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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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The discussion of sexual behavior has generated some rich concepts to discuss how human desire works. Here I want to discuss three terms that have interesting meaning.

(1) virgin

A simple denotation: hasn't had sex. The connotations are varied, and change with context. It could mean:

  • Something is pure and innocence, untouched by corruption (virgin landscape).

  • The first time (the virgin voyage of a boat)

  • Someone hasn't had a life-changing experience (skydiving virginity)

  • That something is safe (virgin drinks without alcohol).

  • Insulting someone unable to earn their desire (virgin vs chad)

(2) pornography

Pornography is famously difficult to define outside of "I know it when I see it". Coming from the greek pornographos (writing about prostitutes), it most commonly refers to sexual images and videos that stimulate erotic desire in the viewer.

When used as a metaphor, the scope of "porn" expands to something like the passive observation of the desired object without without the work to actually access it. To fully enjoy it, the viewer must suspend disbelief, and imagine they are a part of the porn in order to pretend the simulation satisfies one's desire for the real thing. However someone who has only viewed porn is often still considered a virgin (but not innocent!), because they haven't actually experienced the desire fulfilled yet.

  • The SFW porn network (earthporn for nature, quoteporn for inspiro) is pornographic.

  • Most of reddit has a pornographic nature to it. (eg: relationship drama)

  • Streamers and podcasts are friendship porn.

  • Cooking shows are food porn and online cooking videos are pornified

  • Instragram is status porn (and sometimes regular porn).

  • Sports competitions are both porn of the game being played, and porn of victory feelings.

  • Careless blogposts can end up as insight porn consumed for pleasure.

  • Cards-against-humanity game is transgressive joke porn

(3) cucked

A cuckooo bird will lay it's egg in the nest of another bird, tricking them into raising the cuckoo's hatching. This naturally evolves to refer to situations where a parent (usually the dad for obvious reasons) is raising kids he thinks are his, but are in fact from another man. Which then simplifies to the actual act of watching someone else have sex with someone you want. Nowadays known as a cuckhold fetish.

The concept of cucking has become so broad and complicated that a psychiatrist could write a whole book about it. A sample story might have a husband watching someone else fuck his wife. Which raises the question at the core of the cuck fetish: why doesn't she fuck the husband? A full understanding of cuckholding requires explaining all three motivations. The cuckhold is usually motivated by (suppressed?) feelings of insecurity. He his not capable or worthy of having sex with her. The bull is motivated by either lust or rubbing superiority of dominance hierarchy in the cuckolds face. The cuck-er similarly may be lustful, or could also be sadistically belittling the cuckold.

Racial dynamics add to this swirl. The common case is a white man watching a white woman fuck a black man (with a large penis). This fantasy props up so much there are entire porn sites based on this concept, and plenty of alt-right fanfiction about it. Racial insecurity. There's a secondary market for asian men watching an asian woman fuck a white man (with a large penis), which is related to WhiteMale-AsianFemale couples, and asian masculinity in general.

Some use of "cuck" in practice simply mean coward. Someone with "cucked beliefs". Or a cuck-servitave (cringe conservative). This dilutes the richer meaning of cuckholding. A more proper usage is the bike-cuck meme, in which a man copes with the loss of a bike by imagining someone else enjoys riding it more than him. Perhaps he'd like to watch too. An additional meme is the copypasta that raising a daughter is cucked because the dad is spending his time and effort helper her grow as a person for another man to enjoy. Which is an interesting broken perspective.

....

All porn is cuckhold porn. The object of desire (the sex) is happening on a screen and is inaccessible. The viewer must either accept the cuckholding, or delude themselves into thinking they are a playing a part. This process spirals into insecurity, first from feeling inferior to the object of desire, which leads to a cuckhold fetish to the porn itself, a feeling that one doesn't deserve to fuck reality and should be constrained to the porn. Giving up and accepting that fucking reality is too much wok.

I realized years ago that I can't stand commercial porn because it's impossible to imagine myself feeling empowered with the actors you see in commercial porn. I know from experience that if I'm around a bunch of super hot people, it doesn't make me feel super hot, it makes me feel super ugly. I seek out homemade porn that lets me envision myself empowered if I was in the room: porn featuring homeless men, for example, because I feel superior to them.

All porn is cuckhold porn.

Well, all sex acts are downstream of power. Cuckolding is an explicit illustration of power. I have engaged in anonymous sex with other men since I was 18, once I realized how power and domination work between men this became clear. The more dominant male performs the top role and the more submissive male performs the bottom role. (This is not just in anal sex but in oral sex and aggression dynamics and so on.)

I like to view straight cuck porn often, because I find the eroticization between the two males very exciting. I usually ignore the women when I view it. Seeing two straight men go through the same process that two gay men go through when they have sex is gratifying. Cuck porn is basically gay porn with a woman inserted, but the domination and power dynamic between two men is still the same, even when there is no sex act performed directly between the two men.

Not directly related, but a similar definitional debate that was had many times during games of Never Have I Ever in grad school: What counts as "Sex" for the purpose of determining Body Count, [Loss of] Virginity, practice of sexual orientation, etc.?

Classically, the heteronormative definition of sex (PIV intercourse to male completion) pretty much covered the concept. But sexual orientation complicates this, it seems ridiculous to say that a woman who has had sex with many women but no men is a virgin. Equally the variety of sex acts can complicated it, and the use of "loopholes" like oral or especially anal sex to claim technical virginity strikes most as intensely silly.

Dan Savage has generally been a proponent of labeling "Last Name Sex" (Oral, Anal, Manual, etc.) as equivalent to intercourse. But standard cultural practice has been to treat them at least slightly differently at different times.

At the same time, you have men who want to claim to have had sex with women when the thing they did seems to have stopped well short of sex. Does masturbating in front of someone constitute sex? Ejaculating on a dance floor with a partner who was just dancing with you?

So we have two major failure modes: the nice Babtist college girl who claims to be a virgin despite the high school nickname Oral Audrey, and the male desperate to pump up his numbers who claims he had "cyber" sex with a camgirl because he paid her to watch him masturbate.

The definition we settled on for purposes of determining who should drink/lower a finger in a game of Never Have I Ever was this: Sex occurs when a person 1) achieves orgasm through the 2) intentional 3) physical 4) acts of another person. When those criteria are met, both the party who orgasms and the party who caused the orgasm have had sex.

  1. Orgasm by one party is necessary to establish that a complete sex act has occurred. It is not relevant if the other party orgasms or not. Sexual acts that don't result in orgasm for any party are categorized as "fooling around." Normally, in hetero relationships, it will be the case that the male orgasms and the female may or may not, but the reverse works as well. I have trouble picturing a complete sex act in which nobody orgasms. If neither could get it done, while theoretically it could have been the whole nine yards but they couldn't hit the target, it seems more likely that it was abortive or farcical, involving physical impotence or alcohol.

  2. The acts have to be intentional, they have to be intended to produce orgasm. So the dancing example, that isn't sex. Or a guy who rubs against a woman in a crowded subway car.* An accidental orgasm doesn't count.

  3. The acts have to be physical, they have to involve touch. Talking someone through masturbation, watching someone, or cyber sex aren't sex.

  4. The acts have to be those of another person. Masturbation doesn't count, if another person is merely present and observing. There is some debate here, if the orgasm is ultimately self-initiated during acts with another person, I tend to lean towards that counting as long as the physical acts are contributing to the orgasm. So masturbation does count if the other person is playing with the masturbator to achieve and intensify arousal and orgasm.

This definition has the advantage of covering all sex acts across all sexual orientations and genital configurations. But there are definitely some "edge"ing cases where it might deliver odd results.

The alternative definition, proposed for purposes of answering the question to partners and friends about Body Counts, is that if you want to claim a high number only penetrative sex to orgasm counts, while if you are trying to claim a low number everything even mildly adjacent counts. So an 18 year old boy claiming to his buddies that he lost his virginity doesn't get to claim anything but PIV to completion; but an 18 year old girl trying to trim her partner count to sound less slutty to her boyfriend should be forced to include anyone who met even 3/4 of the above criteria. This definition is good in that if you follow it, you'll never be accused of lying or hiding anything; it is bad in that everyone wants to lie all the time and will anyway.

What other definitions would TheMotte propose? Are there different definitions useful in different situations?

*This is where we'd fit in an argument about consent.There's no good way to handle it, hopefully it's not that big an issue for any indiviudal.

I have trouble picturing a complete sex act in which nobody orgasms.

To be frank, has happened to me a fair few times.

Maybe “intended to”?

Maybe needing 3/4 of those factors works better? I'm trying to think if it leads to any possible false positive hacks.

Ugh, you try to finish while rolling. Good luck.

I have definitely had “a complete sex act” while on MDMA with no orgasm for either person. (Persons, honestly.) If you go at it for a long while, but you never, uh, seal the deal, but you still have that connection and intimacy, I consider that a sex act.

So a handjob counts as sex for the purposes of NHIE answers? I guess that's the price you have to pay for covering woman-on-woman sexual acts without overcomplicating the definition.

Yes. It seems pretty clear to me. Last name sex. It's status as consolation prize is kinda irrelevant, and skill dependent, to the question. You certainly can't have sex any other way afterwards until the refractory period concludes.

To me handies are less relevant to the WLW question than they are to the evasive evangelical girl question. Given that our NHIE questions tended to "punish" slutty behavior. So consider "Never have I ever... Had sex with a man!" If a guy gave a man a hand job to completion he should clearly drink. Or a kings rule like drink if you've had more than five sexual partners. A girl who's had PIV with three guys and gave five others hand jobs should clearly drink there.

You were playing “never have I ever” in grad school? Wild.

It combines Law Students favorite activities: drinking and arguing about precise terminology and definitions. Somehow alcoholics will engage in a five minute debate to avoid taking a tequila shot if someone tries to make them drink it.

Anyway it's the most fun at 22-26 when people have diverged significantly in their experiences. Freshman year of college everyone is pretty close together with a few outliers, after 30 everyone is pretty close together with a few outliers, at 25 there's a huge spread between the top and the bottom.

(1) virgin

A simple denotation: hasn't had sex.

Oh you fortunate person that has not encountered the (yes, on Tumblr way back, but also around the place way back as in several years ago) notion that this is not a simple definition and it's all to do with the patriarchy and ackshully it only means "an unmarried woman" so the virgin goddesses could well have been having sex, so there male chauvinists! The obsession with virginity is only a way to control women and their sexuality! Virgin doesn't mean hasn't had sex and why are you so obsessed with my hymen anyway?

Fourteen year olds encounter feminism for the first time and go bonkers, in other words. They don't seem to think about male virgins, or if they do, they dismiss it as "men can't be virgins anyway and it doesn't matter" for some idiotic reason, don't ask me to remember why it was.

But you don’t have to listen to 14 year olds on tumbler.

Until they grow older and get hired at HR at my employer. Microaggressions etc were in official training.

We don't.

Still, a distressingly descriptive model to explain the last ~10 years of Western society is "virtually every left-leaning politician, journalist, educator or media figure started treating 14-year-olds on Tumblr as infallible fonts of wisdom". Even if the 14-year-olds on Tumblr are wrong, they seem to be disproportionately influential figures in our culture. So it's probably a sensible idea to at least be aware of what they believe even if you disagree with it.

The obsession with virginity is only a way to control women and their sexuality!

Isn't it though? Historically and presently in many central Asian societies they dramatically restrict womens lives in order to ensure virginity. High status men demand paternity certainty, and in order to achieve paternity certainty you have to restrict women's sexuality, and in order to restrict sexuality you have to make sure they're never alone with another man or have the mobility to go somewhere they could be alone with a man. Is there a society that does costly practice like seclusion/hijabs/foot binding to secure male virginity?

Now that I think about it, it is a sort of forerunner argument to the trans activist contention: biology no real.

"Virginity" is only a social construct and merely means "unmarried woman". So a woman could be a literal whore but if she's not married and never has been, she's a virgin!

I think most of us would agree that is stretching the definition to the point of absurdity.

Based on the practices you referenced, it seems like it's certainly not only a way to control women and their sexuality; rather, it's a way to instrumentally control women and their sexuality for the purpose of fulfilling some other need, in this case paternity certainty for high status men. Given that, the chain of reasoning seems to be the reverse, actually; people want paternity certainty, and virginity is, for biological reasons, intricately tied to paternity certainty, and so people form an obsession with (preserving) virginity, which, for physical reasons, requires control of women and their sexuality. People are instrumentally controlling women and their sexuality only as a way to fulfill their obsession with virginity (which is in itself an instrumental goal on the way towards paternity certainty), rather than the other way around.

The figurative use of the term "cuck" is essentially just a dysphemism for calling someone a "doormat". The assumption is that men who allow their wives to have sex with other men aren't really okay with it, but go along with it due to a lack of backbone and an inability to establish boundaries for themselves. This obviously generalises (no one was fooled that "bike cuck" really didn't mind his bike getting stolen).

For centuries, laughing at the man who had the horns planted on his head was the attitude in society.

It's only modernity that has made it into a fetish where money can be made out of producing porn, and people get together to indulge in their kink.

Ah, progress?

The assumption is that men who allow their wives to have sex with other men aren't really okay with it

Which is itself interesting because in practice it seems as if almost all cuck relationships involve the man persuading his wife or girlfriend to engage in his sexual fetish, not the other way around. There seem to be some women who propose open relationships, perhaps in rare cases even swinging / partner swapping but I’ve never heard of a woman proposing that her husband sits in the corner of a room jacking off while she fucks a well-endowed man out of the blue.

Cuckolding (as in the fetish) is a purely male paraphilia. I mean that in the sense that the relationship is between the ‘cuck’ and the ‘bull’, the woman doesn’t even have a special name, she’s just the woman, the wife, the girlfriend. It’s a humiliation fetish that instead of other forms of sexual domination or humiliation, which are direct, involves a third-party, namely the woman, in the sexual humiliation so that the ‘cuck’ and ‘bull’ are never themselves interacting in a sexual way.

One interesting question is whether the ‘cuck’s’ attraction to his wife is even relevant. I don’t think it is. In fact there are fetishists who fantasize about being cuckolded ‘by’ their mothers, sisters and so on, and usually not even in an incestuous or Oedipal way, it’s purely about being humiliated by the ‘bull’. The bull’s penis, used to humiliate them is what ultimately turns them on.

This is why I think that cuckolding is not a purely heterosexual thing. I think there seems to be a real sexual attraction to the ‘bull’ in a lot of men with this fetish. The wife is objectified in the purest sense, becomes merely a vehicle that allows them to explore these feelings of wanting to be sexually humiliated by another man.

I agree with a lot of that, but I'm not sure about the endpoint about homosexual attraction being part of it.

Cuckolding is about reclaiming some kind of lost power. Cuckolds see themselves as uncompetitively unattractive and shut out of normal sexuality. Cuckoldry as a fetish allows the participant to make that a kind of choice: by eroticizing the fear and insecurity, the male mind regains a level of control. He might believe he can never satisfy his wife directly, so his mind removes him from direct contact with her but still allows them to achieve mutual sexual satisfaction. That's why it also always has to involve the female object somehow involving him in the scenario. It can't just be the woman fucking a hot man, but instead she has to go on at length about how the cuck is so inferior to the bull and how she has to deceive him to get what she truly wants.

It's analogous to how rape victims will sometimes start having rape fantasies, in that they both allow the fetishist to regain control over something he or she has no control over.

I don't think these two explanations of cuckoldry would be exclusive of each other.

In fact there are fetishists who fantasize about being cuckolded ‘by’ their mothers, sisters and so on, and usually not even in an incestuous or Oedipal way, it’s purely about being humiliated by the ‘bull’. The bull’s penis, used to humiliate them is what ultimately turns them on.

As a reverse example, there's a quite vocal segment of people who play pornographic video games that claim any presence or implication of a male sexual partner in their game that is not the protagonist is cuckolding (or NTR as they call it). Or even that any sex between love interests that is not a threesome with the protagonist is one.

That's why adult games are basically segregated into NTR games, harem games that very carefully avoid anything that might trigger their playbase, games with female protagonists that have sex with dozens of partners and a small minority of games that can afford to ignore the backlash and do what they want.

there's a quite vocal segment of people who play pornographic video games that claim any presence or implication of a male sexual partner in their game that is not the protagonist is cuckolding

Or heck, even the presence of non-human, gender-ambiguous tentacles. Thus the rivers of ink spilled over whether Muv-Luv Alternative counts as NTR or not.

I have no idea of the psychology involved, and I think humiliation fetish is part of it. I wish we could go back to "what grown adults get up to in their bedrooms is nobody else's business" because I do not want to know about this, thanks.

Cuckolding (as in the fetish) is a purely male paraphilia.

You know that there exist women who get off on watching their husbands fuck other women, right? Obviously it's more rare than male cuck fetishists, because all extreme fetishes are less common in women than they are in men, but it's not unheard of.

I could have said homosexual, I think female cuckolding / cuckqueaning is generally different though, it seems more like a variant on swinging and from what I’ve read humiliation of the woman cuckold isn’t usually the primary sexual turn on for her, it’s more about wanting to satisfy her man, keep him, make him happy, kind of like a Ghislaine Maxwell with Epstein type thing.

It's more common in women, just less extreme because everyone involved can satisfy that desire quite easily (if they are hot enough and/or willing to pay).

FMF threesomes are an incredibly common fantasy, and a woman fulfilling it for her husband is barely transgressing normality, while getting most of the cuckqueen jollies. Similarly, a woman with an "understanding" attitude to her husband's affairs might secretly eroticize it, but she has no need to verbalize it or make a big production of it.

Male cuck fantasies have to be verbalized because they are more transgressive.

I don't think FMF is about women's desire for cuckolding, it seems to be guys who want to engage in threesomes but will not countenance having it be MFM (or whatever way the acronym goes) because that would be gay.

If we take it that women are all a little bit bisexual, it's a lot easier for a woman to go along with her boyfriend who wants a threesome with a hot chick for his birthday than try and talk him into letting her have two guys at once, because he's only going to get jealous and sulky about that.

Now if the hot chick is an ex or a woman who is going to be in his life, then sure, the woman is going to be jealous and less likely to agree, because that again raises the spectre of "so you want to bang her, do you? are you cheating on me?" the way that the MFM would for the man.

would be gay

This musical documentary claims there's a 'Golden Rule', that it's not gay when it's in a three-way.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pi7gwX7rjOw

I don't think FMF is primarily or only about being a woman being aroused seeing her partner with another woman in most cases, but there are definitely women (personal experience) who get off on that aspect of it. If your personal experience of it is different, you/[r] partner simply may not be in that aspect of it.

My point is that because FMF is a very normal male fantasy in 21st century secular western culture, your cuckqueen doesn't need to go out of her way to make a big thing out of her desires, she simply does a thing her husband probably wanted to do anyway. There is no cultural or moral block to navigate. If she just tells her male partner she is open to it, he won't ask motivation questions.

Whereas a male cuckold is very much going against normality, and so he has to make a big production out of it or it won't get done at all. He has to have a talk with his partner and tell her specifically that this turns him on, or she won't go along with it because it doesn't make any sense.

It seems to me that ‘FMF’, even if initiated for a man who wants two chicks at the same time bro, has a kind of sexual ‘equality’ in that everyone is having sex with everyone. In MFM, by contrast, the two men are almost certainly not having sex with each other (perhaps your experience suggests differently, I’d be interested in hearing it). This is why many men also reject the idea of MFM with their partner, because it’s adding another man without him getting any pleasure from him; the archetypal MFM situation is either cuckoldry or two frat bros tag-teaming a drunk sorority girl.

The idea of two men and a woman all having sex with each other (including the men with each other) almost has a kind of Byronic libertinism to it, I don’t think it describes a lot of sex that happens today.

Maybe something like an FMM? You’d need a bi man and a gay man who doesn’t mind the F…

Weirdly, I’ve always thought MFM to be more…threesomey? than FMF. It feels like to me that at any given moment in an FMF threesome one woman isn’t getting the whole package, even if it evens out in the end. Like some sort of serial monogamy with an observer waiting in line, or maybe a couple as a unit having sex with a woman. Then again, thinking about it, it probably isn’t necessarily that different from MFM…

In reply to both your replies to me, yes you have it exactly right. That is exactly why FMF threesomes are more common. Though I think the "equality" is a lot less common than you seem to think, it's more a of a platonic ideal that is only rarely reached than the average. A lot of FMF threesomes degrade into some mix of one person watching the other two fuck" or "theoretically Bi unicorn is a pillow princess" or something like that. But that's why they at least make it far enough to fail, yeah.

Once again, though, it is perfectly possible for any other motivation to free-ride on that "normal" motivation, so a shameful fetish motivation doesn't need to be exposed to daylight. Defining Fetish here as "Needing X stimulus to get off" (where X isn't something banal like physical stimulation of the genitals or whatever), we quickly reason that the Fetishes are only detectable or necessary to confess where they are weird, because if you required X to get off but it was something fairly normal it would never be apparent unless it was from inside the person's mind. If I had a fetish for Brunette white girls no one would ever notice because that is a solid percentage of my dating pool to begin with, I could date ten brunettes in a row and at most it might get a giggle from people who were close to me; if I had a fetish for Asian girls or Ebony-Skinned African girls it would probably be noted eventually by my friends as those women are a little rarer in my social circles, maybe if I dated three or four in a row people would notice; if I had a fetish for dwarves or women three inches taller than me it would be immediately apparent to even casual observers after the second in the series and strongly suspected/mocked at the first.

My argument is that precisely because FMF are more common, and because there are all these other reasons why women might be engaging in them, any woman that likes the "watching my partner fuck another woman turns me on" aspect of it never has to talk about it, she just gets what she wants. Where a man enjoying that is rarer, so he needs to explain it in a way that protects (lol) his heterosexual bona fides.

The idea of two men and a woman all having sex with each other (including the men with each other) almost has a kind of Byronic libertinism to it, I don’t think it describes a lot of sex that happens today.

And it is a damn shame it doesn't. RETVRN

More comments

All porn can be used as cuckold porn if the viewer imagines themselves to have a particular relationship to the performers but that doesn't mean all porn inherently is cuckold porn. You could make the same argument about basically all forms of entertainment, that watching/listening/reading about other people achieving great things must lead the audience to either delusionally imagine themselves in such a situation or spiral into inferiority and take masochistic pleasure in that inferiority.

The flaw in your argument is that you're discarding relating to a fictional character and imagining yourself in their place as a delusion not a key part of how human societies have spread knowledge and values for thousands of years. An ancient Greek could become insecure and depressed hearing about all the cool stuff Odysseus did and knowing that they'll never do anything that great, or they could be inspired by the story to seek out clever and unusual solutions to problems in their day to day life. The audience isn't cucked by the media itself but by how they imagine themselves relating to it.

Of course the knowledge and values passed on in a lot of mainstream porn are garbage because it's an audiovisual representation of a tactile experience generally aimed at the total indulgence of the preferences of one gender (usually men). You could watch what's popular in /r/chickflixxx and then go out and do some of those moves on a female partner and that would be a non-cucked way to engage with porn since imagining yourself as the man is no longer delusional.

All porn can be used as cuckold porn if the viewer imagines themselves to have a particular relationship to the performers but that doesn't mean all porn inherently is cuckold porn. You could make the same argument about basically all forms of entertainment, that watching/listening/reading about other people achieving great things must lead the audience to either delusionally imagine themselves in such a situation or spiral into inferiority and take masochistic pleasure in that inferiority.

Honestly wonder if the recent surge in cuckold porn has something to do with how it injects a ton of taboo/shock value to a scene, without requiring a ton more budget or extremism to actually film. I know a guy who's a mid-grade porn producer, and he's told me that the whole 'stepcest' trend is also an example of this. Since you can turn a vanilla scene into a stepcest scene with literally 10 words added to the script and not having to pay the talent for doing anything especially physically arduous.

Honestly wonder if the recent surge in cuckold porn has something to do with how it injects a ton of taboo/shock value to a scene

I think so, definitely. Porn is all about novelty, and after a while the last shocking thing is now commonplace, so you have to move on to something even more extreme. And your actors (unless they specialise in it) probably don't want to do extreme BDSM stuff, so fake incest or cuckold stuff is a way to have a taboo subject and still keep everyone happy.

Parsimonious hypothesis: An aspect of male heterosexuality is wanting to see his female partner, whether temporary or long term, degrade herself sexually—and a key aspect of female heterosexuality is wanting to oblige.

In more “ordinary” circumstances, this is for his physical benefit, and may manifest itself in her doing ball-licking, rimming, gagging throatfucks, anal, facials, and the like. In more extraordinary circumstances, this may result in BLACKED-adjacent behavior and beastiality—the ordinary going haywire and defective. And these are all reflected in porn.

All porn is cuckhold porn.

So if, on a rainy day, I whack it to an old POV sex-tape of myself banging some chick, that would be intertemporal cucking? Reminds me of the Time Traveler’s Wife.

It’s an amusing Ship of Theseus type thought experiment: Most of the cells in “my” body have likely been replaced since then. Oftentimes, then-me even sounds different and jests differently in the skippable introductory cut-scenes beginning few minutes than I do/would now, which sometimes catches current-me off-guard and makes current-me laugh with the jokes by then-me.

Soon some of my old personal phone videos could qualify as period pieces, if they don’t already. It’s also pretty funny many of those chicks are married now.

In more extraordinary circumstances, this may result in BLACKED-adjacent behavior and beastiality

Of all the things to share a sentence. Having sex with animals or black people. You know, comparable examples of "extraordinary" deviance.

Having sex with animals or black people. You know, comparable examples of "extraordinary" deviance.

This is uncharitable. OP discusses "racial insecurity" as a factor in interracial cuckolding and @Sloot's comment can easily be read as a callback to that. Cuckolding and bestiality are both examples of fairly extraordinary deviance from baseline human sexual behavior, as far as I know. Jumping straight to "this must be racism" is all heat and no light. Don't do this.

I disagree. I actually considered the charitable interpretation rule before responding and decided to continue with a charitable view of their actual comment. I don't recall them discussing racial insecurity somewhere else in this thread. Having no memory of that I'm responding to this one comment by them.

"Blacked" porn isn't cuckold porn. It's just interracial porn with a black guy. A plain and unambiguous reading of their comment directly relates regular interracial sex and sex with animals as "extraordinary" examples. So I'm responding to what they wrote, not some unrelated set of claims that would be more charitable to their larger point.

I will take care to charitably interpret posts. And I'm not one to cry racism, so no worries there for the future. But I think I'm right about this one.

I don't recall them discussing racial insecurity somewhere else in this thread.

This seems like a reading problem, then. From the OP (to which the person you were responding was directly responding):

Racial dynamics add to this swirl. The common case is a white man watching a white woman fuck a black man (with a large penis). This fantasy props up so much there are entire porn sites based on this concept, and plenty of alt-right fanfiction about it. Racial insecurity.

(Emphasis added.) As for this:

"Blacked" porn isn't cuckold porn. It's just interracial porn with a black guy.

This may be a fair criticism; I admit that I did not go check on the exact nature of "Blacked," and will simply take your word for it here. But if "Blacked" porn includes any interracial cuckolding porn at all, then I think your interpretation still fails the charity test in this case.

It's trivial true that somewhere in all the internet there is some video that is both "blacked" and cuckold. Just like "blacked" is not anal or any other fetish, but some tiny portion of those videos will also include other categories of porn.

But we can't use the standard of a single counterexample in discussions. In all the content online and all the various interactions of hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of people, there must be some small set of Chinese robbers or "blacked" porn where they decided to something different than normal and added some guy to play a cuck.

Perhaps someone could even make a larger sensible point using those examples. But OP didn't. He merely dropped the incrediblyinflammatory statement about "extraordinary circumstances" such as sex with animals and black men. Not cuckoldry. Not some other reasonable point that you or I could come up with.

Rather than addressing some reasonable point that OP didn't make, I addressed their actual simple and clear statement. Charitability is not disregarding someone's words in order to substitute in unrelated but more sensible claims.

He merely dropped the incrediblyinflammatory statement about "extraordinary circumstances" such as sex with animals and black men

See, no, this is not enough charity. This is putting words in someone's mouth. "OP" isn't who you were responding to, OP is one level up from that. OP mentioned interracial cuckoldry, and someone else responded with a comment about "BLACKED adjacent behavior" which you took to mean something inflammatory, but which in context of the OP could, charitably, be a reference to the aforementioned interracial cuckoldry (which the brand BLACKED apparently famously produces, albeit not exclusively, which fact I am somewhat annoyed you have now made me research to be sure).

And here's the thing--maybe you're right! But the level of confidence, indeed insistence you're bringing to bear here is evidence of inadequate charity. No one actually said "having sex with black people is, or is like, bestiality," only that "BLACKED adjacent behavior" (contextually potentially a reference to interracial cuckoldry) was an extreme case, as is bestiality. Where someone does not make an explicitly inflammatory claim, context matters, and your earlier response to me suggests you were either ignorant of or ignoring that context.

Doubling down here with bad takes on the of meaning of charity does not help you. Don't lecture me about "actual simple and clear" statements when you are forced to repeatedly reword what was actually said in order to support your umbrage.

This is the 3rd motte post I've read in the space of 24 hours that's left me wondering "wtf did I just read?". The second was the OP and the first is Mr. 73 questions. Nevermind agreeing or disagreeing I'm struggling to put myself in a mindset where this even follows.

I'm struggling to put myself in a mindset where this even follows.

Think about it logically.

Parsimonious hypothesis: An aspect of male heterosexuality is wanting to see his female partner, whether temporary or long term, degrade herself sexually—and a key aspect of female heterosexuality is wanting to oblige.

It is not clear to me why this should be "an aspect of male heterosexuality", as opposed to "an aspect of [something else]".

An aspect of male heterosexuality is wanting to see his female partner, whether temporary or long term, degrade herself sexually [...] ball-licking, rimming, gagging throatfucks, anal, facials, and the like

It's hard for me to conceive of such garden-variety acts as degrading.

I think we should be quite careful to distinguish submission (in its most general sense - in the sense of taking on any sort of relatively lower status for any length of time) and degradation. The former need not imply the latter.

I like the theorizing about aspects of normal male heterosexuality wanting to degrade and female heterosexuality wanting to oblige. Opportunity to study those mechanics of how sexual desire is actually related to by the person.

Those categories seem like a good start, with more underlying variation and complexity that could be analyzed more. Maybe Queer theorists have also looked at this?

Sounds like something radfems would say, except they would call this not female heterosexuality, but male heterosexuality imposed on females.

It’s crazy how radfems deluded themselves into thinking that all sexually submissive desires must be imposed from the outside by a patriarchal conspiracy.

Do they not know how many sub men there are?

They haven't gone far from some of the mottizens that paint everyone with a very broad brush. Or even a paint roller.

Watching porn of oneself. Hm not sure how to categorize that. Perhaps metaphorically masturbatory? Because one is finding themselves hot? I dunno

The fear of being "cucked" is making some people psychotic. View anything through such a loose lens and you see yourself getting cucked everywhere. And you're not a cuck, right? So all this cucking makes you feel emasculated and boiling with rage and you'll do anything to make it go away, even if it means giving up your humanity.

That one is a relatively insignificant and powerless man doesn't have to be viewed through the lens of a sexual fetish. There's other, healthier ways to cope.

Haha perhaps I am psychotic due to reading Baudrillard too young and getting to read such things.

I agree some people get way too deep into cuck stuff, especially in right-wing internet circles. However I think the root cause is from unaddressed insecurity complexes, which present themselves as feeling unworthy of their desires and finding excuses including imagining superior competition in great detail.

All porn is cuckhold porn.

Is every fictional story a cuckold story? Whenever I enjoy a work of fiction, am I getting cucked? If I read Harry Potter for enjoyment, am I getting cucked?

If I can enjoy Harry Potter without being cucked, then why can't I enjoy porn without being cucked? We can subsume both experiences under a single general process of experiencing fiction. The fact that one is more likely to make me ejaculate than the other does not seem to me to be an essential difference.

Further, although it's perhaps a bit arguable, the "All porn is cuckhold porn" view doesn't seem to apply well to what I've always seen described as softcore porn: your classic Playboy features solo performers but still manages, um, titillation (although one could, IMO weakly, argue that Hefner served that role).

Even then, to use your example of fiction, there's a line -- a blurry one, sometimes -- between reading Harry Potter and appreciating its storytelling (for the articles, I swear!) and identifying with Harry as a self-insert. Excessive self-insertion even a frequent trope in low-quality fanfiction. There's always a bit of tension between wanting to be like the protagonist, and wanting to be the protagonist.

I do find the premise to be interesting, and possibly true in certain ways in lots of cases, but I don't think it's quite as all-encompassing as it's stated.

Reading fiction is a metaphorical cuckholding when the reader is watching the characters experience the narrative and discovery that they themselves want to experience.

This is not a bad thing about fiction, and it is not-not a bad thing. I think there's an important pattern to be noticed around 'cucking' and how we experience desire. I don't want to be making the worst argument in the world by tying this pattern to the negative connotations of 'cucking'.

If you read Harry Potter and enjoy it, there may be many reasons why you enjoy it. Learning character archetypes, learning more about oneself through reading, trying to predict what happens next, etc. But if you told me that you expressly enjoyed reading Harry Potter because you would love to go on a wizarding adventure and therefore enjoyed reading about someone else who could... well. Especially if you told me you'd rather read Harry Potter than go on your own adventure somehow.

Harry Potter's adventures are more interesting than my adventures in the day, because they're more exciting and I don't have to do any work to make them happen.

I think this focus on (the possibility of) self-inserting while reading literature, the idea that literature primarily exists to represent pleasant states of affairs, is misguided. It ignores whole genres that represent states of affairs that no one would want to experience: horror, true crime, surrealism, etc. It also ignores wide swaths of poetry and other types of non-representational writing. What would it mean to self-insert while reading Pound's Cantos or Eliot's The Waste Land?

Learning character archetypes, learning more about oneself through reading, trying to predict what happens next, etc.

I wouldn't phrase it in these terms, but I would suggest a concept of general aesthetic experience that goes beyond mere self-inserting or mere delight in mimesis. And I contend that this sort of general aesthetic experience can be applied to at least some works of pornography as well. Some porn is wildly imaginative (mainly in the sphere of written erotica, indie comics, and the like - not your average studio production) and shares the sorts of salutary properties and features that you find in other quality works of art.

Those miserable genres of media are known as Misery Porn. The reader wants to experience something about those cases (the desirability of the victim?) and can experience those thrills second hand, through the victim getting fucked by the world, much like a cuck watching someone experience what he is too insecure to experience himself. Hmm it's a stretch.

The boundary between art and porn is going to be complicated because neither concept is well defined. My view is that a few things are true:

  • there is porn (explicit video) that has artistic aesthetic value alongside the titillation. (eg through camerawork)

  • there is an art of making porn: where various representations of titillation are practiced.

  • there is a porn-like nature to all art: where it is trying to invoke a feeling in you without involving you in reality.

This is one of the oldest arguments against fiction, famously. But I’ve always had the suspicion that people who love fiction the most often have highly overactive imaginations. They’re already doing the above in their heads, living lives they’ll never lead, that kind of thing. The book is only another vessel for the imagination, they wouldn’t set out on a real adventure either way.

As a fiction lover with an overactive imagination, that's essentially accurate.