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I'm flirting with a rather incendiary view.
Over the COVID era and the recent excessive developments in the LGBT movement, I've been looking into radical feminist worldview where my gripes with a lot of society overlaps with some of theirs. At least, a section of theirs. I can't help but think that they are at least partially correct in their analysis of gender dynamics, regardless of the solutions they purport. I also agree with them that men are by default degenerates that need tons of rigorous external tempering to get right. And that access to porn is a bad idea, I've personally seen what crippling porn addiction can do to a man. Now I don't buy into the rest of the grift attempting to promote what they regard as feminine features in men, and indeed such attempts at social engineering can be pretty disastrous. I watched this video last night about what it means to be a man in a sedentary, urbanite lifestyle that doesn't really key into our more primal instincts like before, say, the Second World War. A lot of cult classics like Fight Club and Taxi Driver had already impended signs of a male crisis. Combine with this the growing wealth inequality. The consumption of various media that bring to life our escapist fantasies across all genres like high fantasy or superheroes or science fiction or even highly romanticised high school dramas, actually serves to remind them exactly how mundane our life really is. Going forward, I think it'll only get worse as it festers with no easy solutions. Worse still, we're pursuing the wrong solutions by regurgitating the myth that all behaviour is socialised and not evolutionary, that we could get men to "unlearn" masculinity and "learn" femininity. In the end, such attempts will not only push the rejects over the edge, it might also risk creating more rejects. In many ways, I see Tyler Durdan as the "proto-red pill" media in how the persona gives the rejects what they desire and giving them an opportunity to pursue hightened competition in dominating in actual fights. The more woke the culture gets, and the more progressives freak out over the "red pill media" gaining traction and blame it as the source of "male entitlement" rather than a symptom of something a bit more complicated, the more these rejects' perception of society will overlap with the red pill crowd's. I realise the second part of my comment seems completely contradictory to what I'd said in the beginning, but what I'm trying to say is that radfems are correct in their analysis that the "degenerate phase" is the default phase of men and it requires significant external pressures to correct. Part of the problem could be that young boys being coddled might potentially give way to the mentality that life is a template where a series of events fall into place like they're a given like so: school -> girlfriend -> college -> job -> success. But if the habit of actively working towards your every goal isn't imbibed into you since a very young age, once reality confronts you, you become a doomer and just give up like you could do nothing about it. Like you were just born in the wrong household/class/society/whatever. I don't think the mainstream media is ever going to address this head on without being bogged down by what goes within the overton window of the culture war.
I know its a rather chaotic hodge podge stream of thoughts, but I hope I made sense in getting my point across.
What exactly can it do? Make men that don't want to have sex with real women anymore? That doesn't sound like nearly the end of the world, other men will gladly step in to fill the gap. And for those men, does it create severe unhappiness, or just men who don't care to participate in the rat race of trying to get laid. Also, doesn't sound like the end of the world.
Porn addicts can't have sex with real women. Erectile dysfunction, eventually even the drugs won't work.
That's the nice thing about porn, serious use causes emotional blunting - flattens the highs and lows of emotions. Of course, eventually the reality of having one choice only, and that choice is being a perpetually single loser sinks in. I say 'loser' because it's really unlikely for porn addicts to maintain ambitions or a drive to succeed.
It's a dysfunction of the reward system, the entire thing gets out of whack because a basic drive is getting oversatiated.
Even before any porn addiction develops, regular masturbation to porn will erode one's willingness to even go out and pursue women.
I think you've got the cart before the horse. The willingness to go out and pursue women is eroded (due to consistent failure) before the regular masturbation to porn.
I don't know about you but in my school we were watching porn before anyone was having sex. I really doubt that men are exhausting other avenues of achieving sexual satisfaction before going to porn. It's another case of the easier if poorer substitute outcompeting the real thing, and the substitute gets quite a head start.
I get it, pursuing women is hard. It is expensive in terms of money and opportunity cost, it opens you up to embarrassment, it requires a lot of self-development if you've got poor social skills, and it's worse these days if you don't have the right look for Tinder, but whenever I start making excuses, or hear someone else doing it, I have to ask 'how did your last 10 attempts go? Oh you didn't even make 10 attempts? Well there you go.'
I won't post a selfie, but I've been likened to both Ricky Hatton and Triple H, and still rarely has it not worked out for me when I've actually been trying.
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I've seen a porn addict's partner eventually end up a femcel (not the involuntary sort, the toxic kind), though that relationship wasn't the only wave in her storm. No kids or permanent relationship commitments in this case, luckily.
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What I meant is, for the men who do want to participate in the rat race, it creates an unrealistic perception of the experience that can be difficult to decouple from. Combined with concerns over performance anxiety, not a good outcome.
It's not even that. And it's not 'performance anxiety' either! People with performance anxiety get morning wood.
Pornography addicts do not get morning wood despite not having any of the conditions associated with that, such as severe heart disease or diabetes.
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Well, the women's equivalent to porn is romantic comedies: we could say that they create an unrealistic perception of what a man should be and do to get a relationship, and then you have tons of "femcels" who just want Mr. Right who must be rich, hot, tall, gentle
and a vampirebut I do not see the same moral panic about romance novels.The moral (or rather, social) panic I see isn't about romance novels, but rather about the failure of men as a class to not produce enough of them that meet the expectations of women who want a Mr. Right who's rich, hot, tall, gentle,
and a vampire. The analogue for porn would be if there were a moral panic about not enough women being young, attractive, sexually open and skilled nymphoniacs. It's just identifying the societal problem at different parts; for unrealistic expectations set by romance novels, the "panic" is around the failure of men to achieve them, while for unrealistic expectations set by porn, the "panic" is around men consuming and being influenced by them.More options
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a vampire, a pirate, a knight, a doctor etc.
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I don't really think romance comedies/novelw or whatever are "women's equivalent to porn" and I find that a curious analogy.
OP's point about porn coming (cough) with a price is, I think, spot on--not to be an old man but porn used to be relatively a challenge to get one's hands on. Now free porn of almost any stripe cam be had for free as easily as literally tapping one's thumb a few times.
I expect any quantitative 'data' on this will not be without a significant amount of noise for myriad reasons, but there are various reasonable assumptions one can make about the socially (and even sexually) debilitating effects of long-term porn 'consumption.'
Romance novels/movies are totally the female equivalent of porn.
The thing to understand is that men and women are attracted to different things. Men are primarily attracted to youth, beauty, and fertility, all of which can be appraised based on appearance[1]. Meanwhile, women are somewhat attracted to physical characteristics, like height and muscles, but what really gets their motor running about a man are his nonphysical attributes; rich, aloof, dominant, confident, dangerous, badass, high status, leader of men, sexually experienced, dark triad traits, etc.
The purpose of porn is to stimulate a man's reproductive instincts. And since men are primarily attracted to visual cues, porn mostly consists of an endless stream of images depicting naked girls who moan a lot. Sometimes there is a plot, but if so it is perfunctory, like the 20 minutes in a horror movie you spend watching random kids act like jerks before the monster shows up and starts fucking them up. Hentai doujinshi has it down to a science; 5-10 pages of setup, followed by 15-30 pages of fucking.
And, likewise, the purpose of romance novels and movies is to stimulate female sexual instincts. But as we stablished, women are attracted to completely different things than men are. So, instead, romance stories depict an endless stream of billionaire athlete demon pirates kings who look great with their shirt off and declare their undying love for the audience surrogate. It is nine hundred pages of the male love interest demonstrating how aloof and alpha he is, a hundred pages where he breaks down, gets weepy, and shows his soft inner core of twu luving betaness, and one page where he tears the lady’s clothes off with his teeth and the couple finally at long last get some action.
Needless to say, both of these can lead to rather... unrealistic expectations.
[1] And secondarily attracted to purity, kindness, fidelity, humility, and obedience, but those are harder to depict in porn. Not that people don't try; the nurse is a popular porn character for a reason, and hentai doujinshi will usually devote what little space is reserved for the plot to making sure you understand that the girl is a virgin.
I appreciate your lengthy response but none of your links convince me of what is I still think is an odd comparison.
You don't have to tell me that women and men's sexuality takes different forms, but I really don't think women masturbate to romance novels or love story films or whatever to even a fraction of a degree that males are spanking it to pornhub (or whatever).
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With movies, the argument being made is that women want relationships and men want sex. It's a stereotype, but one with some grounding.
Romance novels... in addition to the above, they're full of actual sex scenes. They are literally erotic material, just in a text rather than video medium.
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Too much validation is also a problem. Men and women are probably just too different to have hard analogies.
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I'm not surprised. You're a man after all, I assume. To men, stimulation is visual. But romance novels aren't visually stimulating, so they don't count as porn, right? But, in fact, stimulation for women is mental.
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This remains just as true with romance novels and fanfiction. It also seems to be just as strange (if not stranger) than visual porn. I learned about this the other day and really drove home to me, someone who takes a degree of pride in my knowledge of weird internet cultures, how little I know about the female side of the internet.
As a female on the internet, that was new to me, too, so don't feel bad.
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