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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).

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.

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.