbors.” It’s certainly an extravagant approach, but we won’t knock Chase for wanting to live near his best friend.

On the field, the arrangement has worked quite well. Chase had 1,455 receiving yards in the regular season, winning AP and PFWA Offensive Rookie of the Year honors. Despite spending a year apart, it didn’t seem like he and Burrow missed a beat from their days at LSU, when they romped to a national title behind a historically explosive offense. Whether their chemistry has anything to do with the living situation, who’s to say. Obviously, though, it hasn’t hurt.

There's a second gay romance plot (apparently hockey is nothing but closet cases in this universe) where the captain for the Rangers falls in love with a guy who works at a smoothie shop, but their love must remain SECRET, and he can never be seen at his apartment! And once again I'm like, if you're a star player, having a weird smoothie twink living in your house as part of your entourage wouldn't even be all that odd.

A lot of twitter hockey fans complained that the climactic scene of that plot didn't make any sense, when the captain brings the smoothie twink onto the ice for a kiss after winning the stanley cup at MSG and the crowd applauds. I can only assume the complaints came from fans who have never seen their team win a championship. Jalen Hurts could have shown up to the parade in a fur suit last year after smoking Mahomes and the Philly fans would have applauded. Hell, for the most part, if right after the win a player started kissing a man on the field, I wouldn't even process that it was gay, I would just think he was really excited and got his wires crossed.

Sports guys kissing their team mates after a victory is old hat in soccer 😁 Heck, "heterosexual life partners" is old hat.

I'm glad (I think) that the show was "gay sex all the time for the ladieez" because there was a lot of the relationship discussion stuff online. But your review of it, having seen it, makes sense to me. The plot is dumb, because yeah: what, guys never hang out together? Sure, if they're meant to be hated rivals on teams that hate each other, then hanging out might seem odd. But I think the whole "sneaking around because HOMOPHOBIA" is a large part of the appeal, the "oppressed" and allies sure love stories reassuring them that they are "oppressed" for being gay etc. See the transgender day of remembrance list of trans murder victims where "getting hit by a car = murder" because systemic racism, transphobia, something something.

Sure, if they're meant to be hated rivals on teams that hate each other, then hanging out might seem odd.

Not really, low key most of the big players hang out together, and while we love team rivalries, we love chivalry and sportsmanship between players. "Beat the piss out of him, but when the clock hits zero go get a beer" is pretty much the male ideal.

If anything, the one actual homosexual superstar in US sports history responded by being so out-there party-hardy macho that he ultimately killed a bunch of people to prove how tough he was. Which is a shame, because if he had come out instead of shooting those immigrants outside a night club, we'd probably have the Aaron Hernandez Supportive Teammate Award given out every year in the NFL. And it would have been fine because he played with the one white QB in the NFL who worships the devil instead of Jesus Christ.

But gay in a way that seems coded to appeal to women, not gay men. I have a feeling a show by gay men for gay men about gay men and gay sexual life would be very different and much more like porn for straight guys.

funnily enough I heard about this show from the gay couple in my group of board game friends last weekend and they seemed to quite like it.

[cw: pretty gay]

To be fair, you do get some gay shows (and even gay porn) by men that's about The Relationships. They just look different.

Take this comic by TooMuchDynamite (cw: furry, clean). Sappy lovey-dovey feminine-energy take on self-sacrifice as a (somewhat literal) sin eater, gotta be a chick thing, right? Nah, he's a he, he's gay, really really into bara (cw: furry, guys in relatively subtle underwear); the same comic opens up with a well-formed gay goat demon I'm not gonna link to because the focus character straddles the line between 'that's an unrealistic bulge for a jock strap' to 'that's just a dick'.

To go back to written form erotica, I've recommended both Kyell Gold and Rukis Croax as expert writers of gay furry smut, but one of them is a gay guy with a husband, and one of them isn't (and probably won't turn out to be a trans guy, if I had to guess), and you don't need a massive amount of familiarity with the fandom or the conventions of yaoi to know which is which. Out of Position is pretty much the football equivalent to Heated Rivalry, complete with sports-themed public coming out arc, and a lot of trials and tribulations about the relationships and how people interact and what's motivating them, and the furry conventions are the least of the differences in either the smut or the social framing.

((And there are even some straight-porn-for-straight-guys writings that go into that level of "caring about the people involved" stuff. For furry writers, I'd point to the Tempe O'kun's straight works, or EddieW for a writer who is fully straight, for examples where the relationship tribulations take such center place that the smut often becomes nearly-forgotten.))

Some of that's biology -- you're telling me the sex that's slower to warm up and has a faster recuperation time favors written stories with a longer buildup and more repetition? -- and some of it's mode of attraction, but I'm... skeptical that's the full story. There's mechanical reasons straight women are a lot less likely to be size queens or be fascinating by a guy firing off like a fire hydrant. There's no such convenient physical explanation for the differences between gay and yaoi exhibitionism, and there's some pretty obvious social ones.

They have a gut-level aversion to their partner experiencing lust towards other women that are typically younger and better-looking than them

I agree that's probably a factor, but I think there are other factors in play. Women object to porn not only if it's their male partner consuming it but also if it's some basement-dwelling incel type.

I think that at a deep, instinctual level, women appreciate that (1) without male service, they would quite literally starve to death; and (2) they receive male service in large part due to men's need for female validation, often through sex. So that when a woman sees a man getting sexual gratification without paying dearly for it, she instinctively finds it very threatening. So for example, if a female pop star becomes wealthy in part by flaunting her body on stage, women tend to be okay with it. But if that same woman instead flaunts her body for a porn mag for $200 a week, women tend to get outraged.

So that when a woman sees a man getting sexual gratification without paying dearly for it, she instinctively finds it very threatening. So for example, if a female pop star becomes wealthy in part by flaunting her body on stage, women tend to be okay with it. But if that same woman instead flaunts her body for a porn mag for $200 a week, women tend to get outraged.

But the pop star is getting paid in both cases, assuming it's not a free gig. The men ogling her still have to pay up.

The men ogling her still have to pay up.

In my second example, I was assuming that it's the same woman but she's not a pop star. Rather, she's just another porn actress getting paid relatively little. And men pay to watch her, but very little. Generally speaking, this type of situation outrages women. Even though fundamentally it's no different from the hypothetical multimillionaire pop-star.

Sorry for not making myself clear before.

I just realized that I skipped over the word 'dearly' in the original comment. My bad. Altogether I agree with the general point that society as a whole is generally not comfortable with any man having sex for 'free' in the rather wide sense of the word, especially when that free boning is taking place in the context of cohabiting, for example.

On a somewhat related note, do scantily clad pop singers usually earn significantly more than porn actresses? I wonder.

On a somewhat related note, do scantily clad pop singers usually earn significantly more than porn actresses?

Certainly the well known ones, such as Taylor Swift, do. Note that Taylor Swift has what could be called a "residual claim." In other words, if she blows up, she reaps most of the benefits. By contrast, if a movie by a porn actress blows up, it's her employer that reaps the benefits. Unless of course she is independently successful, for example a big OF star. But in that case, the situation is much less objectionable to feminists.

I think it has a lot to do with HereandGone's point: the pop star is modeling something that might be fun for a woman and her romantic interest to role-play, while the porn actress often is not.

while the porn actress often is not

You mean not fun for the woman in the relationship to roleplay? :)

Yes, that's what I meant. What's the :) for?

More comments

I think there exist plenty of women who would not like it if their partner consumed and masturbated to porn but have little issue with its existence as a whole, particularly when used by single people or in relationships where its use is agreed to. Plenty of women I know have articulated this in addition to concerns about giving men a confused view of sex. It is not hypocritical to support the existence of porn and not want it to be misused in a partnered relationship with expectations of sexual exclusivity. Nor do I think it's a women-only phenomenon: plenty of men don't want their girlfriends looking at porn for similar reasons despite having used it in their past or sharing similar hesitation. I think the only problematic view would be expecting your partner to refuse it while continuing to use it yourself.

Partnered relationships with expectations of sexual exclusivity? What, I can't use my right hand by myself in a relationship?

It is hypocrisy, or at least gross overreach. Most of the women I've known IRL have been neutral to positive towards porn, but the ones who found it objectionable would find it even more objectionable if their boyfriends demanded they stop using their vibrators and reading smut in their spare time. Often they go as far as to claim that smut isn't the same as a porno, since one is coarse and visual, and the other is in the rarefied realms of imagination.

What, I can't use my right hand by myself in a relationship?

Sure, you can. I would just expect you to be on the same page with your partner about it, in terms of what counts as cheating etc. Hence my use of the term "expectations." It's up to the expectations that you and your partner would set. There is no such thing as an overreach if you both agree to it. I don't see any problem with you similarly hoping your partner stop reading smut.

I won't deny that hypocrites exist, but I've known plenty of women are fairly principled about it. Just depends on the circles, I suppose. To be fair, I am sympathetic to the idea that smut is qualitatively different than video porn on a psychological level, but they're close enough we can treat them the same socially.

which of course is not the real reason

And further, this is the reason why older women push to have women younger then them treated as mentally equivalent to animals -> unable to consent, hence #fightfor25 (and to a large degree #metoo).

and will backfill a reason that sounds less jealous and more socially acceptable.

Well, that and feminists still need men to enforce the social order that privileges them. Saying this directly would destroy that compact.

You would see the same if they found their partner was having sex with dogs. This would greatly upset them but they would state the reason is something to do with animals being unable to consent, which of course is not the real reason.

Come on. I am pretty sure that most women, feminist or not, would be disgusted at the thought of their partner having sex with dogs and would not need "Animals can't consent" as a justification for their disgust.

"Women only hate porn because they're jealous of hotter younger women" is also very uncharitable and probably not true, or at least their stated reasons for hating porn are also genuine, even if insecurity about hotter younger women plays a part.

Come on. I am pretty sure that most women, feminist or not, would be disgusted at the thought of their partner having sex with dogs and would not need "Animals can't consent" as a justification for their disgust.

Of course they would be disgusted, daguerran was not denying that. But they would be unable to justify it as anything else than lack of consent because disgust is outside of the moral vocabulary of the modern liberal west (as per Haidt's observations on WEIRD morality). Try explaining why it's disgusting without resorting to a variant of "it hurts the animal" (or imagine a situation where the animal initiated, and is clearly unhurt by it). You'll inevitably end up sounding like a rabbi or an imam explaining why eating pork is impure. Of course, in many situations it probably also hurts the animal, so the objection is also partially genuine, but it's a different impulse that led to digging for a post-hoc justification for condemnation.

Similarly he posits that jealousy is outside that vocabulary, and that the justifications for porn-negativity given are post-hoc, even if they might still make a genuine point sometimes.

A good test for that would if someone offered as a solution that porn be mandated to be instructive in helping men bring women to orgasm, but otherwise could still be of hot younger women. Do you think the complaints would stop? Do you think there's any amount of accomodations that could be done for the goalposts to stop moving? Personally, I think he's right on the money that the only accomodations that would do it are those that make either porn unthreatening to the sexual value of those complaining about it, or so unenjoyable that men stop watching.

This is also partly a communication issue, no? The woman either failed to communicate what she wants from the man, or the man did not listen or understand when she did so.

Had the man not watched porn but still been abstaining from sex for decades, he would also not know how to satisfy a woman. So you get the same experience of the woman leaving unsatisfied. The main difference would be that the abstainer probably has fewer preconceptions, so maybe he will be more careful. But that does not directly correlate with being better at sex.

Yeah, there's a lot of romance in the idea of so carefully reading your partner's microexpressions that you can tell exactly how they want things or how things are working at a given time, but in the real world it's something you actually have to use your words to get done properly.

Ironically, the "communication issue" can be looked at a similar way as porn only with the genders reversed: women get a very confused one-sided view of how relationships work from media targeting their fantasies, one where the man always knows exactly what the woman wants and delivers without her having to communicate at all...

I actually don't think this one is specifically gendered. Both my wife and I have at times struggled with expecting the other to know our preferences and desires without having to explicate them.

The experience isn't gendered, but the cultural narrative about it is. Women are not criticized for failing to live up to their partner's unvoiced expectations to nearly the extent men are (EDIT:), largely as a consequence of men being expected to communicate directly and women being expected to communicate indirectly.

I agree with this and, sadly, think it extends further.

When men do communicate directly, it's perfectly acceptable for a female partner to issue a blanket veto in either a positive or negative sense.

"Hey, babe, I like blowjobs."

"I am not a fleshlight for your entertainment!"

Subtext: The guy wasn't commanding or coercing a blowjob, but was voicing his own kinks or whatever. The response assumed an imperative "command" and the veto is delivered.

"Hey, babe, I'm stoked about your plans for your friend's baby shower, but, that's the same time as the football game I wanted to watch. Perhaps you go it alone?"

"You never support me!"

Subtext: The guy is gently trying to message that he'll be miserable at the baby shower, it's likely she will detect his miserableness, and this, in and of itself, may be the cause of a fight later in the day. Furthermore, he has a reason that is, to him, quite important to not be at the babyshower. He's probably looking to make a compromise, she immediately jumps to the assumption that he's merely thinking "lol, fucking gay-ass babyshower."

First, I don't think the above is the de facto communication pattern in modern relationships. It is, however, common enough in my own experience and observation that I don't think what I've outlined above qualifies as hyperbole. And, of course, there are mature couples who can talk about their sexual kinks / fantasies etc. without getting weirded out (even if it includes toaster fucking) and can reasonably make concessions on social outings and recreation to fit each other's strong preferences as well.

Still, I think there is a an imbalance between how normie men and women are allowed / incultured to use vetos and other strong-arm relationship tactics. And I believe it is new. I can remember as a child asking my Grandfather what going to work was like for him (did you use a typewriter or a quill pen, ahahaha!) He told me about his day and then dropped this nice little anecdote;

"Your Grandma always had dinner ready when I got home, because a good wife knows that her husband is going to be hungry after a long day of work!" The obvious level of recoil on one or two of my aunt's faces was priceless. Even the more well adjusted pair rolled their eyes and gave small smirks.

But, perhaps, isn't this just the revelation of my Grandfather's preference that he, very likely, explicitly communicated to my Grandmother? Was this horrifically insulting and demeaning to Grandma? (I can assure you it was not.)

In today's normie long term relationships, I see a verbal pattern with men that is equivocal and designed to be low impact. "Hey, babe, I was thinking that ..." or " You know what could be fun?" or "Oh, hey, wanted to run something by you ...." It is extremely uncommon to hear a direct imperative tense verb; "Pick up the dry cleaning, please" or "Make sure dinner is ready at 6:30" or "We are going to the potluck on Saturday." This is a retreat from male coded directness to female coded subtlety. It is, in fact, the de facto verbal mode of the basic normie marriage.

You could imagine how irritating it is to hear that men spend 30 minutes a day jerking off to porn for decades and then one of them finally gets to fuck you and has no idea how to bring you to orgasm and you leave the experience totally unsatisfied. Consistently!

And that is surprising...how? Visual porn normally caters to men, not women. Of course it doesn't normally work as a training film for bringing women to orgasm. Duh. It's the equivalent of reading romance novels in order to learn how to please men.

It's not surprising that porn-for-(non-autogynophilic)-men avoids seeing what the inside of a woman's head feels like. It is kinda weird from a bi guy perspective how much straight-for-guy's-eyes porn focuses on the man or men, and how little is focused on something really prioritizing women qua woman. I would expect places like I Feel Myself to be a genre, but they really don't look like it.

I doubt it would help a lot even if it existed -- there's a lot of variation from one person to another, as a lot of same-sex couples have found out for better or worse -- but still strange.

So much this.

The number one complaint I hear from women about porn is that it gives men a very confused, one-sided view of sex. You could imagine how irritating it is to hear that men spend 30 minutes a day jerking off to porn for decades and then one of them finally gets to fuck you and has no idea how to bring you to orgasm and you leave the experience totally unsatisfied. Consistently!

I guess apologies if this is TMI but this was literally me with my wife when we were in high school. The first time I fingered her my only experience was from porn and so naturally that was what I tried to replicate. It was a painful uncomfortable experience for her and she left quite unsatisfied. Fortunately for me my response was to go online and look up some actual useful information about what women like. Talk with her about her preferences. Developing the skills to bring her to orgasm was not that hard! Unfortunately I get the impression a lot of men have the opposite takeaway. "If she doesn't like what the women in porn like, it must be something wrong with her!"

It has become an accepted social reality that average women will happily suck dick, swallow cum, do gangbangs online for the money, and it’s all normal, because it’s not like they are doing anything objectionable or whatever.

This doesn't strike me as true at all. But let's be more precise.

suck dick

I would consider oral sex to be an entirely normal part of mature human relationships. I'm also pretty confident that's been a staple of human relationships since we evolved genitals and mouthes. This is incredibly normal and has been forever.

swallow cum

This is part and parcel with sucking dick, and also very normal? I don't have strong feelings here but it's kind of a natural outcome of sucking dick, again, this has been happening for 10,000s of years, very normal.

do gangbangs online for the money

Literally no one thinks this is normal? Anyone who does gangbangs online for money immediately loses nearly all of their dating status (yes, simps and sexual deviants who are fine with this exist, but they're rare).

I'm very confident that no woman I know would be willing to do this. And I'm very confident that every man I know would be unwilling to date a woman who had done this. I'm also confident most women I know wouldn't be willing to date a man who did this. This is wildly not normal.

I was referring to women who do all of those things online i.e. in front of the camera, for money. I guess it wasn't worded clearly enough. The women who currently engage in this are, as far as I can tell, average women from average places; they may come from broken homes, but again, broken homes today are so frequent as to be close to average. Their activities are normal in the sense that nobody bats an eye even. There's no scandal, no outrage. Nobody can try generating outrage about this and at the same time retain a safe, mainstream status in society. Nobody cares.

Oh I see what you mean. No disagreement there

On #2, you're overthinking it. It's still fanservice just with a feminist veneer. @HereAndGone2 suggests naive female pop stars are being manipulated into this by evil male managers, but I suggest that's crap -- they know what they're doing too.

It's still fanservice just with a feminist veneer.

In a nutshell, indeed it is.

But female popstars don't attract a straight male audience with the fanservice. Swifties and Arianators (who seem to be the biggest still-active popstars with that vibe) are overwhelmingly female - men aren't willing to pay that much money to see Taylor Swift gyrate in a bodysuit while singing chick-orientated music. (Male artists who use female backing singers and dancers as fanservice is a different proposition - that isn't going anywhere and the male fanbase like it).

Google AI says that the female solo artist with the largest male fanbase in absolute terms is Mariah Carey (who was as thirst-trappy by the standards of her day as Swift and Grande are now), but her fanbase is mostly female with queers over-represented - she's just big enough that the substantial minority of straight male fans is a big number.

Female soloists with male-skewed fanbases (again, per Google AI) include Joan Jett (and the Blackhearts), Stevie Nicks, Alanis Morisette, Pink, Hayley Williams (leads Paramore), and April Lavigne. Of those, only April Lavigne does sexy, and her sexy persona is much more gothy and less girl-next-door than the singers with female fanbases. (I also think there is a pattern of female singers leading mostly-male instrumental bands having more male fanbases than female singers who rely on session musicians).

Whatever Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande doing with the minidresses and bodysuits, it is appealing to young women far more than it does to men. The Freudian analysis would be something on the lines of women wanting to be the centre of attention for their sexual desirability and therefore wanting the icons they vicariously live through to perform sexual desirability when they are the centre of attention. An interesting point about female popstars' slutty stage outfits I remember reading in a dentist's waiting room was that the outfits are designed like technical dancewear - and suggesting that part of what is going on is that "slop-creating female pop musicians" (great turn of phrase, @Botond173) see themselves as dancers (who were always more sexualised than singers).

The other point of comparison is women's athletic uniforms - where the only reason they aren't continuing to get skimpier is because they can't without an unacceptable risk of wardrobe malfunctions. It is very obvious that most (but not all) female athletes want people (probably other women at least as much as men) to look at their toned bodies. And this isn't just a chick thing - straight male bodybuilders are desperate for other men to look at their toned bodies.

I watched a Sabrina Carpenter video (Espress) and then an Avril Lavigne video (Complicated), to see the contrast. The thing that really stood out to me was that in the Sabrina Carpenter videos men are either servants (holding her up, massaging her, doing her feet), eye candy, or threats (handcuffing her, putting her in a police car while she rolls her eyes) while the April Lavigne video is full of her having fun with her male friends.

I'm reminded of a comment made here a while back that men like female characters who have a close relationship with at least one man who is not their love interest. A father, a friend, a brother, whatever. It's a strong signal that they like at least some men for their own sake, and that they wouldn't be a complete bitch to you if you ever met them just because they don't find you hot.

I'm not sure how far to extrapolate or reverse this. Women often go for sausage-fest cast shows like Sherlock, or the Avengers, where there are no women and/or the main character is actively hostile to any female characters. Likewise men go for cute girls doing cute things and magical girl genres which have no men at all.

April Lavigne

Avril. I wouldn't bother if it was just once but you're both doing it, at least one consistently.

Ha! I wrote Avril, then reread @MadMonzer's comment and 'corrected' mine :P

Guilty as charged.

I'm reminded of a comment made here a while back that men like female characters who have a close relationship with at least one man who is not their love interest

This seems to just be filtering out a particularly hamfisted brand of woke politics is all.

Women often go for sausage-fest cast shows like Sherlock, or the Avengers, where there are no women and/or the main character is actively hostile to them.

Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock (Avengers movies have female cast-mates) is a high-status, mercurial genius who doesn't care for people except a few that impress him who he forms a deep and abiding relationship with. Watson, one of the few people this applies to and the one it applies to most strongly, is the usual partner in all of the slash fics.

This is basically 50 Shades of Grey by proxy. Or Metropolis. Many such cases.

I think Sabrina Carpenter is an interesting case study here. Her music is ridiculously sexually explicit, she performs in lingerie and a core part of her act is miming heterosexual sex positions. That said, I get the sense her audience/fanbase is approximately 0% heterosexual male. It gives me the same vibe as burlesque, which seems to be a major form of entertainment for blue tribe women in major cities yet has zero sexual currency with hetero men. Burlesque performances will include lingerie and actual nudity from women, but I don’t get the sense any straight men are watching burlesque compilations on pornhub.

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately, but I feel burlesque is sort of spiritually akin to male war reenactors. They are both reenacting the past to give themselves gender valdiating experiences, men getting to pretend to experience heroism and self-sacrifice in combat, frumpy feminists getting to experience a reenactment of sexual desirability

As someone who recently went on a date to a burlesque circus, burlesque is now mostly queer coded. It was an excuse for mainly gay buff acrobatic men to get nude-ish and then some women in skin-tight gymnast like clothing to do acrobatic stunts.

This discrepancy in nudity between the sexes was startling. It was not designed for the hetro male gaze. It was designed for the queer gaze. If it was designed for the hetero gaze, more men would attend.

There is a French restaurant near me that did burlesque and dinner, and that was much more hetero coded, and equally the audience was more normal (in that it didn't skew queer or gay or woman). It was also more enjoyable, at least for me FWIW.

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately, but I feel burlesque is sort of spiritually akin to male war reenactors. They are both reenacting the past to give themselves gender valdiating experiences, men getting to pretend to experience heroism and self-sacrifice in combat, frumpy feminists getting to experience a reenactment of sexual desirability

Well, damn. I never thought about all that this way before.

They are both reenacting the past to give themselves gender valdiating experiences, men getting to pretend to experience heroism and self-sacrifice in combat

War re-enactors?! No, these are neckbeards playing dress up. They want to be hailed for their assiduous attention to historical detail and accuracy, not their "heroism." Even if airsoft, which is pseudo-athletic, most of the time is spent geeking out over hyperrealistic gear, rather than drilling movement to contact.

The male "gender validation" activity is sports. Go to any sports bar and just listen, you'll find several different styles of conversation, but it's all about the fantasy of kicking the shit out of the other team. You have the has been High School QBs who know more about the game than the NFL does ("sloppy defense!"), you have the hyper nerds who want to systematize dominance ("Davante Adams averages 1.8 yards of separation per target, you can't cover him even if you're covering him!"), and just the highly emotive (and likely drunk) general issue fans ("Go! go! go! COME ON, COME ON, YOU CAN'T CALL THAT A HOLD!").

miming heterosexual sex positions.

I woke up feelin' cheesiest, coach in a kind of DEUS VULT! mood. This has only exacerbated it. Burn the witch.

War re-enactors?! No, these are neckbeards playing dress up. They want to be hailed for their assiduous attention to historical detail and accuracy, not their "heroism." Even if airsoft, which is pseudo-athletic, most of the time is spent geeking out over hyperrealistic gear, rather than drilling movement to contact.

I guess there is a fine line between cosplay and military reenactment, isn't there?

And the Freudian analysis is probably correct. Also, I didn't just have female soloists in mind but various K-pop girl groups as well.

there is a pattern of female singers leading mostly-male instrumental bands having more male fanbases than female singers who rely on session musicians

There is in fact such a pattern in certain metal genres that has basically become the butt of jokes and meme material among male metal fans.

Instead, these women are normally open feminists, more or less loud ones, treating the “male gaze” and “unwanted attention” with disgust, loudly declaring that it’s not like they are trying to cater to icky men or anything, and are supposedly engaging in all this virtual whoring / thirst farming with a sort of weird irony in mind, where this is all simultaneously an act of female empowerment and a display of girlboss agency while at the same time some sort of critical commentary on the sad state of a shitty society that treats women like sex objects or whatever.

Or a third option: young female performers (take the case of Britney Spears) get steered by older male managers into "now it's time for your hot horny bitch phase" under the pretext of "no, no, this is empowering you, you're claiming your sexuality!" and similar guff. By the time they wise up to what's going on, it's too late and they're stuck with this image. I hate that girls are being taught that 'yeah, you gotta send nudes to your boyfriend if you want to keep him, that's just how it is' and then we get 13 year olds finding out that their private photos are being shared around for laughs and wank material.

But I'm a dinosaur. The socially conservative society I would prefer has been dynamited and we're all standing in the rubble.

It has become an accepted social reality that average women will happily suck dick, swallow cum, do gangbangs online for the money, and it’s all normal, because it’s not like they are doing anything objectionable or whatever.

Because it became normalised first in sexual relationships, when men started asking for what they saw in porn. "What do you mean, you don't want to suck my dick? Fine, you don't want to do that, I'll find another girl who will". Now blowjobs are just commonplace parts of what is the expected sexual repertoire. Heterosexual anal sex has gone the same way: from something only seen in porn to something daring when discussed in the mainstream to "spice up your sex life, ten top tips for having butt sex and keeping your man happy". See Dan Savage's "Good, Giving and Game" where if your partner doesn't want to engage in whatever kink or fetish you apparently can't live without, then if they're not willing to give in you are perfectly entitled to look for someone willing outside the relationship, or dump that partner's vanilla prude ass. That was in the context of gay sexual relationships, but the advice was trickling out for straight relationships as well: if she won't do it for you, then you are justified in finding someone who will.

Are you really surprised young women have learned this is what is expected of them? OnlyFans and the rest of it are just the fruits of this taken to its logical extreme.

Because it became normalised first in sexual relationships, when men started asking for what they saw in porn.

I think that's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. I suggest a different explanation which is connected to the concept of critical mass in the realm of social sciences, which I find plausible. If there's a certain human behavior that is considered abnormal but a minority of people start engaging in it more and more, there'll be a cascade effect once they reach 15 or so percent of the population (a critical mass). With increasing speed, it'll then become normalized. I guess this is what happened to casual sex.

We can assume there'll always be a subset of the female population willing to engage in casual sex (let's ignore prostitution for money as a phenomenon in this respect). In societies that are generally puritanical and restrictive, this subset is minuscule, which means men live with the assumption that casual sex is generally unavailable, even though most of them would be open to the opportunity one way or another. The most attractive ones will pursue it here and there to some extent, but it'll not be normalized throughout.

During the Sexual Revolution, due to a combination of of factors that we're mostly familiar with here, I think the subset of women open to casual sex reached a critical mass. When this started to have an effect on social norms, the idea took hold among men in general that initiating casual sex is largely OK from now on. And the cascade effect has been with us ever since. It was all downhill from there, if you disapprove of casual sex. Not only did women start competing with one another for the attention of got guys by engaging in casual sex, but they also did so by signaling their willingness to cater to the sexual preferences of those men. Hence the normalization of blowjobs. The commercialization of porn was an expression of this trend in the entertainment industry, but I doubt it was the driving force behind it.

Just some data to support the growing Overton window of sex: 40% of young women request being choked, up from 15% of 40-49 year old women. It's a huge explosion.

That said, I think it's absolutely brutal to suggest that blowjobs and Anal are a bridge too far. These sex acts are fantastically enjoyable. The former especially is absolutely a sex act that should be standard fucking equipment in any relationship with a penis.

Just some data to support the growing Overton window of sex: 40% of young women request being choked, up from 15% of 40-49 year old women. It's a huge explosion.

This would be consistent with a previous finding that women are more turned-on by violent porn than men, although it'd be good if such results were replicated. Of course, naturally a softening euphemism emerged: "consensual aggression."

Even among normies now for a while, it's been well-memed that chicks are aroused by getting violently dominated (including choking), to a degree that would shock men who grew-up believing in gender egalitarianism and women's Wonderfulness. One can see here for a Thanos "Nani?!" meme example.

Of course, naturally a softening euphemism emerged: "consensual aggression".

See also CNC (consensual nonconsent).

The former especially is absolutely a sex act that should be standard fucking equipment in any relationship with a penis.

Exhibit A in "why you cannot now turn around and blame women for being sluts and whores after the sexual revolution".

Guys, if it's going to be "women should be chaste and not sleep around but also if she's dating me I expect full service", you are asking for the impossible. Buggery is now something that is "fantastically enjoyable" and women should be prepared to give it up to their men. Or else?

Do you guys see what I am saying about the creep (as in "increase", not "creepy") in sexual expectations that ordinary men have, and why I think exposure to porn is responsible for a lot of this?

sexual expectations that ordinary men have

Only the men?

I would hope that if a couple is committing to a monogamous relationship i.e. to only ever taking sexual pleasure from each other from now on, then both sides would work hard to make sure that the other is feeling satisfied, which maybe sometimes means at least trying things. Partly out of obligation, partly because it would make someone who they hopefully care about happy. For the woman maybe sometimes it means blowjobs, for the man maybe it means roleplaying Mr. Darcy or Poldark or something else they find hideously embarrassing. And one would hope that equally each side would respect when their partner really doesn't want to do something. But a pre-emptive 'we're never doing that and don't you ask me again' seems a poor way to treat a partner.

Or to put it another way, sure, porn gives people more ideas of how to give their partner pleasure, some of which will turn out to be good in real life and some won't. This sounds like broadly a good thing to me if approached with care and affection, and I don't see what this has to do with promiscuity outside the relationship.

Oh sure, trying things. But there has to be reciprocity; one partner can't be the one always asking "do this for me" but then refusing when asked the same on the grounds "ugh, that's disgusting/nah not interested in that/too much work".

And if you hit a hard limit, then pushing too hard gets messy because suddenly you're blowing up your marriage and your settled life over "if I don't get this one particular thing, I'll be miserable and unhappy forever and it's not like ordinary sex is pleasurable, and I really really really need my partner to indulge my piss-drinking kink".

Definitely, 100%.

I both partially agree with you and am frustrated that you're engaging with a strawman. Engaging in sex acts <> Promiscuity. Full stop. Of course men cannot have their cake and eat it too. Women that are easy to sleep with are easy to sleep with.

But to the other half of this - what is the limit of sexual activity you consider permissable? Because you're actually pushing back on Oral Sex here, not Anal. I'll veer into a less logical argument: people who think kissing the genitals of someone they love is beyond the pale are insane. I literally cannot conceive a relationship where something that low risk and high reward is off limits. It's unbelievably selfish.

The Algebra for anal is different, but not meaningfully so in a monogamous relationship.

Oral and anal should never be done with a woman you love and respect. It is degrading and wrong. If you want your wife to be a whore then you do you, but I wouldn’t want that.

Do you also believe that men should not perform oral sex?

It depends. Maybe OP is referring to committed relationships instead of serial monogamy and hookups, I don't know. Either way, this is just an expression of the typical male fantasy that I've mentioned here before: the gracious, modest woman who isn't a dirty slut with anyone in the world but you.

If you're an average man starting a hetero relationship in our time and the woman is swearing up and down that she's never going to give blowjobs because those are so degrading etc., you're well advised to be suspicious, because there's a real possibility that she's lying.

If your argument is that blowjobs should be moved out of the Overton window altogether or be confined to the realms of prostitution and marital relationships, I'm willing to hear you out.

I think that we in the modern West struggle to understand these things because we have lost the understanding that intentionally tempting someone is a sin, and we have lost the ideas we need to discuss two people sinning against one another.

This can result in some unexpected and kind of weird Shiri’s scissors. Take the Baby It’s Cold Outside discourse: As the song is written, the male singer is trying to convince the female singer to stay the night by offering her a series of plausible excuses to do so; she kind of wants to but knows she shouldn’t, or at least that she’s expected not to. His tone is best described as playfully predatory.

That breaks people’s minds. Since there is no longer any socially acceptable category for culpable seduction, everyone tries to collapse the wave function into either “cute coming of age story” or “rape.” About ten years ago I heard a middle school choir (ages 11–14) perform the song with cigarettes and booze removed but sexual implications left altogether intact. On the other hand, people have been decrying the song’s radio play for years now on the grounds that it glorifies rape, which is the only moral category many people have for predatory sex.

Much of the yes-means-yes advocacy seemed to me to come from the same place. College girls had sex that they came to understand on some level was Not Okay. They (often correctly) accused college boys of exploiting them, and the boys (often correctly) pointed out that the sex was consensual. There is a natural temptation for everyone to claim innocence by projecting all the guilt onto the other party, but in this case the kids didn’t have a fighting chance: Their elders had robbed them of any moral categories outside “rape” and “not rape.”

So yes, I have known the Christian woman who sleeps with her boyfriend and, when asked, points out that this is what is expected of her to continue the relationship, and I acknowledge that this a real temptation placed upon her. I also know that she has a normal libido, and that on some level she was using the expectation as an excuse to do what she wanted to do. Her responsibility doesn’t render him innocent, and vice-versa.

I will certainly not claim to know how socially conservative secularists should navigate the current landscape. Both men and women have said that trying to do the right thing often feels like a sucker’s bet, and I believe them. I think that we in conservative churches can start by dating and marrying only sincere fellow believers, which we should be doing anyway. But that doesn’t address the underlying issue.

As you point out, even the Christians have folded on this. Catholics are not supposed to break the laws around sexual morality but of course the vast majority do because the culture now is "well yeah everyone has sex with their partner". I've seen the massive change on this in Ireland from the early 80s to today. We've updated to being a modern Western society with the same mores and morals.

So yes, the expectation there is "but you agreed to have sex with me, and there's no rule about this means commitment or a permanent relationship or anything of that nature anymore". We're stuck between two stools, as you doubtless have seen on here, all the criticism of women for sleeping around etc. whereas nobody is saying "men, too, should not be sleeping around". Indeed the argument is that women are not sleeping around enough, since "waaah, it's so unfair! women can get as much male attention as they want, just by existing, but guys can't even get a chance get a handjob on the third date, they can't even get a first date!"

It's not the fault of women that male sexuality is so easy it seems to be permanently turned on to "high" and just having boobs and ass means dick goes sproing! and guy wants to get dick wet.

Neither is it men's fault that women make stupid decisions and end up with the disaster guys. I've seen a court case in the papers right now that makes me want to scream. Oh, sure: the guy who came home drunk and threw the baby across the room is a "good father". The only hope there is that maybe this woman will finally get her and the kids out, but I wouldn't bet on it.

I think current mores have left everyone with the worst of both worlds; the old double standard is still floating around, but the sexual revolution has left the expectation that women and men will have sex outside of marriage, be that on a casual basis or within some kind of relationship. So men are feeling aggrieved at not getting the sexual access that they imagine the Chads and Alphas are getting, and blaming women for being simultaneously too promiscuous and too picky, and women are feeling aggrieved at providing the expected sexual access but not getting commitment in return (even the cases where "so me and my boyfriend have been living together for five/ten years, I'd love to get married, but he is making no move toward that/when I talk about it he shrugs it off that we're fine as we are" means "girl, he's never gonna propose, why would he? free milk without having to buy the cow!")

And we can't fix it by trying to turn the clock back because (to mix metaphors) that horse has bolted.

I am also pretty aggrieved that you basically can't tell a Christian from a secular person from their behavior anymore. I watched this guy talk about all the dates/sex he was having with all these different women and all the smooth lines and all the previous divorces and all the sex toys he owned and all the assplay that he enjoyed and all the tattoos he has, so I was very surprised to find out one day that he's actually Christian. And yet, his response to me was always "live a little, you're so Puritan". A Christian ought to hold Puritanism highly, I think.

I think men should also not be sleeping around before marriage. But it's difficult to criticize men for that kind of thing without coming across as salty that they're getting so much sex. I'd also guess the userbase here is composed of men, and they primarily want to focus on the opposite sex because that's who they need as romantic partners. Of course, sleeping with those same women before marriage is just making the problem worse. Ultimately, it's probably intractable... birth control and the information economy necessitating an extended adolescence means that pretty much no one is a virgin at the time of marriage anymore.

necessitating an extended adolescence

It wasn't necessary, but this failure is 100% on the traditionalists. You can see the echoes in "but no daughter of mine will be dating at 13".

They didn't understand the consequences of it at the time, and some of them are just operating on instinct and still don't- but "refuse to pursue the things you want because it's holy not to" in a time where the things you wanted became far more available (i.e. far less risky) had, and continues to have, massive downstream consequences.

In the face of this they insisted on "just do nothing" (rather than what they should have done, which was to accelerate life and the achievement of those milestones, not retard it), and when the youth walked away their persecution complex did the rest. And the youth that remained were more likely to have the same hatred of life within them, or the same development issues that cause them to be compatible with delaying life far past that normal range, so the problem persists.

Availability bias is a hell of a drug. When we say all child stars go crazy, we are ignoring the vast majority who did not. Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan come to mind because their wreckage was photogenic ("leave Britney alone!!"). We tend to ignore the thousands of former child actors who are now working as unremarkable real estate agents or middle-managers in the suburbs. If we look at the high-tier cohort from that era, we find people like Natalie Portman, Kenan Thompson, or Joseph Gordon-Levitt. They seem, by most accounts, to be functioning adults. They didn't have public meltdowns, and they didn't undergo a sudden, jarring pivot into hyper-sexualized branding.

This suggests that the "going crazy" outcome is not a universal law of child stardom, but rather a specific subset of outcomes driven by two things: the personality traits of the children (and parents) who seek high-level fame, and the specific economic demands of the transition from "adorable child" to "adult artist."

Consider the Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez examples. It might be very tempting to view their transition into hyper-sexualized imagery as a psychological rebellion against a father figure or a Disney-enforced childhood. But looking at this through a lens of market signaling, a different picture emerges.

If you are a child star, your brand is built on a specific type of innocence. This brand has a hard expiration date. By the time you are twenty, the Disney Girl persona is a depreciating asset. To survive in the industry, you have to execute a rebranding that is loud enough to signal to the market that you are no longer a child. If you do this subtly, nobody notices, and you simply fade away. If you do it loudly, you successfully kill the old brand and create space for a new one.

The majority of Miley Cyrus's fans today barely remember her cutesy Hannah Montana shtick. She quite successful pivoted, and has done pretty well for herself after the transition. Either way, she couldn't continue as HM indefinitely.

This is not necessarily a sign of "daddy issues" or clinical mental illness. It's a pretty rational response to a career-threatening bottleneck. It is the "I am an adult now" signal amplified to a level where the signal-to-noise ratio overcomes the public's lingering memory of you as a twelve-year-old. The fact that this rebranding often takes the form of hyper-sexuality is less about individual pathology and more about the fact that sexual maturity is the most legible, universal signal of adulthood available in our culture.

There is also a selection effect at play regarding who becomes a top-tier child star in the first place. High-level fame requires a specific type of drive (or perhaps a specific type of parental obsession, itself probably heritable) that may be correlated with higher-than-average rates of neuroticism or cluster B traits. We might be looking at a population that was already at higher risk for mental health struggles, which the industry then amplifies. This is different from saying fame causes the illness. It might just be that the people most likely to seek the spotlight are also the people most likely to struggle when the spotlight gets too hot.

I would also push back on the idea that these performers are just "doing what they’re told" by sleazy managers. While that certainly happens, it ignores the agency of the performers themselves. Many of these women are highly intelligent businesspeople who understand exactly what sells. They are navigating a landscape where the "male gaze" is both a source of revenue and a target for performative feminist critique. They are playing a complex game of triangulation. They provide the sexual imagery that the market demands, but they frame it as "empowerment" to satisfy the cultural gatekeepers of the prestige media.

(Case in point, Taylor Swift)

This isn't necessarily madness on the part of the performer. It is a highly sophisticated, if somewhat cynical, way of maximizing market share across two demographics: the "dudebros" who want the fanservice and the "woke" commentators who want the girlboss narrative. In other words, you get the horny gents, and you let their girlfriends convince themselves that this is somehow empowering.

Looking at this broadly, we've created a world where the most valuable currency is attention, and the most efficient way to get attention is to play in the space of sexual signaling while simultaneously denouncing the very people who are paying attention. It is a system that optimizes for friction. (Though I suppose if I were making their kind of money, I might be willing to trade a little bit of my own sanity for the privilege).

I'd just like to say, thank you for making an actual argument here. I can still tell that this is a topic you feel passionately about from the way you talk about it but you're expressing it without resorting to snark and sarcasm. And I actually share most of the same views as you, especially about the socially conservative society I would prefer being blown to bits. I'm not a mod here, but please, more of this.

Well, I suppose if you’re a pop singer who started out as a teenage girl and you aren’t explicitly Christian, keeping up your clueless romantic virgin schoolgirl persona becomes tiresome, limiting and cringe after you turn 21 or so in a society where premarital sex is normalized. Thankfully I’m not that knowledgeable about this entire sleazy subject but as far as I can tell, Britney Spears also had scarce intentions herself of maintaining her good girl image after a while.

(On a related note, do all such pop singers have sleazy old men a managers? I wonder.)

Because it became normalised first in sexual relationships, when men started asking for what they saw in porn.

Hold up. So where was it normalized first? Real life or porn?

Taylor Swift seems, to my limited knowledge, to have navigated the problem of getting older and remaining popular/a star without resorting to the "oops, all my clothes fell off!" stage.

Look at Pink, who was big, and now is not so big. She, too, went through the "yeah I'm empowered" unconventional fashion choices. She's still touring but is not, I think, as relevant as she was; her audience is getting older along with her. They're loyal, but the 20 year olds aren't flocking to her (if I'm wrong, please correct me). Whereas Swift seems to have managed to get those 20 year olds to be her audience as well.

Look, I don't think pop stars are very smart, and the managers and record producers do tend to older guys. See the 80s line of manufactured boy bands and girl singers churned out by the likes of Stock, Aitken and Waterman as songwriters/producers. And I do think that the career trajectory for the disposable pop girly does go through the "slutty is empowered" stage on the way to "you're 30 or older now, the teenagers aren't buying your records any more, the exit is that way" ending, because Sex Sells and 50 year old men know that hot slutty 20 year old girls will get press attention and publicity, and even better if it can be sold on the back of fake feminism.

Whereas Swift seems to have managed to get those 20 year olds to be her audience as well.

Taylor Swift is kind of sui generis because she’s the last mega-celebrity that the mono-culture ever produced. She got in right under the line, just before social media fractured the attention economy into a million little bubbles. I don’t think it’s possible for any new pop star today to reach that level of name recognition.

I don't think Taylor Swift or Pink ever had an early good modest girl image though.

Taylor Swifts early image was 1000% good girl modest. You could argue that her audience was trivial compared to what it is now, and that would be true, but it's unmistakable that she was a polite good girl country singer first.

Polite, yes. Country girl, yes. Modestly dressed, sure (back then, that is). Going through a string of guys, presumably sleeping with them at least once? Absolutely.

Taylor swift started out with(and still makes money off of) a ‘girl next door’ vibe which is close enough.

See my reply to FiveHourMarathon below.

Pink is kind of unusual in that she started with a highly sexualized aggressively edgy punk style and then in the mid 2010s aggressively pivoted to much more middle of the road family friendly pop-banger mileu.

Have you ever heard the song, “You Belong With Me”?

You're on the phone with your girlfriend, she's upset

She's going off about something that you said

'Cause she doesn't get your humor like I do

I'm in the room, it's a typical Tuesday night

I'm listening to the kind of music she doesn't like

And she'll never know your story like I do

But she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts

She's Cheer Captain, and I'm on the bleachers

Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find

That what you're looking for has been here the whole time

If you could see that I'm the one who understands you

Been here all along, so why can't you see?

You belong with me, you belong with me

Walk in the streets with you in your worn-out jeans

I can't help thinking this is how it ought to be

Laughing on a park bench, thinking to myself

"Hey, isn't this easy?"

It’s hardly even subtext. It’s just text.

That is the female equivalent of the Nice Guy: I'm Not Like Other Girls. Both of them complaining about being friend-zoned and when will the object of their obsession wake up and realise that the partner they're currently with is wrong for them and if they'd only just look at me, they'd see how much I love them, and how good I'd be to them.

Someone quoted a song by a male artist which was about "that jerk beats her up, why does she stay with him, she should leave him for me" and it's the same energy.

Pink no, but that was Taylor's whole thing. Kinda still is.

Quoting two comments from a Manosphere blog in 2012:

If you've ben following along, since Swift became "legal", she's been riding the carousel with abandon, going through men like water and using them as fodder for her songs. This is the essence of her popularity -- not purity, far from it, but because she writes about her real experiences riding the alpha carousel, and other women her age range (let's cast that net broadly at 15-30) relate to what she is singing very much.

It's hard to call her a slut, really, because she represents the new normal for women her age. Now granted she is far, far prettier than normal (she has truly model-level looks and would have clearly been a quasi-supermodel (or a full-blown one) had she not been musically talented. And I don't think her "innocence" schtick was an act, either -- I think, again, it reflects the mindset of many women in that age swipe who see themselves as being fundamentally innocent yet very sexually active -- which is the way Swift portrays herself.

In short Taylor Swift is the poster girl for the contemporary young woman -- a very supermodel-ish poster gitl, to be sure, but her popularity among her female fans (who are the overwhelming majority of her fanbase) has to do with her singing about experiences that are similar to their own, which has been the case for many of her songs, not just this one. This is the first big one about a ONS with an alpha, whereas the others have been about serial monogamy with alphas, but, as Dalrock points out well, these are really two sides of the same coin, and the former is something that most women who are doing the latter engage in a couple of times (or more, for some).

See, I don't think that the culture in general considers young women who have an occasional "it just happened" animal attraction ONS to be sluts. Nice girls do this, and remain nice girls as long as they don't do it regularly. That is, as long as the ratio is 70%+ serial monogamy and 30% or less animal attraction ONSs, your "nice girl card" isn't revoked. Taylor Swift is still a nice girl, therefore, who has the occasional ONS, and writes about it (just like she writes about her serial monogamy stuff with alpha males).

She's still not a slut, really. A slut is Ke$ha, not Taylor Swift. The threshold for sluthood is very high in this culture, which means Swift can still be a nice girl and engage in occasional promiscuous behavior -- because in 2012 that's what nice girls do. As long as a certain threshold isn't passed, she's still a nice girl and not a slut -- like Taylor Swift. And a huge proportion of 15-30 age women relate 100% to this.

So...yeah. According to the "new normal", she isn't a slut per se.

And of course men never went through a series of women as muses, and engaged in serial monogamy? That's the double standard in action: I am a man of the world, experienced and tempered by time and wisdom, who has loved many women but never been tied down by one. She is a slut riding the alpha carousel.

Men who say such things about themselves rather pointedly don't care to cultivate an image of themselves as dutiful, modest (boring) family men.

Odd that they consider her so attractive. De gustibus non est disputandum I guess? But I'm going to anyway: a big part of Swift's success is that she isn't that hot. She's good looking, but she's the exact level and type of woman where most women within one standard deviation of the median can relate to her. She's built like a romance novel protagonist, like a hollywood version of an everywoman.

I'm not going to fundamentally disagree but I ask you to consider what % of women "within one standard deviation of the median" are fat or frumpy.

More comments

Thankfully I’m not that knowledgeable about this entire sleazy subject but as far as I can tell, Britney Spears also had scarce intentions herself of maintaining her good girl image after a while.

I'm reminded of Sam Sheridan's quip in A Fighter's Heart where he noticed that a major risk factor in deaths in the boxing ring was family members in the corner. A fighter's brother, father, uncle was much more likely to keep sending him back out there until he died than was a professional coach.

I suppose this is a reference to her stage parents?

Managing female sexuality is a sleazeball man’s game, and female pop stars are selling female sexuality- not as a product, as a fantasy.

I don't know when it happened exactly, but, if you look at her current social media posting Britney Spears is clearly clinically mentally ill. The South Park episode is a good summary of what fame did to her. Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez seem like purer examples of the "I'm grown up now, fuck you dad!" type, with triple daddy issues in Cyrus's case.

but the tl;dr is that all child stars go crazy or disappear. Props to Macaulay Culkin for pulling his life back together.

I just posted a similar comment above, but I'm so confused by how quickly these discussions escalate.

I'm pretty sure oral sex has been happening for all of human history. It's so normal. It's not very invasive. No tissues get damaged.

The porn-enabled proliferation of anal is definitely weird and unfortunate. But to include it in the same paragraph as oral sex is just so strange to me. It's such a massive escalation from oral sex in terms of risk and discomfort I don't really see how they can be compared.

Especially because I do not believe for a second that oral sex was rare until the 90s or whatever when hardcore video porn started seriously proliferating throughout society.

Especially because I do not believe for a second that oral sex was rare until the 90s or whatever when hardcore video porn started seriously proliferating throughout society.

Can't tell you what the book was or who because it's been so very long since I read it, but one account of the Marquis de Sade and his happy habits included that he used to hire hookers. Well, so far so norma, sez you. Yeah, but he wanted them to do kinky shit, which came out at his trial.

Oooh, what kind of kinky shit did the Father of BDSM want that disgusted professional prostitutes?

Fellatio. (Well, that and some yes for real kinky shit)

So yeah, I think social attitudes have changed over the centuries. Roman brothels were offering blow jobs as part of the services available, but Roman social mores still were that this was something you would only request from whores and not wives or girlfriends (the entire subject of the impure mouth in Roman rhetoric and as part of political attack ads, as we'd call today). And of course, men sucking cock was on a scale from laughable to disgusting perversion.

We have moved from "this is something you only ask degraded women to do" to "this is part of normal sex". That's a big shift in attitudes.

Fair distillation in my book.

Its crazy how we've come around to the "porn is bad (from the feminist perspective) but women should be rewarded for producing it" (see: Bonnie Blue) point of view as a seeming cultural default.

Then add the additional wrinkle where men who are excessive porn consumers (where 'excessive' is a moving target, mind), or otherwise admit to partaking are still ostracized... even though the action of consuming porn is, I'd say, objectively less degrading and disgusting than the acts involved in producing the hardcore stuff.

There's sort of an implicit "if you're a male porn addict you're pathetic and its good that your money is going to women, even though we wish women would instead choose to not produce porn at all" subtext or something.

And on top of that women can read the most egregiously pornographic books and make them best-sellers... and we're all pretty aware that they're getting off to these things in private, but once again they can claim this makes them 'bookworms' and get a certain amount of adulation from admitting it.

There's an absolutely fair argument "real porn is produced by real people and depicts genuine suffering" vs. words on a page.

But as far as the psychological impact on the consumer I'd wager they're quite similar.

The fully cynical view is that the women are wonderful effect just dominates all cultural narratives. Human psychology is bent against criticizing attractive women, and so if women are engaging in [taboo/disgusting acvitity] maybe many humans will just contort their thought processes to find that thing really good actually, as long as its women doing it.

That's not the explanation I'd run with, I think it just frames the issue properly.

There's an absolutely fair argument "real porn is produced by real people and depicts genuine suffering" vs. words on a page.

That might be a fair argument, if fictional drawn porn didn't draw even more ire than live-action porn.

if fictional drawn porn didn't draw even more ire than live-action porn.

Is that actually the case?

If it is, I wonder how much of it is that the limitations of typical porn stars and porn producers (ugh, "money shot") are removed...

I think it is more that going after drawn porn is often easier in a number of ways (eg, no sex workers complaining about the negative impacts of your "advocacy", fewer connections to networks of corruption, etc).

“We”?

There are two groups, split on unsurprising demographic lines. The young and unattached are more laissez-faire; parents are mysteriously less comfortable with legitimizing any sort of sex work. Progressive, conservative.

But that split is mostly about production. There’s broad, non-partisan agreement that porn consumption is low-status. That part’s the cultural default.

I’ll agree that romance novels sort of play by different rules, but I think you’re overselling it a bit. There’s a different generational gap, too. But I’m not really inclined to trawl the NYT bestsellers for proof.

Its crazy how we've come around to the "porn is bad (from the feminist perspective) but women should be rewarded for producing it" (see: Bonnie Blue) point of view as a seeming cultural default.

It occurs to me that this default seems much less absurd if you realize that the cultural default is also willfully incentive-blind. It's an uneasy truce between people who don't think of porn as bad from the feminist perspective, they just think of all kinds of things it strongly correlates with as bad, and people who don't think that they're rewarding women for producing porn, they think they're being respectful to women who've been exploited by it.

There is a far more basic dynamic at play there, which is also the reason why sex toys for women are a much bigger and less stigmatised market: because men's value is measured by their ability to convince women to have sex with them, men who obtain sexual gratification without the need to do so broadcast to the world that they are losers.

There is no obvious counterpart of this for women - given that the counterpart animal-brain valuation is often stated as "measured by their ability to exercise choice and reject even high-value men", and the animal need is taken to be for resources and validation rather than sex, perhaps the distaff version of the coomer is something like a streamer maintaining a simp army by way of heavy plastic surgery/makeup/AI retouching/voice changers. I do get the sense that the embarrassment around women's no-makeup high school photos is a bit similar to the embarrassment around men's browser history.

There is no obvious counterpart of this for women

Cats. The female social equivalent of porn is cats. It’s a hyperstimulus that satisfies a biological drive that the person would have gotten social esteem for had they successfully achieved it “the right way”. In this case the biological drive is having children and being a mother. And you see similar stereotypes about the excessive user being creepy and filthy (the cat lady hoarder crammed into her apartment with her ten cats and a box of wine).

I don't buy it. Despite the stereotype and the mild snickering, nobody is cagey or secretive about their cat-keeping habits.

that the person would have gotten social esteem for had they successfully achieved it “the right way”

Would they? In 2026?

I think everyone is quietly going to think that a mother of four is less pathetic than a cat/dog mom of four, but now days they probably would be more careful about saying it out loud.

Dogs are a much better equivalent; small breeds in particular are just like slightly less verbal toddlers.

Guess what the dog mom stereotype is about…

Its an odd clash between our primal lizard/ape brain and our more economizing higher mammal brain that we seem to be well aware that "sex" is cheap in the abstract, you can find it with just a little effort and risk, and if you have some cash can acquire it, in varying degrees of quality.

Got specific names for it and everything. High end "sugar babies," low end "lot lizards."

So its not like some hard-to-acquire thing that has intrinsic value due to its rarity.

But... acquiring it from decent-looking women without having to pay out for it (up front, especially) usually means you're an absolute high-value stud who will literally be the envy of other men.

Status-seeking interacts with sexual politics in some odd ways here. If I have, I dunno, about 4-5k, I could spend the night with some of the most gorgeous women on the planet (so my research suggests). But I don't think that would, by itself, afford me any extra status points, and would in many contexts lower my status.

So its a commodity, but also something way, way more important.

I don't know, in the 4-5k example the circumstance that it would presumably be a financial strain for you does a lot of work here. It's one thing if you can eat rice and beans for two months to afford a quickie, and another when this is "easy solution if/when the urge arises" pocket change. (Compare owning a Ferrari to spending a similar amount for a 1h test drive for your birthday.) Similarly, we don't have particular reason to assume that any of Genghis Khan's baby mommas entered the arrangement particularly enthusiastically (as opposed to being bought, either directly or in units of the liquid asset that were the lives of his hordes), but when people speak of the fraction of modern-day people who descend from him, it still rings with some sort of grudging admiration.

On the flip side, the male advantage in acquiring resources has also eroded (especially anywhere near the median, rather than around various outliers; the overwhelming maleness of Bill Gates's economic bracket is irrelevant to the life of most women), and yet the ancestral patterns persist.

I guess I'm just saying, I could pay money to a hooker and then say "I banged an absolute 10/10 last night!" and be completely honest, pull out a photo showing her on my arm, and this might gain me some status points with the boys until it comes out that she is in fact a high-class hooker. Then all that bravado dissipates.

Buttttt, if I pull that same hooker with my own wiles and charm I can say "hey guys lol I banged a 10/10 escort last night without paying" then that might get me even more status because I just demonstrated value above and beyond being wealthy that can overcome even a working girl's cynicism.

Or so I'd expect. Thus its not the sex-having itself that is the flex, its the "girls find me attractive/interesting enough to give it up for free" part. Absolute social proof.

(for me, I'm genuinely at the point where sex doesn't mean much at all unless its with someone I have a true intimacy with, and so guys flexing their conquests leaves me mildly envious but not particularly threatened).

Got specific names for it and everything. High end "sugar babies," low end "lot lizards."

In OLD and social media, "sugar babies" will refrain from disclosing as such until you get their number and take the conversation to other channels, lest they get banned from the platform. While rarer, they often appear indistinguishable from normal girls too, just the usual attractive young woman's assortment of bikini pics, thirst traps, nights out with their girlfriends, pics of them in a cocktail dress at a two-person table in an expensive restaurant (who's taking the photo?).

If you have no interest in "sugar babies" like me, this represents time having been wasted talking to such a girl. Sometimes in the past when I've been traveling abroad or preparing to travel abroad (and thus chatting with girls in their local language) is to make lemonade out of lemons and amuse myself.

I say abroad because this doesn't work in English-speaking countries since I can't play dumb in terms of language familiarity the same way. Basically they'd say they're a [positive euphemism for a sex worker] and I'd "innocently" inquire if that means [less positive euphemism for a sex worker]. The equivalent in English would be something like, once we've been text messaging or WhatsApping or whatever for awhile:

Her: btw... im a sb and looking for something mutual
Me: what's an sb
Her: sugar baby
Me: what does that mean
*beat*
Me: ohhh is that like a prostitute?
Her: no not like that!!

And hoe maddening ensues. Even female sex workers are quite defensive and sensitive about their Wonderfulness.

Nowadays, I'm all-too-tiresome'd out to entertain myself like the above and will just leave it at that after the initial reveal.

Not really endorsing your post, but there is a REAL problem with women refusing to advertise their 'true' status in any way that might give up the game before a guy invests attention in her. Even being on a dating app isn't proof positive that she's available and serious.

Girls will have dozens of photos on Insta of just herself in various states of dress and undress, and you'll only find out she has a boyfriend after you've been texting sporadically back and forth for a month (happened to me recently).

Of course the wannabe SBs and the OF purveyors want to hide that until they think they've got you invested enough to slide down the sales funnel.

Yet even 'honest' girls will elide their current relationship status insofar as they'll neglect to mention their ongoing FWB situations or that they're still pining over a guy back home and they'd drop everything to move back there with him (also happened to me). Why not, you know, include him in some photos or at least acknowledge that he's there?

A guy might not know exactly what sort of woman he pulled until 3-6 months into the interaction. Its maddening.

When I learned that the Germans used to have a traditional method for women to advertise their availability I got kinda mad that we don't use similar systems any more.

As a result, it is utterly rational for a guy to assume there's a hidden caveat when a girl 'presents' as single but isn't really open about what that means to her. And that means withholding investment until he is reassured she's actually available and isn't about to spring the "please pay my rent this month" trap.

Girls will have dozens of photos on Insta of just herself in various states of dress and undress, and you'll only find out she has a boyfriend after you've been texting sporadically back and forth for a month (happened to me recently).

Yet even 'honest' girls will elide their current relationship status insofar as they'll neglect to mention their ongoing FWB situations or that they're still pining over a guy back home and they'd drop everything to move back there with him (also happened to me). Why not, you know, include him in some photos or at least acknowledge that he's there?

From her perspective, even if she's fairly confident (tentatively, at least) she'd like to stay faithful to her current relationship or situationship, why prematurely cutoff a vector for attention, a potential orbiter, or another "break-glass-in-case-of-emergency" backup in the event she does decide to cheat or monkey branch away from her current dick-provider?

A guy might not know exactly what sort of woman he pulled until 3-6 months into the interaction. Its maddening.

Sometimes you might even bang a girl only to find out weeks, months, or years later that she had a boyfriend at the time, was engaged, or was/is married.

As a result, it is utterly rational for a guy to assume there's a hidden caveat when a girl 'presents' as single but isn't really open about what that means to her. And that means withholding investment until he is reassured she's actually available and isn't about to spring the "please pay my rent this month" trap.

Another reason why not to get too attached to any one prospect; why to aim to get the bang with any particular prospect as soon as possible.

Not really endorsing your post, but there is a REAL problem with women refusing to advertise their 'true' status in any way that might give up the game before a guy invests attention in her. Even being on a dating app isn't proof positive that she's available and serious.

Certainly is. Women who's entire profile is '@instabae' or 'I'm hardly ever on here, come find me on monetised-thirsttrap.com/teehee'.

Back in the day, the pump and dump was weaponised against women like this (gold-diggers etc) with a very very large amount of collateral damage.

It sure feels like whenever you enter a digital conversation with (what appears to be) an attractive woman, there's like 50-50 odds that there'll be a reveal that this is just the top of her sales funnel once you've actually engaged.

No, I will not follow your insta, snap, telegram, join your discord, or subscribe to your Patreon or Substack.

And even the ones that don't... tend to not care that the general goal of such convos used to be meeting up in person. I've heard the term "rain check" too many times in the past few months.

I strongly encourage people to take breaks from OLD (or even dating in general) when they feel burnout. You won't be at your best when burnt out and frankly it feels horrible to keep engaging when you've had a bad run.

More comments

I like this comment because it sets up and interesting model.

Want a thing and don't care about status games? Buy it. Get rich, get what you want.

Want status but don't care about money? Get famous through any means necessary.

Want a thing and also care about status? Play whatever status game you want, and get to the level of wealth you need to acquire the thing.

But, of course, we see the hacks all over the place.

If you have lots of money - like, lots and lots of it - you acquire at least some status. If you have a lot of status (fame) you can pretty easily acquire money, perhaps even lots and lots of it.

It's that "both" model that is tricky. You want both status and money but you have to balance out one with the other lest you lose one or the other.

I don't know. This was off the top of my head, but it's interesting to play with.

I like what you're laying down.

Minmaxing seems to be in vogue now.

Nobody really wants to do the slow, steady, 'reliable' path. And, granted, I think there are fewer of those nowadays, given the pace of change.

You're 'losing' if you only bought index funds rather than YOLOing on NVDA.

One can also compare and contrast how, for example, Billionaires like Soros, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos have spent their fortunes.

A simple illustration of your point is the fear of the "Gold-Digger" woman who only loves you for your wealth. So guys sometimes go to pains to conceal the extent of the wealth to see if they can land a girl without ostentatious displays.

and then... some guys go ALL IN on ostentatious displays, going into debt to give the appearance of wealth and hoping to fool women long enough to lock them down.

People can arguably choose which games to actively compete in, and their particular goals in it will inform strategy.

But if you're not implementing a minmax strat, playing for the 'meta,' you can feel like you're losing constantly in the short term.

But if you're not implementing a minmax strat, playing for the 'meta,' you can feel like you're losing constantly in the short term.

Absolutely. So what matters more is which game you choose to play. Finite and Infinite Games does a great job of describing the two types of primary social games. This is one of my most recommended books.

Not to bring it back to Jesus, but ... to bring it back to Jesus, the entire "game" chosen there is sacrificing the fame / wealth / comfort of this world for the infinite comfort of the next. From a pure game theoretic standpoint, it's a total no-brainer. If not only the expected return but the guaranteed return to one course of action is literally infinite bliss forever, you go all in on that. For people who choose not to believe, they are still making a somewhat rational decision in their pursuit of wealth/status in this life. The tricky part is for lukewarm believers - C&E beige Catholics, whishy washy mainline protestants, cultural Jews, secular Muslims etc. who "believe" yet also hedge by pursuing wealth and status on earth. It's actually that exact non-minmax you're talking about and they'll likely get caught in the middle one way or another. And then, you know ,go to Hell forever.

I need to read that one.

Added to my library pull list.

Funny to bring up the Jesus thing. Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) is very near death, and he has claimed the intention to convert to Christianity.

Leaving aside whether that is a true conversion under Christian doctrine, its a ridiculous approach to minmaxing to live life a certain way all up until the very last moments then hit the "I want eternal bliss" button at the end, consciously trying to stave it off rather than just, you know, doing it.

Women have a particularly stark issue here, where part of their ideal strat for maximizing happiness is to have kids, which has a fairly sharp biological cutoff, so one would think they should try to satisfy that element early on. But cultural advice is to get other goals out of the way first, then play a game of baby fever chicken in your late 20's/early 30's. The tradeoff probably seems reasonable looking at it from the perspective of a 20-year-old.

I've noticed several female friends and acquaintances who developed their professional careers and now are just sliding under the fertility wire by having a kid (twins, in one case) with some guy who... I mean he's in the picture, but they are distinctly NOT married to him.

Time will tell how that turns out for them, but its also a bit unfair to the child, you ask me. One of the issues with minmaxing is you forget that other people's interests are entangled with your own.

and he has claimed the intention to convert to Christianity.

Relevant Simpsons clip

You can't fake true, in the heart intent. If Scott Adams is doing this because he is, all of a sudden, afraid of going to hell, then 1) He's acting out of fear (sinful) and 2) Is not acting out of a true love for God (also sin). All that being said, I don't actually believe that all deathbed repentances are invalid. Sometimes, someone is called in those last few moments. While it may seem like this is the ultimate "Get out of jail free" card, the reality would probably be that the person, while truly called to Christ and therefore happy to (after a stop in purgatory) go to paradise, is also full of remorse for not having Him in their life for all of their other years. Imagine having had an entire life you thought was happy and then, moments before death, discovering the ultimate in music / art / passion. It probably wouldn't actually be that enjoyable as you'd be full of regret.

More comments

The general social consensus seems to be that complaining about anything pretty women do is low status and petty, and complaining about anything ugly women do in any way is needlessly mean-spirited. It’s generally understood that many women are needlessly petty, but for a man to point that out openly is itself generally dismissed as a sign of pettiness.

I think it can be done if you're a high status enough male and if the framing is correct.

I can't think of a good example for the pure high status male, but, for framing, the host of the "Whatever" podcast, when he wants to, does this well. Unfortunately, that show has mostly turned into a circus where he invites on OnlyFans models and then literally guys from Andrew Tate's posse to flame each other. If you can find clips, however, where it's just the host and usually 1 - 3 OnlyFans girls, he actually does a passable job of framing he issue as one of personal integrity and self-worth versus instant gratification.

Yep.

I once again point out how Andrew Tate 'gets away' with it by cultivating such a ridiculously outsized villain persona that this critique just rolls off him.

But it'd be really nice if you didn't have to adopt a villain persona to be taken 'seriously' rather than dismissed outright for broaching the forbidden topic.

Even couching it as genuine care for womens' wellbeing gets vilified.

Uh, do these women bragging about how much they read come out and say ‘yeah, it’s all porn’? I’m pretty sure they don’t and pointing it out is impolite due to the subject of conversation.

I’m also not aware of pornstars getting much adulation(as opposed to stuff- they probably do generally out earn their well behaved peers, at least when you correct for class).

... kinda?

You have to go pretty far before any woman is going to use 'beanflicker novel' or even 'it's erotica', but Reddit's /r/romancebook has a first page with Kink and Sex Acts Megathread - Knotting, FMC and MMC has something erotic happen in front of them and it makes them both “snap”, and Mmc fucks fmc thinking she is his girlfriend. I'm not an absolute expert in the field, but even the M/M stuff is written for and often by women's consumption, and about the point where the protagonist secretly begins taking contraceptives so the fuckening can continue, there's not a lot of fig leaf.

(To be clear, I'm not judging, here! ... well, except in the giving some of the books individual ratings, and considering if I want to drop some furry names in the megathread.)

Yes, there's still some stigma about this stuff: a woman reading Morning Glory Milking Farm (cw: not-great romance art, incredibly heavy-handed innuendo in picture, the book is bizarrely vanilla) on the train is going to get similar looks as a guy leafing through the original edition Savant and Sorcerer (cw: woman in swimsuit-level-nudity). But you're not going to see a Fifty Shades of Gray For Men make the front pages, nor will some random male-focused shipper fanfic smutty fanfic get a full film. Even the for-gay-guys equivalents are a lot more heavily policed: there's no Magic Mike-but-actually-gay.

Most people talk about it through euphemism in wildly public spaces; spice, heat, the citrus scale, so on. But they're still pretty overt about it, with over half of this book list having explicit smutty sex scenes (3 'pepper' or higher). Maybe that's less of a deal because it's a mostly written environment. But it's not something that's hard to spot.

I'm more skeptical that this is bad. I've made and will continue to make the argument that even pretty kinky or genre-focused smutty or smut-adjacent works can have broader meaning or allow deeper insight, and that even works that are just read for gratification are fine whether they're smut or milsci-fi (even if gustibus non disputandum meets some discomfort with WH40k books). But it's a thing, and the difference in expectations by gender is a thing.

But you're not going to see a Fifty Shades of Gray For Men make the front pages, nor will some random male-focused shipper fanfic smutty fanfic get a full film

Funny you should say it like that, since Fifty Shades of Grey is LITERALLY a Twilight fanfic called Master of the Universe with the names changed.

Master of the Universe:

I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror. Damn my hair, it just won't behave, and damn Rose for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal. I have tried to brush my hair into submission but it's not toeing the line. I must learn not to sleep with it wet. I recite this five times as a mantra whilst I try, once more, with the brush. I give up. The only thing I can do is restrain it, tightly, in a ponytail and hope that I look reasonably presentable.

Rose is my roommate and she has chosen, okay, that's a bit unfair, because choice has had nothing to do with it, but she has the flu and as such cannot do the interview she's arranged with some mega industrialist for the student newspaper. So I have been volunteered. I have final exams to cram for, one essay to finish and I am supposed to be working this afternoon, but no - today - I have to head into downtown Seattle and meet the enigmatic CEO of Cullen Enterprise Holdings, Inc. Allegedly he‘s some exceptional tycoon who is a major benefactor of our University and his time is extraordinarily precious... much more precious than mine -and he‘s granted Rose an interview... a real coup she tells me... Damn her extra-curricular activities.

Fifty Shades of Grey:

I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror. Damn my hair – it just won’t behave, and damn Katherine Kavanagh for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal. I should be studying for my final exams, which are next week, yet here I am trying to brush my hair into submission. I must not sleep with it wet. I must not sleep with it wet. Reciting this mantra several times, I attempt, once more, to bring it under control with the brush. I roll my eyes in exasperation and gaze at the pale, brown-haired girl with blue eyes too big for her face staring back at me, and give up. My only option is to restrain my wayward hair in a ponytail and hope that I look semi presentable. Kate is my roommate, and she has chosen today of all days to succumb to the flu.

Therefore, she cannot attend the interview she’d arranged to do, with some mega-industrialist tycoon I’ve never heard of, for the student newspaper. So I have been volunteered. I have final exams to cram for, one essay to finish, and I’m supposed to be working this afternoon, but no – today I have to drive a hundred and sixty-five miles to downtown Seattle in order to meet the enigmatic CEO of Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc. As an exceptional entrepreneur and major benefactor of our University, his time is extraordinarily precious – much more precious than mine – but he has granted Kate an interview. A real coup, she tells me. Damn her extra-curricular activities.

By contrast, looking at both Head over Feet and The Love Hypothesis, it seems clear that the latter was more heavily edited.

I was in the waiting room of a doctor's office yesterday and my wife noticed a number of....spicy? (I think was the term) books on the bookshelf. None of the current monster/dark fantasy stuff thats all the rage right now, but absolutely text based pornograrphy for women. About a dozen of them. The exact same shelf, immediately adjacent to the smut books, were three different editions of the Bible. This was an office in a Catholic hospital.

... and pointing it out is impolite due to the subject of conversation.

Its impolite because its only men that seem to take issue, and its inappropriate for men to criticize women. Full stop.

I've left out the absolute best part imo. The overwelming majority of these books are written in a non-omniscient* first-person, producing an entire generation of women "readers" who struggle with, or fail completely, to parse the meaning of third-person prose. They can't keep track of who is doing what; literally can't tell who the subject/object of the sentence is and get so confused they give up on the book. The meme is "3rd person is immediate DNF" (did not finish).

*non-omniscient in that the main PoV character often lacks the knowledge of what the main PoV character is thinking or planning.

https://tiktok.com/discover/i-cant-read-third-person

https://old.reddit.com/r/Barnesandnoble/comments/1lhiwrs/third_person_difficulties/

https://old.reddit.com/r/romanceunfiltered/comments/1nys2bs/illiteracy_driving_first_person_pov_trend_in/

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/4854296-struggle-reading-books-in-third-person

To be fair, some of that reflects people who 'can't' read third-person in the performative 'just can't even' sense; they're capable of it, they just don't like to do so, or don't find it as entertaining. There's a pretty sizable BookTok force that has a similar reaction to first-person perspective books or fanfic, as well, generally seeing it as schlocky and prone to confusing action-state errors. The third-person diehards aren't necessarily any freer of messy fanfic behavior (eg, y/n fics are pretty common in both first-person, second-person, and third-person), but it's a lot less of a clear dividing line than you'd expect.

((Though, yes, the people who literally-literally can't read third person works exist, too.))

I tend err toward third-person than not, but I do have some sympathies, here. From a writing perspective, first-person lets you get away with a lot of scenes that would devolve into endless pronoun problems or feel bizarrely clinical, and there's a lot of mystery or action gimmicks that either don't work or come across as author fiat in a third-person work (even one where the pov is highly restricted to one person).

producing an entire generation of women "readers" who struggle with, or fail completely, to parse the meaning of third-person prose.

Damn. As a commenter on one of those reddit threads mentioned, I always thought first-person was the "weird" way of writing a story. Haven't these women read anything in school? Or even Harry Potter? Or... oh, shit! Hunger Games is first-person!

This is a bit of a blackpill.

It should be, relates nicely to the way Men and Women engage with video games, (huge generalization here) women like to insert themselves into the character and "roleplay" as themselves, while men typically embody the the true abstract character's motivation, roleplaying as some one who isn't going to necessarily act like themselves.

The exact same shelf, immediately adjacent to the smut books, were three different editions of the Bible.

I wonder which book they were most often opened to....

Uh, do these women bragging about how much they read come out and say ‘yeah, it’s all porn’? I’m pretty sure they don’t and pointing it out is impolite due to the subject of conversation.

Ha.

Hahah.

HAahaahah.

Not only that, they're trying to normalize it by suggesting men should learn from it. Check out the likes on the subject video.

Here's at least one example of a lady showing off her reading habits. 45.2 Million views. 124k loves on twitter.

Guess the content of most of those books.

Of course, there's plenty of people roasting her for the particular choice of novel. Just far more coming to her defense.

I've also delved a tiny bit into so-called "Booktok."

Try it sometime!

I’m also not aware of pornstars getting much adulation

Bonnie Blue has gotten to go on mainstream shows for interviews now.

Her own mother is on record as tacitly approving.

Basically, she might be one of the most 'well-known' (infamy, if not actual fame) British women in the world these days.

Hard to find any 'official' condemnation of her actions, but a lot of manosphere (Tate included) commentary, and tons of people making money off her indirectly or directly. Bali did arrest her which she of course turned into more publicity.

She's fueled a mini attention-industry and every ounce of attention is just prolonging her presence in the Zeitgeist.

Will AI slop actually change anything? The sheer volume of porn and attractive women thirst posting on instagram is so vast that even if the volume is increased by orders of magnitude it won't change anything.

post-monogamist society where women are normally trying to out-slut one another in various ways to compete for the sexual attention of high-status men

Does this actually work? The female status game seems fundamentally broken because women are competing for status with games that won't lead to relationship or career success. Does spending lots of time on social media actually increase the chance of getting a high value man? Instagram's user base leans heavily female to begin with. Writing mediocre slop on linkedin while friend-requesting large numbers of men seems far more efficient than posting breakfast pics on Instagram.

Do the thirst trap pics actually lead to quality dates on online dating? A reasonably attractive woman in a fancy dress is probably not going to have a more difficult time finding a decent man on hinge than a woman posting bikini pictures.

It seems like women are driving themselves to literal insanity playing status games in terms of shopping, competitive travelling and social media without actually getting much in return. Machu Pichu pics and bikini pics on Instagram, fast fashion and keeping up with micro trends and expensive handbags are largely irrelevant for women's success in life.

I don't think they are actually fighting for male attention. I think this is ingroup status signalling and woman trying to be more popular among women. The prize seems less tangible.

I don't think they are actually fighting for male attention. I think this is ingroup status signalling and woman trying to be more popular among women. The prize seems less tangible.

I agree. This (and mobile gambling / sports betting) is the only "social media is destroying the world" narrative I buy. Political / ideological "radicalization" has been more or less debunked (it's the 1-5% of online political hyper posters who actually get real weird). "Phone addiction" while real in a habitual but not neurochemical sense is mostly a matter of self discipline and cultivating a dynamic and varied lifestyle.

But intrasexual competition for status is hardwired into both males and females. The difference being that for females, a lot more of the status is derived from attention markets - what other people think of you relative to other women. For men, it's more about quantitative and hierarchical absolute performance rather than a group voting / market dynamic. Far less ambiguity.

This is where social media really does "hack" the brain. It is an always on, 24/7 "who is the popular girl" machine that requires constant updates and vigilance from all users. The only want to win is not to play or - as in the Bonnie Blue case - to pursue such an extreme strategy that you'll have very few direct competitors, but may, perversely, actually lose status the more you exploit it.

It seems like women are driving themselves to literal insanity playing status games in terms of shopping, competitive travelling and social media without actually getting much in return. Machu Pichu pics and bikini pics on Instagram, fast fashion and keeping up with micro trends and expensive handbags are largely irrelevant for women's success in life.

I don't think they are actually fighting for male attention. I think this is ingroup status signalling and woman trying to be more popular among women. The prize seems less tangible.

I've seen the argument that a lot of this is women picking up their trends downstream of what GAY MEN are saying is 'in.' I.e. gay men are gatekeepers in fashion, media, travel, and dating, to some large degree. So their tastes (and attitudes!) are thus picked up by those most attentive to such things.

I think there's truth there, and no, not some large 'conspiracy'. Just a disconnect. If women keep doing things they believe men like (as taught by gay men) and yet do not get straight men they actually want interested in them... something something definition of insanity.

By and large, Straight men are pretty directly signalling "We like tig ol' bitties and approachable, kind personalities, with the idealized representation of femininity being Sydney Sweeney." Meanwhile Sabrina Carpenter is who gets aggressively marketed and celebrated.

All a girl needs to really appeal to even a decently high-value guy is be a 'beautiful mid' who expresses some interest in his hobbies, and isn't a pain to be around.

(You can spot this dynamic in practice with the "SEC Couples" trend).

By and large, Straight men are pretty directly signalling "We like tig ol' bitties and approachable, kind personalities, with the idealized representation of femininity being Sydney Sweeney." Meanwhile Sabrina Carpenter is who gets aggressively marketed and celebrated.

Okay, I'm not that familiar with celebrity culture, but is Sydney Sweeney well-known for having a more approachable and kind personality than Sabrina Carpenter? It looks like you're using political signaling as a proxy measure here.

Persona wise, there's a major difference. Sabrina's songs openly disparage men, and she murders them in more than one music video.

You’re not being shallow enough.

Sabrina Carpenter's most popular songs are basically about exasperation and/or toying with men. The title of her latest album is at least a little ironic.

Sydney Sweeney likes to show off her boobs and wear blue jeans.

Does this actually work? The female status game seems fundamentally broken because women are competing for status with games that won't lead to relationship or career success.

The alternative would be, I dunno, learning how to cook, being pleasant, or just basically not being a troublesome harpy. The sort of things that are completely countercultural today and come across as hopelessly cringe in the eyes of the modal single woman.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats