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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
See also CNC (consensual nonconsent).
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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?
Only the men?
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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%.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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.
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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).
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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.
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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.)
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Have you ever heard the song, “You Belong With Me”?
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.
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Pink no, but that was Taylor's whole thing. Kinda still is.
Quoting two comments from a Manosphere blog in 2012:
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.
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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.
A huge portion, that's sort of what median means.
But Swift isn't a Sydney Sweeney or a Margot Robbie or a Marilyn Monroe, or a Britney Spears or a Madonna in music, a gorgeous and unattainable figure of perfection who men want and women want to be. I don't think her schtick would work if she were that hot.
Swift is above average, but at her most made up, she's still built like an ironing board with no sexual charisma.
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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?
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Managing female sexuality is a sleazeball man’s game, and female pop stars are selling female sexuality- not as a product, as a fantasy.
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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.
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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.
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.
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