1) Shows his mind is still very firmly in the 70s-80s-90s Manhattan arc
2) Is not bad wedging in the “blue” cities where there’s definite tension in the limousine liberal/minority/young upstart D coalitions, over housing, over culture, over policing.
In Portland there’s a brewing conflict over “more traffic cops to realize our Vision Zero pedestrian safety plan” (coalition being bicyclist hipsters and outer-city dwellers with few options) and “no, we want to minimize police contact” (leftists and the woke)
3) illustrates that police unions are an alternate chain of command that the federal government can articulate with when blue-appointed formal leadership demurs
Anonymous asked: have you listened to conor oberst much? he has similar "resurrecting america" vibes to you, see Gossamer Thin, NYC-Gone Gone and Gossamer Thin from his main group, Forest Lawn and Dylan Thomas from Better Oblivion Community Center, and Golden Parachutes from Desaparaceidos
Before WWII, the “Classic Six” apartment layout of Manhattan’s Upper West and Upper East Sides might consist of 20% low-income residents, with the maid’s room opening directly onto the workplace.
‘cause for a while I’ve been expecting a cultural turn on correlation of forces grounds but it was severe enough I couldn’t possibly imagine how anyone could get to narrativizing it from where we are, and I just found an answer-shaped idea, it’s chillingly well precedented, the coalition that would be against it just spent the last decade defining themselves against each other, the premise and the motte are perfectly in line with modern goodthink, and the bailey is the most corrosive weapons-grade infohazard I’ve ever seen
And since then first I heard all sorts of guesses, but it mostly seemed an excuse for people to pour their apocalypticisms out on me, no two were the same. But I meant “infohazard” seriously, not just like dangerous forbidden knowledge but like encountering it changes your worldview in a way you can’t shake
Okay.
It’s “Rapekink”.
The “problem” is “gee, how do we derail all this anti-rape fixation so it’s not the defining element of our male-female relations” and that’s the key. Like, being raped, as a kink. Particularly, as a common nonvolitional response to being raped, processing a trauma that challenges your sense of self by eroticizing and “owning” it.
Presents as (overwhelmingly) female empowerment through owning your sexuality, a “by the oppressed, for the oppressed”, “there’s no wrong way to be a survivor and it’s not your place to tell people how to do it” thing
The motte is “if this is you don’t be ashamed, it’s more common than people admit, and accepting it and incorporating it into your sex life through things like ‘consensual nonconsent’ roleplay with a trusted partner is not only acceptably healthy but can be an affirmatively healing form of self-care”
The bailey is “rapebaiting” as practice, for when the thing about your NC kink is that it’s not C
Mostly based on reddit, centered around one forum, but that’s where our sexual unconscious is now that tumblr shook it off. (Because they wanted to dump all the middle schoolers off on somewhere with moderation, truefax. Like when I found the “teacher crush community” I was scrolling through intrigued and then you come across a picture tagged #me #underage and like haha, best of luck kid I’m closing this window)
But expanding. New affiliate subreddits in the sidebar all the time, and I see its tropes leaching into other scenes. “baiting”.
A lot of the stuff romanticized seems to be pretty borderline, like “I went out to the club to get fucked and dressed and acted slutty enough that the guy I found and wanted to fuck didn’t bother with foreplay or seeking affirmative consent” or like “my boyfriend, who I’ve repeatedly told I want to wake up with his dick inside me, stuck it in while I was sleeping”, it verges on “free use” kink
That’s a homeostatic mechanism I didn’t think about, the more things you call “rape” the more people decide they have a thing for rape.
Then you get to stuff like “I can’t believe I’m in college and still a virgin, someone PLEASE tell me how to look irresistably vulnerable at parties” and it’s like “hm”
And how do you stop it? Antis all the time going off like “just cause you were TRAUMATIZED by X doesn’t make it okay for you to EMBRACE X as a kink” but they’ve never actually got that established as a norm in a space they don’t control and everyone’s already hardened their spaces against their infiltration and they’ve already passed their peak influence and are dismissible
Are you going to say they’re being survivors wrong?
Going higher profile would mean the following ideas being introduced into the culture, that’s the “infohazard” bit, now you know it forever:
Some share of girls who are drunk and vulnerable, or who are “leading you on” only to refuse you are quite literally trying to get raped, which they would like very much and be disappointed in the absence of.
No, contrary to everything they’ve said for decades it’s not just a safely cordoned off fantasy that disappears when the quotation marks do, they really mean “raped”
Corrective rape and “marking” work, you can in fact mold someone’s sexual nature or compel them to fixate on you by forcing sex on them
You can actually establish dominion over someone by forced orgasm and fluid bonding, and can leverage all sorts of bullshit off that
That last one - “rape shield” laws introduced in the 70s-90s suppressed things re: the alleged victim in court cases. Your broader sexual experience, so they couldn’t establish you as available unto up-for-grabs levels. But also about the experience, it was thought that was wielded against you for leverage-by-humiliation, “did you cum?” that used to be something the defense lawyer would ask you under oath in open court
(I knew someone accused of rape in college but she later admitted it was false and it bugs me that in court it would be suppressed that she racked up a three-digit count that year walking from the shower to boys’ rooms and dropping her robe; not cause it establishes her as unrapeably easy but as adrift and seeking attention with blunt instruments.)
They often identify an “origin story”, there are four typical origin stories
I had a rough experience and it wrecked me, like it was this black hole in my memories I couldn’t help falling into every day and it wrecked me every time, then somewhere from 6 months to several years later something flipped and now it’s the only thing I can get off to and that’s fucked up as hell
I had a rough experience and though I didn’t want it I realized at the time it was more physically and mentally arousing than anything (and maybe he noticed) and I feel really weird about that but now I can’t get it out of my head
I had a fucked-up childhood and when I became a sexual being wouldn’t you know, it was pretty fucked up
Nothing ever happened to me, before I was a sexual being I really had a thing for kidnap scenes in movies and now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
These aren’t people *ignorant* of the proper way to do things, the story varies between “I sought help through traditional victim-centered groups but I felt like my experience was erased and now I’m glad to find people who center my voice” and “this is what works for me and all that matters is self-care”
Or “hu-hyuk, I just like rape”. The lord of the rapekink subreddit is called PervOtaku, the other admins cross over with r/stupidslutsclub which feels similar in a consensual idiom, instead of setting you on a glidepath to rapebaiting it sets you on a glidepath to “the mall challenge”
Some stories smell like fantasies, but part of the conceit is that people are defensively eroticizing experiences that were pretty grody in real life
Some stories you can tell are just fantasies if only because they were clearly concieved in third person omniscient and then rewritten in first person to fit the subreddit’s thereapeutic framing device
But they’ll ban you if you point that out. Creating a hostile environment for survivors and all.
Too many people show up being too believable for it all to be astroturf, product of some channer Discord.
Precedents:
That 1965 Sean Connery Playboy interview
I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman–although I don’t recommend doing it in the same way that you’d hit a man. An openhanded slap is justified–if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I’d do it.
Since Teddy Roosevelt, at least since Prohibition, at least at least since Generation of Vipers in ’42 there was an elite male consensus that women had taken things over because men had failed to keep them in control, a big part of The 60s, its leadup and tail was a male assertion
As 2000s feminist bloggers pointed out at length, Norman Mailer and underground comix and all that midcentury male freedom was all about the freedom to relate to women for their fuck-value and thus treat unfuckable matrons as worthless. A good part of Soul On Ice was about reclaiming “rapist”!
The Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s
Like, this was very literally a thing the last time we went through this cycle, second-wavers were like And Therefore, Let’s Suppress Valorization Of Power Dynamics In Male-Female Relations and the normies AND the Gorean nerds AND the BDSM lesbians and the emerging Foucauldian scholars were like “but wait it’s HOT when women get hurt, it turns us on” and they won
Also the emerging porn industry, today it’s not so on its toes in the face of “obscenity” law but it seems pretty good at splashing money around when they need to, so let’s hope
love when a Facebook ad makes me feel extremely Seen and then the Why Am I Seeing This Ad? page gives me some vague bullshit, like yeah, suuuuure you thought I’d like a Pavlovian biofeedback shock bracelet based on my interest in Meditation, bitch
Women are being paid big commissions to use online dating sites to
seduce gullible men into trading highly leveraged financial derivatives
with the promise of friendship or romance, according to confidential
analysis of pressure sales techniques.
Brokers are spending more
than $280 million a year on introducers, such as women using social
media sites and messaging services, to lure punters into complex
financial products called contracts for difference that are typically
leveraged 200 to 500 times.
That’s more than double the amount
spent by the nation’s entire gaming industry on promotion and is in
addition to about $130 million spent by the derivative brokers on
traditional advertising.
Reached via direct message on Twitter, Bronze Age Pervert, declined
to discuss his real-world identity. In a rambling note, he said he was
influenced by a book about homosexuality in the Nazi army and claimed,
“I’m largely responsible for the Trump administration’s push for
universal worldwide sodomy promotion,” an apparent reference to the
administration’s campaign to abolish laws that criminalize
homosexuality. (This appears to be a joke. A source close to the White
House who is familiar with the initiative scoffed at the claim.)
In one more bit of “our revealed preferences as seen in sexual media indie erotica trends are probably a better guide to the actual cultural shifts going on than our publicly proclaimed ideologies”:
I am starting to see more and more FtM “fuck me like a girl” posts in the erotica and roleplay subreddits and the gonewilds, especially the “plz degrade me” ones, because it’s framed as misgendering as degradation
And a lot of times, kink fetishization seems to be how people reconcile their worldviews with the exact things they most don’t want but nonetheless must admit exist in the world. So I’m not saying they really want to be seen as women, might be a sign of the exact opposite.*
And yet, in the cis, hetero world there already exists a kink about men having their maleness denied, being proclaimed worthlessly female as a humiliation, being treated and fucked as women, being gaslit and manipulated into seeing themselves as women.
It is called “sissification”, and interestingly this FtM “misgender me with your dick” stuff doesn’t seem to draw on or be aware of it at all, and it doesn’t even seem to have convergently evolved to fetishize the same angles of it. If anything, it seems to combine hetero Fsub “use and degrade me irrespective of my wishes” tropes with gay male yaoi seme/uke dynamics.
And I look back to last year when someone was like “all these FtM bandwagoners, they’re really just fujoshi fangirls, y’know”, and I who had no sense there even was a trend to bandwagon was like “no I didn’t, what?”
And now I’m like “hm”.
* though I mean, if you’re offering yourself up on r/Misogynyfetish, you are asserting that degrading you constitutes “misogyny”, so, hm.
One interesting thing is the shifting roles of condoms in heterosexual culture
Like, part (but not all) of the Sexual Revolution dynamic was The Pill and now you didn’t have to worry about it! (As in, men didn’t have to worry about contraception, which was entirely on women now)
But then AIDS, which was part-cynically leveraged to reenchant condoms (or abstinence) even among straights
Remember the Austin Powers bit where the spy frozen in the Swinging Sixties and unfrozen in the 90s laughs off the concept of condoms as something for sailors? (who patronize cheap dockside prostitutes also patronized by other sailors from disease pools all over the world)
But that seems to have faded. Since the 2000s I see girls complaining that guys never want to wear condoms “any more”, the whole “stealthing” thing treats insistence on condoms as one of those female things you pretend to humor but certainly don’t actually respect
And then there’s the girls that want it. “creampie” as a fetish, the act of just ejaculating in a vagina as like a special niche sex act, you started to see that in the mid-2000s. You saw stuff called “creampie” before that but that was specifically eating semen out of the vagina, as part of cuckoldry or other Fdom humiliation, or in MFF threesomes as a way to get everyone in on the cumshot
And so now that’s advanced to the point where impreg risk is almost a mainstream hot part of heterosexuality, which gets a bit weird. Saw a reddit post that was like “my boyfriend stopped using condoms after a few months, and he’d be dirty talking to me like he was going to knock me up, and that was really hot, and I just thought of it as a hot kink, but then I actually became pregnant”
and
friend
Oh okay I looked back over that reddit post and though she never directly said it, reading between the lines she was herself on birth control, which is why she thought of barebacking with impreg dirty talk as a weightless lark. So the thing getting pregnant made her reevaluate wasn’t “wait, this is really how babby is formed?”, it was “wait, was he serious about the impreg thing and sabotaging my birth control?”, which is a lot more sympathetic and less ditzy.
So okay, that’s not a sign of “people are fetishizing insemination and impregnation so hard they forget that’s what sex is for”. But it is a sign of “people are fetishizing impregnation as a hostile, controlling act so hard they forget that some of the people vocally enthusiastic about impregnation as a hostile, controlling act actually want to impregnate women as a hostile, controlling act”
For one, that’s extremely relevant to the infohazard, which you will hear about before September
For two, there’s also themes of “being impregnated as a hostile, controlling act” floating around out there. “Forced orgasm”, don’t-let-him-pull-out, baby-trapping, “yandere”, as a way to steal him or lock him down.
That seems to have started with the by-women, for-women, power-dynamics-first world of erotic fanfiction, but professional studios are starting to introduce elements of it to the “step”-family incest brands they kicked off the post-gonzo Return of Plot with, or even create brands specifically for it.
And so if that’s becoming an equal part of our post-consent mainstream sexual imaginary, you wonder just how much kidding on the square it is.
I suppose another take on Marianne Williamson and the neomystic turn generally is it’s a turn inward. It takes all the energy floating about that had been aimed at society and structure and turns it to self and sensibility. And that’s a thing that happens, and you’d kind of expect it to happen around now, and diverted into culture the energy can even get pretty golden-agey as the dialectic grinds towards synthesis.
That’s the social unrest of the 60s diverting into the “Me Decade” 70s and “Morning in America” 80s. That’s the revolutionary period of the 1910s being suppressed in the First Red Scare and yielding to the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance.
That’s second-wave feminism falling to an ‘80s pincer move between cultural conservatives and S&M postmodernists – falling as a sociopolitical project. And then its themes got turned inward and coopted and reemerged in the 90s as Wicca, as Lilith Fair, as lesbian chic, as riot grrl, as Xena and Scully and Buffy, as the music I think of as VH1core chick-rock – Shawn Colvin, Natalie Merchant, Meredith Brooks, Paula Cole. As a sensibility, a subculture, a product, an aesthetic (that could be digested into more products, into Target collections and remodeling TV about shiplap and healthy relationships)
China’s
Global Times said she had been “worshipped” as a “cute goddess” by some
members of her loyal audience with some fans even giving her more than
100,000 yuan ($14,533, £11,950).
So part of what’s going to be confusing about the cultural shift coming up that I’m trying to prepare everyone for, is America still kind of has this image from a 60s model where “blue” = urban = liberationary and “red” = rural = authority.
But part of the story of the last decade was that broke down, after the financial crisis as money and good bourgeois concentrated in the cities and grew comfortable in power, we saw what “blue authority” looks like.
And since even red and grey tribe elites tend to live in “blue” territory that was taken as a sign of a national social “tightening”
But this whole time there has been a characteristically red-liberation proceeding apace. As resources and well-behaved gentlefolk drain from rural areas, as all the budget and staffing changes since the 90s realignment work their way through the system, “red” areas - where more “blue people” live than vice versa are becoming increasingly lawless.
Explosives, guns, and wilderness vehicles that urbanites don’t even realize are legal (if they even are) are popular forms of recreation; the forces of law & order are too under-resourced to get a hold of the physical territory let alone the internet and black and grey markets powered by organized crime thrive
It’s not like a federal court system overloaded with immigration and everything necessary to make the country actually run has capacity to spare on “sexting”, either, so you’re growing a sexual culture that based more on schoolgirls, prostitutes, and schoolgirl prostitutes than Japan
Gangs spawn counter-gangs, “protector of the sheep” becomes more an identity than a role, dissident local elites maintain their own military forces and challenge central authority
In Indian Country it has become common knowledge there’s no law binding the white man and they roam free raping, killing and taking slaves.
Meanwhile Christian-identified cultural conservatism has either elevated its members to middle class mainstream and passed them on to blue culture or totally failed to reproduce itself, God-fearing church-going Christian college girls go on Tinder to check “date a girl” off their list
Not completely unprecedented, the ‘60s outlaw motorcycle gang vogue and ‘70s back-to-the-land stuff was kind of about rural lawlessness as liberation. God knows “available drugs and sex with young women” was part of the mythos of Woodstock, or the rural outlaw raves of the British Summer of Love.
(Over those few years, to the traditional sounds of an English summer –
the drone of lawnmowers, the smack of leather on willow – was added
a new noise)
But no one thought of that as the plot of the last decade, because everyone thought “blue” culture was in the driver’s seat, would be in the driver’s seat for the every 30-years-or-so shift where we resolve social tensions by expelling a section of the respected polity and voiding their claims. That’s what “Flight 93 Election” was about.
But they charged the cockpit, and by now, basically, every part of the turnaround and mechanism of the purge is locked in. Blue culture’s tribunes yell just as much before but you notice they’re not trying to claim any new ground, they’re indignantly pointing out that things they thought they secured are being challenged.
Bluechecks have stock, reflexive Aimee Terese dismissals now because now they operate in a discursive world where they have to account for Aimee Terese.
And whether you were waiting for “liberatory culture” or “red culture” or “rural culture” to come back it is not going to be what you remember it as
