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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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@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.

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...

“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 on 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 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.

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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.