the more I think about this comment the more this mindset skeeves me out. An entire generation of kids who think sex = hardcore porn and that anything else is a waste of time. Any eroticism or romance is entirely discarded and deemed obsolete and inefficient. It's gross as hell and the mindset of a coomer not someone who has lived a life of love and loss and had complex sexual experiences both positive and negative. Sex is a huge component of love and life for many, if not most people, and an integral part of social reproduction and the existence of our species. To remove complex sexual relationships from all art and just relegate it to a separate category of "disgusting fetishistic hardcore porn" which we only ever engage with when we get off is very bad for society. It exacerbates the madonna-whore complex to its logical endpoints and extremes, every public facing hero is a chaste hero while all sex is corrupt, evil and to be hidden away. We delude ourselves that our heroes aren't fucking. It's victorian puritanism, and it's giving us little dopamine drips when we do evil depraved shit.
An entire generation of kids who think sex = hardcore porn and that anything else is a waste of time. Any eroticism or romance is entirely discarded and deemed obsolete and inefficient. It's gross as hell and the mindset of a coomer not someone who has lived a life of love and loss and had complex sexual experiences both positive and negative.
Unfortunately this is the gross mindset that porn addiction creates. And many among Gen Z are addicts, even if they don't care to admit it. The generation having the least sex and all.
Unfortunately this is the gross mindset that porn addiction creates.
Shame is the more important factor. I honestly think that more of this than people usually talk about is due to how NoFap and related movements have been used, often as parts of a far-right radicalization pipeline. Making people feel ashamed over something that is natural is a powerful method of social control since the "problem" that a cure is being promised before will never go away. It's not at all a coincidence that groups like the Proud Boys have this shit as a central tenet of their group. It's not a coincidence that a lot of major religions have rather strict standards on sexual conduct -- if the people following your religion always have something to repent for then they'll keep coming back.
Porn/masturbation addiction itself is also highly controversial in mainstream psychology for a number of reasons. To the extent that it is given serious consideration it is usually treated as a compulsive disorder rather than as an addiction, because addiction includes specific biomarkers which studies have not reliably found. Another concerning metric is that self-reported pornography addiction is not a good predictor for amount of porn usage, but is a great predictor for religiosity. It should also be noted that the rule for what is or is not a mental disorder is limited to things that cause distress, disability, increased risk of death, or significant loss of autonomy (with a few extra qualifiers I'm leaving out for brevity) -- this also makes the way that people usually accuse people of being porn addicts somewhat problematic, because usually the accused isn't showing signs of any of those things. It is quite likely, for that reason, that a substantial portion (if not most) people who claim pornography addiction have more of an issue with how they view porn or sexuality more broadly than they do with their use of it actually causing problems.
I did read an article some time ago discussing sex-negative trends in Gen Z from the angle of fandom culture, which I'm not sure I entirely agree with the framing of some broader cultural issues brought up, but I do think its overall conclusion that legislation like FOSTA-SESTA and its direct effects and chilling effects on social media sites made online spaces more vulnerable to the US's puritan culture to be absolutely spot-on. I am also quite concerned with these effects ending up destroying queer spaces. The article did bring up the damage done to Tumblr's queer spaces, and how a more sex-negative space filled the gaps left by explicitly sex-positive users leaving. Another well known example is the dreaded kink at pride discourse, demanding that we erase important parts of queer history just to satisfy a bunch of assimilationists and cishets. I have also seen whispers of similar currents in the furry community, which has traditionally been a sex-positive, queer majority space. While I am quite confident in the fighting spirit of the furries, and that with "become unmarketable" as our rallying cry, our horniness will be neither contained nor extinguished by American puritanism and the unnatural lifestyle it promotes... I just cannot imagine that things would be anything but worse for people with my experiences without them being the way they are, since I owe so much of my ability to comfortably explore my sexuality, not to mention my spouse, to the community being the way it is. Queer liberation relies on the open defiance of societal norms surrounding sexuality, because it relies on queer people not having to be ashamed about falling outside of sexual norms. We are absolutely not past that point yet, so why the fuck do we have people saying that it's time to start being ashamed of this shit again? I would call it a form of assimilationism.
I really do think porn addicted coomers are a big part of the sexless Marvel capeshit fanbase. They go together, the porn addiction and the disgust with sex. The idealist compartmentalizing and sin/repentance cycle.
The Marvel stuff is usually sexless because the target audience is kids. Even Endgame and infinity war were only a PG-13. It's a bit crazy that adults latch on so tightly to this kind of stuff. Same with Disney adults. I'm not saying that it's "more adult" to watch movies with sex in them or anything, I'm just saying that it's a weird phenomenon.
Everyone I see going to Marvel stuff and talking about Marvel stuff on youtube and whatnot are all millenials and elderly millenials and some Gen X guys from Star Wars fanbases
Like, sure my 6 year old nephew loves Spiderman and spiderman TV cartoons but that's not what we're talking about when we talk about sexless Marvel slop. We're talking about the films that wiped out all other types of films, not harmless children cartoons
Well yeah that's Marvel brain for you. I do not understand it at all. The last one I watched was Age of Ultron and it made me want to never watch a superhero movie again.
I've been a hater since Dark Knight, I fucking hated that movie and don't get why anyone liked it. That was the best one too, it only got worse after that. Hilariously the only one I think is tolerable is Joker which isn't even a capeshit movie at all and has 0 powers.
Dark Knight actually had a competent lead director and actor in Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale respectively. So that helped save it from the structure of superhero movies for some. I didn't have any strong feelings about it when I first saw it. The joker is tolerable because it feels like a story about actual people and is not bound to the structure of superhero movies.
Counterpoint: hollywood sex scenes are the cinematic equivalent of a hooters. It's crass titillation for the sort of person who cranks it to the sears catalogue and starts trembling in excitement when they read the word "nubile." It's also a "legitimate" excuse for directors to force actresses to undress around them, like the piece of shit showrunners behind GoT who started plotting revenge on Emilia Clarke after she was able to renegotiate her contract so she wouldn't have to undress around them anymore.
the more I think about this comment the more this mindset skeeves me out. An entire generation of kids who think sex = hardcore porn and that anything else is a waste of time. Any eroticism or romance is entirely discarded and deemed obsolete and inefficient. It's gross as hell and the mindset of a coomer not someone who has lived a life of love and loss and had complex sexual experiences both positive and negative. Sex is a huge component of love and life for many, if not most people, and an integral part of social reproduction and the existence of our species. To remove complex sexual relationships from all art and just relegate it to a separate category of "disgusting fetishistic hardcore porn" which we only ever engage with when we get off is very bad for society. It exacerbates the madonna-whore complex to its logical endpoints and extremes, every public facing hero is a chaste hero while all sex is corrupt, evil and to be hidden away. We delude ourselves that our heroes aren't fucking. It's victorian puritanism, and it's giving us little dopamine drips when we do evil depraved shit.
Unfortunately this is the gross mindset that porn addiction creates. And many among Gen Z are addicts, even if they don't care to admit it. The generation having the least sex and all.
Shame is the more important factor. I honestly think that more of this than people usually talk about is due to how NoFap and related movements have been used, often as parts of a far-right radicalization pipeline. Making people feel ashamed over something that is natural is a powerful method of social control since the "problem" that a cure is being promised before will never go away. It's not at all a coincidence that groups like the Proud Boys have this shit as a central tenet of their group. It's not a coincidence that a lot of major religions have rather strict standards on sexual conduct -- if the people following your religion always have something to repent for then they'll keep coming back.
Porn/masturbation addiction itself is also highly controversial in mainstream psychology for a number of reasons. To the extent that it is given serious consideration it is usually treated as a compulsive disorder rather than as an addiction, because addiction includes specific biomarkers which studies have not reliably found. Another concerning metric is that self-reported pornography addiction is not a good predictor for amount of porn usage, but is a great predictor for religiosity. It should also be noted that the rule for what is or is not a mental disorder is limited to things that cause distress, disability, increased risk of death, or significant loss of autonomy (with a few extra qualifiers I'm leaving out for brevity) -- this also makes the way that people usually accuse people of being porn addicts somewhat problematic, because usually the accused isn't showing signs of any of those things. It is quite likely, for that reason, that a substantial portion (if not most) people who claim pornography addiction have more of an issue with how they view porn or sexuality more broadly than they do with their use of it actually causing problems.
I did read an article some time ago discussing sex-negative trends in Gen Z from the angle of fandom culture, which I'm not sure I entirely agree with the framing of some broader cultural issues brought up, but I do think its overall conclusion that legislation like FOSTA-SESTA and its direct effects and chilling effects on social media sites made online spaces more vulnerable to the US's puritan culture to be absolutely spot-on. I am also quite concerned with these effects ending up destroying queer spaces. The article did bring up the damage done to Tumblr's queer spaces, and how a more sex-negative space filled the gaps left by explicitly sex-positive users leaving. Another well known example is the dreaded kink at pride discourse, demanding that we erase important parts of queer history just to satisfy a bunch of assimilationists and cishets. I have also seen whispers of similar currents in the furry community, which has traditionally been a sex-positive, queer majority space. While I am quite confident in the fighting spirit of the furries, and that with "become unmarketable" as our rallying cry, our horniness will be neither contained nor extinguished by American puritanism and the unnatural lifestyle it promotes... I just cannot imagine that things would be anything but worse for people with my experiences without them being the way they are, since I owe so much of my ability to comfortably explore my sexuality, not to mention my spouse, to the community being the way it is. Queer liberation relies on the open defiance of societal norms surrounding sexuality, because it relies on queer people not having to be ashamed about falling outside of sexual norms. We are absolutely not past that point yet, so why the fuck do we have people saying that it's time to start being ashamed of this shit again? I would call it a form of assimilationism.
Superb writeup, I enjoyed it a lot ty
I really do think porn addicted coomers are a big part of the sexless Marvel capeshit fanbase. They go together, the porn addiction and the disgust with sex. The idealist compartmentalizing and sin/repentance cycle.
The Marvel stuff is usually sexless because the target audience is kids. Even Endgame and infinity war were only a PG-13. It's a bit crazy that adults latch on so tightly to this kind of stuff. Same with Disney adults. I'm not saying that it's "more adult" to watch movies with sex in them or anything, I'm just saying that it's a weird phenomenon.
Everyone I see going to Marvel stuff and talking about Marvel stuff on youtube and whatnot are all millenials and elderly millenials and some Gen X guys from Star Wars fanbases
Like, sure my 6 year old nephew loves Spiderman and spiderman TV cartoons but that's not what we're talking about when we talk about sexless Marvel slop. We're talking about the films that wiped out all other types of films, not harmless children cartoons
Well yeah that's Marvel brain for you. I do not understand it at all. The last one I watched was Age of Ultron and it made me want to never watch a superhero movie again.
I've been a hater since Dark Knight, I fucking hated that movie and don't get why anyone liked it. That was the best one too, it only got worse after that. Hilariously the only one I think is tolerable is Joker which isn't even a capeshit movie at all and has 0 powers.
Dark Knight actually had a competent lead director and actor in Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale respectively. So that helped save it from the structure of superhero movies for some. I didn't have any strong feelings about it when I first saw it. The joker is tolerable because it feels like a story about actual people and is not bound to the structure of superhero movies.
eh all-ages family media and "for kids" are different. marvel wants that 8-80 money not the lesser g-rated childrens cartoon money.
Counterpoint: hollywood sex scenes are the cinematic equivalent of a hooters. It's crass titillation for the sort of person who cranks it to the sears catalogue and starts trembling in excitement when they read the word "nubile." It's also a "legitimate" excuse for directors to force actresses to undress around them, like the piece of shit showrunners behind GoT who started plotting revenge on Emilia Clarke after she was able to renegotiate her contract so she wouldn't have to undress around them anymore.