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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.
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.
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:
Fifty Shades of Grey:
By contrast, looking at both Head over Feet and The Love Hypothesis, it seems clear that the latter was more heavily edited.
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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.
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).
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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.
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I wonder which book they were most often opened to....
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