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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I don't know what you've described as I haven't had first person experience of any of this stuff but is it fair to say your summary is 'shit is weird, I'd like it to be weirder'?

I'm hesitant to go that far, since there's a bit of a Russel's Conjugation where my kinks are quirky, my interlocutor's kinks are extreme, those people over there have kinks that are problematic and harmful. And I'm in the furry fandom, so my ideas of what's weird are gonna be a little distorted. And there's definitely extant stuff like the emoji streams that creep me the fuck out.

But I think that, outside of certain specialized focuses, economic and social (and biological) pressures have largely pressed a lot of normie internet-visible adult content into certain extremes of either minimally-deniable-underwear-models at one and then gonzo-money-shots at the other. Yet for all the feminist complaints about mainstream porn as 'sex without being sexy', but there's a lot of space where you can have sexiness without being about sex. That doesn't necessarily mean weirder and kinkier (I'll again bring up casual nudism), nor does it necessarily mean calmer and fuzzier (the non-furry version of Changed's latex fetishism might already exist and might even squeak under Twitch's rules).

I'd like to make some high-minded argument about healthier sexuality rather than things going straight to 11, or a low-minded one about it being my kink, but it's mostly just an under-explored space I find fascinating.

Well there's no particular moral judgement from my side. Im just not familiar with much of this world and these things on the internet that pop into being seem so arbitrary - I mean presumably anything can become an object of desire and identification through conditioning. I'm left feeling overwhelmed that we will have any shared high level culture or values remaining, or whether the future is just atomised norms and behaviours.