My reply is mostly to Yellowblack's chapter from a few posts ago, when he started this whole "self-aware" deconstruction of shrinking stories on writing.com.
The angle you went with in your post was that sex is driven primarily on our instinctual need to reproduce. Except that's far outdated - we don't desire sex purely for the need to reproduce, we desire it because it is a pleasurable activity that releases oxytocin and endorphins into our brains. Sex has been just as much for recreation as it was for reproduction; hell even some animals have sex for purely recreational (or sometimes territorial dominance) purposes.
In fact, in our modern day society, reproduction is now seen as an unwanted consequence of sex. In fact, due to overpopulation going on in the world, our generation is in potentially no danger of dying off (at least not by old age). Effectively our society is the first one that's really been open with the concept of sex. Truth be told, the reason that civilization and cultures the world over have treated sex as a taboo because the framers of religious institutions didn't want people having sex all the time, because they didn't want anyone enjoying life; because the more people enjoy life/the higher the standard of living rises, the less people will depend on superstition to survive. The priests basically told people that sex was immoral; you couldn't have it until you got married, and you could only do it for reproductive purposes.
Simple fact is, our modern society's fascination with sex - particularly the more taboo aspects of it, like you find on the internet - isn't the cancer of society. It's a Consequence of Society; basically speaking, mankind has ultimately been so sexually repressed for centuries - being told that a basic pleasurable activity that promotes healthy stress relief, was an immoral, disgusting practice that was going to get them burned in hell for all eternity - that people are unwilling to face their sexual sides. People like to pretend that they're somehow 'above' the need for sex...but they're not. And society's taboo viewing of sex was what created this problem.
Instead of trying to teach teenagers how to have sex safely, we're instead teaching kids to not have it at all; trying to scare them that immediately upon having sex even once, a whole bunch of scary shit will befall them - moral depravity, STDs, unplanned pregnancies. And because of how society has vilified this perfectly natural human function, it has now moved on to a psychological need in people.
But getting sex isn't easy, considering the vilification process has lead so many people to believe that a purely physical relationship is wrong, and the people who want the physical without the emotional are just users. No, they are not; Rapists are just users. People who want sex without an extended relationship are fully within their rights, just as their partners who have the right to say, "No".
Which is why Masturbation became such a common thing. If you can satisfy yourself without having to go through all the work, then why wouldn't you? (and if you can't satisfy yourself, you should see a doctor about that.)
But much like sex, Masturbation is also viewed as taboo. Hell, there's a story in the Bible where God kills someone for doing it. But seriously; who does masturbation hurt? If you can be responsible about it and not let it take over your life, then it basically serves a daily function that can get you through the day...
But more than that, everyone seems to have some personal and impersonal kink - an attraction to something that is not considered the norm for sexuality. (And that's because the "norm" for sexuality for the longest time was - Man and Woman, Tab A, Slot B.) Usually when someone finds out what they're attracted to, they're afraid and ashamed of it for "not being normal". That can have psychological damages.
But then they find the internet; a small portion of the universe where there are other people who are attracted to the same thing, and are not ashamed of it. They learn that they don't have to be afraid of it either; their personal paraphilia doesn't hurt anyone. Sure people keep it a secret, because it's such a personal matter, and better yet - they don't let this personal kink define who they are.
And by that - not letting it define them - they are able to live their professional lives while keeping their personal stuff where it belongs. And of course, they use the internet to help feed these personal kinks through fantasy scenarios like this. And also, fantasies like this are perfectly harmless toward the objectification of women. If your fears that these stories are contributing to that are true, then that would mean that all of society would be treating women as mere objects. And despite what Buzzfeed might have you believe, that isn't the case.
The simple fact is, this is nothing more than a sexual fantasy for nothing more than fap material; a daydream that's not supposed to be real or make sense. It's like when a kid daydreams about saving the world in order to escape the boredom of sitting in class. A little kid cannot save the world, that doesn't make sense - and every time you question what happens in the fantasy, the fantasy itself falls apart. It's not supposed to have an explanation because it only exists to satisfy a need.
And that's the most important part - the Escapist Appeal. That's the whole idea of fantasy; it allows you to escape the bewildering mundanity of real life and experience something impossible. The women in these fantasies aren't "objects", they're more like "phantoms"; exaggerated facsimiles who are meant to represent our desires and that we can project our urges onto. Simply put, a story like this isn't contributing to women being treated like sex objects, just like how it isn't contributing toward pedophilia or incestuous relationships.
Simply put, it's not our outlet for replacing ourselves and our own relatives in the story. We read about it and fap to it, because of the taboo that surrounds it. It's basically exciting to see characters to cross that line. Hell, I could go into an extensive essay as to why it's exciting to read a story like that, that doesn't reflect our own personal desires. Hell, half the things I read on this website, I read purely for fun, but would never want to actually happen to me.
But back to the supposed "objectification" angle.
Going back to the "Phantom" comment I made before, it is literally because the women in these stories are not real people. They are literally gone with the wind the moment we stop thinking about them. Their overzealous sexual nature is purely built upon our desire for them to desire us. (Mainly because too many women in real life pretend like sex isn't important to them.)
And hell, if you think about it, it is literally the opposite situation, since in these stories, it's actually the women treating the men like mere objects. Maybe this is representative deep down that most men are afraid of being taken advantage of, considering that most of these stories feature the protagonists participation unwillingly, because he's powerless to fight back.
But going to my final fight...the simple fact is, stories like this happen on the internet for a reason and they serve a purpose, a much needed function. Human beings have been forced to deny their deepest desires out of being told those desires are immoral and were threatened with ostrisization, criminalization and damnation. But those desires don't go away, they need to satisfy them every once in a while in order to function...If they keep getting pushed down beneath the subconscious, the harder they will come back with a vengeance until they can't be ignored anymore.
It's kind of like that episode of the Simpsons where Ned Flanders begins watching people on a town-wide camera network, and nags them into behaving the way he considers normal, even intruding on their privacy. Once Homer and Bart discover their backyard is a blind-spot, they start charging people to do whatever they want. Principal Chalmers is seen wearing a Tu-Tu and says, "This used to be a small part of me."
Then Homer explains to Flanders that by nagging everyone, he wasn't making a paradise, he was just repressing all the undesirable deviant nature of the townsfolk, until it manifested in one nexus of (supposedly) "pure concentrated evil."
That's exactly the parallel of society vs. sex that I mentioned earlier, and the same thing will happen if people are not allowed to have their personal fantasies online as well.
Another example is the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story; it wasn't about good and evil, it was about man battling his repressed nature. Jekyll was restricted by society to behave a certain way, forcing him to repress all his anger against society and his desire to rebel against it. All of that was repressed and ignored for years, until it literally formed an alternate personality in him. The potion merely removed his inhibitions and brought that "repressed side" out...Although not so much in a metaphorical form, but more with a drastic physical transformation...
But my point is...we need to have at least one place where we can be weird. We need to have our private sessions with a fantasy woman who only exists to fill our needs, so that we don't go around expecting it from REAL women in real life. This behavior isn't creating an attitude towards that, it's actually helping to prevent it. If you don't want this kind of behavior in society, then you NEED to let it exist here.
The angle you went with in your post was that sex is driven primarily on our instinctual need to reproduce. Except that's far outdated - we don't desire sex purely for the need to reproduce, we desire it because it is a pleasurable activity that releases oxytocin and endorphins into our brains. Sex has been just as much for recreation as it was for reproduction; hell even some animals have sex for purely recreational (or sometimes territorial dominance) purposes.
In fact, in our modern day society, reproduction is now seen as an unwanted consequence of sex. In fact, due to overpopulation going on in the world, our generation is in potentially no danger of dying off (at least not by old age). Effectively our society is the first one that's really been open with the concept of sex. Truth be told, the reason that civilization and cultures the world over have treated sex as a taboo because the framers of religious institutions didn't want people having sex all the time, because they didn't want anyone enjoying life; because the more people enjoy life/the higher the standard of living rises, the less people will depend on superstition to survive. The priests basically told people that sex was immoral; you couldn't have it until you got married, and you could only do it for reproductive purposes.
Simple fact is, our modern society's fascination with sex - particularly the more taboo aspects of it, like you find on the internet - isn't the cancer of society. It's a Consequence of Society; basically speaking, mankind has ultimately been so sexually repressed for centuries - being told that a basic pleasurable activity that promotes healthy stress relief, was an immoral, disgusting practice that was going to get them burned in hell for all eternity - that people are unwilling to face their sexual sides. People like to pretend that they're somehow 'above' the need for sex...but they're not. And society's taboo viewing of sex was what created this problem.
Instead of trying to teach teenagers how to have sex safely, we're instead teaching kids to not have it at all; trying to scare them that immediately upon having sex even once, a whole bunch of scary shit will befall them - moral depravity, STDs, unplanned pregnancies. And because of how society has vilified this perfectly natural human function, it has now moved on to a psychological need in people.
But getting sex isn't easy, considering the vilification process has lead so many people to believe that a purely physical relationship is wrong, and the people who want the physical without the emotional are just users. No, they are not; Rapists are just users. People who want sex without an extended relationship are fully within their rights, just as their partners who have the right to say, "No".
Which is why Masturbation became such a common thing. If you can satisfy yourself without having to go through all the work, then why wouldn't you? (and if you can't satisfy yourself, you should see a doctor about that.)
But much like sex, Masturbation is also viewed as taboo. Hell, there's a story in the Bible where God kills someone for doing it. But seriously; who does masturbation hurt? If you can be responsible about it and not let it take over your life, then it basically serves a daily function that can get you through the day...
But more than that, everyone seems to have some personal and impersonal kink - an attraction to something that is not considered the norm for sexuality. (And that's because the "norm" for sexuality for the longest time was - Man and Woman, Tab A, Slot B.) Usually when someone finds out what they're attracted to, they're afraid and ashamed of it for "not being normal". That can have psychological damages.
But then they find the internet; a small portion of the universe where there are other people who are attracted to the same thing, and are not ashamed of it. They learn that they don't have to be afraid of it either; their personal paraphilia doesn't hurt anyone. Sure people keep it a secret, because it's such a personal matter, and better yet - they don't let this personal kink define who they are.
And by that - not letting it define them - they are able to live their professional lives while keeping their personal stuff where it belongs. And of course, they use the internet to help feed these personal kinks through fantasy scenarios like this. And also, fantasies like this are perfectly harmless toward the objectification of women. If your fears that these stories are contributing to that are true, then that would mean that all of society would be treating women as mere objects. And despite what Buzzfeed might have you believe, that isn't the case.
The simple fact is, this is nothing more than a sexual fantasy for nothing more than fap material; a daydream that's not supposed to be real or make sense. It's like when a kid daydreams about saving the world in order to escape the boredom of sitting in class. A little kid cannot save the world, that doesn't make sense - and every time you question what happens in the fantasy, the fantasy itself falls apart. It's not supposed to have an explanation because it only exists to satisfy a need.
And that's the most important part - the Escapist Appeal. That's the whole idea of fantasy; it allows you to escape the bewildering mundanity of real life and experience something impossible. The women in these fantasies aren't "objects", they're more like "phantoms"; exaggerated facsimiles who are meant to represent our desires and that we can project our urges onto. Simply put, a story like this isn't contributing to women being treated like sex objects, just like how it isn't contributing toward pedophilia or incestuous relationships.
Simply put, it's not our outlet for replacing ourselves and our own relatives in the story. We read about it and fap to it, because of the taboo that surrounds it. It's basically exciting to see characters to cross that line. Hell, I could go into an extensive essay as to why it's exciting to read a story like that, that doesn't reflect our own personal desires. Hell, half the things I read on this website, I read purely for fun, but would never want to actually happen to me.
But back to the supposed "objectification" angle.
Going back to the "Phantom" comment I made before, it is literally because the women in these stories are not real people. They are literally gone with the wind the moment we stop thinking about them. Their overzealous sexual nature is purely built upon our desire for them to desire us. (Mainly because too many women in real life pretend like sex isn't important to them.)
And hell, if you think about it, it is literally the opposite situation, since in these stories, it's actually the women treating the men like mere objects. Maybe this is representative deep down that most men are afraid of being taken advantage of, considering that most of these stories feature the protagonists participation unwillingly, because he's powerless to fight back.
But going to my final fight...the simple fact is, stories like this happen on the internet for a reason and they serve a purpose, a much needed function. Human beings have been forced to deny their deepest desires out of being told those desires are immoral and were threatened with ostrisization, criminalization and damnation. But those desires don't go away, they need to satisfy them every once in a while in order to function...If they keep getting pushed down beneath the subconscious, the harder they will come back with a vengeance until they can't be ignored anymore.
It's kind of like that episode of the Simpsons where Ned Flanders begins watching people on a town-wide camera network, and nags them into behaving the way he considers normal, even intruding on their privacy. Once Homer and Bart discover their backyard is a blind-spot, they start charging people to do whatever they want. Principal Chalmers is seen wearing a Tu-Tu and says, "This used to be a small part of me."
Then Homer explains to Flanders that by nagging everyone, he wasn't making a paradise, he was just repressing all the undesirable deviant nature of the townsfolk, until it manifested in one nexus of (supposedly) "pure concentrated evil."
That's exactly the parallel of society vs. sex that I mentioned earlier, and the same thing will happen if people are not allowed to have their personal fantasies online as well.
Another example is the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story; it wasn't about good and evil, it was about man battling his repressed nature. Jekyll was restricted by society to behave a certain way, forcing him to repress all his anger against society and his desire to rebel against it. All of that was repressed and ignored for years, until it literally formed an alternate personality in him. The potion merely removed his inhibitions and brought that "repressed side" out...Although not so much in a metaphorical form, but more with a drastic physical transformation...
But my point is...we need to have at least one place where we can be weird. We need to have our private sessions with a fantasy woman who only exists to fill our needs, so that we don't go around expecting it from REAL women in real life. This behavior isn't creating an attitude towards that, it's actually helping to prevent it. If you don't want this kind of behavior in society, then you NEED to let it exist here.
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May 12, 2023
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