I hope we all know this and are just doing it as a bit, but sometimes I do see shit on this website that makes me go “Oh y’all are genuinely just weird prudes”
The “gooner epidemic” is not real, gooning is an incredibly niche kink that very few people engage in.
“Porn addiction” is basically non existent and affects such a small portion of the population as to not be relevant. The idea that most people have in their heads about porn addiction is propaganda made up by evangelicals.
We do not live in an overly-sexually-liberated time. There is not an excess of sexual content or exposure to it.
Most of the time when people talk about “the gooner problem” what they’re actually talking about is a mix of two unrelated things, people living normal sexually liberated lives, and undersocialized young men that don’t know how to interact with people.
Sex is good. We should be having more of it. We should encourage healthy, safe sex featuring whatever kinks you and your partner(s) consent to. Don’t fall for puritan propaganda comrades.
I don’t know what a gooner is but i have to disagree with the “porn addiction is not real” statement. It’s a very real thing, and like other addictions, people simply refuse to admit they have a problem.
As a male i’ve had to endure porn talks throughout my life, from my high school circle, to my college circle, to my coworker circle, to catching my uncles watching porn, to every single random countryside worker. Literally every conversation with men ends up about porn or homophobia.
No kidding but at some point i had to watch porn as “research” just in case i had to talk about it in a drinking game or something, because “name porn genres” is something that always comes up in drinking games. How is this not real?
i have to disagree with the “porn addiction is not real” statement
You disagree with experts on the topic then. “Porn addiction is not real” is the opinion of the WHO and APA among many other groups. This is the academic consensus.
As a male i’ve had to endure porn talks throughout my life, from my high school circle, to my college circle, to my coworker circle, to catching my uncles watching porn, to every single random countryside worker. Literally every conversation with men ends up about porn or homophobia.
People talking about porn is not evidence of addiction, nor is being caught watching porn. Would you say people are addicted to Star Wars because every conversation lately ends up about Andor? The fact that people are uncomfortable talking about porn is itself evidence of us living in a puritanical culture.
Also as a generally male-presenting non-binary person this is not my experience talking to men, porn really does not come up that often at all.
i had to watch porn as “research” just in case i had to talk about it in a drinking game or something, because “name porn genres” is something that always comes up in drinking games
Again I don’t see how this is evidence of anything. “I had to experience a thing people talk about during drinking games in order to answer those questions” yeah? I had to watch Friends because it comes up during bar trivia all the time. That is not evidence of widespread Friends addiction.
Gooning is endemic now because the government ended goon lockdowns too early
Sex is not bad, nor is being sexually liberated.
However sex and sexuality as it it treated under our current society is highly misogynistic and exploitative.
“Oh stop being a prude” is definitely a phrase uttered to many young women in the entertainment industry to shame her into exploiting her body for capital.
“sex and sexuality as it it treated under our current society is highly misogynistic and exploitative.” Repeat this again. I cannot say I know how women feel but from what those close to me say its a catch 22 for em in a lot of social situations in and out of the entertainment industry.
Relatively new account.
Calls out hexbear site culture in a backhanded way, implying this is a problem that can be “fixed”.
Makes very bold statements, the only source being a random tiktok video.
Conflates leftist ideas about women not being overly sexualised with right wing puritanical beliefs.
Makes very basic feel-good statements that don’t commit to a strong position, AKA the “liberal politician” approach.
Acts as if they are just “helpfully reminding” hexbear to “be more normal” and “not fall for propaganda” while basically telling us to not worry and support status quo ideas.
Not sure if I should go “
” or “
” either way, this is some lame ass bait. Not everyone obsesses over how much people get laid as you do dude, get over it.That video also uses the “female prostitution is the oldest profession” line too, which is not true and also clearly the exact kind of right-wing propaganda as “gooning is an epidemic” is.
Yeah, I don’t know how anyone can watch these sorts of
umm acktually… kind of smug pseudo intellectual tiktok videos. Even if I agree with a video, the sheer smugness and self-righteousness of this sort of content is so offputting. Tiktok is an awful place.To be clear, the creator in question is a PhD candidate talking about the topic of his research. It’s not a “pseudo intellectual” it’s a literal academic.
I meant the tiktok format in general. Some of my favourite creators (like Milo Rossi) do the same thing with their tiktok videos, it just feels smug, arrogant, unpleasant and pseudointellectually smug, and unpleasant to watch as a result. I just don’t think it is a good format for sharing information with people.
First off, I’ve been here since the sub was banned and the lifeboat Discord, I’ve changed accounts a few times for opsec.
To be quite honest I didn’t expect this to become such a struggle session. This wasn’t even supposed to be particularly a callout post of this site, it was more a comment on US culture broadly and the comment about the volcel police was supposed to be a site relevant joke.
I shouldn’t have said the thing about “weird prudes,” that was rude, my point was just that this idea that these ideas have even crop up in leftist, pro-sw, pro-lgbt spaces like Hexbear.
I certainly see how it comes off as backhanded attack on the site’s culture, and I’m sorry, that was not my intention.
- “Oh shit, they’re onto us! Quick do some damage control! Say you’ve been a part of the site for years to give you credibility!” “Make sure you claim no responsibility while still pushing the right buttons to ensure they stay divisive!” “Quick, quick, pull out the phrasebook, give a non-commital apology!”
“whew! Nailed it. No one will suspect us now.”
I’m only joking (or am I?), I just feel like being a bit mean. But this weird liberal politician way of speaking is not healthy. You can commit to a point and stick to your guns, it’s ok. Though I am wondering why you thought this wouldn’t cause a struggle session if you’ve been here for years. I’ve only been here for a couple of years, and your post’s inflammatory nature is really obvious. It’s clearly designed to treat your position on this as the “passive, neutral, correct” version of things, while accusing anyone who disagrees with you of believing in right wing conspiracies (poisoning the well against them). It seems obvious to me that this would cause a lot of discussion and argument, so I’m wondering what result you expected to get from this?
Oh shit new bear thread with more comments than votes fuck yeah gotta pull this up on my middle goon cave monitor for some background reading
For real though fuck this site for teaching me what a gooner is you can all go to hell for that one
pull this up on my middle goon cave monitor for some background reading
so there I was, gooning to my hexbear threads when
People online be like “I just saw a tiktok, new opinion downloaded” and go from there.
It straight up contributed to the end of a relationship for me. Speech patterns/humor/knowledge all became tiktoked. It sucked.
Y’all talking about puritanism as if the reason for the volcel police isn’t to make sure our precious bodily fluids aren’t sapped and impurified.
radlib take. sex is great, and people should be having it, and online pornography, which commodifies the most intimate and shared human experiences, and only serves to further atomize and alienate us from each other and ourselves, sucks. it produces less sex and less intimacy; it creates a market which degrades and exploits.
we easily diagnose mindless consumption as bad and deadening of the spirit, but yet people refuse to admit this when it comes to frictionless consumption of sexual gratification. why is this, why is the need to signal that one isn’t a prude require an endorsement of gooning?
and online pornography, which commodifies the most intimate and shared human experiences, and only serves to further atomize and alienate us from each other and ourselves, sucks.
Pretty sure people would make porn and share it in a communist society too. Not everybody considers sex as this sacred intimate act that needs to be hidden from the rest of the world, some people are just naturally extremely horny.
Sure. But a porn industry is a completely different beast, especially in a neoliberal hellhole.
i don’t care about what happens in a liberated society. i care about what happens in a (current) neoliberal, thatcherrite non-society, where everyone is merely individuals, where the collective good is spit on, where the profit motive creates uncaptured externalities which befall those on the losing end of class distinctions. it is in this world wherein online pornography is incentivized, produced and commodified; and it is this one which is reified precisely by this sort of production in particular-- because a world in which you can instantly gratify yourself alone, all the time, in lieu of having to go outside and talk to and then fuck someone else, is one which forgoes the development of constitutive attachments with others, a necessary requirement of community.
if some people are so invariably into consuming porn, i would suggest they opt for capitalism – though Marx may have allotted for gooning in the morning before fishing at midday and critiquing after dinner, capitalism will surely provide a more varied and variegated porn under the profit motive. all that is holy is profaned, and these people (who, apparently, are NOT the product of their environments, but would be necessarily just, really, irreducibly horny) would be better off there.
i don’t care about what happens in a liberated society. i care about what happens in a (current) neoliberal, thatcherrite non-society, where everyone is merely individuals, where the collective good is spit on, where the profit motive creates uncaptured externalities which befall those on the losing end of class distinctions.
Repeating what I said elsewhere: I know a good handful of people who draw erotic art/write erotic stories without any expectation that they will ever make money off of it. They make it because they want to make it, and they share it because they know there are others who will enjoy it. This isn’t some ethereal hypothetical, this is happening right now despite capitalism’s merciless drive to commodify everything in its grasp. And people drew sexy pictures and wrote spicy stories before capitalism, too - if it didn’t start with capitalism, why would it end with capitalism?
because a world in which you can instantly gratify yourself alone, all the time, in lieu of having to go outside and talk to and then fuck someone else, is one which forgoes the development of constitutive attachments with others, a necessary requirement of community.
You could make this exact same argument against masturbation. Or reading. Or meditating. Or any other solitary activity. Some people are naturally introverted, no social configuration is going to change that, and it’s absurd to suggest that it’s somehow bad and wrong to not spend every waking moment in the company of other people. To say nothing of people who are so undesirable that finding a sexual partner simply isn’t an option.
if some people are so invariably into consuming porn, i would suggest they opt for capitalism – though Marx may have allotted for gooning in the morning before fishing at midday and critiquing after dinner, capitalism will surely provide a more varied and variegated porn under the profit motive. all that is holy is profaned, and these people (who, apparently, are NOT the product of their environments, but would be necessarily just, really, irreducibly horny) would be better off there.
The idea that if you like something, you’ll inherently like it most in its capitalist form is absurd. To reuse an analogy I brought up elsewhere, this is like saying that anyone who enjoys video games should support capitalism because clearly gray-brown military shooters and predatory slot machine apps are the apex of the medium.
Yes, commodifying sex is bad because commodifying anything is bad. When porn ceases to be a commodity it will become less harmful, much like anything else.
I’m really not sure what point you’re making here, do you think there wouldn’t be porn sites that people would use as masturbation tools in a communist society? Why is “instant gratification” inherently a bad thing? When you open your fridge to have a snack you’re “instantly gratifying” because you’re not involving yourself in the entire process of making food.
“Oh y’all are genuinely just weird prudes”
Hmm some people maybe
The “gooner epidemic” is not real, gooning is an incredibly niche kink that very few people engage in.
That’s true
“Porn addiction” is basically non existent and affects such a small portion of the population as to not be relevant
That’s NOT true
We do not live in an overly-sexually-liberated time.
Agree
There is not an excess of sexual content or exposure to it.
I strongly disagree, I think boys these days get exposed, and expose themselves, to sexual content far more than even when I was young
Sex is good. We should be having more of it. We should encourage healthy, safe sex featuring whatever kinks you and your partner(s) consent to.
Yes
BTW Let’s tone things down, struggle session over GOONING is wild, people
“Porn addiction” is basically non existent and affects such a small portion of the population as to not be relevant
That’s NOT true
The World Health Organization disagrees with you, as does the American Psychological Association. I don’t know how to tell you “this disease is fake” in a more definitive way than “All of the experts on this subject say it’s not real”
I agree with you like 90% but I don’t think you can say it’s not real at all just because they decided (for now) not to classify it as a mental disorder. There definitely exist people that have a very unhealthy relationship to pornography that it very negatively impacts their lives.
I agree it’s way overblown due to religious brainworms tho.
I won’t disagree that there are people who have an unhealthy relationship with porn that negatively impacts their lives.
But that is not what makes an addiction, and a lot of that unhealthy relationship is caused by the stigmatization of porn in the first place.
Having an unhealthy habit of overconsumption actually is the textbook definition of addiction
Addiction requires more than that. At the very least it requires dependence, tolerance, and cravings, which porn addiction generally does not have, and usually requires some level of withdrawal symptoms which porn absolutely does not have.
Another important distinction is that stopping porn consumption generally does not improve outcomes and in fact can make them worse. If I stop smoking cigarettes, after enough time the nicotine cravings stop, and the negative effects of smoking (coughing, lung cancer risk, being stinky) begin to fade. Stopping porn consumption does not make people suddenly able to have healthy, anxiety free sexual relationships, and tends to increase anxiety and shame.
Dependence, increased tolerance and requiring more and more extreme porn, and cravings are all present in individuals with porn addiction.
There are people who are addicted to everything, including things like Minesweeper or Sudoku or cleaning. How you can stake out the absurd position that there’s no such thing as porn addiction is absurd, when sex addiction is well documented and hits the same mental stimuli.
You are fundamentally incorrect and need to read the scientific literature on this. Like, this is not a matter of opinion, what you just said is equivalent to saying “vaccines cause autism,” we have research on this and your claims are not backed up by the evidence.
I’m not gonna talk to each of those points I’m just gonna tackle the first one, there is no evidence of porn dependence. What you’re mistaking for “porn dependence” is almost entirely anxiety, depression, and shame relating to sex and pornography.
If having a sexual experience with another person is anxiety inducing and you’re ashamed and can’t communicate well about it, it’s going to be hard to perform sexually, and you won’t have this issue with porn because there isn’t another person involved. Thats not dependence, it just kinda looks like it because “I can get hard when I’m watching porn but not with my girlfriend”
Volcel vanguard has nothing to with gooning. It came about because redditors are mostly porn-brained males that can’t stop making spaces on reddit uncomfortable for women at literally every single opportunity. Volcel vanguard spawned as a meme to shame people and counter that on the CTH subreddit.
It is useful and it is good and people absolutely do need to be told to shut the fuck up about it or else you end up with spaces that are made entirely uncomfortable for everyone else.
I’m ace and while I do look at horny images from time to time, full-on pornography or sexually explicit talk still grosses me out, I sometimes feel prudish or childish about that as a result.
I feel in a weird place when all this talk is made about normalising sex while being sex-negative, I don’t want to push my preferences on all of society, y’know?
Whenever I personally referenced the “volcel poIice” meme it was intended to be lighthearted, a friendly reminder that it got weird in a way that could give a chuckle.
Whenever I personally referenced the “volcel poIice” meme it was intended to be lighthearted, a friendly reminder that it got weird in a way that could give a chuckle.
I’m also asexual, and I think I always saw it that way?
I think it’s helpful to frame it in terms of a cultural context.
For instance, Japan has a squeezable tanuki testicle toy for kids, whereas that probably wouldn’t fly in the US (admittedly, the US doesn’t have very many tanuki either) because the culture sexualizes just the mere existence of genitals, so people start acting weird if you bring it up that things like that exist in other countries.
I would guess “normalizing sex” is probably more about the euphemisms and weird ways to talk about it while pretending to dance around it. As much as we should fight against compulsory sexuality that not everyone needs to have sex all the time, I think it’s counterproductive to take the Texas “abstinence only STD roulette wheel” sex ed approach that isn’t really helping anyone.
In any case, I think that the meme’s intended function of filtering out creeps is probably a good thing if it works, but I’m probably least qualified to speak on that.
Japan is probably not a good example to use for a healthy liberated sexual culture
Yes. I didn’t intend to claim that but I’m leaving the comment up so the other ones make sense. I only used these specific examples because I already knew about them.
Do you know of any actually good examples of cultures as a whole that are?
I would say East Germany before the collapse of the USSR off the top of my head
this thread reminds me of the time i saw people on here say that looking at porn at work is sexual assault
What a creepy and weird thing to do at work
sure but it’s not “assault” and imo characterizing it that way kinda detracts from actual assault in a way that makes me uncomfortable
Uh it is. The fuck is wrong with you.
I assume they mean, like, in secret?
“Looking at porn in private” or “looking at porn secretly taking precautions to not be caught” is going to be perceived different than “looking at porn at work” by most people
if i hear “looking at porn at work” i’m assuming that’s like in a toilet stall on your phone, or in an office you can lock and have some privacy.
undersocialized young men that don’t know how to interact with people.
You don’t even need the “undersocialized” or “young” qualifiers there. However the volcel police meme started back on the old sub it was quickly weaponized to target the sort of omnipresent low-level sexual harassment that creeps do all over reddit and it’s managed to persist past the death of the sub and multiple ground shifts in site culture here because it works at suppressing that.
While I disagree with a lot of the opinions posted all over this thread, the one about volcel police being tired is just blatantly wrong. Its a great meme purely as a tool to identify that people being horny when no one else wants them too should stop being public about it. This was even something the Chapo boys were saying, “do not get your political opinions from jerk-off sites”
Close the tab, open up your favorite material. Lay one out and then come back and use the discussion better. Or just be a fucking adult and keep it to yourself unless the vibe is more explicit. Especially because so many more people read the posts than commenting, its nice to just have a bot you can ding up to get yourself posting and being upvoted.
Sex is good. Porn is often not.
Other than a lot of porn being exploitative in it’s production, overconsumption of porn is very common, and often contributes to people having weird attitudes to over sexualising women.
It fucks with your reward system. You can absolutely become addicted. It’s not a particularly healthy habit. You can desensitise yourself to real sex and change the way you’re able to enjoy it.
In these times, where you get served up porn content on your explore page for no good reason, I think porn consumption can easily become unhealthily pushed upon you.
The volcel police meme is a bit tired now, but I do think it’s good that we keep this site mostly non sexual.
overconsumption of porn is very commo
i would consume way less porn if anyone within a 200 mile radius would wear a fucking mask
fair point, especially about being served up sexual content in spaces otherwise not meant for it (like instagram). again, capitalism preys on humanity’s basest desires and floods our markets with sexual content.
and as an old, i just want to say that the “sex positivity” era of the early 2010s ran cover for throngs of abusers to get easy access to people who were exploring their sexual liberation and caused lots of harm to lots of good people, so it really leaves a bad taste in my mouth now.
The free love movement during the 70s-80s included a lot of adults getting to sexual acess to teenagers, at least in europe it did. Thats why there are so much older media with straight up illegal age gaps. And of course french cinema where half of the stuff is about a 15 year old having a forbidden romance with her 40+ married poetry teacher.
Yep, really sad. Just because the algorithm can detect I’m a young man, my explore page gets flooded with sexual content. I never search for that on Instagram, and I only ever open them to select the option ‘stop showing me content like this’ - and yet, just because my interests are otherwise very male, I will never stop being shown a steady stream of onlyfans girls.
And yep, same as the free love generation in the 60s and 70s. Lot of pedos there. Lot of pedos in the hippy scene in general, even to this day.
The people’s VOLCEL VANGUARD are on the scene! PLEASE RESERVE YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS FOR STRATEGIC ACTS OF MASS REVOLUTIONARY CUMMING!!!
This is my new favorite volcel vanguard post.
“We do not live in an overly-sexually-liberated time. There is not an excess of sexual content or exposure to it”
Idk maybe I am ignorant on history, but like…what time but the current would have MORE exposure to sexual content than the current internet age?
I do feel like we are living in one of the most if not the most sexually liberated and over exposed times in history for good or for ill I feel like that’s just obviously the case.What does sexual liberation mean to you? Putting housing out of
youngmost people’s reach, dating being enclosed by apps under a monopoly, wastelands of soul-less sexual content made solely to satisfy markets and algorithms, and wave after wave of legislation criminalizing queerness, sex education, and existing in public space couldn’t possibly be what you mean. So what do you?This and honestly I think the existence of dating apps is sexually repressive in and of itself.
Many people today are uncomfortable with the concept of flirting with a stranger at a bar. And I don’t just mean “Man you just can’t sexually harass a woman like you used to!”
Both men and women have now become accustomed to the idea that it’s only appropriate to flirt in the environment of dating app where flirting is inherently agreed on up front. It is only appropriate to do romance under the thumb of the corporations. Anything else would be a social faux pas, you wouldn’t want to potentially make someone uncomfortable would you? Best to stay in the meeting space designated to you b Capital.
fuck bars even without covid extra fuck bars after covid.
Fuck covid I miss going to bars all the time
Didn’t Pompeii literally have dicks carved into the street to point the way to the nearest brothel? I think the classical world was incredibly sexually liberated and similarly exposed to sex a lot more than we are.
large parts of the the classical world were slave societies, including pompeii. that level of sexual exploitation really strikes me as at odds with ‘sexual liberation’
honestly voIcel police is just a really tired meme. that said I do really value the anti-horny culture of this particular board, it’s played a big part in keeping this a good space for people that aren’t cis men I think.
honestly voIcel police is just a really tired meme.
