By David Futrelle
Can “Gender Critical” feminists — a.k.a. TERFs — talk about anything without turning the discussion into an excuse to bash trans women?
I was browsing through the Gender Critical feminism subreddit — Reddit’s main hangout for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists —
and ran across a discussion of the ever-more-extreme nature of online porn.
“Stuff from 10 years was your soft porn – missionary, blowjobs, and sure, male orientated but the female had some sort of pleasure at least,” wrote a commenter called DetectiveSpaghetti.
These days the dark stuff (the hardcore youd find ONLY if you really wanted to find) its everywhere. Anal sex, face-fucking, its the norm not the exception. Its disgusting
I don’t doubt that porn is getting more extreme, but anal sex? People have been putting things in their butts for thousands of years, and I’m pretty sure that there were plenty of anal sex videos readily available ten years ago.
Someone called DowntownOrange replied:
Yeah, I went to see what they had in some supposedly soft core/female-oriented category and one of the first vids was something like “skinny teen gets her ***** destroyed by 5 big guys”
She followed up with more results from her, er, research:
I just went to pornhub again to check what they called it and the category name is “romantic”, the first vid is called “Giving her good dick after falling on her Ass In night club”, the third one is “I suck him in the public pool shower and he cums all over me”. Incredible.
She’s got a point, or at least half of one, in that not all of the titles in the “romantic” category are particularly romantic in nature. I just went and browsed the first couple of pages of “romantic” results on PornHub and the titles listed ranged from “Couple have romantic sex” and “Passionate couple falls in love having sex” to slightly-less-romantic-sounding titles like “30-year-old Slav very much asked to work on her fat ass” (huh?) and “Romantic sex leaves her showered in …” well, you get the idea.
It’s at this point the discussion got a little weird.
There’s a separate one “popular with women” that apparently shows the vids that “real women” watch the most. I do wonder how many of those “real women” have dicks though, skewing the results, considering TiMs are obsessed with porn…
Yep, she’s accusing trans women of messing up the video recommendations for cis women with their (presumably) degenerate tastes in porn. (A TIM, or Trans-Identified Male, is deliberately misgendered TERFspeak for trans women.)
I went and looked at the “popular with women” section of PornHub too, and honestly the only particularly weird video I noticed involved someone called Miss Banana taking something called the “Fire Noodle Challenge while getting Fucked.”
I don’t know if it was cis or trans women (or both groups working together) who got that video onto the front page of the “popular with women” category, but I can report that Miss Banana did in fact manage to eat the entire bowl.
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Why does this sound like an incel complaint?
Isn’t it pretty well known that a lot of titles on PornHub are designed to be YouTube-style keyword search manipulation and not accurate descriptions of the video’s content?
Any time I go to PornHub, its location-based algorithm shows me nothing but damn incest (stepmom/ stepsister) videos because apparently that’s what’s hawt in Ireland right now. I suppose that’s trans peoples’ fault too? ?
Her browser cookies, that’s what’s showing her trans stuff. Turn on private bring she’d probs get completely different stuff.
Thank you for your service.
I’m actually surprised these TERFs are watching porn at all. I’d imagine most TERFs are also SWERFs/sex-negative and wouldn’t approve of porn use.
As for whether porn has gotten better or worse, I’m no expert, but from what I know, there are way more options available for people with niche interests or who want to see certain things. Sure, the hardcore stuff might be more hardcore, but if you don’t like that then don’t watch it. As well, the amount of feminist and indie porn is much greater than it was 10 years ago, so I imagine more women are watching and enjoying porn now, rather than what these TERFs seem to be implying.
I’m also a little surprised they didn’t mention the presence of trans and non-binary performers, seeing as trans porn appears to be popular now. I’m sure the TERFs are pissed about that too.
Funny– David Foster Wallace’s “Big Red Son” essay posited that the more brutal porn was being driven by misogyny, not trans people. Make of that what you will.
I expect the TERFs are looking at porn for the same reason their close allies in the Religious Right claim to – to find evidence of how evil and degenerate their targets are. Especially given the massive crossover between TERFs and SWERFs, like Professional Liar Gail Dines.
Fact is, misogynistic porn IS a lot easier to find these days. So is feminist porn. And porn catering to virtually every fetish. (Except freckles, for some reason.) Because porn in general is easier to find.
(That said, the seeming ubiquity of “step-incest” porn – on mainstream sites – recently seems pretty bizarre to me. It seems like every studio, and every performer, is getting in on it.)
So yeah, unsurprisingly I did recognize Cory Chase in the header photo. The internet is for porn, after all.
Christ, that whole thread. Shades of the Huxley novel, Brave New World. It makes me feel grateful to be a married, middle-aged person.
TERFs always sounded shitty, but it seems they’ve gotten worse the last couple of years. Like the MRM, they are now virtually indistinguishable from Nazis. It’s sort of interesting and terrifying how various terrible internet subcultures have morphed into one even worse mega subculture.
@Allandrel
Freckles are hard to find? I’m surprised. That seems like a common enough thing that it wouldn’t be so hard.
I recall Gail Dines being a SWERF, but I don’t remember her being transphobic. It doesn’t surprise me at all though, seeing as like you said there is definitely an overlap.
@WWTH
It seems like there are more of them as well. I thought they had decreased in number, but apparently they are back. I’m worried that soon they will become violent and start publicly assaulting trans people.
It’s also probably not long before they become white nationalists and declare that only white cis women are women.
Ok, let’s be serious for a moment:
Softcore porn was a thing to get around network requirements!
FFS, I remember back in the days, when there was a noticeable difference between the softcore stuff on late-night TV and the stuff on late night pay-TV.
And that softcore wasn’t “female-oriented”.
Oh… and tag-cheating on an online video platform? STOP THE PRESSES!
(thing) is ruined! It must be the fault of (people I hate)!
@Naglfar
It’s REALLY WEIRD what gets tagged and what doesn’t. Like, I think about the sexiest thing a woman can do is laugh, but good luck finding that through search algorithms.
@TheKND
Yeah, the “stuff 10 years ago was softcore” is patently ridiculous. Porn on the internet has always run the gamut to meet audience preferences.
Of course, many of these TERFs/SWERFs engage in a lot of Humpty-Dumptying with the terms “softcore” and “hardcore.” The industry has a pretty simple definition – “softcore” means any sex acts depicted are simulated, and “hardcore” means the depiction of unsimulated sex acts.
Whereas TERFs/SWERFs usually use “hardcore” to mean “anything I don’t like,” as seen in the OP.
(The workings of the porn industry are one of the special interests that I developed an autistic fixation on and read way too much about. Right after medieval angelology and right before the history of the G.I. Joe franchise.)
I love a good ending. Thanks for…uh…researching this for us.
I have no idea what the stats are on who uses porn and how much and why, but I do have an impression that men use porn more than women, and guess what?
Over on Pharyngula & FtB generally almost all the “gender critical” people seem to be men bravely protecting women from the sexism of having gender categories destabilized and the resulting rape of the women no longer protected by rigid gender categories by the “undesirable” humans.
It is, of course, a truly noble, feminist calling in which men have selflessly engaged for centuries in their efforts to stamp out oppression.
:eyeroll:
@Allandrel:
Perhaps (since I assume they don’t have to show proof the participants are actually related) it’s a way of selling a fairly standard video as something extra-kinky without requiring the performers to do anything different than usual except use familial terms of address?
Think of the novel you could write!
@Allandrel, Moon Custafer
I’d read that novel. G. I. Joe shoots a porno with some angels? It can be a companion to the novel about all the things I read too much about. Whenever I find a way to combine airliners, cetaceans, and Greenlandic culture.
As for the thing about incest porn, this article has some ideas as to the popularity. I’m not really into porn, but I can sort of understand the appeal from a Freudian perspective.
@Moon Custafer, Naglfar
I could easily see Cobra* getting into porn as a way to generate revenue** and put out subliminal indoctrination.
As for the angels, it could be a crossover with In Nomine where Andrealphus, the Demon Prince of Lust and Mammon, the Demon Prince of Greed get involved with Cobra’s porn scheme. So some angels have to infiltrate G.I. Joe to help counter them.
*G.I. Joe’s perennial Ruthless Terrorist Organization Determined To Rule The World
** Cobra’s main source of revenue is not ransom demands, or arms dealing (though they do both). It’s a pyramid scheme based on selling household cleaning products. While many companies and countries in G.I. Joe are given fictitious analogues, this pyramid scheme is never, ever named, strongly implying that it is not “something like Amway” but in fact IS Amway.
@Naglfar
Oh man, that article mentions “wincest.”
Never did know her name – just recognised her from Ted Cruz’ “accidental” retweet of that one.
Sometimes straight porn ends up in the gay searches. This just means that the search engine isn’t perfect.
Amazing how much these “Gender Critical Feminists” actually sound like incel dudes kvetching about “Muh Pornoz”.
Surely just a malign coincidence!
(/s, in case needed.)
@ Cat Mara:
Obama’s
Also the idea that straight cis gender people don’t like anal sex is really odd to me. That’s like saying no one thought of doing oral sex on their partner until internet porn was created.