🐌 masturbation without friction is bad for women

11 Oct, 2024

disclaimer: we're talking about men attracted to women. it's the main dynamic at play here

in the pursuit of male sexual liberation, we've destigmatized masturbation. masturbating in private to your work colleagues is very much in the overton window, it's a frequent joke in mainstream pop culture, and it's defended by the (male) mainstream online, though not always spoken aloud between real people in the real world.

to lay out the current broad strokes (sorry) of the argument in favour of this norm:

jerking off to a colleague, so long as it doesn't affect your relationship with them (and stays private) is fine. what you do alone in the privacy of your own home with your own thoughts should be enshrined away from the morality police.

it's a rare bipartisan position broadly accepted by both the sexually-enlightened left, and the sexually-entitled right (though not the religious right). i was sympathetic, though put off by it, before i saw the first wave of men becoming infatuated by LLM-powered girlfriends and realized the danger we were running into. hopefully this will convince you as well.

initial assumptions

1. humans habituate to stimuli, then seek novel or more intense stimuli. reductionist, but broadly accurate.
2. masturbation, and by extension porn consumption, is a base level dopaminergic reward loop that is highly influenced by this habituation process
3. at scale, these processes can drive significant population-level proclivities, attitudes and behaviours in men that may not be explicit, but nonetheless occur¹

taking these assumptions as broadly true, we move on to an exercise i think is helpful. a spectrum of acts you should draw a line on to describe where you begin to feel uncomfortable. assume the colleague is unlikely to find out about the act.

a man masturbates using...

1. porn from a consenting porn actor
2. porn from a porn actor who has since stated they want their historical work removed from the internet
3. the thought of a work colleague
4. the memory of a lengthy, but secret, leering stare at a work colleague
5. the beach holiday pictures of a work colleague
6. a porn actor that closely resembles a work colleague
7. an AI-generated porn video with the work colleagues picture convincingly superimposed onto the porn actor
8. stolen nude photographs from a work colleagues poorly secured device
9. sexual pictures taken of the work colleague without their consent (e.g. a camera below their desk)
10. a full virtual AI girlfriend, modelled on them visually and their communications
11. a physical sex robot, modelled on the work colleague's pictures and communications
12. a full clone of the work colleague, programmed/convinced to be in a willing sexual relationship

having debated this topic a few times, most (online, male) people seem to firmly object around 7. a few common rationales come up for where people feature on the above spectrum:

1. likelihood of leakage into a real relationship
2. evidence of obsession and likelihood of increasing obsession
3. addiction and resultant atrophying social skills

we can break these down into

1. the subject of sexual interest becomes aware and is post-hoc violated by acts they didn't consent to
2. effort put into the sexual act indicates some concerning trends

effort is a fair signifier for problematic behaviours that might suggest their willingness to go further. we can easily imagine someone going to the lengths of downloading 300 instagram pictures and 1000 tweets to feed into an AI-GF program is also someone more likely to engage in behaviours like stalking, which we know to be closely linked with violence.

this is where AI comes in - effort has lost its utility as a signifier of problematic behaviour and a foundation for moral rationale. today it is a couple hours work to scrape social media to digitally clone someone as an AI. tomorrow there will be a one click service where you drop in a couple links and it spits out a digital sex doll lookalike to your colleague for a monthly subscription. not long after, you'll be able to upload that lookalike to your sex doll.

²

so effort is out the window. what about the potential for leakage? maybe keeping it simple and just masturbating to the thought of a work colleague is the solution. compartmentalize your behaviour, treat them with respect in person and jerk off to them in the comfort and privacy of your own home. maybe engage in some lucid dreaming to concoct fantasies entirely within the safety of your own mind. problem solved?

unfortunately people vastly overestimate their ability to compartmentalize. the "beauty is beastly" effect from workplace studies of gender dynamics have fairly confidently concluded that women are penalised in male-dominated fields for attractiveness, are presumed more suitable for feminine coded (often lower level) roles and reduced career advancement. there are a host of "objectification theory" studies that conclude objectification reduces moral concern for women and harms their professional prospects.

while we cannot with confidence conclude that a particular man³ will fall victim to these effects, we have to conclude that at a population level, these effects occur and are exarcerbated by the objectification of women. entitlement to sexual gratification is a commonly held and unchallenged belief among men today that must be challenged.

worse still, immediately being rewarded for the sexualisation and objectification of a woman in your proximity is only going to get worse as technology improves. in the pursuit of novelty and intensity, it is already easy for simple algorithms to pipeline porn consumers towards more extreme content. the implications applied to the aforementioned AI-GF clone are pretty unpleasant, especially when we consider the prevalance of incest content in mainstream porn today.

we arrive, i think, at the only solution to solve the moral dilemma presented in the spectrum above. the only consistent framework that can be used as a moral foundation to make decisions in these difficult circumstances. a relatively modern tool, and one that has seen broad uptake already in most other areas, especially sexual conduct - consent.

people are entitled to ownership of their bodies, digital or physical, and should not be replicated without their consent. this includes in media (voice actors replaced by AI come to mind), in porn (deepfaking people into existing content) and yes, even in fantasy (lucid dreaming/masturbating to fantasies of people you know). the conclusion, if we are to look back at our spectrum above, is to place our line of tolerance directly between 1 & 2. we should probably also rethink how we react to porn actors deciding they want their content removed in retrospect, rather than being permanently sexualised and objectified for decisions they made when they turned 18.

the moral landscape should not be defined by our assumption that the cat is out of the bag and our rights to digital autonomy have been so thoroughly violated by corporations that we have no need to respect each other's. sexual gratification is not so fundamental an entitlement that we should breach moral standards to acquire it.

sexual gratification then, should require obstacles. it is a reward mechanism, a driver, a motivator to be used in the pursuit of connection and togetherness. it should push you to risk embarassment, rejection, even danger. replacing the instrumental pursuit of reward with direct access to the reward will only deepen the underlying presumption of immediate entitlement to women's bodies without their consent.

indeed masturbation without friction is bad for women.

footnotes