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Notes -
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.
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.
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?
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.
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