- cross-posted to:
- science@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- science@beehaw.org
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I don’t give a damn what kind of porn people watch. I do care that this colors their perspective on how trans people actually live. Most of us aren’t sex workers. And most of us that are don’t do it by choice. We’re just people trying to live our lives. This kind of thinking is incredibly dangerous, as it leads to believing that someone just being themselves in public is an act of sexual exhibitionism. I didn’t transition as a sex thing. My life is not a costume. I transitioned and have lived my entire adult life as myself, worked my entire career and built my entire life around my transitioned name and gender. Rather than a 24/7 drag act, most days I’m wearing jeans and hoodie.
We’re just trying to live our lives in peace. But a bunch of perverts are using their porn habits to inform their moral judgments about an entire class of people.
This ties into a bigger issue where almost nothing related to sexuality can ever be healthy or normal to many conservatives.
Sex to these conservatives is inherently deviant and filthy. Making conscious life decisions related to sexuality or sexual identity will never be just a life decision. It will be equivalent to actively engaging in sexual acts.
Being trans to them is actively paedophilic because it exposes children to the concept of sexuality and gender. Sex ed will be paedophilic to them because it does the same. Each person’s actions are not the sole thing that defines them, but also their position in society as dictated by “what it has always been”. Men have always led households by marrying women and having kids, therefore men that don’t are a threat.
Conservatism is quite black or white when it comes to things like identity or introspection. It is an ideology that very frequently wages war on self questioning and exploration in exchange for compliance and conformism. It’s why many conservatives hate universities, scientists and partially why they hate immigrants. The entire ideology grows by appealing to people who do not want to be intellectually challenged. It’s especially attractive to those that don’t want to understand other ways of thinking.
Conservatism as an ideology always exploits the greatest potential weakness of the left wing: naivety, and presents itself as the “responsible” or “reasonable” solution to a reckless and harmful left wing. They frame things like empathy and humanitarianism as weaknesses rather than virtues.
It’s why most of the conservative rhetoric revolves around “being taken advantage of” or “being scammed by” this or that group. They love stories about immigrants exploiting the system, cheating or stealing because it proves their worldview that what’s foreign and unknown is out to get them. It is an ideology driven by fear.
And the biggest problem is that, unlike progressivism (which also has its ideological vices and weaknesses), conservatism never seeks to help the weak or empower the vulnerable. Instead it seeks to maintain the hierarchy and keep people in their place. In the US that translates to keeping immigrants weak, keeping black people down, keeping women in the kitchen, keeping white men ahead, keeping the US as an imperial power, and keeping its allies subservient.
Being trans to them is actively paedophilic because it exposes children to the concept of sexuality and gender. Sex ed will be paedophilic to them because it does the same. Each person’s actions are not the sole thing that defines them, but also their position in society as dictated by “what it has always been”. Men have always led households by marrying women and having kids, therefore men that don’t are a threat.
Our own minds will expose us to sexuality way before the age of 18 though. This is why it’s so important to have sex ed. So that kids with feelings won’t go messing around (together!) and not knowing what’s what. In Holland we’ve always had that pretty early so teenage pregnancies were super low but lately the conservative forces have also taken hold there. It’s blowing over on social media. So now a lot of parents are up in arms over it especially in the mostly religious regions.
It’s why most of the conservative rhetoric revolves around “being taken advantage of” or “being scammed by” this or that group. They love stories about immigrants exploiting the system, cheating or stealing because it proves their worldview that what’s foreign and unknown is out to get them. It is an ideology driven by fear.
Yes but it somehow seems to resonate more than it should. I wonder if some people have an innate need for being told what to do. I absolutely don’t, I’m very anti-authoritarian. But really the religious conservative life is pretty shit. You have to go to church, have all these boring life rules, you can’t have sex with other consensual adults, etc etc. Being left-wing is much more free. Yet people choose to follow religion. I think the indoctrination as a child plays a role in this but I don’t really think it would catch on so much if it didn’t fill an innate need.
People like rules that are clearly defined.
They don’t like gray areas.
Because of the cognitive work involved. People do not want to think about things. They want to know them.
It’s not about authoritarianism, it’s about the features of our brains and biology. Learning is literally a painful process for the brain and people avoid it. Not any different than how physical exercise is painful and people avoid it.
People who seek to learn, just like people who seek physical exercise, have re-wired their brain to enjoy those things than by default, they would not.
What? What the hell does transporn have to do with, 1. Your personal identity and 2. How everyone else perceives trans people? Porn is fantasy not real life.
Man, you can’t just ignore how porn molds the way people see others and what they expect of them, be it men, women or trans people
I mean ya… But this can be said about anything at all. How about the 24 hour news cycle… Just constant news all the time screaming in your face. Or flat Earth videos on YouTube… Millions of people believe the earth is flat. Or maga propaganda permeating literally everything nowadays.
We’re humans and can be easily influenced.
Furthermore I don’t see a mechanism that would support what’s being said under the original comment here that would be present in porn to support what you’re saying in context.
… How can you both understand and not understand at the same time? Are you american?
To sum it up, minorities suffer from the gaze that is cast upon them, especially if this gaze is exploitative, degrading, objectifying and made by and for the pleasure of the oppressor, thus reinforcing the oppressor’s bias against the minority.
If trans porn is the only way these men are confronted to the existence of trans people, they’d oversexualize the idea of trans, which in turn leads them to blame/despise the trans even more (because of both their conservative views and unhealthy relationship with sex), not even leaving trans people the space to be something else in their eyes than objects to jerk off to (aka “people”).
What does being American have to do with anything?
Provide a source to support what is clearly a biased opinion.
What you’re describing, objectification, is a downstream effect, not a cause. A person would already have to hold anti-trans views to behave the way you’re describing. The bias exists prior to the porn consumption, or that bias may even influence the type of content they seek out.
Roughly 7 out of 10 people in America watch porn at least occasionally. That represents a majority of the population. More than half the country is not anti-trans, which directly undermines your claim about “the perception of trans people.”
The person you are interacting with is trying to browbeat you because they don’t like what you are saying because they have some weird anti-porn beliefs, which frankly, a lot of people do. They themselves are falling trap to the ‘porn corrupts’ anti-sex narrative, while seemingly being critical of anti-sex narratives. I see this all the time.
And they are mad you are suggesting that all media corrupts, and porn isn’t some super special deeply influential thing compared to any other media consumption. You evil porn-normalizer!
Yeah, got it from the “I’m suffering, for x, y and z reasons.” “No you’re not, prove it” vibe.
The guy is clearly a troll who has no idea what he’s talking about. I went at it with him for a few more exchanges and had to block him. He was more stupid than your average idiot.
Yeah, that’s so unbelievably not fucking surprising. A weird amount of harassment I’ve gotten for being trans has been kinda (or occasionally extremely) sexual. Also the redder the area the more I get street harassment.
ETA: Oh upon reading the article, the city I’m thinking of (Lexington, KY, I basically couldn’t take a walk without being catcalled there) is in the top 10 cities.
And yeah, anti trans bigotry is interesting because it seems to be an alliance of exterminationist bigotry (“x people should not exist or should be hidden and we should work towards that goal”, examples of targeted groups include disabled people, Jewish people, and gay people) and supremacist bigotry (“x people are our lessers and must be forced into their place beneath us”, anti black racism is the classic example). You have plenty of transphobes who just want us gone no matter what, but you also have quite a few who think our place is as discreet sex workers and are mad that we are insisting we deserve to live in society as equals and do whatever work we want. They were fine with us as prostitutes, but not as mechanics, as shameful side pieces but how dare we say we deserve to be spouses.
That perspective of us is deeply entwined in the insistence that anything pertaining to us is sexual. They look at us and reduce us solely to the lens of sex then condemn us for it. Then when some of us internalize that our only value as people is as sex objects they point and say “see look, we told you”.
Same is true for men/women who exhibit strong/exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics. Often it is viewed as inviting sexual harassment under the ‘they were asking for it’ stupidity.
I think there is a lot of overlap too, with people’s perceptions of trans presentation and say bimbofication, like they see your presentation as necessarily trying to call attention to yourself. And yeah for some really douchey people they see someone in wheelchair or etc as doing the same thing and for some reason it gets them angry for having to perceive difference in others.
Its almost like a form of OCD where they hyper fixate on something that is different that entered toeir awareness and then they become upset that they are hyperfixated on it and blame the person.
But also, unpopular opinion, but I do think there has been a large adoption of the patriarchal feminine archetypes in the trans community of trying to adopt that hyper femininity that grosses me out. You shouldn’t be inspired by the sex dolls of men to be a woman.
Oh hey, yeah I have noticed a lot of that too. People do weirdly feel the need to police other people’s body parts. A lot of the straight/bi women I have dated are particularly nasty about this and will make casual commentary about strangers presentation or bodies, and it’s a total double standard if I did that.
Trans community has it’s own massive issues internally. I have noticed also there is way more support and positivity for MtF than there is for FtM, and a lot of really hostile commentary on other people’s stage of transition, or their sexuality.
Sometimes I wonder, there does seem to be a cultural obsession with gatekeeping femininity and the so-called privileges of it, and yet nobody is seeking the privileges of masculinity. There is also a huge uptick in gender sentimentalism for cis people in bother presentation and gender roles, with those of us who don’t focus on such things as being considered less than.
Article says there are more searches for trans-related keywords in GOP areas. However it doesn’t say anything about trans porn searches vs cis porn searches. It wouldn’t surprise me if conservative areas have more searches for porn in general, so all the numbers are higher. Anyway the article uses a lot of statistical jargon without seeming to check this basic issue. FAIL.
Yeah that is the case. Utah has the highest porn consumption per capita, I recall.
The more anti-porn a society is, the more they secretly consume porn.
I have noticed that there is still a huge anti-porn sentiment here as well, that of course, narrowly focuses on porn addiction and extreme genres of pron and generalizes those things as something everyone who watches porn is or must become, rather than acknowledging most porn consumption is limited/casual and porn has a ton of genres and varieties and flavors.
I am honestly not surprised.
I knew some people in the calvinist bible-belt regions in Holland (they’re very strict, a bit similar to mormon, almost amish-like in terms of strictness except not having any aversion to technology). For example washing a car on sunday is absolutely out of the question and most people wear black those days. If you don’t show up in church the whole village will hate you.
Anyway so the video rental shops in those regions were buzzing with the worst kinda porn. One of my friends managed video rental shop and he said the relative porn amount was 2-3x bigger than in the city areas.
This is for people for whom porn is highly illegal according to their religion. Somehow it causes some kind of attraction for them.
I’m very atheist and sex-positive and very much into kink, polyamory etc but it was never because of the ‘forbidden’ element for me. So I find it hard to understand that. But I’ve definitely seen it being a big thing yes.
Anything that is taboo is attractive.
Easiest way to make kids not interested in something is for their parents to do it. Easiest way to get them interested is for their parents to forbid them from it.
Pot consumption among teens is plummeting, now that it’s legalized and teens see it as something that their lame parents like doing, rather than something cool and illegal.
Also explains why all the porn of us calls us slurs. I hate it.
(Seriously, it’s so hard finding trans porn that feels like it’s for trans people instead of for people that want to dehumanize us)
I have no issue finding trans porn that isn’t dehumanizing and has no slurs.
Interesting, but not sure the data proves the headline. The best they can say is that such searches originating from red states are a significant portion of all US searches.
Obsessed: no definition or evidence to support this.
Republicans: not a definitive connection, though plausible.
I don’t want to say this is irresponsible reporting, but it’s not factually accurate either.
It’s bait. Take a vague dataset, and draw overgeneralized conclusions from it to play into people’s biases and hostilities.
And people LOVE it. They want to believe that republicans are all evil transphobes who are sitting around masturbating at trans porn all day, because it makes them feel good about themselves to setup these strawmen compare themselves too.
The truth of course, is far more nuanced and complex, but people don’t want to learn. They want to hate-masturbate and ego-stroke.
Oh and let’s not forget, all religion is bad and evil and hates sex!
Oh and let’s not forget, all religion is bad and evil and hates sex!
Nobody said that. Talk about straw men!
What are you smoking? basically every lemmy thread has that, and it’s in this thread. Lots of lemmy users are angst atheist types who are think anyone who is remotely religious is a fundamentalist and are completely ignorant of moderate or reformist sects that make up the majority of believers.
