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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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[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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
You mean not fun for the woman in the relationship to roleplay? :)
Yes, that's what I meant. What's the :) for?
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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.
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.
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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).
Well, that and feminists still need men to enforce the social order that privileges them. Saying this directly would destroy that compact.
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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.
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.
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