Quercus

Ideological Turing Test (Porn): The Essays

2022-10-19T00:00:00-04:00

Intellectual Turing Test essays

Part 1: Pro-Porn

In this section, you will see eleven pro-porn statements. Seven of them are by authors who identified as pro-porn, while four of them are by authors who identified as anti-porn.

Your job is to identify which authors are genuinely pro-porn. The order of the statements has been randomized. Each statement has been titled with a randomly generated word, for easier reference.

If you participated, it is fine to vote on your own statement.

Statement: Peanut

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

This is too variable to give a simple answer to. It might be the bulk of their sex lives, it might be a thing they get fun ideas from, it might be a thing that screws them up. There’s no general answer.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Probably mostly based on informed consent, in production, distribution, and consumption. The reasonable concern to have is harm to actual people who exist, such as being filmed without their consent, or getting things they aren’t ready to handle.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

They should apologize for walking-in-on, because that’s rude. Also they should probably have a talk with the kid because, at least in our current world, the kid probably shouldn’t have been able to get the porn and someone could face legal repercussions for this.

Statement: Floor

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Loosely, porn availability makes people’s sex lives more convenient. That’s more important than it sounds, and applies in several ways - more convenient to get turned on at a time it’s reasonable instead of waiting for arousal to strike on its own, more convenient to select from the menu of available sex thoughts and sex acts instead of having to independently invent them all (or get them from children’s movies), more convenient to experience variety in the safety and privacy of one’s own home instead of trying to simultaneously juggle social interactions while figuring out what works for them. Some forms also have direct not-solely-sexual entertainment value (fanfiction, for instance), mixing porn with other genres, though my secondhand understanding is that this is less true of visual porn. From that angle, omitting porn would be sort of like omitting stories about time travel, or stories about people raising children - there are some thematic depths that require specific content.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Normal labor regulations should apply to performers, maybe a few extra because a) normal regulations may be inadequate even for normal labor and b) there’s some plausible public health interest in preventing STI outbreaks. Porn shouldnt be casually presented in any way that’s easy to stumble on or hard to avoid - no trailers in Disney movies, for instance, though a trailer that was itself not pornographic advertising a movie that had sex scenes might be acceptable (if an irregular failure of market segmentation).

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Depends enormously on context. Did this happen because they wanted to download Sailor Moon, and their download was labeled maliciously? Did it happen because their friend pranked them? Did it happen because their sketchy older neighbor sent them a link? Did it happen because they knew of the existence of anime tentacle porn and acquired some to watch? The parent might not know, obviously, but can probably rule some things out and others in based on whether their child is an anime fan, collector of mischievous friends, acquaintance of a sketchy neighbor, or really into octopus documentaries. I’d want to know, most of all, the child’s mood in this situation - horrified fascination? Embarrassment same as if their parent caught them writing their initials and a classmate’s in a heart? In the first case I’d suggest pausing their anime and asking if they really meant to be watching that. In the latter case the parent should excuse themself and maybe ask about it a couple days later.

Statement: Dance

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Porn enables people to explore their sexuality in a safe context. It’s possible to walk away from porn at any time with no awkwardness, no fear of disappointing a parter, no lingering complications. That provides an important space for people to figure out what they want and what they don’t with low stakes, which lets them approach partnered sex with greater self-awareness and confidence. Similarly, if there’s something one person enjoys and their partner doesn’t, the partner might explore porn featuring that thing to figure out what they’re comfortable with in no-pressure situation.

Porn can help people process things they’ve done and things that have happened to them and figure out how to relate to their own experiences.

Porn can educate people about consent and safety practices: a lot of teenagers’ first exposure to various questionable situations is a porny fanfic with an author’s note saying “hey, definitely don’t do this in real life, that’s [rape/a nasty disease risk/etc]”.

Finally, for people whose libidos are lower than they prefer, porn can be a useful aid to partnered sex. Someone who wants to experience loving intimacy with a partner, but has trouble getting physically “in the mood”, might use porn to “warm up” in a low-pressure way and then have more fun in the bedroom.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Porn actors should have the same rights and protections as any other actors. It should be illegal to make or distribute video or photographic porn of someone who doesn’t consent to that (including stuff like revenge porn and clandestine upskirt photos) or of someone under 18 other than yourself. Nobody should be prosecuted for porn of themselves. Text and hand-drawn images are fine. People on AO3 should tag their fic accurately. Also note that this is all in an ideal spherical cow world where laws are enforceable; IRL everything is a mess and difficult.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Handling this sort of situation starts when the kid is a toddler. Any children of mine will grow up with access to lots of information about their bodies and about human sexuality as they become old enough to ask for it, and I will demonstrate trustworthiness and respect so that (I hope) the kids will feel safe coming to me with anything that’s troubling them. I will provide them with lots of resources containing information on safety, consent, physical and emotional issues surrounding sex, and the ways in which porn is unrealistic. And with that foundation laid, if I walk in on my daughter watching anime tentacle porn, I will apologize for not knocking, turn around, and shut the door as I would hope they would do for me. One cannot teach courtesy without modeling it.

Statement: Block

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

positive, helps form desires and self discover, also release tension

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

the production of it should not be allowed to cause harm to minors or non-consenting adults (defining harm is hard but we can get some basic principles in place).

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

“hey, I feel like this content is not appropriate for your age range but also I support you learning things I guess, please ask me excruciatingly awkward questions” / I have no idea

Statement: Law

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

What does porn do to people’s sex lives? Well, that varies with the person. In general, it helps people’s sex lives by giving them more opportunities for a sex life! It gives users more sexual good times and makes them less sexually frustrated, which’re good things in themselves.

But even beyond that, it means they can pressure their sexual partners less because they’ve got other means for sexual release. It can prompt people to be more creative, help them experiment in safer and less risky ways than with a partner, and help them figure out which sexual things they enjoy. (This even stretches to sexual orientation; there’re people who’ve figured out they’re gay or bisexual from porn!)

There’re certainly some harms - whether partners who feel betrayed, or people who’ve exclusively developed tastes impracticable for the real world, or people who’ve become addicted to it in a way that harms the rest of their lives. But porn has done a lot more good.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Porn should be regulated to protect the actors from real harms - whether sexual abuse, STD’s, or coercion. That’s definitely in need of regulation. California’s attempted 2015 regulations were too strict and impracticable, but something in this is needed. (And some parts of it should go beyond just porn films - the film industry in general is rife with sexual harassment and coercion.)

There’re advantages to keeping some porn away from children, but also disadvantages - especially in modern America, where any regulations like that would be abused to keep sexually-active teenagers in the dark as well. So on balance, there shouldn’t be any prohibitions on the consumer end. Of course, people shouldn’t be sexually harassed by seeing explicit porn ads in the middle of unrelated websites, but that isn’t happening at present, so no new regulations are needed there.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

If a ten-year-old is watching porn, this’s probably uncomfortable for the parents, but uncomfortable things aren’t necessarily bad. It’s not a categorically bad thing for her to be watching porn, but it could be a sign of bad things.

So, the thing for her parents to do is to ask why, and to make sure she feels it’s safe to talk with them. If she’s sought it out for curiosity or for budding sexual feelings (10 is the average age of puberty for American girls), okay; just make sure she understands that it’s fantasy (which might be easier than otherwise given anime tentacles). If her friends are talking about it, well, make sure none of them are actually pressuring each other into actions they aren’t comfortable with.

Statement: Core

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Porn has different impacts on different people’s sex lives. I will admit that there are some who are perhaps harmed or disturbed by consuming porn - those people should not use it. For others, though, porn can be something that allows personal exploration and self-expression, something that delves into areas of the psyche that mainstream society often rejects or is unwilling to discuss, and even something that can be helpful as a reference point for discussing and exploring sexuality (and especially kink) with a new partner! I think many people have come across kink material online and thought “oh, I’m *not* a freak, there are other people who experience these things too!” and that can be quite a valuable experience to have!

Further, porn can be a way to do some of this exploration in relative safety, as even things that would be really bad if done in real life can be explored in fiction. There was an infamous case in the 1930s where someone derailed a train on purpose, killing or wounding over a hundred people, thanks to kinking on people screaming and dying - in today’s world, maybe that guy would be writing and reading fic online rather than actually killing anybody!

Ultimately, sexuality can be an important part of the human experience, and porn is one way that people can engage with and relate to their sexuality and hence their experience of the world as a whole, often in a context that’s much safer than other options. This can be quite beneficial to one’s sexuality and sex life.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

This isn’t really one coherent answer as much as several somewhat-related points, hope that’s okay!

I think porn made without the consent of those depicted (either to the sex act in question, to that act being recorded, or to the recording being distributed) should be banned. This principle would ban child sexual abuse material or videos of actual (not simulated) rape, and also voyeur footage, “revenge porn”, the distribution of hacked sexts or leaked celebrity sex tapes, and so on. Note though that the level of enforcement and penalty required probably varies from case to case - if someone is systematically abusing children and selling films of it by illegal methods, that is far worse than if someone gets angry after a breakup and decides to share their ex’s sexts to a group chat, though the latter is still quite bad!
Reasonable measures should be put into place to protect porn actors and actresses from sexual abuse and exposure to sexually transmitted diseases on the job. I don’t really know what the best way to do this is or whether the government even needs to get involved, but in principle this seems like it might be an opportunity for workplace safety laws if the industry proved unable to self-regulate.

- In a more sophisticated society, it might be favorable to implement some kind of content warning system for porn in general, though I don’t think that we’re particularly close to getting that today and I’m not sure such should be mandatory. Ao3 is doing far better than mainstream video porn sites in this respect.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

So, I have to say I wouldn’t be *thrilled* to see this, but like… what are you going to do? By that age I’d really want to have had “the talk” – and not just the sex one but also the one about “there are some bad things on the Internet that you might see someday, if you see something like that it’s OK to just close it down and come talk to me if you’re scared or feel bad”. Given that (and the fact that anime tentacle stuff is at least somewhat obscure), if she’s watching this stuff I kind of have to assume she in fact wanted to see it?

So yeah, I don’t think I’d be *happy* about finding this, but again, what am I going to do? If I flip out and try to lock down her Internet usage, that’ll just turn her against me and make it so she is less likely to go to me if she does end up seeing something really bad. If she is really curious about porn or determined to see it, that’s fundamentally her choice, not mine, and honestly she could probably find a way around such restrictions anyway? My job is to be a loving and supportive parent, not to dictate what she watches.

(That said, if she says things that indicate some adult is sending her links to a bunch of porn stuff, my response might look very different - but again I think she’s more likely to tell me about that kind of thing if she sees me as fundamentally a friend and ally rather than a harsh authority figure who will yell at her and flip out if she ever looks at “bad stuff”.)

(also, uh, I might want to figure out a way to politely tell her to lock the door next time.)

Statement: Ridge

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

The only reasonable way to answer a question like this is using distributions and data. I have no data that I’m aware of, so at best, I can answer only based upon my personal experience, which is this: porn acts like an outlet for a drive which can be incredibly destructive if not used carefully. It’s far better for a young person to use porn as a masturabtory aid, than to go out and find a partner to hook up with. Again, this is purely anecdotal, but I would guess that people who consume porn regularly are probably less lonely, and less likely to engage in risky sexual encounters, or relationships that are net harmful primarily because they satisfy sex drives in ways that minimize risks such as getting into a bad relationship and then staying there, or choosing a partner who turns out to be violent, or addicted to drugs, out of immediate desire.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

The only rules here should be around consent. In particular, it should be illegal to produce or distribute images of people who aren’t consisting to be in those, which would include both revenge porn as well as children who can’t consent.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Any answer here is going to depend heavily on the nature of that parent-child relationship. All children are different, and there are very few one-size-fits-all approaches. Chances are the kid will be embarrassed at that situation and will be very hesitant to talk about it at all. In that situation, attempts by parents to pry would likely make the situation worse, so I think what I would do is say, “if you want to talk about it, that’s ok. If not, that’s OK, too.”

It’s basically impossible me to separate visceral reactions from this scenario, from what a reasonable, caring observer would do. My gut intuition here says, ’kids need to have the freedom to explore and understand the world. What is most important is that she is healthy and confident; both of those will come natural from love and trust than they will from puritanical oversight. Reacting too much to any one situation is usually asking for failure. I will just focus my efforts on the stuff i was already planning on focusing on: namely, setting a good example, being emotionally available, and encouraging her to find interests and pursuits that will help her develop and grow as a human being.

Statement: Extract

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Makes them more insular in their sex

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Information campaign on how it hurts the creators & users of Porn

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Explain that this is not age appropriate & restrict access to devices with unfiltered internet access to a more age appropriate time

Statement: Exile

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Like all vices, porn can be consumed in a healthy or unhealthy way. Recognizing that it is fantasy, that it is shot and staged for the medium and that it is not what real life sex is or ought to be is vital. Overconsumption can be a problem, and trying to apply things from porn to real lord is a problem but other than problem-users, it’d be hard to say porn does any one thing to the sex lives of users.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Porn should be created with many of the same workplace safety regulations in place including those specific to such an industry where communicable disease can spread. Regular oversight of working hours and fair pay are a must, as well as regular testing for STIs, with health care costs for diseases acquired through work paid for as worker’s compensation. Workers should have the freedom to and ability to consent or withhold consent from specific acts and production.

Porn should not be easily available to minors, but much of the oversight on that would by the nature of the internet today, mean watchful parents exercising good judgement.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

They should not punish, but have a constructive conversation with their daughter about healthy sexual behavior, limits, and consent, as well as discussion about what is or isn’t developmentally appropriate for the specific child at a specific age. Parents should then be aware of the interest and be careful to monitor her behavior and online activities going forward.

Statement: Sight

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Increased variety of sex?

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Child porn should absolutely be illegal, and actors should get fair wages. Oversight is important for ethical reasons.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Have a calm and reasonable discussion with them about it, explaining what it is.

Statement: Clock

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

In most cases I think it doesn’t have that much of an impact. I think the median case is that it’s fun and this is a mild positive effect.

In some cases I think it improves people’s sex lives by helping them discover things they’re into that they otherwise didn’t know about.

I think there’s an anti-porn narrative that people’s sexual interest will tend to get saturated by porn, more or less, such that they stop being interested in “normal” things or “normal” (non-porn-star) partners; I’m pretty sure there exist people of whom this is true to some extent, but I don’t think it’s the usual case. I think for most people physical IRL sex with real people is just much more interesting than vicariously observing sex they can’t participate in.

I do have a model where - for any given activity that people often enjoy, there will be some percentage of people who will find that activity so overwhelmingly compelling that it causes them to neglect other stuff they care about, in a way they don’t endorse. The percentage of people this is true of, as well as the consequences for those people, will vary between different things of this type. For some kinds of drugs, likelihood of addiction and consequences of addiction are really quite high. For something like social media or video games, likelihood of low-level addiction is kind of high but likelihood of the kind of addiction with really severe consequences isn’t. I think something similar is true of reading really compelling fiction; as a kid I often neglected responsibilities in favor of reading, and I have also sometimes experienced this as an adult and have friends who have as well. I would guess that porn might be in a similar range of ~addictiveness to books or video games. (This is complicated by the fact that for some people, the amount of porn they endorse consuming is zero, so any nonzero amount will be more than they endorse, which isn’t true of e.g. reading scifi. I think that’s kind of more a “map” problem than a “territory” problem, though.)

For teenagers/people new to sexuality, porn may sometimes play a larger role in shaping their ideas about sex. Mainstream video porn often has kinda weird ideas about sexuality, so I could see that having weird, not-great results sometimes; my impression is that e.g. explicit fanfic communities have a much better culture. I do think that teenagers are capable of not believing everything they see, so I think there’s a limit to how much porn can influence teenagers’ explicit beliefs about sex, but I guess it might more strongly influence things that aren’t propositional beliefs, like e.g. beauty standards (in the same way that normal TV influences beauty standards, but visual porn can perhaps reach into areas that normal TV doesn’t, like what people’s genitals “should” look like).

If we’re including e.g. explicit fiction that both provokes sexual arousal and explores interesting interpersonal/ethical/psychological/etc. themes, I think this is often actively good for people in the same way that interesting fiction that isn’t about sex can be. Fiction is often really useful for exploring and clarifying worldviews, values, and ways people can be, and sex is a pretty big and important part of many people’s lives, so I think it’s really good for there to be fiction that explores sex in this kind of detail.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

I think basically no forms of porn should be banned for their content. (Possible exception: image/video deepfakes of real people? I’m also somewhat okay with banning drawn/CGI porn portraying children, though I don’t think it’s necessary. Porn can also be subject to more general laws about defamation and privacy and whatnot.)

Some forms of porn should be banned for how they’re made. This includes any visual porn involving real underage children or nonconsenting adults; if it becomes known that someone portrayed in a porn image or video did not consent to be in it, that video should not be legal. General labor regulations should apply.

I also think that people should be able to at any time demand that any porn images/video involving them should be taken down, unless they’ve signed a contract agreeing to have that content be broadcast for a period of X years which isn’t over yet. (I think it’d be pretty reasonable to disallow having X > 10 or so.)

Porn should also be subject to content warnings, but I probably don’t think the state should enforce that. Other than this and non-porn-specific laws, I don’t think text porn should really be subject to any regulation at all.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

To be honest I don’t know the full answer; if I were actually in this situation I’d want to ask some trusted friends for advice. I can certainly think of a lot of ways a parent can make this situation worse (e.g. by treating this as inherently an emergency; by making the kid feel ashamed of themselves; by taking away the kid’s ability to talk to their friends; by trying to force the kid into a conversation they desperately don’t want to have); all of those can be outperformed by simply apologizing for barging in, closing the door, and never speaking of it again. I don’t think that’s necessarily the best outcome, though; I think ideally it would be good to have some kind of conversation with the kid about healthy ways to relate to sex and porn and fantasies, perhaps? I really do not know what a good way to go about trying to have such a conversation is, though; as I said, I’d probably want to ask some friends for advice.

Part 2: Anti-Porn

In this section, you will see eleven anti-porn statements. Seven of them are by authors who identified as pro-porn, while four of them are by authors who identified as anti-porn.

Your job is to identify which authors are genuinely anti-porn. The order of the statements has been randomized. Each statement has been titled with a randomly generated word, for easier reference.

If you participated, it is fine to vote on your own statement.

Statement: Steep

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

It damages them by isolating their sexuality from actual people, inherently objectifying those depicted and creating an expectation that sexual availability doesn’t need to involve consent. It also tends to harm interactions with real people, who may be less glamorous than porn stars, and whose sexual interactions are unlikely to live up to the expectations created by carefully edited scenes shot over multiple hours.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Banning seems obvious. The production is inherently dehumanizing and harms the victims, even if they are unaware of the harm, and the distribution harms the recipients, so there’s no real benefit to be had here.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Clearly explaining the harms and why this is bad, also finding out how the daughter got access to the porn and filing charges or pursuing prosecution if at all possible.

Statement: Log

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Pornography is deeply negative for people’s sex lives. The use of pornography promotes degrading, objectifying, and misogynistic images of women and is harmful not only to those involved in producing it but also to those who consume such. Porn promotes a view of sexuality that fundamentally reduces the human person into an object for gratifying desires rather than someone who one can see as an individual.

Further, much pornographic material promotes bad sexual practices – bad (or no) consent, sexually violent or aggressive acts, dangerous and irresponsible behavior around sexuality, and so on. Now one can say “oh, it’s just a fantasy,” but fantasizing about things that would be bad in real life is itself bad and should not be done, and risks degrading one’s sexuality further. Many people report a “slippery slope” where they find themselves desensitized to the sorts of porn they used to watch and slowly getting into more and more extreme material -- in some cases things that would have horrified them if they had seen such initially!

Is it possible for there to be positive things that people get out of pornography? Yes, it is -- but it would also be possible to get those positive things without pornography. I know of no cases where a work of art requires pornography to get its message across, and many where the inclusion of pornographic elements obscures or damages a work that could perhaps otherwise be quite good.

Additionally, though I expect this next section will not be very convincing to most non-Catholics, the main purpose of pornography for many is to facilitate masturbation, an act which is itself immoral and harmful to a healthy sex life. The fundamental telos of human sexuality is oriented towards a married couple drawing together in a way that is unitive and procreative (or at least open to life, even if no actual procreation occurs with a given act), and sex acts that deviate from this, like masturbation – or for that matter probably an overwhelming majority of the acts depicted in pornography – are intrinsically wrong.

I am not saying that it is always a shame or a sin to have sexual desire, to be clear – a huge majority of people do have such desires – but the proper place for that desire to be acted upon is sex within marriage and open to life. Porn is a debasement of that desire and shows people a false image of what sexuality should be for, hence harming them and their relation both to sexuality and to other people.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

The government should ban the production and distribution of pornography. This was a common position (at least in the United States) within living memory – we know that it’s been tried and it’s more or less worked fine!

With respect to the regulatory specifics, I’m not entirely sure how this would best work in the Internet era, but I’m sure something could be figured out – if nothing else, the government would be able to prevent many porn sites from existing simply by leaning on credit card companies, payment processors, and Internet service providers/web hosting businesses.

I recognize that this is a radical position in today’s society. Fundamentally speaking, though, if someone were selling tainted food that was dangerous to the body, we would want the government to act to stop them – indeed, inaction would seem bizarre and irresponsible. But for some reason when someone sells pornography – tainted material that is dangerous to the mind and the soul – many are suddenly unwilling to allow the same principle to hold.

Also, I want to flag that I’m not saying the cops should kick down your door to search your house for Playboy magazines with no warning or warrant or whatever – that’d be ridiculous – nor am I advocating for a theocracy. The government was not a theocracy when porn was illegal some decades ago and doing this would not make it one. I do think that porn is a public bad and that it’s appropriate for the government to take action to protect people from it, however.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Ideally, one would have set up filtering software etc. such that something like this would never happen in the first place.

That’s kind of “fighting the hypothetical”, though – given for the sake of argument that it did happen, maybe with something that slipped through the filters, I think it would unfortunately prove necessary to have a serious talk with her about how there are many things out there that are fundamental degradations of human sexuality, that we should avoid looking at such, that sexuality is a natural thing and it’s okay to be curious about it but that we should be careful not to misuse it outside its proper place, and so on. Depending on the circumstances (ideally she wouldn’t know what it was and had found it by mistake) it might also be a good idea to impose stricter filtering.

I imagine this situation might be tremendously awkward, but if I could possibly save her from being harmed by pornography in the way that so many have been I would want to do so! I hope that by that age, I would have already had conversations with her that would help her see both that sexuality is something natural and valuable and also that unfortunately there’s a lot of stuff out there in the culture that debases it from its proper place.

(I want to flag that I’m not a parent and my take here might be very naive – if it ever becomes the case that I look likely to become a parent, I’ll likely want to read up on child psychology and other such things and figure out more systematic responses!)

Statement: Greet

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

I have nothing against masturbation but once you start involving other people in your sex life (not just your imagination, the people themselves), their interaction with the situation has a lot of management ethically required and it’s incumbent on you, not a movie producer, to manage it. So it makes consumers’ sex lives less ethical, as you’re sexually interacting with people you can’t check in with or work out an individual sharing of pleasure with. It also gives a really skewed sample of what kinds of ways people have sex. There’s the obvious fetish content, of course, but also industry fads, and the fact that it’s all oriented around a third party viewer and therefore needs to be visible to a camera - cunnilingus in particular adapts really badly to that.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

I don’t especially want more government involvement here. The government doesn’t have a good track record of distinguishing victims and perpetrators, and a lot of my objection to porn is about corrosive effects on individuals not necessarily different in kind from getting into dumb arguments on Facebook. But I do think there should, ideally, be (without taking a position on how it should get this way) more clarity in movie ratings, age gates on porn websites that aren’t as vulnerable to just lying, and maybe some kind of Pigouvian tax (yeah, that’s government involvement, but I think “apply taxes” is more in their wheelhouse than “define and legislate porn”.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Close her laptop, have a serious conversation about who she thinks was voicing and drawing those characters and what they would think of her watching it and why that presumably didn’t occur to her before. Have a suitably embarrassing transfer of information about appropriate sexual behavior at various stages of development.

Statement: Subway

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

(First off I want to note that the strength of all effects of porn varies between people - some are fine/relatively unaffected, while others are moderately or strongly affected. I expect that the strongest effects will generally be on teenagers who are getting their first significant exposure to sex via porn (unfortunately common).)

In general I expect porn, like all media and indeed all life experience, to implicitly shape people’s expectations/standards/preferences about the world. It’s normal, of course, to be influenced by one’s knowledge environment, including the media one consumes; but while non-porn media can influence people in all kinds of directions, including positive ones (though I certainly also have critiques of the broader mass media environment), I expect the direction of influence from porn to be mostly pretty negative. Also, porn often has more ability than other media to influence people implicitly in its domain because for many people it has less to compete with - kids learn how to make friends both from movies and from real life throughout their entire lives, but when it comes to sex, real life experience is just much harder to come by for most people than Internet porn, so one can end up with a pretty strong porn-centric picture of sex before they ever have a real sexual interaction with another person. (I also suspect that porn influence can end up self-reinforcing through classical conditioning.)

Specific kinds of negative influence I expect porn to have:

1. Internalizing harmful beauty standards, for oneself and one’s partners.

For oneself: one will likely have more anxiety and negative feelings about oneself, feel less comfortable in one’s skin, be more likely to find it hard to relax and feel comfortable with an intimate partner. One will also be more likely to feel pressured to spend a bunch of time on beauty labor.

For one’s partners: this intensifies the dynamic where all the men are interested in like the top 10% most attractive women, which is not a good time for anyone.

(Of course normal television does these things too, but I think it’s worse when the beauty pressure extends to body parts normally covered - for one thing there’s less one can do to even change some such parts, for another thing it’s just an extra level of pressure to feel like you need to be correctly beautiful even in your most intimate moments.)

2. Expectations about sex acts/behaviors

Porn disproportionately caters to men due to their generally higher sex drive, so sex acts men prefer are much better represented, which shapes people’s expectations of actual sex in a male-centric direction, which leads to women feeling pressured to do stuff they’d rather not (and less likely to get stuff they do want). More generally, there’s a sort of “male gaze” problem in porn, a systematic departure from what sex actually looks like in real life / what sex should actually look like in an equitable society.

Yet more generally, porn is unlike real sex in various unrealistic ways that teach people bad habits (especially in the case of teenagers who haven’t had a chance to learn better habits in real life). Most legibly, this affects practices around sexual safety and sometimes around consent; more subtly, porn doesn’t really optimize for showing what the interpersonal dynamics of healthy sexual interactions actually look like (e.g. because porn optimizes for selling a fantasy of perfect sex, you won’t really see people say no to any sex act and propose something different, or ask their partner to stop or do something differently - which are actually really crucial sexual scripts to learn). It models bad ways of interacting, which are bad for people’s flourishing.

3. “Hedonic treadmill” for attraction/arousal

It’s common for novel stimuli to be more exciting or arousing than familiar ones. So by watching a lot of porn you can desensitize yourself to sexual stimuli you once found exciting.

Also, sometimes people kind of imprint on things? I’ve talked to people who came of age sexually more or less exclusively with porn and found that their sexuality built itself around kinds of stimuli that they can get from porn but can’t from real life, which was kind of damaging to their ability to enjoy sex.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

This is an area where my belief in free speech butts up uncomfortably against my belief that porn not only is currently bad but will predictably be mostly bad, due to the incentives of its producers.

In a capitalist media ecosystem, media is subject to the same kind of optimization pressure as (for example) fast food. Capitalism is really good at giving people what they want - not necessarily what’s good for them, just what they want in the short term, right now. As food under capitalism trends towards hyperpalatable snacks that are bad for most people’s long-term health, so porn that exists in the real world will inevitably trend towards attraction-superstimulus, optimizing so hard for profit/views/clicks that it will do so at the expense of other considerations like modeling good sexual practices, or not giving people weird sexual complexes that hamper their real-life sex lives, or presenting a gender-balanced view of sex. So when people talk about the notion that porn could in principle be made better, part of my reaction is “Everyone Will Not Just”.

…but, also, when governments censor media for its content, it usually turns out bad. In this case I don’t actually think that central examples of porn have much actual value that would be destroyed by censorship - but I worry about edge cases, gray areas, poor enforcement; I worry about actually valuable sex ed content being banned, for instance, or non-pornographic content that deals with sexual themes or portrays [gasp] same-sex intimacy. (Worth noting that at this time several U.S. states are taking steps to restrict educational access to what I think is good, non-porn content about sex; I don’t really trust my government to do this kind of regulation in a way that doesn’t make things worse.)

A reasonable harm reduction measure might be to somehow make porn be harder for minors to access - except that I’m not sure how you’d do that without massive invasions of privacy. It might also be okay and helpful to mandate content warnings, notes like “this is not intended to resemble real life” before every video? Barring other clever ideas I’m not currently thinking of, there may not be a good way to regulate the content of porn without collateral damage.

However, I think it’s both much more feasible and really important to regulate the labor conditions of porn actors. I think being in porn is pretty bad for nearly everyone who does it, for a bunch of reasons:

Being held to strict beauty standards is often pretty damaging.
You can’t afford to be careful about your boundaries; if you said you’d shoot a scene with a particular person at a particular time to have to go ahead and do it no matter how you’re feeling in the moment.
Thinking about sex transactionally tends to be bad for people in general.
Working in porn is “sticky”, in that once porn videos with you in them exist out in the world, it’s harder to move on to a more respectable career (but also, once you are old enough to be “past your prime” demand for your labor goes down).
Capitalism-superstimulus pressures mean that there’s extra demand for young women to do this work - but younger people have generally done less of their own sexual exploration and have less of a sense of their own boundaries and desires, and thus are more likely to be strongly affected by their work.
More generally, I think that under capitalism it’s extremely common for people to have unhealthy relationships with their jobs; and for all but the most in-demand workers there’s quite a high risk of having concretely bad relationships with their specific employers, too. When you mix sex with this type of toxic dynamic, you often get really bad results.

So we should regulate labor conditions in porn. How? I’m not an expert, but some thoughts:

Increased scrutiny of porn employers regarding regular labor regulations.
Higher minimum wage for porn? (I’m less worried here than I’d normally be about preventing positive-sum trades - I think in porn it’s much more common than in most other industries for trades to turn out worse than nothing for the worker, and I don’t think a chilling effect here is necessarily a bad thing.)
Require a higher minimum level of provided healthcare for porn workers?
Higher minimum age for porn, perhaps?
This is too weird to be adopted in real life, but what about a policy like “roll this die; if the die came up 1 or you don’t want to, don’t do your scheduled shoot today” to let people set boundaries in real time without retaliation?
Right-to-image laws that let you ask anyone hosting images/video of you to take them down, such that they are required to comply.

Also, of course, we should move towards a world where nobody has to do porn in order to survive.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Honestly in some ways anime is less bad than live-action porn that involves real humans having sex and pretends to be realistic. But I’d still worry about this shaping her sexuality in ways that make it hard for her to have a healthy sexuality later. (for example - will it give her fetishes that make it harder to have a satisfying sex life? will it give her bad instincts around consent?)

Ten years old is young enough that it may make sense to use parental controls that will block this kid of thing; I think it probably depends on the kid. But also, instead of in addition to that, you should have a conversation with her - don’t act judgmental or punish or threaten her, but do bring up ways you think this type of media may have a bad effect on her, and why you think she shouldn’t watch it. Possibly also bring up as a relevant sidenote that live-action porn has additional ethical issues around the treatment of the performers, and that even if she disagrees with the rest of your arguments that may be a good reason to stay away from that.

(If she finds having the conversation painfully intolerable, writing your thoughts down for her to read instead might be a good idea. This is going to be awkward in any case; do try your best to put her at ease insofar as that’s possible.)

Statement: Shiver

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Porn affects people’s desires. When someone is repeatedly exposed to something in a sexual context, they start finding it sexy. This can lead to people being interested in rare body types, logistically difficult or unsafe or impossible acts, acts the vast majority of possible sex partners don’t like, etc. This can screw up one’s sex life by leaving one incompatible with the vast majority of people. Porn can also give people an inaccurate impression of what safety precautions are reasonable and normal, or portray situations that would be rape in real life as sexy dubcon that turns out okay in the end. Finally, porn can be addictive, or at least something close to it. Many people have spent hundreds of hours even they consider to be wasted on masturbating and watching pornography, and this is much more common than the same problem without porn so the porn is probably causally involved.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Video porn that really does have no redeeming artistic merit should be illegal to sell, as should any sexual depiction of minors (including drawn/animated/CGI/etc). Text-based pornographic works should definitely be kept out of school libraries and possibly should require proof of age to purchase (though doing this online poses its own thorny privacy issues).

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Don’t interrupt emotionally in the moment. Go away and start a conversation later, when you’re emotionally prepared. Say up front that you’re not mad, just curious, and that you want to be sure the kid is okay. Ask why they were watching that stuff and what they were getting out of it, and point them towards healthier, age-appropriate resources for learning about sexuality. Also, offer to set them up with a psychologist if they want to talk about this sort of thing confidentially with someone other than a parent.

Statement: Landscape

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Makes monogamous sexual partnerships much harder

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Should not be allowed to be sold in places where children can engage with it

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Explain that this is not age appropriate & restrict access to devices with unfiltered internet access to a more age appropriate time

Statement: Black

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Viewed more broadly, porn fits into a category of “approximations of human drives.” Sugar in food, as well as intermittent reward schedules in video games fit into this same category. In short, we are surrounded by evolved mechanisms which mimic our drives in ways that are easier to gratify than the real things. The presence of these imitations is intensely destructive because they don’t actually satisfy our drives, but they can sap our motivation to go out and accomplish things. The only way a person can be satisfied with their live is by learning to channel and control effort towards long term goals, coupled with a constant appreciation for the good they already have.

Note that I’m simply describing healthy dopaminergic and serotonergic systems here and arguing that we should see porn as being yet another mechanism that hijacks dopaminergenic drives without leading to the kinds of environmental changes that reliably produce serotonin release. Progressing in a video game is easier and more predictable than accomplishing things in the real world since the accomplishments are clearly meaningless: all dopamine, no serotonin. So when you play games, you feel better now, but you also feel far worse in the long run. Eating food that feels good now is easier than learning to enjoy the preparation and consumption of healthier food. It also feels far worse in the long run. Porn is yet another item in this same category, but i think it can be far more destructive because providing cheap temporary satisfaction of the sexual urge can lead to permanent loneliness. No partner will ever be as available and desirous of you as the images available to you in pornography. Functional, healthy relationships are probably more important for happiness in life than anything else; i believe ample evidence demonstrates this. Pornography encourages people to see others as tools for the ends of their own pleasure.

It is inconsistent to believe that representation matters in books, that it’s good for kids to see girl engineers and groups of multiracial kids playing, and yet at the same token think it’s not bad for a person brain to consume lots of images that contain the underlying message, “other people are objects who exist for you to look while you pleasure yourself.” I think the media we consume absolutely shapes our beliefs, by informing base rates in the probabilistic predictive models that our brains use. “Base rates about potential relationship partners” are absolutely going to inform your behavior.

What’s worse about porn than addictive video games, junk food, or explicit endorsements of racism, is the high level of social sanction around it, coupled with the more insidious nature of the damage. I think young people today are far more likely to be ruined by cannabis than they are by heroin, because the damage done by heroin is much more obvious; people become withered skeletons with rotting teeth and they die from OD’s. But with cannabis, it’s far more subtle. Just a general lack of drive, a loss of potential. Given the insane potential individual humans have, though, cutting off someone’s potential to be fully realized and functional isn’t that different, in terms of the magnitude of loss t the world, from having them be fully addicted. The difference between a fully realized human being and an ‘ordinary person’ is, i think, far greater than the difference between an ordinary person and someone who dies of a drug addiction - because most ordinary people, i think, are anxious, unhappy, stressed out, and confused, primarily because we are surrounded by cheap approximations of the good, living in a culture that tells us only idiots believe ‘good’ means anything about objective reality.

So if cannabis is bad because the nature of its damage is subtle and all it really does is ensure that even fewer people will realize how enormous their potential is, Pornography is even more subtle than cannabis, because it seems even more harmless. And yet what it does is cultivate unreasonable desires and expectations in people, in the same way that playing guitar hero probably makes you less likely to learn real guitar. The absence of a fulfilling long term relationship can ruin, has ruined MANY good people.

Do you want a generation of shiftless, angry young men, unable to commit, expecting women to be permanently available to them as sexual partners without any understanding of how to navigate a relationship? That is porn’s great gift to us.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

The only thing that should matter here is consent. No amount of laws is going to change this situation. Revenge porn and child porn violate consent so should be crimes. Anything else should be legal as free speech. In general, the question “how should X be regulated” reads to me, like, “how can we use ritualized violence to improve the situation of X.”

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

All children are different, as are all parents. I’m not going to answer how a parent should respond, in the abstract here. But i can answer how I think would be best for me to react:

I don’t want to sever my kids’ trust in me. That’s critical. I need to set a good example for them, and i need to encourage them to develop and grow along natural, healthy lines. Curiosity is natural and healthy, as is sexual arousal. So I think the best thing i might do here is not react to this specific situation (reacting usually makes situations worse) and instead be consistent about both demonstrating a healthy lifestyle, articulating why it works, and telling them openly about my own experiences. Ensuring they have healthy relationships with older peers of mine may help as well; i think a young woman like this would benefit more from hearing her mother talk candidly about her experience with porn than having me talk to her about this stuff.

Reacting out of fear almost always makes situations worse, and in general i think kids will learn best from me setting a good example of a healthy, functional, happy human being. If i’m doing that, tentacle porn won’t be an problem. If i’m not, tentacle porn is the least of my worries.

Statement: Development

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

It means they have less sex.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

It should be highly regulated to keep minors from seeing it, and actors need protections to keep them from being abused.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Calmly explain to them why they shouldn’t watch it.

Statement: Labor

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

People who engage with porn develop habits, mental and physical, which tie their sexual expectations to those of filmed fantasy. It developmentally skews and inhibits a person’s ability to have a healthy relationship with sex and with partners who are not the ideal seen in porn. People take lessons from porn on what does or should feel good or what does or should look “normal” from porn and it affects their self-esteem and ability to judge themselves and others well.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Porn should not be made widely available to the public, if there is a reason it must Stull exist, it should be heavily regulated and taxed. Those who create porn should be registered and sets regularly inspected. It should not be distributed except to people who can electronically verify their age through some official mechanism to prevent porn from being accessed by children or those who have already been proven to be sexually maladjusted, such as those previously convicted of sex crimes.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

They should take away her internet access, subject to strict parental controls being implemented, and have a long talk with her about healthy and safe sexual habits.

Statement: Hard

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Porn makes people worse people by influencing their desires to be depraved

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Porn should not be allowed but since there will always be a black market, it should be regulated heavily and taxed heavily

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Take away their internet access and have the birds and bees talk

Statement: Weigh

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

I think porn has brought sex more to the forefront of people’s minds, which is a bad thing given how readily it already comes to many people’s minds. Being able to more readily find sexual release without other people involved mitigates some of the harm of this, but nowhere near all. I think this has diminished culture in general, by other non-sexual interests frequently losing out in the competition for people’s attention.

(Also, porn has made many people feel ashamed of watching it, which is a bad thing - though you could argue that’s more caused by people’s attitudes than porn itself.)

Simultaneously, it’s increased trends and comparison between sex lives and sex partners, making sex more a public thing with mass culture instead of a thing that has separate “subcultures” inside each individual relationship. This could help some people out of what would be impoverished “subcultures,” but it hurts others by comparing partners to an ideal actor. This is even worse than normal mass culture, because people are comparing their real-life partners to actors following scripts with the messiness of real life removed, frequently engaging in behavior that can be (unsexily) painful and dangerous in real life. I think this harm is much greater than the benefit, and the benefit could be gotten in less-harmful ways.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Despite these problems, I don’t think the government should try to stop porn. Quite aside from constitutional problems (in the US), the Internet is impracticable to censor - as we can see from China’s attempts to censor the Internet broadly, and as we can see from most governments’ sadly-failed attempts to take down child porn. Any attempt to ban porn would merely set the government up for public ridicule, as well as criticism from the people who want porn.

Plus, I’m dubious about whether it’s the government’s place to go to such extreme measures to protect people from themselves.

But the government should definitely keep people from stumbling across porn by accident, it can keep it away from children as much as practicable, and perhaps it can put small inconveniences in the way of getting to it so it’s not an impulse decision. But I’m not sure how that would work, and it’d definitely be politically impossible at present.

(Also, of course, the government can and should protect porn actors by making sure they’re giving informed consent.)

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

First off, ask questions and listen! Have a real conversation! The goal isn’t to keep her from porn; she’ll eventually have that opportunity if she wants to see it - even sooner than age eighteen, if the parents aren’t willing to isolate her from society. The goal is for her to understand and agree how it’s a bad idea to seek out porn. It’s important for the parents to not make her feel like they’re her enemies and try to hide things from them.

Maybe she wasn’t even looking for it - in which case her parents should suggest safe search practices and antiviruses. Or maybe she was just curious - in which case, okay, she’s satisfied her curiosity; no need to look again.

Or maybe she’s going through puberty (like the average girl her age) and trying to understand her new feelings - in which case it’s past time for her parents to help her understand things. Or maybe her friends are pushing her to look at it - in which case, her parents should encourage and help her to stand up against peer pressure and maybe get a better friend group.

(Whatever the reason, if she hasn’t had it yet, it’s time to tell her about sex and what it means, in a way appropriate to her individual maturity level. It’s also time to remind her about how self-control is a good thing in general.)

Beyond this… If she seems to understand, and her parents think she’s trustworthy, okay. But if not - well, I haven’t raised kids, but I know rules can help develop self-control. I’d suggest her parents tell her not to look at it again. If she doesn’t seem to listen, maybe an Internet filter would be a good idea, or a rule about Internet use in her room, or a router filter that lets the parents know what sites she’s looking at - but that depends on her and her parents’ technical acumen.

Ideological Turing Test (Porn): The Results

2022-10-19T00:00:00-04:00

Previously: the setup, the submissions.

The ITT got eleven submissions: seven from people who identified as pro-porn, and four from people who identified as anti-porn. Thanks to all our participants! The identifiers listed below are those people chose for themselves on the submissions.

Alicorn (“Floor”, “Greet”)

Alicorn identified as pro-porn. Alicorn’s pro-porn statement (“Floor”) was voted 80.6% pro-porn, 19.4% anti-porn. Alicorn’s anti-porn statement (“Greet”) was voted 63.3% pro-porn, 36.7% anti-porn.

apxhard (“Ridge”, “Black”)

Apxhard identified as anti-porn. Apxhard’s pro-porn statement (“Ridge”) was voted 63.3% pro-porn, 36.7% anti-porn. Apxhard’s anti-porn statement (“Black”) was voted 38.7% pro-porn, 61.3% anti-porn.

Brian (“Extract”, “Landscape”)

Brian identified as anti-porn. In fact, Brian identified so strongly as anti-porn that he wrote two sets of anti-porn statements, ignoring the instructions. I will be excluding him from the analysis. Brian’s “pro-porn” statement (“Extract”) was voted 9.7% pro-porn, 90.3% anti-porn. Brian’s anti-porn statement (“Landscape”) was voted 46.7% pro-porn, 53.3% anti-porn.

Cleric (“Sight”, “Development”)

Cleric identified as pro-porn. Cleric’s pro-porn statement (“Sight”) was voted 45.2% pro-porn, 54.8% anti-porn. Cleric’s anti-porn statement (“Development”) was voted 71% pro-porn, 29% anti-porn.

Evan Þ (“Law”, “Weigh”)

Evan Þ identified as anti-porn. Evan Þ’s pro-porn statement (“Law”) was voted 74.2% pro-porn, 25.8% anti-porn. Evan Þ’s anti-porn statement (“Weigh”) was voted 58.1% pro-porn, 41.9% anti-porn.

NormalAnomaly (“Dance”, “Shiver”)

NormalAnomaly identified as pro-porn. NormalAnomaly’s pro-porn statement (“Dance”) was voted 93.3% pro-porn, 6.7% anti-porn. NormalAnomaly’s anti-porn statement (“Shiver”) was voted 86.7% pro-porn, 13.3% anti-porn.

seebs (“Peanut”, “Steep”)

Seebs identified as pro-porn. Seebs’ pro-porn statement (“Peanut”) was voted 53.3% pro-porn, 46.7% anti-porn. Seebs’ anti-porn statement (“Steep”) was voted 90.3% pro-porn, 9.7% anti-porn.

Shouperman (“Exile”, “Labor”)

Shouperman identified as pro-porn. Shouperman’s pro-porn statement (“Exile”) was voted 25.8% pro-porn, 74.2% anti-porn. Shouperman’s anti-porn statement (“Labor”) was voted 48.4% pro-porn, 51.6% anti-porn.

skepp (“Block”, “Hard”)

Skepp identified as pro-porn. Skepp’s pro-porn statement (“Block”) was voted 45.2% pro-porn, 54.8% anti-porn. Skepp’s anti-porn statement (“Hard”) was voted 71% pro-porn, 29% anti-porn.

tcheasdfjkl (“Clock”, “Subway”)

Tcheasdfjkl identified as pro-porn. Tcheasdfjkl’s pro-porn statement (“Clock”) was voted 100% pro-porn, 0% anti-porn. Tcheasdfjkl’s anti-porn statement (“Subway”) was voted 74.2% pro-porn, 25.8% anti-porn.

TNT (“Core”, “Log”)

TNT identified as anti-porn. TNT’s pro-porn statement (“Core”) was voted 76.7% pro-porn, 23.3% anti-porn. TNT’s anti-porn statement (“Log”) was voted 23.3% pro-porn, 76.7% anti-porn.

Analysis

As noted in the data above, one participant is being discarded for failure to follow instructions. Analysis is over the remaining 7 pro-porn and 3 anti-porn participants.

Pro-porn statements

The pro-porn statements from pro-porn participants received an average rating of 61.8% pro-porn. The pro-porn statements from anti-porn participants received an average rating of 71.4% pro-porn.

Notably, every individual pro-porn statement from anti-porn participants outperformed the average score of sincere pro-porn statements.

The most convincing pro-porn statement overall was by pro-porn tcheasdfjkl, with a 100% pro-porn rating. The most convincing pro-porn statement from an anti-porn participant was by TNT, with a 76.7% pro-porn rating.

The least convincing pro-porn statement overall was by pro-porn Shouperman, with a 25.8% pro-porn rating. The least convincing pro-porn statement from an anti-porn participant was by apxhard, with a 63.3% pro-porn rating.

Anti-porn statements

The anti-porn statements from anti-porn participants received an average rating of 60.0% anti-porn. The anti-porn statements from pro-porn participants received an average rating of 27.9% anti-porn.

No anti-porn statement from a pro-porn participant outperformed the average score of sincere anti-porn statements. One anti-porn statement from a pro-porn participant (Shouperman) outperformed the lowest score among sincere anti-porn statements.

The most convincing anti-porn statement overall was by anti-porn TNT, with a 76.7% anti-porn rating. The most convincing anti-porn statement from a pro-porn participant was by Shouperman, with a 51.6% anti-porn rating.

The least convincing anti-porn statement overall was by pro-porn seebs, with a 9.7% anti-porn rating. The least convincing anti-porn statement from an anti-porn participant was by Evan Þ, with a 41.9% anti-porn rating.

Summary

Pro-porn people performed very poorly at writing convincing anti-porn statements. Anti-porn people performed very well at writing convincing pro-porn statements – to the point where they came off more pro-porn than the pro-porn participants!

This is pretty embarrassing for the pro-porn crowd, guys.

Ideological Turing Test: Porn

2022-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

In an ideological turing test, as proposed by Bryan Caplan, people with opposing views on a contentious issue attempt to pass for one of their ideological opponents. The goal is to demonstrate your understanding of the opposite side of an issue, by testing your ability to imitate them.

In concrete terms, the mechanics are this: I am soliciting medium-length posts from people both pro- and anti-porn. Each participant should write two posts; one post should feature their actual views, and one should be a fictitious post from the opposing point of view. I will anonymize them, mix up the real and fake posts, and post them here in random order, along with polls on whether each post is real or fake. Your goal is to have people vote that both your posts are written by real adherents of the relevant ideology. At the end, I’ll reveal which is which.

If you’d like to participate, you can submit your posts here. I’m providing the following three prompts for both sides to answer:

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?
How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?
A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

A couple of paragraphs on each, for a total of 500-1000 words per post, is a good target.

You are extra encouraged to participate if you would describe yourself as broadly anti-porn! I expect to have a lot more participants on the other side. If you are worried about connecting your opinions to your real name or usual internet handle, it is absolutely fine to include a pseudonym of your choice, and I’ll use that at the reveals.

Exact timing depends on the participants I manage to solicit, but I’m anticipating something on the order of magnitude of a month for people to submit responses, and I’ll poke people who’ve expressed interest before closing submissions.

Charcoal as a Disinfectant

2022-01-06T00:00:00-05:00

An excerpt from a book that Betrothed gave me for Christmas.

The great efficacy of wood and animal charcoal in absorbing effluvia and the greater number of gases and vapours has long been known.

Charcoal powder has also, during many centuries, been advantageously employed as a filter for putrid water, the object in view being to deprive the water of numerous organic impurities diffused through it, which exert injurious effects on the animal economy.

It is somewhat remarkable that the very obvious application of a perfectly similar operation to the still rarer fluid in which we live – namely, the air, which not unfrequently contains even more noxious organic impurities floating in it than those present in water – should have, up till February last, been so unaccountably overlooked.

Charcoal not only absorbs effluvia and gaseous bodies; but, especially when in contact with atmospheric air, oxidizes and destroys many of the easily alterable ones, by resolving them into the simplest combinations they are capable of forming, which are chiefly water and carbonic acid.

It is on this oxidizing property of charcoal as well as on its absorbent power, that its efficacy as a deodorizing and disinfecting agent chiefly depends.

Effluvia and miasmata are usually regarded as highly organized, nitrogenous, easily alterable bodies. When these are absorbed by charcoal, they come in contact with highly condensed oxygen gas, which exists within the pores of all charcoal which has been exposed to the air, even for a few minutes; in this way they are oxidised and destroyed. My attention has been specially directed for nearly a twelve month to the deodorising and disinfecting properties of charcoal, and I have made an immense number of experiments on this subject.

On the 22nd of February last, I brought the subject before the Society of Arts, and on that occasion exhibited a specimen of a charcoal respirator and the mode of employing it. I likewise dwelt at some length on the utility of charcoal powder as a means of preventing the escape of noxious effluvia from churchyards, and from dead bodies on board ship and in other situation.

On the 9th of June last I also, in a letter to the Society of Arts, proposed to employ charcoal ventilators, consisting of a thin layer of charcoal enclosed between two thin sheets of wire gauze, to purify the foul air which is apt to accumulate in water-closets, in the close wards of hospitals, and in the impure atmospheres of many of the back courts and mews-lanes of large cities, all the impurities being absorbed and retained by the charcoal, while a current of pure air alone is admitted into the neighboring apartments.

In this way pure air is obtained from exceedingly impure sources. Such an arrangement as this, carried out on a pretty large scale, would be especially useful to persons necessitated to live in pestiferous districts within the tropics, where the miasmata of ague, yellow fever, and similar diseases are prevalent.

The proper amount of air required by houses in such situations might be admitted through sheets of wire gauze or coarse canvas, containing a thin layer of coarse charcoal powder.

Under such circumstances, also, pillows stuffed with powdered charcoal, and bed coverlets having the same material quilted into them, could not fail to prove highly beneficial.

A tolerably thick charcoal ventilator, such as I have just described, could be very advantageously applied to the gully-holes of our common sewers, and to the sinks in private dwellings, the foul water in both cases being carried into the drain by means of tolerably wide syphon pipes, retaining always about a couple of inches of water.

Such an arrangement would effectually prevent the escape of any effluvia, would be easy of construction, and not likely to get soon out of order.

The charcoal respirators to which I have already referred, and to which I should wish to draw especial attention, are of three kinds.

The first form of the respirator is constructed for the mouth alone, and does not differ in appearance from an ordinary respirator, but is only half its weight, and about one-fifth of its price.

The air is made to pass through a quarter of an inch of coarsely powdered charcoal, retained in its place by two sheets of silvered wire gauze covered over with thin woollen cloth, by which means its temperature is greatly increased. The charcoal respirator possesses several advantages over the respirators ordinarily in use: –

1st. Where the breath is at all fetid, which is usually the case in diseases of the chest, under many forms of dyspepsia, &c., the disagreeable effluvia are absorbed by the charcoal, so that comparatively pure air is alone inspired. This, I think, may occasionally exert a beneficial influence on diseases of the throat and lungs.

2ndly. The charcoal respirator for the mouth alone will certainly prove highly useful in poisonous atmospheres, where miasmata abound, if the simple precaution is only observed of inspiring the air by the mouth and expiring it by the nostrils.

The second form of respirator is ori-nasal – that is, embracing both the mouth and the nose. It is only very slightly larger than the one already described, and does not cover the nose as the ordinary ori-nasal respirator does, but merely touches its lower extremity, to which it is adapted by means of a piece of flexible metal covered with soft leather. When this respirator is worn, no air enters the lungs without first passing through the charcoal, and any effluvia or miasmata contained in the atmosphere are absorbed and oxidized by the charcoal. This form of the respirator, therefore, is peculiarly adapted for protecting the wearer against fevers and other infectious diseases.

The third form of the respirator is also ori-nasal, but is much larger, and therefore more cumbrous than the preceeding variety. It is intended chiefly for use in chemical works, common sewers, &c., to protect the workmen from the noxious effects of the deleterious gases to which they are frequently exposed.

I think it but justice to myself to state that I have no pecuniary interest in any of those respirators. Though strongly urged to do so, I refrained from securing them by patent, on the ground that inventions for the prevention of death and disease ought to be sold at the lowest possible price, and should not, therefore, be encumbered with the expense and restrictions dependent upon patent rights. These respirators have been very successfully manufactured by Mr. W. B. Rooff, of 8, Willow-walk, Kentish Town, who sells the one for the mouth alone at 6s.; the small ori-nasal at 8s.; and the large ori-nasal at 10s. each.

I am aware that some persons, who admit the deodorising properties of charcoal deny that it acts as a disinfectant. I would direct the attention of such persons to the following statement of facts: – About a year ago the bodies of a full grown cat and two rats were placed in open pans, and covered by two inches of powdered charcoal. The pans having stood during all that time in my laboratory, and though it is generally very warm, not the slightest smell has ever been perceptible, nor have any injurious effects been experienced by any of the nine or ten persons by whom the laboratory is daily frequented.

Now, had the bodies of these animals been left to putrify under ordinary circumstances, not only would the stench emitted have been intolerable, but some of the persons would certainly have been struck down by fever or other malignant disorders. Within the last few months charcoal powder has been most successfully employed both at St. Mary’s and St. Bartholomew’s hospitals, to arrest the progress of gangrene and other putrid sores. The charcoal does not require to be put immediately in contact with the sores, but is placed above the dressings, not unfrequently quilted loosely in a little cotton wool. In many cases patients who were rapidly sinking have been restored to health.

In the instance of hospital gangrene, we have to deal not only with the effluvia, but also with real miasmata; for, as is well known, the poisonous gases emitted by gangrenous sores not only affect the individual with whom the mischief has originated, but readily infect the perfectly healthy wounds of any individual who may happen to be in its vicinity. So that in this way gangrene has been known to spread not only through one ward, but through several wards of the same hospital.

Within the last few weeks, the dissecting-room at St. Bartholomew’s hospital has been perfectly deodorised by means of a few trays filled with a thin layer of freshly-heated wood charcoal. A similar arrangement will, in all probability, be likewise soon applied to the wards of St. Bartholomew’s, and every other well-conducted hospital.

From these and other considerations, therefore, I feel perfectly confident that charcoal will prove by far the cheapest and best disinfectant.

Unlike many other disinfectants it evolves no disagreeable vapours, and if heated in close vessels will always act, however long it has been in use, quite as effectively as at first.

If our soldiers and sailors, therefore, when placed in unhealthy situations, were furnished with charcoal respirators, such as the second form above described, and the floors of the tents and the lower decks of the ships were covered by a thin layer of freshly burnt wood charcoal, I think we could have little in future to apprehend from the ravages of cholera, yellow fever, and similar diseases by which our forces have of late been decimated. If found more convenient, the charcoal powder might be covered with coarse canvas, without its disinfectant properties being materially impaired.

The efficiency of the charcoal may be greatly increased by making it red-hot before using it. This can easily be done by heating it in an iron saucepan covered with an iron lid.

When the charcoal is to be applied to inflammable substances, such as wooden floors, &c., of course it must be allowed to cool in close vessels before being used.

[We have deemed these remarks by Dr. John Stenhouse, F.R.S., lecturer on chemistry at St. Bartholomew’s hospital, to be of great importance; we have, therefore, printed them in extenso.]

from Enquire Within Upon Everything

London; Houlston and Stoneman, 65, paternoster Row; and all booksellers
First published in a bound edition, 1856, by Houlston and Stoneman
First reproduced in facsimile, 1979, by Barrie and Jenkins Limited
First published in the United States of America, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-60556
Printed in Great Britain

2022 Predictions

2022-01-03T00:00:00-05:00

See also: predictions and resolutions from 2021.

All predictions as of January 1st, 2023.

WORLD

No draft in US - 99%
No new Millennium prizes awarded - 98%
Hollowart remains the best site of its kind - 95%
Queen of England will survive - 80%
Not the warmest year on record - 70%
TSLA share price will go up (current value: $1,200) - 90%
Kim Jong-Un alive and in power - 98%
There will be 50 states in the US - 99%

ROOT

There will be at least one new herb in the Official Roster - 98%
Root will not still be at OneMedical - 70%
Root and I will complete at least one thread - 60%
I will not read any full books out loud to root - 80%
Root will not date anyone new - 70%
I will not get root signed up for cryo - 80%
Root will not do any new recreational drugs - 90%

FAMILY

I will still intend not to have biochildren - 90%
I will not become the (practical or legal) guardian of any minors - 98%
I will not do christmas with my parents - 98%
I will have three living grandparents - 60%
I will not see my parents in person - 90%
I will speak to a member of my nuclear family on phone or videochat - 80%
I will not get back on speaking terms with my mom - 90%
I will communicate directly with my mom (any medium, at least one message each direction) - 60%

MEDICAL

I will not get COVID (to the best of my knowledge) - 95%
I will get my flu shot - 90%
I will not get glasses - 98%
I will not attempt suicide - 98%
I will still be on all my current medications - 70%
I will be taking a new medication - 60%
I will get another (fourth) covid shot - 60%
My acne will improve - 60%
I will not get a sleep study - 60%
I will meet with a therapist - 90%
I will not meet with a therapist more than once - 60%
I will see a dentist - 60%
I will not have to go to the ER on my own account - 90%

PHYSICAL FORM

I will not grow out my hair past my shoulders - 98%
I will not drink more than a symbolic amount of alcohol - 95%
I will still be a vegetarian - 95%
I will not be a vegan - 98%
I will not get my ears pierced - 80%
I will not do any new recreational drugs - 98%
I will not dye my hair - 90%
I will not do a pull-up - 70%
I will not get a tattoo - 80%

LIFESTYLE

I will not buy a house - 98%
I will move at least once - 80%
I will attend at least one wedding - 60%
I will attend at least one funeral - 60%
I will live in Oregon - 60%
I will not live in California - 70%
I will not get a pet - 70%
I will not still be working freelance as my primary income source - 80%
I will still be working from home - 60%
I will not go back to grad school - 95%
I will not legally change my name - 60%

ACHIEVEMENTS

I will not win NaNoWriMo - 98%
I will not attempt NaNoWriMo - 95%
I will not make >= 10 blog posts - 60%
I will read at least one new, complete, commercially-published book - 90%
I will not get a driver’s license - 60%
I will get a learner’s permit - 60%
I will not finish reading homestuck - 70%
I will not put up stars on my bedroom walls - 80%

TECH

I will not get a new phone - 80%
I will not get a new primary computer - 90%
I will still be primarily using my current primary email address - 80%
I will not acquire >100 followers on any new social media account - 80%
I will not run a discord server with >10 members - 60%
I will get on a new phone plan - 60%

MISC

I will not travel outside the country - 90%
I will not attend any protests - 98%
I will watch at least some of the Winter Olympics - 70%
I will not have to go to the ER on anyone’s account - 80%
I will buy a new pair of shoes - 90%
I will not give 10% of my income to charity - 90%
I will give at least 1% of my income to charity - 90%
I will not have to take further legal action against my stalker - 60%
I will not acquire any new headmates - 80%
I will not sign up for cryo - 90%

KINGSLEY SPECIAL: VULGAR

I will use a urinal - 80%
The search for “from:[my discord handle] fuck” in BOCU will have at least 300 results (current: 189) - 70%
I will not piss outside at any time - 70%

KINGSLEY SPECIAL: PERVERTED

I will not have PIV sex - 95%
I will not go to Pride - 90%
I will not have sex with any new bodies - 80%
I will not get top surgery - 60%
I will not acquire any new emfriends - 70%
I will still identify as nonbinary - 70%
I will still identify as transmasc - 99%
I will still be on T - 99%
I will not still be on the same dose of T - 80%
I will still be engaged to root - 90%
I will still be in love with root - 99%
I will still be with root - 95%
I will still identify as androsexual - 70%
If root and I break up, I will be the one who does the breaking up - 70%
I will not get married - 95%
B. will start hormones - 80%
Conditional on B. starting hormones, they will self-assess as happier than now - 90%

KINGSLEY SPECIAL: FETISH-ADJACENT

I will not get caned - 80%
I will obtain an ovipositor - 60%
I will acquire a latex kink - 70%
I will acquire a docking kink - 60%
I will not acquire a nipple penetration kink - 90%
I will not acquire a pony kink - 60%
I will acquire a mummification kink - 60%
I will not acquire an inflation kink - 70%
I will not acquire a soft vore kink - 70%

KINGSLEY SPECIAL: BLASPHEMOUS

I will still be an atheist - 99%
I will have my traditional blasphemous sex for my deconversion anniversary - 60%
C. will still be Catholic - 95%
L. will still be Catholic - 80%
I will do or roleplay at least one new excommunicable offense - 60%
I will not enter a Catholic church - 90%
I will not enter a Catholic church specifically for the purpose of blasphemous activities - 95%

2021 Predictions: Resolved

2022-01-02T00:00:00-05:00

At the start of 2021, I made some predictions. Here I’m grading them.

Predictions in bold came true. Predictions in ~~strikethrough~~ did not come true. Predictions in italics could not be determined in some way.

Confidence level: 99%

I will still be in love with root
I will still be an atheist
I will not have PIV sex
I will not grow out my hair past my shoulders
No draft in US

Actual accuracy: 100%

Confidence level: 98%:

Biden will be inaugurated as planned
I will not get COVID
M. will not come out to me
I will not win NaNoWriMo
I will not attempt suicide
I will not buy a house
I will still intend not to have biochildren
No new Millennium prizes awarded

Actual accuracy: 100%

Confidence level: 95%:

I will still be with root
I will not become the (practical or legal) guardian of any minors
I will not travel outside the country
I will get a COVID vaccine
I will not drink more than a symbolic amount of alcohol
I will not attend any protests
There will be at least one new herb in the Official Roster

Actual accuracy: 100%

Confidence level: 90%:

I will still be a vegetarian
I will move at least once
I will not do christmas with my parents
I will not officially disown my parents
I will not get a new phone
I will not have to go to the ER on my own account
I will not get my ears pierced
Root will get a new job
Root and I will complete at least one thread
I will read at least one new, complete, commercially-published book
Hollowart remains the best site of its kind
I will attend at least one wedding

Actual accuracy: 100%

Confidence level: 80%:

I will start T
I will watch at least some of the Olympics
I will tell my parents my name
~~I will make < 10 blog posts~~
I will get my flu shot
~~I will acquire a new emfriend~~
I will still be engaged to root
~~M. will go to college in the country~~
I will not get glasses
I will not have to go to the ER on anyone’s account
I will not do weed
I will not get a new primary computer
I will not go to Pride
I will not get a tattoo
I will have three living grandparents
I will attend a large unmasked indoor event
I will have significant body-image improvements
Queen of England will survive
Bitcoin above $5k
~~Bitcoin below $30k~~
I will still be primarily using my current primary email address
Legal quarantine/lockdown restrictions fully lifted in US

Actual accuracy: 73%

Confidence level: 70%

I will not get top surgery
I will not get a driver’s license
I will not acquire >100 followers on any new social media account
I will not have sex with any new bodies
I will be out at work
I will still identify as nonbinary
I will not do any major holidays with my parents
~~I will read at least one more book of the Vorkosigan Saga to root~~
Bitcoin above $8k
~~Bitcoin below $20k~~
I will not attend any funerals
I will no longer own any dresses
Not the warmest year on record

Actual accuracy: 84%

Confidence level: 60%

~~I will give myself an injection~~
I will get a new job
I will still be on all my current medications
~~I will give approximately 10% of my income to charity~~
~~I will see my parents in person~~
I will not meet with a therapist
~~I will get on a new phone plan~~
I will get a sleep study
I will not get back on speaking terms with my mom
~~I will still live in California~~
~~I will not get the restraining order I want~~
~~I will get a pet~~
I will still be working from home
I will go to an aquarium
I will still identify as androsexual
~~I will finish reading homestuck~~
I will not cut
~~I will not see a dentist~~
Root will not date anyone new
~~Bitcoin below $10k~~
Root will get top surgery
If root and I break up, I will be the one who does the breaking up

Actual accuracy: 52%

Summary

99% predictions: 100% happened
98% predictions: 100% happened
95% predictions: 100% happened
90% predictions: 100% happened
80% predictions: 73% happened
70% predictions: 84% happened
60% predictions: 52% happened

Overall I’m pretty pleased with the results! Most of that seems within random variation. (I could do a formal statistical analysis but I’m not going to.)

Stay tuned for 2022 predictions.

The Inexorable Queerness of Love

2021-08-08T00:00:00-04:00

You see straight people, sometimes, stammering awkwardly around whether that special someone they’ve gone on a couple of dates with counts as their boyfriend or their girlfriend yet. It’s a wellspring of pain and awkwardness: did he really just introduce me to his parents as his girlfriend? is she ever going to say ‘boyfriend’ about me? is he going to think I’m moving too fast? is she really that clingy?

It doesn’t tend to go that way, when you have my tendency to date nonbinary people. Instead, what should I call you? is an inevitable question from the first shy invitation for coffee. It’s a hard question, and one which prompts more hard discussions. I’ve learned in the course of these that my Californian friends don’t share my Southern instinct that partner implies a serious, long-term relationship, one which might be marriage if you weren’t too gay or anti-establishment for the institution. They agree it’s a touch clinical, but what else is there? You can rifle through coinages and neologisms, but they all have their pitfalls. Datemate has a pleasing assonance to it, but it’s painfully cutesy. Boyfriend and girlfriend generalize into the unfortunate childfriend, which no one uses. Emfriend, my personal choice, taken from the ey/em neopronoun, is prone to mishearing. Sometimes I’ll just pick one, boyfriend or girlfriend, guessing which will fly under the radar or be more conspicuously gay, depending on my mood. I’ve always wished for the audacity to use lover.

It doesn’t get easier when the relationship takes steps forward, either. Fee-ahn-say, spoken out loud, is pleasingly ambiguous, but writing it down requires a collapse of the wave function. Sometimes I spell it with three e’s, instead of one or two, or replace them with a cryptic schwa: anything to signal this word does not fit into your lexicon. Other times, I get fanciful: my betrothed, my affianced. Once you’re married, you can say spouse with a straight face, or dodge the question with my better half, but I’ve never found a good word for the wedding day – only the hideous broom and gride.

The conversations never stop. Queerness is an exercise in deconstructing relationship paradigms – maybe the most pretentious sentence I’ve ever written. It’s true, though. Sometimes you just throw them out of the window; sometimes you bend and contort yourself to squeeze into the radio buttons of an obstinate form; but most often you take the Ikea furniture of social expectations down to its constituent pieces, build something new and weirder out of it. Sometimes the result is charming but rickety. Sometimes it fits better than you could ever have dreamed.

Weddings, of course, with their whirlwind of traditions – only half deBeers-coined – are a minefield from before the question is popped. You’re spared the agony of unwanted proposals when you’ve been talking for months about whose job it is to pop the question; no one has to return an ugly ring when you’ve had to negotiate who would wear it in the first place. The Betrothed and I had two proposals and an anti-proposal, assembled like up and down quarks into a proton; we negotiated engagement rings cuddled up on the couch, arms around each other, shopping side-by-side on our computer screens. I’d always told myself I wanted a ring that cost less than a hundred dollars; the one on my finger now cost twenty times that. It was a long discussion, but I love my ring.

Who wears a white dress, if anyone does? Do we reject the patriarchal social construct of virginity, or do we admit that the color never even meant that and we want the lace and frills? Is there a garter? Who smashes cake in whose face? Who will marry us, and where, when a church and a priest are out of the question? (God bless the Unitarians, and all that, but I’m not marrying in a church – I don’t need a panic attack on my wedding day). Who leads the first dance? Who speaks their vows first? Wait, who speaks their vows first in straight couples?

And then there’s the vows. You can’t say lawful wedded wife, of course, or you may now kiss the bride, but does it really sound as good to just say you may now kiss? Maybe we don’t need anyone’s permission to kiss. Maybe we want to include disclaimers in our vows, terms and conditions that our guests would prefer to click on through without reading. Certainly we can’t say forsaking all others, not when my emfriend is standing in the congregation smiling. (Is it still a congregation? It sounds wrong to call it an audience. Is there a group noun for guests?) If we say to obey, are we practicing kink in front of children? If they put a collar on me, will a grandparent faint? Must you dodge till death do us part if, like a lesbian couple I know, you intend never to die? What am I promising, when I stand up in front of friends and family and the state of California? What does marriage mean to me? What does love mean? Does anyone care, or are they just waiting for the cake?

It’s not just the formalities, either. You can’t just assume kids will happen if and when they happen, when your gametes are incompatible. Whose will you use? Who will be pregnant? Or should you adopt? What will they call you, when Mom and Dad don’t apply? You could just use your first name, if only you knew what that was – legal name, work name, the internet handle your friends call you…? How do you decide who gets their top surgery first? And the joke about the lesbians who can’t open a jar of pickles – it’s not just a joke. Not always, at least.

An open secret: sex gets better when you deconstruct it. You can lay it out like a buffet: penetration, orgasms, hands, mouths, toys, domination, submission, pain, pleasure. Usually only one of us gets off, in any given session; you’d think some kind of formal alternation might be required, but in practice it works out fine. (We did have simultaneous orgasms, once.) There’s a dizzying array of silicone dicks – we each have favorites – and half a dozen vibrators charging at any given time. Sometimes one of us is too dysphoric to undress; sometimes, instead of fucking, we cuddle with a pillow in between us, each individually miserable in a body warped away from our mind by puberty. We’ve had scenes where no one undressed, no one was touched, and they were fabulously hot. Once we both woke up in the middle of sex, having started to fuck in our sleep. Sexsomnia: it’s a thing, people.

I see women, online, bemoaning that they can’t get off on their boyfriend’s dick; I see men who feel emasculated because they can’t come from a blowjob. My Betrothed went to a forum, once, and asked men if they’d have a one-night-stand where no one touched their dick. How would that even work? one asked. So, just video games? I’m down, said another. I want to take people by the shoulders and say: sex can be what you want it to be! You can have a dick shaped like a rosebud or a tentacle! You can put your hand inside your partner and make them come screaming! You can have five orgasms, or none, or give one to yourself with your head in your partner’s lap while they watch TV! Think about what you actually want, for once. Jerk off in the bedroom alone, and invite your partner in for cuddles in the afterglow. Have a conversation with your partner and find out that they think you grope them too much, and you think they grope you too little. Tie someone up and then come five times while they choke you on their cock. No one can stop you.

Here’s my point: all of love is like this, not just the parts which have a letter somewhere in a too-long acronym. When I try to figure out whether to refer to the multiple system I’m engaged to as my partner or my partners, it’s the labels question all over again. We spend as much time and energy deconstructing dishware as sex: I like mugs, they like glasses, our plates are from the West and our bowls from the East, we agree that an electric kettle is a necessity but I will never understand what’s wrong with making rice in a pot on the stove. It’s all right. They put up with the enormous waffle-maker that was a present from my ex. I’m not going to get rid of it. It makes great waffles.

I’ve discovered, like (no doubt) every generation before me, that building a household together is an exercise in deconstructing your assumptions. Things you took for granted your whole life turn out to be a family quirk. You have to pick and choose and compromise, and with enough luck and enough love, you come out the other end happier and stronger than how you went in. Inside our house, you take off your shoes (Betrothed’s hobbyhorse) and you don’t drink alcohol (mine). We have separate bedrooms, but we share a bed at night, because it’s important to me. They taught me to eat hot pot, and learned to make macaroni and cheese that’s better than the comfort food I grew up with.

Of course we fight, sometimes, when the assumptions clash. I don’t understand what we’re supposed to do with more rooms than we have people living in the house. They wish I would stop drinking from their water glass. Other times things we brought with us click right away. I sold them on Teva sandals, and now I have to figure out which of the two near-identical pairs is mine ever time; they introduced a bus tub for dishes, and I liked it at once. Each of us brought our own weighted blanket to the relationship, and now they both live on the couch. We merged our collections of Squishables.

Love is queer: you have to take it apart, look at the pieces, figure out what sparks joy. Even Marie Kondo says that it’s okay to have eleven pinball machines, if that’s really what makes you happy. Not all baggage is bad. My mother told me once, when I was little, that it was okay to ask your husband to open a jar for you, even if you can do it yourself; it’ll make him feel validated, strong, like a provider. I’d never dream of playing dumb for a guy, or throwing a game to one, but the jar thing seemed sensible to me. These days, Betrothed brings jars to me, and asks me to open them with your strong boy hands. It’s true – it does make me feel validated in my masculinity. Some things get folded back in, like that, like a sourdough starter. Some things are made new. We’re choosing our own last name.

Love is queer, and I think any love that survives has to be, more than a little bit, no matter how heterosexual it is. No one has the wedding they dreamed of as a little girl; you have to put your dreams together with someone else’s. (Unless you’re one of those people who marries a bridge, I guess, or the Empire State Building. I think those people are wonderful, I honestly and unironically do. May we all know so clearly what we want in life.)

It’s been striking me, lately, how much the process of building our household resembles the process of building my body. I think a lot of cis people would benefit from learning to look at their bodies like trans people do, thinking about what they like, what they want, what would make them happy, what they can do to get it. And I think building a household, straight or gay, is much the same. You have to queer it up a bit. Bring in your coauthor from the internet to coparent your child. Admit that you’re too disabled to keep up with the chores and hire a damn maid already. Skip the dining table and get cushions to eat on the floor. You don’t have to follow the rules. No one can make you. The doormat says come back with a warrant. (Betrothed, who is very patient, puts up with it.)

On Really Trying

2021-08-05T00:00:00-04:00

There’s a specific thing I refer to as “really trying.” This is probably misleading of me, because to some degree it’s a learned skill: people can definitely intend to try at something, and have the experience of trying at it, and never for a moment do the thing I’m going to call Really Trying. At the same time, though, I think it’s an important concept, and noticing when people are and aren’t doing it can give you some important information about their values.

The way I usually explain this is: Really Trying is the thing you do when you really want a goddamn coke.

Have you ever just really, really had a craving for a coke? (Or insert your food or beverage of choice here – I don’t even actually like coke.) You go to get a coke from the fridge, but then you notice you’re out of chilled cans. Fine, you’ll get a room-temperature coke and pour it over ice. Those are above the fridge, and you usually get your roommate to take them down because you’re short, but your roommate is out of town. You don’t have a stepstool. You try standing on a phonebook, which you still have around in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty one for some reason, but that’s not enough. An overturned wastebasket would be perfect, but it won’t take your weight. You think about physics for a second and then go get the wastebaskets from all the rooms in the house, turn them over, arrange them, and then put a two-by-four across them to stand on and distribute your weight.

The box of coke cans in the cupboard is empty. Why the hell can’t Monica ever throw them away when she takes out the last one.

You take everything out of the fridge to make sure you didn’t miss a coke can somewhere, to no avail. So then you decide to go to the store. It’s three miles and you don’t have a car but you can walk three miles, it’s fine. You put on your good walking shoes and fill a water bottle and stuff a few dollars in your pocket and you walk to the store. You’re kind of drenched in sweat by the time you get there but you really want that goddamn coke.

The store only carries pepsi.

The next closest store is too far to walk. There’s a bus line but you didn’t bring your bus pass. But you have your phone, so you download the app and buy another bus pass, and ride a succession of three buses to a store which turns out to be expecting their shipment of coke tomorrow.

Fine. You take two more buses home and then you order a fucking pizza just to get some coke. The pizza place calls you to tell you they don’t carry coke anymore, would you like a Dr. Pepper, and you offer to tip the driver $50 if they will swing by a gas station and bring you a goddamn coke.

They bring you a coke. It’s in a glass bottle. You don’t have a bottle opener.

You watch a couple of youtube videos and try opening it with a few household items, but you just can’t make it work. So you get out a bowl, and you smash the bottle into it, and you strain the coke through a couple of coffee filters to get out the glass shards, and then you drink your goddamn coke.

That’s what really trying to get a coke looks like.

Now: obviously there are degrees here! You can genuinely try to get a coke and still only care so much about it. It is, in fact, objectively silly to really try this hard to get a coke. But when it’s something genuinely important, it’s not so silly.

Even when it is something genuinely important, not everyone is going to be able to try all of those things. You might not be able to walk three miles, or the bus app might only work on iphone and you have an android, or you might not be able to afford to tip $50 for a coke. That doesn’t mean you’re not Really Trying, that just means your resources are limited.

But there’s still a particular kind of Trying, present in the coke example, which I want to gesture at.

You’re not just doing the motions of Try To Get A Coke. If part of your job description included giving people cokes when they asked for them, and someone asked you for a coke, you would probably look in the fridge, notice you didn’t have a stepstool, conclude you’d fulfilled your responsibilities, and tell the customer that you were out of coke. No one would blame you for that! You did all the things you could reasonably be expected to do! But it’s not what you do if you’re really trying to get a coke.

Another (less silly) example is that the rationalist community is generally committed to Really Trying about death. People generally try not to die, and even to prevent other people from dying! But they don’t generally really try. Really Trying about death looks like actually sitting down and thinking for five minutes by the clock about whether there’s anything you can do. It looks like researching charities and making spreadsheets about how many lives they save per dollar. It looks like the desperate Hail Mary throw of cryonics. It looks like anti-aging research, and saving hard drives full of information about yourself in case of rescue sims, and debating whether it’s worth wearing bike helmets in cars.

There are a lot of reasons that people fail to Really Try. I think the most common one is probably something like learned helplessness. Most people really don’t want to die, but there’s a lot of cultural learned helplessness about death (“two things are inevitable – death and taxes”). And this is reasonable enough! For most people, throughout most of history, there’s been a pretty hard limit on what they could do to avoid death. Even for smaller things, it’s easy to have too much learned helplessness to Really Try. I suspect the school system teaches a lot of this. Not only does it rarely reward Really Trying, it often punishes it; if you Really Try on an assignment, you’re likely to get marked down for not doing it the way the teacher intended.

It’s also important to keep in mind that it’s easy to see someone Really Trying with limited resources, and assume they’re not Really Trying. “Resources” here is a broad term: it can mean time and money, but it can also mean skill at outside-the-box thinking, executive function, or spare weirdness points to spend. Really Trying uses up a lot of all of those things. (Which brings us to another point – no one can Really Try at everything all the time, or even at most things most of the time. It really has to be reserved for a few top priorities, while you do a normal reasonable as-much-as-can-be-expected amount of trying at other things.)

Still, observing what things people Really Try at can give you information about their priorities. And this is even more true of organizations, since you can reasonably be less concerned about whether you’re claiming they don’t “really care” about something when they’re just short on resources or have learned helplessness about it – you’re not going to hurt the organization’s feelings, it’s reasonable to just care about the outcomes.

In particular, it’s useful to think about interventions which aren’t standard and expected, but are fairly easy to think of and not too costly in various resources. A person or organization who isn’t trying any of those interventions is more likely to not be Really Trying at the goal in question, and that tells you something about how much they genuinely care about it. (Again, with the caveat that you might be missing ways in which the intervention is more costly than you think!)

For instance, a programming company which is just following standard expectations will offer some disability accommodations to its employees: an elevator for people who can’t climb stairs, accessible bathrooms, medical leave, etc. A programming company which is really trying to recruit the best programmers regardless of their disabilities will do other things, too. Maybe they’ll ask new hires if they want a chair, a sitting ball, or a standing desk at the same time as they ask if they want a Mac or PC. Maybe they’ll have flexible work-from-home policies, or a room stocked with different mice and keyboards for people who have trouble with the standard ones. There’s a limit to how many resources they’ll expend, obviously – they’re trying to make money – but if they’re really trying to get the best people, they won’t just do the normal things.

This can be a painful and unflattering check to apply to myself. Am I just going through the motions of trying to resolve a conflict with someone – am I just doing enough that I can shrug and say to onlookers “well, I did everything I could, it’s not my fault” – or am I really trying? Did I really try to do that task, or did I try just enough that I could reasonably say “I can’t, you do it instead” and pass it off to someone else? (Be careful, of course, if you’re prone to scrupulosity. You cannot, and should not attempt to, Really Try at everything in your life. Think about a handful of specific things that are very important to you, and Really Try at those.)

Demanding Prayer

2021-08-04T00:00:00-04:00

[Epistemic status: this is a post I never got around to making while Catholic, about Catholic theology. It’s still important to me, so I’m making it now. It’s written from a Catholic perspective, even though I don’t believe that anymore, because that’s simpler than prefacing every sentence with “within a Catholic worldview…”. Read it as you would a worldbuilding post.]

Prayer is hard.

This feels halfway wrong, and halfway too obvious to state. It’s like “math is hard”. On the one hand, I think math is a lot more accessible than most people think, if it’s taught well, and a lot of what makes math hard for people is just trauma. On the other hand, math is an enormous field full of ambitious intellectual endeavors; of course it’s hard. Prayer is like that.

I’m very aware of what a novice I am at prayer. I’m not an extraordinarily holy person. And I often feel like I’m groping in the dark; I’m not the kind of person who has Spiritual Experiences (TM). Sure, sometimes I get nice fuzzy feelings when I pray, but there’s nothing supernatural about them. It’s the same kind of nice fuzzy feelings I get when I read certain fiction, or hear certain songs: directed at God insofar as all appreciation of the good and beautiful is directed at God, but not something to be taken too seriously as feedback.

But if there’s one thing that’s clear to me about prayer, it’s this: we’re told, explicitly and repeatedly, to argue with God. To demand more than he gives us – more than he offers – more than is remotely reasonable. God wants us to haggle, to pester, to listen to what he tells us we can have and demand a thousand times more. And he will give it to us.

I don’t pretend to be enough of a theologian to have a good answer to why God wants that. It’s the perpetual question about prayer, right: why would you pray, when God is already going to do what’s best? I don’t have a brilliant answer, but I’m pretty sure it’s the definition of the sin of vanity to decide that we’re very clever and very saintly for not praying, when we’ve been told over and over to pray for our daily bread. So I’m not going to try to explain why we’re supposed to do this – just why I believe that we are.

It starts with Cain. Popular culture gets the Mark of Cain wrong, a lot of the time. It’s not a curse, it’s a blessing. God curses Cain to be a “fugitive and a vagabond,” and Cain says: hey, that sucks, I’m going to get killed by the first person who sees me. To which God replies, oh, fair point, and puts a mark on him to tell people not to hurt him.

Even Cain got to haggle with God. And it worked.

We see this with Abraham in Sodom. God tells Abraham that he’s going to destroy Sodom, and Abraham immediately starts haggling with him. Won’t you spare Sodom if there are fifty just men in it? What if there are forty-five? Forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten? And every time, God agrees.

(I always wonder what would have happened if Abraham had kept haggling. Could he have haggled God down to one just man? Would God have spared Sodom for the sake of Lot?)

Then there’s Jonah in Nineveh. God sends Jonah to tell Nineveh he’s going to destroy it in forty days. The people of Nineveh repent and fast and beg, and God changes his mind – and when Jonah gets annoyed about this, God gets mad at Jonah. It’s clearly important that God can be haggled with.

There’s lots more in the Old Testament alone. God tells Moses to go talk to Pharaoh; Moses says, hey, I’m no good at public speaking; God agrees that’s a fair point and has Aaron help. The Israelites get tired of manna and demand quail, and God accommodates.

(Another thing I wonder: I’ve heard a Jewish take that Abraham failed the test re: sacrificing Isaac, and that makes sense to me. Was he supposed to bargain with God? Was God disappointed that he just agreed to something so cruel and unfair?)

Possibly the most important instance of this, for me, is the wedding at Cana. For those not familiar with the story, it goes like this:

Jesus and Mary are at a wedding, in Cana, as per the title. Everything is going well, right up until they run out of wine. The servants tell Mary – I assume she’s the matron of honor, or something – and she tells Jesus, hey, they’re out of wine.

Jesus says: ugh, mom, you know I’m not starting in on miracles yet.

Mary, who is having none of this, tells the servants: just you watch, my son is going to fix this. Do whatever he tells you.

And Jesus, put on the spot, sighs and turns water into wine. It’s his first public miracle.

This seems incredibly important! God wouldn’t make that the beginning of his public life if he wasn’t trying to make a point with it! And I have trouble taking away any point other than: if God says no, keep demanding until he says yes.

Other instances in the New Testament include but are not limited to:

the parable about the man who stands at the door and knocks until the homeowner gets up in exasperation and gives him what he wants
the woman at the well who argues that “even the dogs eat the scraps which fall from the children’s table” until Jesus gives in
Thomas demanding to get to poke the holes in Jesus’ hands, feet, and side

As far as I can tell, God not only likes it when we demand more than he offers, he wants us to do it. And he usually gives it to us.

So my answer to the problem of evil, at least in part, is: demand more! Demand better! Scream at God and storm Heaven! Argue that bad things should not happen to good people! Insist on reparations in full! Demand that God retroactively unweave every shed tear from the fabric of the universe, because nothing less is good enough! Argue that not one sheep should be lost, not one soul fall into darkness, that even one evil person cast into eternal suffering is a blight on God’s justice and a wrong impossible to right!

I’m pretty sure God likes that sort of thing. And he might even listen.

2 months of T

2021-04-12T00:00:00-04:00

Previously: 1 month of T, 17 days of T

Lots of medical (and some sexual) TMI follows. Reading other people’s detailed accounts of hormone therapy was valuable to me, so I’m providing the same thing. If you don’t want to know all about the shit my body’s been up to, this post is not for you.

The biggest visible change in the last month has been hair growth on my inner thighs, which I’m extremely pleased about. I’ve never had body hair there before, and now there’s scattered dark hairs from knee to groin.

Voice continues to change, less dramatically than last month. I’m spending a lot of time consciously remembering to speak in the newly comfortable range, instead of in the familiar but no-longer-comfortable pitch.

Towards the start of the month I had a lot of misophonia, especially about chewing, which I don’t usually have a problem with. That thankfully seems to have let up over time.

Sex drive seems to have mostly levelled off for the moment, which I’m extremely grateful for. I’m getting some very distinctive sexuality shifts, which is fascinating, especially since they’re generally expansions of what I’m into rather than alterations. Visual stimuli in general are way more compelling than they used to be; I’m seeking out a lot more video porn, and talking Betrothed into wearing lingerie. I’ve always been quite exclusively androsexual, but I’m getting some gentle nudging in the bi direction: femme-leaning enbies are a lot more attractive than they used to be, and I have a newfound utter fascination with boobs (at least as long as they’re not on a girl).

Still bleeding, to my deep irritation, but at least my periods have been lighter. Very much hoping that comes to an end soon.

Everyone warned me about acne. I didn’t think it could get any worse. Oh how wrong and hubristic I was. I’ve always gotten it on my shoulders and upper arms; now it’s discovered the new and exciting territory from elbow to wrist. Hate this.

Doctor did a blood test around the month-and-a-half mark, and said my T levels were up from 20 somethings to 200 somethings, so confirmation that I’m getting good absorption. I can expect another delightful blood draw at the 3-month mark, and if I’m not up a little farther by then he’ll increase the dose.