meme is a word that was created to label the theory that ideas themselves are transmitted like pathogens and evolve as they’re transmitted from host to host as if they had genetics. it’s also where we get the use case of the word “viral” for internet popularity and both have been bastardized from their roots just like “demure”
The Selfish Gene is an excellent book and Richard Dawkins is a great writer. But, wouldn’t it be interesting if, instead of his infamy for anti-religious philosophy, the thing we remember in 100 years about Richard Dawkins is the fact that he coined the word “meme“?
honestly i wish that’s what he were famous for at this point already, his theory of memetics is grossly under appreciated and in my opinion has been a much greater cultural contribution than any of the anti religion stuff
Great post! We wrote about Pornhub's Year in Review and arrived at similar conclusions, only from the perspective of sex therapists:
"It’s not lost on me that the two biggest trends that they noticed, “demure desires” (or sexual scenes depicting modesty and/or mindfulness) and “the secret lives of Pornhub wives” (or sexual scenes involving wife, tradwives, and Mormon wives), existed in a year in which conservative movements have invested countless money and resources to market a "traditional" form of femininity."
“more niche fetishes, like … tentacle hentai, that couldn’t have existed until new technology gave them a means to develop”
and i gotta stop you right there in the name of my man Hokusai who was woodblock printing up tentacle hentai in 1814. and i doubt Hokusai invented the genre. i think he was fulfilling a preexisting demand
Why is it “bad” if what men desire to see in visual porn drives what gets shown in visual porn when men are traditionally more inclined to be aroused by visual porn?
I’m going to hope that you don’t see male sexual desires as inherently bad.
If those words start being the driving force in WRITTEN porn (which is more traditionally the variety liked by women) then I would see your point. But to me what you’re pointing out is just a market response. Don’t get me wrong - I thought your observations were on point and interesting - I just don’t see it as necessarily “problematic.”
It’s not WRONG for males, who are evolutionarily programmed to want particular things out of sex to want those things out of sex any more than the reverse would be wrong for females.
written porn is called erotica. i’m not sure of the stats but I do know that women are more into audioporn, which really wasn’t much of a thing 10-20 years ago. It’s both spoken word and ASMR together. My life has improved since I discovered it. Audioporn is much more diverse than visual porn, I’ve noticed.
Also I don’t believe there is any proof that men are programmed to want certain things out of sex. do you have any research on that?
There is tons of research about what males and females want out of sex. We’re programmed by evolution to have completely different mating strategies. Mind you I’m talking statistically here. Obviously there will be outliers but in general this is pretty well-trodden territory.
Think about the following:
For a female human making a new person costs 9 months and brings with it a very real chance of death. Even without dying it can be very hard on health. It’s a serious danger.
For a male human it takes an ounce of protein and four minutes if you’re lucky (that’s a little joke but you get my point).
There’s just no way those two genetic variants can be programmed to have the same mating strategy and have the species be evolutionarily viable.
A female’s best strategy is to be very selective about whom she mates with because reproduction is incredibly costly.
A male’s best strategy is to mate with as many females as possible as often as possible because mating is incredibly cheap.
This CANNOT lead to the same mating strategy from an evolutionary perspective.
I am speaking of humans as animals, here, because we ARE animals even though we have a complex social structure. But that social structure was built within the confines of evolution. People always want to forget that we’re still animals so I feel like it’s worthwhile to remind them.
The audioporn thing is super interesting. Thank you for taking the time to teach me about it.
My MA in anthro is now twenty years old. However, FWIW my thesis topic was on human mating. I know that’s likely not satisfactory on its own but my overall point is that any article I could cite is going to be older still. But I’m not sure how someone versed in the field could argue with the points I listed above with a straight face.
This is not some Andrew Tate bullshit. When I was in college these ideas were pretty well worn.
Edit: hmmm… “well worn” isn’t really what I want here. Well established might be better.
You’re not upsetting me. You should absolutely ask to see the receipts! That’s only fair in science (even if, maybe especially if the science is as soft as anthropology). I teach science now and absolutely encourage my students to question everything and everyone- especially me.
The problem is that I don’t have anything immediately to hand to offer. You might try Helen Fisher, who was someone I met back in the day and whose work I liked quite a bit. Other than that I’ll need some time to look things up if you want more specifics but what I’m putting together here is somewhat of a conglomeration of what I’ve learned over the years. I wasn’t expecting a thesis defense this evening. 😉
So maybe start with Fisher and I’ll see what I can remember.
But there’s another thing. A lot of this stuff is no longer in vogue in anthropology. It may still be in evolutionary psychology but political correctness and other more recent social movements have made this kind of stuff now unpopular on the left. When I was in college it was only unpopular on the right.
Because academia is left leaning, when something goes out of vogue there it sort of disappears. So you will likely find other opinions today that disagree (which is fine but that doesn’t make them right).
The Kinsey studies probably had solid research on this as well although that is WAY out of style.
I’ll look and if I find something of particular interest I’ll post it. Please know I have taken absolutely no offense and if my tone seemed so I apologize. I will say that it is VERY hard on the internet today to express views on anything human sexuality related when you look like me.
“Donald John Trump, the twice-impeached, thrice-indicted 45th President of the United States, died on December 29, 2024, mere weeks before he was set to be sworn in for a catastrophic second term. His death, while tragic for those still entranced by his cult of personality, offers a much-needed reprieve for a nation and world terrorized by his existence. He was 78.” Read more…
There was some dude commenter here saying perversion was programmed into dudes by evolution.
The Long Game schooled him in how stupid that was. We also let him know that the dude excuse of "guys like quantity while women like quality" is ridiculous because quantity is incredibly wasteful and destructive while quality is efficient and uses resources logically and wisely. Dude opinion on reproduction is pretty much irrelevant, as their part and it is negligible. Their part is to support the woman.
And the whole conversation was deleted. That's actually a better outcome than we hoped for.
Do we think this could be also pointing to the argument of nature vs. nurture? Are we born like this or do we learn it at some point? Either way I also think it's a mix of both. Very interesting. Great read. Thanks.
We’re likely to see a great deal of tension over the next 18 months between the traditional, religious pro-purity culture right and the MAGA/MAHA right. The fetishization of the tradwife will be an interesting thing to watch and analyze.
It definitely seems to be a combination of both in my eyes. Cultural trends can certainly influence desires, but at a deeper level, these trends, as you expressed already, seem to speak to something we already had within us that was waiting to be unearthed. Especially so with something as mystical as desire, it's not hard to hold on to unrecognised wants that become quite attractive (pardon the pun) when finally recognised, such as the case with these cultural trends.
You really can't take a google ngrams chart as your research and call it a day. Much like the poor only show up in ancient history when priests and nobles mention them, kinks before the internet (perhaps a bit earlier than that) are quite opaque.
I love factually driven this was, it doesn’t draw specific conclusion in itself but the facts are written in such a way that certain conclusions are drawn automatically in our heads I loved this post <33
I have a lowkey theory that the rise of pseudo-incest porn and cuckold porn is tied directly to 'cuck' becoming an insult in 2014-'16. But that this also reflects very old threads in authoritarianism and strong hierarchies. Incest was and is not an uncommon thing amongst the 'nobility' whether that's a long-running monarchic dynasty or a multigeneration plantation family. But you see this preoccupation with familial sexuality through multiple threads. The 'purity' and 'promise' rings that some evangelicals get into. The brother that gets hyperaggressive towards anyone interested in his sister. The father making 'jokes' about killing a boyfriend.
“more than just mere memes: they’re ideas”
meme is a word that was created to label the theory that ideas themselves are transmitted like pathogens and evolve as they’re transmitted from host to host as if they had genetics. it’s also where we get the use case of the word “viral” for internet popularity and both have been bastardized from their roots just like “demure”
The Selfish Gene is an excellent book and Richard Dawkins is a great writer. But, wouldn’t it be interesting if, instead of his infamy for anti-religious philosophy, the thing we remember in 100 years about Richard Dawkins is the fact that he coined the word “meme“?
honestly i wish that’s what he were famous for at this point already, his theory of memetics is grossly under appreciated and in my opinion has been a much greater cultural contribution than any of the anti religion stuff
Another banger post!!! This was so interesting
Great post! We wrote about Pornhub's Year in Review and arrived at similar conclusions, only from the perspective of sex therapists:
"It’s not lost on me that the two biggest trends that they noticed, “demure desires” (or sexual scenes depicting modesty and/or mindfulness) and “the secret lives of Pornhub wives” (or sexual scenes involving wife, tradwives, and Mormon wives), existed in a year in which conservative movements have invested countless money and resources to market a "traditional" form of femininity."
Here's a link to our full post: https://sexvangelicals.substack.com/p/why-banning-pornhub-doesnt-actually
Just subscribed to the Etymology Nerd. Excited to read more!
This comment blew my mind. Thank you for the insight! 🙌🏻🙏🏻
“more niche fetishes, like … tentacle hentai, that couldn’t have existed until new technology gave them a means to develop”
and i gotta stop you right there in the name of my man Hokusai who was woodblock printing up tentacle hentai in 1814. and i doubt Hokusai invented the genre. i think he was fulfilling a preexisting demand
We’re in psychoanalysis territory now. You would really enjoy Lacan if you haven’t already. This is super in alignment with his ideas.
Why is it “bad” if what men desire to see in visual porn drives what gets shown in visual porn when men are traditionally more inclined to be aroused by visual porn?
I’m going to hope that you don’t see male sexual desires as inherently bad.
If those words start being the driving force in WRITTEN porn (which is more traditionally the variety liked by women) then I would see your point. But to me what you’re pointing out is just a market response. Don’t get me wrong - I thought your observations were on point and interesting - I just don’t see it as necessarily “problematic.”
It’s not WRONG for males, who are evolutionarily programmed to want particular things out of sex to want those things out of sex any more than the reverse would be wrong for females.
I'm saying male sexual desires are a driving force in ALL social media content, not just in porn.
written porn is called erotica. i’m not sure of the stats but I do know that women are more into audioporn, which really wasn’t much of a thing 10-20 years ago. It’s both spoken word and ASMR together. My life has improved since I discovered it. Audioporn is much more diverse than visual porn, I’ve noticed.
Also I don’t believe there is any proof that men are programmed to want certain things out of sex. do you have any research on that?
There is tons of research about what males and females want out of sex. We’re programmed by evolution to have completely different mating strategies. Mind you I’m talking statistically here. Obviously there will be outliers but in general this is pretty well-trodden territory.
Think about the following:
For a female human making a new person costs 9 months and brings with it a very real chance of death. Even without dying it can be very hard on health. It’s a serious danger.
For a male human it takes an ounce of protein and four minutes if you’re lucky (that’s a little joke but you get my point).
There’s just no way those two genetic variants can be programmed to have the same mating strategy and have the species be evolutionarily viable.
A female’s best strategy is to be very selective about whom she mates with because reproduction is incredibly costly.
A male’s best strategy is to mate with as many females as possible as often as possible because mating is incredibly cheap.
This CANNOT lead to the same mating strategy from an evolutionary perspective.
I am speaking of humans as animals, here, because we ARE animals even though we have a complex social structure. But that social structure was built within the confines of evolution. People always want to forget that we’re still animals so I feel like it’s worthwhile to remind them.
The audioporn thing is super interesting. Thank you for taking the time to teach me about it.
My MA in anthro is now twenty years old. However, FWIW my thesis topic was on human mating. I know that’s likely not satisfactory on its own but my overall point is that any article I could cite is going to be older still. But I’m not sure how someone versed in the field could argue with the points I listed above with a straight face.
This is not some Andrew Tate bullshit. When I was in college these ideas were pretty well worn.
Edit: hmmm… “well worn” isn’t really what I want here. Well established might be better.
You’re not upsetting me. You should absolutely ask to see the receipts! That’s only fair in science (even if, maybe especially if the science is as soft as anthropology). I teach science now and absolutely encourage my students to question everything and everyone- especially me.
The problem is that I don’t have anything immediately to hand to offer. You might try Helen Fisher, who was someone I met back in the day and whose work I liked quite a bit. Other than that I’ll need some time to look things up if you want more specifics but what I’m putting together here is somewhat of a conglomeration of what I’ve learned over the years. I wasn’t expecting a thesis defense this evening. 😉
So maybe start with Fisher and I’ll see what I can remember.
But there’s another thing. A lot of this stuff is no longer in vogue in anthropology. It may still be in evolutionary psychology but political correctness and other more recent social movements have made this kind of stuff now unpopular on the left. When I was in college it was only unpopular on the right.
Because academia is left leaning, when something goes out of vogue there it sort of disappears. So you will likely find other opinions today that disagree (which is fine but that doesn’t make them right).
The Kinsey studies probably had solid research on this as well although that is WAY out of style.
I’ll look and if I find something of particular interest I’ll post it. Please know I have taken absolutely no offense and if my tone seemed so I apologize. I will say that it is VERY hard on the internet today to express views on anything human sexuality related when you look like me.
i second this
💀💀💀
𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗢𝗕𝗜𝗧𝗨𝗔𝗥𝗬 𝗢𝗙 𝗗𝗢𝗡𝗔𝗟𝗗 𝗝. 𝗧𝗥𝗨𝗠𝗣
𝗜𝗻 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗝𝗶𝗺𝗺𝘆 𝗖𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗿, 𝗮 𝗟𝗶𝗳𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗖𝗼𝗿𝗿𝘂𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝗖𝗿𝘂𝗲𝗹𝘁𝘆, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗼𝘀
“Donald John Trump, the twice-impeached, thrice-indicted 45th President of the United States, died on December 29, 2024, mere weeks before he was set to be sworn in for a catastrophic second term. His death, while tragic for those still entranced by his cult of personality, offers a much-needed reprieve for a nation and world terrorized by his existence. He was 78.” Read more…
https://open.substack.com/pub/patricemersault/p/the-obituary-of-donald-j-trump?r=4d7sow&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
There was some dude commenter here saying perversion was programmed into dudes by evolution.
The Long Game schooled him in how stupid that was. We also let him know that the dude excuse of "guys like quantity while women like quality" is ridiculous because quantity is incredibly wasteful and destructive while quality is efficient and uses resources logically and wisely. Dude opinion on reproduction is pretty much irrelevant, as their part and it is negligible. Their part is to support the woman.
And the whole conversation was deleted. That's actually a better outcome than we hoped for.
Do we think this could be also pointing to the argument of nature vs. nurture? Are we born like this or do we learn it at some point? Either way I also think it's a mix of both. Very interesting. Great read. Thanks.
We’re likely to see a great deal of tension over the next 18 months between the traditional, religious pro-purity culture right and the MAGA/MAHA right. The fetishization of the tradwife will be an interesting thing to watch and analyze.
It definitely seems to be a combination of both in my eyes. Cultural trends can certainly influence desires, but at a deeper level, these trends, as you expressed already, seem to speak to something we already had within us that was waiting to be unearthed. Especially so with something as mystical as desire, it's not hard to hold on to unrecognised wants that become quite attractive (pardon the pun) when finally recognised, such as the case with these cultural trends.
You really can't take a google ngrams chart as your research and call it a day. Much like the poor only show up in ancient history when priests and nobles mention them, kinks before the internet (perhaps a bit earlier than that) are quite opaque.
https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?attachments/1609887293897-png.1688/
creampie hahaha
I love factually driven this was, it doesn’t draw specific conclusion in itself but the facts are written in such a way that certain conclusions are drawn automatically in our heads I loved this post <33
I have a lowkey theory that the rise of pseudo-incest porn and cuckold porn is tied directly to 'cuck' becoming an insult in 2014-'16. But that this also reflects very old threads in authoritarianism and strong hierarchies. Incest was and is not an uncommon thing amongst the 'nobility' whether that's a long-running monarchic dynasty or a multigeneration plantation family. But you see this preoccupation with familial sexuality through multiple threads. The 'purity' and 'promise' rings that some evangelicals get into. The brother that gets hyperaggressive towards anyone interested in his sister. The father making 'jokes' about killing a boyfriend.