Pornography, Political Punditry, and the Men Who Pay to Play
Don't worry: This piece is safe for work.
Have you ever noticed how disgusting so much Internet pornography is?
Of course you have, even if you don't want to admit it—which by now, we should all have gotten over and moved on from.
And by what I mean by "disgusting" is not the conventional sort of sex scene that you might find in any bedroom in America—a pleasant and rewarding experience for both partners. No, I'm talking about acts intentionally designed to disturb and transgress, to horrify even as they arouse.
I don't begrudge anyone their kinks and fantasies. What I'm concerned about is the suggestion that transgressive kinks participated in by the few should be regarded as healthy sexual behavior for all, mainstreaming sexual acts that would only have been sought out by a small demographic.
There's a hidden reason why so much material once regarded as extreme and kinky has now been normalized and turned into behavior that young people understand they should be prepared to engage in when they begin their sexual lives.
Why this dramatic sea change, which Gen X and millennials have observed in living memory?
It's because the pornography produced today is not for the "consumer" of porn. Instead, it is for the customer of porn.
The pornography produced is not made for the "moderate consumer" who may pull up a few porn sites every now and then, spend 5-15 minutes relieving himself (and it is almost always men), and then go on about his normal life. That material is more like advertisements to try and lure in the customers who will actually pay money for it.
Rather like alkaline or electrolyte water marketed to niche consumers with specific dietary or athletic needs, despite the fact that it's otherwise remarkably similar to what comes out of taps in the Western world, the pornography produced today is for those who are so fanatical about pornography that they are willing to shell out serious money each month to pay for their favorite angles, performers, or specific acts.
The result of this over the course of the last 25 years has been that because so much more "extreme" material has gone out into the mainstream, these more degrading, dehumanizing, disgusting sexual practices have now gone more mainstream.
Is this a good thing? While we're very familiar with cultures of repressed sexuality in which normal fantasies and desires are bottled up too much, here we're seeing the creep of cultures of unbounded sexuality. Here, sex is turned into something solely about the one person engaging in it (not the two people), in pursuing and exploring everything to an absurd, unhealthy, obsessive degree.
Sorry, but I don't think it's positive for more people to be having more degrading sex that they aren't sure they really want to have: that they just think they are supposed to do because so much of this extreme sort of pornography has been mainstreamed.
This is a "moderate" position isn't, it? Or do I now qualify as a "prude" by suggesting that maybe choking women during sex or role playing as mother and son or living as a “throuple” might not offer the path to happiness that one suspects?
But this isn't really an essay about porn. I just knew that would be an effective clickbait hook.
What goes on behind bedroom doors is only society's business up to a point. But this insight that "the men who pay" distort the sexual "market" can be understood to apply in other situations, too - including, for instance, what goes on behind boardroom doors, including those of your—or my—favorite media nonprofit. And that’s everybody's business.
Take political punditry. Survey the broad marketplace of political opinion from left through right and its representation in websites, TV shows, but especially in the underlying intellectual foundation of both: the nonprofit space.
If you hadn't thought about it, the non-profit media world is where ideas develop—and then creep out into the broader, for-profit, “mainstream" media.
Have you ever wondered why a magazine or website may publish something that provokes a flood of objection, yet no retraction is forthcoming—if anything, the publication doubles down on it?
That’s because a political publication does not serve the interests of its readers. It serves the interests of the men (and it is almost always men) who pay for them.
The publishers, editors, and writers of these non-profit publications do not have to worry about their readers getting mad. No, they have to worry about the donors writing the checks getting mad. The publication is for the donors to feel good about themselves for promoting the ideas that they, specifically, believe in—not for the readers to benefit from.
This means that the tiny percent of people who want to donate to nonprofits to create political intellectual media will then exert an outsized level of influence, with their ideas seeming to be much more influential and popular than they actually are.
And the impact on the "political ideology" market from this distortion made via money is the same as the distortion in the "sexual fetish" market. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in both cases, we have much more fringe, abusive, extreme ideas being promoted, created by men obsessed with dominating others and screwing people over and taking their money, no matter who gets hurt.
So the political culture we have now is what emerges from this crucible. And it's easy to see in a leader who bridges both worlds.
Our current president is so obsessed with porn that he paid to have sex with an adult film actress—a porn star. He paid even more to hide it illegally. And the men who voted for him, who jump around in their red hats, admire him for it. If they had that much money themselves, they'd have hired Stormy Daniels, too. (But for now, they'll settle for subscribing to an OnlyFans account.)
And these two forms of online media ultimately become a feedback loop. The more men of power fill themselves with fantasies of degradation, the greater it fuels the implementation of their ideas of degradation.
And under the right strongman, those ideas become policies (see: Project 2025).
This is something that I've come to consider lately, but have hesitated to fully explore: Can we detect a relationship between men in the grip of an extreme sexual dysfunction and men who need to advocate for an extreme political ideology?
Why, yes: It appears we have once again bumped in to Mr. Elon Musk, who comes here pretty often. I will discuss him in the next piece in this series, a provocation I have titled "The Unfuckable Man's War Against Beauty and Freedom."
That's scheduled for Friday. Pease join us again later this week for the continued exploration of how the chaos of our political culture might be partially fueled by a country—and a small category of men—filled with all manner of sexual neuroses and confusions.
Without suggesting any perceived or actual parallels with living people, something I didn't know until I read about it in a book on the sociology of war this year is that Hitler was an extreme sexual deviant, on the shame/degradation side of things. He could only reach climax after being urinated on by his partner, and that's only part of it. (Incidentally, of his six mistresses, three committed suicide.)