I saw the response. It’s a shame she didn’t explain her angry reaction although I suppose she’s saying that people should be able to do what they want. People doing what they want in private is one thing, doing it in the full glare of the internet, in my opinion, debases and corrupts the whole of society. But then, I’m just a dinosaur 😁.
Its also a huge problem that so many people can’t disagree civilly.
The juxtaposition of prostitution as an act of despair and desparation forced to service the needs of depraved men, to then find some massive percentage of young females have only fans accounts where they profit handsomely from the fantasy life of lonely men. Two totally opposing poles!
Great topic with plenty of room for serious reflection.
That’s a very striking way of putting it, Alan. We seem to have become so inured as a society to things that would have seemed unimaginable in previous generations that I’m sometimes tempted to think we’ve lost our moral bearings entirely – and that many of our other problems may be downstream of this.
Morality has unfortunately been we thrown into the political realm: used where it is an advantage and ignored when it suits. We have so many glaring examples of this narrow focus, point scoring approach. I get quite pessimistic when I see no endeavour to critically think, avoid tribal allegence to play solely to your team or engage in good faith debate.
How do we come back to a shared humanity when so many wish to ratchet up the pressure? That's the big question.
I’m a member of that classroom and the thought that my grandchildren will grow to adulthood in that world, I find depressing and upsetting. The internet has many amazing attributes, one of them being that we can discuss these issues online with people from across the world. And yet there are always going to people who will debase and push things to the lowest common denominator. I suppose we will just have to find ways of teaching children to filter out and ignore the trash. But when I think of my childhood in comparison to that of today’s children, I can only feel sad.
Very interesting to hear your perspective on this – thanks. I sense there may be some recalibration underway. Cultural and technological revolutions often overshoot before they settle. Perhaps we’re still in the early stages of figuring out our norms at the intersection of sex and technology.
In 1991 - around 20 years after your thought experiment - I was sixteen. In my class, the boys would discuss girls as if they were commodities - what they were like to have sex with, what they might be like, whether they'd 'do' a particular girl, how ugly a girl was but how easy she was so it was worthwhile, etcetera. They did this in front of us. Some girls even joined in, bitching about other girls to get kudos with the boys.
We girls learned that our value lay in how attractive we were to them, how good we were at sex, how to manage the balance between slag and frigid. This was encouraged by magazines like More with its 'sexual position of the month' and Cosmo with its blow-job guides (read by teens although supposedly for adults).
In my year alone one girl got pregnant at 14, another girl, also at 14 had a long affair with a teacher in his 30s (our head of year), another was mass abused in a park by a bunch of boys in our year, only one of whom was expelled. Plus other, lesser incidents.
What's broken is that all this is now in the open. The dark thoughts of boys and the girls who comply are on-screen, in public, unashamed.
I wasn't at school in the 1970s so I can't say whether those girls would have been aghast. But I wouldn't have been in 1991. I would have said it was inevitable.
This was not happening, at least not so publicly I noticed it, at scale, at my high school in the 1980s. But I suspect there was a spectrum that existed, where different schools, different demographics, manifested different behaviors. This is certainly what you are prone to seeing if you hit puberty in the absence of any lived morality.
I did go to a fairly rough school, but I'm sure my experience isn't unique. And magazines (in the absence of the internet) definitely normalised promiscuous behaviour amongst girls, which didn't help.
I guess lived morality is a net result of family, friends, community (including school) and society (especially mass media).
I think the pro-sex feminists took over the latter, with all the smut and none of the self-respect, because, smut sells, to the detriment of girls, directly, from the content, and also to boys, who really don't need much latitude given to indulge in their baser instincts wrt sex.
Puritanical/Victorian mores take a lot of flack, but the mount of moral virtue really does have very slippery slopes.
This piece captures the emptiness, the sadness, and I think the absurdity of where we're at in terms of relationships and sex. And where we're at is disturbing, imo. There's so much to think about here.
A commercialized, consumer culture in which everything has become a commodity - to the extent that so many people see themselves and their sexuality as a "product" - how the hell did we get here? How did people become so shallow, so empty? So disconnected from the innate sacredness of loving relations?
I want to think about this some more and will likely comment more later.
Some writers of the past 20 years (Kingsley Dennis, Paul Levy, etc.) have written about something like a mind virus - Levy called it Wetiko, which was a Native American concept, of a mind/soul toxin that infects entire cultures, and it feels like they were really onto something!
I'm really glad to read this, Anna, as I almost didn't publish it. The subject is difficult to write about without getting misinterpreted, and other writers (Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, et al) cover these issues with far more expertise. Still, I wanted to say something about what many of us feel: that something terribly important has been lost. It's very sad.
It truly is. I'm glad you decided to publish this - it's important. Some people may react defensively, but it's likely because you reflected back to them something about themselves and their lives they didn't want to think about.
Some months back I read a piece from a young gen z woman who was describing the sadness and wistfulness she felt after looking at a picture of high school kids from the 80s (?) hanging out and interacting with each other, as all of us over 50 did at that age. We got together in person, had parties, cruised around in our cars, went to each other's houses, had dances, went to clubs, plays, movies - we DID stuff. We asked each other out in person! We talked face to face and solved problems in person!
She observed how engaged with each other the students in the picture looked, how happy, and she said "I've never known a world like this". She meant a world in which everyone wasn't completely focused on a little screen in their hands. That actually broke my heart a little!
Below are some thoughts prompted by the essay above.
The author raises an important point, which is the stark contrast between the ideal of feminism and the reality of what it would turn into half a century later: the technological promiscuity and prostitution on OnlyFans, and the lack of distortion of human sexuality that accompanies pornography. At the same time, there is less actual sex and reproduction in the West than ever before, according to Census statistics.
In the 19th century in Western nations, people married in their twenties, and a woman might have anywhere from 5 to 15 children, all within the bounds of Christian wedlock, replenishing the society with people and expanding Christendom. This was the norm, but it all changed from the 1960s onward with the advent of the sexual revolution, abortion, the pill, secularization, and modern feminism.
Traditional marriage was viewed as oppressive by some leading feminists, but now their misandric movement has taken things to such an extreme that men are afraid to ask women on a date, and the MGTOW movement exists in response to the high rate of divorce (initiated mostly by women).
MeToo turned into a witch hunt that libelled men, equating a sincere compliment to sexual predation. Now Western men are afraid to approach women in person, and with good reason, leading to a decline in intimacy, marriage, and children, and resulting in a slow cultural suicide.
The MeToo ethos, although initially critical of the Hollywood casting couch, ended up as a barrier to human intimacy and reproduction that women are now complaining about: decent men do not approach them anymore, fearful of being seen as sexual predators, and this fear is not unfounded.
Another aspect of this is that when young men lack the incentive to marry and have children, many of them see no point in making a good living either, or if they do, they see no value in sharing a life with a woman who will turn around and divorce them and take their wealth and block access to their children through family courts and children's services (MGTOW). Some have become 'passport bros' seeking a love life and marriage abroad in more traditional societies like the Philippines. Western women demonized men, and men got the message: they are unwanted.
Feminists are critical of passport bros, and also MGTOW and the MRA (men's rights movement), but they created the conditions that led to these reactionary social developments. By MRAs, I do not mean Andrew Tate; I mean good thinkers like Tom Golden and Stephen Baskerville who analyze what has happened to men and women in the last half-century.
There was definitely an adverse moral and social cost as the sexual revolution unfolded, so it needed to be reigned in, but when radical feminists and MeToo put the brakes, they did so by demonizing all men as toxic and turning them away from women. They threw out the baby with the bathwater when they "smashed the patriarchy."
Reproduction rates in the West are at an all-time low, due to the decline in marriage and the normalizing of abortion, the pill and contraceptives. I myself was brought up being told there was overpopulation and you needed a good career to have children. I question both beliefs now. When I was younger, every woman I knew had at least one abortion. It was commonplace. If they eventually had children (and many did not), it was just one or two, not 5 or 15.
The rise of transgenderism is playing a role in this, too, rendering young people who would have been productive members of society and parents in a past age into confused, sterilized basket cases.
MeToo re-established constraints that had been put into place by traditional religious societies torn down by feminism, but the result is a civilization committing suicide: as fewer people have children, governments and corporations bring in labour from the third world. These are often people who do not fully assimilate and who do not share Western values -- in particular, Muslims. The slow death of the West is thanks in large part to feminism.
Early feminism is not laudable either. We often hear it's about egalitarianism, the vote, resisting oppression, and women's rights, but Janice Fiamengo has documented that the lead suffragettes were actually misandric: they hated men. The first and second waves of feminism are not as laudable as we are often taught.
Interestingly, Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932) predicted a future in which sex was treated too casually. The motto was "Everyone belongs to everyone else" to encourage universal promiscuity.
In the novel, toddlers are encouraged to engage in "erotic play" to normalize sexual contact. Today, we see the sexualization of minors by educators, as well as the promotion of LGBTQ in schools, e.g. drag queen storytelling. Also, with natural reproduction replaced by laboratory reproduction, procreation isn't necessary. Now we see women freezing their eggs and undergoing in vitro fertilization.
Yes, the 1970s girls could not imagine this future, but conservative Christian thinkers warned that feminism and the sexual revolution would turn out badly. They argued that "decoupling sex from marriage, procreation, and lifelong commitment would commodify human beings, distort natural relationships, and ultimately lead to unhappiness."
Conservative moralists warned that removing societal norms surrounding sex would not create a utopia. It would create a dystopian society. And it is doing so incrementally. "Free love," it is also now understood, causes confusion and emotional harm. Their warning appears to have gone unheeded. A society cannot exist if people stop having children, and the imported workers and their children eventually outnumber the host society. And globalists want it that way; they have become very wealthy from socially engineering the death of the West.
The solution is a return to traditional marriage and reproduction. The problem is that now many men are justifiably afraid to enter into a contract that statistically has a high probability of being broken by the woman. Even "living together" is risky for men because after some years it is deemed a common law union by the courts.
You've added a lot of additional context in this essay – thanks. Plenty there to think about. I've not heard of the MGTOW movement, but it doesn't surprise me that it exists. As for Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, that's a really interesting point. I haven't read this in years. I'm now tempted to pick it up again.
I forgot to mention that in the 2nd and 3rd waves of feminism, there were two opposing feminist views of pornography:
1) The radical anti-sex feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, were against it. She and others like her were rabid misandrists and thought all men are really rapists, that sex was the same as rape, and marriage is the same as sex slavery.
For example, she wrote, "Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women." Mary Daly called for reducing men to save the planet, blaming them for all the world's problems.
They were the feminists who informed the latter-day radical misandry and gynocentrism that now characterizes many of our institutions. But they did have a point when they argued that porn harmed women and girls.
2) The other type of feminist response to porn was the pro-porn or so-called "sex-positive" stance. The one who comes to mind is the prostitute and author Annie Sprinkle.
The essence of their position is that women have "agency" and free will and can choose to be "sex workers" and that this is somehow liberating. It's certainly a way to make a lot of money for some of them. Their position became equated with anti-censorship and free speech.
But this type of feminism ignores the fact that a lot of prostitution and porn is the result of not of free will but drug addiction, desperation, manipulation, and even actual sex slavery and human trafficking.
Conclusion: The anti-sex feminists won in everyday life, because there is now less sex, marriage, and reproduction. Misandry is now a part of life for men and boys in the West, who have become emasculated by it.
The pro-porn feminists won with OnlyFans because it's a way for women and girls to be prostitutes in a way that seems to bypass pimps and is safer.
Overall, women lost on both counts. They are now unhappier than before, at least one study concluded. Prostitution comes with a serious spiritual cost, which is why many of them become drug-addicted and commit suicide. Misandry comes with a cost, too, as it ruins women's chances for marriage, family, and motherhood. They don't want emasculated feminist men; they want real men, but those men wisely avoid them.
This hypergamy creates an imbalance in the dating world, with a majority of women wanting 1% of men (big salary, 6 ft tall, handsome and fit) and ending up alone.
Lastly, feminism is wrong because, as Jordan Peterson points out, the historical narrative of women being uniquely oppressed by men is a falsehood. He argues instead that life itself was fundamentally oppressive for both sexes.
Gender roles are not designed to subjugate women; they are a naturally arising division of labour for the sake of survival in difficult circumstances. History is defined by extreme scarcity, high mortality rates, and dangerous living conditions. This was the true oppressor of humanity. Men faced danger in war and heavy labour, while women managed the dangers of childbirth, child-rearing, and home life.
To view it as men oppressing women is a Marxist interpretation. Peterson says that traditional marriage was a partnership, not a prison. Radical Marxists and feminists are against the family and marriage. They want to dissolve them. However, women who are deprived of motherhood lose out on the most meaningful experience of life. Feminism has not done them any favours.
"...The “don’t shame” phenomenon was particularly damaging. Third wave feminism and what was called “sex-positive feminism” went hand-in-hand, effectively determining anything related to “sex” or deemed “sexual” that was also technically “consensual,” was above board—off-limits in terms of criticism.
That included BDSM, pornography, stripping, pole-dancing, posting thotty photos on Instagram, prostitution, and any variety of fetish. This is ridiculous for obvious reasons. Just because a woman agrees to sell sex doesn’t mean it’s good for her or that the man paying for it is doing something ethical. This exchange and the sex trade at large is neither “good” nor ethical. And “consent” in such contexts is just a get-out-jail-free card for those who would prefer not to think about the spiritual, physical, emotional, or ethical consequences of their actions or the actions of others..."
Wasn’t sure whether to publish this one. It’s not my usual terrain, which is why I’ve framed it as a thought experiment.
When I shared part of it to Notes, it got a very angry response, which suggests this is sensitive territory.
I’ll leave comments open for a while. Happy to hear opposing views. Disagreement is fine – abuse isn’t.
I saw the response. It’s a shame she didn’t explain her angry reaction although I suppose she’s saying that people should be able to do what they want. People doing what they want in private is one thing, doing it in the full glare of the internet, in my opinion, debases and corrupts the whole of society. But then, I’m just a dinosaur 😁.
Its also a huge problem that so many people can’t disagree civilly.
The juxtaposition of prostitution as an act of despair and desparation forced to service the needs of depraved men, to then find some massive percentage of young females have only fans accounts where they profit handsomely from the fantasy life of lonely men. Two totally opposing poles!
Great topic with plenty of room for serious reflection.
That’s a very striking way of putting it, Alan. We seem to have become so inured as a society to things that would have seemed unimaginable in previous generations that I’m sometimes tempted to think we’ve lost our moral bearings entirely – and that many of our other problems may be downstream of this.
Morality has unfortunately been we thrown into the political realm: used where it is an advantage and ignored when it suits. We have so many glaring examples of this narrow focus, point scoring approach. I get quite pessimistic when I see no endeavour to critically think, avoid tribal allegence to play solely to your team or engage in good faith debate.
How do we come back to a shared humanity when so many wish to ratchet up the pressure? That's the big question.
Not many profit handsomely (I've read), most would make more money door-dashing.
I’m a member of that classroom and the thought that my grandchildren will grow to adulthood in that world, I find depressing and upsetting. The internet has many amazing attributes, one of them being that we can discuss these issues online with people from across the world. And yet there are always going to people who will debase and push things to the lowest common denominator. I suppose we will just have to find ways of teaching children to filter out and ignore the trash. But when I think of my childhood in comparison to that of today’s children, I can only feel sad.
Very interesting to hear your perspective on this – thanks. I sense there may be some recalibration underway. Cultural and technological revolutions often overshoot before they settle. Perhaps we’re still in the early stages of figuring out our norms at the intersection of sex and technology.
In 1991 - around 20 years after your thought experiment - I was sixteen. In my class, the boys would discuss girls as if they were commodities - what they were like to have sex with, what they might be like, whether they'd 'do' a particular girl, how ugly a girl was but how easy she was so it was worthwhile, etcetera. They did this in front of us. Some girls even joined in, bitching about other girls to get kudos with the boys.
We girls learned that our value lay in how attractive we were to them, how good we were at sex, how to manage the balance between slag and frigid. This was encouraged by magazines like More with its 'sexual position of the month' and Cosmo with its blow-job guides (read by teens although supposedly for adults).
In my year alone one girl got pregnant at 14, another girl, also at 14 had a long affair with a teacher in his 30s (our head of year), another was mass abused in a park by a bunch of boys in our year, only one of whom was expelled. Plus other, lesser incidents.
What's broken is that all this is now in the open. The dark thoughts of boys and the girls who comply are on-screen, in public, unashamed.
I wasn't at school in the 1970s so I can't say whether those girls would have been aghast. But I wouldn't have been in 1991. I would have said it was inevitable.
Thanks for your thoughts on this – much appreciated.
This was not happening, at least not so publicly I noticed it, at scale, at my high school in the 1980s. But I suspect there was a spectrum that existed, where different schools, different demographics, manifested different behaviors. This is certainly what you are prone to seeing if you hit puberty in the absence of any lived morality.
I did go to a fairly rough school, but I'm sure my experience isn't unique. And magazines (in the absence of the internet) definitely normalised promiscuous behaviour amongst girls, which didn't help.
I guess lived morality is a net result of family, friends, community (including school) and society (especially mass media).
I think the pro-sex feminists took over the latter, with all the smut and none of the self-respect, because, smut sells, to the detriment of girls, directly, from the content, and also to boys, who really don't need much latitude given to indulge in their baser instincts wrt sex.
Puritanical/Victorian mores take a lot of flack, but the mount of moral virtue really does have very slippery slopes.
This piece captures the emptiness, the sadness, and I think the absurdity of where we're at in terms of relationships and sex. And where we're at is disturbing, imo. There's so much to think about here.
A commercialized, consumer culture in which everything has become a commodity - to the extent that so many people see themselves and their sexuality as a "product" - how the hell did we get here? How did people become so shallow, so empty? So disconnected from the innate sacredness of loving relations?
I want to think about this some more and will likely comment more later.
Some writers of the past 20 years (Kingsley Dennis, Paul Levy, etc.) have written about something like a mind virus - Levy called it Wetiko, which was a Native American concept, of a mind/soul toxin that infects entire cultures, and it feels like they were really onto something!
I'm really glad to read this, Anna, as I almost didn't publish it. The subject is difficult to write about without getting misinterpreted, and other writers (Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, et al) cover these issues with far more expertise. Still, I wanted to say something about what many of us feel: that something terribly important has been lost. It's very sad.
It truly is. I'm glad you decided to publish this - it's important. Some people may react defensively, but it's likely because you reflected back to them something about themselves and their lives they didn't want to think about.
Some months back I read a piece from a young gen z woman who was describing the sadness and wistfulness she felt after looking at a picture of high school kids from the 80s (?) hanging out and interacting with each other, as all of us over 50 did at that age. We got together in person, had parties, cruised around in our cars, went to each other's houses, had dances, went to clubs, plays, movies - we DID stuff. We asked each other out in person! We talked face to face and solved problems in person!
She observed how engaged with each other the students in the picture looked, how happy, and she said "I've never known a world like this". She meant a world in which everyone wasn't completely focused on a little screen in their hands. That actually broke my heart a little!
https://www.theosophical.org/publications/quest-magazine/dispelling-wetiko-breaking-the-curse-of-evil
Below are some thoughts prompted by the essay above.
The author raises an important point, which is the stark contrast between the ideal of feminism and the reality of what it would turn into half a century later: the technological promiscuity and prostitution on OnlyFans, and the lack of distortion of human sexuality that accompanies pornography. At the same time, there is less actual sex and reproduction in the West than ever before, according to Census statistics.
In the 19th century in Western nations, people married in their twenties, and a woman might have anywhere from 5 to 15 children, all within the bounds of Christian wedlock, replenishing the society with people and expanding Christendom. This was the norm, but it all changed from the 1960s onward with the advent of the sexual revolution, abortion, the pill, secularization, and modern feminism.
Traditional marriage was viewed as oppressive by some leading feminists, but now their misandric movement has taken things to such an extreme that men are afraid to ask women on a date, and the MGTOW movement exists in response to the high rate of divorce (initiated mostly by women).
MeToo turned into a witch hunt that libelled men, equating a sincere compliment to sexual predation. Now Western men are afraid to approach women in person, and with good reason, leading to a decline in intimacy, marriage, and children, and resulting in a slow cultural suicide.
The MeToo ethos, although initially critical of the Hollywood casting couch, ended up as a barrier to human intimacy and reproduction that women are now complaining about: decent men do not approach them anymore, fearful of being seen as sexual predators, and this fear is not unfounded.
Another aspect of this is that when young men lack the incentive to marry and have children, many of them see no point in making a good living either, or if they do, they see no value in sharing a life with a woman who will turn around and divorce them and take their wealth and block access to their children through family courts and children's services (MGTOW). Some have become 'passport bros' seeking a love life and marriage abroad in more traditional societies like the Philippines. Western women demonized men, and men got the message: they are unwanted.
Feminists are critical of passport bros, and also MGTOW and the MRA (men's rights movement), but they created the conditions that led to these reactionary social developments. By MRAs, I do not mean Andrew Tate; I mean good thinkers like Tom Golden and Stephen Baskerville who analyze what has happened to men and women in the last half-century.
There was definitely an adverse moral and social cost as the sexual revolution unfolded, so it needed to be reigned in, but when radical feminists and MeToo put the brakes, they did so by demonizing all men as toxic and turning them away from women. They threw out the baby with the bathwater when they "smashed the patriarchy."
Reproduction rates in the West are at an all-time low, due to the decline in marriage and the normalizing of abortion, the pill and contraceptives. I myself was brought up being told there was overpopulation and you needed a good career to have children. I question both beliefs now. When I was younger, every woman I knew had at least one abortion. It was commonplace. If they eventually had children (and many did not), it was just one or two, not 5 or 15.
The rise of transgenderism is playing a role in this, too, rendering young people who would have been productive members of society and parents in a past age into confused, sterilized basket cases.
MeToo re-established constraints that had been put into place by traditional religious societies torn down by feminism, but the result is a civilization committing suicide: as fewer people have children, governments and corporations bring in labour from the third world. These are often people who do not fully assimilate and who do not share Western values -- in particular, Muslims. The slow death of the West is thanks in large part to feminism.
Early feminism is not laudable either. We often hear it's about egalitarianism, the vote, resisting oppression, and women's rights, but Janice Fiamengo has documented that the lead suffragettes were actually misandric: they hated men. The first and second waves of feminism are not as laudable as we are often taught.
Interestingly, Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932) predicted a future in which sex was treated too casually. The motto was "Everyone belongs to everyone else" to encourage universal promiscuity.
In the novel, toddlers are encouraged to engage in "erotic play" to normalize sexual contact. Today, we see the sexualization of minors by educators, as well as the promotion of LGBTQ in schools, e.g. drag queen storytelling. Also, with natural reproduction replaced by laboratory reproduction, procreation isn't necessary. Now we see women freezing their eggs and undergoing in vitro fertilization.
Yes, the 1970s girls could not imagine this future, but conservative Christian thinkers warned that feminism and the sexual revolution would turn out badly. They argued that "decoupling sex from marriage, procreation, and lifelong commitment would commodify human beings, distort natural relationships, and ultimately lead to unhappiness."
Conservative moralists warned that removing societal norms surrounding sex would not create a utopia. It would create a dystopian society. And it is doing so incrementally. "Free love," it is also now understood, causes confusion and emotional harm. Their warning appears to have gone unheeded. A society cannot exist if people stop having children, and the imported workers and their children eventually outnumber the host society. And globalists want it that way; they have become very wealthy from socially engineering the death of the West.
The solution is a return to traditional marriage and reproduction. The problem is that now many men are justifiably afraid to enter into a contract that statistically has a high probability of being broken by the woman. Even "living together" is risky for men because after some years it is deemed a common law union by the courts.
You've added a lot of additional context in this essay – thanks. Plenty there to think about. I've not heard of the MGTOW movement, but it doesn't surprise me that it exists. As for Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, that's a really interesting point. I haven't read this in years. I'm now tempted to pick it up again.
I forgot to mention that in the 2nd and 3rd waves of feminism, there were two opposing feminist views of pornography:
1) The radical anti-sex feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, were against it. She and others like her were rabid misandrists and thought all men are really rapists, that sex was the same as rape, and marriage is the same as sex slavery.
For example, she wrote, "Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women." Mary Daly called for reducing men to save the planet, blaming them for all the world's problems.
They were the feminists who informed the latter-day radical misandry and gynocentrism that now characterizes many of our institutions. But they did have a point when they argued that porn harmed women and girls.
2) The other type of feminist response to porn was the pro-porn or so-called "sex-positive" stance. The one who comes to mind is the prostitute and author Annie Sprinkle.
The essence of their position is that women have "agency" and free will and can choose to be "sex workers" and that this is somehow liberating. It's certainly a way to make a lot of money for some of them. Their position became equated with anti-censorship and free speech.
But this type of feminism ignores the fact that a lot of prostitution and porn is the result of not of free will but drug addiction, desperation, manipulation, and even actual sex slavery and human trafficking.
Conclusion: The anti-sex feminists won in everyday life, because there is now less sex, marriage, and reproduction. Misandry is now a part of life for men and boys in the West, who have become emasculated by it.
The pro-porn feminists won with OnlyFans because it's a way for women and girls to be prostitutes in a way that seems to bypass pimps and is safer.
Overall, women lost on both counts. They are now unhappier than before, at least one study concluded. Prostitution comes with a serious spiritual cost, which is why many of them become drug-addicted and commit suicide. Misandry comes with a cost, too, as it ruins women's chances for marriage, family, and motherhood. They don't want emasculated feminist men; they want real men, but those men wisely avoid them.
This hypergamy creates an imbalance in the dating world, with a majority of women wanting 1% of men (big salary, 6 ft tall, handsome and fit) and ending up alone.
Lastly, feminism is wrong because, as Jordan Peterson points out, the historical narrative of women being uniquely oppressed by men is a falsehood. He argues instead that life itself was fundamentally oppressive for both sexes.
Gender roles are not designed to subjugate women; they are a naturally arising division of labour for the sake of survival in difficult circumstances. History is defined by extreme scarcity, high mortality rates, and dangerous living conditions. This was the true oppressor of humanity. Men faced danger in war and heavy labour, while women managed the dangers of childbirth, child-rearing, and home life.
To view it as men oppressing women is a Marxist interpretation. Peterson says that traditional marriage was a partnership, not a prison. Radical Marxists and feminists are against the family and marriage. They want to dissolve them. However, women who are deprived of motherhood lose out on the most meaningful experience of life. Feminism has not done them any favours.
I saw this today and I thought it relates:
"...The “don’t shame” phenomenon was particularly damaging. Third wave feminism and what was called “sex-positive feminism” went hand-in-hand, effectively determining anything related to “sex” or deemed “sexual” that was also technically “consensual,” was above board—off-limits in terms of criticism.
That included BDSM, pornography, stripping, pole-dancing, posting thotty photos on Instagram, prostitution, and any variety of fetish. This is ridiculous for obvious reasons. Just because a woman agrees to sell sex doesn’t mean it’s good for her or that the man paying for it is doing something ethical. This exchange and the sex trade at large is neither “good” nor ethical. And “consent” in such contexts is just a get-out-jail-free card for those who would prefer not to think about the spiritual, physical, emotional, or ethical consequences of their actions or the actions of others..."
https://www.meghanmurphy.ca/p/bring-back-shame