I hope we all know this and are just doing it as a bit, but sometimes I do see shit on this website that makes me go “Oh y’all are genuinely just weird prudes”

The “gooner epidemic” is not real, gooning is an incredibly niche kink that very few people engage in.

“Porn addiction” is basically non existent and affects such a small portion of the population as to not be relevant. The idea that most people have in their heads about porn addiction is propaganda made up by evangelicals.

We do not live in an overly-sexually-liberated time. There is not an excess of sexual content or exposure to it.

Most of the time when people talk about “the gooner problem” what they’re actually talking about is a mix of two unrelated things, people living normal sexually liberated lives, and undersocialized young men that don’t know how to interact with people.

Sex is good. We should be having more of it. We should encourage healthy, safe sex featuring whatever kinks you and your partner(s) consent to. Don’t fall for puritan propaganda comrades.

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[–] BeamBrain@hexbear.net 7 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

i don't care about what happens in a liberated society. i care about what happens in a (current) neoliberal, thatcherrite non-society, where everyone is merely individuals, where the collective good is spit on, where the profit motive creates uncaptured externalities which befall those on the losing end of class distinctions.

Repeating what I said elsewhere: I know a good handful of people who draw erotic art/write erotic stories without any expectation that they will ever make money off of it. They make it because they want to make it, and they share it because they know there are others who will enjoy it. This isn't some ethereal hypothetical, this is happening right now despite capitalism's merciless drive to commodify everything in its grasp. And people drew sexy pictures and wrote spicy stories before capitalism, too - if it didn't start with capitalism, why would it end with capitalism?

because a world in which you can instantly gratify yourself alone, all the time, in lieu of having to go outside and talk to and then fuck someone else, is one which forgoes the development of constitutive attachments with others, a necessary requirement of community.

You could make this exact same argument against masturbation. Or reading. Or meditating. Or any other solitary activity. Some people are naturally introverted, no social configuration is going to change that, and it's absurd to suggest that it's somehow bad and wrong to not spend every waking moment in the company of other people. To say nothing of people who are so undesirable that finding a sexual partner simply isn't an option.

if some people are so invariably into consuming porn, i would suggest they opt for capitalism -- though Marx may have allotted for gooning in the morning before fishing at midday and critiquing after dinner, capitalism will surely provide a more varied and variegated porn under the profit motive. all that is holy is profaned, and these people (who, apparently, are NOT the product of their environments, but would be necessarily just, really, irreducibly horny) would be better off there.

The idea that if you like something, you'll inherently like it most in its capitalist form is absurd. To reuse an analogy I brought up elsewhere, this is like saying that anyone who enjoys video games should support capitalism because clearly gray-brown military shooters and predatory slot machine apps are the apex of the medium.