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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@Lainy:
What is this “oral sex” you mention?
@Crip Dyke
For a second there I was really concerned that I somehow spelled oral wrong and actually googled it to make sure I spelt it right.
Also side note when you google search oral it also gives you suggestion that other people have searched for. The second one was “human sexual activity” which I am pretty sure is a bunch of aliens.
Uh, isn’t the categorisation on sites like pornhub more or less decided upon by the video uploader? I mean, what’s to stop me uploading a video of a cat being chased off by a cockerel, titling it PUSSY DESTROYED BY GIANT ANGRY COCK and tagging it with “romantic” if I wanted?
I WILL PAY YOU ALL THE MONIES TO MAKE THIS PORN NOW.
Also, too: There’s this guy.
And this woman. [Note: 2nd link is to SFW videos, but the fact that they’re hosted by Pornhub means that inevitably you’ll have NSFW video recommendations on the same page, so… ultimately even if what I’m trying to show you is SFW, the page as a whole is DEFINITELY NSFW.]
@Lainy:
It’s safest if you just assume that absolutely, literally everything written by me has a [sarcasm] tag. Only take it seriously if you’ve considered all the sarcastic interpretations and none of them make any sense (and/ or would require you to interpret me as saying something pro-incel/MRA/Gender Critical/racist/dirtbag/Trump).
@Allandrell:
Do you have any links on the Cobra/Amway connection? I mean, you’re serious right? I mean, yes, the world is fictional, Cobra doesn’t exist, but you’re serious that in that fictional world Cobra is getting its money as Amway?
That is funny as fuck, and puts a great spin on the evil of Betsy DeVos.
I’m not into porn (because ace), so this may be my naivety speaking, but the argument that “people are into incest porn because it’s taboo” sounds unconvincing to me. If that were true, wouldn’t we witness a similarly large increase in porn depicting other gross taboos, such as necrophilia?
Meanwhile, I know from, uh… research… that when you search “twink” on Pornhub, half the videos that come up involve performers that are clearly hunks instead. Who do I complain to about this?
Indeed. I had a conversation with a coworker who was complaining about the normalization of anal sex… back in 2001.
@Weird Eddie:
Well, damn. I bet he was the one who made them change the name of their category of porn featuring trans women from a commonly-used slur too! It’s political correctness gone mad ARGLE BARGLE
@Crip Dyke: Ha ha, that Belle Delphine is awesome! The fun is trying to guess how the hell she can put a non-porny spin on some of the clickbait titles before watching them…
@Lainey:
Lies! There are no aliens on the Internet! None! Say, you’re looking lovely tonight… have you decreased in mass?
@Moggie
I think it’s probably because for most people necrophilia is just a bridge too far. At least, necrophilia grosses me out. On the other hand, if we are to believe Freud about the Oedipus complex, men want to fuck their mothers and so as a result enjoy porn about incest.
EDIT: Apparently there actually is a market for necrophile porn.
I’m going to hazard a guess and say that these TERFs aren’t exactly fond of porn as a whole.
@Crip Dyke
No links, sorry – the G.I. Joe wiki doesn’t go into much detail about the pyramid schemes, and most of the actual, Amway-like details are buried within thousands of pages of comics.
The details that the comics do provide – multilevel marketing of household cleaning products, selling to friends and neighbors, recruiting those friends and neighbors, an emphasis on presenting a successful lifestyle by going into debt, emphasis on fitting into an “All-American mold,” etc. point to Amway specifically, rather than other pyramid schemes.
The big tell, though, is the lack of brand identity. Larry Hama (the writer of the G.I. Joe comics) almost always uses fictional analogues for real things, to avoid implying that real countries or corporations are in league with Cobra. And virtually all of Cobra’s front companies are fictitious, often with less-then subtle references to Cobra in their names.*
But the pyramid scheme is never, ever named. We never, ever see a logo. So while the country of Frusenland is “basically Finland,” Cobra’s pyramid scheme is not identified as “basically Amway” but clearly leaves the door open to actually being Amway. It’s one of Hama’s most subtle bits (and there are a lot of them).
*If G.I. Joe would just have their operatives memorize all the possible anagrams of “cobra” they would be clued in to a lot of schemes a lot faster. “Broca Beach?” “Arbco Brothers Circus?”
This queer, cis-gendered woman was writing a sex blog 10 years ago – and consuming a lot of porn. (I’m gray ace since a brain infection & surgery a few years ago but I used to be highly sexual.) First off, the poster on reddit who thought porn wasn’t that hardcore 10 years ago was clearly not watching internet porn. The trend has been towards hardcore pretty much since internet porn started being available. She must be thinking of Skinemax, late night, softfcore videos from the 80s. Secondly, there are plenty of cis-women who are kinky AF – plenty who are not – and I’m sure that transwomen are smiliarly diverse.
But then I’m preaching to choir.
As hilarious as Belle Delphine’s trolling is, I’m reasonably sure a lot of people are unironically masturbating to her videos.
My understanding is that sudden popularity of incest porn has nothing to do with changing tastes and everything to do with a particular studio that specialized in it managing to get an exclusive deal with Pornhub, so their stuff got spammed all over that site. Other studios, seeing its apparent popularity, boosted by search algorithms, followed suit.
Yes… “research”…
I would imagine as well that PornHub’s statistics on who watches what are probably not entirely accurate, as not everyone is signing up for accounts to watch and therefore it can’t really be known which videos certain demographics prefer.
@Allandrel
I don’t really know much about G. I. Joe, but that is interesting. MLMs are pretty insidious, so if someone was trying to create a global crime syndicate, an MLM wouldn’t be a bad way to do it.
Rule 34. In general, if you can imagine something, there’s likely someone out there who has a kink for it. And some kind of porn of it probably exists on the internet.
@pie @crip dyke
A quick seach shows me that University of South Corolina (the Gamecocks) plays Missouri, Kentucky, and Clemson in foitball this year (all feline mascots). Tempted to up porn-titled videos consisting of nothing but highlights from these games.
@Moggie:
I watch porn, but I read porn writing more than I ever watch video porn.
I noticed a porn-writing boom in incest stuff a while ago. I think that one of the opportunities provided by incist porn, (and it’s even more true of video porn than written) is that you can say that it’s incest porn by throwing in the stepmom or step sibling labels at some point and then go on with normal porn and for people who want that fetish/kink they feel catered to, but for those who don’t, the fact that they called themselves related at some point in a story/video is easily set aside.
In fact, one of the things I like about written porn is that there’s a lot I can more easily change in my imagination.
@ All Andrew:
Nuh-UH… ain’t me….
🙂
🙂
Oooh, porn! My kinda topic! *cracks knuckles*
Frankly, if this DetectiveSpaghetti person thinks that porn was vanilla 10 years ago, I’ve got the lingering spirit of Joe D’Amato to introduce them to, to say nothing of any other exploitation filmmaker from the 70s and 80s.
Either way, it sounds to me like they’re lamenting the rise of extreme gonzo porn, which I personally can’t stand and is the kind of thing that has the potential to injure, but its not like that’s all there is to find. The “porn for women” category tends to have content where it looks like the performers are actually enjoying themselves. And while this is by no means universal, “ethical” porn producers tend to be more open-minded when it comes to their performers, casting trans people, people of colour, those with disabilities etc., as well as writing scenarios that are less glaringly exploitative. (Note: I put “ethical” in quotes as there’s still some questionable practices exposed related to those who brand themselves as ethical pornographers).
@Naglfar has it right when he mentions the demographics though (and PornHub is up front when it says it’s tracking accounts that list themselves as female rather than having any actual knowledge of people’s gender identity).
On a semi-related topic, I do lament the sheer laziness of American adult productions (looking your way Wood Rocket), when European companies like Private are willing to go all out on like a three-part Cleopatra-themed historical drama involving time travel or reincarnation (not sure which, I don’t speak Italian). C’mon, guys, as much as it’s profitable to do endless Marvel movie porn parodies, it’s nice to see something a little more ambitious.
Ancient Rome is a goldmine of debauchery (depending on who you read). It can’t be that hard to get some togas, some wigs and a few styrofoam columns, call an actress “Valeria Messalina” or “Julia the Elder” and pretend you’re banging in front of the Pantheon. Although… I dunno, it would feel weird contributing to what is likely myths about real people written by political enemies. It’s telling that for ancient Roman women, if somebody wanted to destroy their reputation in the eyes of the public, it always came down to “they slept around.” Talk about patriarchy and demonizing women’s sexuality.
Profitable? I thought that essentially nobody was paying for porn any more? Apart from stuff like cam performers, I suppose, where the interactivity is the draw.