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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.

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

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