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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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and there still remains a primordial element that people recoil in horror from

All horror about sexuality emerges from the initial biological condition [that, if you never have sex, you're objectively worthless] combined with the Just World Hypothesis (or as you phrased it, the notion that there's a "proper amount" of suffering required for sexual fulfillment).

The incest taboo is naturally derived from this: the problem is that a man is getting more sex than he deserves through nepotism. This is also the argument against [heterosexual] child sexual interaction; for M/f, it's "he's taking advantage of a female unable or unwilling to price sex correctly" (both of which are theft- the former from the girl herself, the latter from all women), for F/m, it's "she's giving the only asset she actually has for free/in advance to someone who hasn't/might never earn it". (And m/f is either one or the other on a case-by-case basis.)

This is also why Abramic religion "needs" to set a taboo for male homosexuality, because [despite what its followers will claim] that's not a taboo that comes from biology (including M/m)- because if it's happening, the dom/top earned it. Sure, it's not going to result in babies, just pleasure/sophisticated masturbation, which is why the Catholic church in particular falls back on "natural law" explanations of why it's bad, but it is natural that the dominant partner in the relationship just gets to do this by definition. Besides, the women any man of worth has acquired (as property) sometimes aren't willing or able to submit to sex at any particular time.

I don't think that fapping to porn is some great revolutionary transgressive act or something

But that's inconsistent with the fact that, given the above, you're "cheating" the system- you're getting a facsimile of what you are supposed to dedicate every fiber of your being to getting, and sometimes, you're getting a superior product, for free, to someone else who had to put in a great deal of effort only to score a woman so undesirable she couldn't even give herself away.

And yeah, I'd be real pissed off about people being better than me too in an environment where sex is a scarce resource- horrified, perhaps. This goes double for prostitution, where sex is given an explicit price; men do not want to know how much existential fulfillment costs because their entire instinctual sense of self-worth is built on being able to afford better (and women do the same thing, as their entire instinctual sense of self-worth is built on how high a price they can charge).

The dense network of strictures, rituals, and emotional associations that surround sexuality cannot be reduced to purely rational or utilitarian concerns about its possible harms or effects.

Sure it can; I just did it. This is identical to the "irreducible complexity" claim Intelligent Design creationists use- whereas I posit the reason most people do this is because it's been true as a property of all life so long as to simply be instinct (combined with the fact that we're the only rationalizing animal).

Some people are able to identify when their instincts are operating and have open enough personalities to point them out, but it's unreasonable to expect everyone to, much less intentionally reject them, much less back up that decision to reject them. People that do this anyway are "abnormal".