#pornotopia

The apparent transgression of the graphically sensual…

La aparente transgresión de lo sensual gráfico…

Setenta años después de la aparición de Playboy, la música urbana mantiene ese tríptico aspiracional (chicas, coches y casas) con una pátina estética que bebe del porno. Algo que parece transgresor pero solo confirma las estructuras de poder existentes. La sexualidad usada para mantener la desigualdad era algo que se había iniciado décadas antes.

i'm asexual. a world where every adult "should" want sex with most other adults, and is assumed to want sex with most adults as a baseline, isn't gonna work for me. but pornotopia lite, as it's described in your post, is already too anti-sex to me. nearly everything past the first sentence feels objectionable. "people should be picky about partners; sex or porn addiction is a real thing worth worrying about; forming a family should be your priority; sex is private and talking about it in public should be frowned upon" these are all things i heavily disagree with. i'd find pornotopia-lite way too restrictive.

i guess similar what you said about how even though you're not a woman, you feel unsafe in places where women don't feel safe to be topless. i don't want sex, but i don't feel safe in a place where people wanting sex aren't allowed to be open and casual about it.

I'm going to address that. Soon. Or at least Soon™ (as such things go) and in pieces, because this next point ardently resists being condensed and generalized.

I'm still on my bullshit. Block the #pornotopia tag if you want to keep reading my other stuff but are done with this topic. And, importantly, before I go on ...

This post comes with a Content Warning for discussions of weight loss and disordered eating, below the cut. If you're struggling and at risk of relapse if you think about that too hard, skip this post.

I have to start this one by being personally vulnerable in a way that I'm afraid is going to hurt me, but if this goes to 10,000, fine, I can at least hope it does somebody some good.

Okay? Let's go, let me expand on something I tried to condense and ended up over-condensing in my "Searching for Pornotopia" kick-off post.

The "Unfuckable" are Easy Prey for Villains

It's early 1978. I'm 17 years old, and months away from graduating from the Union of Christian Schools (and John Birch Society covert front group) high school that my parents forced me into to escape murderous bullying for my mental health in the local public schools.

The senior class is having an unsupervised "open study hall" in one of the larger classrooms, some few of us working on homework, most of us just socializing. I'm as happy as a pig in congress because I'm hanging out with both of my ongoing (if fruitless) crushes. Let's borrow some names from cryptography, call the taller, skinnier, bespectacled, earnest girl Alice and call the shorter, cheerier, heavier, sexier one Carol. And of course I'm Brad (sorry Bob), the compassionate famine-thin autistic liberal nerd. I've been friends with both since at least sophomore year.

Alice and Carol get to talking about their respective most-recent dating disasters, and they turn to me and ask for my my most recent dating disaster. Mortified but brave, I admit to them that I've never been on a date in my life. Do I want to date Alice asks, hell yes. Nobody's ever said yes. (Left unsaid: including both of you, not that you apparently remember.) So Carol turns to Alice and says, "[Alice], you've known him forever, why haven't you gone out on a date with him?"

And Alice's laugh is sudden and brief, shocked and horrified. She's a good person, she knows that her surprise has made her do something unforgivably wrong, so she chokes it back fast. But then she makes it worse, right to my face. "I can't imagine dating Brad. (pause) I can't imagine anyone ever dating Brad."

I wrote this in the first-person because it is 2025, I'm 64 years old, and I am still there. That mental, emotional , and social injury has never even scabbed over, let alone healed. It has haunted me my whole life.

And it didn't occur to me at the time, but it may not be a coincidence that within about a year, I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time.

I've lived a long life, and not all of it awful or alone. I've been ferociously political since I was 13, and a journalism addict since I was four. So feel the impact of those facts when I say that I cannot think of any more effective way to permanently cripple a human being than to tell them that nobody will ever feel an ounce of attraction for them, that they will never feel an affectionate touch. And we have whole industries dedicated to doing just that. What diet-culture capitalism and Alt-Right violent radicalization have in common is that they prey on the unloved.

A Perfect Cinderella Story

It's an intense competition to ask me "Brad, what's the most radicalizing thing you've ever read?" but with this on my mind, the slam dunk has to be chapter 5, called "A Specimen American Myth," in Philip Wylie's 1942 (and thus public-domain!) mental-health jeremiad Generation of Vipers.

He points out in the older, continental, mythical stories of the Little Cinder Girl, the prince is a cipher, barely a character, just a reward, a McGuffin in modern terms. The Fairy Godmother intervenes because he's in danger of marrying one of two lazy, slovenly, greedy (but lovely, not ugly!) girls, but also, more importantly, because Ella of the Cinders is everything the Faerie realm admires: generous to a fault, considerate to a fault, and tidy to a fault. Cinder Ella's introduction to, and ultimate marriage to Prince Charming is a reward for her virtue.

Not, unlike in the children's book versions that began to circulate in the Anglosphere in the early 20th century, a reward for her beauty. And it is those versions that make the stepsisters Ugly. Wylie argued that one of the reasons that the whole world was going insane was that:

Boys are taught that the only things women care about are wealth and power, and that they should judge their own success by the youth and beauty of the women who want to fuck them. And, the obvious converse:

Girls are taught that the only things that men care about are youth and beauty, and that they should judge their own sexiness by how wealthy and powerful the men who want to fuck them are.

And, he argued, this drives all of us insane because most moms are disgusted with themselves for having to settle for the husbands they got, and most dads are disgusted with themselves for being married to someone who got old and fat. And dads (and other men) teach young boys that that's why they have to be ever more successful providers so they don't end up with an ugly woman like their mom, and moms (and other women) teach little girls that they have to stay young and thin, and at least dress to look like they have big boobs, or else they'll end up with a loser like their dad.

The Return of Fascism and the Black Pill

This is the straight line that leads to pickup artistry, to Game, to incelry, to the black pill. This why two consecutive generations of right-wing violence hucksters have flogged the same story: liberals and feminists have stolen the good jobs that were supposed to fund your success, they left you behind, you won't have a home of your own or any other success to be proud of until you're 40 or more, by which time all the young, pretty girls will be married, out of your reach, and you'll be lucky if you have the option to be grudgingly accepted by women who are total losers, irreparably damaged themselves by that point. No young, beautiful woman will ever express any attraction to you. You will never feel an affectionate touch.

So vote for Trump, they said. Burn it all down.

The Horror of Diet-Culture Capitalism

A strong candidate for the most radicalizing documentary I've ever seen was Catharine Gilday's 1990 movie, The Famine Within. She interviewed many girls and women of all ages about their experience of a then-recent research finding. I'm quoting from long-ago memory here, so I may have a detail or two off by a little bit, but it was something like this:

The average woman goes on her first calorie-restriction diet at the age of 11. Nearly always because of an unkind remark from an older female relative. She will go on another diet every 8 years. Each of these diets will fail within 18 months and result in a net gain of at least 10 pounds.

Let me also send you to nutritionists Matt Priven and Jen Baum's hour-long podcast episode about the history of diet drugs. If I may summarize their summary, we've had multiple generations of diet drugs, starting with "thyroid extract" in 1888 up to GLP-1 inhibitors of today. They all have the same ultimate mechanism of action: they make anorexia nervosa less painful. Not less deadly, just less painful. And just like every other form of extreme calorie restriction, none of them could be taken for very long and, just like every form of extreme calorie restriction, they on average result in an overall net gain, not loss, of weight, they make the women who take them fatter.

So after 137 years of failure, why do diets and diet drugs still sell, especially to women? Because successful men, the ones women want, are looking for youthful appearance, big boobs, and narrow waists. And there will never be a shortage of scientists and companies, deep in the throes of confirmation bias, willing to take their money, "cashing in on body issues, selling skin and bones and big boobs" (as Jax put it in her hit song "I Know Victoria's Secret").

Ritzy Relaxation, cama electrónica 1959, presentada en la exposición de muebles de Earls Court, London.