Like, you realize what I’ve been saying with my “sexual media”, “post-consent culture” stuff is that the ideological counters to egalitarianism-tho-the-sky-may-fall woke culture ARE being circulated embedded in pornography, as a widespread shadow shared culture that by nature is antifragile against prim bougie prudery

birlinterrupted:

I think that a relatively under-discussed aspect of talking abt the shifts in p*rnography consumption or like, the social situation surrounding it is that the boundaries that previously existed to produce and (for lack of a better term) disseminate it have so massively lowered that I think it is much quicker at tracking social change (and surrounding social conversations) as well as more attenuated to fringe contradictions than it used to. Like, it is all much less beholden to a smaller group of people w the means to produce images/videos and distribute them, and I think that yr always gonna see much more illuminating (and sociologically interesting) strangeness or eccentricity from amateur communities than you are from corporations who have an overhead.

pornography is the cutting-edge master form of culture rn, like the music video was in the 80s, and we’re gonna have to deal with that

One last thing before I get to the infohazard proper:

Looking back a lot of the distinctively ‘90s sexual imaginary was basically aestheticized caricatures.

The whole ‘80s S&M thing, Mapplethorpe and Madonna, left us with a strong image of the dominatrix, in black leather/latex wasp-waisted corset and whip. (The outfits in the Matrix were intended for an audience with that figure in mind) The “teen” in cheerleader outfit and pigtails and a lollipop, the bleach-blonde bimbo with breast implants and inch-long painted nails. Even if you did that last one well - Pamela Anderson - it was still over-the-top. They didn’t try to have porn stars act anymore but gonzo hadn’t come in yet so you’d have a movie that was like, the woodsmen in firefighter gear doing it on a firetruck. (With women, I should specify.)

And that stuff was so abstracted from any real referent as to be weightless, cotton-candy fantasy.

You heard a lot about “asian fetishes” and I’m sure part of that came from the kids of the ‘70s immigrant wave coming of age but part of that was that Japanese porn was making the American market, and you had hentai with its own over-the-topness but also the live-action stuff hadn’t lost the knack of “here’s the prettiest girl you saw on the street today, undressed, in a tableau that sets up accessible fantasies”.

And it’s striking how the defining fantasy figures of our current moment seem to be running a lot closer to bare metal, and a lot more hostile.

Maybe “step-“ family members who molest you, “daddy” as a figure who when not your actual father is fetishized as an older and more powerful, controlling man grooming you for his use. Cuckold/bull, “the guy who steals your girl”. The crazy stalker girl you literally have to fight off (or fail) because she’s trying to get pregnant by you to own you.

Like, these fantasies are all based off the actual dynamics of real people who will ruin your fucking life, and that’s something.

An interesting thing is how softer, more abstracted versions now seem to use a vocabulary borrowed from the Japanese - monster girl stuff tends Fdom as loving GFE,
“stuck in wall” as a weightless rape scenario, ahegao and public use toilet stuff so over the top as to be completely removed from everyday experience.

Some of that’s the “re-enchanting heterosexuality with power dynamics” trend. Like, in an open parking lot, who outranks who, the firefighters or the party girl? That’s… not even an axis, really.

But a lot of it really seems female-led. Maybe it’s not even so much the girls are into Fsub as they are into eroticizing social power dynamics. God knows that’s the traditional charge of romance novels, from bodice-rippers to whatever the fuck Wuthering Heights was, the value went totally over my head at least at the time.

Maybe I don’t even appreciate how much of that is topping from the bottom. Like when I had been saying “so much Fsub” part of it I had noticed some crossover from ASMR and therapy culture like “reassurance” or “appreciation”. “Small dick appreciation”. Reassuring an anxious guy, a shy virgin. And from my perspective I took that as loving Fsub, but now that I think of it, “appealing to someone’s vulnerabilities, inferior social position and/or mental illness to recruit a sexual bond with them” is kinda ambiguous, isn’t it?

A big part of the generation change coming up is like

The bourgeois respectability bubble that had been reinflating since the 80s popped

kontextmaschine:

hm

@megapope said: what in the hell

@cyprinodont said: Men are not real

Like, when I told you that if you keep your eyes on the right part of the horizon you can see post-consent culture working itself into being… Like, if you haven’t been following the Fsub sexual media stuff, have you at least noticed stupidpol?

And boy, wait until you hear about the infohazard.

Yes, people unironically using “Minors” as a coherent category to identify with is weird, and there is category creep, I just saw a post like “protect girls in their early 20s from grooming by older men”

Honestly you know the idea of “child pornography” as some utterly beyond-the-pale thing this metastasized from didn’t really come into coherence until the 80s and 90s. (People looking at ESR and being like “oh, I forgot libertarians actually did emphasize a pedophelia/ephebophilia distinction” miss that’s a very specifically 90s thing because it was still being hashed out then)

Legal regulation of pornography used to revolve around the category of “obscenity”, which was famously “know it when you see it” hard to define in a legally robust way as people just stopped trusting The Man’s judgement, they had to try to specify it.

“Redeeming social value” - basically, “no, don’t fucking ban Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Tropic of Capricorn, that’s worthy”, but in effect it meant “if you mix your porn with culture, that’s fine”, that’s why those erotic pulp novels I compared to Salon headlines were framed as sociological investigations, that’s why Playboy had articles, that’s why 70s porn had plots like Hollywood

They tried “community standards” but that was kind of unworkable, “Obscenity” as a category was dead by the Clinton administration, the fact that the internet is regulated under something called the “Communications Decency Act” was a last gasp, part of the hilarious thing about the Dubya administration was John Ashcroft and absolutely no one else cared

But at the same time the 70s “gee it is great and healthy for everyone involved to sexualize teenagers” really was going pretty far, I talk about Brooke Shields like, we very much did have a big mainstream star whose brand was “fuckable 13 year old” doing shoots in Playboy publications and doing movies where she was naked the whole time and doing famous ads for Calvin Klein seductively saying she wasn’t wearing underwear

It’s not til New York v. Ferber (1982) that the Supreme Court even suggests it’s constitutional to ban child pornography, only Osborne v. Ohio (1990) that it’s permissible to ban mere possession, as contrasted to actively producing and distributing. And the decisions are pure handwaving clearly to get some excuse to have some tool to push back on this.

In preventing more Brooke Shields, I suppose they also prevented more Traci Lords, who got a fake ID for her porn career and was reputed as one of the best dirty talkers in the industry

So like, this stuff as the master-concept of sexual morality is pretty fucking recent, the millennials are really the first ones to grow up with it enforced with heavy sanction.

Also makes sense why so many of them got off on the taboo nature of it, one of the reasons I’m talking about “sexual media” is to remind people that actually, there is a huge boom in teenagers openly identifying as sexual and even pornographic beings that’s central to the coming culture wave, I first noticed this a few years ago where I searched on a tag that was apparently also used by the “tc community”, or “teacher crush”, which was students coming together to identify around really wanting their teachers to fuck them and being validated in that identity.

Also like, one thing in the last few years, a veil’s come off and it’s completely clear that “sexual access to teenagers for winners” was an absolute load-bearing element of every part of society, and a vital interest of like every center of elite power that they would spend quite a bit of energy to defend! And the idea of them as off-limits was the facade all along, and when you separate a facade off its underlying structure it is not the facade that stays standing.

Like, the growing notion of the young as an off-limits class can’t keep going on forever, and when something can’t go on forever, it stops. If you’re like “haha what, the libertarian pedophile/ephebophile discourse is back”, its means the idea of pushing a dividing line back to puberty is a live option again.

“Guys be sending dick pics”, bitch as if between Omegle, Snapchat, and Reddit we can still pretend “welp I’m bored, time to get on the internet and show strangers my genitals” is a male-specific thing

Also, even the idea of streamers as findommes or courtesans isn’t honestly all that novel in American culture

If you go back to the original noir period, you know how you have this figure of the nightclub torch singer, who cultivates a sultry look and demeanor, who put on performances of seductive singing and dancing with a stage patter to cultivate a sense of intimacy, for an audience of lonely men who might try to capture her attentions off the stage by doing things for her or buying her expensive gifts?

…well?

So in talking about the distinctive porn- and social media-mediated post-millennial sexual culture…

“sexual media”. okay I’m gonna use that

So in talking about the distinctive post-millennial sexual media culture, I’ve been talking about how it “reenchants heterosexuality with power gradients” and it’s heavily Fsub, but there’s an exception that on thinking about it really just proves the rule

And it’s the borrowed-from-hentai concept of the “Yandere”, the “crazy eyes”, obsessive, Cluster B, baby-trapping stalker, or knifeplay rapist psycho

And it’s not exactly like that’s a new idea in American culture, Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction basically limned the type 30 years ago. The conceit of Gone Girl, signal text of our current sociosexual moment, was that Amy Dunne was a yandere the whole time underneath the “Cool Girl” persona she was performing, a lot of noir “femme fatales” were, effectively, yanderes

But in a moment full of all sorts of fetishized Fsub idioms – ageplay and impreg-as-conquest tropes are basically everywhere – it’s like the only* Fdom idiom gaining traction, and that’s striking. Not practice, maybe, a lot of streamer culture is basically mainstream findommeing, but it just shows how much of the sexual consciousness is in a “Make Heterosexuality Predatory Again” space when imagining a woman taking the sexual lead means imagining a woman as a predatory threat.

*okay not really, there’s a much smaller rise in a “tomboy” idiom for assertively but consensually taking a sexual lead. I guess that makes sense, they don’t all grow up to yell discourse in the #butch and #FtM tags, some of them become those Tinder girls with pictures of their CrossFit abs. Still, “the idiom for non-predatory sexual assertion is ‘not really being a girl’‘ is pretty striking in its own right.

(it’s real)

Fascinating things about r/gonewildaudio

This is me infodumping my current hyperfixation on basically amateur porn, so skip that if you want.

On the other hand it IS fascinating, and it is this blog’s official line that “stuff to jerk off to” is just as real and valid and particular a part of culture as anything else.

r/gonewildaudio is a Subreddit focused around creating, posting, and sharing erotic audio.

[1] The standard format is like somewhere between a radio play and one half of a phone sex conversation - performers will portray one character interacting with another audience-perspective character WHOSE LINES ARE SILENT AND IMPLIED.

This means that the best writers and performers have to craft dialogue really well, use vocal nuance, and diegetic SFX to tell the entire story; median artists tend to use repetition (“What? Y-you want me to take off my shirt and perform this incredibly specific fetish? Okay.”); bad ones basically retreat from inhabiting a character to narrate.

[2] There are, broadly put, 3 types of recordings put out. Ones where the performer wrote the script (or at least conceived the scenario) themselves; “ramblefaps” which is basically someone talking dirty while masturbating with no scenario; and script offer/script fills.

This last category might be the majority, it’s where one writer will compose and post a script that performers then see and pick to record. It is ALMOST-ALWAYS cross-gender, so women will be performing fantasies composed by a straight man for an intended audience of straight men and vice versa.

[4] It is hetero as all hell. There is basically no queer content. SOMEtimes a woman will post a ramblefap marked F4A (“all”) or a scenario where she mentions (to the male audience stand-in) that she’s also into girls but that’s it. Not even any sissification stuff that I could see, which is surprising cause those guys are all about the “girl softly talking nasty to you” format.

(My experience is entirely off F4M performances, because I’m also hetero as all hell.)

[5] A lot more women into Fsub fantasies, and a lot, lot, lot more into rape fantasies, than you might think based on common depiction of “where is American womanhood at in 2019”

Part of it surely is the more forbidden something is the more fetish fuel it is, part of it is surely the result of filtering on people who enjoy offering themselves up as a sexual outlet for strangers, and it’s all just fantasy anyway. But I am reminded of those tube-site stats that showed that female viewers were really strongly drawn to videos with violence against women.

[6] There’s a definite age split in the women performers that has a few effects.

Like half of them I get the vibe they’re late 30s or 40s, that sweet spot in between “biker wife” and “has shelves specifically dedicated to SF/F”. Renaissance faire sex freaks, basically. They mostly just seem to focus on whatever their tastes are.

The other of them are college students or early 20s, they’re more likely to have a Patreon  and do custom commissions and treat it as a side-gig, posting on a regular weekly schedule and listening to other girls as *market research*. They’ll still gravitate to their own kinks, but they seem to have a better sense of their output as product from the audience perspective.

Which is to say more… professional. Talking about it is still tabooed there, but I have the sense this is not the first time many of these girls have acted as erotic artists. This is the fruit of the generation that grew up with AO3, Omegle, Snapchat, Tumblr, ubiquitous and private cellphone cameras. I grew up consuming internet porn sure, they came up as producers - performers or curators. Of all the effects of ubiquitous internet porn on youths I’ve heard speculated, I never heard anyone consider that by the time they’re 22 or so they would come out really *good* at porn. I’m interested what’ll come of that. (We sure wouldn’t have had rock and roll if no one under 18 played guitar.)

[7] It’s adjacent to a lot of things, really. It’s adjacent to camgirling, obviously. It’s adjacent to ASMR, on the “girl pleasing you by talking softly in your ear” beat. It’s adjacent to erotica and h-manga just by being actually plotted, adjacent to podcasting and streaming in that it depends on a boom in prosumer audio recording equipment.

[8] There’s a common pattern where people join, get really intensely involved for 6 months or so and then delete their account and fall away. And several people explain that this came from emotional burnout and intimacy overload. That one of the best ways to bond with someone is share an orgasm with them, and posting a popular audio you’re basically sharing an orgasm with thousands of people.

And some of them reach out to you and there really is something in common, kinks at minimum, and you’ve already exposed your vulnerability and your true inner self and that speeds intimacy along, and you’ll record their scripts and vice versa or you’ll at least message about your days, but after enough of this you’ve accumulated TOO MANY INTIMATES, more than you have the time or emotional labor to service as a co-intimate but they didn’t particularly do anything wrong so you feel bad about letting them down and eventually it builds up too much and…

[9] Of course some that reach out there ISN’T that bond, you hear they get a lot of harassment and whatnot and if even women talking about anodyne stuff on twitter get that you can imagine it for them. I mean, celebrities and porn stars have problems with stalkers and with them it’s at broadly admitted that the characters they portray (at least before gonzo when they portrayed characters), or even the “celebrity” persona (ostentatiously fake porn names!) are not the “real them”, here you don’t even have that distance.

(And of course by now the business model of the old SFV studio porn is you *can* fuck the porn stars, no one makes much money off shoots anymore, it’s advertising for their real career as high-end escorts. This is, incidentally, a similar model [maybe as “sugar baby” or just “trophy wife”] as long prevailed for even non-stripper dancers like ballerinas, cheerleaders, or rap video girls)

At the same time… around twitter and things you see people asking “what could possibly make guys think women want to see their dick pics/breathy texts”. And I mean, “well, for 20 minutes (or if you listen through a whole body of work 4 hours) she masturbated while whispering dirty things about herself in my ear and trying to get me excited by saying she wanted me and loves to be used by men without asking” is probably the most reasonable possible answer there. If someone did that and then scolded you if you pulled your wang out or called her a filthy whore under other circumstances, it would just be odd. And I get that it matters that that wasn’t specifically for you but “oh, she does that for any and every random stranger” does not intuitively suggest more delicacy.

(re:)

Searching “Jewish”. Several of my earliest partners were so it’s meaningful to me I guess. Results didn’t really remind me of them though, maybe I should’ve searched “mischling”.

I mean, did you think I’d be embarrassed to admit I found it while trying to jerk off? That’s not even the funniest thing I’ve ever found while trying to jerk off.

(That would be the hentai doujinshi someone’s been paying to translate into Australian “bogan” slang.)