• MoneyIsTheDeepState [comrade/them,he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    PCD certainly is a serious problem and not a moral failing. As you say, my statement is incomplete, but I might call it focused instead. The reason I'm bringing up lonely men here isn't because I think PCD is confined to men, but because I don't know anything about women's experiences with it

    I go into more detail in a separate comment thread, but my take on the way NFT Avatar talks about PCD as sort of, 'just how men work,' is that within their worldview, it very likely is how they're supposed to work. Tradcaths, Evangelicals, Mormons, and non-theistic Fapstronauts as they regrettably call themselves all share similar mechanisms for binding people's sex drives into a feedback loop of doomed internal battles-of-will followed by feelings of shame and inadequacy steeling their resolve for the next doomed battle

    It's not just about masturbation, either. It's part of a broader, essentialistic way of looking at people and their sexuality. In that kind of framework, the concept of an "ideal person" can be contrasted to "human nature," and flattened onto a linear conception of morality. So, set the ideal to be both arbitrary and practically impossible, and suddenly you're violating Morality (or some pop-psychology equivalent) by thinking about butts, which almost seems funny until you think about how hellish that is

    What I guess I'm trying to say is that, in addition to all the other traumas people go through, we have some massively popular ideologies that systematically inflict particular kinds of ideological trauma on tons of people. I was lucky enough to escape Evangelical philosophy early, but it's hard to describe just how reliably disorienting it can be to have a conditioned anxiety response to experiencing joy