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this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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chapotraphouse
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radlib take. sex is great, and people should be having it, and online pornography, which commodifies the most intimate and shared human experiences, and only serves to further atomize and alienate us from each other and ourselves, sucks. it produces less sex and less intimacy; it creates a market which degrades and exploits.
we easily diagnose mindless consumption as bad and deadening of the spirit, but yet people refuse to admit this when it comes to frictionless consumption of sexual gratification. why is this, why is the need to signal that one isn't a prude require an endorsement of gooning?
Pretty sure people would make porn and share it in a communist society too. Not everybody considers sex as this sacred intimate act that needs to be hidden from the rest of the world, some people are just naturally extremely horny.
Sure. But a porn industry is a completely different beast, especially in a neoliberal hellhole.
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. it is in this world wherein online pornography is incentivized, produced and commodified; and it is this one which is reified precisely by this sort of production in particular-- 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yes, commodifying sex is bad because commodifying anything is bad. When porn ceases to be a commodity it will become less harmful, much like anything else.
I'm really not sure what point you're making here, do you think there wouldn't be porn sites that people would use as masturbation tools in a communist society? Why is "instant gratification" inherently a bad thing? When you open your fridge to have a snack you're "instantly gratifying" because you're not involving yourself in the entire process of making food.
you ask what the point of my post is but you didn't grapple with any of it. why would i care about your ideal version of porn? i live in the real world. the proliferation of porn, how it is produced, and how it is consumed, is exploitative and, insofar as it creates "gooners", is deadening. sitting around in your house all day jerking off is self-evidently bad, as is playing slot machines all day, as is eating processed foods all day from your magic fridge.
the issue isn't that you don't have enough treats, or can't get them quickly enough. the issue is that you are provided treats, at the expense of others and the world, and these treats are used as a substitute for deeper psychological and spiritual needs/desires. no one is gooning all day out of an invariable individual preference -- there's something deeper at play/at work.
its just obviously, prime facie sad to sit inside and jerk off all day to a mediated, prefabricated fantasies. not because sex is bad or shameful, but because you've become alienated from the world and are reduced to a little treat piggie.
I think we're basically in agreement then. I was at no point trying to defend the porn industry as it exists today, sorry if it came off that way.
porn would basically be like fanfic or modding but porn