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The Straight Men Who Masturbate Together
It’s called ‘buddy-bating,’ but is it ‘gay’?
There is a subset of straight men you might not be aware of. They like to jerk off next to a buddy, but without touching him. This is called “buddy bating.” There are also straight men, sometimes the same straight men, who enjoy watching a man or two men penetrate another woman, and become aroused by the woman but also the men’s thrusting and grunting and muscular bodies. It’s not that they want to fuck the guy. It’s just that they think it’s hot. They don’t identify as gay, perhaps not even bisexual; they may prefer terms like “heteroflexible” or “straightish” interchangeably.
“Straightish is just used to describe heterosexual sex that is homoerotic, or dudes engaging in the same sexual experience together, but with a woman,” Trey Lyon tellsMEL. Lyon is a 32-year-old sex-positive, self-described bi/fluid man who runs the porn Tumblr Fuck Yeah! Friendly Fire, billed as the “definitive source for kinky straightish porn.”
It’s unclear how many men identify as straightish; Lyon says he mostly uses the term to describe the porn he features, and prefers to identify himself as bisexual. Six years into running the site, he has nearly 200,000 followers, a large swath of whom are men curious about exploring a straightish identity.
FYFF (the term friendly fire means men who ejaculate on each other in these adjacent sex acts) mostly features porn involving two men and one woman in engagements that sprinkle heterosexual porn with homoerotic overtones — that is, a lot of two-dicks, one–vagina action. Maybe it’s just a woman blowing two dudes intermittently, or a closeup of double penetration — two dicks occupying both of a woman’s holes at the same time.
On Lyon’s Twitter account and blog, as well as in his podcast and interviews, he enthusiastically promotes this subculture of misunderstood, often shamed men. They identify asmostlystraight and are often partnered with women, but like masturbating with other men (often while watching straight porn together), having sex with women while physically very close to another man, and/or watching men in porn in general.
Lyon’s mission is about more than curating titillating straightish porn, though. “It’s not only about getting off and jerking off to porn, but also me showcasing a version of sexuality that is heterosexual, but also very heteroflexible,” he says. “It’s me saying it’s okay for you to be engaged in these types of scenarios around women and men, and not feel your sexuality has to be threatened.”
It’s clear his followers and others on social media view straightish behaviors like buddy bating as modern and radical:
But it doesn’t appear to be a mainstream perception. Many people still believe that bisexual people don’t really exist—and that bisexual men, particularly those who would beat off in each other’s presence, are probably just in denial that they’re gay.
“They think bisexuality is really just one stop from Gayville,” Lyon says.
Case in point: On Urban Dictionary, “straightish” is defined as closeted, more or less:
Someone that is straight as far as the normal beholder, but hassexwith the samegenderbehind closed doors on a regular basis. One can seem (and be therefore deemed) straightish, or itmayhave been proven.
The example sentences underscore the implied closeted meaning further:
“His outfit is perfect! Is he gay?”
“I mean… he’s straightish.”
or…
“I’d love to suck him.”
“He’s straight..”
“Ehh…ish.”
Note that both example sentences refer to “he” and not a “she.” Women are still given the latitude to make out with another woman at a party to titillate partygoers and still leave that party with a heterosexual identity in tact, or claim an unquestioned bisexuality, too.
Not so for men.
“Guys are told that if you’re sexually fluid you’re automatically gay,” Lyon says. “That mentality shamed me into believing I was gay when I’m not. People told me I wasn’t bisexual, and it wasn’t a real thing. Before I knew myself, I bought into that.”
Lyon says it’s not just men doing this shaming. Often times, it’s the girlfriends or wives of “straightish” men giving bisexual or straightish men the side-eye. “These guys tell me that it’s their women oftentimes that present as homophobic,” Lyons says. “They want to bring another guy to a threesome, and it’s the woman with the insecurity, being likeOh my god, are you gay?”
But they aren’t gay—not there’s anything wrong with that, either.
In a recent Savage Love column, Dan Savage answers a question from a 29-year-old woman whose boyfriend, Adam, recently told her that he and his college roommate Steve used to masturbate together. She doesn’t think either of them is gay, but she admittedly doesn’t “know what to make of this.”
“Maybe they’re heteroflexible?” she speculates, wondering if it’s “common” for straight guys to masturbate together. Complicating matters is the fact that Steve still hangs around the couple, who otherwise have “fantastic, no-complaints” sex.
Savage turns to Lyon to take the wheel. “Buddy-bating among straight guys is more common than people may think,” Lyon tells Savage. To answer why straight men experiment in this way when they’re definitely not gay, Lyon cites Jane Ward’s 2015 book Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men. Lyon — quoting Ward — says that “sexual interaction between straight white men allows them to leverage whiteness and masculinity to authenticate their heterosexuality in the context of men.”
Lyon goes on to say such acts are bonding in a “masculine, albeit sexual way with another guy, while also still only being responsible for getting themselves off.” It strengthens their friendships, he says, adding that there’s nothing to be ashamed of, especially when, in the case of the letter from the woman to Savage, Adam is being totally open with his fiancée about it.
Savage, for his part, calls bullshit on Ward’s book’s entire conceit. While acknowledging that, yes, a straight guy can have a gay or bi experience and still be straight, Savage points out the buddy-bating boner in the room here:
Straightness is so valued (and apparently so vulnerable) that some people can look at guys who put dicks in their mouths at regular intervals and construct book-length rationalizations that allow these guys to avoid identifying or being labeled as bi, gay, or queer. (And if sucking dick allows straight men to “authenticate their heterosexuality,” wouldn’t there be gay men out there eating pussy to “authenticate” their homosexuality?)
It’s a valid point. After all, if it were truly okay for straight dudes to fantasize about men and enjoy masturbating with them, why not just call it “gayish?” Doesn’t “straightish” imply a discomfort with gayness, an attempt to distance oneself from homosexuality?
Lyon said he doesn’t disagree with Savage’s response, but he makes two points about the heteroflexibility he and other men enjoy. Yes, it’s harder for men to identify as bi or even straightish, because of the idea that it must mean they’re gay.
“There are a lot of dudes [who message me] who are worried about their sexuality, who think something is wrong with them because of this notion of a rigid sex paradigm we’ve created in our society,” Lyon says. “So that everyone’s sexuality is palatable to the masses, there are strict little boxes you have to be confined in. I just say no, that’s bullcrap.”
Second, Lyon says, straightish men who find his website express relief that a place exists for people who share their predilections. They’re curious about jerking off with another man, and wonder how they might go about it. They make a clear distinction between simply masturbating beside a man or watching porn with men fully shown (as opposed to POV porn), versus actually engaging in gay sex.
He says he’s enjoyed buddy bating with friends for years, for instance, and that while men who might be gay can also use that interaction as a way of exploring that orientation, that when those men are gay or bisexual, things escalate pretty quickly.
“We’re not guys who necessarily want to penetrate or be penetrated by another guy,” he says.
“I have buddies I’ve jerked off with a decade and we’ve never engaged in that way; I have buddies who after a few times of doing it will open up and want to explore more. A guy who wants to explore gay sex will do it however he wants to do it, like next to a guy on a couch, jerking off. That guy had an orientation all along that was bisexual. But I’m talking about a guy who understand this is just a part of his sexuality, a bonus to what he does with his wife or girlfriend, and he has no interest than that.”
He calls it supplementing their heterosexuality. “Plenty of my followers have no interest in sex with a man, but they like the bonding of jerking off next to a buddy,” he says.
In a podcast with clinical psychologist David Ley, who has written about the myth of sex addiction as well as a recent guide to ethical porn for men, they discuss what’s behind all this. Over the years, Lyon has fielded his fair share of questions from men who write to him because they’re concerned about being bisexual, or confused about why they find this type of straightish pornography stimulating when they “shouldn’t.”
Ley says, simply, that sexuality is a complex thing. “Our sexuality is developed and designed by evolution to compete with other men’s sperm. The shape of the penis works like a suction pump to remove semen in a woman’s vagina from another man. When a man is responding to the presence of the other man, he ejaculates harder, he gets erect again sooner and his ejaculate contains more sperm.”
“What’s interesting is that now,” Ley continues, “the pornography you’re talking about, it takes that competition and turns it into excitement and arousal.” At the core of this attraction for men, Ley tells Lyon, is that it’s also a taboo. That means, he says, it can “become sexy and arousing, because we want to be naughty.”
And thanks to a few key shifts in modern thinking — the ubiquity of porn, and the shifting definition of sexual orientation to include more than just gay or straight—we now have “lots of people out there who can get aroused by things that aren’t consistent with their identity,” Ley says.
Ley recommends that, rather than worry about the labels, that these men start from a place of investigation and curiosity, asking themselves, “What does it mean if I get turned on by these things?”
It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Part of the issue here in embracing bisexuality is that it’s long been considered less than a “real” sexual orientation even within the gay community. Bisexual writer Beth Sherouse wrote earlier this year at Think Progress that it’s perplexing that bisexual people still feel unrepresented in the LGBTQ community when half of that community identifies as such. Sherouse said she still fields comments about the fact that bisexual people simply have less to complain about, since they can “choose to pass as straight.” As a result, it’s as if bisexual people, she writes, “are everywhere and nowhere.”
Lyon points out to Ley that there’s still this perception that being bisexual means you want to have relationships with both sexes, when for many people it may just be a sexual attraction, and not a romantic one. “Sex is about far more than who you share your genitals with,” Ley says. “It’s also who you spend time with, who you love.”
But things are changing, potentially to a point where being straightish won’t leave so many men confused, or their girlfriends troubled. “Bisexuality is where a lot of the work is being done right now,” says Ley, who uses the term colonizing the middle to describe the plethora of terms for the different shades of bisexuality. “There’s fluidity, pansexuality, genderfluid, or gender queer,” he says. “There’s mostly straight. Heteroflexible. Now, people get to try to understand their sexuality, as opposed to fit their sexuality into the box of how they’re told it’s supposed to work.”
Lyon regularly checks in with his followers to see how the site is helping them address their issues and desires. One follower told him that before finding FYFF, he used to get off on “solo cum vids,” and that after experiencing his first buddy bating session recently, thanks to the encouragement he found from Lyon, he found it “incredible, and since then, he and his friend have never been closer.”
He told Lyon it’s simply because men never get to be vulnerable in this way. It’s the taboo that makes it exciting, but by exploring it, the taboo is diminishing.
Lyon also routinely counsels men on how to explore their curiosity about this straightish act, directing them to a masturbation enthusiasts’ site called Bate World where they explore, among other things, buddy bating and why it’s still stigmatized. (“All guys like to masturbate,” Lyon told me. “But these guys really really like to masturbate.”)
Other men tell him that finding his site has “saved their relationship.” They’re able to use it to have discussions about their sexuality with wives that allow them to grow and expand the relationship, that otherwise would’ve ended in divorce.
Lyon also works as a sex coach, and he feels that the work he’s doing is critical to shifting understanding of how fluid sexuality really is. It’s not exactly sex missionary work—he’s not trying to win over guys to his way of thinking. He just wants to diminish the stigma, which he believes is critical to healing homophobia. After all, a guy who’s comfortable with a straightish point of view isn’t likely to be offended or outraged if a guy hits on him at a bar.
“Yeah, it’s about guys jerking off,” he says of his work. “But it’s also about helping guys have the freedom to love themselves and their sexuality wholly. To engage in ways that feel sexually good to them. That’s the work I’m passionate about doing.”
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Should You Masturbate at Work? Some Considerations
Apparently almost everybody is doing it. Should you?
Fapping is the new smoke break. Masturbating at work is a “great way to relieve stress and tension,” a psychology prof at Nottingham Trent University said recently, not to mention a “great self-motivational reward.” A 2015 survey from Time Out that found that some 40 percent of New Yorkers masturbate on the job keeps recirculating on the internet, as does a 2012 survey from Glamour that put that figure closer to 31 percent. Either way, look around the office: Easily a third to nearly a half of the people you’re grabbing coffee next to in the break room are devoting some amount of their work day to stroking it. Should you be one of them? Ask yourself these questions.
Do you really have to do this?Sure, you’re batshit horny, or thinking about your latest sexual fixation. But let’s think this one through: You ostensibly live in some sort of dwelling with a more traditional sense of privacy than any job is going to offer (outside of manning a lighthouse). It’s called your house. Is work really your best location for becoming fully erect and massaging your member to completion?
FINE, you really have to. But can you be super fucking quiet?We assume that unless you’re a particularly breathy masturbator, you ostensibly have years of practice beating off in tomblike silence.
Does everyone clear out in your office in the afternoon so you have the place all to yourself?According to one chronic work masturbator who has masturbated at work a few times a week for years, this is your best bet for jerking on the clock. He told me he often arrives at work late and stays later than most of his colleagues, so once everyone is gone, it’s into the bathroom and out with the laptop. (Note: He’s still not dumb enough to beat it right out in the open. You shouldn’t be either.)
Do you work for a giant corporation in a building with whole wings under construction, or an office space so vast that there are routinely free, unoccupied entire floors and/or empty offices with reliably locking doors?The chronic masturbator told me that, second to a totally empty office late in the day, finding an unoccupied floor or office with a locking door is your next-best bet for employed masturbatory bliss, assuming you don’t get stumbled on by a janitor or realtor trying to show the place.
Does your office have a single-use stall with a reliably locking door?It’s private, and there’s a reasonable amount of time you could sneak away to do the deed, no questions asked.
Can you get it done in under five to 10 minutes so as not to elicit any suspicion?Take too long and someone’s going to need that bathroom and start asking questions.
If it’s a multi-stall bathroom, can you be quiet, efficient and contain any potential “jerking-off” shadows, or at least make them look like a nervous tic (e.g., a foot shake), knowing there’s someone sitting right beside you?This is still doable, believe it or not. “I like to pick a stall in the public bathroom,” Patrick, a 40-year-old government worker, told us last year about his affection for work jerking. “Usually, there aren’t a lot of people around. But sometimes I have to wait for neighbors to leave.”
Do you have a patented system in place for pretending you’re doing official business?“I’ll begin with my feet facing the proper direction, and then, I only turn around in the stall once I’m finished,” Abe, 30, told us about his approach. “Wipe, flush, done.”
Do you need visual assistance to jerk it? Do you have a phone? Do you have porn on that phone? Are you able to get off to porn without sound, or, less desirable but also possible, risk using headphones that render you unable to keep your wits about you if someone is outside?“Thank god for Tumblr!” Patrick added.
But are you connected to office wifi while looking at this porn at work?#problematic
Do you have an obvious “I just came” face that someone (a nosy coworker or a bruh in finance) will call your dumb ass out on?Wipe it.
How quickly after you get off before your dick goes soft?Because walking out with a stupid I-just-came faceora semi-hard dick-in-pants situation is a dead giveaway.
Are you a sloppy jerk — i.e., will you accidentally cum on yourself and blow your cover? Or, will you splash water on that cum thereby looking like you pissed yourself?The latter is better, but they’re both stupid.
What’s your strategy if you get caught?Like every sexual experience, you must hope for the best but prepare for the worst. While the more likely story is that someone will simply suspect you’ve been beating it on break rather than actually walk in on you (but uh, holy shit, you’re toast if that happens, unless that’s your thing), you should be prepared with some kind of explanation should anyone confront you.
And really, there’s only one: Constipation and/or the shits. That’s embarrassing, but you could live down explosive diarrhea that splattered out into the break room snack basket sooner than you could survive being The Guy Who Wanks at Work. So pick your poison. And safe (paid) jerking out there.
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Why the Alt-Right Thinks Porn is a Jewish Conspiracy
A few months ago, a user on a bodybuilding supplement forum asked if it was weird that he had a childhood crush on Lola Bunny from Space Jam.
“It’s not weird,” someone assured him. In fact, this someone added, there’s “a conspiracy from sinister guys at the top” to pornify popular culture, in order to get young boys so addicted to pornographic images that they develop “bad social skills” and are too weak and distracted to resist the elites in power. “Looks like it worked,” agreed another user, who then pressed ENTER 144 times and posted a gif of a fly rubbing its front legs together, with a hook-nosed, yarmulked Jewish caricature photoshopped on its head.
How did this bodybuilding forum go from Lola Bunny screenshots to anti-Semitic memes in less than 24 hours? Well, it turns out that despite the stereotype that alt-righters spend hours in their parents’ basements watching tentacle hentai, many of them are theoretically anti-porn. More specifically, they believe porn is a Jewish conspiracy to weaken white men and, if all goes according to plan, destroy Western civilization. (Honestly, this isn’t that different from how a lot of mainstream commentators talk about porn — but more on that later.)
I became aware of the alt-right theory of smut on February 11, 2018, the day after right-wing New York Times columnist Ross Douthat called for an outright ban on pornography. A conservative writer I follow on Twitter agreed with Douthat, and I replied with some practical concerns about what might happen if the porn industry became an unregulated black market. Then someone with the handle @SwiFT__1889 (a simultaneous tribute to alt-right icons Taylor Swift and Charles Lindbergh) wrote this:
Lindy TayTay’s impassioned stance took me aback. All of men? The well-being of the masses? What was going on here?
After some clicking around, I found they’d recently retweeted Paul Nehlen, the white nationalist running for Paul Ryan’s seat in Congress, and the tweet linked to a video titled “The Jewish Role in the Porn Industry.” That same day, February 11, Twitter suspended Nehlen’s account, and hundreds of his followers changed their avatar to Nehlen’s and used hashtags like #FreeNehlen and #JeSuisPaulNehlen.
The video in question was made by Mark Collett, former director of publicity for the British National Party (check out this 2002 video of baby Mark being interviewed by baby Russell Brand, featuring the line, “I just missed a call for you, ya Nazi!”). Since it was posted nine months ago the video’s garnered 80,000 views.
Collett’s argument is this: Jews have had a disproportionate presence in the porn industry since at least the 1970s. (There’s some truth to this, as we’ll see in a bit.) And they aren’t just motivated by profit — they actually mean to harm Western civilization, too. Young white men, Collett claims, become addicted to porn at an early age, to the point where they’re less and less interested in, or even capable of, actual sex. Furthermore, these young men’s addiction drives them to pursue ever greater highs, as the porn they used to watch no longer works for them. So they end up hooked on gay and trans porn, and interracial porn featuring black men and white women. This is why “cuck,” the porn trope of a white man forced to watch his wife have sex with a black man, became a popular alt-right term for anyone to their left.
The goal of this addictive material, supposedly, is to neuter and desexualize white men, and ultimately doom the white race. This is where the alt-right theory of porn ties into the larger theory of white genocide. The immigration of people of color into Europe and North America, coupled with the declining birth rate among white couples, will render white people a minority, if not altogether extinct, and then Jews will be the only high-IQ race left in the West, leaving them free to control the black and brown masses.
Collett is far from alone in his views. He’s joined by white nationalist and alt-right voices like David Duke, Kevin MacDonald, Identity Dixie, the Daily Stormer and this random YouTube commenter:
This was a response, by the way, to a video posted by The Golden One, a Swedish bodybuilder-fascist who frequently tweets out memes like this:
“It’s hard to find someone on the alt-right whodoesn’tbasically buy the ‘Jews created porn’ idea,” says Daniel E. Harper, who knows the ins and outs of the Alt-Right Extended Universe better than anyone who isn’t, you know, a Nazi. And according to Harper, the alt-right is generally in agreement that the purpose of porn is “to corrupt ‘the host society,’ i.e. white society.”
What’s the alt-right’s evidence? They like to point out that in 2016 Israel passed a law blocking all internet porn sites by default, requiring users to contact their ISP if they want access. In other words, the alt-right claims, Jews know porn is bad for you; they only want to spread the virus to other societies.
Another piece of evidence the alt-right cites over and over again is an article published in the Jewish Quarterly 14 years ago, written by Nathan Abrams (now a film studies professor at Bangor University in Wales with a new book out on Stanley Kubrick). Abrams argues that Jews have been, and continue to be, disproportionately influential in the American porn industry. He discusses such figures as Reuben Sturman, who built an adult-bookstore empire and became the nation’s largest smut distributor during the 1970s and 1980s; and Al Goldstein, the Screw magazine co-founder who first outed J. Edgar Hoover and gave Deep Throat (the film, not Hoover’s erstwhile deputy associate) its first signal boost. There’s also the gonzo porn pioneer Seymore Butts; Steven Hirsch, the founder of Vivid Entertainment, for years the largest porn studio in the world; and actors Ron Jeremy and Nina Hartley. (Collett would add to this pantheon Greg Lansky, CCO of the popular interracial site Blacked.com.)
Why the disproportionate Jewish presence in porn? Abrams suggests it was the same reason Jews dominated Hollywood from early on — it was an industry with a low barrier of entry and little respect from polite society. Plus, unlike in other industries, Abrams writes, “in porn there was no discrimination against Jews.” Abrams even speculates there’s a subversive element to Jewish involvement in porn, a middle finger “to the entire WASP establishment.” Indeed, Al Goldstein once claimed “the only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks.”
As you can imagine, Abrams has been getting crazy emails about this article for more than a decade. The alt-right takes advantage of Abrams’s legitimacy as a scholar, always making sure to mention he’s a professor, not a crank. But at the same time, they hold his scholarship in contempt; they say it’s evidence the Jews aren’t just undermining Western civilization — they’re bragging about it.
But Abrams says this alt-right conspiracy theory of porn is nothing new; it’s just the latest incarnation of a longstanding association of Jews with prostitution, STDs and sexual perversion. Hitler spent several pages of Mein Kampf bemoaning the spread of syphilis via Jewish pimps and prostitutes, which he feared could jeopardize the continuation of the Aryan race. The Nazis even had an umbrella term for prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, abortion and other forms of sexual degeneracy — “sexual Bolshevism,” which, like the “cultural Marxism” the alt-right blames everything on, is just a short hop away from blaming the Jews.
Even when they haven’t been anti-Semitic, critics of so-called sexual degeneracy have long been motivated by a desire to preserve the white race. Asthis ContraPoints videoexplains, the modern concept of degeneracy developed in the same post-Enlightenment stew as scientific racism. European and North American elites fretted that industrialization, urbanization and cosmopolitanism would transform vigorous white men into, well, beta cucks. Their societies would then weaken and decay until they were overpowered by more robust outsiders, just as the Huns and Visigoths supposedly conquered Rome because it was too busy having genderqueer orgies. “Impotent, decadent manhood,” writes historianGail Bederman, would bring about “race suicide.”
For example, look at this British cartoon from the 1870s. An older man walks upon a newlywed couple and finds they’re pouting:
The young man is disappointed in the size of his new bride’s waist and the shape of her nose, which pale in comparison to the classical sculptures he’s obsessed with. His bride is similarly disappointed in his chin and lack of facial hair. They’re so educated and sophisticated that they’re more into erotic art than each other.
Furthermore, we know from this cartoonist’s other work that he feared the men in his society were becoming feeble soyboys indistinguishable from women:
So what was the solution to this epidemic of weak, over-civilized men? Boys and young men were encouraged to lift weights and go camping (this is where we get the Boy Scouts) and to stop playing with themselves. Americans who weren’t Jewish started circumcising their infant boys for the first time in significant numbers, in part because the sensitive foreskin was thought to be too great a temptation. The U.S. government cracked down on pornography, abortion and contraceptives, which were all seen as aiding and abetting race suicide.
But the truth is, when modern commentators criticize porn, they’re often using the same basic framework. For one thing, they don’t really care about porn’s impact on women. As the British lad-mag-editor-turned-anti-porn-advocate Martin Daubney puts it, “Porn is more of a problem for men than women.” He explains this by way of brain science, but the real thrust (or lack thereof) of his argument is that he cares more about what porn might do to men’s sexual prowess, “turning increasing numbers of men in their sexual prime into flops.”
The other telltale is when people fret over porn’s “threat to virility” and “collapsing birth rates.” I assure you they’re not worried about birth rates in Nigeria or Indonesia. Just as with the opioid epidemic or the old tire factory closing down, these commentators’ main concern is what porn will do to white men. When Douthat called for a ban on porn, he lamented that American society is “trending Japan-ward,” invoking the stereotype of an effeminate man more interested in furry manga than raising a family. This isn’t that different from the NoFap redditor who says, “White people are being outbred by Muhamed, Jamal, Chang and Enrique,” and then issues the clarion call of “don’t fap, breed.”
Are there serious problems with porn? Sure. But we can’t have that conversation if we’re narrowly focused on poor men degenerating into antisocial incels. The biggest problem with porn, after all, is that people have stopped paying for it! Pirated content powers free tube sites that promise bottomless wells of dopamine blasts, making porn both more addictive and more accessible to children.
If we started consuming porn ethically, we’d give a boost to better, more creative porn, and young folks could be exposed to sex that didn’t follow the pattern of bored kissing, bored blowjob, bored pussy-eating, bored missionary position, bored doggy-style, a little more bored blowjob, money shot. Paying for porn would also encourage productions with a more diverse array of bodies, skin tones and gender identities.
But we don’t want to have that conversation. If we think there’s a problem with porn, we’d rather blame “modern society,” the “elites” or “cultural Marxism,” and before you know it, you’re only a YouTube rabbit hole away from blaming the Jews for white genocide. We need to grapple with how the modern porn industry is shaped by neoliberalism, patriarchy and white supremacy, or else all we’re left with is the same tired story of white dudes suffering from death grip.
Bill Blackis a historian of American religion and culture with a focus on the Civil War era. His writing has appeared atThe Atlantic,Voxand theWashington Post. This is his first piece for MEL.
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1 comment:
Excellent articles. Thanks for posting them.
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