Damn! Now you have me thinking about this. Would ADHD help by making a woman better at multitasking with two partners, or hinder by possibly causing her to drift out of the moment to some totally unrelated thought? That can happen with just one partner (don't ask me how I know). Maybe...maybe an MFM threesome would provide enough sensory overload that intrusive thoughts are less likely to be able to derail the entire session. Plus...stick with me here....having two guys as partners increases that odds that at least one of them will be good at cunnilingus. If both are....jackpot! Just sayin'.....
I haven't run the test but I think the hypothesis that it's the multitasking sweet spot is right. Not so few as to allow one's brain to start hamster wheeling, not so many as to wind up forgetting someone
This raises the old question of why a guy having sex with two girls at the same time is seen as cool for the guy but degrading to the women, but if a woman has sex with two guys at the same time it's seen as cool for the guys but degrading to the woman.
Well it’s easier for women to find willing sex partners than for straight men, but arguably it’s more difficult to convince straight men to have a MMF threesome? Lol
An interesting point - why is that as a woman you just can't win in sexual situations? Also, I would think that if said woman wanted sex with 2 guys and arranged this tryst that's pretty....if not empowering, pretty badass...
I thought the "devil's threesome" referred to a bisexual MMF threesome rather than one focusing on the woman. Some corner of Tumblr refers to this as MFM vs the bisex MMF, apparently...
The odd thing is growing up in the 80s/90s the right wing/Republicans had a monopoly on sexual puritanism. It became akin to a punchline; see the Republican politician dad played by Phil Hartman in CB4.
Then in the 20teens you started seeing sexual puritanism on the left, which in many ways horsehoed with the right ("she's giving him a blowjob! What a slu . .I mean degrading act by a socially repressed female!"). This dovetailed with young people having less sex en masse, which is where I think a lot of the critiques ultimately come from; folks not having sex who wish they were having sex finding ways to take down people who are actually having sex.
I agree - if I add to that I feel like radical feminist types basically fall into two buckets
1. The extension/radicalization of GW
2. Victims of SAs
I think the first one is literally what you explained and the second one I think is more based on the actual trauma (like I’ve seen online some former sex workers turning into this type of radical feminists bc of the SA)
And let me add I think the crux of MeToo and the unveiling of male predatory behavior was a good thing that had been covered up for too long. But like many good things of the past decade activists got on the steering wheel and turned the progress bus into a ditch.
Yeah totally agreed - if anything the activist did some disservice here by indirectly validating manosphere/far right wacko type.
And if anything, as Matt Y continues to mention, I feel like activists get way less strategic or goal oriented compared to civil rights movement or first wave of feminism esp post 2008.
I think this has so many reasons including but not limited to
- overreach by activists type who experienced successive wins in gay rights and Iraq wars etc
- influence of aforementioned trauma induced movements (I think this made the movement very puritanical)
- attention economy incentivizing more extreme galaxy brain takes
- supply of very highly educated non STEM ppl post 2008 (I think this is what Noah Smith mentions and I suspect their obsession with “messaging” and “languages” stems from this fact.)
I always feel awkward bringing it up on this topic because there are obviously a lot of uhh fraught tropes around women, sexual assault, and "man hating".
But it's no different than other radical beliefs online - there are a lot of people who are ideologically obsessed with a topic due to personal trauma and wear that on their sleeve (I mean... incels).
This is all beating around the bush to say, "I have definitely stumbled upon small forums of especially paranoid people and yeah, there was definitely an evident correlation."
well, I should've been a bit more cautious bringing this up, my apologies
that said, yeah 100% and I guess in a sense, I suspect many participants of GWs are true for that discription although the type of personal trauma is very diverse I imagine...
And I just recalled someone called the current internet discourse “Tumblr(left) meets 4 chan(right)” - I think both are heavily influenced by traumas in very different ways
(And as a Japanese, I owe an apology to Americans for the creation of 4 chan as it is the copycat of 2 chan, the similar Japanese online chat forum)
I've been thinking recently about how much tumblr's culture of rigid social rule theorizing appealed to me as a kid basically *because* I was autistic.
I hadn't made the connection to 4chan even though I was there first, and growing up browsing it instilled a lot of online behavior I think of as instinctual (e.g. lurk moar)... HMMMM.
well, I used to be very neurotic about it too and still am to an extent! (like I def wouldn't bring it up irl)
And yea, there def is some trend that could be described as Trauma (incuded) Olympics, which def has a horseshoe distrbution on far rigt and far left and very much online...
i'm reminded of how it used to be suggested that i might be doing a sexual act with a guy 'to get him to like me'. i get what they mean, but at the time it was baffling, like part of the idea of getting a guy to like me is *so that* he'll have sex with me.
This is all bound up too in the stuff covered in the "dressing for other people" post - the fact that women have a history of being pressured or forced into certain roles has rightfully caused a course correction, but there's also the fact that like... all social interaction is performance to be observed, so one shouldn't get too freaked out by not being able to completely let go of the expectations of others
It means you didn't experience any pleasure from the act and did it just to be liked. If you keep doing things you don't like, just to be liked, that means you don't have any boundaries or a sense of self, and are actively harming both those things. It's normal for friends to be concerned.
yeah, and there was, to me, no reason to think that i wouldn't have gotten pleasure from the act. i was extremely interested in the act and it seemed to be a self evidently fun and good thing to do that i obviously wouldn't do if i didn't want to.
also i will say i don't remember this coming from concerned friends, but from guys (e.g. an ex or the guy himself.)
The thing about power is it just exists. Sometimes it's about one person's perception, sometimes it's inherent. If you're doing a sex act with someone who considers it a way of holding power over you, then yeah, it's degrading even if you find it fun. It's kind of like if you enjoy dancing but someone's like 'dance, monkey" and then you don't enjoy it anymore.
This one time, I heard of a guy's reputation as a veritable slut, and I decided to seek him out and get involved with him, because I was in the mood for that kind of relationship. After we were suitably entangled, he talks about how he "netted" me with his wiles and i was helpless with his charm. I'm like wut. Especially since I had not been subtle with my interest or getting to the point. I tried telling him, but he was too self-absorbed to listen and change his idea of how things had unfolded.
I decided i couldn't keep seeing him for too much longer because this was a red flag. I didn't think it was good to be too involved with someone who didn't think I had desire or thought i was "desperate". It felt like a setting for all kinds of weird mind games. Soo.... we had fun the rest of the summer and then I blocked him.
I think this argues against your point above. If you had fun and exited on your terms, that's the power. If you kept that power (you played him for a summer and then block him) then how can anything you wanted to do with him be degrading. Even things you didn't go in wanting, tried anyway, and concluded "OK, not doing that again." are just....mistakes, part of learning. I don't see how there's anything that's inherently degrading..
That i got out of a degrading situation is what is empowering. I'd rather i had enough self respect to exit right away. I'm not sure 'using' anyone is empowering in a good way, especially if you're 'using' them while they think they are 'using' you. There's no mutual respect there, no foundation for a long term relationship, no love or possibility of it.
Sex with love and mutual respect is the best thing. Everything else is a knockoff we resort to when the real thing isn't an option.
Ah, I think I understand a bit better. You decided to pursue this guy, succeeded in getting with him, decided he wouldn't work out long term, but continued to see him - presumably have sex with him - for the summer. In the aftermath you are kicking yourself that you didn't have the...self respect? discipline?...to eject as soon as you knew what he was.
I think this speaks to CHH's original thesis: sometimes it can just be about being horny or enjoying someone's company even when you know there are no further possibilities. You don't say why you decided to continue for the summer, but you write as a bright and inciteful person so I'm assuming you had your reason(s). Where we differ is you seem to feel badly for having that reason, whereas I don't think you should.
I do agree with you about sex in a loving and respectful relationship is, overall, the best. I've been doing that for 37 years and counting. Finding that person is hard though, in my case took years, and in the meantime I think it's OK to scratch an itch so to speak..
and the CCH sitcom has another scene "Another time, when my husband and I were walking in Central Park late at night, a cop stopped him and asked him “how he knew me.”
I think the comment about growing up sexually repressed is the key to "empowering," and it can apply society-wide. The notion is that having sex for pleasure--because you're horny--is empowering when the dominant message you're getting is that it's bad to feel horny, bad to be sexual, bad to take birth control, bad to do anything other than cut a hole in a sheet while ovulating and try to conceive a child. And the reality is that the current right wing government of the United States is 100% behind that message.
Yeah, I really feel like turning sex into moral dichotomy starts from religious conservatives who demonized (casual) sex - and while I understand the desire to push back on the moral front, I think pushing back on personal liberty front (I have sex bc I want to - there’s no good or bad about it) is more chill and useful.
Like many other internet things, “maybe take a step back?” feels like a good advice (a lot of people are trigger by “take a step back” comment online tho lol)
Eh, is it, though? That damn Afrikaaner and the orange man aren’t precisely avatars of sexual morality. I think a big part of why the right-wing moral panic has moved to trans people is that there just aren’t enough people left who can be bothered with the Bush-era old evangelical stuff, and there’s some law of conservation of Republicans being controlling about genitals.
Good point that I didn't make it clear that this was a strictly misogynistic thing. Those guys don't moralize about men being sluts, just women. It's the old "what do we call a man who sleeps around vs. a woman" except they really truly believe that the men are studs and the women are hoes.
With respect to the particular act in question here, I think there's probably a fairly understandable reason why most societies will have a huge taboo against it.
Having sex with multiple partners, where one is the center of attention, is pretty much the most common sexual fantasy for both men and women. I think for women, that's extremely threatening to people, so they have a strong incentive to want it to be socially stigmatized and considered bad/associated with being degraded.
Because women already have such an easier time getting sex, and men are already so much more willing to take whatever available option is offered. Just imagine imagine if women felt it was totally acceptable without any taboo, to be with more than one man at a time?? The resulting ratios and sexual availability odds would be horrific. Just lines of guys constantly waiting for their "turn" while the attractive women endlessly enjoyed themselves -- that would be bad for everyone else. It would amplify an already-existing motivational discrepancy into a dystopia.
I don't think anyone is thinking about it that way consciously, but it's there somewhere in their mind, and scares them, so they assign it "bad and degrading" to socially discourage it.
Which is quite effective, seemingly. Because most research shows this is an extremely prevalent female fantasy, but one that most women do NOT want to try IRL, precisely because of the scary/dangerous/degrading taboo surrounding it. Even CHH says she has no interest, but I wonder if she means IRL (which is standard) or also in fantasy (not standard).
Imagine if society just telegraphed the message to women that "oh you can have two (or more) dudes whenever you want, and they would be super nice to you and would respect and admire you EVEN MORE afterwards, and so would everyone else". If they thought that, this would just be going on all the time and think about how terribly eroded male bargaining power would be in that situation -- of course they wouldn't like that.
And people can try and deny it all they want and pretend they're oh so libertarian and unconcerned with the sex lives of others, but you can't NOT be concerned with others' sex lives when sex happens in a marketplace to a certain extent, where norms shift availability and can end up severely undermining one's relative bargaining power.
People don't have as much of a strong reaction about a dude having a threesome, and are more accepting of society sending them the exact message I described above, because everyone sort of knows this is extremely difficult to pull off and will never, ever happen with any level of commonality or frequency. Most guys have a hard enough time just convincing one woman to have sex, forget two at the same time. There's no strong impulse to guard against something that is sort of a once-in-you-life if you're lucky level rare achievement in the first place.
Whereas any woman who wasn't blatantly repulsive could put out an ad saying "horny for two guys at once" on whatever the local freak app is, and quite literally have some on her doorstep within 30 minutes, any day of the week. That's already a market/motivation dynamic, but it would be parabolic if women didn't at least keep it to one at a time.
As with many things, the red pill guys project a lot of their own issues while denying the same impulses in themselves. They love talking about how women would rather share a Chad then date a loser. That's true for a small minority of women, but most would rather just forego sex entirely, rather than than share a guy. And guys endlessly publicly telegraph for PR purposes their unwillingness to share a woman sexually -- which they absolutely would rather not -- but plenty will do so if given the option (especially if no one else will find out).
This is the feline method of sexuality. The female goes into heat and all the male cats come around and basically politely wait their turn -- there is a lot less fighting among the male cats than people seem to think. I suppose women acting like cats in heat is the ultimate terror.
Lots of dressing things up in language about "empowerment" or "degradation" is just rationalization of people's fears/desires. Here's a useful shorthand:
Oh my goodness I did not expect to laugh so much when opening a post on this topic. Thank you for that.
Also, I don't understand why parents are taking kids to Sabrina Carpenter concerts and then complaining that she's sexual. Do people not do their research before booking tickets? She's not exactly shy about who she is!
“…as it would require three young people to meet up at the same time without anyone flaking. Even Gen Z’s “sex scandals” are just about sending nudes.”
Arguments about whether something is empowering or degrading seem to originate from people who have a strong subconscious link between sex and power/status in their minds. The idea that sex can just not be related to power and status doesn't seem to occur to them. They see it as an inherent property of sexuality, rather than of how they view sexuality.
Yes, exactly!! The rhetorical trick of "is it empowering or degrading" is that it pre-supposes that "is sex about power or connection" is an already settled question and the answer is "about power, duh." I think this is why I find the 'empowering or degrading' discussion so tiresome. The conceptual wrong turns has already been taken.
You might be a couple years too young to remember this, but during the Lewinsky scandal, the media acted like it was horribly degrading for Monica Lewinsky to have fellated Bill Clinton. Not because of the dynamics between them as individuals, but because she was, one, on her knees; two, sexually stimulating him while not being stimulated in return; and three, receiving his bodily fluids in her mouth. That whole affair was how I (sixth grade) learned what oral sex was, and for several years, I thought it was inherently an icky thing that gross men did to women when they wanted to degrade them.
What convinced me otherwise was gay fiction, where there are lots of guys who get off on giving oral sex, even if it’s not reciprocal (or not reciprocal at that moment). I was like, “If it’s okay and not degrading for gay guys to do it, then it must be okay and not degrading for women to do it. Because if it was okay for men but not for women, that would be sexist.” Luckily, this was before I became sexually active.
One of the many things I enjoy about being a man is the fact that I get to avoid the (both internal and external) feminist overanalysis of my every thought and action. It must be absolutely exhausting. Bravo to CHH for refusing to play.
“Nobody ever talks about the invisible labor of having ADHD and taking two dicks at once.” Lololol
Damn! Now you have me thinking about this. Would ADHD help by making a woman better at multitasking with two partners, or hinder by possibly causing her to drift out of the moment to some totally unrelated thought? That can happen with just one partner (don't ask me how I know). Maybe...maybe an MFM threesome would provide enough sensory overload that intrusive thoughts are less likely to be able to derail the entire session. Plus...stick with me here....having two guys as partners increases that odds that at least one of them will be good at cunnilingus. If both are....jackpot! Just sayin'.....
>don't ask me how I know
It's been corroborated.
I haven't run the test but I think the hypothesis that it's the multitasking sweet spot is right. Not so few as to allow one's brain to start hamster wheeling, not so many as to wind up forgetting someone
I laughed so hard at this. Maybe we need to start talking about this more? 😂
Preach 😫🙌
This raises the old question of why a guy having sex with two girls at the same time is seen as cool for the guy but degrading to the women, but if a woman has sex with two guys at the same time it's seen as cool for the guys but degrading to the woman.
Well it’s easier for women to find willing sex partners than for straight men, but arguably it’s more difficult to convince straight men to have a MMF threesome? Lol
Enticing dudes into MMF threesomes is feminist! QED.
Is it? I’ve heard it referred to as the “devil’s threesome” in a few places, including “How I met Your Mother”
That said, it’s possibly degrading because straight men feel like they have to make it degrading for the woman so that the act isn’t seen as “gay”
An interesting point - why is that as a woman you just can't win in sexual situations? Also, I would think that if said woman wanted sex with 2 guys and arranged this tryst that's pretty....if not empowering, pretty badass...
I thought the "devil's threesome" referred to a bisexual MMF threesome rather than one focusing on the woman. Some corner of Tumblr refers to this as MFM vs the bisex MMF, apparently...
People observe their own disgust and register it as morality, even if their own feelings are completely arbitrary
The Golden Rule!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi7gwX7rjOw
The devils triangle is not cool for guys
The odd thing is growing up in the 80s/90s the right wing/Republicans had a monopoly on sexual puritanism. It became akin to a punchline; see the Republican politician dad played by Phil Hartman in CB4.
Then in the 20teens you started seeing sexual puritanism on the left, which in many ways horsehoed with the right ("she's giving him a blowjob! What a slu . .I mean degrading act by a socially repressed female!"). This dovetailed with young people having less sex en masse, which is where I think a lot of the critiques ultimately come from; folks not having sex who wish they were having sex finding ways to take down people who are actually having sex.
I agree - if I add to that I feel like radical feminist types basically fall into two buckets
1. The extension/radicalization of GW
2. Victims of SAs
I think the first one is literally what you explained and the second one I think is more based on the actual trauma (like I’ve seen online some former sex workers turning into this type of radical feminists bc of the SA)
And let me add I think the crux of MeToo and the unveiling of male predatory behavior was a good thing that had been covered up for too long. But like many good things of the past decade activists got on the steering wheel and turned the progress bus into a ditch.
Yeah totally agreed - if anything the activist did some disservice here by indirectly validating manosphere/far right wacko type.
And if anything, as Matt Y continues to mention, I feel like activists get way less strategic or goal oriented compared to civil rights movement or first wave of feminism esp post 2008.
I think this has so many reasons including but not limited to
- overreach by activists type who experienced successive wins in gay rights and Iraq wars etc
- influence of aforementioned trauma induced movements (I think this made the movement very puritanical)
- attention economy incentivizing more extreme galaxy brain takes
- supply of very highly educated non STEM ppl post 2008 (I think this is what Noah Smith mentions and I suspect their obsession with “messaging” and “languages” stems from this fact.)
All activism devolves into the omnicause.
I always feel awkward bringing it up on this topic because there are obviously a lot of uhh fraught tropes around women, sexual assault, and "man hating".
But it's no different than other radical beliefs online - there are a lot of people who are ideologically obsessed with a topic due to personal trauma and wear that on their sleeve (I mean... incels).
This is all beating around the bush to say, "I have definitely stumbled upon small forums of especially paranoid people and yeah, there was definitely an evident correlation."
well, I should've been a bit more cautious bringing this up, my apologies
that said, yeah 100% and I guess in a sense, I suspect many participants of GWs are true for that discription although the type of personal trauma is very diverse I imagine...
Ah, I totally did not mean it as a criticism! I meant just to say that I feel cagey about it (neurotic) but have definitely recognized the trend.
And I just recalled someone called the current internet discourse “Tumblr(left) meets 4 chan(right)” - I think both are heavily influenced by traumas in very different ways
(And as a Japanese, I owe an apology to Americans for the creation of 4 chan as it is the copycat of 2 chan, the similar Japanese online chat forum)
I've been thinking recently about how much tumblr's culture of rigid social rule theorizing appealed to me as a kid basically *because* I was autistic.
I hadn't made the connection to 4chan even though I was there first, and growing up browsing it instilled a lot of online behavior I think of as instinctual (e.g. lurk moar)... HMMMM.
well, I used to be very neurotic about it too and still am to an extent! (like I def wouldn't bring it up irl)
And yea, there def is some trend that could be described as Trauma (incuded) Olympics, which def has a horseshoe distrbution on far rigt and far left and very much online...
What is GW here?
gender war?
Duh. Thanks
i'm reminded of how it used to be suggested that i might be doing a sexual act with a guy 'to get him to like me'. i get what they mean, but at the time it was baffling, like part of the idea of getting a guy to like me is *so that* he'll have sex with me.
This is all bound up too in the stuff covered in the "dressing for other people" post - the fact that women have a history of being pressured or forced into certain roles has rightfully caused a course correction, but there's also the fact that like... all social interaction is performance to be observed, so one shouldn't get too freaked out by not being able to completely let go of the expectations of others
It means you didn't experience any pleasure from the act and did it just to be liked. If you keep doing things you don't like, just to be liked, that means you don't have any boundaries or a sense of self, and are actively harming both those things. It's normal for friends to be concerned.
yeah, and there was, to me, no reason to think that i wouldn't have gotten pleasure from the act. i was extremely interested in the act and it seemed to be a self evidently fun and good thing to do that i obviously wouldn't do if i didn't want to.
also i will say i don't remember this coming from concerned friends, but from guys (e.g. an ex or the guy himself.)
The thing about power is it just exists. Sometimes it's about one person's perception, sometimes it's inherent. If you're doing a sex act with someone who considers it a way of holding power over you, then yeah, it's degrading even if you find it fun. It's kind of like if you enjoy dancing but someone's like 'dance, monkey" and then you don't enjoy it anymore.
This one time, I heard of a guy's reputation as a veritable slut, and I decided to seek him out and get involved with him, because I was in the mood for that kind of relationship. After we were suitably entangled, he talks about how he "netted" me with his wiles and i was helpless with his charm. I'm like wut. Especially since I had not been subtle with my interest or getting to the point. I tried telling him, but he was too self-absorbed to listen and change his idea of how things had unfolded.
I decided i couldn't keep seeing him for too much longer because this was a red flag. I didn't think it was good to be too involved with someone who didn't think I had desire or thought i was "desperate". It felt like a setting for all kinds of weird mind games. Soo.... we had fun the rest of the summer and then I blocked him.
I think this argues against your point above. If you had fun and exited on your terms, that's the power. If you kept that power (you played him for a summer and then block him) then how can anything you wanted to do with him be degrading. Even things you didn't go in wanting, tried anyway, and concluded "OK, not doing that again." are just....mistakes, part of learning. I don't see how there's anything that's inherently degrading..
That i got out of a degrading situation is what is empowering. I'd rather i had enough self respect to exit right away. I'm not sure 'using' anyone is empowering in a good way, especially if you're 'using' them while they think they are 'using' you. There's no mutual respect there, no foundation for a long term relationship, no love or possibility of it.
Sex with love and mutual respect is the best thing. Everything else is a knockoff we resort to when the real thing isn't an option.
Ah, I think I understand a bit better. You decided to pursue this guy, succeeded in getting with him, decided he wouldn't work out long term, but continued to see him - presumably have sex with him - for the summer. In the aftermath you are kicking yourself that you didn't have the...self respect? discipline?...to eject as soon as you knew what he was.
I think this speaks to CHH's original thesis: sometimes it can just be about being horny or enjoying someone's company even when you know there are no further possibilities. You don't say why you decided to continue for the summer, but you write as a bright and inciteful person so I'm assuming you had your reason(s). Where we differ is you seem to feel badly for having that reason, whereas I don't think you should.
I do agree with you about sex in a loving and respectful relationship is, overall, the best. I've been doing that for 37 years and counting. Finding that person is hard though, in my case took years, and in the meantime I think it's OK to scratch an itch so to speak..
"They will be no female enjoyment of sex acts around here young lady . . . "
You have my name!!!
this was the funniest thing you have ever written
and the CCH sitcom has another scene "Another time, when my husband and I were walking in Central Park late at night, a cop stopped him and asked him “how he knew me.”
Yea, this one had me chortling. I want to hear how the rest of the exchange went!
I think the comment about growing up sexually repressed is the key to "empowering," and it can apply society-wide. The notion is that having sex for pleasure--because you're horny--is empowering when the dominant message you're getting is that it's bad to feel horny, bad to be sexual, bad to take birth control, bad to do anything other than cut a hole in a sheet while ovulating and try to conceive a child. And the reality is that the current right wing government of the United States is 100% behind that message.
If nothing else, I'm grateful that this reminded me to listen to the Ben Shapiro WAP remix,
Yeah, I really feel like turning sex into moral dichotomy starts from religious conservatives who demonized (casual) sex - and while I understand the desire to push back on the moral front, I think pushing back on personal liberty front (I have sex bc I want to - there’s no good or bad about it) is more chill and useful.
Like many other internet things, “maybe take a step back?” feels like a good advice (a lot of people are trigger by “take a step back” comment online tho lol)
Eh, is it, though? That damn Afrikaaner and the orange man aren’t precisely avatars of sexual morality. I think a big part of why the right-wing moral panic has moved to trans people is that there just aren’t enough people left who can be bothered with the Bush-era old evangelical stuff, and there’s some law of conservation of Republicans being controlling about genitals.
Good point that I didn't make it clear that this was a strictly misogynistic thing. Those guys don't moralize about men being sluts, just women. It's the old "what do we call a man who sleeps around vs. a woman" except they really truly believe that the men are studs and the women are hoes.
Society accept that women are not an alien species and also enjoy desiring and being desired challenge (impossible)
No but unpacking my baggage around this was the topic of this mornings coffee so this post was weirdly well timed for me
“At the time, I wasn’t interested in casual sex, although again, if I were…would that need to be bucketed as empowering or degrading too?”
I misread the syntax here in “that need to be bucketed” and wondered - what is bucketing? a sex act I need to research on Urban Dictionary? Haha.
With respect to the particular act in question here, I think there's probably a fairly understandable reason why most societies will have a huge taboo against it.
Having sex with multiple partners, where one is the center of attention, is pretty much the most common sexual fantasy for both men and women. I think for women, that's extremely threatening to people, so they have a strong incentive to want it to be socially stigmatized and considered bad/associated with being degraded.
Because women already have such an easier time getting sex, and men are already so much more willing to take whatever available option is offered. Just imagine imagine if women felt it was totally acceptable without any taboo, to be with more than one man at a time?? The resulting ratios and sexual availability odds would be horrific. Just lines of guys constantly waiting for their "turn" while the attractive women endlessly enjoyed themselves -- that would be bad for everyone else. It would amplify an already-existing motivational discrepancy into a dystopia.
I don't think anyone is thinking about it that way consciously, but it's there somewhere in their mind, and scares them, so they assign it "bad and degrading" to socially discourage it.
Which is quite effective, seemingly. Because most research shows this is an extremely prevalent female fantasy, but one that most women do NOT want to try IRL, precisely because of the scary/dangerous/degrading taboo surrounding it. Even CHH says she has no interest, but I wonder if she means IRL (which is standard) or also in fantasy (not standard).
Imagine if society just telegraphed the message to women that "oh you can have two (or more) dudes whenever you want, and they would be super nice to you and would respect and admire you EVEN MORE afterwards, and so would everyone else". If they thought that, this would just be going on all the time and think about how terribly eroded male bargaining power would be in that situation -- of course they wouldn't like that.
And people can try and deny it all they want and pretend they're oh so libertarian and unconcerned with the sex lives of others, but you can't NOT be concerned with others' sex lives when sex happens in a marketplace to a certain extent, where norms shift availability and can end up severely undermining one's relative bargaining power.
People don't have as much of a strong reaction about a dude having a threesome, and are more accepting of society sending them the exact message I described above, because everyone sort of knows this is extremely difficult to pull off and will never, ever happen with any level of commonality or frequency. Most guys have a hard enough time just convincing one woman to have sex, forget two at the same time. There's no strong impulse to guard against something that is sort of a once-in-you-life if you're lucky level rare achievement in the first place.
Whereas any woman who wasn't blatantly repulsive could put out an ad saying "horny for two guys at once" on whatever the local freak app is, and quite literally have some on her doorstep within 30 minutes, any day of the week. That's already a market/motivation dynamic, but it would be parabolic if women didn't at least keep it to one at a time.
As with many things, the red pill guys project a lot of their own issues while denying the same impulses in themselves. They love talking about how women would rather share a Chad then date a loser. That's true for a small minority of women, but most would rather just forego sex entirely, rather than than share a guy. And guys endlessly publicly telegraph for PR purposes their unwillingness to share a woman sexually -- which they absolutely would rather not -- but plenty will do so if given the option (especially if no one else will find out).
This is the feline method of sexuality. The female goes into heat and all the male cats come around and basically politely wait their turn -- there is a lot less fighting among the male cats than people seem to think. I suppose women acting like cats in heat is the ultimate terror.
Lots of dressing things up in language about "empowerment" or "degradation" is just rationalization of people's fears/desires. Here's a useful shorthand:
Everyone says it's empowering = doesn't threaten anyone, boring, who cares
Only young feminists say its empowering = increases bargaining power of specifically hot young women only
Women say its empowering, men say degrading = threatens men and erodes their bargaining power
Women say its degrading, men say its empowering = threatens women and erodes their bargaining power
Everyone says it's degrading = legitimately objectively disgusting
This was a very well thought out comment.
Oh my goodness I did not expect to laugh so much when opening a post on this topic. Thank you for that.
Also, I don't understand why parents are taking kids to Sabrina Carpenter concerts and then complaining that she's sexual. Do people not do their research before booking tickets? She's not exactly shy about who she is!
I think it’s an imagined problem honestly lol. I have a feeling it’s almost entirely girls over 13.
“…as it would require three young people to meet up at the same time without anyone flaking. Even Gen Z’s “sex scandals” are just about sending nudes.”
I loled at this.
Arguments about whether something is empowering or degrading seem to originate from people who have a strong subconscious link between sex and power/status in their minds. The idea that sex can just not be related to power and status doesn't seem to occur to them. They see it as an inherent property of sexuality, rather than of how they view sexuality.
Yes, exactly!! The rhetorical trick of "is it empowering or degrading" is that it pre-supposes that "is sex about power or connection" is an already settled question and the answer is "about power, duh." I think this is why I find the 'empowering or degrading' discussion so tiresome. The conceptual wrong turns has already been taken.
How can you disentangle sex from power when either party has a legal right to refuse?
"DJing Satan’s vinyl"
There's a great throwback 80s rapper named in there somewhere.
You might be a couple years too young to remember this, but during the Lewinsky scandal, the media acted like it was horribly degrading for Monica Lewinsky to have fellated Bill Clinton. Not because of the dynamics between them as individuals, but because she was, one, on her knees; two, sexually stimulating him while not being stimulated in return; and three, receiving his bodily fluids in her mouth. That whole affair was how I (sixth grade) learned what oral sex was, and for several years, I thought it was inherently an icky thing that gross men did to women when they wanted to degrade them.
What convinced me otherwise was gay fiction, where there are lots of guys who get off on giving oral sex, even if it’s not reciprocal (or not reciprocal at that moment). I was like, “If it’s okay and not degrading for gay guys to do it, then it must be okay and not degrading for women to do it. Because if it was okay for men but not for women, that would be sexist.” Luckily, this was before I became sexually active.
One of the many things I enjoy about being a man is the fact that I get to avoid the (both internal and external) feminist overanalysis of my every thought and action. It must be absolutely exhausting. Bravo to CHH for refusing to play.
Perhaps the real empowerment from sex is the friends we made along the way