This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I believe light maledom/femsub dynamics are on a continuum with normal heterosexuality, but extreme BDSM in general, and particularly femdom/malesub dynamics are disruptions that speak to fundamental psychological problems and not kink-as-play.
My crackpot theory is that straight male subs are driven by their actual schemas and beliefs about the world, not by raw sexual desire. Their submission fantasies are actually a means of separating themselves from their sexual desires, which they believe they aren't worthy to fulfill. Submission becomes a sublimation of the sexual into the enjoyment of denial. "I may not be worthy of having sex with a woman, but I can serve her non-sexual needs." "I may not be able to please a woman, but I can watch and faciliate as she is pleased by another man."
The 'upside' is that you're at least acknowledged by a woman, even if you're humiliated by it. But if your schema of the world tells you that you're unlovable and unfuckable, sexually worthless, then being humiliated by a woman is at least something, some kind of involvement with her, and that's better than nothing.
IMO, this is far, far more common as a fantasy or desire than the actual number of people practicing it, almost entirely due to the complete lack of female dominants.
Female dominants have their own problems -- one thing is there's like 5 of them for every 1 trillion men who want to find one. But also I believe that women who sexually dominate men are almost exclusively 1) mentally ill, and dangerous, predatory or 2) doing it because their male partner got them into it, and his enjoyment of it positively reinforced it or 3) into it because they actually want something else and they've sublimated that desire into dominance.
On #1, IMO, this is not the sort of thing you say at a dinner party, but I believe the majority of self-initiated female dominants are psychopaths, extreme narcissists, or in general people with serious mental disorders who see sexual domination as a power trip. They're often surprised at how low male subs are willing to go, and being able to push against boundaries and find nothing pushing back is the sort of thing that predatory people have always done. An uncomfortable number of female dominants are little more than Warren Jeffs in a dress.
Because of the dearth of female dominants, male subs are often desperate and willing to put up with almost anything, and this is a really, really bad posture to have when entering into a power exchange relationship. "Exploring this side of my sexuality is too dangerous given the environment" needs to be the fallback. But if people were able to do that with their sexuality broadly we'd live in a better world.
On #3, I've seen women who really just wanted to be in a mutualistic and affectionate relationship describe it as a "female led relationship", and their conception of this is literally "having a honey-do list" and "being the one who buys the groceries." I've seen women who simply wanted a man who admired them describe it as "femdom" because their husband called them ugly and they wanted a man she could order to call her beautiful. I've seen women who genuinely wanted a relationship in which she could expect an orgasm now and again describe this as "femdom," because her big idea was that she could order a guy to go down on her.
"Maybe if I get leverage over men and form a relationship in which I'm In Charge, then I can get what I want" is the logic there. In that sense I'm not sure that I can say definitively whether or not it's simply the same phenomenon as the redpill discourse, but from another angle. It's power relations as the resigned second-choice after affection and intimacy didn't work out.
And of course, the biggest portion of #3 is dominatrixes/'findom' 🙄 where "the thing they want" is simply money, and because there's far more demand for female domination than supply, money is a... workable selection mechanism and it's one that many men are willing to pay. Often for crumbs -- again, male subs are desperate, and the amounts of money men are willing to pay to be indifferently humiliated by a woman flabbergasts me. I read a story on the internet once about a mildly sexually traditional woman who got into doing paid femdom chats on the internet, was utterly disgusted by it, but kept going because she made wildly good money. The oldest profession in the world is quite remunerative.
I personally believe a big part of the large numbers of female submissives has to do with women genuinely desiring hot sex, but feeling ashamed of this, for traditional ('sex is sinful'), status ('don't be a slut'), and feminist ('male sexuality objectifies women') reasons.
It's hard to overstate how much of the past 20 years has been a sustained attempt at putting in the water supply a level of cynicism about women's sexuality re: men that competes with the Victorians in terms of how bad it makes people feel about sex. As a teenage boy, I actually believed women got exactly zero pleasure from vaginal intercourse -- not just that they typically couldn't have an orgasm from it, but that they genuinely felt nothing, it had no level of satisfaction either physical or psychological for them and they did it entirely because men made them do it, and then when I actually started having sex and she enjoyed it and said she wanted to do more of it I was utterly shocked. She was too!
It's also not hard to find women whose three extreme kink interests are exactly the same: "free use", breeding, and CNC. In other words, sexual instrumentalization, impregnation, and rape. What are women desperately afraid of? What are the complaints we hear from women about their fears of men? They're afraid of being sexually instrumentalized ("objectification"), being stuck with a pregnancy ("deadbeat dad"/"men want to control women's bodies"), and rape, which of course needs no reference because its badness is clear.
IMO, I think this is another form of painful (and not always true) schemas about the world being sublimated into a kind of resigned acceptance, and therefore made in some way pleasurable or sought-out. These young women believe that the state of the world is such that all women can expect is sexual instrumentalization, impregnation, and assault, and seeking out explicit BDSM relationships becomes a way of finding a man who will at least admit that's what he's doing, and provide a safe word escape route from the experience of being treated like a warm body by a man's sexual desire that wants nothing else from her.
It's "all sex is rape" being taken to its ultimate conclusion, formalized and made explicit, even to the point where a submissive woman's desire for sex is sublimated into it. If this is the dark and unforgiving world a woman lives in, and every man is in fact a rapist-in-waiting, then the only option available, unconsciously and psychologically, is to find one who will at least be nice about it.
I guess you can say I have ethical and psychological critiques of the kink community. I don't believe they're in general bad people (although predators love to wear the language of kink like sheep's clothing), but I do think there are unexamined psychological problems, pain, and mental illnesses that seriously affect the community and those deserve to be interrogated.
Absolutely incomprehensible take.
I know I’m worthy of my wife. Seeing her in control is still inherently validating and sexy, for the same reasons as most any show of enthusiasm. Being desirable is good! I’m not talking about extreme BDSM here, just mild to moderate femdom.
No shit. You don’t need a maximally-cynical model predicting abuse and assault to think “hey, I’m supposed to play hard to get, but what if I could still get railed in the process?”
Now apply this reasoning to men, who have the same post-Victorian, post-Puritan culture in the back of our minds. The tradeoff between desirability and availability applied to rakes and bachelors, too. Consider whether we might also derive some benefit from playing with that dynamic, from allowing our partners to express the desire and longing which we know they feel.
If you think of yourself as a basically obligate "straight male sub", which is the kind of person urquan was talking about, then a) telling on yourself, b) you're sufficiently outlier enough not to have a clear view on the topic at all. I get the impression that's not the case and you're just talking about it being hot when your wife is sexually aggressive, which is not at all the same thing as was being discussed in the parent post.
This... get complicated, and I don't think "obligate straight male sub" is a sufficiently precise category. Some central and common parts of that category, both by self-identity and popular culture, include:
I think urquan's motioning toward stuff like cuckolding, extreme chastity play, and redirections 'away' from actual sex. But while cuckolding exists, even there, a lot of stuff you or I would call cuckolding doesn't slide into the same psychological space. The broader other-men-fucking-your-wife-fandom includes:
That doesn't necessarily make them healthy or any less indica of psychosexual weirdness. Some of the simple boring stuff can be a sign of unmanaged anxiety: some bondage subs are all about not being able to make a 'wrong' move, or being forced to make one of two wrong moves and being rewarded for it in predicament bondage. Being 'ordered' is a really convenient way to disclaim responsibility for noticing your partner's interests, and no small number of subs do actively abuse it. While some of the 'oh don't make me clean off my wife's partner's dick' people are in it for orientation play or humiliation there's definitely some self-closeted-in-unhealthy ways going on.
Even where it's just sensation-focus, there's probably something behind it, in the sense that normal people don't like getting zapped or forced to hold their bladder or shoved into a frilly skirt. Some of them are just outright worse than just hating their sexuality: I'll point to findom, again, as something that's handling a normal desire ('show I value this person I'm having sex with') in an exceptionally unhealthy way even when the actual expression is just 'oh love of my life let me show you how much I like your pussy'.
But it does make them hard to fit into "if your schema of the world tells you that you're unlovable and unfuckable, sexually worthless". Even a lot of redirection of sex or chastity or cuckolding that eliminates the sub's ability to fuck is more about the prohibition than sub's self-perception or external valuation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Scattered thoughts:
Oh no, I fully believe I'm worthy to fulfill them. But that statement also disqualifies me from being a sub. Rather than the "I may not be able to please a woman, but I can watch and faciliate as she is pleased by another man" sense, it's the power to know that happening doesn't actually matter, not the pain of knowing that it does (re: the chad 'swinger' vs. the virgin 'cuckold'). Which is why allowing the realization to happen (on either side) destroys relationships if provoked.
Or the "or you want the release of anxiety from having fucked up and being ‘free’ of that" dynamic is in effect on the male side, but that's just the "had a bad day at work so the woman initiates even though he's not on it today" kind of femdom. Not necessarily a central example of such though.
gold_digger.jpg, and what I describe at the very bottom is part of why people get really mad at [minimum, the appearance of] this
You do have to be careful when doing this; thinking with your dick here leads to trouble. But that's just more being able to gauge people accurately/keeping a clear head in the discovery process between who is and isn't suitable to have a relationship like that with than anything else, something malesubs might not even be able to pull off given the lack of femdoms (or may "settle" for someone driven more by a quest for D/s than is healthy for either participant).
I tend to do this but that's more a question of seeking people to grow with, so it's not really as one-sided as it otherwise seems, but there's always that risk and I'm probably doing it wrong anyway. Or maybe it's just an unacknowledged mental problem on my end.
Yeah, but of course they're going to call it that given the room temperature is what I describe at the bottom. This is kind of just what healthy relationships are supposed to look like.
It occurs to me that a command of "you shall not lay with a man as you would a woman" may not technically be limited to men.
The people who invented this believe 2 things:
Which maps 1:1 onto the liberal critique of socialists, mainly because both are true. Which is why people who believe this claim so loudly that it isn't true, and that bleeds into the claim that it's deontologically wrong to see sex as labor. They make those claims of "don't be a slut" and "being sexually available is sinful" because it literally devalues sex to do that, which affects those at the bottom of the market worst of all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link