Ghosts in the Machine

Hollenhund had an interesting response to a question posed in last week’s post that I thought I might come back to here:

1) Why is there “yourbrainonporn” for men, and not “yourbrainonyourdildocollection” for women? “yourbrainoneroticnovels” “yourbrainon50shadesofgray” “yourbrainonTwilight” “yourbrainonhavingtoomanyorbiters” “yourbrainongettingtoomanymessagesinyourinboxonokcupid”? MEN are the ones that it’s a “problem” if they want variety. MEN are the ones that have to change. MEN are the ones that have to fight their biology. hmmm…I wonder why THAT is. Maybe to help create more Softeks, where the girl can cheat on her boyfriend with him and then shame him for looking at another girl

I doubt their goal is that specific. This new narrative about porn addiction being a public health problem is obviously seen by its supporters as yet further ground for political consensus between feminists and social conservatives. It’s not that feminists want to turn the porn industry, or what remains of it, into a political target again, it’s that they need a narrative that is aligned with the Feminine Imperative and moves public discourse about the mating market away from subjects they, and women in general, are very uncomfortable with.

As long as the mainstream media pushes this narrative about young men getting addicted to online porn and thus opting out of the mating market, it will largely stifle any public discourse about the popularity of female emotional porn (romantic literature), and also the real potential causes of widespread porn use, like the drop in average female quality on the mating market and unrestrained hypergamy. Social conservatives, feminists, and the majority of common folk will, of course, be happy to put all blame on men for any social problem, real or not. And it’s very obvious that porn addiction isn’t a problem they want to actually do anything about, it’s more like an excuse for women to whine and moan. Frankly I’m very skeptical about the whole issue of porn addiction, because if something just happens to perfectly fit into the Feminine Imperative, it’s probably no accident. And one wonders how much scientific evidence there actually is for it.

I’ve addressed the physiological and social associations of male masturbation in the past in The Pheromonal Beta, as well as Pathologizing the Male Sexual Response. The “lively” discussion about male masturbation in this week’s comments notwithstanding, the topic du jour in the Twittershpere also seemed to coincide with this topic.

Personally, I think the ‘moral’ dictates about jerking off follows evolutionarily pragmatic reasons for male shame in masturbation while female masturbation is an arousal cue and seen as a positive. Female masturbation is a cue for sexual availability while male masturbation is essentially a Beta Tell.

That’s the nuts and bolts of it from the bio-evolutionary perspective, but as with all other inherently male thumbscrews, the Feminine Imperative has long exploited the sociological implications of men’s need for sex. One thing that slips by relatively unnoticed with social conventions that serve the Feminine Imperative is that the same presumptions that would serve a masculine (in this case sexual) imperative are always shamed or stereotyped – that is until they come into a context that is  useful to the feminine.

Sex Sells What?

“Sex sells” is a cliché that can be used in the positive for women, but it is always a negative for men. For women, sold sex in advertising, romantic literature, the meteoric popularity of ‘divorce porn’ for married  women, or really any media that stimulates women’s sexual interests is always seen as positive, empowering and exceptional. Even if what their being sold is seedy or can have a potentially negative consequence, in a feminine-primary social order women ‘own’ sex from today’s social perspective. In other words, society at large is expected to defer to women on issues of sex and, by association, romance, love, etc.

Women can still be sold  something or induced to buy a product or to adopt a mindset, but that article or the message that’s meant to be internalized is associated with the ‘positive’ of a sexual inference with women.

For men, male sexuality is always a negative association unless that sexuality is expressed in a way that complements women’s sexual strategy. Something being sold via sex to men is either seen as preying upon an inherent weakness (or dependency) for sex or it’s paired with ridicule for men being typical ‘pigs’ and they’re unable to dissociate sex from the objectification of women. So ingrained is this shame-association that men have adapted sexual competition strategies around it in order to identify better with women in the hopes they will be perceived as “not like other, typical, sex hungry men” and that their intimate interests are motivated by something more ephemeral that sex.

The social utility of this shame-association, of course, parallels the utility of Male Catch 22 for the Feminine Imperative, but there’s a useful  duplicity for women in this inescapable shame of male sexuality. For instance, when women seek to convince both themselves and men that fat-acceptance and “changing the standards of beauty” should be men’s metric for wanting to fuck and pair with less desirable women, we see the usefulness of that duplicity. Men are useful in the perception that they’re sexually uncontrollable pigs for being so gullible as to allow “society” and advertising agency to define what they think is arousing.  However, the Feminine Imperative will readily use (or attempt to use) that same weakness  to exploit men into acting against their own, evolved, sexual best interests by selling them the ideal of accepting fat women as a new standard of beauty.

There are no feminine parallels for the pathologizing of the female sex response because those would simply be hindrances to women optimizing their Hypergamous imperatives. Why are there no “yourbrainonporn” sites for women? Why are there no XXXChurch equivalents for the ladies? Why are there no support groups for women ‘addicted’ to romance novels or divorce porn movies? Because that exclusively male pathologizing is only beneficial to the female sexual strategy.

This is the depth of control that the female-primary imperative seeks over men – that our most base biological, existential need should be distorted and psychologically molded by shame to the point of instilling lifelong neurosis and conditioning fear-based gender self-loathing to effect women’s sexual strategy above all other considerations.

I’ll quote the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies once more here: for one sex’s strategy to succeed the other’s must either be compromised or abandoned. Whether subtly instilled or publicly shame-conditioned, associating men’s sexuality with sickness or perversion, weakness, and disability, the underlying purpose is an effort in convincing men to abandon any claim to their own sexual imperative in favor of that of women’s.

Slut Shaming

If this seems like a sea change from the old order days when women were shamed for even the hint of promiscuity while men were lauded for their own sexual exploits, what you’re seeing is the societal shift to feminine social primacy. There was a time when sexual indiscretion was something that shamed women. Today, it’s almost laughable that there should be a need for a social convention like “slut shaming”. There is no such social referencing, but if men on whole can be put to shame for the belief that other men might still cling to older order reservations about women’s sexual exploits it serves to place women’s sexual strategy above that of men’s.

There is always the old standby – the horrible “double standard” about men banging a lot of women being heroes while women who bang a lot of men are sluts (“it sooooo unfair!”). This is a laughable, antique social convention in an era of slut walks and female-centric birth control, but it’s still the reflexive go-to trope when the mechanics of pathologizing men’s sexuality comes to light.

Sex-positive feminism has always been a two-edged sword for women. That positivity ‘fempowers’ women so long as they cling to the old order missives about the Patriarchy repressing that sexuality while it simultaneously disqualifies their complaints of it as Hypergamy becomes more and more openly embraced.

Ghosts in the Machine

Hollenhund continues for us:

YaReally and hoellenhund, you’re talking about all this VR porn stuff but isn’t this basically the same dynamic as prostitution? Same kind of alternative sexual relief (that is not your wife) and same reason why the FI shames prostitutes and men who use prostitutes etc..because they lower the “price” of sexual release..?

YeReally has already answered your question well, I’d say. He brought VR porn up, I didn’t, because I was observing the current situation, not something that only exists today as a potential future development.

I’d add that the dynamic is somewhat different. Apparently the state is willing to penalize prostitution, at least to a degree that makes it sufficiently risky and expensive for many men to avoid it, and the majority of women and their male bootlickers are willing to support political efforts to suppress it. Neither of that applies to pornography of any sort. Women will complain about it, they will support a narrative that portrays it specifically as a problem caused by men, but it’s not like anyone actually wants to make an effort to do something about it. Do you think any woman wants to date, or have sex with, a reformed porn addict? Do you think women want porn addicts to get out of the basement, get their shit together, and hit on women in order to get real-life sex?

For the record, I’m not going to deny that excessive masturbation is unhealthy, or that excessive porn use can elicit unrealistic expectations of sex in a mind of an inexperienced man. Anything should be done in moderation, that goes without saying. But the current public discourse on porn and its effects is complete BS.

I’ve forgotten where I saw the quote posted, so I’ll paraphrase it a bit (I think it may have been Illimitable Man), but there’s a new concept I read about how human beings’ experience of consciousness is now assuming a new, third, aspect – the immediate, the internal and now, the virtual.

The immediate experience is one in which you directly relate with people in real time. It’s you physically and vocally interacting with others. The internal is the conversations you have with yourself and both your conscious and subconscious interpretation of what you’re experiencing, learning, behaving, etc. (i.e. what you’re thinking).

However, the virtual (or digital) aspect of consciousness is something humans have only recently developed and are now on the cutting edge of really understanding. The virtual experience is what I’m doing now as I type this post. I’m relating to you what’s going on in my thought process (to the degree of which I’m aware of it) in a virtual medium. Virtual porn, virtual games, virtual shopping, etc., really anything you do in a digital realm is part of this new form of ‘being’.

Humans in 2016 experience things in ways that our forebearers could scarcely dream of. Our immediate and internal experiences are now being informed by out virtual experiences – in accelerated ways that I don’t think most people really appreciate. The Feminine Imperative is now fighting to establish a foothold in this virtual experience. Thus, we see efforts like GamerGate meant to lock down a control over how men will be allowed to experience this virtual reality. We also see the preliminary efforts to both socially and legislatively institute feminine-primary controls over yet to be developed possibilities of virtual experiences.

Jerking off to ubiquitous, free, online porn is one such experience that the Feminine Imperative has had to play catch-up to with regard to restricting men’s access to it. And thus, we get contingent social controls from the imperative to counter this lack. It’s not enough that men be shamed for their sexual response to online porn. The accessibility makes this impractical, but there’s really no ‘sales’ transaction for which men would feel their sexual “weakness” being exploited.

However, the counter to this then becomes making men’s sexuality itself a disease. “Porn Addiction”, sex addiction, in a religious context even ‘impure thoughts’ become a disease not to be cured, but to be managed by women – women’s definitions, women’s approvals and disapprovals, women’s sexual strategy interests.

And porn is just the tip of the iceberg with regard to the Feminine Imperative’s controls of men’s virtual experiences with women.