I personally am more sympathetic to reactionary takes on the sexual revolution than the author to whom I assigned the piece, so will be incorporating references to this book into future posts on adjacent subjects...
I am a man in his late twenties. We are the very last group that did not have easy smart phone/internet access at a young age. Our exposure to porn at a young age was limited to Cinemax/HBO soft core after our parents went to bed. Still nearly every other guy I know has acknowledged that porn has had an overall negative impact on their relationship to sex, yet we are almost universally regular users. In my generation we have record high rates of body dysphoria (relating to penis size) and erectile/sexual dysfunction that can be directly traced to porn use. I seriously worry about how it is going to effect kids who are currently coming of age, given that they have been exposed to hardcore anal gang bang videos before they have even had their first kiss. There is no fucking way you can convince me that this is anything other than detrimental to a person’s healthy sexual development.
I don’t have an issue with porn in the abstract, as sex can be a beautiful thing. It’s the sheer amount, ease of access, and content (e.g. rough anal) that’s the real issue. I don’t have a solution, but I think this problem is a lot bigger than people realize.
I don't have conversations with men other than my husband about this, so it's hard to know directly, but I do read about research which claims (I don't know how one measures this) that 90% of men admit to regular porn use. He told me one of his close friends - married to a charming and attractive woman - admitted to him that he has literally terabytes of saved porn. Whatever the fuck for? Why?! How endlessly fascinating is it to watch Drug Addict Tab A go into Drug Addict Slot B, over and over and over? Also I read somewhere that PornHub's busiest time is Sunday mornings which makes me think of all the women I know whose husbands don't accompany them to church, who I guess watch them pull out of the driveway and then fire up the laptop and pull out the wang. How undignified, how disgusting. I don't understand it. Is it as simple as women who want to stop buying shoes or eating chocolate or buying lattes, but they just can't seem to?
That 90% sound about accurate, only because older men don’t have smartphones and don’t use them the same way. If you’re looking at men around my age the number is closer to 95% look at porn regularly. Basically if a man masturbates regularly, which nearly every man does unless they are getting consistent sex multiple times a week, they are watching porn. Basically no one uses their imagination to masturbate anymore.
The thing you have to realize is that men generally have almost unlimited sexual desire that doesn’t wane over the course of a relationship. Sex is not only a way to bond with their partner but also a way of making men feel masculine and powerful. That feeling plays an important role in the male self concept. Over time in relationships sex tends to become more about bonding and less about catering to the more primal side of things. Women are generally more OK with this than men. Porn is specifically catered to the primal fantasies of men and the type of sex they would like to be having. Most would love to be having this type of sex with their wife, but rather than having that conversation and risking rejection/forcing it porn fills the void. The issues really arise when this takes on a life of its own and porn completely replaces any intimacy.
I think there’s probably some truth to the church thing, but I think it’s mostly that people are off work or hungover on Sundays so men like to wake up and rub one out. So I don’t think it’s really much like buying lattes except for the fact that it has to do with impulse control, it’s much deeper than that.
I have talked to many women friends in whose marriages porn is a problem, and what a problem it is. It seems that for many men, fulfilling these desires with their wives is complicated (I sympathize; sexual communication/expectations can be very difficult), so they go the easy route and use pretend fantasy women. Wives are not stupid, and know this is happening, and there is N O T H I N G that makes a woman feel smaller and less desirable than the idea that her husband would rather masturbate to a set of fake tits / indulge a weird kink than be intimate with her. This may or may not be a fair way of looking at it but this is how it feels to the woman. And thus the drawbridge goes up, the hurt and anger and resentment and rejection set in, and the real problems begin. It's just awful.
Could is not also be the possibility that some of the fantasies are inherently degrading and the man does not want to subject their partner to it? Most guys like to be topped off, but the moment you describe the willing partner as "the mother of their children" that desire dissipates like a mephitis in the wind
pssst: that was the point.....the subtler point, though, is that it's also not a binary issue, since I really doubt Freud existed at a time where DVDA bukkake finishing was a way of saying "I love you"
"there is N O T H I N G that makes a woman feel smaller and less desirable than the idea that her husband would rather masturbate to a set of fake tits / indulge a weird kink than be intimate with her."
Of course everyone (and every relationship) is different, but allow me to suggest that your comparison is invalid. It's not a case of a man preferring someone different to his partner. It's not an either/or. It's the difference between fantasy and reality. I don't think you would tell anyone (man or woman) not to dream or fantasize if they already have a partner.
That's not to say that porn is never a problem or that men don't use it to avoid sexual relationship issues. But for a woman to leap to the conclusion that porn equals rejection is to profoundly misunderstand men's sexuality.
I agree women have to do their part but you’re lacking nuance. Human sexuality is a delicate dance and there are so many men who think just because they are married/in a relationship with someone it means they are entitled to sex. Just as women need to try to understand male sexuality, men need to understand female sexuality. If a guy is a bum who has completely abandoned all effort to bring any type of romance/seduction to the relationship he can’t expect his wife to be open enough to reenact the porn he’s been watching.
On top of that, men have to remember that porn isn’t fucking real. I use anal as an example in my original comment because it’s become so common in porn but if you have any experience with women you know 1. How unrealistic the portrayals of it are and 2. How impractical it is in real life. So you have to manage your expectations, and if it gets to the point where you can’t even get turned on without watching anal videos then it’s time to cut back on the porn.
I guarantee you that there are people in your circle who have been negatively effected by porn use, you just don’t know it because it sounds like you’re in a mostly sex-positive community (which is a good thing) and it’s almost viewed as taboo/prudish to acknowledge porn can be a bad thing. I think “it’s just sex” trivializes things a bit.
"The thing you have to realize is that men generally have almost unlimited sexual desire that doesn’t wane over the course of a relationship"
Male sexual desire definitely wanes over time. Consistent access to online porn has created a false sexuality and made people think more about sex than we normally would had online porn not been a thing. It has also given us ideas about sex that we would have never thought up on our own. This in turn has made us less satisfied with the usual "normal" or "vanilla" type of regular sex that humans have been satisfied with for ages. Online porn exposes people, now at younger and younger ages, to all types of bizarre fetishes and kinks to the point where putting one's tongue inside someone's anus is practically "mainstream" (so I've been told). This is all artificial, manufactured, fake sexuality that is somehow touted as "normal fantasy" and "healthy desire". It's not organic.
People don't like to hear it, but not all porn is healthy and neither are all sexual fantasies.
Essays like this highlight why conservatives don’t conserve anything. “We don’t want to tell anyone how to behave! That would be against our principles! Instead, we’ll let leftists ruin society but at least we’ll have our principles.”
Degeneracy has clear negative effects -- individually and socially -- whether you base it on religious or secular grounds.
>”But who is to devise this moral system and who is to enforce it?”
We will, because otherwise they will. “Freedom” can only exist in a moral society, something the founders stated, so I find it hard to say that idea is in any way, shape, or form contra American-values.
The social values leftists are bent on upending we’re not instituted for no reason. Maybe we should think long and hard about they exist and how to protect them.
An excellent essay today from Ms. Collins. My contribution to this discussion would be as follows:
1. Sexuality is complicated, be careful about letting govt. or moralists get involved.
2. Men and women are very different biologically, particularly with respect to sexuality.
3. The male sex drive is stronger than women can imagine, as the big electron decided men would be the ones to ensure the species survives.
4. Women have no understanding of the male sex drive and should not pretend to - any more than men should write about what a woman experiences when giving birth or having an abortion.
It is bizarre to live in a culture where the Woke mob on the left and the Puritans on the right find themselves in agreement. And, it is certain that anything these two groups can agree on is bat-shit crazy and should be rejected completely.
"Men and women are very different biologically, particularly with respect to sexuality.
3. The male sex drive is stronger than women can imagine, as the big electron decided men would be the ones to ensure the species survives.
4. Women have no understanding of the male sex drive and should not pretend to - any more than men should write about what a woman experiences when giving birth or having an abortion."
And men don't understand female sexuality nor should they pretend to or write about it. Women crave sex as much as, often more than men, when they are being sexually satisfied. They have a greater capacity for orgasms, have multi-orgasmic potential, and their orgasms are much more intense than the male orgasm. They achieve orgasm more frequently from masturbation than they do from men because many men just do not know how to facilitate the female orgasm. Forget about multiple orgasms.
I'm a man writing this after years of being completely clueless myself. Until I decided to learn from women.
Like you, I’m not sure if I agree with the Dworkinites’ solution. But it doesn’t seem like religious faith is really working either — both because religion’s hold is weakening in general and because it seems very clear that a huge number of Christians don’t actually live by the precepts of their faith, ESPECIALLY on sexual issues.
There is no solution that can be imposed from the outside. There is simply individual choice and individual dignity. Christians were instructed to be salt and light in a fallen world, and need to start taking that seriously.
"Even if one agrees with her evisceration of contemporary feminism, it is worth consider the opposite of her proposals, a sex-positive Christianity, for example, or a conservatism that embraces desire."
Haven't we been living, to a great extent, in a sex-positive Christianity or a conservatism that embraces desire since the 1960s? Doesn't any culture, at its deepest level, consist of an ever shifting balance between controls and releases?
But isn't it also the case that in 2022 the apparent shift in the U.S., to a culture of no apparent limits on any level ( for example, in our contemporary polarized domestic politics, imagining our political opponents as enemies, and at its most extreme, even imagining that these enemies possibly deserve a bullet to the head (i.e. no longer any ethical constraints in our imagination and only concern about winning absolute political power at any price).
Has our contemporary politics/economics and culture deteriorated to such a level that any type of no is now considered only oppressive?
Regarding your second to last paragraph: I do have daughters, five of them, and I do tell them all of those things. I wish I had realized how determined are the forces that will tell them otherwise before it was largely too late to combat them.
No smartphones for your kids before they are 18 and can buy their own, and do not allow unsupervised internet, and be extremely careful with what TV and movies they are allowed access to when they are young and impressionable. I implore you. I learned the hard way. The world does not want them to be strong, Godly and dignified. The world wants them to be cheap, disposable, and weak.
Has it occurred to you that others have life experience that inform their views?
I used to have smug, immature attitudes too. I used to think limits on animal instincts were for suckers. I used to think women could have brainless, meaningless sex with no repercussions just like men. I even used to think that it was wrong, controlling even, to try to shield my children from shitty ideas.
I learned from my mistakes. I have been a parent for over twenty years and I have six children. I now know that my naïveté about allowing children to be exposed to and formed by the world’s lunatic ideas about sexuality before they are young adults was completely wrong.
This article saved my subscription to this Substack. Please put out more articles or transcripts as I prefer to read rather than listen. I will post my reaction to this piece in the reply.
The tension between freedom and social cohesion in this article is lovely, a reminder that we behave like cats and the scolds have taken it upon themselves to herd us. The other half of the freedom coin is responsibility. Which is nice if you are mature, wise, thoughtful and seasoned by life and are brave. But that isn't life's starting line and part of freedom is letting people be damn fools which the aforementioned people know they are as much of the time as anybody else. This includes the freedom to value whatever values possess you most. What I like in this writer's words today is the brazen honesty, the knowing and the knowing not knowing. Honesty. Speaking in good faith, devils be damned. But for the woke types, the corporate commercial types and the media chimeras and all sorts of baffled regular people teetering on the end of an existential cliff, honesty is the enemy to their ends and is best chained up, gagged and commoditized.... honesty can cost you your livelihood, your family, friends, liberty and your life. It is dangerous but living a lie is slow death, eventually collective death. But since their are no final answers, no way a kaleidoscopic reality can be tamed even shortly without tyranny, and policy and rules must be negotiated, the only way back from decadence is to speak true, let the merits of open speech be known and not flinch in the face of those who would destroy us and our delicate freedoms out of fear, greed and utopian dreams
I haven't read Perry's book, but I believe I remember the gist of her Unherd columns. It is interesting to me that these anti-porn feminists always write as if gay men don't exist. The existence of gay men and gay porn is too inconvenient to their thesis that all porn is rooted in misogyny.
Citation for "all porn is rooted in misogyny," please. Gail Dines states that she is specifically addressing het porn in her work. Are you referring to Dworkin?
"Ethical porn" is a loss-leader which comprises a tiny fraction of the market and which nobody faps to - its sole purpose is to serve as a rhetorical device shielding the 99% of porn which is unethical from the scrutiny it deserves.
I see it frequently. Perry and particularly Julie Bindel in terms of Unherd. But as I said, they generalize about porn without ever acknowledging the existence of gay men.
Entirely beside the point whether most men arent gay, and no call for her to be all be all things to all people. The point is, if misogyny was at the root of porn then there would be no gay porn. And yet, as we know, there is plenty of it, and gay men quite enjoy it.
It’s certainly the root of some porn. Not really sure how else to take the choking stuff- or the multiple guys ejaculating in a woman’s face.
A lot of what is in porn is sex that women aren’t into.
It’s not comparable to gay porn because obviously that is going to depict sex that both parties would enjoy. Some hetero porn depicts sex that is demeaning to women, and sex that would be really uncomfortable/painful in real life. So heterosexual men are getting fucked up ideas that do not translate to real life.
Few people would dispute that straight porn *can* be misogynistic, or even that it often is. But her point is that it always is, and if there was no misogyny there would be no porn at all. I think the nonsense of that should be self-evident. But apparently to Perry, Bindel, and others, it is not.
"Thus I, an American woman surrounded on all sides by other women telling me what to do, assert my libertarianism, all the while knowing that liberty contains within it the seed of loneliness."
Indeed, and far beyond a seed of loneliness, it possesses the discomfort of uncertainty. I think this is why we see a perpetual backlash against freedom throughout history. Liberty is lonesome, but liberty for us as individuals is chaos and confusion to those around us. My freedom implies my unpredictability. It's quite worth the trade-off, in my view, as the alternative is to be told what to do, often in arbitrary and unsettling ways.
The vast majority, yes. Quite frankly, you come across as a relatively young man. As such, "long-term" for you probably means a couple of years. For me, "long-term" means a couple of decades. And, in my experience, most men and women are worse off with the current porn regime than they would have been with a more restrictive regime.
Thank you for this. This is the first substack from you that I have read though I have been tracking with you on twitter. It is refreshing to see a more personal longer expression guided by someone else's literature.
"Indeed, Perry is admirably unafraid to state simple truths in plain language: she devotes paragraphs to asserting that men and women are not only physically but psychologically different, as anyone outside the muzzled professional classes can freely admit."
Until 10 seconds ago, everyone knew that men and women were quite different. Now stating the differences is a form of heresy. Actual scientists acknowledge this. The "woke" deny it. Since the "woke" rule (with an iron fist) almost everything (the media, K-12 education, universities, Hollywood, SV, Tech, Wall Street, big corporations, the FBI/CIA, the military, the government, NGOs, etc.) the truth is unheard.
I personally am more sympathetic to reactionary takes on the sexual revolution than the author to whom I assigned the piece, so will be incorporating references to this book into future posts on adjacent subjects...
I am a man in his late twenties. We are the very last group that did not have easy smart phone/internet access at a young age. Our exposure to porn at a young age was limited to Cinemax/HBO soft core after our parents went to bed. Still nearly every other guy I know has acknowledged that porn has had an overall negative impact on their relationship to sex, yet we are almost universally regular users. In my generation we have record high rates of body dysphoria (relating to penis size) and erectile/sexual dysfunction that can be directly traced to porn use. I seriously worry about how it is going to effect kids who are currently coming of age, given that they have been exposed to hardcore anal gang bang videos before they have even had their first kiss. There is no fucking way you can convince me that this is anything other than detrimental to a person’s healthy sexual development.
I don’t have an issue with porn in the abstract, as sex can be a beautiful thing. It’s the sheer amount, ease of access, and content (e.g. rough anal) that’s the real issue. I don’t have a solution, but I think this problem is a lot bigger than people realize.
I don't have conversations with men other than my husband about this, so it's hard to know directly, but I do read about research which claims (I don't know how one measures this) that 90% of men admit to regular porn use. He told me one of his close friends - married to a charming and attractive woman - admitted to him that he has literally terabytes of saved porn. Whatever the fuck for? Why?! How endlessly fascinating is it to watch Drug Addict Tab A go into Drug Addict Slot B, over and over and over? Also I read somewhere that PornHub's busiest time is Sunday mornings which makes me think of all the women I know whose husbands don't accompany them to church, who I guess watch them pull out of the driveway and then fire up the laptop and pull out the wang. How undignified, how disgusting. I don't understand it. Is it as simple as women who want to stop buying shoes or eating chocolate or buying lattes, but they just can't seem to?
That 90% sound about accurate, only because older men don’t have smartphones and don’t use them the same way. If you’re looking at men around my age the number is closer to 95% look at porn regularly. Basically if a man masturbates regularly, which nearly every man does unless they are getting consistent sex multiple times a week, they are watching porn. Basically no one uses their imagination to masturbate anymore.
The thing you have to realize is that men generally have almost unlimited sexual desire that doesn’t wane over the course of a relationship. Sex is not only a way to bond with their partner but also a way of making men feel masculine and powerful. That feeling plays an important role in the male self concept. Over time in relationships sex tends to become more about bonding and less about catering to the more primal side of things. Women are generally more OK with this than men. Porn is specifically catered to the primal fantasies of men and the type of sex they would like to be having. Most would love to be having this type of sex with their wife, but rather than having that conversation and risking rejection/forcing it porn fills the void. The issues really arise when this takes on a life of its own and porn completely replaces any intimacy.
I think there’s probably some truth to the church thing, but I think it’s mostly that people are off work or hungover on Sundays so men like to wake up and rub one out. So I don’t think it’s really much like buying lattes except for the fact that it has to do with impulse control, it’s much deeper than that.
Thank you for taking the time to explain this.
I have talked to many women friends in whose marriages porn is a problem, and what a problem it is. It seems that for many men, fulfilling these desires with their wives is complicated (I sympathize; sexual communication/expectations can be very difficult), so they go the easy route and use pretend fantasy women. Wives are not stupid, and know this is happening, and there is N O T H I N G that makes a woman feel smaller and less desirable than the idea that her husband would rather masturbate to a set of fake tits / indulge a weird kink than be intimate with her. This may or may not be a fair way of looking at it but this is how it feels to the woman. And thus the drawbridge goes up, the hurt and anger and resentment and rejection set in, and the real problems begin. It's just awful.
Could is not also be the possibility that some of the fantasies are inherently degrading and the man does not want to subject their partner to it? Most guys like to be topped off, but the moment you describe the willing partner as "the mother of their children" that desire dissipates like a mephitis in the wind
pssst: that was the point.....the subtler point, though, is that it's also not a binary issue, since I really doubt Freud existed at a time where DVDA bukkake finishing was a way of saying "I love you"
"there is N O T H I N G that makes a woman feel smaller and less desirable than the idea that her husband would rather masturbate to a set of fake tits / indulge a weird kink than be intimate with her."
Of course everyone (and every relationship) is different, but allow me to suggest that your comparison is invalid. It's not a case of a man preferring someone different to his partner. It's not an either/or. It's the difference between fantasy and reality. I don't think you would tell anyone (man or woman) not to dream or fantasize if they already have a partner.
That's not to say that porn is never a problem or that men don't use it to avoid sexual relationship issues. But for a woman to leap to the conclusion that porn equals rejection is to profoundly misunderstand men's sexuality.
I agree women have to do their part but you’re lacking nuance. Human sexuality is a delicate dance and there are so many men who think just because they are married/in a relationship with someone it means they are entitled to sex. Just as women need to try to understand male sexuality, men need to understand female sexuality. If a guy is a bum who has completely abandoned all effort to bring any type of romance/seduction to the relationship he can’t expect his wife to be open enough to reenact the porn he’s been watching.
On top of that, men have to remember that porn isn’t fucking real. I use anal as an example in my original comment because it’s become so common in porn but if you have any experience with women you know 1. How unrealistic the portrayals of it are and 2. How impractical it is in real life. So you have to manage your expectations, and if it gets to the point where you can’t even get turned on without watching anal videos then it’s time to cut back on the porn.
I guarantee you that there are people in your circle who have been negatively effected by porn use, you just don’t know it because it sounds like you’re in a mostly sex-positive community (which is a good thing) and it’s almost viewed as taboo/prudish to acknowledge porn can be a bad thing. I think “it’s just sex” trivializes things a bit.
Your comments lack wit and and insight
"The thing you have to realize is that men generally have almost unlimited sexual desire that doesn’t wane over the course of a relationship"
Male sexual desire definitely wanes over time. Consistent access to online porn has created a false sexuality and made people think more about sex than we normally would had online porn not been a thing. It has also given us ideas about sex that we would have never thought up on our own. This in turn has made us less satisfied with the usual "normal" or "vanilla" type of regular sex that humans have been satisfied with for ages. Online porn exposes people, now at younger and younger ages, to all types of bizarre fetishes and kinks to the point where putting one's tongue inside someone's anus is practically "mainstream" (so I've been told). This is all artificial, manufactured, fake sexuality that is somehow touted as "normal fantasy" and "healthy desire". It's not organic.
People don't like to hear it, but not all porn is healthy and neither are all sexual fantasies.
Sex can be a beautiful thing, but pornography strips it of the thing that makes it beautiful (ie love).
> “Such is the attitude of the censor...”
Essays like this highlight why conservatives don’t conserve anything. “We don’t want to tell anyone how to behave! That would be against our principles! Instead, we’ll let leftists ruin society but at least we’ll have our principles.”
Degeneracy has clear negative effects -- individually and socially -- whether you base it on religious or secular grounds.
>”But who is to devise this moral system and who is to enforce it?”
We will, because otherwise they will. “Freedom” can only exist in a moral society, something the founders stated, so I find it hard to say that idea is in any way, shape, or form contra American-values.
The social values leftists are bent on upending we’re not instituted for no reason. Maybe we should think long and hard about they exist and how to protect them.
An excellent essay today from Ms. Collins. My contribution to this discussion would be as follows:
1. Sexuality is complicated, be careful about letting govt. or moralists get involved.
2. Men and women are very different biologically, particularly with respect to sexuality.
3. The male sex drive is stronger than women can imagine, as the big electron decided men would be the ones to ensure the species survives.
4. Women have no understanding of the male sex drive and should not pretend to - any more than men should write about what a woman experiences when giving birth or having an abortion.
It is bizarre to live in a culture where the Woke mob on the left and the Puritans on the right find themselves in agreement. And, it is certain that anything these two groups can agree on is bat-shit crazy and should be rejected completely.
"Men and women are very different biologically, particularly with respect to sexuality.
3. The male sex drive is stronger than women can imagine, as the big electron decided men would be the ones to ensure the species survives.
4. Women have no understanding of the male sex drive and should not pretend to - any more than men should write about what a woman experiences when giving birth or having an abortion."
And men don't understand female sexuality nor should they pretend to or write about it. Women crave sex as much as, often more than men, when they are being sexually satisfied. They have a greater capacity for orgasms, have multi-orgasmic potential, and their orgasms are much more intense than the male orgasm. They achieve orgasm more frequently from masturbation than they do from men because many men just do not know how to facilitate the female orgasm. Forget about multiple orgasms.
I'm a man writing this after years of being completely clueless myself. Until I decided to learn from women.
Like you, I’m not sure if I agree with the Dworkinites’ solution. But it doesn’t seem like religious faith is really working either — both because religion’s hold is weakening in general and because it seems very clear that a huge number of Christians don’t actually live by the precepts of their faith, ESPECIALLY on sexual issues.
Not that I have a better solution at hand.
There is no solution that can be imposed from the outside. There is simply individual choice and individual dignity. Christians were instructed to be salt and light in a fallen world, and need to start taking that seriously.
"Even if one agrees with her evisceration of contemporary feminism, it is worth consider the opposite of her proposals, a sex-positive Christianity, for example, or a conservatism that embraces desire."
Haven't we been living, to a great extent, in a sex-positive Christianity or a conservatism that embraces desire since the 1960s? Doesn't any culture, at its deepest level, consist of an ever shifting balance between controls and releases?
But isn't it also the case that in 2022 the apparent shift in the U.S., to a culture of no apparent limits on any level ( for example, in our contemporary polarized domestic politics, imagining our political opponents as enemies, and at its most extreme, even imagining that these enemies possibly deserve a bullet to the head (i.e. no longer any ethical constraints in our imagination and only concern about winning absolute political power at any price).
Has our contemporary politics/economics and culture deteriorated to such a level that any type of no is now considered only oppressive?
Regarding your second to last paragraph: I do have daughters, five of them, and I do tell them all of those things. I wish I had realized how determined are the forces that will tell them otherwise before it was largely too late to combat them.
No smartphones for your kids before they are 18 and can buy their own, and do not allow unsupervised internet, and be extremely careful with what TV and movies they are allowed access to when they are young and impressionable. I implore you. I learned the hard way. The world does not want them to be strong, Godly and dignified. The world wants them to be cheap, disposable, and weak.
You have it all figured out, my dude
Has it occurred to you that others have life experience that inform their views?
I used to have smug, immature attitudes too. I used to think limits on animal instincts were for suckers. I used to think women could have brainless, meaningless sex with no repercussions just like men. I even used to think that it was wrong, controlling even, to try to shield my children from shitty ideas.
I learned from my mistakes. I have been a parent for over twenty years and I have six children. I now know that my naïveté about allowing children to be exposed to and formed by the world’s lunatic ideas about sexuality before they are young adults was completely wrong.
ok
best of luck to you, kiddo
This article saved my subscription to this Substack. Please put out more articles or transcripts as I prefer to read rather than listen. I will post my reaction to this piece in the reply.
The tension between freedom and social cohesion in this article is lovely, a reminder that we behave like cats and the scolds have taken it upon themselves to herd us. The other half of the freedom coin is responsibility. Which is nice if you are mature, wise, thoughtful and seasoned by life and are brave. But that isn't life's starting line and part of freedom is letting people be damn fools which the aforementioned people know they are as much of the time as anybody else. This includes the freedom to value whatever values possess you most. What I like in this writer's words today is the brazen honesty, the knowing and the knowing not knowing. Honesty. Speaking in good faith, devils be damned. But for the woke types, the corporate commercial types and the media chimeras and all sorts of baffled regular people teetering on the end of an existential cliff, honesty is the enemy to their ends and is best chained up, gagged and commoditized.... honesty can cost you your livelihood, your family, friends, liberty and your life. It is dangerous but living a lie is slow death, eventually collective death. But since their are no final answers, no way a kaleidoscopic reality can be tamed even shortly without tyranny, and policy and rules must be negotiated, the only way back from decadence is to speak true, let the merits of open speech be known and not flinch in the face of those who would destroy us and our delicate freedoms out of fear, greed and utopian dreams
Grateful for the nuance here and to be introduced to Ms. Collins. Thank you.
I haven't read Perry's book, but I believe I remember the gist of her Unherd columns. It is interesting to me that these anti-porn feminists always write as if gay men don't exist. The existence of gay men and gay porn is too inconvenient to their thesis that all porn is rooted in misogyny.
Citation for "all porn is rooted in misogyny," please. Gail Dines states that she is specifically addressing het porn in her work. Are you referring to Dworkin?
"Ethical porn" is a loss-leader which comprises a tiny fraction of the market and which nobody faps to - its sole purpose is to serve as a rhetorical device shielding the 99% of porn which is unethical from the scrutiny it deserves.
I see it frequently. Perry and particularly Julie Bindel in terms of Unherd. But as I said, they generalize about porn without ever acknowledging the existence of gay men.
Maybe most men aren’t gay? I mean, she’s a feminist, she can’t be all things to all people.
Entirely beside the point whether most men arent gay, and no call for her to be all be all things to all people. The point is, if misogyny was at the root of porn then there would be no gay porn. And yet, as we know, there is plenty of it, and gay men quite enjoy it.
It’s certainly the root of some porn. Not really sure how else to take the choking stuff- or the multiple guys ejaculating in a woman’s face.
A lot of what is in porn is sex that women aren’t into.
It’s not comparable to gay porn because obviously that is going to depict sex that both parties would enjoy. Some hetero porn depicts sex that is demeaning to women, and sex that would be really uncomfortable/painful in real life. So heterosexual men are getting fucked up ideas that do not translate to real life.
Few people would dispute that straight porn *can* be misogynistic, or even that it often is. But her point is that it always is, and if there was no misogyny there would be no porn at all. I think the nonsense of that should be self-evident. But apparently to Perry, Bindel, and others, it is not.
Excellent essay.
"Thus I, an American woman surrounded on all sides by other women telling me what to do, assert my libertarianism, all the while knowing that liberty contains within it the seed of loneliness."
Indeed, and far beyond a seed of loneliness, it possesses the discomfort of uncertainty. I think this is why we see a perpetual backlash against freedom throughout history. Liberty is lonesome, but liberty for us as individuals is chaos and confusion to those around us. My freedom implies my unpredictability. It's quite worth the trade-off, in my view, as the alternative is to be told what to do, often in arbitrary and unsettling ways.
Perry’s point seems to be, "Everyone should have my preferences, and those who don't are wrong and bad."
Or, maybe, her point could be "Your preferences lead to bad results."
Long-term bad results for everybody, both men and women.
The vast majority, yes. Quite frankly, you come across as a relatively young man. As such, "long-term" for you probably means a couple of years. For me, "long-term" means a couple of decades. And, in my experience, most men and women are worse off with the current porn regime than they would have been with a more restrictive regime.
So, yes, "Your preferences lead to bad results."
Thank you for this. This is the first substack from you that I have read though I have been tracking with you on twitter. It is refreshing to see a more personal longer expression guided by someone else's literature.
"His beautiful photographs of male genitalia"--yeah, right.
I guess if it’s a black-and-white photo close-up of a penis it’s suddenly transformed into “art”
And strapped to a board.
"Indeed, Perry is admirably unafraid to state simple truths in plain language: she devotes paragraphs to asserting that men and women are not only physically but psychologically different, as anyone outside the muzzled professional classes can freely admit."
Until 10 seconds ago, everyone knew that men and women were quite different. Now stating the differences is a form of heresy. Actual scientists acknowledge this. The "woke" deny it. Since the "woke" rule (with an iron fist) almost everything (the media, K-12 education, universities, Hollywood, SV, Tech, Wall Street, big corporations, the FBI/CIA, the military, the government, NGOs, etc.) the truth is unheard.
You should read Pornland by Gail Dines before undertaking any serious writing on the subject.