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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.
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 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.
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