I don’t give a damn what kind of porn people watch. I do care that this colors their perspective on how trans people actually live. Most of us aren’t sex workers. And most of us that are don’t do it by choice. We’re just people trying to live our lives. This kind of thinking is incredibly dangerous, as it leads to believing that someone just being themselves in public is an act of sexual exhibitionism. I didn’t transition as a sex thing. My life is not a costume. I transitioned and have lived my entire adult life as myself, worked my entire career and built my entire life around my transitioned name and gender. Rather than a 24/7 drag act, most days I’m wearing jeans and hoodie.
We’re just trying to live our lives in peace. But a bunch of perverts are using their porn habits to inform their moral judgments about an entire class of people.
This ties into a bigger issue where almost nothing related to sexuality can ever be healthy or normal to many conservatives.
Sex to these conservatives is inherently deviant and filthy. Making conscious life decisions related to sexuality or sexual identity will never be just a life decision. It will be equivalent to actively engaging in sexual acts.
Being trans to them is actively paedophilic because it exposes children to the concept of sexuality and gender. Sex ed will be paedophilic to them because it does the same. Each person’s actions are not the sole thing that defines them, but also their position in society as dictated by “what it has always been”. Men have always led households by marrying women and having kids, therefore men that don’t are a threat.
Conservatism is quite black or white when it comes to things like identity or introspection. It is an ideology that very frequently wages war on self questioning and exploration in exchange for compliance and conformism. It’s why many conservatives hate universities, scientists and partially why they hate immigrants. The entire ideology grows by appealing to people who do not want to be intellectually challenged. It’s especially attractive to those that don’t want to understand other ways of thinking.
Conservatism as an ideology always exploits the greatest potential weakness of the left wing: naivety, and presents itself as the “responsible” or “reasonable” solution to a reckless and harmful left wing. They frame things like empathy and humanitarianism as weaknesses rather than virtues.
It’s why most of the conservative rhetoric revolves around “being taken advantage of” or “being scammed by” this or that group. They love stories about immigrants exploiting the system, cheating or stealing because it proves their worldview that what’s foreign and unknown is out to get them. It is an ideology driven by fear.
And the biggest problem is that, unlike progressivism (which also has its ideological vices and weaknesses), conservatism never seeks to help the weak or empower the vulnerable. Instead it seeks to maintain the hierarchy and keep people in their place. In the US that translates to keeping immigrants weak, keeping black people down, keeping women in the kitchen, keeping white men ahead, keeping the US as an imperial power, and keeping its allies subservient.
What? What the hell does transporn have to do with, 1. Your personal identity and 2. How everyone else perceives trans people? Porn is fantasy not real life.
Man, you can’t just ignore how porn molds the way people see others and what they expect of them, be it men, women or trans people
I don’t know, I’m very sex-positive and I enjoy porn. Sometimes I even learn new things I like from it. I don’t think for a minute that it’s real and I would not apply it to vanilla people (my more kinky friends however yes if I know they’re into something).
I don’t really think my stepsister will get stuck in the washing machine. Does it form sexual behaviour and practices? Probably yes. I’m sure a lot of people try squirting now, which was popularised in porn. Is that bad? No, I don’t think so at all. Why would it be? Sex knows fashions just like other human behaviour.
The really crazy one is oral sex. It’s become so accepted and ubiquitous that if you don’t like it, you’re the weird one. But if you stop to think about it, it’s clearly a kink.
Yes I know that oral was not practiced a lot in the past within marriages in particular (though during the war in brothels I’m sure it was). But why do you think it’s particularly kinky?
I agree in terms of deep throating, that’s a bit of a kink and I personally don’t like doing it (even as the one being deep throated). That was popularized by its namesake movie I think.
But normal oral how is that so kinky? I personally love it, it’s a lot more gentle than regular sex. And it tastes so good 🤭 I even love doing that for hours (both ways) and skipping the penetration part altogether. 😋 But oral kinda feels like it’s meant to be done.
It’s not really a modern thing as such either. The kama sutra features a ton of it, including gay and lesbian versions.
You’re kinda proving my point. The reason why you don’t see it as kinky is because it’s so common. If it wasn’t common and normalized, people would see it as a kink. I’m kink-positive; I don’t have a problem with that. What I find interesting is how accepted and ubiquitous this one kink has become, and I think we have porn to thank for that.
It’s not really a modern thing as such either. The kama sutra features a ton of it, including gay and lesbian versions.
Well, that isn’t really surprising. I think you would have a really hard… er, difficult time finding a new kink. People have been horny for as long as there have been people, and every imaginable configuration has been tried out thousands of years ago. Except for vibrators or any of the other modern sex toys? Because those didn’t exist before.
Hmm how do you define kinks then?
I really think oral sex is so normal it’s never really been a kink except in the strictest communities.
I agree kinks don’t have to be ‘new’ to be a kink, but I was referring to the link to porn. While it has existed for longer, it’s only really been accessible to everyone for a century or so.
Ironically, they’re treating trans women the same way they treat cis women—as sexual objects who don’t deserve bodily autonomy.
I mean, I’d say this is the opposite of ironic, it is extremely expected and logically follows from how the conservative brain/worldview works.
Basically it just boils down to ‘being horny is a sin, sin is an evil, supernatural force or state of being, that acts with will, or comes from deliberate, intentional agency… thus anything that makes me horny, I must dominate, control, defeat, as an external enemy, and also deny that it makes me feel horny, to avoid looking like I have fallen (in) to sin.’
When you institutionalize the idea of a fundamental, carnal, human desire as supernaturally evil, everything relating to how you interact with or experience that desire becomes a shameful perversion, and then you have to hide that perversion by one means or another, and those means are often conquest, conquest involves ‘othering’ the enemy.
For all their talk of personal responsibility, their entire worldview is designed, with many layers of artificial constructs, to shield them from critical self-reflection, to channel them away from actually understanding themselves.
How can you possibly be responsible for yourself, if you do not even understand yourself, why you do the things you do?
To them, what is most important is the performance of conformity to a hierarchichal group identity role.
That’s their ‘gender’.
Not self-expression.
It’s ironic because they insist that trans women aren’t women, but then they treat them like women (in this aspect, at least). That’s irony.
Ah! Yes!
That, that element of it, that is absolutely ironic.
I guess I just instantly went into a ‘theory of mind’ kind of angle, derp.
Yeah, I’ve seen this pointed out before. They say that trans women are men, but they don’t treat them like men. They treat them like women.
This reminds me of a friend of mine whose trans daughter attending elementary school had a bully calling her a “boy” and then chasing her around and trying to kiss her. Really, kid? Do you like to kiss boys now? Obviously, sexual harassment isn’t cool at any age, and that needs to be dealt with, but it just goes to show that even at that young age deep down they know the difference.
Yay, equality?
They can’t get off if it’s mainstream, they need their fetishes to be taboo, and preferably illegal. So, they make it illegal, then rub themselves raw over it.
This is, upsettingly, probably true for a significant portion of them.
Huh, and here I thought we didn’t like any of the same things.
You see the performers as people. They see the performers as fuckmeat. You are not the same.
Very good point. I also see now that this is only focused on search terms for MtF folk. I’m an equal opportunity gooner, I enjoy some fine-ass FtM peeps in porn too. I have a feeling they don’t.
Republicans don’t believe that FtM people exist. In their minds, they’re just delusional women who wish they were men, but it makes perfect sense to them that women wish they were men. It would be weirder to them to hear that not all women wish they were men. It’s completely part of the sexism and patriarchy.
The reason that they’re so obsessed with trans women by comparison is that it goes against their entire worldview. A man who wants to be a woman? Why would anyone ever want to be a woman?! There’s also the bigotry and everything else, of course, but the fact that it defies what they see as the natural order or hierarchy of the sexes drives them crazy.
Ha! Next thing you are going to tell me is that gay meet up apps like Grinder get overloaded at Republican events.
Interesting, but not sure the data proves the headline. The best they can say is that such searches originating from red states are a significant portion of all US searches.
Obsessed: no definition or evidence to support this.
Republicans: not a definitive connection, though plausible.
I don’t want to say this is irresponsible reporting, but it’s not factually accurate either.
Yeah not to mention some of the data for searches for porn coming from states with age age verification checks are using VPN’s to other states. (Like 80% of porn hub traffic from Louisiana dropped after the age verification laws, and VPNs went up across the board, as in those users likely were not just showing up as users from other states)
It’s bait. Take a vague dataset, and draw overgeneralized conclusions from it to play into people’s biases and hostilities.
And people LOVE it. They want to believe that republicans are all evil transphobes who are sitting around masturbating at trans porn all day, because it makes them feel good about themselves to setup these strawmen compare themselves too.
The truth of course, is far more nuanced and complex, but people don’t want to learn. They want to hate-masturbate and ego-stroke.
Oh and let’s not forget, all religion is bad and evil and hates sex!
…this is an overgeneralization
You mean yo say correlation is not causation?! How dare you, sir!? I challenge thee to a bartitsu duel!
There’s always a relevant XKCD.
Who just searches on google for porn? wtf? That can’t be a legitimate sample of the public, can it?
Where are you going? Some sticky TOR server or something?
I usually don’t have to worry about it because your parents let me watch.
Yeah, that’s so unbelievably not fucking surprising. A weird amount of harassment I’ve gotten for being trans has been kinda (or occasionally extremely) sexual. Also the redder the area the more I get street harassment.
ETA: Oh upon reading the article, the city I’m thinking of (Lexington, KY, I basically couldn’t take a walk without being catcalled there) is in the top 10 cities.
And yeah, anti trans bigotry is interesting because it seems to be an alliance of exterminationist bigotry (“x people should not exist or should be hidden and we should work towards that goal”, examples of targeted groups include disabled people, Jewish people, and gay people) and supremacist bigotry (“x people are our lessers and must be forced into their place beneath us”, anti black racism is the classic example). You have plenty of transphobes who just want us gone no matter what, but you also have quite a few who think our place is as discreet sex workers and are mad that we are insisting we deserve to live in society as equals and do whatever work we want. They were fine with us as prostitutes, but not as mechanics, as shameful side pieces but how dare we say we deserve to be spouses.
That perspective of us is deeply entwined in the insistence that anything pertaining to us is sexual. They look at us and reduce us solely to the lens of sex then condemn us for it. Then when some of us internalize that our only value as people is as sex objects they point and say “see look, we told you”.
Everyday I find myself completely baffled by human behavior. There are days I legitimately do not think I’m the same species.
If I hate someone, I genuinely hate 1athem. Like Gary that I worked with in 2003. 20+ years later, and I STILL think he’s one of the biggest 1assholes I ever met.
1At NO POINT do I want Gary porn. Maybe Gary death porn, but not sexual porn. I’d like to see him walk into a walk-in closet, when a bunch of spinning blades shoot out and cut him into tiny dice sized cubes.
But these people claim to hate trans folks, but then go home and beat their meat to them? Where’s the hate then??? If you’re going to hate someone, truely hate them because they stand for everything you dispise. Otherwise, you’re just saying your own values mean nothing to you, and you shouldn’t be taken seriously at face value.
And in this particular case, why even bother hating trans people at all? Just accept trans people for who they are, and bust all the nuts you want without being a hypocrite.
Aside from kids and animals, there aren’t many kinks I’d look down on people for, as long as they’re just true to themselves. I may not like the idea of licking feet, but if thats your thing, own up to it! Be yourself!
Fuck Gary!
I’m trying!
i was just skimming and (๑·̀ᗝ·́)૭ GARY!!!
what is it with garys?
(i love you grampa gary)
fuckin gary
Deviation from social expectations can be attractive as can novelty. Fetishization of a group is often associated with the group being perceived as exotic and possibly even taboo. And there are a lot of people who when they feel shame about their desires lash out against those they desire. The sort of guy who feels the need to tell everyone he’s not into fat chicks? Yeah he’s getting rejected by them in secret.
Your example is someone you personally hate because Gary fucking sucks. But if there were a group of Garys who were just a bit different that you were always told not to interact with because they’re bad despite the fact that they all seem perfectly nice if a bit odd. Well a certain portion of your community would find themselves torn between the excitement of the exotic (hell you don’t see a Gary every day, and you usually have to go to a certain part of town to see one) and the expectations of not interacting with them, and this would lead to shame and anger, because to an unexamined and immature person these Garys are seducing them, tempting them away from what they know to be the rightful separation of good normal people and Garys. This is even worse if anyone could turn out to have always been a Gary. Maybe some of those people are afraid they might be a Gary but are afraid to even think about it enough to discount it. So they may start calling to ensure there’s no chance of them accidentally running into a Gary and making sure nobody becomes a Gary hoping that that will keep them safe and maybe even punish the Garys who did this to them.
Goddamn, I’d really like to see this Gary fellow.
Why the random numbers
THE NUMBERS, MASON!
Everything going on with the femboy heatmap is incredible. All the red and blue areas of the southwest doing the handshake meme. The population cachment areas of fucking Scranton and Pueblo of all places going all in for some reason. The smooth cultural gradient in Cascadia.
It’s also in the wrong article because femboys aren’t trans, but it is funny to contrast it with the map for ‘shemale’ (eugh)
They don’t even hide it, the Manosphere paradoxaly loves femboys.
They don’t see it that way cause they think being a top isn’t gay.
For a lot of these guys, it seems being gay is more about the stereotypical gay behavior. Discrete sex with other men is fine, but acting stereotypical is Gay.
Also explains why all the porn of us calls us slurs. I hate it.
(Seriously, it’s so hard finding trans porn that feels like it’s for trans people instead of for people that want to dehumanize us)
Honestly, I think it goes deeper than that, I think that many guys that go for trans porn actually are very into it, probably because it’s such a “taboo” subject for them.
It’s similar to whenever there is a Republican or conservative convention somewhere, immediately it becomes a Grindr hotspot.
There are boat loads of gay / trans people in those extremist communities, because of course there are, and while publicly they will bash anything LGBT, privately they get off on it
See also that mega extremist church pastor that would constantly bash the gays and then got caught snorting coke from a gay prostitute
Edit:to add to this: I think that most trans porn made is not primarily made for trans people, but for men. Similarly to how most gangbang porn also isn’t for girls, it’s for men. Sure, trans people and girls can watch it, enjoy it, everyone is free to do whatever as long as they don’t hurt anyone or thing, as far as I am concerned, but the main audience is just plain men.
I know a guy who’s a sex worker and he has had quite a few clients who are actively homophobic. When he told me this, I made a comment based on the assumption that these guys were closeted gays with internalised homophobia and he said “no, I think it’s something deeper than that”
His theory was that it’s basically a convoluted humiliation kink, where they are genuinely grossed out by the idea of having sex with a man, but they do it anyway because of the tabooness of it
Totally this.
I remember reading somewhere long ago about how in Israel gas masks were this taboo thing that came all the way from the holocaust where certain people had it as a kink to wear that with sex, and maybe even inhaling something…
I think its a “natural” part of humanity to have these kinks, and as long as they are done safely I have little problem with it.
The real problem is though that people DO like this, but they hate that they like it. This is where you get a pastor screeching how they hate gays because they are so yuckie, yet they snort cocaine from a gay escort dick. (Yeah, I"m talking about that guy)
Oh shit… oh no… this can’t fucking be… am I Republican!!! /s
You’ve fallen into a logical of fallacy of confirming the consequent.
Edited it and added the /s for sarcasm there for ya buddy. 🫂
I am honestly not surprised.
I knew some people in the calvinist bible-belt regions in Holland (they’re very strict, a bit similar to mormon, almost amish-like in terms of strictness except not having any aversion to technology). For example washing a car on sunday is absolutely out of the question and most people wear black those days. If you don’t show up in church the whole village will hate you.
Anyway so the video rental shops in those regions were buzzing with the worst kinda porn. One of my friends managed video rental shop and he said the relative porn amount was 2-3x bigger than in the city areas.
This is for people for whom porn is highly illegal according to their religion. Somehow it causes some kind of attraction for them.
I’m very atheist and sex-positive and very much into kink, polyamory etc but it was never because of the ‘forbidden’ element for me. So I find it hard to understand that. But I’ve definitely seen it being a big thing yes.
Christ (and their society) can only forgive those who genuinely regret their sins, so their sins have to be something they genuinely regret. If they watched nice vanilla porn where people treated each other with respect, they might start actually enjoying sexuality, and then they might no longer regret it, and then they are doomed.
See also how rape fantasies are very popular in women’s erotic media because they absolve the protagonist and reader of having proactive sexual desires. You don’t need a Christian or Abrahamic framing for this, just a situation where people are ostracized for having unsuppressable natural desires. Binge eating, binge watching, doomscrolling, rotting in bed - shame creates perversion.
I’m not sure if this applies to all denominations. The Calvinists I spoke of don’t do confession and there’s definitely no forgiveness.
In Calvinism, the ritual of confession is a man sacriligeously trying to play God. But Jesus stilll died for God’s forgiveness. That’s the fundamental premise of Christianity. It’s just that any priest who claims to intercede on your behalf is a fraud.
Here’s a website maintained by a Presbyterian Calvinist minister.,
Ministers can attempt to divine the will of God through the Bible, but they are as much authorities on the matter as physicists are on quantum physics. Ultimately it is your responsibility to understand the will of God, to live accordingly, and to reckon with when you don’t.
No person can grant you forgiveness; not yourself, not your religious leader, and not your peers, only God can. So yeah, you would see no confession and no forgiveness in a strict Calvinist culture. People can only be forgiven after death by carrying their regrets with them all their lives.
As I understand it, in Holland they also have a thing called predestination, where they think their lives have already been decided for them including any sins they might commit, and including whether they go to heaven or hell. So there’s nothing really they can do about it during their lives. I don’t know if this is a specific branch. It always sounded pretty grim to me, though on the other hand I would think like “hey let’s go wild because whatever I do it won’t matter anyway”. But I probably grossly misunderstand the idea. Friends from that community have assured me that it definitely does not work that way 😅
Community also plays a big role in it, much bigger than I’ve seen in Catholicism. As in more judgmentally so.
I’m neither but I’ve lived in many places :)
Choice and “predestination” are unintuitive even in secular philosophy. The interpretation of quantum mechanics most popular among quantum physicists - the Many Worlds Interpretation - is a fully predestinatory model. Everything flows completely from the initial boundary conditions of the universe. Your choices are fully calculated in. Even if you experience quantum randomness in your perception, that’s just because you can only remember your own path on the quantum world tree - neighboring universes where the quantum randomness flipped the other way are outside of your perception.
This interpretation is 100% consistent with all observations we can make. And yet we observe ourselves making choices. This is because we do not understand the full complexity of our own neurology. We simplify the fully quantum-deterministic biological computer that is our body as a person with thoughts, feelings, and motivations. In this simplification, choice seems malleable, when in truth choosing the other option would either be physically impossible or down to a quantum coin flip with no intelligent reasoning behind it.
When we imagine someone “could have made” a different choice, we are implicitly imagining a slightly different universe (branch) from the one we live in, in which some different historical quantum perturbation or some difference in the material reality resulted in them making the other choice.
Which means that while a MWI supporter believes in predestination of sorts, they can still choose freely whether to have strawberry or pistachio ice cream. It’s just that the boundary conditions of the universe and the particular quantum perturbations of their particular quantum history result in them choosing one or the other.
While John Calvin was not a quantum physicist, he did preach a similar philosophy. Though this is definitely a point where the dozens of different branches of Calvinism differ on the theological details.
But roughly speaking, this means that while Calvinists do believe in predestination, they also believe/notice they can choose whether to live in sin or to obey god. It’s just that this choice is determined by God, as it is determined by God whether or not they go to hell. And according to the Bible, people who make “good” choices go to heaven and people who make “bad” choices go to hell. Therefore they choose “good”, or try to. Not because it earns them a place in heaven but so that if God chose to send them to hell anyway that would be kind of bullshit.
(This last sentence is heavily editorialized; it’s the sort of thing they’ve had regular schisms about)
So a Calvinist hearing your attitude would respond something like “Of course you would go wild if you knew the truth of predestination, you’re probably the sort of person that goes to hell”. When someone is ostracized from the community, the community comes to the collective conclusion that they’re probably the sort of person that goes to hell. They can’t know God’s will for certain, but the Bible tells them as much as anything can and it looks like the Bible says they’re doomed.
Meanwhile they, the good Calvinists, are probably predestined to Heaven, so all their bad actions are probably just bumps on the road to God’s mercy, right? … Right?
You should generally dismiss what physicists in academia say about metaphysics, because crackpot quantum mysticism is rampantly popular and so you rarely get anything coherent from them.
I would recommend you check out my article here. Most academics in the physics departments believe in a property called “value indefiniteness” which amounts to crackpot solipsism based on poorly reasoned arguments that obviously cannot possibly be correct because Louis de Broglie presented a counterexample decades before these crackpot arguments were even made.
This is a strange phenomenon that the physicist John Bell points out in his paper “On the Impossible Pilot Wave.” The “pilot wave” theory is a model which is mathematically equivalent to standard quantum mechanics yet is value definite, and was first presented by de Broglie in the Solvay conference in 1927. Yet, despite this, academics from John von Neumann to Richard Feynman would go on to publish “impossibility theorems” trying to prove value definiteness is impossible, even though they all had a counterexample sitting in their lap.
Bell would then go on to publish several papers showing where the flaws in all their arguments are, but it had no impact on academia, and solipsism remains the overwhelmingly dominant position. Indeed “value indefiniteness” really is just a renaming of solipsism to make it sound less ridiculous. It literally means that particles have no values when you’re not looking at them, and since macroscopic objects, even other human beings, are made up of particles, it naturally applies to them as well: value indefiniteness = other people don’t exist if you’re not looking at them.
Many Worlds arose from this same crackpot delusion of physicists who recognize that solipsism is kinda silly but don’t want to give up value indefiniteness… which is literally solipsism. So they try to find a middle ground between solipsism and solipsism and their views just end up becoming coherent.
Bell points out in his paper “Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists” that Many Worlds is still basically just solipsism but with a lot of extra baggage to confuse people to what they are even arguing so it is not so obvious that it is. A lot of Laymen falsely think Many Worlds is just the claim that there are many classical worlds. If I go to measure a photon in a superposition of both possible paths, then they think it means there will be a classical world where I perceive it on one path and another classical world where I perceive it on another path.
No, Many Worlds is even more incoherent, because no one perceives anything on any path at all. There are simply no objects which travel through 3D space within the interpretation. Consider that you walk from your living room to your bedroom, and you remember clearly that you did that. Since Many Worlds is still value indefinite, there does not exist any definite trajectories in 3D space, and so your memory has to be a complete lie. That didn’t happen. Indeed, no matter how strongly you feel that there is a computer/phone screen in front of you right now, in Many Worlds, that also must be a lie, because no objects exist in 3D space so there cannot be an object with a definite value in front of you right now.
This is what Bell saw as so absurd about it. Everything we perceive and believe we have perceived has to be largely disconnected from the real world, almost as if we’re living in a fake simulation, a brain in a vat, that is entirely disconnected from what is “actually going on.” Many Worlds is more batshit idiotic than you are led to believe from YouTube videos. It does not follow from the science at all, but follows from the crackpot quantum mysticism of “value indefiniteness,” which has no basis in the mathematics at all. Even many of the believers in academia admit that no one knows how to actually derive what we actually perceive from the interpretation.
I think you’re conflating mathematical and philosophical realness and then Principle of Explosion-ing your way into hating on physicsts. Quantum indefinite interpretations still result in the same mathematical predictions about observations, so all your talk about MW saying your memory is a lie is just obvious bullshit. The labels are different but there is still a mathematical structure of a person having memories.
Its also like they all hate undocumented immigrants but only hire them for work.
My dad used to removed about immigrants taking jobs, but would swing by Home Depot to grab some Mexicans whenever he needed extra hands on a construction project. Conservatives are just hypocritical morons.
EDIT: Wow, this place bans the no-no synonym for the word “complains”? What in the seven nanny hells is that.
