Porn and Dating Apps: The ‘Brothel Model’ Approach to Modern Heterosexuality

submitted by anxietyaccount8 from onthewomanquestion.com

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[–]FlippyKing 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

I listened to a video that talked about how porn is used as a psyop by governments against their enemies. I don't have any thing to back this up, but the guy was saying that the Israelis used porn in the occupied territories and the CIA has used it to break down the fabric of societies.

He also talked about the idea of sexual liberation in terms of the cultural pressures for it coming from the top down through the bigger media outlets and how this goes back long before TV. For my own sanity I have to make a distinction between genuine freedom of choice for people, and the kind of societal pressure in defining new norms artificially. He quoted an unnamed college student who apparently was a RA at her dorm. The woman was confronting a professor who told the class how they (students, young adults) are sort of naturally promiscuous and all that. She said she confronts this daily with younger women coming to her for advice on how to deal with the pressure they want resist but also want to fit in.

He continued on this topic, moving up to top-down societal forces shaping culture. He talked about how the early Soviet government promoted it to break down the culture that tied to people to the past, but soon reversed that decision when they saw a decline in production. A big part of what Lenin was doing, and even bragged about, was managing Russia better than the Czars so that it could compete with the west in spite of the winters. That was a big 'take-away' in Russian intellectual circles after the Crimean War. If they did it long enough to break ties to the past only to then restrict the freedoms they championed, well apparently not really championed but used for an ulterior goal, then people in the west looking to manipulate society may have picked up on it and adjusted to roll it out a little slower.

He tied it all to the idea of Cultural Marxism, which I had never really seen a credible connection to actual Marxism or Leninism, or any of the older class-based economic left that thought about the autonomy and dignity of the worker (and in some anarchist circles, extend that to the full person as more than just an economic actor), and Gramasci and the the Frankfurt School. I found them to be snobs who held the working class in disdain. He pulled some rather damning quotes from them which read as intentionally subversive as some of the stupider things I've seen from "queer theory" (just ... ... I mean come on ... what they hell is that and how is it taken seriously by anyone?), and he uses them to make his point that they were all about breaking society to remake it by pulling the rug out from under community cohesion starting with families and relationships between the sexes and all that "baseball, mom, and apple pie" stuff (in the US, I guess, "football or rugby, mum, and Yorkshire Pudding" for Brits, or "Guiness, Ma, and more Guiness" for Ireland (jk).

He also took this idea of cultural marxism, not as a liberator but a subverter and dissolver of cultural norms and bonds that clears out what is there to make room for what the elites want to replace it with, and looked at foreign policy. He talked about Iraq and how the Wolfowitz Doctrine was cultural marxism. Apparently the US introduced and protected porn there as a way to break that (or really those) society (societies). The drone strikes against weddings and ambulances make more sense in that context. They were very open about how they were intending to remake that society. It may have been portrayed as an attempt to make it an AynRandLand or something like that, but really it was about making a hell on earth. And, if this video by a catholic priest talking about Marian revelations is to be considered, porn led the way. Even if you consider the source suspect, and question the overall thesis, which I've struggled with, there is a lot of food for thought there.

[–]anxietyaccount8[S] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

I've heard that porn was used in political conflict before, but am not really interested in that whole argument. It uses porn as a struggle between different groups of men (elites vs "regular guys", Christians vs others), but the #1 thing porn seeks to do is maintain control over women, and men from any country can agree with that.

[–]FlippyKing 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think on an individual level the specific act of creating porn controls women, rapes them really. Apologists might try to rationalize it away but what ever they call it, it will be a form of rape. The distribution of porn along with its acceptance also controls women in that it sets a societal expectation on them, which is a lowest common denominator that no individual might hold but ends up dragging us all down to where those who control culture want it to be (the gutter, because they hold the general population in disdain. That's why big record companies only saw Rap as viable when it glorified the worst aspects of the culture Rap came out of. This is true of nearly every cultural thing that becomes commercially viable not because of our demand but because of the demands of those who disseminate it). But women are not in a vacuum. Women are half of society. To say men are not controlled by porn is easily seen as not true. The new levels of sexual violence that has become common in consensual sex are a form of that control of men to expect and want that from women-- to want to degrade women, to break society and our cultures even more than it are.

In the same why that what ever you do for the least of you, you do for me, what ever injustice is done to others is an in justice done to all of us. If we ignore the injustice and suffering of others, we kill off our own empathy and our own connection to the rest of humanity. Men who are OK with what is done to women, because those who force our culture into being a pornographic culture, are just as controlled and manipulated as women. The physical suffering of women via porn, and the false standards of behavior set by it on women, create mental and emotional scars on men who expect what is not real. Men and women suffer together in a porn culture where they could and should be seeking communion and love growth in relationships with each other and in community with each other. Who has it worse keeps it a fight. To solve the problem we must all transcend the problem. Porn creates broken people, both men and women, and a broken society for all of us.