Blaming men for their porn use misses the point

It's not the real problem

I previously made the point that women can be degenerates as well.

The TL;DR is that:

1. Men generally consume porn in the form of videos

2. Women generally consume porn in the form of literature

3. Video porn is treated much harsher than literature porn

One flavor of pushback was that this double standard against men is largely acceptable because the video porn industry is more exploitative than literature. While I agree with this, I find the motivations behind this general line of reasoning to fail on multiple fronts:

1. First, it assumes that women who go into sex work have no agency

2. Second, if porn is rife with exploitation, then it's up to policy makers and law enforcers to get rid of the exploitation. Hollywood is also exploitative, but next to nobody argues that everybody should boycott Hollywood wholesale because executives exploit powerless actresses.

   1. If certain feminists wish to argue that porn is exploitative by its very nature, then they should first reconcile their arguments with the sex positivity wing of their movement.

3. Third, porn is one of the few places where women generally out earn men, and yet the people who criticize the exploitation in porn very rarely have the same level of empathy for the male actors.

4. Fourth, this sort of reasoning downplays the degree to which people's minds can be warped by erotic literature.

Simon Laird goes through some top-level statistics in porn usage, which clearly indicate that men see the downsides of porn usage as well. It's hardly as if every man has a ubiquitously positive view of porn consumption.

But in this post, I want to take a step back and make a simple yet somewhat controversial claim — the hardcore stuff is not the real problem

Rather, it's the overwhelming amount of softcore porn, otherwise known as thirst trap content, on regular sites. (That also includes this website, for the record.)

So much of the content on the regular internet is designed for low grade sexual stimulation to men. The problem is that there's almost no way to be rid of it.

Taking myself as an example, I was watching bloopers from The Office the other day, and now I get recommendations like this:

Similarly, the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman coined a term called NSDR, non-sleep deep rest. These are audio tracks that are designed to help someone relax and recharge in the middle of the day.

This leads into ASMR content, much of which can be pseudosexual in nature. Right now if I type in “audio ASMR” into the search bar, I get this as the first result:

With all respect to the creator, it's very clear that she has a specific strategy in marketing herself.

Related, I've been searching up rehabilitation exercises for a couple of the injuries I currently have, and so I inevitably end up getting recommended content like this.

Even looking up clips of old Sci-Fi movies inevitably brought me to the scene in Blade Runner 2049 where Ana de Armas is doing a little hypnotic dance while Doja Cat is playing in the background.

Okay this last one's a lie, I intentionally searched that up.

The point being that I believe the majority of men are not actively seeking out thirst trap content all the time, but almost every category of content has its own thirst trap variation, which inevitably gets recommended.

What's more insulting, however, is the fact that if men point out this sort of content is sexual, then women will act ignorant, and play a game of plausible deniability

• “Oh, Jenna Fischer is not allowed to wear that top? What are you, a sexist?”

• “Oh, it's actually your fault for searching up relaxing videos in the first place.”

• “Oh, she's just showing off her squat.”

It's the “what was she wearing” argument that's commonly used against women whenever they are harassed – but in reverse.

Quite frankly, it's been disappointing to see how little empathy women actually have for this issue.

If everyone you know is a pack-a-day smoker, and every bit of content that you saw online featured a pack-a-day smoker, then it's little wonder that you would eventually start smoking a pack a day.

Most women are more than happy to take a step back and point to systemic issues for things that disproportionately impact them, but as I've noted many times previously, they become libertarians in cases where men are in distress.

Women have their own sexual pressures, but they don't have to suffer the same degree of low-level titillation in their regular lives, because by and large they are aroused more through other mediums, such as auditory and written word.

There's no real equivalent of a thirst trap for literature; it's hardly as though people go around plastering single paragraphs of erotica all throughout the city. A rough equivalent would be if there's a person following them all the time, whispering vaguely sexual scenarios in their ear 24/7.

This is the bigger problem compared to the actual porn websites

To be clear, I can't imagine it's healthy to constantly watch videos where someone's step sister is stuck in a washing machine for some reason, only to get railed for the next twenty minutes.

The things this fucker has seen

But I would imagine the majority of men go on to these websites when they're already set off by some other stimulus, so a more reasonable solution would be to work one level upstream.

A very simple and implementable solution would be if these platforms allowed users to turn off thumbnails. This would force content creators to put more clear and descriptive titles, and it would not require any sort of age verification.

This one small adjustment to the interface would give users much more control over their experience – which, of course, is precisely the reason why it'll never happen.

In which case, women should spend less time scolding men on their porn habits, and instead divert that energy to the social media platforms, as well as the other thirst trap creators who benefit from these dynamics. They will not do this, however, as this will disrupt the imagined solidarity that women are supposed to have with one another.

Anyways, that’s about it — I’m off to, uh, watch Blade Runner 2049.