/siberia/ - Off-topic

Well, I don't comment very aggressively on the topic but I do think widespread porn is misaligned with my goals and a net loss for sexual liberation. I think porn upholds heteronormativity, it's the primary reason why 'straight' men have not broken through the barrier of homophobia to claim bisexual identification over the past few decades in the same way women have. Something close to one third of young women identify as bisexual now, whereas it was around 5% in the year 2000. Meanwhile, the rate of bisexual identification in men has gone from like, 1.5% to 2.5%. Porn is the reason for that disparity. As soon as homophobia lessened widespread digital pornography gained traction.

We've inherited a whole cultural mythology of circle jerks and homoerotic frat hazing rituals and none of that happens anymore really. it used to! Militaries, boarding schools, logging camps, fraternities, YMCA hostels, sailors, monasteries, and cowboys all had reputations as hotbeds of homosexuality for a reason.

C.S. Lewis wrote about his all-boys boarding school and the rampant normative homosexuality there in his autobiography:

<A Tart is a pretty and effeminate-looking small boy who acts as a catamite to one or more of his seniors. […] They were not like slaves, for their favors were (nearly always) solicited, not compelled. Nor were they exactly like prostitutes, for the liaison often had some permanence and, far from being merely sensual, was highly sentimentalized. […] You will have missed the atmosphere of our House unless you picture the whole place from week's end to week's end buzzing, tittering, hinting, whispering about this subject. After games, gallantry was the principal topic of polite conversation; who had a case with whom, whose star was in the ascendant, who had whose photo, who and when and how often and what night and where…. I suppose it might be called the Greek Tradition.

Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas wrote in his own memoirs, Before Night Falls, about his own peaseant childhood growing up in rural, mud-hut, pre-electricity 1940s Cuba:

<In the country, I think, it is a rare man who has not had sexual relations with another man. Physical desire overpowers whatever feelings of machismo our fathers take upon themselves to instill in us.

Young men who didn't have sexual access to women would become increasingly sexually frustrated and then they'd end up experimenting with the homies at some point, alcohol often being an enabler when there were not normative (if secret) cultural forms to resort to. What happens nowadays? If you feel horny, you go in a room, shut the door, and be with the naked sexy women getting penetrated on your phone you have access to 24/7.

You know where that doesn't happen though? Prisons. Being prison gay is still a thing. Why is being prison gay still a thing? Mostly because you don't have access to naked sexy women in your pocket 24/7.

Porn stops the buildup of sexual frustration leading to prosocial behaviors that would result in men shattering the mythology of normative heterosexuality in a similar way to how women are currently doing the same. Regular pornography use is generally an anti-social, solitary activity. It halts the seeking of pro-social releases to sexual frustration and all of the emotional bonds that can help build.

The inability of low-status men to break through the barrier of heteronormativity has also played a factor in the blowback against feminism and the incel trend. There'd be a whole lot less of that if porn weren't satisfying sexual frustration in the most junk-food kind of unsatisfying way and men realized they could just go down to the park bathroom glory hole and get a blowjob, and if they couldn't get women to like them they actually could just kiss their homies in a romantic way.