In the wake of mattress carrying Emma Sulkowicz’s claim of rape falling apart, Emma Gray at the Huffington Post has created a chart to detail what kinds of situations would indicate that a man accused of rape should not be presumed guilty. According to the flow chart there is no scenario where after being accused a man should no longer be presumed guilty. Once the accusation is made the man is presumed guilty, and nothing the accuser does or says should undermine that assumption. As Gray explains, we shouldn’t get caught up trying to see if an accusation is truthful or not, because somehow this is unfair to the accused:
Instead of picking apart the narratives of every woman (or man) who comes forward with claims of assault, let’s put that time and effort towards reforming policies that do a disservice to both survivors of assault and those they are accusing.
There are no perfect stories. There are no perfect victims.
Based on this, I would say the only way to not be presumed guilty of rape is to either not be accused, or not exist.
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maybe google glass and always recording ourselves is really self defense
Yes, we should not get caught up on things like facts, evidence or truth; let’s get down to the man lynching. After all it is the penile system where those with a penis are convicted and those without a penis are victims.
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This is why putting leftists in charge always leads to gross injustices and huge body counts. These are the type of people who make Reigns of Terror, gulags, reeducation camps, Cultural Revolutions, and KIlling Fields happen. They don’t understand the process if justice but are certain who should be favored and punished.
We need a manosphere “Sue the bitch for libel” defense fund. Obviously involve the police, and when they find nothing, file a lawsuit and get judgments. It might only need a few suits to go through before it becomes self-sustaining.
The chart is reasonable, but it only has very narrow conditions.
Here are a few more:
The accused was visiting relatives 500 miles away for a week either side of the timeframe.
The accuser is a raving lunatic psycho, just released from a locked ward and was off her meds.
The accused is gay (though wasn’t wearing rainbow garb) and only interested in hairy, burly, men.
The accuser was seen on security cameras at a bar, drinking with her girlfriends at the time.
I have a far simpler suggestion. Just as smoking is banned on most campuses, simply ban sex. Completely. By being on campus or on the property of an affiliated organization like fraternities, “No” is the answer. Not even those strange California consensual contracts. If you break this rule, you are immediately expelled.
Why don’t I think Brigham Young or Bob Jones U would have a problem. Worse, why do I think Notre Dame, and various Christian colleges would.
I guess the key is to always be the accuser. So immediately after coitus, call the police and claim rape. And since feminist doctrine declares false accusations should have zero consequences (so as not to deter real victims), there’s no drawbacks to making the rape accusation. Keep that cell phone in with the condoms.
These people are really playing a dangerous game. It’s gotten so ridiculous eventually the pendulum will swing back with a vengeance and nobody is going to believe actual rape victims.
@tz
No problem. Your reasonable chart covers all possible variations at the bottom where it says:
As a side note, why are you always such an ass? If you don’t like my blog, why not run along? Or better yet, create something of your own instead of being so tiresome. My suggestion would be to find a wife and start a family.
How would that help? No sex needs to be proven for an accused man to be presumed guilty of rape. I don’t think you have thought this through.
Your solution to feminists trying to railroad men with false claims of rape is to… make it easier to railroad men by assuming they are guilty of rape.
That chart is disgusting. Eric is exactly right about nobody believing actual victims. Because once it’s diminished (as in the chart) to something happened you didn’t like with someone who you were dating and are still dating… Every human being on the planet is a victim of “rape.”
That chick doesn’t even realize that she is encouraging the type of thing she is trying to prevent. Idiot.
“That chick doesn’t even realize that she is encouraging the type of thing she is trying to prevent.”
Its so off that I can’t help assume someone paid Emma Sulkowicz to create this drama. Like with Sandy Hook, I smell a hoax of greater proportions than just a false rape accusation. Things are just so blatantly obvious, like they don’t even bother trying to make things look or sound believable anymore. That’s how foolish the powers that be take us to be.
Women want the freedom to explore their sexuality and the freedom to accuse that they’ve been sexually assualted.
Yesterday, I saw this:
http://therightscoop.com/you-have-to-watch-rabid-feminists-attack-daily-beast-writer-for-daring-to-defend-man-accused-of-rape/
Notice how the implicit, but unstated premise in the panel members’ argument is that if any one piece of evidence fails to conclusively prove innocence, it can be rejected outright. Then we can consider the totality of only those pieces of evidence which indicate guilt.
Only if there is a single piece of evidence which, on its own, absolutely and beyond all doubt, proves innocence will they even consider it.
The manner of the crime as described isn’t very likely in the context of the relationship, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
The behavior of the accuser isn’t a very likely response from someone who had experienced such a crime in such a context, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
The accuser waited for any evidence to grow old and cold before reporting, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
The accuser apparently recruited others to bolster her accusations by making similar accusations with her, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
But the accuser accused someone, and that DOES mean it happened, and is therefore the only evidence which may be considered.
I was wondering if any dumbshit would be so simple as to put this nonsense plainly in public. Question answered.
The lead story yesterday on the Marxist CBC (Cdn Broadcasting Corp.) was women may choose universities based on number of sexual assaults. While that is a concern if they are real assaults, how many felt “assaulted” because they were whistled at by a guy they consider a creep or looked at by same?
A little off-topic, but perhaps not… guilty before born:
“I Aborted My Baby – Because it was a Boy,” Injustice Stories, 17 Jan 2015
http://injusticestories.com/i-aborted-my-baby-because-it-was-a-boy/
I wonder how this works for school teachers and there male students. If my son was failing a class it was due to rape.
Actually it was a both a feminist and a Muslim who tried to bring attention to what was going in Rotherham years ago. The powers that be only started paying too little attention, too late. Additionally not all the cases were rape cases. Many of the girls and young women considered some of those men their “boyfriends” and the sex consensual. Of course in the cases where they were minors it would be considered statutory rape but to this day some of them are convinced those guys were and still are their boyfriends. Any suggestion for such cases?
It might be that the othe
At this point, if I’m ever on a jury for a rape trial, and there is ANY “he said – she said” aspect to it, I would almost certainly vote to acquit no matter what the other evidence was. Then again, that’s probably true of any complicated case: cops are scum (even the “good” ones), prosecutors are scum, judges are scum with their thumbs on the scale for the prosecution, and witnesses lie all the time. Unless the whole thing is on film, AND the rest of the evidence unequivocally supports a guilty verdict, “Not Guilty” is the only ethical answer. I’ve hung a jury before, and I’ll gladly do it again.
THIS is what happens when people tell me that the presumption of innocence is part of “rape culture,” and that letting false accusers walk away free is necessary to protect real victims. It’s the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” syndrome. I am now spring-loaded to the “Disbelieve” setting.
Way to go, feminists.
Shem asks,
“Any suggestion for such case?”
I have a suggestion: treat all Muslims as agents of a hostile foreign power… because that is what they are. Anyone who doesn’t understand that does not understand Islam.
feminazis and gender wars go on : http://injusticestories.com/i-aborted-my-baby-because-it-was-a-boy/
“I have a suggestion: treat all Muslims as agents of a hostile foreign power”
They’re being treated as “rapists” and that isn’t stopping many of these girls and women from taking them as consensual boyfriends and sexual partners. Rotherham was a mixed bag, yes there was non-consensual sexual activity with minors but there were also consensual relationships in the mix. And there were a lot of parents who couldn’t control their wild offspring.
Teddy cam in your apartment, keep for 7 years.
About male birth control, I googled it and this article was the first one up.
“Research for a male pill launched right around the time when the search for a female pill began in the 1950s, but fell short of making it to market. Consider this statistic by the CDC: More than 80 percent of women surveyed between 2006 and 2010 reported using the pill, which has been offered for the past 50 years, but we still don’t have a comparable pill for men. In the meantime, condoms continue to be the most popular form of contraception for men.
What gives?
There are a few standout reasons why an oral contraceptive for men isn’t available. A big part of the problem is the side effect: Men fear that taking a male birth control pill could make them impotent. “There have been a lot of almost insurmountable side effects for every compound tested,” said Dr. Elaine Tyler May, Ph.D., Regents Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota and author of America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril and Liberation. “The most significant is impotence — nobody wants to take a birth control pill that makes them impotent.”
The other major problem? “Hormone-based efforts work well in 80 to 90 percent of men, bringing their sperm counts down to zero. It’s reversible and pretty well tolerated. The problem is, it doesn’t work in all men, and we don’t know why,” said John Amory, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington. And, that means it’s not safe to be released in the marketplace just yet.
Plus, it’s much easier to physiologically regulate one egg a month than hundreds of thousands of sperm a day. And, when you think of it as purely a numbers game, it’s easy to see why a female pill makes a lot more sense than a male pill.
There are other potential male birth control options coming down the pike — a reversible vasectomy for one, that’s quick, cheap and proven to be 100 percent effective. But, it still hasn’t been approved in the U.S., though trials are supposed to begin as early as 2014.
In the meantime, women will continue to bear the brunt of birth control responsibility. The male pill is, allegedly, just five years away, but it remains to be seen whether men will actually use it.
http://www.refinery29.com/2013/10/55725/birth-control-men
“Based on this, I would say the only way to not be presumed guilty of rape is to either not be accused, or not exist.”
Or not put yourself in the kind of situation where you could be accused.
Growing up, our parents taught us to not be alone with someone of the opposite sex (as a general principal) until married.
No exponential increase can go on forever, and feminists keep doubling-down on the “false rape accusations are rare and harmless” lie, although it has been every bit as thoroughly disproved as the “77-cents-on-the-dollar” lie that is finally starting to lose traction for normal people (thinking people knew it was false all along).
Within the black community in the U.S. there has been a quiet revolution going on in some jury boxes: some black jurors simply stopped voting “Guilty” for black defendants. It didn’t matter how the cases played out, these jurors simply stopped believing that the authorities were acting in good faith. (The article I linked is based on the idea that the police and prosecutors are paragons of virtue who never lie or cheat, so don’t take that part seriously, but the trend it describes is real.) It’s a crude form of jury nullification, but was probably inevitable given the culture. We may be headed that way for rape cases: as more and more accusations are shown to be fraudulent in high-profile cases – while feminists keep insisting that making blatantly false rape accusations is acceptable, and may get you invited to the State-of-the-Union address by a sitting U.S. Senator – some people will simply not be able to overcome reasonable doubt no matter what the prosecution says. It won’t be many, but it doesn’t take many… only one juror is all it takes to hang a trial jury.
If juries would stop voting to convict men in murky cases (in other words, do their sworn duty as jurors with regard to the presumption of innocence when there is reasonable doubt), prosecutors would bring a lot fewer of those cases (prosecutors HATE to lose, and far too many will gladly send an innocent man to prison rather than take a hit on their conviction rate). Until now, prosecutors could count on jurors giving them the benefit of the doubt. It is up to jurors to say, “No. Regret is not rape. No. Voluntary drunkenness does not void consent. No. Tears are not unimpeachable evidence.”
Shem; “there were a lot of parents who couldn’t control their wild offspring.”
cough cough make that “were not permitted by various all-powerful state agencies to” control their wild offspring. Parents who kicked up a fuss were arrested and threatened.
I see PC Hassan Ali was unaccountably wiped out in a mystery hit&run on a suburban road the other side of the river a few days ago. Ubiquitous CCTV, car described, middle o’t’town … and still no arrests. Apparently he was “under surveillance” as a key witness.
As someone put it on a local blog. “to be hit so accurately, in the dark, by a small car on a long, slow (30mph) road may be accounted a misfortune. To be killed by a blue Corsa .. looks very much like carelessness ..”
Quite so, Minister.
Most … careless.
Whisky, or Mother’s Ruin? Shall I be mother?
Chin chin!
I do hope there are not going to be many more of these unfortunate … occurrences, Chief Constable?
Oh, you can rest assured, the buck stops with me now, ma’am.
seriouslyserving writes, [Do not] “put yourself in the kind of situation where you could be accused.”
Even that isn’t enough. One of the Duke lacrosse players that scumbag prosecutor Mike Nifong tried to send to prison was not even at the party with Crystal Magnum (the false accuser). At the time of the alleged assault he was with his girlfriend using an ATM on the other side of town… an ATM that video-recorded the transaction and created both electronic and paper receipts. Even that didn’t keep him from being accused… even that didn’t keep the prosecutor from trying to send him to prison. Men and boys are routinely forced (under threat of prison without trial) to pay child support for children that were borne by women they never even met, even after that fact is known.
Ah, there ya go .. https://www.facebook.com/southyorkshirepolice/posts/10152670562733097
“A police officer believed to be under investigation in relation to the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal has died after being hit by a car.
PC Hassan Ali died in the early hours of Friday morning after being struck while on foot and off duty in Sheffield on 28 January.
Sky News understands the death is not being treated as suspicious.
It is thought the 44-year-old was being probed by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) after allegations against him.
Sky News’ Mike McCarthy said: “He was under some kind of surveillance, we understand, by his own force in South Yorkshire.””
Oh, I forgot. Silly old Hector that I am. You may not of heard of the ridiculous Noddymobile that took PC “H” off. Here’s a remarkably similar one, slightly different paintjob.
Oh chiz and curses. Wrong Toytown car link. I hope this one is better, or I shall thcream and thcream until I am thick! Wasn’t meant to show the actual vroom-vroom, just the linky.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/humbersidepolicepics/7190019378/
Oh dear I bet it comes up hugeapotamus .. sorry Dal. Rip it up if it’s wasting space.
@Shem
I remember reading about reversible vasectomies becoming available “soon” in the 1970s. The newspapers are always going on about imminent medical breakthroughs that never seem to happen.
It will probably happen at some point, though.
“I remember reading about reversible vasectomies becoming available “soon” in the 1970s. The newspapers are always going on about imminent medical breakthroughs that never seem to happen.
It will probably happen at some point, though.”
Its already happened, years ago, in India. I guess the reason Big Gov and Big Pharma are delaying it here is that our population has not yet crossed one billion?
@Lyn87
>I have a suggestion: treat all Muslims as agents of a hostile foreign power…
So that means telling the government to negotiate with them and give them portions of your land, because there is no military solution, right?
That’s what we are telling Ukraine with respect to the Russian soldiers with tanks and missile launchers on their land.
Yes, off topic. But intellectual consistency and honesty is important, so there ya go 🙂
Gandarusa
Relationship Question
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=945488
Marriage falling apart. Should I cut my losses and try for an annulment?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=945479
Anyone use “Perspectives on Marriage”?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=945424
Emma Suckowitz finally being shown for the liar and whore that she is, was and ever shall be, Amen!
I think the narrative that they are trying to push here is one where the woman is always the victim of rape, no matter what the criminal system states. The idea is to punish men via public opinion, expulsion and shaming. That no matter the consequences, women are never to blame.
A society cannot be considered just unless women have the absolute inviolable right to:
(1) Vote;
(2) Own property;
(3) State subsidized education (including the right to participate in sports);
(4) Compete for jobs requiring physical fitness standards where those standards are lowered for women only;
(5) State subsidized health care (including contraception);
(6) Engage in unlimited sexual activity without facing social censure;
(7) Kill their unborn babies with impunity;
(8) Divorce their husbands and breakup their families while having their separate lives financed by their ex husbands and maintaining the presumption of custodial care giver; and
(10) Falsely accuse men of rape with impunity.
Did I miss anything?
We need a manosphere “Sue the bitch for libel” defense fund. Obviously involve the police, and when they find nothing, file a lawsuit and get judgments. It might only need a few suits to go through before it becomes self-sustaining.
Exactly how to deal with false accusers. Sue them into oblivion. Wannabe victims will quickly learn, and stop the nonsense. Nothing makes a lying person humble more than a pending lawsuit against their lies.
One of those curious areas where tradcons and feminists converge.
People need to open their eyes and stop giving them the benefit of any doubt….they aren’t doing this to ‘prevent rape,’ or any such thing. It’s power, plain and simple. They want absolute power over men, and they have made significant progress toward their goal. “Rape” is just the expedient hammer they wield; similar to “its for the children.” Who would be in favor of rape? duh.
@seriouslyserving
Being alone with the opposite sex isn’t required. All it takes is an accusation. And if the man proves he wasn’t with the woman in question at the time she alleges, what feminists are arguing is the accuser should be free to change the dates until she finds one that he can’t prove he wasn’t with her.
Also, marriage isn’t a shield for this. Going along with the radical feminists won’t end hookup culture, because the feminist goal with these policies is to bolster hookup culture. This is yet another case where conservatives are volunteering to be maneuvered around by feminists. It is a brilliant trick by feminists, and incidentally it is why we are trapped on slut island.
Dale,
That’s not the kind of treatment I meant. Every nation has agents of other nations within its borders. For the most part it’s all above-board, and those agents register their presence with the host government. But when hostilities break out, those people are ordered to leave and given safe conduct to do so. I was thinking more along the lines of putting all Muslims into container ships and running those ships aground in the Persian Gulf, where their fellow goat-shaggers can support them with all the petrodollars they’ve accumulated.
In fact, since Islam is apparently so tingle-inducing, we can send our feminists along with them. They’ll finally be forced to realize how privileged Western women are, and the rest of us will get some peace and quiet. It’s a win-win.
Maybe it was annoying but the offhand comment from tz actually got me seriously thinking about the end result of this hysteria. A modest proposal; an old solution to the “new” problem. The surest way to “outlaw” sexcrime – or sexthoughtcrime – is to go back to an earlier 20th century standard. To wit: outlaw all fornication on campus. That USED to be the rule. It sure was at Rutgers and other then all-male schools: if you were caught in the act, it was deemed moral turpitude, and you got expelled.
By now you see where this is going, yes? It dovetails precisely with the current “progressive” thinking that the state (acting through the school’s administration) must step in again and rein in those awful awful predatory menz just like in the good old days. No need to worry or prove “consent”, enthusiastic or otherwise; consent becomes irrelevant. The test is elegantly simple: did someone do the nasty or not? If yes, out they go.
And just like the good old days, only men will be expelled going forward. That’s how it was pre-privacy revolution: men were considered the actors, women the victims. Which has re-emerged as the prevailing norm today: you are a victim and need protection.
I use the term “fornication” to include any non-marital sex act. Which pretty much takes care of everything, so-called sodomy too. In some SJW eyes cis-gay men are just as awful predators as those under the sway of cis-heteronormative sexism (a real term from Colgate’s freshman orientation course – I am not making that up).
So rather than reinventing the wheel, all progressive-thinking colleges should just adopt the old Bob Jones University student manual on male-female dating (i.e., prohibit it). One size fits all. Trad-cons and SJW’s can agree. Which makes giving this framework the force of law more likely.
I will leave to other bloggers to unpack the supreme irony of today’s SJW crusade to proctor all on-campus bedroom conduct, reversing the hard-fought crusade of earlier activists to end such proctoring and create zones of privacy at universities, so that students (all legal adults) could express their sexualities freely without fear of reprisal. And another modest proposal: if women are unsafe at schools where men are present, do we re-institute and mandate unisex men’s and women’s schools for their protection?
Prostitution, aka contract sex, or celibacy are the only choices left. Even sex in marriage may lead to accusations of domestic violence, rape, divorce, property theft, and child kidnapping by the other parent. Legally, you would be better off to punch a random woman on the street than to push your wife away from you who gets in your face.
Remember that arguments about fairness won’t find much purchase, because the idea is that because men are the “oppressor” class, and women are the “oppressed class”, that it is not only okay to be “unfair” to the “oppressor” class, but it is morally mandatory and required to be so in order to undo the “persistent structural injustice” between the privileged, oppressor class and the unprivileged, oppressed class. In other words, fairness is irrelevant, and even required, because of the overarching goal of overturning entrenched, persistent male privilege. This goal/end is seen as so important so as to justify pretty much *any* means at all in order to achieve it.
This can be clearly seen in the approach to sex/rape. The idea is that men hold a structural position of privilege in this area (laughable as that sounds to many men, who experience life in very much the converse, but anyway, per the narrative …), due to male physical power to overpower women and “take” sex at any time, the “prevailing script of no means no” which puts men in the privileged position of initiator and aggressor, with the woman as responder and surrenderer, and so on. The idea is that this “privileged position” is so entrenched, and so harmful to women and equality, that extreme means are justified to uproot it — and if that means presuming that all sex is rape unless affirmatively proven otherwise, then that’s fine, because this works towards negating the “entrenched privilege positions” accrued by male physical strength and the prevailing mating and sex script.
Remember, it’s for the same reason that these kinds of ideologues are advocates of “pegging” (i.e., female sexual penetration of males anally using sexual toys so as to simulate male homosexual sex) — it is an extreme activity, but it serves to undermine the “prevailing script” of man as initiator, man as penetrator, man as dominant, and replaces it with man as submissive, receptive, penetratee. It “equalizes” the sexes by negating the “structural privilege” that men have by virtue of the “script” which casts them as initiator/dominator/penetrator, which inherently places women in a position of “unequal power” and therefore must be brought down.
Virtually any means — no matter how unjust, unfair or downright bizarre — are justified when you are obsessed with the idea that men hold certain entrenched privileges which must be uprooted to ensure justice between the sexes. It’s a revolt against biology, obviously (even the idea that things like the man penetrating the woman is based on a “social script” is a revolt against basic biology), but it is what it is. These people are crazy, but they are not powerless because of the huge power that academia and the media has in shaping cultural, political and legal developments in our culture.
I need to read all the replies, but a question on this statement by TFH:
Democracy has a life-cycle, after which it is followed by a ‘feminist’ police state + goddess cult. There is no other outcome possible from full democracy.
What are the other examples of this? I can’t think of any “feminist” police states in history, but I may be overlooking something.
Vox posited that aristocracy was next rather than the dictatorship that most claim follows. I am not sure those are mutually exclusive though, as a government could have strong elements of each.
Curious for good thoughts on this.
John Adams argued, explaining the importance of the presumption of innocence and a high bar of evidence for conviction:
“We are to look upon it as more beneficial, that many guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should suffer. The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world, that all of them cannot be punished; and many times they happen in such a manner, that it is not of much consequence to the public, whether they are punished or not.”
“But when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, it is immaterial to me, whether I behave well or ill; for virtue itself, is no security. And if such a sentiment as this, should take place in the mind of the subject, there would be an end to all security what so ever.”\
Emma Sulkowicz’s claim of rape falling apart
Wow, that’s one long-ass article. Can anyone sum it up? I assume it’s about some lying twat.
Brad:
The Roman Empire.
These people are really playing a dangerous game. It’s gotten so ridiculous eventually the pendulum will swing back with a vengeance and nobody is going to believe actual rape victims.
That’s feminist BS. Do you know what is the one thing all real rape victims have in common? Their assailants leave physical evidence behind, which can be used to charge those men with rape, as long as the victims bother to go to the police. No amount of publicized false rape accusations will change this.
Remember, it’s for the same reason that these kinds of ideologues are advocates of “pegging” (i.e., female sexual penetration of males anally using sexual toys so as to simulate male homosexual sex) — it is an extreme activity, but it serves to undermine the “prevailing script” of man as initiator, man as penetrator, man as dominant, and replaces it with man as submissive, receptive, penetratee.
The advocacy of pegging has a much more simple benefit for both feminists and women: it provides average feminist women with yet another pretext to distance themselves from all those “crazy feminists” while remaining de facto feminists and keeping to vote for feminist policies. Feminists retain their social influence while demonstrating that they are true believers of the one correct and pure ideology. All women win! PMAFT explained it here:
http://www.antifeministtech.info/2013/03/the-problem-with-feminists-and-pegging/
@Hollenhund2
Do a search on “On Aug. 29, two days after the alleged rape” to get to the meat of it. In a nutshell, she claimed he brutally anally raped her part way into a night of consensual sex. She didn’t report a rape, so the only evidence is her accusation. Yet they remained in frequent facebook contact after the date she claims he raped her and the nature of their exchanges don’t fit her story, including lines like “I love you Paul.”
The point of the HuffPo chart/post is that we should still assume the man is guilty, even when the only verifiable evidence indicates that no rape occurred.
This is just so stupid. Duke Lacrosse nonsense, the BS allegations towards Jameis Winston, Jackie’s BS nonsense at UVa, and now this. THIS is what we get with the hook-up culture, women giving out s-x for nothing and then (talking to the wrong person who CAN’T get laid) and being talked into believing that the s-x was rape. That is rape culture.
Philly,
Exactly two questions should be asked of every woman agreeing to the marriage contract, two; and these are perhaps far more important than even her vows: #1) Do you agree to obey your husband in all things, to do whatever he tells you to and #2) Do you agree to submit your body to your husband whenever he wants it? If she says yes to both, that should be law, now it would be impossible for her to be “raped” by her husband AND she could never “frivorce” him because she has to obey him. Because these two things are NOT law enforced by government, we have this marriage 2.0 crap.
Novaseeker,
Just last night I was researching a response and wandered into a feminist viper-pit where they were discussing paternal surrender. Some NYT writer said it was only fair that men should have the same reproductive rights as women. Drama ensued, of course.
The comments went right along with what you were saying. Both the feminist writer who responded and most of the women who commented wanted to draw a line between pregnancy and childbirth, as if the decision to give birth should be the woman’s alone since she has the uterus, but a man’s obligation to pay for the resultant child for two decades was of no consequence, since working in a capitalistic society is a privilege that men have (yeah… they actually think that).
But what really shocked me was that while some of the women acknowledged that it was the exact opposite of “equality,” they just didn’t care, because the people who were being obligated to subsidize the choices of women were men. The fact that feminists also fight tooth-and-nail against the idea that consent to sex is consent to parenthood (for women) was neatly swept aside, as that demonstrates their hypocrisy about abortion “rights” if they also demand that men pay child support for children when they did not agree to parental responsibilities themselves.
That’s feminism in its rawest form – women get rights with few or no responsibilities and men get responsibilities with few or no rights. It’s not about equality. It never was.
It’s a revolt against biology, obviously (even the idea that things like the man penetrating the woman is based on a “social script” is a revolt against basic biology), but it is what it is. These people are crazy, but they are not powerless because of the huge power that academia and the media has in shaping cultural, political and legal developments in our culture.
I’d say it’s more a revolt against plain common sense, really. To believe that men have it better than women in life, that they’re just entitled dickheads with privilege yet they cannot even notice it, that they’re the rulers of society, is lunacy, simple as that. Yet this is what the average woman actually believes, even if she doesn’t call herself a feminist and doesn’t openly display misandric attitudes.
And let’s not forget the one simple reason why these crazies have power: average women believe them. It’s this huge mass of people who give them power. The average woman sincerely believes rape victims should not be heartlessly “forced” to give a testimony, undergo a forensic exam and go to court, because it’s all just so unfair.
BradA @ 10:01 am:
“Democracy has a life-cycle, after which it is followed by a ‘feminist’ police state + goddess cult. There is no other outcome possible from full democracy.
What are the other examples of this? I can’t think of any “feminist” police states in history, but I may be overlooking something.
Vox posited that aristocracy was next rather than the dictatorship that most claim follows.”
I’m in the dictatorship camp. Democracy lasts until people start voting themselves money out of gov’t revenue. Soon everybody has a seat on the gravy train, which stops the gravy train for going anywhere. Nobody wants to be the first to give up his seat on the gravy train. Gridlock results until one politician (or group of politicians, I suppose, but usually a charismatic or military leader) manages to force his will onto his rivals. The people who retain their seats on the gravy train are thrilled it’s moving once again and don’t look closely at Dear Leader’s personal agenda.
Gonna be the fate of Europe any year now. Again.
Its just People magazine. HuffPo has about as much journalistic integrity as the National Enquirer. It means nothing. Posts like those means that don’t take themselves seriously so why should I?
That is Social Security.
Well….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fraser_Tytler
They are not quite sure where this comment came from originally. I guess it doesn’t matter. It is accurate.
but a man’s obligation to pay for the resultant child for two decades was of no consequence, since working in a capitalistic society is a privilege that men have (yeah… they actually think that).
Of course they think that – because of the apex fallacy. Most women think like that. They assume the workplace is basically just some sort of vacation for the average man, especially if he’s white. He can just choose from lots of cushy, well-paying jobs, because he’s a privileged asshat. At the workplace he basically doesn nothing of value. After all, that’s why the economy is in the shitter, don’t you know – white men ruin everything. He just does some BS on the computer or with his tools, scratches his balls, farts, watches porn on his computer, checks his Facebook page, drinks Coke, smokes, tells sexist and racist jokes with his equally shitty male co-workers, sexually harasses the women working in the office, maybe has his cock sucked by one of them. He then goes home, and at the end of the months he gets a nice, fat paycheck which he promptly spends on porn DVDs, strippers, beer, a new console, cable TV, a computer game, flashy clothes, a PUA seminar and car accessories. He’s just a gigantic dipshit.
A female poster on a religiously-themed website that I frequent recently suggested that the worst consequence that a man falsely accused of rape could face would be the “loss of a few friends.” Seriously.
They assume that because the workplace IS basically just some sort of vacation for the average woman. Doing “admin” work and worrying about keeping your desk neat, typing letters, doing HR generalist BS, its all just vacation for most women. And job where you don’t have to ‘think’ is pretty much a vacation. You show up on time, you punch in, you do your mundane tasks, you punch out. That feels like vacation.
hoellenhund2 @ 10:56 am:
“At the workplace he basically does nothing of value. … He just does some BS on the computer or with his tools, scratches his balls, farts, watches porn on his computer, checks his Facebook page, drinks Coke, smokes, tells sexist and racist jokes with his equally shitty male co-workers, sexually harasses the women working in the office, maybe has his cock sucked by one of them.”
I don’t smoke. 🙂
Lyn87:
Seconded to your comments. I am also falling firmly into the “I don’t believe rape accusations” camp. I’m there because it seems that these rape claims just don’t hang together even by a preponderance standard.
Every time you drill down deeper and ask the questions and find out what REALLY happened, it almost always comes back to one of the following: consensual sex, or her consent to sex while voluntarily intoxicated, or consensual sex later regretted for whatever reason, or a revenge accusation following a breakup or a pump and dump.
This idea that voluntary intoxication negates clearly given consent is pure bullshit. That line of thinking suggests that the slightest amount of intoxication prevents an individual from forming any judgments or making any decisions about anything. Now, granted, many times intoxicated people make POOR decisions, but we can’t keep people from making poor decisions. Instead, we simply impose upon them the consequences of their own poor decisions.
We hold people criminally responsible for all sorts of things they do while drunk or stoned – driving, using firearms, robbery, larceny, homicide. If it is the case that voluntary intoxication destroys the ability to determine a course of action and then follow it through, then the entire concept of “mens rea”, or the “guilty mind” necessary to form criminal intent, is now in question.
So I’m now at the point of “I don’t believe rape claims”.
Lyn87: “I have a suggestion: treat all Muslims as agents of a hostile foreign power… because that is what they are. Anyone who doesn’t understand that does not understand Islam.”
That’s what Americans used to say about Catholics. That we were all agents of the pope.
That’s also what some say about Jews. That they’re more loyal to Israel.
And it’s what they said about Germans, Italians, and Japanese during the previous world wars.
I thought we were past all that.
Here’s what I call Muslims in the United States: Fellow Americans.
“Its so off that I can’t help assume someone paid Emma Sulkowicz to create this drama”
It’s hard to relate to, but some people live for attention above all else. Like those women who poison their children to get sympathy, I think Emma S just wants people to fuss over her. Her “payment” is being invited to the State of the Union by a senator.
The “victims” in these national scandals have all, to a girl, been proven liars. Perhaps the feminist journalists writing these stories should do their due diligence before publication, and do it from an objective, rather than idealistically driven, frame of mind. There are real rape victims out there who deserve to have their stories told. Perhaps if these journalists weren’t so hell-bent on advancing their agenda, they might actually do some good.
Narrowly speaking, aren’t Catholics *supposed* to be agents of the Pope? 😉
“Remember that arguments about fairness won’t find much purchase, because the idea is that because men are the “oppressor” class, and women are the “oppressed class”, that it is not only okay to be “unfair” to the “oppressor” class, but it is morally mandatory”
This point can’t be made enough. Feminism is a mass conspiracy theory, no different than saying lizard-aliens from Alpha Centauri are secretly running the world at Area 51. Only by keeping this in mind does feminism make sense.
“Brad: The Roman Empire”
Wasn’t Rome’s republic followed by an emperor and Christianity, not a feminist cult? Women weren’t even full citizens in the empire.
deti,
Disciplinary committees at universities already know all of this. But they have been simering in the feminist imperative so knowing this does not change the fact that they still want to ACT. Because of the feminist imperative, an injustice was done. And they will act on it. But they are smart and they know that this particular injustice would NOT result in any kind of guilty verdict (for anything) in an actual court of law with government authority. So they encourage the girls to come to them and NEVER to the actual law enforcement who has jurisdictional authority because once she files criminal charges with the real police/DA, the university loses all power to negotiate on her behalf.
Think about it. If she goes to the school and says she was raped (but not the police) the school can send the “school police” to the boys room to pick him up and bring him before their committee. At this point, those simmering in feminist imperative and insist that the boy pay for “something”, they can give the lad a couple of options: sign this piece of paper here that you admit that you violated the girl and you will have to leave school at the end of the semister, but we will never tell your parents that you raped her. We’ll even get your transcripts together and help you transfer, the next school will never know what you did. OR, we’ll tell her to press charges with the police. Your choice.
He should pick door #2. Call their bluff. If he did exactly what this guy did at Columbia, he would not be convicted of anything (and probably not even charged by the DA.) But when you are a 19 year old boy who doesn’t want to explain to your parents (who are paying your tuition because they are still might be under the false belief that you are virginal and pure and their son of whom they are sooooooo proud) your mind is racing and you opt for #1. You think you are protecting yourself.
If she goes to the police first then the school CAN’T act. They can’t act because she had made this a criminal matter which means government is now stepping in to settle it. The university has no power to ACT on the feminist imperative. Think about it. If the school kicks the boy out AND the either the DA refuses to prosecute (as has happened with Jameis Winston since there was no rape) OR they prosecute and lose (the boy is found not guilty which is what will happen in an actual court of law where feminism will NOT hold up as justice) NOW the boy has a lawsuit against his former univeristy for wrongfully booting him out of school. And he’ll win big bucks.
So no, in these matters (where it is not really rape-rape) the school most certainly does NOT want the girl going to the police. Because at least one of us will be on the jury, we are good talkers, and he wont be convicted because there will have been no crime.
That said, if some boy kicks down the girls dorm-room door, throws her on the bed, rips her clothes off, and sodomizes her right in her own room (you know the rapes that never actually happen at school in the world of reality), not only will the school INSIST that she press rape charges, they will even offer to drive her to the hospital to collect evidence.
“I thought we were past all that”
Me too. Personally I’m a lot more worried about crazy white SJWs than Muslims.
I mean, have their been enough democracies in history so far that we can say what their life cycle is?
A modest proposal; an old solution to the “new” problem. The surest way to “outlaw” sexcrime – or sexthoughtcrime – is to go back to an earlier 20th century standard. To wit: outlaw all fornication on campus. That USED to be the rule. It sure was at Rutgers and other then all-male schools: if you were caught in the act, it was deemed moral turpitude, and you got expelled.
—————————————————————————————————————-
No. You have fallen into the trap so ably explained by Dalrock in his post above yours. This ‘solves’ nothing, since the feminists’ rationale has no moral basis; it is strictly to change the societal and legal system in the country conclusively against men, simply because they were born male. They are very happy to have the tradcons’ unwitting (or witting) assistance in this – this ‘solution’ would make this “untouchables class” arrangement permanent.
@questionassumptions
Not to put too fine a point on this because (you are right) it is fairly clear that “leftism” or “socialism” has indeed been the habitual partner to those sorts of evils. But really it’s not any “ism”, it’s simply a group seeking power convincing a sufficiently large enough batch of people that they are victims.
Once you are convinced that you are a victim, and by that I mean a blameless person who has been wholly victimized by some other party/person, you become essentially capable of justifying anything. Your critical thought is immediately suspended, and all actions are interpreted from the position of being someone who was (or is currently being) “wronged”.
It is being convinced of your own victimhood that is the true evil. It’s a base lie, and it is a perversion of the truth of your existence. The truth of your existence, of all our lives, is that life is unfair to everyone fairly equally. The wealthy suffer as they are chained to their wealth. The destitute have freedom the wealthy cannot imagine (only when we’ve lost everything are we free to do anything). Convincing someone of their victim status entirely removes responsibility and choice away from that person, turning them into a mindless baby/zealot bent on achieving recompense.
Never let yourself be convinced that you are a victim.
RPL,
If you understood Islam and its doctrines like I do – like I HAD to – you wouldn’t make the mistake you did. It may not be popular, but there are people within the government who understand the nature of the Islamic threat a LOT better than you do. I was one of them. Sadly, what we know is not well-received by the “tolerance” crowd, and I personally knew a guy pretty well (whose name I won’t give: he already has a price on his head) – who held a position in the Joint Intelligence community, who is now persona non grata in those same circles for what he said… and proved before Congress.
As Poke Salad said above, feminists don’t really want that. A policy like this would make women accountable as well. That is a non-starter. Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES should ANY public university EVER have the authority to throw a woman out of school for having consentual s-x with anyone. NOW would lawyer up and stop that policy immediately.
Moreover, I’m not sure a public university that gets state funds could have such a policy. Fornication is not a “crime.” Fornication is not something that government cares about, ’tis only a crime that God cares about. And (well) public universities and state governments do NOT defer to the KJB when setting up all their laws and regulations. That may have been a good policy at Rutgers back in the day, but there is really no chance that Rutgers could get away with enforcing that policy today.
Perhaps ugly feminists can’t get laid but for them to have any power, they have to get beautiful women to align themselves with them. Feminists understand that beautiful women who actually CAN get laid, like s-x. They want s-x. And feminists want women (who can get laid) to have as much s-x as they want provided the s-x is ALWAYS on her terms and she always feels like she is consenting. The moment she starts to feel the slightest regret/remorse, welp, that might be rape. So ACT!
@BradA
“What are the other examples of this? I can’t think of any “feminist” police states in history, but I may be overlooking something. Vox posited that aristocracy was next rather than the dictatorship that most claim follows. I am not sure those are mutually exclusive though, as a government could have strong elements of each. Curious for good thoughts on this.”
I think the traditional progression Aristocracy > Timocracy (rule by the landed) > Oligarchy (rule by the rich) > Democracy > Dictatorship > Aristocracy was laid out by Plato in “The Republic.” Its been a while since I read it but as I recalled he used recent examples in Greek city states to illustrate it. Its under Wikipedia as “Plato’s five regimes.” He claimed that each regime was the logical progression of the weaknesses of the one before.
Sir John Bagot Glubb outlined his lifecycle of civilization by breaking it up into “ages” rather than regimes, as he saw regimes themselves as merely the figureheads and inconsequential to the fundamental changes to a civilization. From his “The Fate of Empires” (a highly recommended and short read he says, “Today we attach immesne importance to the ideology of our internal politics… Past emipres show almost every possible variation of political system but all go through the same procedure from the Age of Pioneers through Conquest, Commerce, Affluence to decline and collapse.”
Glubb puts feminism under the section as describing one of the many signs of the decline and in his essay cites the fall of the Roman and Arab empires, “An increas in the influence of women in public life has often been associated with national decline. The later Romans complained that, although Rome ruled the world, women ruled Rome. In the tenth century, a similar tendency was observable in the Arab Empire, the women demanding admission to the professions hitherto monopolised by men. ‘What,’ wrote the contemporary historian, Ibn Bessam, ‘have the professions of clerk, tax-collector or preacher to do with women? There was an agitation for the appointment of female judges, which, however, does not appear to have succeeded. Soon after this period, government and pulbic order collapsed, and foreign invaders overan the country. The resulting increase in confusion and violence made it unsafe for women to move unescorted in the streets with the result that this feminist movement collapsed.”
I apologize for my long quotes but I feel I wouldn’t do the text justice with ommission. I’m not terribly familiar with the Arab empires but as I understand the Roman empire grew long in tooth it became increasingly more totalitarian of basic economic life and in Glubb’s citing of the Arab empire how it mandated a 5 day work week during its collapse is first evidence of me of 10th century Arab government micro management. (The collapsing Roman empire resorted to all kinds of draconian measures to maintain funding, which paved the way for European serfdom.)
Question: Drunk man, BAC of .17. Drunk woman, same BAC. Both are voluntarily intoxicated. They have consensual sex.
According to some people, the drunk man raped the drunk woman, even if she clearly conveyed words and conduct consistent with consent. I say it’s bogus.
Take the argument to its logical conclusion. If the man is drunk, he can’t have formed the requisite intent to do anything, much less commit a crime. He’s not liable for anything he does while voluntarily intoxicated.
Same argument. He gets drunk, has sex with her, then intentionally burns down her house with drunk woman in it. That’s arson and homicide; felony-murder. That’s death penalty. But wait — according to current logic, a voluntarily intoxicated man cannot form the requisite intent to commit crimes. He skates.
I look forward to Sharia Law being implemented. Hell, it’s a huge step up from the farce that passes for justice in the UK and US nowadays.
One last thing about Islam and then I’ll let it drop as being O/T unless others want to continue. I might as well say who my acquaintance is, since he’s not in hiding due to the threat to his life and family. His name is Stephen Coughlin. A number of his lectures are on-line for anyone who wants to learn more. He’s not some fringe dude with a sign on a street-corner, either. He was considered one of the Pentagon’s leading experts on the subject of Islamic Law (and its nexus with armed jihad). I knew him well enough that he gave me a draft copy of what was to become his first book to look over before it was published. Again, if you don’t think Muslims should be treated as agents of a hostile foreign power, you are simply demonstrating your ignorance of Islam.
I found Lyn87’s and thedeti’s comments about rape case juries to be deeply thought provoking …
Maybe a few years ago even after I was well into the red pill, I would still have given the prosecutor and the victim the benefit of the doubt. But not anymore. To get a guilty verdict out of me now, the case has to be made on the physical evidence with very little to no “he said/she said” involved. Length of time between occurrence and reporting to law enforcement will also play a part. Anything over 2 hours to contact LE after the victim is free to go is suspicious. Drunk sex or regret sex on a college campus? I’m sorry, she put herself there, not guilty.
@Real Peterman, I’m with you about the SJW’s.
Regarding the effective life of a republic, Benjamin Franklin is commonly quoted: “When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.” Seems to me that the effect Franklin spoke of is pushed by the presence of universal suffrage among men and then accelerated by female suffrage. The Founding Fathers restricted voting to men who owned property, and did not permit direct taxation. Both of those restrictions have long since been broken and the price for breaking them is coming due in this generation.
All regimes have a life cycle, not just democracies. “And this too shall pass away …”
The one regime that is meant to overcome the cycle is the overarching secular-intellectual “sect” founded by modern philosophy. Whether this will actually pan out remains to be seen, but it’s 500 years old and counting, which is not inconsiderable. But even within philosophic and intellectual modernity, it is understood and expected by its founders that individual regimes will still come and go.
Pre-modern political philosophy posits a more or less never-ending “cycle of regimes,” perhaps most clearly stated in Polybius (more of a historian than a philosopher, but he got the basic idea from Plato and Aristotle). Polybius wrote at the time of the 3rd Punic War (~150 BC), so he could reflect on the course Rome had already run up to that point. Yet it’s still amazing how well his script predicted what would happen to Rome in the subsequent 3-4 centuries.
In any event, to say what the cycle predicts next, one would have to first determine in what stage of the cycle America currently is in. In its purest form, the cycle goes like this:
Kingship=>tyranny=>aristocracy=>oligarchy=>democracy=>anarchy, then back to kingship.
In reality, regimes or nations are often conquered in the midst of their various turmoils before they can run the complete cycle. And, in practice, anarchy is usually very short-lived, if it happens at all, so as democracy devolves into license, the more typical step is to jump straight to “kingship.”
But even that requires qualification. Aristotle has very specific criteria for what constitutes genuine kingship. The one-man rule that typically follows late republican rot almost never lives up to those criteria. Hence the emergence of the phrase “Caesarism,” which arises from sort of a combination of political philosophy and historical hindsight. Caesarism is a tyranny in the strictest sense—unlawful or illegitimate usurpation of rule—but differs from tyranny in other decisive senses. The two most important are 1) it’s not necessarily cruel and oppressive rule. Julius and especially Augustus, for instance, were not cruel or oppressive. Augustus especially tended toward justice and mildness and was a very capable administrator. You do get Nero and Caligula, and later Severus and Caracalla, but on balance there were more good emperors than bad, and even some of the bad ones were skilled administrators. Point 2) is more important though, and it is that Caesarism is the NECESSARY, perhaps inevitable consequence of late republican or democratic rot, when the people can no longer govern and republican institutions no longer function, but there is still a common economy, infrastructure, administrative state, institutions, currency, and (to greater or lesser degrees) language and culture.
Compare, then, Rome and America to this template.
Rome: Founded by Romulus—heroic king
America: founded by heroic adventurers / settlers acting under charter from a legitimate king
Rome: early and middle kings (Numa, Tullus, etc.) do good things for the state
America: Benign neglect from Stuarts / first 2 Hannoverians
Rome: Late kings (Tarquins) become oppressive tyrants; forced out by aristocratic cabal
America: George III angers leading Americans over taxation and other issues; they stage Revolution
Rome: long period of rule by patricians, through Senate and Consulate
America: long period of rule by leading Americans in which divisions are mostly not class based but sectional and ideological
Rome: As aristocracy monopolizes power and wealth, people clamor for greater share in offices and spoils; gain it through massive agitation
America: after sectional crisis ends, oligarchic business class arises which rules confidently for a generation-and-a-half before succumbing to popular demands in Progressive and New Deal eras
Rome: People not happy with resolution of so-called “Conflict of the Orders”; populist leaders such as the Gracchi and Marius push state further and further in a leftward, populist direction
America: Period of “false calm” domestically during and after WW2; then “the ’60s” (plus the ’70s); social conventions smashed in the name of liberation of the people
Rome: Sulla’s reforms fail; Pompey, Caesar, further corrupt the state for their own ends; Pompey loses at Pharsalus on a fluke or bad advice, but that’s just a detail—the republic by then was dead; question was not how to avoid one-man rule; question was, Who will be that one man? Term could just as well “Pompeyism” or “Pompism”
America: ?????
We seem incapable of governing ourselves but the machinery keeps chugging along. We are in unprecedented times and the analogy with the past is never 1:1. We cannot rule out the possibility that our managerial elite know how to keep this going indefinitely. It seems fantastic, but who would have thought it would have lasted this long and survived so many crises?
Or it may inevitably fall and if it does, the theory+history, I would suggest, predict not a renewal of aristocracy but rather Caesarism.
On a final note, it matters who Caesar is. It’s not inevitable that, whoever he is, he must be part of the current ruling class. He could just as easily come from outside it. Pompey almost won, after all. Sulla DID win and then gave up power voluntarily because he (mistakenly) thought he had restored republican virtue. There was nothing inevitable about Caesar, though Caesarism itself was probably inevitable. Our “Caesar” could just as well be right-wing as left-wing, and just as likely from the “historic core” as from the “globalist elite” or the “fringe.”
“When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.”
This quote–most often attributed to Tocqueville, but sometimes to others of the Founding era–was in fact made up by some economic writer of the mid-20th century. That’s not the exact words, either.
In any event, Franklin didn’t say it. He did famously reply to a woman who asked him, on exiting Independence Hall just after they finished the Constitution, “Dr. Franklin, what kind of government have you give us?”
“A republic—if you can keep it.”
“A modest proposal; an old solution to the “new” problem. The surest way to “outlaw” sexcrime – or sexthoughtcrime – is to go back to an earlier 20th century standard. To wit: outlaw all fornication on campus. That USED to be the rule. It sure was at Rutgers and other then all-male schools: if you were caught in the act, it was deemed moral turpitude, and you got expelled.”
In loco parentis. A middle aged married couple needs to live in every dorm and every frat/sorority house and watch these kids like hawks. Curfews need to be strictly enforced. College is for studying, not sexing.
RA,
A courtroom is inherently red pill. A courtroom is where reality talks and bullsh-t walks. That is vitally important as it so clearly explains why so many rape “victims” refuse to press charges (the 1-in-5 narrative nonsense about rapes on campus.)
And why do I say that? It has always been hard (dare I say, almost impossible) for a DA to successfully prosecute a rape crime where the victim and the defendant knew each other. That is because it is extremely easy for the defense attorney (if he or she are competent) to cast the actual s-xual encounter as a mere case of “regret” and not “rape.” Remember, the defendant is not going to DENY that the s-x happened, ONLY that they both wanted it (at the time.) That is a pretty easy argument for a jury to buy, thus crushing many of these cases.
The only time these rape cases are easy to prosecute is when the defendant is denying that he and the victim actually had s-x. They are making an argument of mistaken identity, that no crime occurred, or an argument that the defendant was somewhere else when the crime occurred. In those cases then yes, of course, you might still give the prosecutor or the victim the benefit of the doubt.
That is why it has been so important as of late with this “yes-means-yes” crap in California that the victim not even be present when a university is judging a student-rapist based on her rape aligations. If she can’t be cross-examined (even if it is only a make-shift university court), then her credibility can’t be cross-examined which (again) tends to make a sympathetic school administrator or student immersed in the feminist imperative give her the benefit of the doubt (even in her annonimity.)
“Prostitution, aka contract sex, or celibacy are the only choices left. Even sex in marriage may lead to accusations of domestic violence, rape, divorce, property theft, and child kidnapping by the other parent.”
There’s no reason why couples can’t draw up a contract for sex. The BDSM crowd does this and it serves to establish clear consent, boundaries and expectations. As the relationship evolves new contracts can continue to be drawn up. This is probably the safest way to go in today’s climate. Some will say it takes away from the romance and spontaneity of natural relationships but the BDSMers claim such clear and open communications add spice and bring them closer.
Something to consider.
As far as pegging this is the first I’ve heard of it. Anal sex between heterosexuals is unsafe, unhealthy and just unnecessary. Buy stock in adult diapers today, make a fortune 10 years from now.
Lyn, I’m sure you can point to some bad Muslims. But there are, what? a BILLION Muslims in this world? How many are actively engaged in terrorism? It’s not 100 million (10%). It’s only a few percent. Maybe a fraction of a percent.
As for Sharia Law — I’m sure you can point to some ugly passages. But the same can be said of Levitical Law. (Indeed, stoning is popular under both laws.) But there are plenty of modern Muslims in this world, despite the media’s incessant cherry-picking of the worst news incidents.
That’s now media bias works. Bias isn’t about lying. It’s about cherry-picking the few soundbites — out of the millions of news incidents that occur around the globe every day — so as to create the illusion that your cherry-picked stories represent normalcy.
Shem,
I’m confused as to how you could know about the “ins-and-outs” of BDSM contracts (sorry, I couldn’t resist), but be completely ignorant of pegging.
Nonetheless, have any BDSM contracts ever been upheld in court? That’s the only thing that really matters, and I’m guessing the answer is, “No.”
“Exactly how to deal with false accusers. Sue them into oblivion. Wannabe victims will quickly learn, and stop the nonsense. Nothing makes a lying person humble more than a pending lawsuit against their lies.”
Is the man accused by Emily Sulkowicz doing this? Did the Duke Lacrosse boys do it? Has any falsely accused man done it? In law precedence need to be set.
“There’s no reason why couples can’t draw up a contract for sex. The BDSM crowd does this and it serves to establish clear consent, boundaries and expectations. As the relationship evolves new contracts can continue to be drawn up. This is probably the safest way to go in today’s climate.”
If prenups can be tossed aside with careless abandon when there’s cash and prizes to be grabbed, any such contract could too. You think someone who lies about rape won’t lie about the accused going off the boundaries of the contract?
And of course, you can’t possibly think the accuser’s been lying. “Stop analyzing the narrative! Listen and believe!” That’s how it works. When the word of the woman is to be believed above all, there is _no_ safeguard.
On a more general note, I bet ghosting doesn’t look so paranoid these days, does it?
RPL,
You are displaying your ignorance. I’m not going to debate with you until you can do so from a basis of expertise, or at least knowledge. In the real world, people live or die by the degree to which they understand an enemy’s doctrinal template. You do not understand the doctrinal template of Islam – not “Islamic terrorists” – but Islam itself. Islamic terror is not a perversion of Islam – it lies at the very root of Islam. The ones who are not violent (for now) are either 1) biding their time, 2) disobeying their prophet, or 3) not in position to do so yet. Part of the problem is that there’s no way to tell them apart until your head is on a spike.
Yes, you can sue these women for defamation. And by law, they should be found liable. But will the women on a jury agree? Will the White Knights on the jury agree?
A woman who made false accusations can start crying on the stand, talking about how she “felt” coerced, even if she wasn’t. How she sincerely and honestly believed she’d been raped, even if she now realizes that she wasn’t.
So, how will the women and White Knights on the jury react to a broken, humbled, tear-streaked defendant?
Same argument. He gets drunk, has sex with her, then intentionally burns down her house with drunk woman in it. That’s arson and homicide; felony-murder. That’s death penalty. But wait — according to current logic, a voluntarily intoxicated man cannot form the requisite intent to commit crimes. He skates.
Current jurisprudence and clinical practice guidelines in forensic psychology make a distinction between “consent” and “competent to stand trial” which, although I wish you were right doesn’t work in court.
When I conduct forensic evals, there is a very narrow lane of conditions that allow the person to argue this kind of thing.
Scott:
You’re exactly correct. The point I was trying to make was the absurdity of the position that a voluntarily intoxicated woman cannot give effective, valid consent to sex. If this is true — that a voluntarily intoxicated woman is unable to give effective, valid consent to sex; then it MUST also be true that a voluntarily intoxicated men is unable to form the requisite intent, the “mens rea”, to commit a crime.
The argument is that an intoxicated woman, even voluntarily intoxicated, is unable to process information, make sound judgments, and then determine a reasonable course of action. That just isn’t true, unless the woman drinks herself to unconsciousness. So it is with a voluntarily intoxicated man, and this is why said man is held criminally responsible for his illegal conduct while intoxicated.
What feminists really want is for women the have the rights of adults (men), while not being liable for the responsibilities that go with it. But authority and responsibilities go hand-in-hand. Of course if they came right out and said that they want women to have diminished responsibility (even less than we assign to children), that opens the question of why they ought to enjoy the rights of adults if they are able to shun the responsibilities of adults. Logically, we’d have to go back to the days when women were under the authority of men, either fathers or husbands, since somebody has to be responsible for their actions, and that person MUST have the authority to constrain them. Obviously that won’t do for rad-fems, so they have developed a way for women to temporarily render themselves immune from adult responsibilities at will: consume alcohol. Alcohol is the magic elixir that turns a strong, powerful, independent woman with adult rights into strong, powerful, independent woman who bears no more responsibility for her actions than a toddler (while retaining the rights, of course).
Obviously that doesn’t work for men, who are treated as adults when it comes to the consequences of their actions no matter what.
The argument is that an intoxicated woman, even voluntarily intoxicated, is unable to process information, make sound judgments, and then determine a reasonable course of action. That just isn’t true, unless the woman drinks herself to unconsciousness. So it is with a voluntarily intoxicated man, and this is why said man is held criminally responsible for his illegal conduct while intoxicated.
Another proof that feminism is nothing but a potent poison. A serious contaminant. There is nothing that feminism has touched that has not become corrupted. Nothing. Be it the Justice system, the education system, the family dynamics, social life, sports, games, workplace, the kids, women, beauty, sex, pregnancy, chastity, etc, etc.
Feminism is the most significant enemy of the human race, and it is no coincidence that the primary proponent of this demonically inspired ideology of feminism, are women. By their very nature, women are easily deceived. This has been shown throughout the ages.
Sometimes I look through the landscape of human history, and tell myself that it is simply too late for our civilization. When you have hordes of militant people, brainwashed by feminism, who actively keep advocating for their own demise, and label you an enemy for pointing out their errors, isn’t it too late?
But sometimes, the optimist in me says, well, there has always been the faithful few. That it was probably much worse during the days of Sodom, but humans survived. Maybe we’ll pull through this as well.
Is the man accused by Emily Sulkowicz doing this? Did the Duke Lacrosse boys do it? Has any falsely accused man done it? In law precedence need to be set.
The accused did not in the above cited cases. But Conor Oberst did against Joanie Faircloth.
The latter had accused the former, a musician, of raping her. Oberst promptly filed a libel lawsuit, prompting lying Joanie to retract her statements and tender a public apology. Mr. Oberst later dropped the lawsuit without prejudice, meaning he could bring charges in the future, if necessary.
When fighting an accusation as serious as rape, the accused must see it as a life or death situation, because it is. He must get the best lawyers to defend him, because once his reputation is stained, he probably can’t get it back.
@RPL
About your reference to Levitical Law as consonant with Islamic Law, perhaps. But you forget that Jesus gave us the new covenant that superseded the Mosaic Law and it is this covenant based on “love your neighbor as yourself”, not Mosaic Law, that forms the doctrinal basis of Christianity. Compare and contrast Jesus with Mohammed and ask yourself as a thought exercise if you could envision Mohammed preaching “love your neighbor as yourself”.
That said, yes there are a lot of peaceful-appearing Muslims around the world, I’ve even traveled extensively in some of those countries and I get what you are saying on the surface. But don’t be fooled. You’re not following Lyn87’s point: these “peaceful” Muslims are in direct conflict with the doctrinal basis of Islam while the “peaceful” Christians are not in a similar conflict with the doctrinal basis of Christianity. In the Middle East, those “peaceful” Muslims are not being left alone, they’re being forced to choose sides. Support jihad or be considered as bad as the apostates.
@IBB
Of course my “modest proposal” to “outlaw” campus canoodling is not meant to be for real: my point is that the logic of the SJW’s is headed that way. I am not so sure the hard-core feminists would object to “no sex please we’re collegiate.” Because the premise is that schools aren’t safe for women students and even a beta student’s weak approach means the woman must pay the “woman tax” to exert enough effort to reject it. Oppression! If all male-to-female contact is proscribed a la Bob Jones U., then it’s safe as houses.
And I know fornication is not a crime (nor do I advocate it be made criminal again). I know such a redonkulous rule will hardly stop hipp kidz getting jiggy: as Dalrock says, it will be the PUA’s who clean up and get all the action just like always. They will only be rarely be sent to Room 101 (unless they’re someone likely to be a famous and rich target like Jameis Winston). But recall that is the logic of the SJW: an expulsion for “sexual assault” is not criminal either. The expelled man can “just find another college” as was famously remarked. (Insert snort here).
Shem has my idea right: today, “in loco parentis” is the new social/sexual liberation.
XXX Church. Jesus loves porn stars too!
“You’re exactly correct. The point I was trying to make was the absurdity of the position that a voluntarily intoxicated woman cannot give effective, valid consent to sex.”
Depends on how intoxicated she is. They check alcohol levels like they do when you get pulled over for driving. Tipsy, buzzed doesn’t count as incapacitated. But neither Emily or her accused were drunk. The poor guy really is dumbfounded by this. If college kids are going to engage in sex, which I don’t think they should, they need to spell out clear boundaries ahead of time. Otherwise how the hell can they know who wants what where or not when nobody speaks out and communication isn’t taking place?
Thanks RA, but you could have gone even further. There is no valid comparison between Levitical Law and Islamic Law. One was directed by God and one is a counterfeit directed by the demon(s) that dictated the Qur’an to Muhammad. The fact that portions of the Qur’an bear a passing resemblance to portions of the OT says nothing bad about either Christianity or the Bible. Indeed, imitation is the highest form of flattery, and even Satan knows he has to create a convincing counterfeit that bears at least some resemblance to the original.
You are certainly correct that “peaceful” Muslims are being pressured to choose sides in a lot of majority-Muslim countries. I’ve studied this professionally for a long time (American lives depended on it, albeit indirectly), so I have few of the illusions that plague people who get their information from media pundits, politicians, and the “can’t we all just get along” crowd that insists on suspending judgement… until they find a duffel bag full of heads.
When I used the term “doctrinal template” I was doing so in the sense of military doctrine. The main goal of military intelligence is to understand how the enemy intends to operate so you can counter it. The Qur’an is the “capstone doctrinal statement” of Islam, and outlines its strategic goals and, to a degree, how Muslims are to accomplish them. People are often surprised at how easy it is to anticipate the strategy of Jihadi’s just by understanding such things as the Doctrines of Abrogation, Tawriya, and Jihad, or to understand their seemingly counter-intuitive actions in retrospect once they have that knowledge. The hard challenge is turning knowledge of their strategy into actionable tactical intelligence. But there is no doubt that jihadists are following their “playbook” to the letter. They have to: they consider it to be a religious obligation.
“I’m confused as to how you could know about the “ins-and-outs” of BDSM contracts (sorry, I couldn’t resist), but be completely ignorant of pegging.
Nonetheless, have any BDSM contracts ever been upheld in court? That’s the only thing that really matters, and I’m guessing the answer is, “No.””
Yes I’ve read cases where they were. I don’t really know all the ins and outs just what I’ve read and picked up in conversations here and there. I’ve heard of butt plugs but didn’t know the practice was called “pegging” and that its being promoted by feminists for either gender. Its unhealthy. This whole fascination with the pooper is unhealthy. Where is this mainstreaming of anal sex traced to? We know homosexual men have been doing that for eons but how did it make its way to mainstream heterosexuals? With such activity being made normal I wholeheartedly support sexual contracts for the married and unmarried alike. Who knows what one’s spouse is going to expect 5 or 10 years down the line?
Shem asks,
“If college kids are going to engage in sex, which I don’t think they should, they need to spell out clear boundaries ahead of time. Otherwise how the hell can they know who wants what where or not when nobody speaks out and communication isn’t taking place?”
I agree, and that’s great as far as it goes, but the feminists want to go far beyond that. They want women to be able to declare a lack of consent retroactively. It doesn’t matter if she stripped naked and was screaming, “F*** ME! F*** ME! F*** ME! Harder! Faster! F*** ME! F*** ME!” loud enough to wake the dead – if she feels bad about it later (because her boyfriend found out, or the guy broke up with her, or she sobered up a bit, to use three real-world examples), then she gets to “feel” raped. Personally, I couldn’t care less if some slag feels bad about her slutty behavior… in fact, she should feel bad about it. What I object to is the idea that she should be taken seriously, or that her widdle fee-fees are more important than the facts of what happened, or that her neuroses are sufficient to call down punishment on a man.
If college kids are going to engage in sex, which I don’t think they should, they need to spell out clear boundaries ahead of time.
Don’t be fooled by the feminist narrative. Virtually none of these kids was ignorant of what was coming down when they got together to have sex or hook up. They knew how to communicate their desires so clearly it will make grandmas everywhere blush. Most often, the girl may regret her decision to give it up so easily, particularly, when the guy subsequently treats her nonchalantly, and di not see any big deal in the sex that they had. In her confusion and shame, she turned to the web/friends/other who are already tainted by the feminist ideas. These are the people who then convince her that she was indeed raped, her consent notwithstanding. In fact, even if she enthusiastically gave consent for sex, but in her thoughts she was saying “No”, but never communicated it to her partner, it is still considered rape. At least, RAINN says so on its website.
“I thought “no,” but didn’t say it. Is it still rape?
It depends on the circumstances. If you didn’t say no because you were legitimately scared for your life or safety, then it would likely be considered rape. Sometimes it isn’t safe to resist, physically or verbally — for example, when someone has a knife or gun to your head, or threatens you or your family if you say anything.
https://www.rainn.org/get-information/types-of-sexual-assault/was-it-rape
“one is a counterfeit directed by the demon(s) that dictated the Qur’an to Muhammad”
Actually there’s a pretty good case that Muhammad never existed (according to “Did Muhammad Exist?”, a pretty interesting book). One theory is that Islam grew out of rejected Christian texts dubbed as heretical as the doctrine solidified (primarily that Jesus was not God but God’s prophet, I think). A group of theologians who held to those ideas left the Christian areas and headed in the general direction of where Islam ended up starting from, and there’s not a lot of evidence in the Quran itself that Muhammad was intended to be a person’s name (it’s more of a title). The theory goes that Muhammad (I think it means “messenger,” if I recall correctly) was originally referring to Jesus. The Quran frequently says people should be like him, but says very little about him, perhaps because the texts originally were linked to the NT where Christ was already described.
The biographical details were all filled in long after his supposed death by people who were already accustomed to putting words in “Muhammad”‘s mouth. The hadiths, as they’re called, are completely untrustworthy collections of random anecdotes. Every petty ruler claimed that “Muhammad totally loved my grandpa and hated so-and-so’s family,” “Muhammad said that people who do what my rival is doing are evil,” etc., and the hadiths are full of these stories, none of which are sourced with any credibility, and all of which started being told something like 60-100 years after Muhammad’s supposed death.
I always feel a bit sad when people talk about how Muhammad sucked; sure he did, if he was even real. But there’s not really much evidence for that. There are also major historical inaccuracies in his bio, such as that Mecca was a big trading outpost, which there’s no evidence for and doesn’t make a lot of geographical sense. Basically everything people “know” about Muhammad comes from outside the Quran, despite it supposedly being God’s complete and perfect word.
” If you didn’t say no because you were legitimately scared for your life or safety, then it would likely be considered rape. Sometimes it isn’t safe to resist, physically or verbally — for example, when someone has a knife or gun to your head, or threatens you or your family if you say anything. ”
What’s not to agree with this?
The essence of the statement is that it is the woman who determines if rape has occurred, facts are not necessary. Sometimes, her “attacker” does not even exist.
My junior year at University, what was being handed out by members of the football team were “s-xual permission slips” where you get the girl to sign before you have s-x (to protect yourself against her false allegations, later.) That was somewhat newsworthy in the very early 1990s. NOW came down on this very hard with extreme prejudice. And their argument against it? She could just say he forced her to sign it against her will and then raped her anyway. They would insist that these slips be thrown out as they are nothing but circumstancial evidence.
Spelling out clear boundaries in this matter does (basically) zero. It does that because in manners of s-x, all things (rape vs consent) eventually boil down to “he-said, she-said.” That is it. And it becomes entirely subjective, who do you believe? We are where we are in this manner because marriage (from a your-body-is-my-property standpoint vs consent standpoint) means NOTHING in the legal sense. It has been degraded to zero and in doing so, leaves us all in the area of pure subjectivity.
“We are where we are in this manner because marriage (from a your-body-is-my-property standpoint vs consent standpoint) means NOTHING in the legal sense. ”
Why should it? Someone should be legally allowed to peg me with a dildo just because she’s my wife and my body is her property and she watched some BDSM video 5 years into our marriage and wanted to try something new?
@Lyn87
How would you feel about military style courts to try cases generally in America? I’ve little to no faith in the jury system. The Grand Jury portion is also ridiculous. My father has been before two, and he says they would convict a ham sandwich if they could.
You are entirely correct about orthodox Islam. Heterodox Islam (i.e. that in Indonesia or sub-saharan Africa prior to modern media and communication) was much more tolerant… because it was mixed with various native religions. That is why the Islamic Jihadists in Mali first blew up the mosques and ancient libraries in Timbuktu. They were too tolerant.
I read the Koran through after receiving a marriage proposal from an orthodox Muslim, and frankly the prophet seemed quite unhinged. That combined with the clearly heterodox presentation of Jewish and Christian beliefs made it clear that it was entirely wrong. Hillaire Belloc has an interesting theory that Islam is simply Christian heresy as the “denial of the Incarnation and all the sacramental life of the Church that followed from it”—with Islam regarding Jesus as a merely human Prophet. Thus the entire cannon can be seen as springing from the starting point that god could never also have a human nature, which was an incredibly common heresy in 7th century Arabia.
Muslims call themselves “pure monotheists”. So do Jews. Arabs should have just converted to Judaism instead of Islam back then.
@Lyn87
The feelings are precisely the problem. I personally don’t care that a girl felt violated after regretting her behavior. Of course, having been in the position of being violated myself I am very, very intolerant of what I consider things that are no big deal. Someone fondled you? Suck it up. Someone restrained you to kiss you? Suck it up. Someone hit you, then forced you, and you have the bloody clothes to prove it? Go to the police.
Granted, the police frequently aren’t all that helpful. I had the bloody clothes etc. but unfortunately was forced to shower etc. so there was little to no DNA evidence to prove anything. I had conversations with lawyers, police, etc. about pressing charges, but they said that without DNA evidence they could not hold him and my life would be in danger, as he knew where I lived and had borderline. He has since done the same thing to 3 other women that I know of, but nothing has been done. I think that the police in my area are either particularly incompetent, overworked, or deluged with false claims due to feminist idiocy.
Isa,
I’m not an expert on the military court system. Unless one is a military lawyer, you don’t get be my rank if you deal with them very much. 😉
From what I understand they may be an improvement over the civilian system, if only for the overall quality of the “jurors.” Having said that, I’m still wedded to the idea of a jury of one’s peers, which is one of the hallmarks of the civilian system. I just wish they actually meant it. Having seen it in action up close as a juror, I would be terrified to be judged by the average civilian juror – they are NOT my peers in any way that matters.
Isa @ 6:22 pm:
“How would you feel about military style courts to try cases generally in America? I’ve little to no faith in the jury system.”
After Obama’s purges, my own feelings are pretty negative. The fact that feminists/Elites try so hard to circumvent our current justice system is itself a very good argument to keep it in place.
I notice most false rape accusations are actually handled outside the criminal courts. Still damaging, of course.
Now an alleged male victim is coming out against Nungesser.
” Jezebel has spoken with three students who accuse Nungesser of sexual assault—one of whom, a male classmate, is currently in the process of pursuing disciplinary action through Columbia and has never previously spoken publicly about his allegations.”
Nungesser was found responsible for another alleged victim’s assault.
“He’d earlier been found “responsible” for another sexual assault, but had appealed and won after the woman grew tired of fighting the proceedings.”
It’s possible this guy has committed sexual assaults. The best way to deal with this is through courts not college boards. Sulkowicz’s mattress performance art was a protest of the way college’s deal with sexual assault. It’s not the place of colleges to deal with them at all. It’s the place of our legal system and this is where these women, and the male victim, need to go.
thedeti,
The Roman Empire.
I don’t think Julius Caeser was a feminist.
Also note (as mentioned earlier) that Rome was a republic prior to that point, not a democracy. Very few examples of a democracy in history.
Interesting in light of the previous post: News article trumpeting “Settle, because Science!”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2943036/Why-SHOULDN-T-wait-perfect-partner-Scientists-say-settling-Mr-Right-better-waiting-Mr-Right.html
You know, black people reacted to white people’s acceptance of them by becoming more and more unacceptable. It looks like women are reacting to male people’s acceptance of their claims by being more and more hysterical.
It’s like they both can’t imagine living without tension.
Pingback: MEN AND CAMPUS RAPE: Guilty Until Proven Innocent, And Nothing Proves You Innocent…. | CRAGIN MEDIA
“Study says our nature has evolved to take safe bet in relationships
This risk-aversion behaviour has helped the human race to survive
Research used a simulation to model best outcome over generations
They found in a small community, it’s wise for people to settle early
But they say evolution doesn’t prefer a single way of dealing with risk”
I agree with all of it. Besides, there’s always someone hotter or richer. We need to take the best of who we can reasonably get.
Look this will be sued out of existence as falsely accused men sue the colleges. I would think it would happen faster as I have stopped all alumni charity to my Alma Mata and they know why. Mine was not that significant but I would sure think a few big donors quitting would stop this nonsense. That’s two big cost centers for libe…leftist indoctrination.
Next, just don’t send men to get BAs from any college that practices guilty until impossibly proven innocent. Send your sons to a college with a BS emphasis. Get a technical degree or go to a technical college/school if you are a male.
The above will take time but will kill upper educati…indoctrination.
@Lyn87
> [send feminists away] It’s a win-win.
That’s a great idea! I’m sure some party-pooper will complain about the evils of forced-relocation however… 🙂
I’ve been jokingly commenting that we’ll soon see the call for campus sexcapades to be filmed by a university approved adjudicator. Sounding more and more like just a good idea.
Gray’s chart redrawn. No messy lines. No pretense of Y/N decision trees. Just a simple two-step process:
STEP 1. THE ACCUSED IS GUILTY.
STEP 2: REFER TO STEP 1.
The astute among us will note that even further simplication is possible.
But of course the flowchart actually drawn could not be this simple because it’s – well – complicated. Because.
Is it just me, or does that chart bear an uncanny resemblence to those convoluted little habitrail tubes we build for hamsters?
It’s the Salem Rapist Trials! Burn!
“You know, black people reacted to white people’s acceptance of them by becoming more and more unacceptable. It looks like women are reacting to male people’s acceptance of their claims by being more and more hysterical.
It’s like they both can’t imagine living without tension.”
Maybe that’s why white women find black men so sexually desirable?
How to deal with boyfriend’s porn addiction
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=945577
Is my son too young to talk about the priesthood
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=945589
Yesterday, 6:28 am
Burt Macklin Burt Macklin is offline
Regular Member
Join Date: June 17, 2013
Posts: 562
Religion: Catholic
Default Re: How to deal with boyfriend’s porn addiction
You deal with it by making him your ex-boyfriend. Then you thank God you found out while there was still a chance to escape.
Seriously, don’t ever believe you can change anyone. What you see is what you get.
Scientists say settling for ‘Mr Right Now’ is better than waiting for ‘Mr Right’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2943036/Why-SHOULDN-T-wait-perfect-partner-Scientists-say-settling-Mr-Right-better-waiting-Mr-Right.html
@Shem
A rather different response from the opposite situation (girlfriend with porn addiction).
Also, quite different from similar situations (e.g. “girlfriend’s a non-virgin” – “she can change and be better, everyone can”). Actually, it’s quite the juxtaposition – CAF enforces the choices that Catholics are allowed to make vis-a-vis the selection of their marriage partner, but only for women. Men are belittled if they approach that territory.
There are two responses here:
1. Sue everyone.
2. Let them know your estate will continue to collect damages from their social security checks.
A female poster on a religiously-themed website that I frequent recently suggested that the worst consequence that a man falsely accused of rape could face would be the “loss of a few friends.” Seriously.
That’s to be expected. Again, apex fallacy. Consider what the average woman thinks of the high-status man i.e. the only type of man she actually notices. She thinks he’s a horribly entitled asshole who rapes women all the time – that is, he commits “rape” according to the current legal definition of the word – and gets high-fives from his similarly horrible dudebros for doing so. His employers and co-workers all cheer him on because they’re all entitled asshole white males just like he is. They have sooo much privilege, society practically sucks their cocks all the time. Only a handful of his male friends are decent, feminist men who realize that rape is a terrible crime.
nnocentbystanderboston says:
February 10, 2015 at 6:05 pm
“My junior year at University, what was being handed out by members of the football team were “s-xual permission slips” where you get the girl to sign before you have s-x (to protect yourself against her false allegations, later.) That was somewhat newsworthy in the very early 1990s. NOW came down on this very hard with extreme prejudice. And their argument against it? She could just say he forced her to sign it against her will and then raped her anyway. They would insist that these slips be thrown out as they are nothing but circumstancial evidence.”
Easily countered. Just have the filled-out slip (pre-sex) be placed in the care of someone relatively impeccable in court, with both the guy and the chick present, clearly not under duress.
Shem says:
February 11, 2015 at 1:08 am
“Default Re: How to deal with boyfriend’s porn addiction
You deal with it by making him your ex-boyfriend. Then you thank God you found out while there was still a chance to escape.”
Or, you screw and blow him enough times a day, every day, that he doesn’t need it. Few guys with that on tap are going to much care about porn, instead using offtime on other things.
They assume that because the workplace IS basically just some sort of vacation for the average woman. Doing “admin” work and worrying about keeping your desk neat, typing letters, doing HR generalist BS, its all just vacation for most women. And job where you don’t have to ‘think’ is pretty much a vacation.
No! Just NO! How DARE you say something like that!
The average woman is convinced that the workplace is horrible drudgery for average women like her, full of difficulties. Her appearance must be appropriate yet not slutty, whereas her male co-workers can afford to look like sleazebags! So unfair! She has to put of with sexual harassment from fat, creepy porn addicts in the office! Plus her asshole boss discriminates against her while favoring asshole white men like himself, so she has to do twice the work in order to get the same salary and respect! So she must never screw up! Typing letters, administrating stuff, doing HR – do you think it’s easy?! Plus if she decides to have a baby, she’ll be laid off and never given another good job in her life!
@seriouslyserving,
While it is a reasonable precaution to avoid being alone in a room with a member of the opposite sex, it is not a sufficient condition, as men who have never even met their accusers get accused.
There is also the problems of those, like cab drivers, who’s job may require it (thus the number of cab companies adding to the expense of a fair due to having to install cameras to prevent the problem of false accusations, among others).
Luke: Have I got the system for -you-.
‘Or, you screw and blow him enough times a day, every day, that he doesn’t need it. Few guys with that on tap are going to much care about porn, instead using offtime on other things.
If she is the religious type that sort of behavior is saved for marriage. And if a guy doesn’t have some semblance of self-control he isn’t good marriage material.
Easily countered. Just have the filled-out slip (pre-sex) be placed in the care of someone relatively impeccable in court, with both the guy and the chick present, clearly not under duress.
That can be countered in court by saying that the witness was biased, and so on. Video is the one thing that is most convincing to a judge and jury, for obvious reasons, but it’s also mostly illegal (at least it is in many states to do so without permission), and so it isn’t going to be admitted as evidence in court. So it’s a he said, she said kind of thing most of the time. And most of the time that does not result in convictions (hard to rise above standard of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt when it’s just he said/she said), which is why the feminists want to change the burden of proof.
Current rape law works, more or less, in terms of having a high bar for conviction (campus rules obviously are kangaroo court, and not subject to any of the same protections or standards). That’s why they want them changed, and are using the campus rules as the first inroads towards that.
Plus, as I and others expected/predicted, many campuses have already outlawed such tapings or made them against the code of conduct, penalty expulsion; and also made them inadmissible in campus rape tribunals. This will continue, and accelerate, if more men actually do start taping themselves and (especially) using such tapes as a defense in these trials. That can’t be allowed! So this will become illegal everywhere.
Right.
In sum, it’s all designed to place 100% burden on the male in the situation.
When we criticize it by saying it requires a blow-by-blow, step-by-step verbal question and ask (which is what the rules themselves suggest), the response is “no, no, you’re supposed to understand when she means yes, even if she doesn’t say it every step of the way”. Well, that comes down to being a mind-reader (ofc doesn’t work) or, rather more pointedly, making consent always revocable after the fact at the option of the woman. Because if the guy gets it wrong, even if she never actually says no or resists or anything like that, she can always say that her initial consent was not continued, and he didn’t solicit the continued consent, so it was rape.
And that’s exactly where they want it — maximum optionality for women, which empowers them. While for men, they are caught between running the risk that they have “gotten it wrong”, even though she doesn’t actually say no or resist, on the one hand, and being a dweeb and actually asking for verbal consent every step of the way (which the advocates themselves seem to think is dweeby).
In short, it’s a set up. And it’s intended to be a set up. It isn’t about preventing rape or sexual assault. It’s about shifting power to women, full stop.
But, seriously, will western men continue to allow the women to dictate the terms of the game? Will they continue to play catch up all the time? As it is now, the feminists (aka western women) come up with some silly “crusade” (e.g. campus rape culture, workplace harassment, domestic violence “epidemic”, etc), and all that men do is play catch up, and react. How long is that going to last? When will men begin to be proactive, rather than being reactive?
But, seriously, will western men continue to allow the women to dictate the terms of the game? Will they continue to play catch up all the time? As it is now, the feminists (aka western women) come up with some silly “crusade” (e.g. campus rape culture, workplace harassment, domestic violence “epidemic”, etc), and all that men do is play catch up, and react. How long is that going to last? When will men begin to be proactive, rather than being reactive?
Which men?
That’s the issue.
The men in power have no incentive to change things. Why? Votes. Female votes.
The men underneath mostly are not motivated or organized, or motivated to organize or be organized, to do much, by their nature (they are not the leaders — that’s why they are underneath to begin with).
This is what happens when the leadership goes corrupt.
That’s true, but I’d say she’s right to be wary of this particular guy. She didn’t just find porn on his computer, which could be chalked up to a release that he won’t want once she’s taking care of him. But he called himself a “porn addict,” which signals a victimology attitude and implies that he sees it as a part of him. His confessing this to her voluntarily is a warning that he doesn’t see it as temporary, but as something that he (and she, if she marries him) will be dealing with for the foreseeable future, with the setbacks and struggles that implies.
I think the stereotype of the hot wife weeping alone in her new lingerie while her husband watches porn instead is vastly overplayed; but if such men exist, this guy could be a good candidate.
Or, you screw and blow him enough times a day, every day, that he doesn’t need it. Few guys with that on tap are going to much care about porn, instead using offtime on other things.
Those who would claim this know very little about porn. Yes, it is easier to avoid when the sex is regular, but the pull remains, no matter the amount of sex. Also remember that porn deals in the mind, not reality. Reality can never completely overcome mental addictions.
@Cali – I agree. I think the whole idea of “porn” addiction is usually the result of a frigid wife seeing the browsing history of their husbands computer. The “addiction” excuse is just to save the marriage to a sexless woman.
Nevertheless, internet pornography can lead to the dangerous rewiring of the brain’s pleasure centers. My solution is then to make only pornography legal with “ugly” or “obese” actors/actresses. This rule would lead the youth channel their pursuits to healthier ends.
think the stereotype of the hot wife weeping alone in her new lingerie while her husband watches porn instead is vastly overplayed; but if such men exist, this guy could be a good candidate.
We had a lieutenant in my first unit like this, except it was World of Warcraft and not porn. I know some girls who are so into female erotica that they can’t respond to normal intercourse anymore, and they label it a sexuality, rather than a dysfunction. This addiction to virtual fantasy worlds seems to be a growing problem in my generation. I don’t know if it’s intrinsically linked to pornography or not, but it is an unfortunately real phenomenon.
How long is that going to last? When will men begin to be proactive, rather than being reactive?
It’ll last as long as there’s no net benefit to being proactive.
“ But, seriously, will western men continue to allow the women to dictate the terms of the game? Will they continue to play catch up all the time? As it is now, the feminists (aka western women) come up with some silly “crusade” (e.g. campus rape culture, workplace harassment, domestic violence “epidemic”, etc), and all that men do is play catch up, and react. How long is that going to last? When will men begin to be proactive, rather than being reactive?”
In addition to what Nova said, it’s not only “which men”, it’s “what do you mean by “proactive” and “reactive”?
Most of the nonleaders are both proactive and reactive by simply withdrawing and walking away. That’s the only thing they can do in the current situation. For many, it’s the only way they can take control of their own lives and situations, so it’s “proactive” in a sense. Men aren’t going to organize for “men”. They take action for themselves, because they know the only real control they have is over their own lives.
How so? Does ejaculating mess up with your brain’s pleasure centers?
All porn does, and this is the problem Churches and society have against it beside the porn being sexual sin. It gives men a viable alternative for sexual release instead of marriage to a woman. It also does so without making the man work harder for longer. In other words, it gives him what he requires sexually without having to work for it.
It does not rewire a man’s brain at all, it has no chemical enhancement to talk about, it is not a drug. No matter how much those above wish it were so. It merely takes away from Womens’ power over men in the field of sexuality.
There are scientific studies which claim to show how porn “rewires” the brain. There is also the testimony of thousands, if not millions, of men who describe how porn has affected their lives. There are whole forums dedicated to this, with thousands of pages of testimony and conversation. None of this I suppose is “proof” but it is at least evidence that something–something bad–is going on.
“Re-wire” may be a bit of a scare term, since the effect does not appear to be permanent. Men with this problem generally report that quitting cold turkey with a 90 day “detox” period “re-sets” their brains and their libidos back to normal.
This appears to be yet another example of how some in the ‘sphere insist on attributing everything bad in the world to the perfidy of women. Even when it seems rather obvious on the surface that trend X or Y is male driven—no, there must be some female vice underneath that really drives men to it. Are we men the ones who truly have “no moral agency”?
The Occam’s Razor explanation for the popularity of porn is very simple. Men have the higher sex drive, and the overwhelmingly greater desire for variety. Porn is like putting an endless buffet in front of a glutton. Everybody likes to eat by nature. We can learn to control that desire, or not. If we can’t, there are consequences (obesity, disease and so on).
Similarly, men want sex by nature and they want variety by nature. That desire used to be easier to control simply because it was so much harder to indulge. Porn makes it very easy to indulge, endlessly. So a much higher portion of men do indulge.
No doubt there are men driven to it by frigid or otherwise uninterested wives. But to say that this is the primary of even sole cause of the popularity of porn is absurd.
Pretty much.
And in that sense, the poor, hapless, betamales, who work (legally) all day and surf pron all night, society doesn’t really care. That is because women don’t really care about them beyond having them pay taxes. So, run to your man cave little boys, whip out your lubricants and rub it into your hands, and surf free hi-definition pron. It keeps them from breaking the law, harming anyone in anyway, and best of all, women don’t have to see these guys in public. In this case, the system is working as designed. It’s a win-win…..
….UNTIL enough time passes and feminist women (who desire marriage for resources/provisioning) realize that they VASTLY outnumber the number of willing alphas (whom they are interested in) who DO create surplus wealth AND are willing to sign up for marriage 2.0. Now the system isn’t working. The marital imbalance creates a huge power shift (to men, even beta men) and this simply WILL. NOT. DO. With these never-married-numbers, we may not be at that point yet, but we are approaching it.
Churchianity can see the writing on the wall here and knows that we are quickly approaching this point of great marital unbalance. Power has been shifting (away from women to men) who are willing and able to marry, for years. I was engaged to 3 women and (I suppose) before I had married, I could have made that engagement number 30 women or more if I really wanted to. I had the power. And really what this power shift is doing is turning more and more beta men (“on the bubble” from a college hoops tournament standpoint) not quite into alphas, but into something else. These beta-bux men have stronger bargaining power with women in their willingness to sign up for marriage 2.0. and thus, cut their accumulated resources in half. They may or may not know the power they have but they do have it. They have it because (as fh state) they don’t HAVE to marry for s-xual release, just surf pron.
Obviously, the only way to shift power back to women and feminism is to criminalize pron in someway or (if failing that) have it designed in such a way that there were NOT literally millions and millions of hi-def streaming videos for free. If they can’t do that then churchianity/government/media/even-Hollywood has to step in and SHAME men AWAY from what they are doing. I mean, Michael Fassbender starred in a movie with Carey Mulligan 4 years ago titled “SHAME” defining what society is trying to do to men who opt this pron-over-marriage route.
I wouldn’t use the word “rewiring,” but in my experience and from what I’ve read, it does tend to desensitize a man to normal female nudity and ordinary sex. It’s easier to get it up for an average-looking woman if you haven’t been spanking it to porn daily for the past few months.
Now, a normal man will still prefer real sex to fake, so when he gets married, he’ll forget the porn and have real sex. He may cut back just from dating a woman, because he’ll be excited about her and won’t be thinking about other women and feeling desperate. Once married, he may occasionally wish his wife were as sexy or talented as the girls he saw on the screen, but it won’t keep him from getting hard for her.
However, a man who announces a “porn addiction” is another matter, because he’s saying he doesn’t know if he can give it up, even if there’s a woman right there willing to have sex with him. That’s something else, not just a guy letting off pressure. I wouldn’t blame a woman for not wanting to sign up for that action, any more than I’d tell a man to marry a fat woman and assume she’ll be able to slim down.
In general, when someone says, “I have this problem that’s bad enough that I feel obligated to tell you about it before we move forward even though it might make you dump me,” it’s a good idea to take that seriously.
Nevertheless, internet pornography can lead to the dangerous rewiring of the brain’s pleasure centers.
This is true, but not surprising. The truth is, every activity you repeatedly engage in, and which brings you some pleasure or pain, over time, will rewire your brain somehow. That is how a habit is formed, and skills learned. There are many folks here whose brains have been rewired through their regular visits to this website. Not saying that is a bad thing though.
Re: Porn and anal sex:
Everyone’s correct here, to a degree. There’s lots and lots of evidence that porn is doing something to its users and it appears to be something of a Pavlovian response. And a big, big part of this is its ubiquity – videos streamed to phones, available free 24/7/365.
What’s driving anal sex is pretty much everything – its increasing depiction in porn, and women offering it to outslut each other for the top men.
Esco, I remember that discussion at the old place about the medical implications of women engaging in anal sex. I also remember in that same discussion and at that same place one of the past and current female commenters discussing, in quite vivid detail, how to have anal sex. This commenter was quite the size queen as well. Par for the course, really.
It has started…..
lA shape of things to come
This 52-year-old mother of four is sooooooo hawt she has turned down 14 marriage proposals!
How do you get a hamster to work so hard for so long? It must be illegal to give so much steroid to an animal!
I have a list of 25 essential requirements, 19 desirable qualities and four ‘can’t stand’ elements….
At age 52…and after four kids. O my.
Sue the Bit** isn’t going to work . . . the accuser doesn’t usually have $$. A legal defense fund might help but I am doubtful.
Sue the Bit** isn’t going to work . . . the accuser doesn’t usually have $$.
The purpose of the lawsuit is not to get money, but to force the accuser to publicly own up to being a liar, and serve as a cautionary tale to other wannabe victims.
Nonetheless, if she is to be believed, she has gotten 14 proposals. What does that say about men?
I like how she claims Christianity forbids her from having extramarital sex. But not from divorce!
FWIW, I only stated “rewiring the brain” in a general sense. I’m entirely agnostic on the neurological effects of internet pornography. Also, I never said the main drivers of pornography were the married men of frigid women. But, I do think those who cry sexual/pornography addiction are from those who get caught.
Reality is twisted. Confessed “porn addicts” are a fount of empathy for some women, especially so in the evangelical female cohort. Therefore, there are men populating every derivative of Celebrate Recovery at local churches because its like a more intense singles group and the
harder they confess to something like porn or sex addiction, or some non-substance related addiction the more Lift feedback they get. Many a marriage of planned obsolescence started with a powerfully moving confession of zee porn addiction
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the harder they confess to something like porn or sex addiction, or some non-substance related addiction the more Lift feedback they get. Many a marriage of planned obsolescence started with a powerfully moving confession of zee porn addiction
More proof that women often choose men they feel they can fix (another form of control).
What is being said of rewiring of the brain is actually the brain’s adaption to the work/pleasure/reward system that humanity functions on. It’s not that the man’s brain is being rewired, it’s simply that he has now found a substitute, a short-cut, that gives him the same reward/pleasure for less work.
The danger would be the same as if man found a way to make food abundant and thus never needed to farm again; and thus humanity forgets how to farm. When the abundant food making suddenly stops, humanity would have a ‘culture shock’ and people would die due to starvation.
Linking that idea to sex and porn, with porn being so abundant, men and women would forget how to socialise with each other, they would forget how to have sex with each other to such an extent that sex with the opposite sex would become vulgar. That would be the danger. The short-cut of porn would damage humanities ability to reproduce to such an extent that extinction could be a consequence.
Empath,
This makes perfect sense. If you are a woman who is marrying ONLY for improvement of your own lifestyle (from a financial standpoint) AND you believe in starter-marriages AND that anything a man could do that you might disagree with would be an excuse to divorce him, then the pron addiction is nothing. And why? Its free. There is no financial “cost” to the pron addiction the way there would be for drug addicts, compulsive gamblers, and even your run-of-the-mill alcoholic. Pron addicts don’t get into finacial troubles (not generally.) They don’t hawk all your fine jewelry for the “pron-fix” that they need. So there is a lot of upside here for her to marry him if she is ONLY doing so for his resources.
How so? Does ejaculating mess up with your brain’s pleasure centers?
Repeatedly to the same stimulus? Yes, Just like booze and drugs. It’s the same place in the brain. You can train it to react in a healthy way or in a dysfunctional one.
The danger would be the same as if man found a way to make food abundant and thus never needed to farm again”
No, there are other dangers, viz., what gluttony does to man’s body and soul.
Porn consumption may not have outward effects on the body the way gluttony does (obesity) nor even comparable inward effects (e.g., diabetes, heart disease) but it appears to affect, negatively, the functions of the brain that control desire. That is, men report ED, “desensitization,” the need for more and more extreme stuff to get hard, and all the while seriously diminishing returns even when they do. In other words it takes ever more and crazier porn to eek out ever fewer and less satisfying orgasms.
As for the soul, the religious teachings here are quite clear and I would say that pre-modern philosophy’s conception of the soul is in basic agreement.
There are blogs and forums where young men describe this. It’s not “natural” for a 22-y/o male to be impotent. Maybe through some very rare blood diseases. But when there are thousands out there who claims this has happened, and they have no such disease, but do report consuming a lot of porn, and then it goes away if they can de-tox for a few months, the connection seems pretty clear.
Men and women are never going to “forget” how to have sex. And certainly not by watching porn, which is by definition a demonstration of sex acts. What does apparently happen is that men lose relative interest in the real thing, and even when they can muster some, can’t perform at an “ordinary” pre-porn level.
Well of course, that’s not rewiring your brain in the someway as adding a drug would though. There are no drugs being added that your body now requires to function, your brain as not changed. You have simply found an easier way to trigger the same pleasure centers as sex with a woman would.
I am not nearly medically versed enough to judge, but some research does show–or at least claims to show–that porn consumption above a certain level does “re-wire” the brain. Whether in a way that is 1:1 analagous to a chemical addiction, I couldn’t say. But even if not, I don’t see why the claim has to be ruled out on that basis alone. Maybe the re-wiring in one case is different than in the other, but it could still exist.
I would agree with the over abundance of porn but not the idea that one now needs greater sources of freakier porn to get off. If you ate food all the time, you might have a problem eating more..
Many men might need more to get off but that could have a normal growth for such a man, who said it was porn that gave him the increased need for freakier arousal, it could just be that normal sex was never enough for him. Also, ED has been linked to many things, porn is just one. Age is another, stress is another, work is another, all sorts of factors cause ED.
Agreed. Register-her dot com had the potential to be groundbreaking, and it was both hilarious and effective while it lasted. He’s since set up an “MGTOW” clearinghouse, which is likewise a dead end, as far as I can tell.
I used to think that Elam was a crass opportunist who saw a chance to make a quick buck. I hate conspiracy theories, but if I were going to play “controlled opposition” for the feminist side, I could hardly do worse than Elam at the job.
He’s accepted interviews at which he consistently made the people on his blog (and by default, all of his ideological fellow-travelers who read it) look like a cluster of raving loonies. People excuse this with, among other things, the idea that Elam has aspergers or some other Neurological problem. I think it’s more plausible that he’s purposely trying to discredit the movement he claims to spearhead.
He’s also been very effective at tearing down people who actually are doing their best to make a difference. I’m thinking of Jack Donovan, but there are dozens of others. He’s denouncing some man on his blog for the crime of disagreeing with him right now, in fact.
People accuse that dysfunctional sperg Rob Fedders of being a feminist plant, but he was never successful or effective. Elam is both.
Regards,
Boxer
The biggest factor that everyone seems to overlook, perhaps not IBB, is that the pron wouldn’t have been so successful if it hadn’t been for a niche market – about 80% of the male population – who have been asked, nay, told to wait for marriage 10 – 15 years to a substandard woman, who cannot cook, cannot clean, belittles them, divorces them, takes half their stuff and sexed every man she really wanted before she turned 30.
Blame pron all you want, it’s a viable substitute to the degree that it provides more than most modern women could do anyway. Don’t blame the substitute, blame the genuine product that has degraded itself to such a point that the substitute is better; and CHEAPER!
Right, as noted above, it’s women’s fault. Men have no moral agency.
How, how quaint, but that’s not what was said and you know it. Feminism decided to hit men where it hurt. In their marriages, in their work places and in their sex lives. Pron filled that void.
Porn can be seen throughout history. It is not here only because of the modern situation.
Escoffier, are you having a Luddite moment?
Well of course, that’s not rewiring your brain in the someway as adding a drug would though. There are no drugs being added that your body now requires to function, your brain as not changed. You have simply found an easier way to trigger the same pleasure centers as sex with a woman would.
Actually, no. You’re confusing the stimulus with the neurology.
The drug doesn’t directly change the neurology. What changes the neurology is extended exposure to the stimulus. That stimulus can be a drug, alcohol, gambling, sex, etc. It’s not the stimulus that rewires, it’s the repeated exposure to a stimulus which generates the same pleasure pattern that rewires.
Note this is different from physical addiction — if that’s what you’re concerned about. It isn’t a physical addiction in the sense that heroin is. But it still conditions/rewires the pleasure center of the brain to respond to a certain stimulus and, by token, to not respond to lesser stimuli.
Porn can be seen throughout history. It is not here only because of the modern situation.
True, but there really is no comparison between cave drawings and HD porn videos on cell phones of whatever type is desired, in endless variety. Same “kind of” thing, but the difference in degree is so vast that it makes it a different thing.
Porn can be seen throughout history. It is not here only because of the modern situation.
Massive difference between the papyrus drawings that titilated Tiberius and ubiquitious, free, streaming HD of all varieties. A difference so large it ceases to be one of degree but is one of kind.
Sure Brad, perhaps some of it was, but not with the realism and ease it is now. That has changed the dynamic. The man also had more to gain by becoming married in those times, not so anymore. That is the degradation caused by feminism, it made pron a more viable alternative.
Seriously guys, come on, what have you got to offer for the billions of men who have determined that pron is a viable alternative to marriage and or trying for relationships with women? You expect them to remain sexual unfulfilled for years and years, to remain unmarried for years and years, to produce the same as a man who is sexually fulfilled but yet demand he doesn’t touch pron..
The Bible warned us about not waiting to get married for fear of falling in to sin, the same for married people not withholding from each other, sin, sin, sin. Yet, no one can offer these men the outlet required for them not to sin. You cannot do it. Until you can, pron will remain a viable alternative.
Eh, that should read…’warned us about waiting to get married…’
The funny thing here is even if what you stated were true – not saying it isn’t, and these men never got addicted to porn at all. They would still not be married or obtaining the sexual fulfillment that they want. The reason why is the very reason they looked at porn in the first place.
Lol, and at least porn cannot accuse you of rape!
fh,
Thank you for the kudos.
Yes I do believe that pron has “filled a gap.” Whether or not this filling of the gap (from a Road to Perdition standpoint) is satan is an entirely different question, but a gap has been filled.
Brad,
No Brad. The pron you could see in “history” is not even remotely close to what is available today. Apples and oragnes sir. The internet and hi-definition streaming video (for free) has changed the game. Completely. It has essencially removed the natural desire for ordinary men to pursue women. That is what we are talking about here. A little black-and-white nickel camera show of a 1920s burlesque dancer never had that kind of power.
What we have now not only harms women from a men pursuing them for marriage standpoint, it has also harmed (if you can believe it) the seedier sides of society. Whores can’t find Johns because they are surfing free pron. Strippers can’t find work because the nudie bars are all being closed because no one frequents them because they are surfing free pron. Its even gotten to the point where (in marriage) wives just “give up” and consent to their husbands going off into his man-cave to surf free pron because… at least this way he doesn’t bother her for s-x!!!! So she can watch her reality tv and read her 50 Shades of Grey. See where we are at Brad?
@Novaseeker
As long as the ‘rewiring’ is reversible, I don’t see much of a problem. If porn becomes a suitable ‘substitute good‘ for real women, it’s because of progressing uselessness of women for the multitude of roles in lives of men.
IBB,
I’m curious: why you you keep typing s-x instead of sex? Or pron instead of porn? Neither one is a curse word.
Lyn,
I’ll tell you later.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pron
Also as ‘pr0n’.
Exfernal,
Good catch on substitute goods. I’ll take it a bit farther and note that, for most men, the price of sex has gone down and the price of marriage has WAY gone up. For women, since the widespread availability of contraceptives, abortion, and the end of the expectation that brides would be virgins, the price of sex has gone down and the price of marriage has disappeared entirely… to the point where – not only doesn’t marriage cost women anything – they get paid whether it lasts of not. There is a cost (or at least an opportunity cost) for women who do not get married.
But that also means that, for most men, the ROI on hard work has plummeted… and therein lies a major problem, since it is excess male productivity that makes advanced civilization possible.
If one believes, as I do, that the soul is real and understandable on both theological and rational grounds, then yes, it follows that porn is bad for the soul, as are any number of vices. If one wishes instead to view porn in a purely transactional way without reference to the soul–either because you don’t believe the soul exists or you just don’t care–then it’s easy to see porn as a matter of indifference or even (borrowing from John C. Calhoun) a “positive good.”
That’s the nub of the difference. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the FI. Some things may help a man disconnect from bad women yet still be bad for the man himself (his soul). Robbing banks may help a man disconnect from a tedious, dangerous, low-paying job. But it’s still bad for his soul. To say nothing of other problems.
Escoffier, that last post was nice. Yes (from a Road to Perdition standpoint), if there is a soul (and I believe there is) and you can find Biblical reference as to why pron does damage to it (mind you, I’ve never found that Book, Chapter, or Verse in the KJB discussing pron) then its bad. I really liked how you explained (from a purely secular standpoint) how pron could be a “positive good.” You’ve given the pro-pron guys a “win” there. Nicely done.
This appears to be yet another example of how some in the ‘sphere insist on attributing everything bad in the world to the perfidy of women.
Since I’m sure you included me among those “some”, I’ll clarifiy that my view is the perfidy of women does exist and it’s indeed a huge force behind many social trends, the main driver of any change that takes place in the SMP, and yet the widespread social consensus today is that it simply doesn’t exist anywhere besides the imagination of a few bitter misogynists. Which is both hilarious and pathetic. Now we’re at a point where blogs such as this are the only places where anyone is permitted to discuss the perfidy of women.
There is also the testimony of thousands, if not millions, of men who describe how porn has affected their lives. There are whole forums dedicated to this, with thousands of pages of testimony and conversation.
Yes, it has affected their lives, or at least they believe, or have been told, that their porn use is responsible for changes in their lives. There are testimonies and whatnot, sure. But how does this prove, or even indicate, that a) anal sex is nearly mainstream b) this mainstreaming is driven by men?
“Re-wire” may be a bit of a scare term, since the effect does not appear to be permanent. Men with this problem generally report that quitting cold turkey with a 90 day “detox” period “re-sets” their brains and their libidos back to normal.
Here’s my problem with the “rewiring” argument in a nutshell:
1. It’s propagated by pundits and other busybodies who regularly peddle misandry in various ways.
2. The narrative that a) porn addiction is spreading like wildfire among men b) impotency is becoming common as a result c) many great, pleasant, fantastic etc. women have trouble finding boyfriends, or arousing sexual attention from their husbands, as a result d) this is a huge problem that throws the whole mating market into inbalance
JUST HAPPENS to very neatly fit into the overall misandrist ideology that is hegemonic in Western public discourse. Is that a coincidence? I think not.
Look…there’s no reason to seek compromise with people who spread this BS. They are agents of societal misandry. There’s no reason to listen to them, or give them even one inch. What are the chances that they’re right anyway? Practically zero.
The Occam’s Razor explanation for the popularity of porn is very simple. Men have the higher sex drive, and the overwhelmingly greater desire for variety. Porn is like putting an endless buffet in front of a glutton. Everybody likes to eat by nature.
I’ll offer an explanation that is even more simple:
1. Women are becoming fat, frumpy, obnoxious and feral.
2. Dating is an enormous pain in the ass for the average man due to unrestrained hypergamy.
3. The majority of wives aren’t attracted to their husbands and will resort to any pretext to reject their advances.
4. Many men a) are unemployed/underemployed b) lack masculine hobbies c) lack the company of other men, due to the combined effect of various gynocentric policies (banning of male-only clubs, Title IX etc). As a result, many young men have lots of free time and excess energy, so they whack off to porn. They have nothing better to do.
Similarly, men want sex by nature and they want variety by nature. That desire used to be easier to control simply because it was so much harder to indulge. Porn makes it very easy to indulge, endlessly. So a much higher portion of men do indulge.
How does that explain the supposed societal epidemic of anal sex, driven by the desires of sleazebag men?
I used to think that Elam was a crass opportunist who saw a chance to make a quick buck. I hate conspiracy theories, but if I were going to play “controlled opposition” for the feminist side, I could hardly do worse than Elam at the job.
IMO AVFM is feminist. They are egalitarians, which from a biblical standpoint is feminist. They do have several useful stats, but they support many feminist views. The enemy of my enemy could very well be my enemy.
As soon as AVFM decided to let the ‘Honeybadgers’ on board…. well, now they’re not allowed to say what they really mean unless the wimmenz agree…
Today I often hear that a great many women enjoy porn. These women are always described as being “liberated” and “sex positive” and as “taking back control over their own bodies” as well as control over their “body images.”
Yet I never hear that women are “addicted” to porn. Women “enjoy” porn. Men are “addicted” to porn. Women watching porn are “sex positive.” Men watching porn are “creeps.”
Re: AVfM, I find it quite disturbing the viewpoint many guys there have. They seem to say “Okay, women are as capable as men, and can do whatever men can do. Well, why do they expect men to pay for their meals? Why do they get the choice to stay home and take care of the household instead of working? Screw those privileges, they should have to do everything men have to do.” They also tend to reject the complementary nature of the sexes.
This is as poisonous as feminism, and it accepts feminism’s central lie. For some reason they can’t seem to understand that feminism’s assertion is simply wrong. They, just as much as the feminists, reject the design of our Creator. If they had their way they would make a different society than we have now, but it would still be awful.
What I fear is that when feminism collapses, men will be jaded and angry and will turn to that ideology instead of the truth.
Porn use is definitely of the same class as stealing. The “it’s okay as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else” argument doesn’t count damage done to the self.
Stealing would still be wrong even if no one would know. Porn is the same. Christians are called to keep our minds on things that are good and beautiful. We’re called to have the mind of Christ. Can you picture Jesus watching porn?
Is it the worst crime in the world? No, of course not. It’s like taking drugs, in that it doesn’t really hurt anyone but yourself. But choosing evil, choosing to look at something degrading, is damaging to the soul. The Bible repeatedly puts the desires of the flesh as being against virtue — the flesh must be conquered and commanded to do what’s right, not simply indulged.
Colossians 3:2
Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.
vs.
Philippians 3:19
Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things.
TFH,
Probably.
I have a daughter and I worry about her finding a husband too. If you had a daughter, you would feel the same way. But I have gone on the record saying…. I’m f-cking greedy! G_R_E_E_D I want 12 legitimate grandchildren. That is my motivation. When I’m 70, I want to be sitting in front of that Christmas Tree and surounded by my grandchilden. That is only going to happen if daughter gets (and stays) married for life and they get cracking.
So yeah TFH… although I completely understand it, because I have a daughter the pron addictions DO scare the crap out of me for our future, I do not like the MGTOW stuff. I do not like green eggs and ham, Sam I am.
AVfM, I find it quite disturbing the viewpoint many guys there have. They seem to say “Okay, women are as capable as men, and can do whatever men can do. Well, why do they expect men to pay for their meals? Why do they get the choice to stay home and take care of the household instead of working? Screw those privileges, they should have to do everything men have to do.” They also tend to reject the complementary nature of the sexes.
This is the sense I get when I go there and read also. There is a very sort of “OK, let’s REALLY do the equality thing” mentality. As you wrote, the central lie of feminism.
@ Chris Dagostino
A female poster on a religiously-themed website that I frequent recently suggested that the worst consequence that a man falsely accused of rape could face would be the “loss of a few friends.” Seriously.
And that is airtight logic from her perspective because she probably cannot conceive of anything that a woman can be accused of anymore that would have consequences more dire than being “un-friended.”
Kill your baby in the womb? It’s not just reproductive freedom, it’s your moral obligation to ensure you never bring anything you don’t want into the world. After all, pregnancy is life-threatening, unless of course you’re 50+ and had IVF. Then it’s natural, beautiful, spiritual. A mystical goddess experience to which all women are entitled, but only on their terms, their time, their way.
Frivorce? You go grrlllll! You deserve better and FI means you can always trade up.
Family left to fend for themselves while you show the world you’re a powerful, independent woman ™? It’s an IQ test. Either let down all woman-kind or let down your family. Remember: you come first.
Hypergamous slut? How dare you men – who are all players at heart – hold us to a double-standard.
Eidolon,
Stealing? Well that depends entirely on property laws does it not?
With respect to the internet, when you could download music from napster (for free) because Sean Parker illegally copied it from someone who wanted to be paid for it, then yes, that would be stealing. Surfing the web for stuff people put up on line for free, (with the intension that what you are watching remain free because there is NO MARKET FOR PURCHASE) is not stealing anymore than when I go to the library and borrow a book for 3 weeks, read it, and return it, I’ve stolen nothing. The town already paid for the book. As dar as pron goes, if I go to a gas station and shoplift a Playboy from the magazine rack, THAT would be stealing. But that is not what we are talking about and you know it.
Stealing in a Christlike sense? Maybe, but only maybe. The damage done to the “self” (from a spiritual standpoint, your “soul” if you will) is when you surf pron, you have taken a great gift from God (your natural instincts to desire to be one flesh with your wife) and have replaced it with a desire to flesh with many different wives (of whom you will never meet in the flesh.) That desire, God wanted you to keep that for just your wife. He didn’t want you to share that with others of whom could NEVER be your wife. So (from a spiritual sense) you have stolen from your wife. That desire is HER property.
But what if you never have a wife? What if (in this world) marriage is just not for you? Or worse, (but entirely possible given this audience) no woman wants to marry you? Then who have you stolen from? You have no wife of whom your desire should be hers. The market value of your desire for a woman is…. 0. No woman has laid claim to your desire as her property. So…. well, there you are MGTOW.
I have never had any difficulty in telling the difference between pixelated images and real people. Porn is (despite Female disapproval) merely advertisement – and an advertisement that men pay for – such that one might have supposed Porn was a cunning ploy by women to raise interest. All women despite their denials think that they are as hot as any centre-fold. Of course, I would rather be immune to female charms, but then I would prefer not to have to breath air or eat food.
mattress carrying Emma Sulkowicz’s claim of rape falling apart
With all of these “stories” of rape being shown to be just that – “stories” without any factual evidence, has anyone taken the time to point out that it appears – that all women lie about rape… That is the message that I’m seeing – of course, I came to that conclusion long ago since women are never held accountable for their lies – they do it much more often than a man would. Since they are never called on it – why wouldn’t they lie?
Personally, I’m glad to see these falling apart – as every time I’ve been associated with a “rape” event – it’s always been a woman feeling sorry for the fact that she cheated and is looking for a way to excuse her actions. I’ve seen it several times as I spent a lot of time in college and associated with colleges… I’ve come to assume that when I hear about a “rape” that the woman is lying unless there is some corroborating evidence, and I’m not talking about another woman saying something – I’m talking REAL evidence… And just because they had sex – isn’t evidence of a rape… Since women are fast to spread their legs…
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Of course perfidy in women exists. But the assertion, being made by at least three here, is that badness in women is the driving reason why men desire porn. That is absurd.
Men desire porn because they are imbued by nature with a strong sex drive and a desire for variety (different women, different acts). Variety in particular is hard to get in real life for all but a few. However, it easy to achieve virtually through porn. So men like porn.
This reminds me of an old Onion headline: “Area man has naked lady fetish.” It’s really that simple. So simple it takes a great deal of hamsturbation to deny, miss, overlook, or spin. I forgot who said this, perhaps Heartiste, but the point was made that the average porn consumer today has seen thousands or millions more naked women than the most powerful sultan with largest harem of the Ottoman Empire. That explains the appeal of porn.
A direct analogy would be to sugar and fat. The human appetite really likes the taste and feeling of satiety delivered by sugar and fat. For 99% of human history, these things were hard to get and expensive. Now suddenly they are cheap and everywhere. So people indulge en masse. And whole populations get fat.
Back to porn: even men who can get sex look at porn. Why? For the variety, the novelty. This is not women’s fault. Or, it may be, partly, in the case of a wife who routinely denies her husband. Do we really think that’s the majority of cases? And what about all the unmarried young men who consume porn voraciously? I know that several of you will say “They can’t get girlfriends because alpha chasing.” OK, fair enough. But in what moral universe do unmarried women OWE unmarried young men sex?
Porn use is a vice. You can deny that, but then you have to deny the existence of both virtue and vice and of morality itself. There’s no question that it’s a sin. Many of you are not only not religious but actively hostile to religion. Fair enough. (Though what you’re doing here, in that case, I don’t know, but I’m not the host.)
I think it is not only a sin but also a vice based on a teleological understanding of man, the only conceivable RATIONAL understanding of man under which morality of any sort has any basis. This is born out by mundane considerations, as “olde tyme” morality often is. I’ve referred above to medical studies. These are waved away. I referred to the testimony of men—thousands of them, many or most “red pill” to a degree—who testify that porn has harmed them, though thankfully not irreparably. Funny how pages and pages of internet testimony about the bad behavior of women in this SMP—this we are told to accept partly on the basis of sheer volume. (I think this argument has merit, FWIW.) But the testimony of many of these same men regarding the bad effects of porn? No way, anecdotal, FI, blue pill, etc. Waved away.
In any case, those are just the near term effects. The greater concern should be the deeper, long-term effects on the soul, whether understood religiously, rationally, or through some combination of the two. I am going to quote someone here because I think this is true and succinct:
“Manliness is mastery and firstly, mastery of self. Philosophy and religion concur in this. All else is … not masculine.”
One of Aristotle’s eleven moral virtues is moderation. He acknowledges the pleasures derived from food, wine, sex, wealth and much else. And, far from being some ascetic, he does not argue for denial but says forthrightly that it is impossible to live a good life without these and other pleasures. But for a life to be good, these must be enjoyed in the right way, at the right times, in the right amounts, etc. And while such pleasures are necessary to a good life, they are not the end or purpose of the good life. A life lived in pursuit of pleasure is a bad life—except for the highest pleasure, which is derived from the exercise of virtue itself.
This will sound alien to everyone because, even as out of step with 2015 as we may be, we are all moderns nonetheless. But all the things you rail against—the FI, the “perfidy of women”, whatever—these can only be “bad” in truth if there is also in truth, in reality, some good, some standard independent of human will in whose reflection we can judge goodness and badness. That does and must include a standard of behavior for men, of things it is good to do and things it is bad to do.
Porn has no place in such a moral universe. If there is morality, if virtue and vice exist, then porn is a vice—whether a frigid wife drove you to it or not. It’s not merely incompatible with man’s higher nature. It perverts and degrades man’s higher nature.
If part of the point of the sphere is to help men become better men—more masculine men, yes, but more than that, simply better men, better people, better human beings, more virtuous human beings—then these desultory defenses and half-hearted praises of porn are worse than counter-productive.
Of course, if you believe I am wrong about virtue, teleology, and rational-natural morality, to hell with it. Fap away.
>> This is the sense I get when I go there and read also. There is a very sort of “OK, let’s REALLY do the equality thing” mentality.
I think many men PREFER a real woman, i.e., an appreciative, devoted, feminine wife. But since those are a rare bird, they say, “Okay, if we’re stuck with equality, let’s have FULL equality.”
Why? Because …
1. Half a loaf is better than none. If we’re stuck with hordes of “strong, independent women,” then they may as well pay their own way.
2. Things must get worse before they get better. The faster we get full equality (i.e., women forced to pay the societal cost of feminism), the faster the whole system collapses.
Escoffier @ 6:06 pm:
“Of course perfidy in women exists. But the assertion, being made by at least three here, is that badness in women is the driving reason why men desire porn. That is absurd.”
I assert it as well. Men would rather have a real woman for sex. If his wife provides a certain amount of sex then he will have little trouble controlling his excess sexual desire if he cares to. Today, what’s happening is that most men are openly denied ANY release. That’s crushing, especially in a (until recently) Christian-dominated society that did not accept any form of sex outside of marriage.
What are non-Alphas supposed to do? The choices are fornication, celibacy and porn. God only allows celibacy, true, but He also wired us men such that true celibacy is almost impossibly hard to achieve. Porn is a sin but also a middle ground between fornication’s severe damage and celibacy’s unrealistic demand.
Playboy debuted in 1953. Penthouse (US version) in 1969. That was the same year that the USSC allowed full frontal nudity on film and when the modern porn industry began.
46 years ago.
This current SMP has been around for, what, 10 years? 20?
From all I have read, in the porn-soaked 1970s, everyone was having lots of sex AND watching lots of porn. There was even a “porn chic” period in which porn movies held “premiers” which people attended as couples.
But this is all driven by women withdrawing?
That is a factor, no doubt, the underlying male desire is the foundation.
You might as well say that fat men are caused by women who are bad cooks. The men have no choice but to eat fast food!
O/T,
Escoffier, are you the same person that posted on J4G about Plato’s thoughts on Alphas? If so, let me thank you personally here and request that you carry through on your desire to write an article on
Aristotle’s Politics.
Classical Greek philosophy is shunned by a culture that constantly tries to appeal to novelty.
If this isn’t the same person, disregard all of that.
Escoffier, at this point I’m pretty sure you’re being deliberately obtuse.
I’m sure you’re aware that mainstream media is relentlessly pushing one defining narrative about the issue of porn. It can be summed up as:
One very specific type of porn, i.e. free online HD heterosexual porn featuring the degradation and abuse of women, targeted at misogynist men with a sense of entitlement, is spreading fast, and young single white men are getting addicted to it all the time. Their brains are rewired, they become impotent, they’ll overlook women “in their league” and wank to impossibly shaped fantasy women instead. They’ll think anal sex is normal and completely OK, and’ll push for it, being the sleazebags they are. They’ll also think abusing and degrading women is great. This, coupled with the online spread of horribly misogynist ideologies like MRA and PUA, is the ONE AND ONLY reason why the mating market is dysfunctional, the sexual marketplace is dysfunctional – i.e. plain-looking yet fantastic, smart, sassy, empowered, cute, pleasant women cannot find either husbands or sex partners -, marriage rates are declining and the economy stagnates. (Japan has already reached a point where the mainstream media blames single men for the prolonged economic stagnation. After all, those fuckers should just man up and get married, and then the economy’d recover.)
Look – I won’t believe any of that for the same reason I don’t watch North Korean propaganda videos and feminist diatribes on Youtube. Because it’s all standard leftist bullshit. In this case, standard misandrist bullshit promoted by feminists and tradcons alike. Complete nonsense.
The specific question here isn’t whether porn use is a vice or not.
The questions are these:
Is free online porn
– highly addictive?
– responsible for an epidemic of impotency among otherwise healthy young men?
– causing the delay/avoidance of marriage by men?
– causing the demise of many otherwise great marriages?
– causing the mainstreaming of anal sex due to warping men’s desires?
– causing economic stagnation?
These questions are relevant and important. Why? Because those who currently control public discourse firmly believe that the answer is yes. Which is, indeed, absurd.
I’ve referred above to medical studies. These are waved away.
It’s because they’re BS. Why? Susan Walsh cites them all the time.
1. Half a loaf is better than none. If we’re stuck with hordes of “strong, independent women,” then they may as well pay their own way.
2. Things must get worse before they get better. The faster we get full equality (i.e., women forced to pay the societal cost of feminism), the faster the whole system collapses.
Indeed!
Yeah, to me, it’s clearly both. Not just as regards anal sex, either, but with other “kinky” acts. Women I dated offered to do various acts for one obvious reason — they wanted to excite me and convince me they were exciting. Did they enjoy it as much as they acted like they did? Dunno.
On the other hand, sometimes I was the one who said, “Hey, how about we try this,” and I might not have done that if I hadn’t seen the act in question in porn to know it looked like fun. But who knows; it doesn’t take that much imagination to say, “Hmm, that feels great, maybe this would too.”
Whatever the reasons, everything has been escalated. The blowjob has become an expected (by women) part of any good date (in mainstream thinking), almost the equivalent of the kiss at the door from 50 years ago. The guy who got to second or third base back then gets reverse cowgirl now. So if a girl wants to really go “all the way” with a special guy, she has to top that somehow, do something she didn’t do for every guy. There aren’t really that many options.
Everything Susan says is now false? Even things that Susan cites are now false simply because she has cited them? Have you heard of the reductio ad Hitlerum? Beyond that, I don’t even know, and certainly don’t claim, that Susan has even cited the studies I reference. The ones that claim that porn forms sexual taste I found elsewhere.
You have ignored everything I wrote about porn being a vice. You explicitly deny the existence of God. You seem also to deny the existence of virtue and vice. There is no good, there is no evil. There is just material existence. If that is what you really believe, then, as I said, fap away. There will be no consequence to your soul because you don’t have one.
But all your railing against women, against contemporary culture, against the FI, against so many things—you are nothing if not a railer—rings completely hollow. You deny the good, morality, virtue, anything higher, but you want to condemn things you find somehow “bad.” On the basis of what? Your preferences? OK, fine. But why should anyone else care about your preferences? You seem to want to try to universalize them but on a foundation of quicksand.
If you don’t believe in any objective morality, nor in God, then you are a nihilist. But an uncourageous nihilist who can’t admit it, even to himself. You want feminism and the modern SMP and much else to be acknowledged and objectively, intrinsically bad. But you can’t abide anything that men do as being similarly objectively bad. And everything good you ascribe to self-serving delusion.
Maybe you are right about the latter, though I firmly believe you are wrong. I know that you can’t consistently hold both beliefs at the same time. So, for all the things you hate hand hold to be bad, they can only be truly be bad in the light of what is truly good, which what you always explicitly and implicitly deny.
None, but that’s why in the past men and women married early. Now…. not so much. Since men aren’t owed sex in or out of marriage, porn use is up. And really, you bring up a point no one here made… that’s dishonest! No one said a woman owes man sex outside of marriage, in fact, most of us strongly state that a woman must wait for marriage before having sex.
I agree with you on the variety aspect. It just might be that porn has become greater than sex with a woman for the average man??
Ah yes, yet annother conversation where people present it as an unassailable truth that “use of porn is sin”, where “you know we’re right”. And where people equate use of a product with addiction to it.
Reminds me very much of those who think that drinking wine at communion (instead of grape juice) is sinful, and that those who disagree are just rationalizing away an obvious truth, except this opinion seems more popular at the moment. Where as the popular ‘vice’ to attack was once alcohol. Why, the tea-tottlers who actually managed to get a constitutional amendment to keep their husbands from “being useful drunkards who go to taverns” as they described it. *eyeroll*
There was even a relatively recent post where porn use was debated to death.
Pardon, “useless drunkards”.
Everything Susan says is now false? Even things that Susan cites are now false simply because she has cited them? Have you heard of the reductio ad Hitlerum? Beyond that, I don’t even know, and certainly don’t claim, that Susan has even cited the studies I reference.
We’d be right to be highly suspicious of any “scientific evidence” popularized by feminists, misandrists and rabid enemies of the Manosphere. Plus it’s known that Walsh is rather sloppy when it comes to citing scientific “proof” of her theories. More on that here:
antifeministtech.info/2009/12/even-more-shaming-language-from-susan-walsh/
antifeministtech.info/2012/07/getting-desperate/
We also know of her hilarious, baseless diatribes against Rollo’s SMV chart. She’s a pundit, plain and simple.
You explicitly deny the existence of God. You seem also to deny the existence of virtue and vice.
I deny the usefulness of contemporary Christianity to men. And you seem intent to build strawmen.
But all your railing against women, against contemporary culture, against the FI
Feminist shaming language. I simply made observations.
You want feminism and the modern SMP and much else to be acknowledged and objectively, intrinsically bad.
I want them to be acknowledged as liars, spin doctors, propagandists and promoters of societal misandry.
But in what moral universe do unmarried women OWE unmarried young men sex?
I don’t know. What I do know is that unmarried men owe unmarried women commitment, time, attention and resources in this moral universe, at least according to the widespread social consensus, supported by those who spread the moral panic around porn addiction.
On the subject of “re-wiring.”
There is some evidence for this, but it is better thought of creating new nodes from which to access certain parts of the brain.
For simplification purposes, lets say there is a node in your brain that is responsible for your operational understanding of the word “pen.”
There are nodes all around it “used for writing,” “has ink in it,” etc.
If that central “pen” node is damaged (like in a head trauma or stroke) you may be presented with a pen and not be able to articulate “pen” but rather engage in circumlocution and say “it is used for writing, it has ink in it, I just can’t think of the name.”
This can be over come and in fact new nodes giving you access to the word “pen” can be created. but it is VERY difficult the older you get, because your brain is less plastic.
This has carryover into the addiction literature and such. But two distinct cohorts (and phenomenon) are really being discussed here.
1. Guys my age (or around my age) who may have had a relatively normative (dads playboys) sexual exploratory youth who now use high tech porn because they are being shut out.
2. Younger men/boys who have had access to high-tech porn their entire lives.
THAT would be interesting to study.
“Manliness is mastery and firstly, mastery of self. Philosophy and religion concur in this. All else is … not masculine.”
Folks —
This was me.
The fact remains — what Escoffier is saying is fundamentally true.
You can dance around what you don’t like feminists saying about porn and that’s fine (although different feminists say different things about porn, and there is a huge pro-porn wing of feminism). But at the end of the day, as men, we are accountable to ourselves. If you don’t accept the feminist rhetoric against porn, that’ fine, but you have to accept the reality that it degrades *you* as a man. Period. Full stop.
Gunner, everyone commit sins — people are weak and they sin. And then they ask for, and receive, forgiveness. What I hear from men when it comes to porn (including what you said) is that they are looking for an excuse for their own sin — that precludes repentance, which precludes forgiveness, which, in turn, leads to perdition.
No-one ever said celibacy was easy. But living without sinning is not easy in general. You no more “need” top use porn than you “need” a Big Mac. You can do better. Stop justifying your own weakness, recognize it for what it is, and develop the self-mastery to overcome it. You can do it, and you will be a better man, a better person, for having done so.
HH, what Susan has to do with any of this, I have no idea. Except that for you she represents a favored target, so you just blast away at her even when it’s completely off topic. Is that merely a diversion, or do you actually think she has anything whatsoever to do with the topic at hand? Your “logic” seems to be “Susan cites studies that I don’t trust, and now you have cited a study whose conclusion I don’t like, therefore you and Walsh are in this together, so the study you’ve cited has no merit.” That is exceptionally weak.
Like I said up-thread, I don’t have the expertise to evaluate the validity of these studies. But 1) they ARE studies that have looked at this, so someone has bothered to try to investigate this topic, and 2) the conclusions are at least plausible, and they are corroborated by the testimony of men who say “Yes, this is exactly what happened to me.” And, again, when the Internet meme is something you want to believe–e.g., young women in this SMP are awful–then you loudly insist that we must take seriously this avalanche of men complaining about women in this SMP. But when it’s something you don’t want to believe—porn causes harm—then the thousands of men who say this are all liars, or else it’s just anecdata from blue pill losers in thrall of the FI. There is a certain consistency in this, but not a logical consistency.
As for “feminist shaming language,” when you have nothing else to say, may as well default to one of your bot-block-phrases.
I simply made observations.
Yes, here are some of your mere “observations” devoid of any moral content or judgment: “I want them to be acknowledged as liars, spin doctors, propagandists and promoters of societal misandry.”
Well … so what? Who cares about lying, spinning, propaganda and misandry? Unless there is some intrinsic good against which these things can be judged, then you’re just whiney because the things you prefer are losing and the things you hate are winning. Boo hoo.
spread the moral panic around porn addiction.
So the simple assertion that porn is a vice is now tantamount to spreading a moral panic? If I said that gluttony is a vice, would that be spreading a moral panic? So on down the line re: all the various sins or vices? (And, yes, Josh, porn IS a sin, not because I say so, but because Scripture and tradition are quite clear about what constitutes sexual sin.)
It seems that some of you want to defend porn simply because some feminists hate it. Though, as Nova points out, some feminists love it. In any case, it’s pretty childish and limiting at the end of the day. Sometimes people you disagree with 99% are going to be right about that 1%. And, anyway, the intrinsic merits of the thing itself can be and ought to be examined completely independent of what others may or may not think of it.
Porn is a sin—indisputable.
Porn is a vice—disputable, but only if the existence of virtue and vice and teleological-rational morality is denied. And if you deny that, then consistency demands that you also deny the validity of any criticism feminism or anything else. You may not like them, but so what? Without a frame of reference—God or natural morality—all you can say is that you don’t like them. Well, they don’t like you either.
Escoffier and Novaseeker, you two gentlemen are on fire here. I see no way to dispute your arguments. Porn is harmful to men. The fact that others would feign to care about men in order to perfect their feminist order doesn’t change the fact.
Let’s be more specific.
Many feminist indeed promote porn, because
a) it provides a career opportunity to women (at least as long as it’s a profitable industry, which it increasingly isn’t)
b) porn actresses are consistently paid more than porn actors – it’s a great reverse pay gap
c) the usual, traditional opponents of the porn industry are Christian fundamentalists, whom feminists view as ideological enemies
d) many strains of porn (certainly not all) are viewed as empowering to women (pegging, BDSM etc.)
That’s pretty much it. I doubt they have further reasons. And even these pro-porn feminists cannot be said to promote all strains of porn, or even all strains of legal porn. And we can expect such feminist sympathy to disappear when the porn industry goes further into irreversible decline.
What about the feminists who oppose porn? The hardcore feminists who promoted lesbian separatism certainly fall into this category, but their influence has apparently weakened a lot since the 1970s. I’d argue the rest of current feminists don’t actually oppose porn. BUT, just like tradcons, they see it as a useful scapegoat that they can point to when they pander to women that are frustrated by the current SMP.
“You no more “need” top use porn than you “need” a Big Mac. You can do better. Stop justifying your own weakness, recognize it for what it is, and develop the self-mastery to overcome it.”
I’m on record here strongly opposing the use of porn. At the same time, there’s no comparison between the male sex drive and being lazy about dinner. It is a legitimate need.
The enduring solution isn’t reminding men to starve instead of eating Big Macs. It’s forcing farmers to stop reserving all the healthy food in America for Justin Bieber.
HH, what Susan has to do with any of this, I have no idea.
1. She has made exactly the same arguments you’re making here.
2. You and her are citing the same kind of surveys and research as scientific evidence.
Certainly an odd coindidence.
Except that for you she represents a favored target, so you just blast away at her even when it’s completely off topic.
No, it’s the other way around. She’s the one who decided to make the entire Manosphere a favored target in order to pander to her female audience, which is exactly what Bodycrimes, Futrelle and other feminist bloggers are doing. They’re all good pals. Blasting away even when it’s completely off-topic – indeed this is an accurate description of what she usually does. And she’s an ardent promoter of the theory that free online porn is having a huge harmful impact on the SMP, and it’s all men’s fault.
Agreed. I was tempted to jump in yesterday, but I can’t even add to the arguments that are already on the table.
I’m hardly “holier than thou” (I like pinups, and am an occasional connoisseur of hardcore pr0n featuring nuns and midgets) … but every time I see someone start replacing regular relationships with reified ones, I see the rest of their lives start to suffer.
We are wired to grow through risk, and one of those risks is entering into a mature relationship with an actual woman. Replacing this process with imaginary relationships based on photography and fantasy is akin to voluntarily going places in a motorized scooter (which I also see lazy people doing these days — coincidence???)
Regards,
Boxer
“Porn is a sin—indisputable.”
Except that it *has* been disputed in previous arguments on this very blog, by going back and looking at the actual definitions of lust. The fact is, no one was actually able to decisively argue for porn as sin without citing catholic doctrine, or presuming use outside of moderation. I just wasn’t able to convince some others either, because they’ve basically already accepted it as an axiomatic statement.
So yes, it is disputable. I’d do it again, except I’m tired of having the same argument to a stand-still, and then suddenly having the same arguments I’ve already faced pop right back up again.
Go ahead and believe it’s harmful, sinful, what have you. Just acknowledge the fact that it is disputable.
The same kind of surveys and research
Is that meant to be as serious argument? I realize that in your mind, it is, but it is really laughable nonetheless.
Plus, I don’t remember her making the exact same anti-porn arguments I am making here, and I find it impossible to believe that she ever did, because I used to post there occasionally about my understanding of / belief in teleological-rational-natural morality, and Susan made it very clear that she didn’t believe in it.
That said, if Susan or anyone else actually is anti-porn, then good for them. And if they hold that view on the basis of a sound understanding of morality, then even better–no matter what else I may disagree with them about.
As far as the argument about porn harming men is concerned, again, let’s be more specific. There are multiple arguments presented about this in the mainstream media.
1. Porn addiction is growing fast, because porn is now free and more realistic than ever.
The question here is what we mean by “addiction” and “rewiring”. The other reason this argument is problematic is because it always goes together with the argument that lots of men are turning down their otherwise willing AND attractive wives/girlfriends for sex due to being addicts. It comes across as standard misandry, based on the notion that men, especially white men, have a sense of sexual entitlement to women outside their league. It’s not something compatible with what we know about male sexuality.
2. Excessive masturbation drains your body of testosterone, zinc etc. and thus has adverse side effects on your health.
Well, no argument there, really. The idea that regular masturbation is more or less acceptable in your teenage years, but not later, has been around for decades, and one doesn’t have to be religious in order to believe in it.
3. Excessive porn use causes erectile dysfunction.
Again, flimsy argument steeped in misandry and not taking into account the possibility that women are increasingly incapable of inducing erections.
4. Porn use makes men think anal sex is normal and should be expected from women.
Again, just standard misandry.
I will leave to others who understand theology and religious doctrine far better than I to cite chapter and verse. But to the best of my knowledge, scripture and doctrine are very clear about what constitutes sexual sin. Porn is not mentioned in the Bible, to be sure, but *legitimate* sex is confined to 1m1w lifetime marriage before God. And that’s it. So, porn is condemned at the very least implicitly by being outside this framework.
Then there is the whole issue of Onanism. Or are you going to argue that porn is not a sin so long as you don’t masturbate? Well, it’s clearly a sin to make the stuff. Or maybe not if the performers are married? Getting very lawerly now.
Please explain why porn is more harmful to men than the apparent lack of sex with women who won’t be their wives anyway? Men can’t get wives, they have to wait so long to get them and then they don’t get sex most of the time.
What feminist order? That’s a red herring. We have differing opinions, you know, when people don’t see eye to eye, that’s not trying to bring about some order.
I agree. Porn is bad, it is sinful, but everyone keeps missing, now intentionally, that porn and it’s usage are a side effect of a morally bankrupt society and the inability of men, ordinary men, to gain sexual access to what should be their wives.
Is that meant to be as serious argument?
I don’t remember her making the exact same anti-porn arguments I am making here, and I find it impossible to believe that she ever did
Yes, it is, and yes, she actually did. Check out the links from PMAFT above, or check our her website and search for “pornography” and erectile dysfunction”. She’s a big believer in the idea that there’s scientific evidence proving that young men are becoming impotent sleazebags with insane sexual expectations due to porn addiction.
And if they hold that view on the basis of a sound understanding of morality
Yeah. She definitely has “a sound understanding of morality”. ROFL/LMAO.
“Misandry” is just another one of your buzz words. So now it’s “misandrist” to be skeptical of anal sex, or concerned for the health of one’s wife?
I suppose next it will be “misandrist” to be skeptical of polygamy? BDSM?
Beyond that, you’ve completely glided by the more important objections to porn. So let me help clarify. You do so because you don’t believe in them. You don’t believe in God or in the teleological morality that I am arguing in favor of. You’ve shown yourself willing to trash God openly on this blog, so why you are hesitant to similarly deny natural morality, I have no idea. Just say it.
BTW, ironic, isn’t it, that on that topic–the most fundamental and important of all at issue here– you and Susan fundamentally agree.
Yeah. She definitely has “a sound understanding of morality”. ROFL/LMAO.
Reading comprehension fail. Deliberate? Typing too fast? Or is the subject just getting too complicated?
You know what angers me the most over this issue, is when married men, who seem to have their whole merry life all sorted out, dandy and lovely, with wives who actually care about them and give them sex on a frequent basis, who then decide to lecture men who have no chance of this life, over what they shouldn’t do. As if it actually matters….
Listen, most men who use porn do not have the chance of finding a Biblical wife, they don’t. What do you propose they do if they burn with passion and have a sex drive?
I read a good quote on the topic of porn addiction recently;
Pornography is not the addiction; women are the addiction. Pornography is just the nicotine patch for the woman addiction.
Impotence is linked far more to what men eat and how they exercise than porn use. It’s usually a drop in their testosterone level causing the ED.
@Escoffer,
So are you saying that porn is sex?
Also, Onan’s sin had nothing to do with masturbation. He had a duty to produce an heir with his dead brother’s line to carry on the line for his brother. He refused, she nagged him, then went to the judges,and was told by authorities to do it. So then he had sex with her, but then pulled out, trying to keep her from having the kid, so he could steal his brother’s inheritance for his own progeny.
What, exactly, does using and abusing a widow have to do with self stimulation for physical maintenance, in a way that modern medicine acknowledges is a physical need for male health?
Finally, you do realize that through-out history, there has been a large amount of porn that involves drawings, or other fictional depictions, right?
And if you really don’t understand the theological arguments, then how, really, can you put forth that the idea is indisputable?
fh,
I don’t think escoffier will touch this one.
fh,
Just do as escoffier says, simply abstain from it the way you would a Big Mac. 🙂 (tongue-in-cheek)
“You know what angers me the most over this issue, is when married men, who seem to have their whole merry life all sorted out, dandy and lovely, with wives who actually care about them and give them sex on a frequent basis, who then decide to lecture men who have no chance of this life, over what they shouldn’t do. As if it actually matters….
Listen, most men who use porn do not have the chance of finding a Biblical wife, they don’t. What do you propose they do if they burn with passion and have a sex drive?”
It may make me a coward, but this precisely why I don’t lecture on this topic.
I hope and pray that you (and others in your situation) find peace in this world. The use of porn is sin, but the milleau of how it’s use has developed is very complex.
The main reason men in the manosphere defend porn is that porn provides a sexual outlet where others don’t exist. Porn is an aid to masturbation, which itself is a substitute for sexual intercourse with a flesh and blood woman. You can set aside whether the porn is the sin, or masturbation is the sin. Focus, though, on the consequences to the porn user himself. He allows things into himself, his body, his soul, that don’t belong to him. He focuses his time and attention on things and ideas that don’t build him up or improve him. Instead they only provide temporary satisfaction. That urge will return and demand satisfaction. That urge must be satisfied NOW, with a minimum of time and effort, and he does it the only way he knows how – by using porn to masturbate. He is caught in a vicious cycle. That’s why it’s sin – it’s sin against one’s own body.
That’s the overarching moral consideration over the very rational explanation for porn use – because many men have no other sexual outlet, or because the sexual outlets they have are inadequate for one reason or another. And men haven’t been taught or shown how to obtain adequate sexual outlets.
How it becomes sin is then using the explanation for sin as an excuse (I do it because I have no other choice) then justification (It’s acceptable, even good, for me to do it because of other things/events/whatever) This soon leads to a seared conscience, or the inability to distinguish between and among rights and wrongs; good things and bad things; pain and pleasure; righteousness and sin.
And there are a lot of studies and mountains of anecdotal evidence that porn is bad for men. Esco is absolutely correct that we can’t just dismiss that, when we rely primarily on mountains of anecdotal evidence of bad female behavior on which the manosphere’s prime tenets are founded. (That bad female behavior will never be “studied” for reasons of which we’re all aware). And we can’t refer to something being “bad” or “wrong” unless there is a corresponding “good” or “right”.
I’m reminded of something Dalrock said a long time ago on a thread here about a wife denying a husband sex, causing the husband to resort to porn. If that is happening, then the wife is sinning against her husband. The answer isn’t for the husband to slink away and use porn. The answer is to confront the wife about her sin and not permit it to compound and multiply.
Contemporary Christianity and feminist bloggers have nothing to do with this at all, really. They aren’t going to be standards against which we men have to measure ourselves, anyway. Anyone can explain porn use. Yes, there are rational explanations for it. Yes, men have REASONS for it. What we can’t do is excuse it (say they are “GOOD” reasons which mean we don’t have to avoid the sin) or justify it (say that using porn isn’t sin, that it is “right” or “good”).
Josh,
No, he is saying it is “stealing.” That is what he said last night. And “stealing” is sin. So by transitive property (and not by the Bible) it is sin.
@innocentbystanderboston
o.O That makes so little sense I’m going to hope there’s just a misunderstanding here, and wait for him to answer for himself.
I am pretty sure that a large number of people on this site do not read the PUA sites. If you did you might be surprised that they are dead set against both pornography and masturbation. They sponsor the no frap pledge, and promote it constantly. Their arguments are the same as those anti-pornography adherents here. They preach that going out and making hundreds or thousands of approaches, and getting shot down with withering rejections 99% of the time is just the way things are. Any alternative weakens the man’s resolve in the face of constant degradation. They want men to have no option but to go out and pander to women so they can get a pump and dump 1% of the time. Those of you thinking you are on the side of the angels in this need to look at those who are in full agreement with you, and ask yourselves if you are a useful idiot or not.
Too often, men can be found blaming social problems for their own personal failures.
Yes, we live in a fucked up society. That doesn’t excuse us, as individual men, from striving for excellence. You owe it (not to society, but to yourself) to become your best self, and to make your life a work of art.
Hell is other people. Don’t worry about our morally bankrupt society. Worry about yourself, and let the rest of it go to Hell.
Related to the OP, re: feminist anger, fame and “power”, from the UK _Telegraph_ newspaper. Note that while the article itself is SFW (no nudity), it has links to sites that are NSFW:
Meet the actress putting her own naked photos online
The article is about actress Caitlin Stasey and her new feminist website:
Josh,
Actually, I am wrong. it wasn’t Escoffier who said it. It was Eidolon. My brain just got “re-wired” because their names both start with a capital E. Guess that means (for me) too much pron use. Here is what Eidolon said.
Escoffier, I apologize.
To the extent that this is a lecture, then it’s a philosophy lecture. Not everyone’s thing, I understand that. Then don’t read it. Drop the class.
What good does it do to lie to ourselves? I understand that some men have it bad with women, some through little or no fault of their own, and they find solace in porn. Is that the worst possible sin they could commit or vice they could indulge in? No. But it’s still a sin and it’s still a vice.
To the extent that we all are humane and wish the best for others, even anonymous Internet commenters we don’t know and will never meet, then we should encourage people to virtue and not to vice. It’s the same thing Dalrock means when he says that denying or rationalizing or remaining silent in the face of people’s open sinning, and their rationalizations for their sin, is “unloving” in a Christian sense.
I do believe, following Aristotle, that those who live virtuously are happier—even more so, that only virtue leads to genuine happiness. Porn can provide comfort, release, stimulation, etc., but not happiness (and certainly not virtue). Those who are unhappy without a woman will not be made happy through porn. At least, I don’t think so. If a woman is for whatever reason simply impossible to attain, then I think—as others in the sphere have argued many times—that there are various paths to self-improvement that can become ends in themselves and that lead to at least partial happiness, certainly something closer to genuine happiness that the phony dopamine simulacrum that porn provides.
All that said, it’s quite obviously impossible for me or anyone else to stop anyone from consuming porn. I don’t have that power. My “lecture” has no such power. I do think it would be for the best, for men’s own individual souls, and I see no reason why I or anyone should refrain from saying so. Above all, I think it’s a grave disservice to peddle lies and rationalizations about porn.
So, my lecture can’t stop anyone. It will either convince, or it won’t. If it does, then someone may stop out of their own free will. If it does not, I don’t see why anyone should care that I think porn is bad for them.
So now it’s “misandrist” to be skeptical of anal sex, or concerned for the health of one’s wife?
To believe that the reason anal sex is being mainstreamed is that men are getting addicted to deviant free porn and are thus pressuring their female partners to do anal = misandry.
To believe that the reason many women cannot find boyfriends is that widespread porn addiction is turning men into impotent sleazebags with impossible sexual standards = misandry.
As a young man (19) that is attempting to keep strong moral values, I have a question
Obviously, I still have sexual impulses, but if masturbation/pornography is a sin, and fornication is also a sin, and not to mention disgusts me heavily, what do I do in regards to these impulses? Thank you in advance.
I don’t “defend porn” and never will. But I won’t accept feminist-tradcon bullshit about male porn use being responsible for various social problems.
(By the way, what about the apparent correlation between the widespread use of porn and dropping rate rates? Heartiste has articles about it. Are we going to argue that porn has no positive side effects at all?)
Does chocolate create virtue? No.
Does a lack of food create medical problems? Yes.
Is gluttony a vice? Yes.
Is eating a vice or a sin? No.
Similarly, having a bit of alcohol here or there is not in and of itself either a virtue or a vice.
Some that drink do so overly much. Some drink not at all, and are grumpy grump tea-totlers that people really wouldn’t call paragons of virtue. In fact, they could be ascribed the attitude of “holier than thou” which is itself problematic.
I’ve seen a lot of assumption of “this is a problem, therefor X”, and “Denial of the problem doesn’t remove it”… but these are the same arguments used by those who say that even a single glass of wine a day, or a week, or perhaps one in some months is sinful.
And, like the tea-totlers, I see a fair amount of twisting of scripture (such as with Onan).
But I’ve yet to see anyone make a case for “this is sinful” save by refering to excess (by which logic, I can say that since being drunk is a sin, all alcohol is sinful), or by presuming the answer to the question.
“The bible says not to sin sexually, Q.E.D.” “Well can you show that in the bible it is a sexual sin?” “Yes, because the bible says not to sin sexually, and Jesus wouldn’t sin sexually, so Jesus wouldn’t do it, and so you should be like Jesus, so you shouldn’t do it.” … “but can you show that it’s a sexual sin?” “Well it is” is the format that most of these conversations take.
It’s a circular argument.
If someone wants to actually establish the point, without relying on self-referential logic, twisting of the original terms, or relying on authority I don’t recognize (such as relying on the doctrine of a specific denomination, rather than using that authorities writing as a way to establish the case), I’m interested in listening. But again and again the argument falls back on one of those three points.
So are you saying that porn is sex?
Obviously, a great deal of porn IS sex—it’s literally people being photographed or filmed having sex. Unless they are married, the it’s sin for them to do it, full stop. I would say that it’s a sin to have sex on display for the titillation of others even if you are married, but I can cite no Biblical passage to support that. Let me repeat that my theological training is scanty. I’ve spent a lot of time with Aquinas, but almost completely through the lens of his Aristotelianism. However, I have no doubt that Aquinas would call porn both a sin and a vice. If I had time, I could troll through the Summa and find passages that indirectly support this view, indirectly since he obviously did not write about porn, but he did write a lot about sexual morality. In any event, on theological matters, we would all be better off listening to Nova, Dalrock, Cane, Cail and others who know so much more than I do.
That said, I remain unconvinced by your lawyerly argument that porn is not sin. First of all, as noted, much of porn literally is fornication on film—that is, recorded sin. This is true even on your own terms. So somehow it’s not a sin to participate in the sin of others? This reminds of a long ago argument when someone tried to maintain that to when a single paramour has with a married person, the single paramour is morally and ethically blameless.
Second, as noted, Scripture and doctrine both state very clearly the single circumstance in which sex or even sexual release is acceptable. Porn very clearly falls outside this circumstance. You are sounding rather like that Garfunkel & Oates gag song “the Loophole.” Do you also believe it is not a sin to have anal sex outside marriage, since it’s not (some claim) specifically forbidden by the Bible, and that girls who have done so can still rightly fully claim to be virgins?
As for “throughout history,” so what? Prostitution is, not for nothing, called the “world’s oldest profession.” Does mere longevity make it moral, ethical, righteous and just?
I don’t think escoffier will touch this one
Are you paying attention at all? The whole debate is about nothing but this.
Just do as escoffier says, simply abstain from it the way you would a Big Mac
Actually, I believe Nova referenced the Big Mac, not me.
Nonetheless, the principle is correct. If X is bad for you, but refraining from X is hard, does that difficulty by itself justify X? Or transform X into a good?
And, since when on a site at least partially devoted to masculinity does “It’s too hard!” count as a serious argument, or even a valid excuse?
@Escoffier –
Both St. Augustine and St. Thomas tolerate prostitution, although they acknowledge it as sinful. I’m sure they would say the same for pornography
“Now although God is all-powerful and supremely good, nevertheless He allows certain evils to take place in the universe, which He might prevent, lest, without them, greater goods might be forfeited, or greater evils ensue.
…those who are in authority, rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain greater evils be incurred: thus Augustine says (De Ordine ii.4): “If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.”
(Summa Theologicae II-II, q. 10, a. 11)
Yes, there is indeed some porn where people are having sex outside of marriage.
And there is some porn where that is not the case. Some of it is drawings of people that don’t even exist.
In this second case, your argument really does fall apart.
And, no, I am not making a claim of antiquity = virtue. I was ensuring that you had the knowledge of a non-trivial category of porn where your argument appears to falls apart completely, unless you pretend it doesn’t exist.
Rather than presume you have no argument to make for “drawings = sex”, I’m ensuring you’re aware of them, and giving you the chance to make a case.
As for “scripture makes it clear”, then please go ahead and show how scripture makes it clear that the only place you are allowed to ejaculate is inside your wife.
Are nightly emissions sinful, or merely unclean (much as are several classes of mold in the levitical codes, as well as having a skin disease)?
If you don’t even know the actual story of Onan, and you leave it to others to make the argument that masturbation is sinful, why should I listen to you repeatedly say that it is “because reasons”?
As for your assertion that I am lawyer-like, I could just as easily make the claim that you appear to want to be a pharisee placing yourself in the seat of Moses, to make heavy the burdens of the faithful, while lifting not a finger to help move those burdens. Save… there is no more seat of Moses. Since the old covenant has been fulfilled, we are under a new one.
Escoffier,
I don’t think escoffier will touch this one
Maybe. But maybe not.
If your life (with women) is one of absolute rejection and hopelessness then I’d say you are in the appropriate position to give someone like feministhater advice regarding the consumption of pron and why he (and others like him… and you) should not be doing that. You are dealing from his level of expertise. You know what it is like. You know how hard it is.
If (however) you do get s-x (all the time) from women or are happily married to a wife who gives you s-x anytime you want it then… no Escoffier… you have no business instructing feministhater or any people such as himself (who get no play from women) on why they should be avoiding pron. You couldn’t even begin to understand what their lives are like and your rants against pron is nothing more than society telling fh to “man up” which makes you just as guilty as a pastor Driscoll.
@IBB
This is nonsense. I’m sympathetic to the argument that large parts of our society are actively destroying marriage while tisk tisking sexual immorality. In fact, I’ve devoted a good deal of my time to this. But this isn’t what Escoffier and Novaseeker are doing. They are very clear in their concern about marriage, but when the claim was made that porn isn’t harmful or sinful, they rebutted it soundly. Either their arguments are correct (which they are) or not. Who is making the argument doesn’t change this, and either way their motives are sound.
Find a wife. If you can’t, sucks to be you. However, you will still be lectured by others on why you are the problem with the world, why you aren’t good enough, strong enough, attractive enough. In the end, if you’re attractive, find a wife and live a good life. If you’re not, fuck if I know.
Dalrock,
Okay, we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one. For me, I find the pron to be sinful. I am in the camp with nova and escoffier. That said, I’m not going to condemn or shame a guy who uses it as his only s-xual release (because from the moment of his birth, he has had no other alternative), that is fh’s and hoellen’s point.
Boil the argument down.
Porn is damaging because it:-
1. Causes a libido crisis…. debatable.
2. Causes men to lose interest in normal women… debatable but only a problem for men who women find attractive.
3. Porn is harmful because it degrades his body or wastes his sperm… debatable but since no women is interested, his sperm is wasted anyway.
4. Hurts his soul as it is a sin. Yea, this is the ONLY reason why I don’t use porn and think it’s a sin. The only.
This is only in relation to a man who is not attractive.
And finally, I only include the harmful effects of porn on the man, not society, not women, not the Church, nothing else. Since all of those parts have deserted men and thus don’t get to lecture men at all.
We could just do a test and see how well the lecturers do. All married men on the forum. No sex for ten years. See how long you can last, see if you can resist the urge and not partake of the pron. To add some spice to the test, each month you must be forced to ask your non sexual wife for sex, at which point she must reject you and dismiss you out of hand. Furthermore, your pastor, priest, whatever must then disparage you when you decry your sexless state and if you dare look at pron or masturbate, well, divorce is the only appropriate response.
To clarify, here is what I would say face to face to a Christian single (or shut out married man):
Porn use is a sin. Try as hard as you can to not do it. When you fail, tell your confessor. (Or if you are protestant, whomever you feel like confessing to). But do not beat yourself up over it.
Now, come over to my house and Mychael will cook you a nice meal and we will introduce you to a nice girl we know.
–or–
If you like, have your wife contact my wife and she will work into the conversation what she is doing wrong as a wife.
(btw, you should seriously consider reconfiguring the format of your comments section if you wanted it to actually allow for true meaningful dialogue to occur, rather than just one big long list of comments. But perhaps you’re not that interested in dissenting opinions anyhow…)
@feministhater
That’s…depressing. Do any of you have any way of determining which women would have good mother and wife qualities? Also, apologies to Dalrock if this is the incorrect place to ask such questions, but I know not where else to ask.
@thetruthisstrangerthanfiction
You will find that blogs with large numbers of comments avoid nested comment threads. It is too difficult to follow new comments, especially when there are many people commenting at once.
In other words, you are a guy with a blog that sometimes gets 10 comments on a post, lecturing me on what I should do to improve discussion, on a throwaway post where your comment is comment number 292. I’m trying to be a gracious host, but you aren’t being a very gracious guest.
To believe that the reason anal sex is being mainstreamed is that men are getting addicted to deviant free porn and are thus pressuring their female partners to do anal = misandry
First of all, this is not quite what I said. What I said was that was that porn is a factor—a major factor, possibly the single greatest factor—in increasing the demand or desire by men for anal sex. I don’t think this desire is “natural” or wired in the same way that the desire for vaginal intercourse is simply part of the nature of being a man. I think it is a taste that can be formed, encouraged, suppressed, or affected in any number of ways, and one effect of porn has been to increase the prevalence and intensity of that taste.
How on earth that is “misadrist” I cannot possibly divine.
To believe that the reason many women cannot find boyfriends is that widespread porn addiction is turning men into impotent sleazebags with impossible sexual standards = misandry
A straw man so absurd and unrelated to anything I wrote, it deserves no refutation.
A point of order here:
When we talk about porn in the specific context we are here, we’re really talking about masturbation. It’s not so much the porn as it is the masturbation. The porn is a means to masturbation, which is the point. Porn is used to help arouse the man so he can masturbate to release. A man can do this without porn but porn makes this much easier. Without porn he has to fantasize or play a “greatest hits” reel, resort to the “spank bank”.
Gents, we’re really talking here about masturbation, which is considered a sin in tradition, supported in Scripture by some interpretations of the story of Onan.
At the very least, there is evidence that excessive masturbation is harmful. It’s pretty clear there’s a link between viewing porn/the availability of porn, and excessive masturbation. That’s what Nova is getting at when he talks about the big difference between the porn of 50 years ago to today’s porn. There’s a really, really big difference between caveman pornoglyphics and Playboys (which is basically looking at airbrushed naked tits), to 24/7/365 streaming videos of hardcore porn of every conceivable variety on the other (which is basically two or more people stimulating each others’ genitals in any way you can possibly imagine)
You had to sneak around to get Dad’s playboys. All you need now is a bedroom and a cell phone, and an average 15 year old boy can masturbate 8 times a day if he wants, limited only by his refractories.
SO, really, what we’re talking about here is masturbation. The porn use is just accelerating and exacerbating masturbation from necessary release into primary lifestyle, at least for some guys.
Anyone who feels “condemned” or “shamed” simply because they read an abstract argument that porn is bad has “inner game” issues they need to sort out. Seriously, are we that sensitive?
“Porn can provide comfort, release, stimulation, etc., but not happiness (and certainly not virtue). Those who are unhappy without a woman will not be made happy through porn. At least, I don’t think so. If a woman is for whatever reason simply impossible to attain, then I think—as others in the sphere have argued many times—that there are various paths to self-improvement that can become ends in themselves and that lead to at least partial happiness, certainly something closer to genuine happiness that the phony dopamine simulacrum that porn provides.”
Much as I hate to admit it, this is absolutely true, and gets right to the heart of the matter (of course, substituting “masturbation” for “porn”. Masturbation at most provides a temporary reprieve from blueball. That urge will arise again, and will require sating again. Masturbation is at best a fourth-rate substitute for a long term relationship with a real flesh and blood woman. It at best relieves the sexual tension, provides an orgasm; but doesn’t and won’t provide connection, joy, intimacy or anything else that human relationships provide.
I think that everyone knows this. It does go to show that men will look for reasonable substitutes and settle for them if the ideal isn’t available. It also shows just how important sex and sexual release is for men. That there are those here and elsewhere who simply don’t understand this, or don’t care, continues to baffle and disappoint me.
A straw man so absurd and unrelated to anything I wrote, it deserves no refutation.
This absurdity is propagated not by you, but by pundits in the mainstream media.
IBB, in addition to what Dalrock said, which I co-sign entirely, you will notice—or would if you read with more care—that I haven’t told anyone to do or not do anything. And I’ve frankly acknowledged my powerlessness on this score.
What I have said is that porn is bad and I have tried to make an argument that explains why this is so. That argument, I thought, needed to be made to counter what amounted to … if not outright praise of porn, then certainly attacks on anyone who questions or criticizes porn.
I also said, because it is true and because it was the humane thing to do, that to the extent that any of us care about our fellow human beings, we ought not to encourage them to vice nor to ignore vice when we see it, or when we see it being praised or rationalized. That’s inhumane.
If someone were on here bragging about drug use, and others were praising him, and still others were saying “It’s nobody’s business” and “drugs are bad, but man, sometimes you just need the release,” it would be idiotic and inhumane not to tell the truth.
How on earth that is “misadrist” I cannot possibly divine.
The idea that anal sex is being mainstreamed because men are getting addicted to porn and are thus pressuring their female partners to do anal is misandric because it’s based on the notion that men have a sense of sexual entitlement and are fundamentally selfish in their sexual behavior.
Exactly, they seem to be able to glance right over the fact that the men they are talking about won’t be getting Biblical wives, they might get wives after 35, but they still won’t be getting much sex, probably none by 38.
“However, you will still be lectured by others on why you are the problem with the world, why you aren’t good enough, strong enough, attractive enough.”
FH, with due respect, that argument wasn’t made. No one has said that men who masturbate to porn are “the problem with the world”, or that they aren’t good, strong or attractive enough. What has been said is that porn use is harmful and sinful. (I can guaran-damn-tee you that there is not a single man commenting here or reading here who has not masturbated, been aroused by porn, or both.)
Whether sinful/harmful or not, FH, Josh and HH are absolutely correct in my view that one of the reasons porn use and masturbation are so rampant is because more and more lower value men are being forced out of the sexual marketplace, leaving them no alternatives and no sexual outlets. Porn use and masturbation are symptoms, not the disease.
I understand as much, that comment is made in the broader context of this discussion, the kind of discussion you would have if you brought it up at your Church or with your family or with pastor/priest.
I understand as much, that comment is made in the broader context of this discussion, the kind of discussion you would have if you brought it up at your Church or with your family or with pastor/priest.
This is they way this post is related to the newest one. The priest at our most recent RC parish (before we converted to Orthodoxy) was absolutely obsessed with condemning men’s use of pornography and totally silent about all the women in f**k me pumps and short skirts in the pews.
Seemed like he preached about it every other week.
@thedeti
I concur entirely that there are studies showing that excessive masturbation, like many other forms of excessive activity, can be harmful.
I disagree with the interpretation of Onan, since Onan wasn’t actually masturbating. He was having sex. Absent that interpretation of Onan, there is no other scriptural support for masturbation being wrong. It is all tradition and presuming the argument/circular reasoning.
Also, Church tradition has said a great many things over the years, and I don’t agree with a lot of those either. The rules of the pharisees were Temple tradition of the day, so I don’t think we can simply trust church tradition.
I also agree with the point that paying for video or pictures of two unmarried people having sex is at least supporting the sin of another.
I think that there are some options (a lot more narrow than the breadth of what’s available) that are permissible ways to “control one’s vessel”, and that in moderation, it is not sinful. Just as drinking to excess is harmful, and denounced in the bible, but “take a bit of wine, for thy stomach’s sake”, and “wine increases joy”.
We should not be gluttons, but enjoying well baked bread to sustain you is not a sin. It just should not be a focus of your life. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4) after all… but no one would deny a starving man a loaf of bread, and call it gluttony. Nor would we force him to eat cow feeces (marriage 2.0), and call it steak.
Josh, for the third time I admit that I am out-gunned on matters of scripture and theology. I can’t prove that porn is a sin. I was raised to believe that it is, by parents and by religious education. I’ve read what Aquinas says about sex and though he does not mention porn, he is quite clear that the only sanctioned or Godly or virtuous form of sexual release is within marriage.
Beyond that, it just strikes me as … implausible at the very least that a religious teaching that is quite strict about sex (which is understandable, given how important and powerful it is) would be silent or even approving of porn. But I will defer to others on this. You haven’t , in any event, made a case that porn is bad. You’ve just poked holes in my claim that it’s a sin. Fair enough, but that’s not an affirmative case.
But my argument was not primarily a religious argument but a rational one. And you mistook the rest of what I said. First, it’s really kind of a joke to say that “some” porn depicts fornicating couples. In reality, it’s more like 99.99999%.
As for drawings, if I am right about Aquinas, then of course they would count. It’s lawyerly to quibble about methods. If the thing itself is bad, it’s bad in this form or that form.
Sorry, that should be “You haven’t made a case that porn is sanctioned or allowed by Christianity or any denomination thereof, or by Judiaism, for that matter.”
See how long you can last, see if you can resist the urge and not partake of the pron
Is this solipsism at work? In the immortal words of Tom Hagen, this is business, not personal.
The thing is either bad, good, or indifferent. That’s irrespective of what any of us do with our lives.
As Nova pointed out, people will sin. When the temptation to sin is great, sinning is more likely. So maybe some of us could hold out, and others would fall into sin. That’s the nature of humanity.
It changes not a whit the underlying question of goodness v. badness.
Porn is used to help arouse the man so he can masturbate to release. A man can do this without porn but porn makes this much easier.
Deti, I don’t think it’s that simple. Porn doesn’t merely make it easier. And in any event, it’s a pleasure, so who wants it be easy? We want to last as long as possible and be as intense as possible. Porn helps with both those things.
Plus it overwhelms—in a way that reality cannot, not even for the highest apex alpha—the hard-wired desire for variety which all men have. And it can greatly stimulate and augment the desire for kink that some men have.
It just becomes a qualitatively different experience than the “highlight reel” or that Fast Times at Ridgemont High imagination scene.
I don’t “defend porn” and never will.
This is slippery, in the vein of the Cold War leftist anti-anti-Communists. They never actually praised communism or the Soviets. But they attacked any and all who criticized communism and Soviets. Much the way you are on the warpath against those who speak up against porn.
But I won’t accept feminist-tradcon bullshit about male porn use being responsible for various social problems.
More straw-manning. May argument, which you must not have followed, focuses on what porn does to the individual man’s soul.
By the way, what about the apparent correlation between the widespread use of porn and dropping rate rates? Heartiste has articles about it. Are we going to argue that porn has no positive side effects at all?
I am totally willing to believe there may be some causation. The question then is, does that modicum of good outweigh the mountain of bad?
Esco:
“We want to last as long as possible and be as intense as possible. Porn helps with both those things”
I disagree. It is that simple. You’re talking about sexual intercourse. But when you get all the way down to it with porn, it’s about masturbating to ejaculation. He doesn’t want masturbation to last; he wants to get to the climax. He wants to come as fast as possible and as intensely as possible. Porn gets him there faster. That’s the whole point.
“Plus it overwhelms—in a way that reality cannot, not even for the highest apex alpha—the hard-wired desire for variety which all men have. And it can greatly stimulate and augment the desire for kink that some men have.
“It just becomes a qualitatively different experience than the “highlight reel” or that Fast Times at Ridgemont High imagination scene.”
I agree with these sentiments that porn satisfies the desire for variety and it’s more intense and altogether different from the spank bank. But again, at bottom, we’re talking about masturbation, which is intended to substitute for (and which for some men completely supplants, either by force or by choice) sexual relationships with a flesh and blood woman.
The idea that anal sex is being mainstreamed because men are getting addicted to porn and are thus pressuring their female partners to do anal is misandric because it’s based on the notion that men have a sense of sexual entitlement and are fundamentally selfish in their sexual behavior..
Lots of things there I didn’t say. I said that porn has formed or encouraged a taste for something that is not present or prevalent in most men by nature.
I said nothing about entitlement, though I do believe that men now more than ever pressure women to do anal. But men have always pressured women for ordinary sex—that’s part of life. That’s not “entitlement” it just … is. I don’t even know what entitlement would mean in this context.
Or what “fundamental selfishness” is either. Presumably the guy pressuring her for anal has also given her a few orgasms by one means or another, so he’s not fundamentally selfish. He just wants this thing, and he figures he’s done things for her, so if she loves him and wants to be reciprocal, she should do this for him.
The problem is that the things he has done for her don’t carry the same risks of injury, infection, and disease. So in that sense, yeah, I guess he is being selfish. He’s asking her to take serious risks for something that, let’s be honest, cannot rationally be defined as a “need” the way some of us describe ordinary sex as a “need.”
If that’s “misandry”, then the definition of “misandry” has become “concern for the health and well-being of a woman you love.”
Yeah, I would say porn makes masturbation more enjoyable, not easier, although both may be true for guys who can’t get it up on imagination alone. The whole point is that you feel, on some level, like you’re there.
Escoffier said a while back that one reason men enjoy porn is the variety. That’s another area where modern porn is exponentially more intense than those Playboys. A guy used to page through a magazine, looking at a handful of girls and then staring at one while he got off. Now he can pull one (or three) up online, watch until the initial variety wears off in minutes or seconds, and then pop to the next, and the next, and the next.
The primitive part of his brain, which doesn’t distinguish all that well between reality and perception, just had a sexual experience in the company of dozens of women. If he does that regularly, it’s going to become a habit and affect his mental and physical expectations, just like any other habit. That doesn’t mean it’s permanent, or that he can’t detox from it, but it’s obviously going to have an effect, and it’s obviously sinful if “lust in your heart” means anything at all.
Sorry, I won’t be providing specific theological references proving that using porn is sinful. If someone asks me where the sun will come up tomorrow, and then demands proof for my claim it will be in the east, I won’t do that either. Some arguments are too dumb to have.
Escoffier,
Good, then tell the truth. Because right now, you aren’t. You are lying. Bringing drugs into this discussion is (what is the word you used, oh yes,) “idiotic” and (here is my words) pure strawman. And why? You can not masturbate yourself to death. No man has ever “OD-ed on jerking off” (the way they can and DO on drugs), ever, in the entire history of the world. Never ever.
From a men’s health standpoint, if you don’t empty your prostate (regularly) you increase your chances of developing prostate cancer later in life. You must keep the pipes working, keep everything flowing, or systems start to shut down. Talk to your medical doctor if you don’t believe me. A man NOT having s-x somewhat regularly, (or God help him “ever”) is very bad for his physical health. Bad. Dare I say… dangerous.
God almighty (in His infinate wisdom) created nocturnal emissions to help men with this “build-up/burning.” But if you are in your 30s or 40s and these things are still happening, there is a problem here. And I’m going to guess we have entirely too many men (on this forum) with this problem.
I agree with you that pron is sin if (for no other reason) that masturbation is sin. But I ask you Escoffier, why is masturbation sin? There is a specific reason why. And (given that reason) why might masturbation NOT be sin (Biblically) for people like fh? Really think about that question before you (or any of you) answer.
Deti, this is getting to be TMI, but someone above referenced PUA site threads that are anti-porn and anti-mast. I’ve seen some of these. It’s very common for men to refer to the practice of “edging” where they sit looking for hours at a time, deliberately delaying climax so that they can draw out the pleasurable experience.
IBB, if you can say that I am “lying”, then I can reply–in all honesty–that you are a moron.
Please make one post that makes a modicum of sense and I will try to respond as best I can.
Escoffier, you related masturbation to drugs. You just did that. THAT is moronic.
@Escoffer,
No, I do not present an argument that “porn is not sin”, because saying that something is sinful is the affirmative argument.
The bible doesn’t say anything about dancing the Charleston, or about using an umbrella to keep dry that I’m aware of. And unless someone could make the affirmative scriptural case that either is sinful, I would be of the opinion that it isn’t.
Under the new covenant, we have a small number of rules under which we must live in grace, and otherwise we should be motivated primarily by our love of Christ. Yes, we should meditate on what is holy. But that does not mean we should not eat bread, or meat, or drink wine.
In the spirit of Romans 14, if you think that you should not do something, then I agree you should not. If you think you must, then I would encourage you to do it. Whether this be eating only vegetables, or observing a specific day (be it Saturday, Sunday, Easter, Thanksgiving, or Christmas).
But in the same way…
13 Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather determine this—not to put an obstacle or a stumbling block in a brother’s way. 14 I know and am convinced in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but to him who thinks anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean. 15 For if because of food your brother is hurt, you are no longer walking according to love. Do not destroy with your food him for whom Christ died. 16 Therefore do not let what is for you a good thing be spoken of as evil; 17 for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
All my life – since I acquired aged five, in exchange for one penny, a piece of bubble-gum which came with that famous bathing-suit shot of Betty Grable – people have been telling me how bad I would be if I looked at ‘that’. That ‘that’ however has over time changed and will doubtless continue to do so. I am entirely behind TFH (though not of course in the Biblical sense) on this one. Sex is always a problem (as St Paul reminds us) but to suppose I am that much more depraved now than I ever was is not, I think, likely.
I’m really quite sympathetic to the problem presented by men who are forced out of the sexual marketplace, or find that participation in it is much more difficult, for whatever reason. Some men cannot attract, or have not to date attracted, a woman they find sufficiently attractive for long term commitment or even for sex. There are a lot of contributory factors to this, not the least of which is female perfidy and changing female desires and preferences.
There’s no easy answer for these men. The best that can be done is to give the advice that’s been given before, which is:
1. Take a good long hard look at yourself and figure out why you are where you are; why you have thus far been unsuccessful in attracting a suitable woman. Be brutally honest with yourself.
2. Decide whether you are able and/or willing to make the necessary improvements, taking into account what can be done and the lowest attraction level of woman you’re willing to accept.
3. Decide whether the potential benefits of making said improvements outweigh the projected costs.
4. If the answer to (3) is “yes”, then make the improvements. If you make the improvements and find a woman, great. If you make the improvements and still don’t find a woman, then you are a better man and human being for having improved yourself.
5. If the answer to (3) is “no”, then make your peace with the situation as it is now and find other routes to happiness and life satisfaction.
Granted: That is a very, very difficult, daunting, and fraught with risk set of choices. And they’re stark and hard: Either improve, or make your peace with the boat you’re in. But it’s not insurmountable. Either way, it’s pretty clear that masturbating to porn is not a “route to happiness”. It’s sexual subsistence at best, just a pressure release valve.
Here is the rubric I apply: (It really only works for Catholics and Orthodox though.)
Masturbating is not a “grave matter” (which is a concept found in Orthodoxy, under a different name).
If you go to Church one Sunday and at confession, you dutifully mention all the grave matters, as well as venial sins you have committed and receive absolution, THEN go home, and have a heart attack while masturbating–all things being equal, you will still go to heaven.
Take this, add it to all that has already been written about the current state of affairs in the MMP (since we are all agreeing the marriage is the proper context for sex) and viola! I chose to not beat up any man today over this. It is a sin, try not to do it, next.
In other words the context determines how much I would chose to make out of a particular venial sin.
Intentionally obtuse.
No, the difference is that you, Dalrock and others have not be made to wait years and years for sex and get it regularly. Yet you are comparing your lives against men who will never get married to a Biblical women and must live with that all their lives without release.
In a word. Cruel.
@Cane,
As per ground previously covered, and re-covered in other threads, “lust in your heart” refers to coveting.
Lusting for/coveting power, lusting for / coveting a woman who is not your wife, lusting for/coveting your neighbor’s convertible.
Are you saying that imagining what it’d like to be president, and what laws you would change is lusting after power? That phrase is usually used for people who are willing to do bad things to get power. Or that wondering what it’d take to get yourself a similar convertible, and being willing to set aside money for it is lusting after your neighbor’s convertible?
“Lust” is a concept that has been both contracted (to be a mostly sexual one), and expanded (to cover a wide variety of things it would not have before, being more expansive in the sexual domain).
I may be opening a can or worms here, but do most guys here really believe that marriage is the graveyard of the male libido? I realize the source is, shall we say… controversial in these parts, but there’s no reason to think the numbers in this story are not correct, as they derive from reputable polls.
__________
Married couples say they have sex an average of 68.5 times a year. That’s slightly more than once a week. — Newsweek
Married people have 6.9 more sexual encounters per year than people who have never been married. — Newsweek
15 to 20 percent of couples have sex no more than 10 times a year, which experts define as a sexless marriage. — Newsweek
20 to 30 percent of men and 30 to 50 percent of women say they have little or no sex drive. — USA Today
25 percent of all Americans (a third of women and a fifth of men) suffer from a condition known as hypoactive sexual desire (HSD), which is defined as a persistent or recurring deficiency or absence of sexual fantasies or thoughts, or a lack of interest in sex or being sexual. — Psychology Today
__________
Here’s what i take from that: sexless marriages do exist (although a couple can do it almost once-a-month and be considered “sexless” according to the clinical definition), but since a significant portion of the population is functionally asexual, it does not not appear that very many married men who want sex aren’t getting it from their wives. Granted, a lot of men would like to have sex more often than they do, but that’s a far cry from “no sex at all.”
Lyn87, the problem with comparing married men to unmarried men is that the married men are always in a relationship — the marriage — while the unmarried men may or may not be in one. So it’s not comparing married men to shacked up men, but also married men to hopeless guys who can’t get a date, let alone sex.
In other words: so the average married man might have sex weekly. The single guy with a girlfriend might get it every night and twice on Sundays — but then they break up after two months, and he gets none at all for several months. And his brother, the shy IT guy, hasn’t had sex in three years. So the married guy has more sex/year than the single guys, on average. BUT, the married guy also has a lot more nights where he could be having sex, and there’s a woman right there in bed with him, so close he can smell her and hear her breathing, but they don’t have sex.
It’s one thing to go to bed alone and not have sex; it’s another to come home to a woman and spend time with her in the house you worked hard to provide for her, watch her getting undressed for bed, and then not have sex. Night after night, more nights off than on. Married men get a bit more sex, but they get a whole lot more frustration from all the nights of not-sex.
So married men have more sex than unmarried men — yes, they should! But not just a bit more; they should be having tons more, even in today’s casual-sex society. They shouldn’t just be having more than the average single guy; they should also be having more than the smoothest alpha PUA at the club. After all, the PUA has to pick a woman, charm her, and get her somewhere private; the married guy already has a wife and a bed.
@Jorge
I wrote a post on this when I first started blogging titled Interviewing a Prospective Wife. That was four and a half years ago, and if I wrote it today I would probably write it a bit differently, but I think it is still a good primer on how to approach the question. More recently I expanded on one part of the older primer in a post titled A simple test. I also have a tag for finding a spouse, which would pull up posts on topic. However, you would still have to sort through those to find the ones specific on finding a wife.
The reality is it is a difficult task, and nothing you do can eliminate the risks. But there are things you can do to better manage them.
Cail– yours is how I have always perceived those stats. It always looks funny to me that married men have just a tiny bit more sex than then the average single guy.
Shouldn’t it be WAY more?
Haha, that made my day.
@Lyn87,
The numbers for married vs unmarried includes in the unmarried people who aren’t even in a relationship of any kind, and don’t have plans to be.
If you look at cohabiting vs married in the US, cohabitation has a higher correlation with sex.
@TFH
I’m not sure who you are directing this at, but I think it isn’t mentioned because it isn’t the topic. Female porn gets a pass that it should not. I get that there is a huge blind spot here in our society, but I don’t think that is what is at play right here, right now.
Lyn87, it was mentioned over a year ago here:
http://www.justfourguys.com/good-christian-men-think-twice/#comment-8627
The full source article is downloadable in the PDF form, for example from here. The ‘average’ does not reflect the usual marital course of decline of frequency of sex and changes in attitude toward it.
IBB, I made an analogy. Drugs are a vice, porn is a vice. As we would not encourage or excuse drug abuse, neither should we encourage or excuse porn consumption. Analogies don’t have to be exactly 1:1 in every respect to get the intended point across.
You may think the analogy is inapt, but that hardly makes me a “liar.”
You frequently use terms so loosely and play so fast and loose with elementary logic and reason that I have to wonder, did you have any kind of formal education at all? The Massachusetts public schools have for 50 years at least been ranked the best in the nation. How did they fail you so badly?
@Femhater
I get the injustice. There is a massive amount of pain caused by us abandoning marriage. I care deeply about this, which is why I write about it. You’ve been around for quite a while. Have you truly not seen this?
I get your frustration with those who are perfectly happy to turn their backs on the problems with marriage while tisk tisking the men this harms. But Novaseeker and Escoffier aren’t those guys. They care about this stuff, and have been writing about the same problems for years.
Funny, both this article and the one before point directly to marriage and interaction with women being highly toxic currently. Yet, men are left with no ‘sinless’ option to do without interaction with women for sexual release, which means they have to take the chance in marriage. Which means women win, they can up the risk, the divorce cash, the rape charges, the whatever they damn well want, well because, pron bad. Marriage strike bad or something like that.
Shooting yourself in the foot is what it is.
No, the difference is that you, Dalrock and others have not be made to wait years and years for sex and get it regularly. Yet you are comparing your lives against men who will never get married to a Biblical women and must live with that all their lives without release.
More solipsism. I have again and again declined to make the discussion personal but kept it at the abstract level. I have said nothing about my own life and nothing about yours. I have said that porn is vice. If you believe it’s not, do what you want. If you believe it is, then by the terms of your own believe, you shouldn’t use it. If you believe it is and still do it anyway, I suppose that makes you a hypocrite, but I also suppose it’s really none of my business.
You seem to want some dispensation from me or Dalrock or at any rate someone who say “Get that release, it’s OK.” I am not in any position to give such a dispensation. But because you or someone else may be having a very hard time in life, possibly mostly or entirely undeservedly, I am not going to say because of that that “vice is not vice.”
I’ll be honest with you guys. When I was in university, I was sexless but had urges that I couldn’t cope with. I didn’t have advice or help or the means to cope with those urges. It plagued me day and night, in lectures, tests, exams, you name it. Nothing could stop it, not prayer, not discussing it with my pastor of friends – who would just laugh and call me a silly virgin – nothing. The only thing that really allowed me to concentrate and get my degree was being able to masturbate and gain sexual release. That’s the simple truth to my situation. I would not have obtained my pieces of paper had I not had some sort of release.
I have spent years learning to control my urges but at that age I could not cope. In that environment, I could not cope, my mind and body was abuzz with sexual repression and anxiety.
I simply cannot fathom why asking men to be abstinent throughout their teenage years and through their twenties is not leading them to sin. Of course it is.. and that is the crux of my argument. And the thing that bugs me is that men in my situation have no help, none. No encouragement, no sympathy, no means to explain their dilemma because, quite frankly, no one cares, especially not your fellow women.
Josh, is your argument basically that because there is no specific Biblical prohibition, then porn is permitted? Reminds me of the formula Fustel de Coulanges gave for the difference between the ancient city and the modern policy. The formula for the ancient world was, “Whatever the law does not command, it forbids.” The formula of modernity is “Whatever the law does not forbid, it permits.” The Bible was certainly written about an ancient city. So the logic seems strained to me,
I would also re-raise my earlier point about pre- or extramarital anal sex. There are apparently some young Christians who think that because this is not specifically dis-allowed in the Bible, it is therefore permitted. Would you agree with that?
Whether or not porn is OK by the letter of the Bible, it seems clearly opposed to the spirit. Much of the purpose of Biblical marriage, and the whole Biblical teaching on sex, is to bind a couple as one flesh for the sake of themselves and their own souls, for the good of children, for the good of the larger religious community, and for the good the political community. Porn very clearly undermines all of those goals. Since the Bible forbids adultery and fornication on exactly these grounds, why would it make an exception for porn?
And, Cail, I fully understand your reluctance to weigh in on this, but I would like to read whatever you had to say. That goes as well for any of the more-theologically-versed commenters than me (which is probably most of you).
“I have said that porn is vice. If you believe it’s not, do what you want. If you believe it is, then by the terms of your own believe, you shouldn’t use it. If you believe it is and still do it anyway, I suppose that makes you a hypocrite, but I also suppose it’s really none of my business.
“You seem to want some dispensation from me or Dalrock or at any rate someone who say “Get that release, it’s OK.” I am not in any position to give such a dispensation. But because you or someone else may be having a very hard time in life, possibly mostly or entirely undeservedly, I am not going to say because of that that “vice is not vice.””
@ Escoffier:
Leave aside any religious considerations. I can accept for purposes of this discussion that porn is vice, sinful, and harmful.
Question: Is masturbation vice, sinful and harmful? Would you have a moral problem from an Aristotlean viewpoint if men masturbate, so long as they don’t use porn to achieve their orgasms?
Escoffier, you don’t get it, do you. You are asking the impossible and are acting high and mighty. Yet when asked to place yourself in the exact same situation, decline because ‘solipsism’. You refuse to see what is a very real aspect of male problems. The real cause is not porn and everyone here knows that.
The deal is this, porn is sin, the difference is your and my take over what is leading men to sin in this way. I don’t agree with the idea that men simply want so much more variety, so much more sexiness all the time, no, I think that men simply have zero access to any sex with a woman that actually wants to have sex with them on a frequent basis and thus have to resort to porn to at least have some stimulation in their lives. That’s it. I have not condoned it, nor promoted it. Merely put a point of view forward to explain what men in my situation go through. I
What about a single, unmarried man? Can he masturbate so long as he doesn’t use porn?
What about a married man whose wife refuses him? Can he masturbate sans porn?
Because in my view, porn isn’t really what we’re talking about here. We’re really talking about masturbation. Porn exists to facilitate masturbation.
So if we remove porn from the equation, aren’t we really saying that masturbation is vice, sinful and harmful? And, if a man isn’t married, doesn’t that obviate the “one flesh” argument against masturbation?
And Escoffier, the reason I am gunning for you is that years ago, when talking about the UMC, you discussed that men and women in the UMC were expected to marry later and obtain their proper finances and education/career first. That women were going to have a couple one night stands, a couple LTRs, and couple this and that and that this was expected and just the way it was. The reality of the situation.
Well, how do you expect men were going to cope, especially those men who didn’t get to have the LTRs and the one night stands?
FH, I’m not asking you to do or not do anything. I’m saying porn is a vice, and one that’s bad for the soul. In my view, that’s just a fact. It’s not a fact that the awful situation of any one man–or a legion of men–can change.
As a general matter, I think it’s best if men avoid vice and practice virtue. How could that statement possibly be controversial? Someone may be sorely tempted for some outlet, and that outlet might be most officiously channeled through vice. That person can be pitied. But so what? What good does anyone’s pity do? It doesn’t make vice into virtue and it doesn’t lessen the harm that vice does to the soul.
These are just “givens” that neither I nor anyone else can change.
Getting rather late here and I have to wake up early, enjoy the debate gents, whatever is left of it!
Just one last thing, I get riled up about this very issue because there is no solution, none that I have been able to find as of yet. I wish people would focus on that solution and thus provide it to men so that they wouldn’t fall into the sin of porn. Alas, everyone keeps focusing on the men watching porn and telling them off but providing them no alternative.
Deti, interesting question. Unfortunately, it requires me to speculate.
Aristotle unsurprisingly never addresses this specific issue, though I have tried to apply his teaching on moderation to the topic. He’s all for having plenty of sex with a lawful spouse, and is dead against adultery, that much is specific.
However, Xenophon sort of has Socrates address this question in a passage in the Memorabilia. Socrates is speaking to a student (Xenophon himself, actually) who confesses that he has come down with a roaring case of one-itis. Socrates is very concerned about this because he is worried that the student will as a consequence do foolish things, neglect his duties, and turn his mind from the higher things. Socrates’ advice is to get release, when absolutely necessary, but with someone ugly.
Now, I must add here that Xenophon was quite an ironist and jokester and so much of his work has a character that is probably not meant to be taken too literally. And that story in particular is told with a comic verve that stands out even in a book filled with amusing scenes.
That said, here is what I take from it. First is the clear recognition that the sex drive is powerful and won’t go away. I point out that in Plato’s Phaedo,, which depicts Socrates’ death at age 70, his wife comes to the jail carrying their little boy. No age is given but he is at most a toddler. In other words, into his late 60s at least, Socrates was still gettin’ it on.
So the sex drive is powerful and there’s no shame in satisfying it, not even for Socrates, the most indifferent man in history (save Jesus) to all earthly pleasures.
Socrates does not advise his student to simply go without forever. (Nor, it must be added, does he say “Get married!”) But he does warn of the dangers of lust and obsession, which he calls “the spider’s bite.” So he tries to help his student find some balance. It’s unrealistic and maybe unhealthy to go without forever, but it’s also unwise to become a slave to this or any other bodily pleasure.
Now, Aristotle is quite explicit in his praise of marriage. He has a whole discussion on the theme of “sexual friendship” which I can go into later if need be. So like Socrates, he recognizes the need, and he tried to find a reasonable outlet for the need. For him this is very clearly marriage.
But as to your specific question, my speculation is this. It’s impossible to imagine Aristotle saying, even in jest, “Go bang someone ugly.” He was just too sober and high-minded to say any such thing even as a joke. However, I could imagine him saying that if you really need, almost as a matter of medical or mental necessity, to rub one out in private every once in while … well, there are worse things you could do. Just be sparing about it, discreet, don’t let it become the focus of your life.
Cail, Josh, et al,
I get your point, but comparing cohabiting couples, or boyfriend-girlfriend couples, to all married couples is not a valid comparison, either. Those couples are in the same phase of their relationship as newlyweds, not all married couples. I’ll admit, when we were newlyweds we did it A LOT… and more often than we do now. That’s pretty standard: pretty much all newlyweds – especially young ones – do. So the guy who gets a hot new girlfriend who’s DTF, or a couple that just moved in together (but will break up within a year) is going to bounce the bed-springs a lot more than a couple of married 40-somethings with two-point-four kids and a mortgage… but probably not more than they did at that stage of their relationship. I have no argument with any of you on that point. What I am challenging is the notion that a large percentage of married men are in an involuntary sexual desert for decades of their married life. I’ll stipulate that most men don’t get it as often as they would like, but to say that sex involuntarily ENDS for more than a small percentage of married men? I’m not buying it.
When you filter out the percentage of men who have diminished (or no) desire for sex because of low testosterone, estrogen in the water supply, stress, or whatever, that pretty much covers the percentage of marriages classified as “sexless.” In other words, except for a pretty small percentage, married men are getting sex often enough that isn’t going to be a health concern – or even cause nocturnal emissions.
The only reason I bring this up is that a lot of people seem to say that wives turning off the sex spigot is a major reason for married men “going astray” in various ways. If a married guy is getting it fifty times a year, the burden is not so great that he can’t deal with it. Twice a year? That’s different, and almost certainly points to a problem with the wife being in rebellion. But those couples are outliers.
Escoffier,
I’ll be kind with this one, but (if you dig your heels in further) this will be the last time I am kind with you on this.
Lets make this real simple, step by step: you can overdose and die from drug use. You cannot overdose and die from pron or masturbation. We (society, the church, the government, God) do not discourage drug use because it is bad for your soul (even though it is.) We (society, the church, the government, God) discourage drug use because it is possible fatal. Abuse drugs, you are (potentially) throwing away God’s greatest gift. Its so bad, government criminalized it (something they have not done with masturbation or pron use.)
This “analogy” you are making (even if it is not 1:1 in ANY respect) is nothing of the kind. Both drugs and pron are sin therefore you discourage both? Really, that is why you discourage drug use, because it is sin? I know that YOU KNOW that drug use and pron use are not analagous in any sense of the word. The point you are getting across is nonsense. That is why I called you a “liar.” One can kill you and the other can’t and you know it. That is the elementary logic I learned in Massachusetts public schools. They didn’t fail me.
Pron is sin (from a spiritual standpoint) but from a physical health standpoint, masturbation offers no physical danger to you and (in fact) is healthful. There is nothing in Bible that argues against it. For those men who do not get s-x regularly (or at all, like fh) they are in grave risk of developing prostate cancer later in life. Ask your medical doctor. Our bodies are machines Escoffier. Reproduction is an act that our body is designed to do. To NOT masturbate is fine and right and just provided you are routinely having s-x. If you are not (and many men here are not) then you better take matters into your own hands (pun intended.) If you must use pron to help keep the pipes flowing (because they are not flowing any other way, and you can’t seem to get anything working any other way) far be it for you or I or any man you is married to try and shame other men who aren’t.
If you can’t get this basic thing now, you never will. That is because your OWN sin (pride) prevents you from even admitting that you are wrong.
fh,
I certainly hope he will NOW. But that sin of “pride” might stop him from getting it. And that would be a shame.
You guys are talking past each other, and have been for quite a while. Example one:
While pr0n won’t kill you, it can keep you from truly living. Specifically it ought not replace authentic human relationships, and for many people it does replace them.
My carnal, baser instincts tell me that many things are probably enjoyable. Eating whole cheesecakes at a single sitting. Riding around on one of those motorized wheelchairs with the basket in front, rather than jogging and walking from place to place, etc. etc. Doing such things once in a while may not really be bad for a man’s health, but they carry the temptation to replace more authentic modes of being with counterfeits and substitutes, which ought to be avoided when possible.
A lot of you guys are also conflating the physical act of masturbation to pr0n consumption. There’s a causal relationship in some cases, but they are mutually exclusive. I haven’t seen Escoffier condemn anyone for occasionally whacking it — only for consuming raunch. This is an important distinction to make.
Best,
Boxer
@Jorge,
Feministhater was rather rude about it but, yes, outside of (debased) marriage there’s no sexual outlet for men. I went though this myself and am close to being a 40-year old virgin so you aren’t alone. Four thoughts:
1. Dead men don’t feel pain. Being bothered by sin is proof you are alive in Christ, unlike Josh the Aspie who has convinced himself that porn is okay despite Ephesians 5 and Matthew 5.
2. We are most valuable to Christ when we are loyal to Him despite the way He treats us, not because of it. This was the central lesson of Job.
3. I read a comment from C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity that helped. Sometimes God is less interested in whether we can endure a trial than whether we can keep trying again after we fail. Romans 7, basically. “I never stopped trying” is a good thing to say on Judgment Day.
4. Don’t get tunnel vision. Yes, sex will be a constant frustration but in the meantime there are surely other things you can do. If the only thing God wanted was a lack of sin then suicide would be mandatory, right?
I don’t think it does. I’m not going to say “most” marriages are a sexual desert, and I don’t know what the percentage is. But there are a significant number where the man is getting far less sex than he’d like (let’s say 20% or less, as in: he’d like it every other night, but he’s getting it every two weeks: 14% as much as he’d like), and it’s the most frustrating thing about the marriage for him. It’s a comedy staple that the sex dries up after marriage, and that didn’t come from nowhere. The man hasn’t lost interest; the wife has lost interest and/or is withholding sex to control him.
I’m also not saying it causes health problems, and I’m definitely not saying it justifies him resorting to sinful acts. But it does contribute to mental and emotional problems, and does tear at the fabric of the marriage because it pushes men toward a supplicating role.
Is going six days a week without sex with your wife too great a burden to live with? Of course not; but if a man wants sex nightly and he’s getting it weekly, then his wife isn’t holding up her part of the marriage. She’s violating her vows to him six nights out of seven. Again, that doesn’t justify porn or adultery for him; it’s just recognition that it may lead to those things.
As you say, comparing marriages to shack-ups is apples and oranges; my point was just that comparing married to single is also apples and oranges. I don’t think “Hey, married people have more sex than unmarried people” is anything to brag about, or any indication that married guys are anywhere near satiated.
I was in two marriages where the sex gradually went away, and I’ve heard the same thing from other guys. Like I said, it’s so common it’s a trope. Problem is, it’s also so common that most guys just accept it as part of the deal: “I hope the sex will continue like this after the wedding, at least for a while, but it probably won’t.” That sucks, and we ought not let wives off the hook with, “Hey, he’s getting it more than he did when he was dating; what’s he crying about?”
I wouldn’t go as far as to make the porn incidental. Porn definitely enhances the experience, or guys wouldn’t seek it out, even pay for it. Porn does add elements to it which are sinful in themselves.
In theory, a guy could masturbate without looking at porn or even imagining a woman’s body, and make the argument that he’s not lusting, just letting off pressure. (I probably wouldn’t buy that argument, but he could make it.) But as soon as there’s a woman’s image in his mind, which is certainly the case with porn, there’s lust involved, and “adultery in his heart.” Sin. I’m not arguing that it’s the equivalent of adultery or anything like that, but arguing that it’s not sin seems laughable to me.
I know that many people here don’t believe that masturbation is a sin. I assume they’re talking about the theoretical scenario where it’s just a physical release. But in a real-life scenario where a man is watching porn or imagining the hot chick from his history class naked, I assume they would recognize sin there — not for the physical act, but for the lusting. So whether you consider the physical act of masturbation to be sinful, it seems to me that the porn viewing is a separate sin on top of that.
As for the “rewiring” issue, I think it’s both. Porn desensitizes your imagination, while masturbation desensitizes your senses. Fortunately, both are reversible.
I’ll be kind with this one, but (if you dig your heels in further) this will be the last time I am kind with you on this.
You mean you’re going to come through my screen and beat me up? Oh, wait, no, you just mean you’re going to be rude to me. Well, blast away, I don’t care. I assure you, you couldn’t possibly hurt my feelings.
As to the “substance” of your post. Yes, you can die from drugs and you can’t die from porn. You seem to think this is most devastating comeback ever. But it’s junk.
So what? The point is that both are vices, and it’s bad to encourage, excuse or rationalize any vice. We don’t do it with vice X, and we shouldn’t do it with vice Y.
Then you go into hysterics about “lying”. It’s really quite extraordinary. Why on earth would this mundane analogy get you so worked up? What kind of person has these reactions to something so trivial?
Then you deny that it is an analogy at all. Apparently you don’t know what an analogy is, because you insist that unless the things being compared and their effects are identical, it’s not an analogy. The Mass public schools didn’t teach you this word? Then let me help. When the things are identical, it’s by definition NOT an analogy. An analogy is a comparison of two different but similar or related things. Drugs and porn are different because one is drugs and the other is porn. They are similar in that both are vices, both are bad for you, both respond to powerful human desires, and both can be addictive.
But you insist that unless the effects are the same, then I am “lying.” Apparently you don’t know what that means either. It does not mean “using an inapt analogy” or “making a faulty argument.” It means deliberately stating something that you know to be untrue. So, if I said that I thought you were intelligent, measured, and logical, I would be lying. But when I compare drugs and porn, I am making an analogy. Which you are free to consider faulty, but to call it “lying” is inaccurate, hysterical, and sloppy.
As for the rest, it’s far from established that the Bible has nothing negative to say about masturbation. There are varying claims in this thread that haven’t been resolved. In fact, one of the posters who agrees with you on this (Josh) disagrees with you in that he denies porn is a sin.
And, I too have seen some studies which claim that there are health risks to men who don’t ejaculate at least every once in a while and health benefits to those who do. Nobody claims it’s really a matter of life and death—that’s your ridiculous hyperbole again—but the basic idea does sound at least plausible. But it would be strange, would it not, if God so designed man that he had to have orgasms for his health, but then prevented some men from ever having them. But as you noted up-thread, didn’t God solve this problem via wet dreams?
Finally, your claim some men “must” use porn to masturbate is risible; Joycelyn Elders risible. It’s certainly easier and more fun with porn, but hardly necessary, for anyone, I would guess.
It’s my fault for engaging. I not only should have known better—I DID know better, at least ever since your absurd claim that any middle class family has the means to gift each of their children 6- or 7-figure assets while the parents are middle aged. And really I knew long before that. It’s foolish of me to respond to you or even to talk about what you post. I will endeavor not to do so in the future. Since I am sure we will both be happier that way, please wish me fortitude in this matter.
@IBB
We (society, the church, the government, God) discourage drug use because it is possible fatal.
/facepalm
Please stop speaking for God, the government, the church, and society.
“We” discourage all sorts of things even when they aren’t fatal. More importantly, God’s commands have very little to do with “possible fatal”. He is very concerned with all sorts of sins that are not fatal – the vast majority of human sin. Ex: Adultery and divorce – which you’ll note get many condemnations in the Bible despite being non-fatal, where drug use gets none. Instructions on drunkenness do cover drug use – and note that “because you might die!” is not why they’re discouraged.
The church’s stance follows God’s stance – which is far more concerned with souls and the eternal spiritual life over the current physical life.
In fact, God also encourages His followers to do all sorts of things that can be quite fatal – because what good is it to gain the world and lose one’s very soul? The Christian walk begins with taking up a cross as death to self.
If you’re going to presume to speak for God, get it right or shut up. Physical self-harm is not the primary or overriding reason why God and the church, or society and government, discourage activities.
Sir Hamster-
These are actually pretty spot on words. And in spite all I have written upthread (which is probably perceived as a lot of equivocation) I understand why most of what God and the Bible calls sin is bad. It is bad for your soul, including porn use.
It’s the same reason I can’t stand the “forgiveness as therapy for the forgiver” argument. It cheapens the repentance/forgiveness process (vertical and horizontal) by making it “therapeutic” and “healthy.”
Sir Hamster,
Although I agree with the substance of your post at February 12, 2015 at 9:11 pm, I have to disagree with your assertion that the Bible doesn’t condemn drug use. The word pharmakeia appears three times in the Greek New Testament (Gal 5:20, Rev 9:21, and Rev 18:23). That is the Greek word from which we get the English words pharmacy and pharmaceutical. In the KJV it is translated as “witchcraft” in Galatians and “sorceries” in both Revelation verses. The people reading it in Greek would have understood it to mean something along the lines of a modern shaman using psilocybin or peyote to enter a trance-like or out-of-body state to commune with spirits (in other words, demons). In all cases it is condemned unconditionally.
The word has several possible meanings, and not all of them are linked to pharmaceuticals. Rev 18:23 certainly refers to one of the other meanings. The first two, however, probably mean drug use in the shamanistic sense.
________________
Cail,
I find nothing objectionable in your post at February 12, 2015 at 8:14 pm. We are in agreement. My argument is not with you, but with the meme that a man should expect to live in an involuntary sexual desert starting within a few years after his wedding. That’s simply not true for most married men. He’s likely to get less sex than he wants, but he’s very unlikely to go without for very long, indeed, probably not more than a few days if he makes his desires known. Women want to be wanted, after all, and most wives don’t loath their husbands (except for those seeking divorce, and not until near the end of the marriage for most of them). I’m not saying that gratuitous delaying tactics are good – not at all. What I am saying is there’s a big difference between once-a-week sex and no sex at all. A lot of guys seem to think that most marriages are, for all practical purposes, sexless or nearly so… and they aren’t.
@Lyn
Thanks for the correction. A downside to knowing only English, some context gets lost.
Also interesting in that modern society tends to think of drug abuse as purely a physical thing; there’s definitely a spiritual element to it, especially with pot-users extolling how it opens their mind.
SH,
My pleasure. It’s a tangential point, since it appears that pharmakeia (as it relates to drug use) is condemned mainly because of its spiritual component (the people who used such substances were deliberately trying to “open their minds” to spiritual influences – which is a VERY bad idea)… not because the drugs will kill you physically, which is the point you were arguing against (correctly, I might add).
“…they carry the temptation to replace more authentic modes of being with counterfeits and substitutes, which ought to be avoided when possible.”
At what cost? At what risk?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem
@Scott,
Thanks too. Your blog has been a very interesting read as I consider what I should do as a single.
Mid teens through mid twenties I could have done with daily sex. By late twenties three times a week sufficed. Now in my thirties I feel horny only about once a week, sometimes twice. My forty something buddies tell me they are fine with sex twice a month. I just think this is the natural outcome of aging and I don’t fight it. I quite happy not being hot and bothered all the time like I was when I was young. Makes life easier and puts me more in control of my life and less dependent on women. It’s my own sort of sexual liberation.
Agreed. Especially since it’s a meme that perpetuates itself: guys hear that that’s the way it is, so when the sex starts going away in their marriage, instead of putting their foot down and expecting it to continue apace, they put up with it and thank God that it hasn’t disappeared altogether.
We should counter that meme: when a man gets married, instead of joking about how his sex life is over, his buddies should be kidding him about how they won’t see him anymore now that he’s got pussy on tap at home every night. It’d help if men went into marriage expecting more sex rather than less, so they wouldn’t put up with less so easily.
Maybe the key is to just not have sex every day before marriage or every day for the first 3 months after. I suspect as more and more people push marriage up until early 30s that’s the way its going down anyway. Had I moved in with my girlfriend at 16, it would have been daily. I didn’t meet her until I was 25 and by then I was down to masturbating just once a week. By the time we moved in together I was already 27 so we never did have a period of daily sex. The expectations for both of us were pretty moderate so there was never any drop off or disappointment in that department. The disappointments came though, oh boy did they ever.
@Escoffer
First off, I’d like to apologies for not making a reply I owe for a few days. There were other things that I needed to take care of. Enough time has passed, the conversation is still done, but I thought I should make the reply. I also wanted to read the Bible chapters that were quoted in my direction before continuing, since if I am in error, I would rather be corrected, than propagate the error to others.
Now, as to your points.
The Bible actually has things it prohibits (like fornication, and sodomy, either one of which would exclude premarital anal sex; drinking wine), things it commands (You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might), and things which are permissible but not explicitly commanded (either being single or married; drinking wine without being drunk).
There are things that the bible does not mention, but we can be reasonably sure are permitted (drinking beer or whiskey, without being drunk, for example).
The Bible also addresses the idea of things that are sins for some, but not for others.
Since it doesn’t seem that you read the referred to passages earlier, I will quote them here for the sake of discussion, since we are engaged in a discussion of what is or is not sin, which is thus a discussion based on scripture. I did not before, because the relevant text is rather large. I hope the quote block works.
Romans 14, NASB translation
New American Standard Bible
Principles of Conscience
1 Now accept the one who is weak in faith, but not for the purpose of passing judgment on his opinions. 2 One person has faith that he may eat all things, but he who is weak eats vegetables only. 3 The one who eats is not to regard with contempt the one who does not eat, and the one who does not eat is not to judge the one who eats, for God has accepted him. 4 Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.
5 One person regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind. 6 He who observes the day, observes it for the Lord, and he who eats, does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who eats not, for the Lord he does not eat, and gives thanks to God. 7 For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; 8 for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. 9 For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.
10 But you, why do you judge your brother? Or you again, why do you regard your brother with contempt? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.
11 For it is written,
“AS I LIVE, SAYS THE LORD, EVERY KNEE SHALL BOW TO ME,
AND EVERY TONGUE SHALL GIVE PRAISE TO GOD.”
12 So then each one of us will give an account of himself to God.
13 Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather determine this—not to put an obstacle or a stumbling block in a brother’s way. 14 I know and am convinced in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but to him who thinks anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean. 15 For if because of food your brother is hurt, you are no longer walking according to love. Do not destroy with your food him for whom Christ died. 16 Therefore do not let what is for you a good thing be spoken of as evil; 17 for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. 18 For he who in this way serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men. 19 So then we pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another. 20 Do not tear down the work of God for the sake of food. All things indeed are clean, but they are evil for the man who eats and gives offense. 21 It is good not to eat meat or to drink wine, or to do anything by which your brother stumbles. 22 The faith which you have, have as your own conviction before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves. 23 But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and whatever is not from faith is sin.
So it is clear that there are a wide variety of things where how you should act depends on your own faith and conviction. And again I say that if you think something would be sinful for you, don’t do it.
There are things that we are commanded not to do, and are sinful in and of themselves to do. And there are things that are unwise. And those who love will desire to correct someone who strays from the path. And wise are those who love correction (paraphrasing Proverbs 12:1).
However, Jesus had some very unkind words for the Pharisees.
Matthew 23:1-12, NASB translation (though the rest of the verse is also relevant).
1 Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to His disciples, 2 saying: “The scribes and the Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses; 3 therefore all that they tell you, do and observe, but do not do according to their deeds; for they say things and do not do them. 4“They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger. 5“But they do all their deeds to be noticed by men; for they broaden their phylacteries and lengthen the tassels of their garments. 6“They love the place of honor at banquets and the chief seats in the synagogues, 7 and respectful greetings in the market places, and being called Rabbi by men. 8“But do not be called Rabbi; for One is your Teacher, and you are all brothers. 9“Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven. 10“Do not be called leaders; for One is your Leader, that is, Christ. 11“But the greatest among you shall be your servant. 12“Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.
This goes directly against what you think would “make sense” to project onto the bible from your perspective, gained from works on philosophy. The “ancient city” model you propose, where you are forbidden from any activity that is not commanded simply does not describe the biblical framework.
As for the rest of your argument, I agree that people having sex with people they aren’t married to (fornication) is sinful. I agree that looking at pictures of people doing so is supporting the sin of another.
But once again, is looking at drawings of individuals, or couples engaged in sex (possibly even explicitly married couple, in the situation presented in the drawing) is, itself, in some way sex? What about masturbation. Is that, in some way, sexual congress? Your argument appears to rely on the notion that it is. As such, I am trying to understand, and get clarification from you, to make sure I understand your position. I do not want to argue against a straw-man of your position, even by mistake.
And now I wish I could edit, due to the closing italics tag not working. I need to improve my proofing skills.
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