I plan to lead this post up with an actual effort post or even straight up publication at some point, but as someone who has historically been weird about sex, it has come to my attention that the vast majority of internet users seem to experience their lack of proper understanding of their situation most obviously in how they view sexual concepts. There’s no sense of scope or of bad things as social issues so they view everything through this myopic view of self-hatred and fear of other’s judgement.

Maybe this is more appropriate for the dredge tank, but I just finished (the end of, absolutely not subjecting myself to the whole thing) watching a 30 minute video of someone trying to psychoanalyze r34 seemingly so they could justify their fear of of their own hobby of drawing erotic art, an observation I came to due to their concluding statements. Said concluding statements effectively consisted of them decrying the hobby and swearing it off out of fear of prevent “intimacy in the future”.

I could reply to this in a whole number of ways, point to how weird it is that NoFap cultists or right wing “anti porn activists” and even this guy all focus on their experiences in how they negatively affect themselves, and conceive of the societal negatives of our pornography industry in terms of a vague “corruption” they assume must seep in and permanently effect anyone who views it and is deemed sufficiently vulnerable until they either “purify” themselves through some sort of ritualistic process or die. But I don’t really think that’s particularly the most interesting part here.

It’s so telling how they always focus on a fear of “losing intimacy”. Never, like, becoming a bad person (except in the ways that it would make people think they’re weird). Or even of being corrupted in a moral sense. It’s like they view anything sexual as inherently infectious and… that the only possible end result of that infection is becoming gay, ace, or developing a kink. Or becoming an “obvious creep”. But they never give a fuck about being a subtle and tactful one. In other words, they’re terrified of becoming “weird” and being judged by what they consider their peers.

I’ll concede that many people have sex and porn addictions. And this guy might be one of them. But the existence of sex addiction alone kind of calls into question the way they frame the concept of porn addiction, like it’s some sort of infected state that’s inherently special and scarier than other kinds of addiction, framed as similar to and/or even worse than drugs like meth or cocaine. Obviously the compulsion could possibly be comparable to those things in some specific situations, and even the harm could be in some specific situations, but the same is true of sex addiction as well. Not to mention gaming addiction and even workaholism. But these things are rarely if ever framed as even remotely similar or as important even though they’re also propped up by multimillion dollar industries and the very productive forces we live in.

The complete lack of concern most of these people show about sex addiction, and to an extent, even a kind of envious admiration of it at times, shows that even the most chronically addicted porn user that makes these sorts of strange NoFap style rants is viewing it from a ridiculously incorrect angle. It’s not about stopping it so you can focus on other goals, or to break compulsions you don’t want to do, or even to get yourself more time away from a cycle of addiction. It’s always about intimacy and connection, tied into a fear that becoming Infected by Porn will make them unable to feel sexual desire in real situations and therefore abnormal, and to an extent, shunned. One would normally assume this is due to the fear of losing something they actually like, but it never occurs to these people that they could simply have a significant partner with the same degree of “depravity” as them, or even just re-condition themselves back to ‘normal’ tastes slowly when the time comes to do so (if it can infect one way, why can’t it infect the other way?).

That’s probably because it’s ultimately just a fear of loneliness due to being shunned for being weird, for being queer-analog. That’s why so much of these things are dedicated to becoming a Real Man, to how sexually attractive #nofap makes you, to how porn will lead you to weirder and weirder kinks. That’s why there’s a complete ignorance of milennia of human-created erotic art, of thousands of years of strange and unfulfillable fantasies. These people ignore the very real and genuine issues of porn addiction and porn industry and the sexual environment we live in and instead hyperfixate on what they deem abnormal behavior because they don’t care about any of the other stuff. They ONLY care about being normal, about being unable to be grouped in with the same people they mock and harass so they have someone to feel superior to.

I feel horrible for these people. Their entire conception of sex has become the ending of Shadow over Innsmouth: Either they stick to only thinking about missionary position (and don’t you DARE draw it!), or they turn into someone “subhuman” from slow corruption. And the reason they all seem so frantic is that, I think, deep down they know sticking to something so strict is nigh impossible, and their conversion to “subhuman” is therefore inevitable.

I’ll fully admit I’m biased here; I participate in and think online horny art spaces can be sometimes really cool actually. But that’s part of why I believe what I do. Plenty of these people have friends and partners and are completely functional. Many of them seem more functional than your average person when it comes to their understanding of what is and isn’t healthy when it comes to sex and sexuality. And yeah, plenty of these people are gay and queer. It’s hard to separate my thoughts on the genre from that and especially hard not to read some seriously weird kinds of bigotry into the shitty half-baked “anti-pornography” arguments people make online. NOTABLY, feminist ones excepted, because they usually refer to actual harm to women that patriarchal depictions of sex acts and norms can cause when they are shown as normal and real. It’s just so infuriating seeing people commit psychic self harm because they can FEEL the sheer malice present in the porn industry and in misogyny and rampant objectification of women, but they just attribute it to weird people and porn addicts and themselves being vaguely bad rather than seeing the chess player behind the old chess robot.

Sorry about the wall of text but I had to write my thoughts out somewhere possibly sympathetic. It’s just so frustrating to me that these people are just rolling around in a ball of self hatred and pulling others into it. Genuinely instilling existential horror in people by telling them they’re cursed forever for looking at a saucy image of Rouge the Bat.