Cracked asked a question, saying they’re asking honestly, so I’ll answer. First the question:
See, we’ve done a few articles on sex workers and porn stars (including a woman who has sex with a ventriloquist dummy on camera) and we keep coming to the same conclusion:
A) The demand for these people’s services is enormous;
B) The vast majority of us partake in some form or another (by consuming porn, if nothing else);
C) They thus fulfill a basic need in a way that the world would sorely miss if they stopped; and
D) We fucking hate them for it. Like, to the point of violence.
Why? We’re honestly asking. Someone let us know.
A & B are both easy to explain: the sex drive of a healthy man is a ravenous beast. Men need sexual release and need it constantly. The fire burns in the loins and the mind and never really stops burning except for those precious few hours after release.
To make matters worse, in today’s liberated society, the male is constantly assaulted with sexual imagery. One can not walk down the street without seeing a girl in a tight and/or low-cut top or ass-accentuating jeans. It’s a constant war for most men between their base urges and societal propriety. They’re constantly seeing on display what they can not have, what they could take but won’t; the whole of society enforcing the cruelty of placing a hamburger in front of a starving man. And man is always starving.
Sex work offers release. A temporary reprieve from the incessant burning and deprivation.
A third aggravating factor can be found in the article:
In other words, a key skill is learning how to simply hang out with clients and make them feel comfortable. Despite what you hear about how men primarily are all about looks, a lot of guys go to strip clubs for more than ogling boobies — they miss (or have never known) having a woman in their life, and for whatever reason this is the only place they can get something a little like that.
Men not only want sex, they want female companionship, a soft place to land, where they can comfortably offload their struggles. Traditionally, a wife would supply this role, but with today’s independent women who value traditionally masculine values over traditionally feminine ones, a soft place to land is not always as easy to obtain.
So there is a demand and this demand is aggravated by modern mores.
Now C is where their observation is not fully accurate as they do not distinguish between the personal and the societal. While sex workers fulfill individuals’ needs, it fails society’s needs. Society needs men to be fathers and to produce. Fatherhood is civilization, but unlike motherhood, fatherhood is not natural, it is a social construct. Like all social constructs it must be maintained and reinforced throughout society or it breaks down.
Sex work tears at fatherhood, it tears at civilization. That is where the seeming contradiction of D comes in, although disapproval or disgust would be a better word than hate. Here are a few of the ways it tears at away at fatherhood:
1) Sex work creates bastards. Children without fathers suffer and generally are less likely to become productive members of society. Before “reliable” birth control was common, bastards were inevitable, but even modern birth control is not as reliable as people claim, and bastards still occur. Fatherless children are societal problems.
2) A man partaking in paid sexual services (or is successful as a cad) is expending effort outside of being a father. He is not spending those same time and resources creating, providing for, and raising his own children. His own family suffers.
3) In many cases, sexual services (or fornication) may even replace marriage and fatherhood entirely. In this case, the man has no family, he raises no children to carry society forward, women are deprived of a potential husband, and he produces less for society as he produces only for himself, not for his family.
4) A woman turning to sex work is a woman not being a wife and mother. Instead of creating and raising children in a stable family environment she is providing sex for profit. Each sex worker is one less young woman in the marriage pool for men, reducing the incentives for men to work towards marriage. Even after a sex worker retires, she is still not a good prospect for marriage.
If you think this is all no problem, just look at our current society as it has relaxed its mores against fornication and paid sexual services. About 40% of children are born out of wedlock, a third of children live without fathers, a fifth of children live in poverty, our birth rates are well below replacement levels, and young men are dropping out of marriage and the workplace.
On a more personal level: women dislike sex workers because they are in direct competition against them for men, even their own husbands. Men dislike sex workers because it is degrading having to pay for what you wish you could achieve naturally and they’ll externalize this self-hatred.
This is why sex workers are disdained. They tear at the fabric of civilization.
****
Another point, what they think of as hate is not always hate, but rather desire and perverted forms of love, particularly when it comes to violence or individual actions. Just looking through the examples of “hate” Cracked provide illustrates this clearly.
Yeah, there’s something about women who are willing to show off their bodies without shame that enrages a very specific sort of terrible person. It’s like they can’t stand the idea of the performer retaining any kind of power at all. “If I’m paying to see her body, I should get total access, regardless of what she says.” Every customer service job requires dealing with entitled dicks, but we’re guessing you’ve never had to deal with that.
…
61 percent of strippers report experiencing someone trying to penetrate them via finger, 82 percent have been punched, and a balls-out terrifying 56 percent reported having a customer freaking follow them home at least once.
That’s not hate, that’s textbook frustrated desire. A man getting handsy or attempting to have sex is not hating, he’s desiring. A man following a woman home is not hate, it is very strong desire.
Where hate might come in is after the fact (ex: the punching): its not all that particularly surprising someone would be hated for rejecting someone by the person being rejected, however irrational that hatred might be.
As I understand it the demand and use of prostitution was far more common in the 1950’s than now. There are lots of reasons, porn, pick-ups and fear of disease are probably the big ones. This is a mixed blessing, less prostitutes but a more degraded culture. However compared to Victorian London, modern society is clean and moral. Porn simply is better than the stews of say London,
Also the assumption that men of any class would have regular access to sex is fairly recent. The poor in the past didn’t marry, couldn’t as many had no assets. I suspect they probably used prostitution, technically a sin but tolerated by the church. Still hated buut understood as necessary to prevent violence The very poor did not usually father children though till modernity and heavy urbanization, probably turn of the last century or so
As for male sex drive, well people in the past had higher testosterone levels but I think ravening beast is a gross exaggeration. It varied a lot with people.
On that topic though, nothing would liberate men and sex workers alike better than a safe pill , MGTOW in a bottle if you will that could be used without stigma to turn off the sex drive. This “liberation” though would end society in a a few generations since as you mentioned we are seeing the incentive to create wealth rests with the incentive to get a mate. The behavioral sink would get multiplied exponentially . We have an inclining of this In Japan reflected in its low birth rates and grass eater subculture. I can’t imagine a vast amplification of that being good.
We may well see this in action alas, no pill but Occulus Rift plus custom porn may well be the proverbial killer app. Great to reduce rape rates and shift gender tension but family formation is done for.
Upside to that though is that people who are religious or have natal belief systems will be fine so it will self correct anyway. If this is only 20% of men and women, so be it. The population will stabilize in tine anyway and a US with say 100 million fairly religious people would be perfectly fine and have somewhat less prostitution depending on how things went.
I’m of the opinion that one of the reasons Christianity took off in the Roman empire was the emphasis placed on female chastity.
The Romans did have a tradition of female chastity, but by the time of the first emperor—coinciding with Jesus’s lifetime—upper class Roman women were engaging in non-chaste sex pretty openly: non-marital sex, orgies, adultery, etc. The emperor had to banish his own daughter for being such a slut.
The wealthier and more stable the empire became, the more and more classes of women started to be whores openly. It was the brazen disregard for sexual chastity that increased. Men simply didn’t want women for any other reason than sex, as marriage to a whore simply wasn’t worth it. And women discovered that, like today, once the carousel was over, they were really miserable without a loving man around.
Christianity placed extreme value on sexual continence, and the Virgin Mary trope wound its way into men’s hearts. Men became attracted for marriage to Christian women due to their chastity. Women saw this and started joining the cult in droves. And many of those women did so because they, deep down, really didn’t want to ride the cock carousel of their times but felt peer pressure to do so—so Christianity offered a bulkwark groupspeak against that peer pressure.
I wanted to add something to my last post, I agree that society needs men to be fathers and produce to some degree. Its pretty clear from our actions and the pure volume of wage arbitrage that its not considered all that important to anyone actually in power however.
Oh we might make lip service to the idea but we don’t actually want to pay the monetary cost spend an inordinate amount of effort to suppress wages. Women entering the workforce don’t help, they actually hinder but in general we will not regulate trade or adjust for automation and computers or do any of the thing needed to ensure patriarchy and civilization are paid for.
Europe is an awful example, upwards of 40% of all men and women of basically peak reproductive age have no full time employment and this does not count the number working full time who could not even with benefits pay for two children . The official figure is 17% for the US .
This starves working men of a future and takes away their incentive and ability to “man up” be a father and do the right thing. It also gives incentives to use porn or sex workers since they’ll never be a patriarch anyway. Responsibilities must grant rewards after all.
I think the presumption that the rich is they have earned their place, have a divine right to it and that hard working smart people who cannot get ahead will just go ahead and raise plenty of new subjects in squalor so the rich can have their servants anyway is pretty much being proven wrong everywhere. I am rather glad of it myself seeing even Brazil below replacement fertility means much less human suffering
And note this pathological greed is not a new problem, the Bible enjoins to “Muzzle Not the Ox that Treadeth the Corn” or some variation four times ,(Timothy 5:17-18, Deuteronomy 25:4, Luke 10:7 and 1 Corinthians 9- 9:10) twice as often thou shalt not murder!
A more Bible based society would have to add that to the moral section of the legal code and avoid the temptations of Neo-Liberalism which are essentially Satanic.
If it can’t those poor wages mean society has a poorer and stupider future
Or well optionally, a society could embrace a heathen code but generosity is virtuous for them and selfishness sinful as well . Worse moving to a society where frith and honor became the dominant forces while it would preserve patriarchy and a future but modernity and prosperity as we know it would be done for. That however is a separate thing.
I think there is also something else not being said here: good, wholesome women – and that excludes the hairy chested feminists, lesbians and turd brained liberals – also look down their noses and loathe sex trade workers. (I still call them sluts, but I also use the dreaded ‘n-word’ when it applies so your mileage may vary).
Women that embrace or tolerate slutty behaviour will also be more likely to indulge in it. Those of you in the dating game that are seeking a meaningful relationship are advised to take note.
Yeah, unfortunately Cracked has turned pretty shitlib since approximately the time Jason “David Wong” Pargin became a senior editor (his “10 ways men are trained to hate women” article was a turning point). A question like “Why, seriously why, do men hate Strong, Proud, Independent Sex Worker Womyn so much?” is obviously disingenuous, and their response follows the predictable script. You do a great job of picking it apart and laying out the actual situation. The whole “people obviously like it, but they also claim to hate it” thing isn’t the least bit hard to understand, it’s just like a fat person’s relationship with cookie dough ice cream. I’ll admit to being part of the roughly 100% of guys who have occasionally watched porn, even though I know it’s nasty and shameful, yet if I could push a button and warp all of it permanently out of existence I would damn well do it and honestly be pretty relieved to have the temptation removed.
“However compared to Victorian London, modern society is clean and moral.”
No. Prostitution is at least as common today in major cities as it was then, it’s just coordinated over the internet and Tindr so you don’t see hookers lounging around in red light districts. Obviously porn use is extremely common today too, which is hardly the mark of a “clean and moral” society. More to the point, the Victorians at least upheld a public standard of chastity even if it was not 100% honored in the breach, whereas today fornication and quasi-prostitution have reached epidemic levels and no one bats an eye.
“The poor in the past didn’t marry, couldn’t as many had no assets”
Where are you getting this stuff from? The population of England more than tripled in the last 150 years. Do you think it was just a few aristocrats driving that? Ever read any Charles Dickens?
“nothing would liberate men and sex workers alike better than a safe pill , MGTOW in a bottle if you will that could be used without stigma to turn off the sex drive.”
Anyone who would actually want this would never have managed to reproduce anyway. For all that a frustrated sex drive is painful, it also adds vividness and emotional intensity to life and can be a strong motivation to improve one’s circumstances. Plenty of time to have low libido when you’re old (NB: old people will often gladly pay high prices for pills that can help them recapture their youthful sex drive for an hour or 2). Drugging people into apathy so they can waste all their time grinding their Night Elf Mage is some Brave New World shit.
“Occulus Rift plus custom porn may well be the proverbial killer app”
I get the impression you spend a lot of time fantasizing about this. Aim higher, my friend.
@AB Prosper —
I wouldn’t say that prostitution rates are particularly low. I’d say that the face of prostitution has dramatically changed. Street prostitution is way down. Pimping is way down. But actual prostitution is rife — and, a key point is that the participants are different than they were previously. Because hooking is something that can be done over the internet, using third party reference and verification services and so on, with no middle man, no pimp, no street walking, no brothel, etc., the *kinds* of women participating in it have changed dramatically in the last 20 years.
Today, there are lots and lots of lots of part time hookers. Women who have a job, in some cases graduate students, who hook with a few men per week for cash on the down low. It doesn’t define their persona — to the outside world, they’re just cute Suzie from accounting. But a few nights a week, or on the weekend, she’s a hooker with a select clientele who pay 250-500 per hour tax free, greatly augmenting her income. In previous eras, these women simply didn’t hook — they didn’t want to street walk or work with a pimp/madam or what have you –> the women who hooked were really desperation cases for the most part. Not so today. Today we are witnessing the rise of the “choice hooker” –> women who have other aspects of their lives, have jobs, earn money, aren’t desperate, but hook on the side for extra cash. They come from all walks of life, really, today, and that’s a huge, huge difference from what prostitution looked like before.
I first was exposed to this when reading a Washington Examiner article in the early 2000s about a woman who worked as an accountant at a government agency in downtown DC, but hooked on the weekends 3 times a month. She was married, and husband was okay with it apparently. She was very “high end”, costing 2-3k for a full day/evening with obviously rather wealthy guys. I assume she must have been quite good looking to be able to charge that. She said that in her first year of doing this, she earned more hooking than she did from her day job — but she didn’t quit her day job because she liked the people and the routine, and the money from that as well, and the image/respectability/life. To everyone around her, she was just another married suburban government worker, while in reality she was a very high priced call girl on the weekends. And she said she got into it at first when a coworker or hers — another government worker — who was doing it at the time suggested to the woman that she do it as well. AKA — this is more common than anyone thinks, because it’s very hidden, for obvious reasons.
I also remember reading a Boston paper article from around the same time, could have been a few years before, interviewing several of the “new kind of prostitutes” — i.e., internet prostitutes. There were four of them I think, two were graduate students (one was in medical school), and one was a professional artist with work in galleries. They liked the money, they liked the sex, they liked the rebellion. None of these women would have ever done anything like this if they needed to use a pimp or madam or walk the street or work in a brothel. All of the women had limited clientele, and a limited number of “dates” per week, so they maintained control over their lives while working in some hooking into things.
I would therefore say that prostitution rates are not really very low. It’s merely the case that the face of prostitution has changed, and that different kinds of women are getting involved in it than was the case before the internet disintermediated the prostitution market.
Something similar has happened in porn. Today, you see people like Miriam Weeks (and she is not the only one, she’s just the most famous one) just opting to go into porn. Girls from upper middle class households, parents still married, academic scholarships — and porn. That never happened 25 years ago. It just didn’t. But it does today. The internet has changed everything, really.
“A man getting handsy or attempting to have sex is not hating, he’s desiring. A man following a woman home is not hate, it is very strong desire.”
RIght. But it’s viewed as hate because the men doing the desiring are undesirable and unattractive. According to this thought process, these men should understand that it’s a pure transaction taking place: Woman takes off clothes and puts on show for money; omega man pays to watch the “movie”. It goes no further.
It’s projection, really: Everyone hates those men. So they accuse those men of “hating” as well.
Since banning prostitution is a core mission of feminism, and feminism is antithetical to civilization, it would seem more likely that sex work is part of the fabric of civilization. Wives are often sexually unavailable, men are needed for critical work that takes them away from home, and some women and men are unsuited for marriage anyway. It probably solves more problems than it causes.
Currently penalties for soliciting prostitution are steadily increased, regulations are created to shut down strip clubs, liberal California effectively banned porn production… is any of this intended to strengthen marriage? It’s not wives who are obsessed with the subject, it’s whores competing with whores.
It’s not often that I see you taking a position that agrees with the Feminists. I suspect that, like abortion and marijuana, making prostitution illegal causes more problems than it solves.
Your main argument seems to be that “sex work ruins civilization/marriage/fatherhood/culture”, but all of those those things are already rotten already, and it is highly debatable that sex work caused these things. Given that it is illegal in the US, blaming sex work for it does not make sense.
I wonder what sex crime statistics are like in countries where prostitution is legal/decriminalized. I haven’t seen any hard stats, but I suspect that sex crimes are less likely than in nations where it is permitted.
Yes, men want a safe place to land. But that safe place is gone, and has been for a long time. I’m not sure that blaming it on sex work is either fair or correct.
To turn to your title, “Why Sex Work is Hated”, I would say that it isn’t particularly hated by men, but we are afraid to admit it to our womenfolk because of the shaming that will inevitably result. Women are overwhelmingly opposed to prostitution on the simple grounds that it neutralizes the one power that they have over men. This may be why women despise sluts or being thought of as one.
NTZ, have you read about or looked at photos of the lower classes of England back in the Victorian Era or later ? It remind me of the dysfunction of Africa. . Heck back around 1720 the “humane” regulation of prostitution prohibited anyone under 12 from working in a house of prostitution. Given that sexual maturity was later sometimes 15 or so) in that period, this suggests to me that in urban areas there was more than a little legal child sex work.
The upper class Victorians certainly kept a clean public face but so do our upper classes and on the whole we do a better job protecting children, succoring the poor, having a livable ecology and limiting the sex trade. Certainly some does go on and modern women are far more promiscuous than in the past but our society on its face is allowed to be dirtier but is actually cleaner. Porn is not the highest degree of moral turpitude after all.
Also many many poor women worked part time in the sex trade in England in that period , more than now I suspect .This was for various reasons, lack of men to marry (there were 700,000 extra women do to male migration and other factors ) and lack of income
And I certainly concede population increased after the industrial era (around 150 years or so) with mass emigration of the surplus. Had they not had the US and other places to go, they’d have died . we can’t count on such luck
besides populations started to level off in 1901 anyway.
our history is much older than that and has grown by drips and drabs. However medieval poverty and early modern was fairly common and ugly and as for later eras, well we have foster care but in the West at least I rarely see Street Arabs and when they are there, we take care of them to a high degree,
Which is more humane, a welfare state and disability insurance or beggars on the street ? We still have some of the later but we have measurably less of them and in terms of actually preventing hunger we could do more but we are trying and doing tolerably at it.
Heck birth control used wisely prevents poverty outright for many people. I’m ambiguous about abortion, if a fetus is a person its immoral but again it might not be and its a separate thing to debate. However birth control and abortion makes live better for many and while its enjoined to be fruitful and multiply, the quality of stock matters too as any steward or shepherd would know.
The Cathedral for all its downsides actually is very Protestant Christian in some ways. Its not volkisch enough for one and its focus on cultural Marxism and Feminism is actually toxic but it does a tolerable job making sure people have food and shelter and safety (till P.C. gets in the way) It certainly could do more and better and I am not sure that some hypothetical NrX state could or would as its heavily steeped in Neo-Liberalism
The thing is the way technology is going may well prove Marx correct on economic matters,
When every job is easier and cheaper done by a machine either we regulate or we find some ways to encourage some kind of patriarchy within the inevitable enormous welfare state. Or we allow untold and avoidable levels of human suffering and death as the system implodes . people may not return to any faith we’dd recognize either . Chose wisely
As for porn use, I pretty much abstain and have for some years. I certainly would not use VR porn anyway.
“Since banning prostitution is a core mission of feminism, and feminism is antithetical to civilization, it would seem more likely that sex work is part of the fabric of civilization.”
Modern feminism includes a sizable “sex-positive” wing who encourage women to screw like men and valorize “empowered” whores and porn stars. As for civilization, probably the single strongest pillar supporting it has always been monogamous companionate marriage, and by definition anything that undermines that (including easily available fornication) is destructive. Civilizations will probably always have whores because human nature can never be perfectly contained, but that’s a bug, not a feature.
“It’s not often that I see you taking a position that agrees with the Feminists.”
Yes, clearly FN is a die-hard bra-burning fish-bicycle women’s libber from way back. Way to argue in good faith. Protip: PORN IS HARMFUL TO MEN.
“I would say that [sex work] isn’t particularly hated by men, but we are afraid to admit it to our womenfolk because of the shaming that will inevitably result.”
Speak for yourself. “Disgust” and “sadness” are more accurate terms than “hate”, but the general idea is dead on. It’s a repulsive and frankly evil practice. If I could snap my fingers and end it this instant I would do it in a heartbeat.
“The Cathedral for all its downsides actually is very Protestant Christian in some ways. […] It does a tolerable job making sure people have food and shelter and safety”
Man doesn’t live by bread alone. I assume you are using Moldbug’s retarded metaphor for the government, MSM, Harvard University, etc, as “The Cathedral”. Please enlightenmen me how these institutions promote the doctrine of salvation from sin through faith in Jesus Christ as taught in the scriptures. If they don’t, please stop association them with Protestant Christianity or assuming that the latter is some kind of do-gooder NGO. Any notion of Christianity not centered around Christ is complete nonsense from top to bottom. The fact that Christians may have been involved in the origins of Progressivism does not make the latter some kind of Christian splinter group, any more than the Denver Broncos are a Christian splinter group for having had Tim Tebow as quarterback.
NZT, sorry you don’t like Moldbug’s metaphor. I find it a useful shorthand for progressive group think .
And as for Christianity , you can’t eat doctrine and salvation is very far away when you are starving. My though on this is that acts of Christian charity far outweigh the salvation minded Pharisee lip service we see so much of these days . You need both to be a good Christian but you don’t need Christ to be a good person though the Bible claims and I accept as a granted weak Christian you need him for salvation.
I might suggest you read the Archdruid Report’s article A Speculation on Christmas so you understand what a good chunk of Christendom looks like from the outside
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-christmas-speculation.html
And as much as you might dislike them, the Prog welfare state does enormous amounts of material good for tens of millions of people and was formed not with some sinister ideology but largely for the same reasons Christianity came about, for the betterment of mankind .This kind of thing is common to some Protestant sects and to Judaism as Tikkun Olam , fixing the world
As such it a religion of sorts just a messed up one that fails to take human nature and the need for things of the spirit into account. The Cultural Marxist aspect ends up being pure evil of the sort C.S. Lewis described in God in the Dock
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
And as for sex work, it called the worlds oldest profession for a reason and no marginally free society will be without it.
I’m influenced by another Christian Thinker G.K Chesterton here
“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.
And this freedom applies to women as well . They are not the same as us but they are not chattel either. We do not treat the Women of the West the ways Muslims do their women . It violates ancient customs far before the Christianity and those are not lightly broken. If we as men do our jobs as husbands and fathers few women will choose this path or be pushed into it anyhow but we all won’t and as men are weak, there will be whores just not many.
What we need though is to get the State back into bounds and to have it stop screwing things up but it has to be done by sober minded men (and a few women) who understand the changes in the world and do not cling to solutions that no longer will work.
Technology changes things for good like it or not and we had better make plans that take that into account.
Lastly we need to more often than that head Matthew 7:5
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
“Men need sexual release and need it constantly. The fire burns in the loins and the mind and never really stops burning except for those precious few hours after release.”
I’m a man in my mid-20s who’s never had a sexual relationship and who has never done anything to try to get one. Should I be thankful that this quote seems completely alien to me? How is it that these feelings manifest in most men? I really can’t think of any instance where my lust wasn’t completely satisfied by mental fantasy or porn.
It is necessary for the flourishing of that stabilizing force, marriage, that both boys and girls be subjected to a social pressure that scorns such behavior that only focuses on the acquisition of material wealth or pleasure of the flesh in exchange for self-debasement.
Shame is a powerful tool, and the stigma attached to paying for sex and selling sex is a necessary stigma.
“They’re constantly seeing on display what they can not have, what they could take but won’t; the whole of society enforcing the cruelty of placing a hamburger in front of a starving man. And man is always starving.”
————————————-
At the core of feminist rape politics is the arrogant conceit that a certain class of people have the right to cruelly dangle raw meat in front of starving dogs.
It’s the most impressive piece of philosophical slight of hand ever perpetrated by feminists upon the modern left when you consider that in
NO
OTHER
CONTEXT
would a leftist even dream of endorsing an idea so hateful.
Dan, part of the onus on porn and prostitution is control of self contained men like yourself . It is thought that society is better served when almost all men and women are married and producing more/ This may be true but men dropping out even when it harms at most no one but themselves makes both the establishment and the business world nervous.
Both of these groups to some degree depend heavily on male participation and when a lot of men come to find participation to not be in their own benefit, general panic and shaming along with regulatory action starts.
This is not new, it occurred before back under the aristocracy under Emperor Augustus in Rome. A quote from here http://purplemotes.net/2014/06/08/men-reluctant-marry/
You talk, indeed, about this ‘free’ and ‘untrammelled’ life that you have adopted, without wives and without children; but you are not a whit better than brigands or the most savage of beasts. For surely it is not your delight in a solitary existence that leads you to live without wives, nor is there one of you who either eats alone or sleeps alone; no, what you want is to have full liberty for wantonness and licentiousness.
And in my opinion the man strike it happening here for the same reasons it happened there, society wants the efforts of men without paying in cash or honors.
If we wan’t men to cooperate, we must pay for it. They must have the resources and the authority to curb women’s bad conduct and the status to match what is expected of them. If they do not, they will do what is best for them. Most will simply enjoy the delights of life as they can, some will pursue solitary activities or vices and a few of the best among them will choose a monastic life. Thus porn and or prostitution or video games for that matter
right now we are starving men of wages, the state is encouraging women to run rampant and a husband or father is without honors in many places.
Fix these things and almost all men with any prospects will marry, have families and strive as father and husband.
I don’t find it hard to believe at all that the feminist paradox is in fact a mechanism of entrapment and continued legal assault. Degrade the culture until sex is at the center of all things, then when men respond to this, slap them down with accusations of rape. Clever system.
A.B. Prosper,
I didn’t mean to give the impression of believing in a “MGTOW” existence. I think people who argue for that tend to believe in a lie—that they don’t really want what they reject. In my case, since reading “game” blogs over the last few years, I’ve occasionally tried flirting with women with no escalation at all from a short conversation without any touching. It’s fun, if there’s any receptiveness.
I believe that my life would be more enjoyable with the sort of simple pleasure I imagine a good relationship with a woman provides. It’s the sort of thing I consider when asking myself “what’s the point”. Somehow, I lucked into a professional job at a decent salary (lawyer for the government). But riding the train to a windowless office for the next 30 years seems a pretty dreary existence.
In that regard, I’d point out that our host links to Early Retirement Extreme. I’ve read all of the posts there, and the basic summary is that, with very high rates of saving, creativity in reducing expenses and developing skills to replace the need to spend money, you can retire pretty quickly on less money than you’d think. There’s a certain innate appeal of that approach to me. It’s certainly the “MGTOW” way, but it seems somewhat hollow. It seems like giving up instead of fighting, at least if one does it for the reasons it appeals to me. (The man behind the ERE blog has a variety of political and ideological convictions that make him think reducing resource consumption as much as possible is a good idea despite his current high-paying gig in finance. It’s not, to him, about avoiding struggle, but rather embracing it.)
My previous comment was, at least I think, a genuine inquiry. The more I’ve been forced to be exposed to the real world through my job, the more I’ve come to realize that my past understanding of the world was hopelessly naive. It certainly makes sense that other men have the sort of insatiable lust our host is talking about, but it’s simply not my experience of things. I’ve taken a glance at the “incel” blogs and forums, and it seems that I’m either particularly good at self delusion, or particularly lucky. This blog seemed like a decent place to ask the question, given that it rejects both the purposeless hedonism of the “game” blogs, and the resignation to failure you find elsewhere.
Good writing on an interesting and enduringly controversial subject, F.N.
Also, “A.B.Prosper”‘s comments were quite interesting.
I have to disagree with your take on C. I think a certain amount of sex work is positive for society, too. In this day and age where wives no longer feel any responsibility for looking to their husband’s sexual needs (heck – they don’t feel responsible to their husbands for anything) sex workers can actually keep many marriages together. Since the majority of married men live in a sexual desert after the kids have arrived, the only other alternative would be an illicit affair or leaving the marriage altogether. Those situations are much more destructive for the family, and by extension, society.
“The vast majority of us partake in some form or another (by consuming porn, if nothing else);”
Cracked might be surprised. It’s not unanimous.
I’d like to give them credit for combining the categories of prostitution and pornography, though. I’ve never understood why our society (in America, at least) thinks of them as so different—If you pay a woman to have sex, that’s not only discouraged but illegal (and the police in my neighborhood, as far as I can tell, try pretty hard to enforce those laws). But if you pay a woman to have sex in front of a movie camera, the Supreme Court tells us that that’s a fundamental right.
“[U]nlike motherhood, fatherhood is not natural, it is a social construct.”
Ugh, what a broken soul.
this is a horrible article. too much to refute and deconstruct. uninformed, sheltered, awful.