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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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Oh, very little written or drawn porn or erotica does much for me, given my own tendencies. But I think the page does present the fantasy as erotic/arousing, this is how the author imagined it would go in her/his sexual fantasy, and few people imagine sexual fantasies that are weird and ridiculous and completely unarousing. The contrast is the point here, and if you're going to say "image of fantasy is meh, image of reality is meh", then that point is lost: "I thought it would be sexy and cool, but in reality it turned out to be weird and awkward and a turn-off".

In the drawn image of the fantasy, the author is imagining she has a genuine, flesh, penis being sucked by the girlfriend/boyfriend. In reality, it's a pink plastic strap-on with a harness over her underwear. The former is the erotic fantasy of the author in her daydreams, the latter is how it was when she tried it for real. If both images are "well this isn't a turn-on for anyone", then they're both pointless and don't need to be included.

and few people imagine sexual fantasies that are weird and ridiculous and completely unarousing

Note that the set of those people and the target audience for the book overlap nearly completely. Everyone else is either busy having sex or browsing nhentai (which is just as bad, according to traditionalists, but their understanding of human sexuality is just as malformed as it is for the self-proclaimed queers).

and if you're going to say "image of fantasy is meh, image of reality is meh", then that point is lost

Yes, but the fact that they're both drawn the same way is the main reason I criticize the book in the first place! It's the story of a woman who bought right into Orthodoxy-Approved sex, rejected it (because it was stupid), "but hey, at least it's not straight sex amirite".

If this author actually wanted to promote queer sex, which she doesn't (and 'queer' in this sense, and more generally in usage of that label post-Tumblr, is just 'women who want an excuse not to have sex with men'), I'd expect it to be pushing top of the charts on [insert your favorite drawn porn site here]. But it isn't, and that is why.

So the reason I'm against it being in libraries is that it's a bad piece of literature that fails to do what it sets out to- which is the mistake theory version of why it's bad, not conflict theory coming from [people who also don't understand sex but no longer have the institutional power to force their misunderstandings onto everyone else].

It's the woke version of a Chick tract, really. Art's just as ugly, too.