site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I don't have much to say but, is any conceivable one time sexual experience worth losing your fucking nuts over?

Like I doubt even having sex with Scarlette Johansson, Ana De Armas and 30 other hot women all at once while on cocaine and heroin and dick pills from Valhalla (they are on some other wordly sex drugs too), would still be worth losing your nuts and a leg. Like wtf.

There's a crazy-sized hole here. I don't think this guy was rationally maximizing utils(well, maybe the hooker who didn't cut any of his parts off); he was a nutjob.

That's why this is an online photoshopping-images fetish rather than a real-world actually-doing-things fetish (like a lot of internet fetishes), and it makes the news every time someone is actually crazy to try something in real life once every decade or so.

Same with cannibalism and other extreme stuff, you hear a single story once a decade and everyone wants to act like it's the tip of the iceberg, but no, it's really just that one insane dude plus a bunch of fanfiction online.

On the slightly-less-extreme (at least compared to nullification and cannibalism) end of the scale, I sometimes think of that one reddit post by the guy who got into scat porn, hired someone to oblige him and then immediately regretted it.

Out of the small portion of people who actually go through with these fetishes, I wonder how many of them immediately regret bringing them into reality.

I don't have a particularly good model of this as kink or lifestyle, but I don't think they're looking at it as a sexual experience in the "wow, what a great orgasm" sense, rather than desiring the end state, either as a description for extreme infertility/submissiveness/'nonmasculinity' (when moderated by hormone therapy), or as wanting to reduce sexual desire (in the case of some eunuchs).

(cw: male pain, contrasting)

Contrast 'ball-busting' or cbt, where the focus is about damage to the testes as itself being wanted, and either repaired and repeated or the character retired for a different one, and where in fantasy acts parallel to or in replacement of an orgasm. Of The Wilds and poiupoiu on SoFurry for examples in written form. Usually more femdom/male-on-male-dom focused, especially for 'normal' non-furry real-world actors.

That said, the lines between those two categories can be vague and complicated.