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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.

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.