Not directly to your point but your overall experience just reminds me: we really lost something when the sexual liberation movement was largely erased. People so often dismiss it because we’re conditioned to dismiss taking sex seriously (outside of a very narrow and specific context) but there’s a lot we lose from that.
Was it erased? We are more comfortable with porn than ever (which I wouldn’t say is okay, but definitely not prudish), and after the jews, the biggest boogie man out there is the gender lobby.
I say we’re in the next phase, and moderators (Visa, Mastercard) need to buckle up for what’s coming.
Are we (edit: 'hope that doesn’t sound antagonistic; I more meant it rhetorically)? No-Nut November has only recently dipped in the general consciousness and goon is currently trending as a pejorative. I think we’re comfortable with pushing the boundaries and with nodding and winking towards it but outright normalization has a fierce backlash.
But part of what the sex. lib. movement was about was both normalization and healthy interaction with sex, not just sexual content being prevalent. There’s plenty of unhealthy ideas and performances that the mainstream porn industry perpetuates, much of it relying on satisfying a normative and patriarchal outlook; feminist porn, for example, was/is a much more sex. lib. approach to porn (from giving women more active participation in the sex portrayed (rather than just the receptive of it) to also having the performers express their emotions more (even if minimally) and how the sex they were having made them feel).
These goals are much more in line with the emotional experience OP was describing, where it’s not just sexual content but a more healthy engagement with that sexual content as well, such as experiencing emotions and attachment. That’s part of why OP’s descriptions reminded me of it.
Mainstream porn, driven by capitalism (which isn’t to say all of us aren’t in some degree, even indie creators; sadly, that’s just the reality, right now), doesn’t care about these things.
And sex. lib. has a distinct history and activism, much of intertwined with gay liberation and…I think most people don’t know that or, like, the battles that were fought for information about safe sex, etc. I mean, it’s not unique (most people aren’t aware about disability history, for example, or events like the Capital Crawl) but it’s still deeply unfortunate.
I do appreciate the time and effort you put into the comment, but I am not arguing against what you are saying.
Since Kinsey &co and the summer of love, the movement didn’t evaporate, it perforated society and mutated. I don’t think I’d be going too far by stating, that the sexual revolution couldn’t have happened without the suffragettes. I see the queer movement as a spearhead in the same direction.
I only had qualm with you saying anything has been undone (sorry if I’m paraphrasing). Yeah, using ‘woke’ as a pejorative for anyone craving progress is a thing now, but that doesn’t mean most of us want nothing more than to love each other freely.
Mmm, I get what you mean. So often, I find myself in conversations (not ours but in general) that have certain presumptions that have been addressed by movements such as these that I feel like there’s this gap in knowledge that shouldn’t really exist but…
I think your point’s a fair argument, though; I’d certainly prefer that, at the very least.
I do understand. I find myself having to regularly check myself to look for miscommunication instead of malice (or stupidity for that matter).
The whole thing is whack, and anyone with two cents of mind and some compassion is just gaping at the horrors being casually thrown around and equally horrifying misdirections.
Thanks to the internet the only way to hide stuff is to drown it out, but we all have our trusted sources (who in turn distort reality in an infotaining world, but that’s where we’re at). This means we can more or less put the big picture together (or at least the players) and make fairly solid guesstimates.
I tell myself this is an all or nothing attempt by the ruling class to legitimize a strangle hold before any major resource wars break out and that people are really wisening up to their shenanigans. I feel ‘doomerism’ is an aspect where they can easily get me. Don’t let them win.
Tycho, of Penny Arcade, actually had some words on this subject around the time the PC version of Stellar Blade came out and people were up in arms about it. I’ll quote it here because I think it’s a good passage.
I used to say that I grew up Christian, but I think it’s probably more accurate to say Evangelical, especially now that more people might know what I’m talking about. Sex was VERY naughty and we needed to be constantly on the lookout for incursions of this secular, demonic, but also somehow worryingly inherent force…? Breaking that pernicious notion down and enabling people to express themselves was the project I thought I’d more or less seen completed. Now it’s come around some weird bend, with precisely the same energy as before, except now it’s being done for the correct reasons. It can’t possibly be this dumb. And yet!
It’s incredibly fucking boring to have the tail end of the revolution you saw win shame the tools that gave them victory, dust off a bunch of regressive shit, and then have the pluck to feel righteous about it.
It sort of mirrors my own experience (minus the evangelical upbringing). I definitely recall a period of general sex-positivity that has now come around some strange turn whereby the very same voices are admonishing people for daring to enjoy sexy things.
It’s because both sides were always divided on sex. The “beer, titties, and jesus” crowd and the anti porn feminists had been the lesser voices of their side for a while. But in the fallout of the sexual revolution, in the 70s and 80s second wave feminism developed a really anti sex stance, especially towards deviant types of sex. This was the feminist sex wars, and its the era of a lot of the more batshit bits. But it did begin with reasonable criticism. There was fighting back however, from lesbian feminist sadomasochism groups like Samois to owned porn cooperatives where radical ideas wete tried like having the entire crew be naked so the performers weren’t the only ones exposed.
People like to blame third wave feminism for the swing back, and I disagree. The third wave was the movement born of the critiques of the second wave, and the renewed push for sexual liberation in the 90s ans 00s was quintessentially third wave. And it got far, it did a lot, and it also left us with a lot to criticize. Whether it’s media criticism like Sarkeesian was harassed for daring to do, or it’s the unfortunately common stories of women being pressured into sex acts they don’t want with feminist language critiques had been mounting in the early 10s.
The theoretical fourth wave is often called twitter feminism, and i think it’s best to consider that the first real thing it did that impacted anything was the metoo movement. I believe metoo was a good thing. It’s next to the Arab spring as among the few things Twitter ever did that are good. But it and the late third wave criticisms gave room for the sex negative side to return to prominence. That’s where we are now, but I dont think it will last.
Because I think we need to remember that while there is an internal back and forth, there’s also the realpolitik of the fact that you can pull horny people if nobody else does. A chunk of gamergate is straight up that. Shining feminist media critiques through the worst possible lens to horny boys and men. Anyways the right has dropped their horny-prude coalition recently and is all in on prude, which is coinciding with chunks of the left getting tired of the dominant position of our prudes.
Anyways free the nipple, and what 20 consenting adults do behind closed doors is their right to do.
Since you seem knowledgeable, maybe I’ll bug you about something I’ve wondered about?
Did you notice a significant (huge by my measure) increase in attempts at polyamory for a period of time? As in, that trend seemed to have almost a start and an end, and a real big swell in the middle. And if so, any comments on how that fits into your timeline overview above? Some of your thoughts sound like they may point to this but I certainly don’t want to put words in your mouth.
Anecdotally, it seems to me like I watched a huge chunk of my (significantly) younger sister’s generation get themselves into plural relationships, then realize after a year or two of various attempts (often including some serious abuse) that actually they didn’t like that idea at all.
And don’t get me wrong, I absolutely encourage people to try what they are curious about, it’s a tragedy to spend a life never exploring what one might like. But that phenomena with polyamory / plural relationships in particular stuck out to me, largely because many of the people I saw try it had never previously indicated even remote interest in similar, some behaved fairly jealously toward their partners actually. It felt like a strange societal motivation, some kind of soft cultural pressure among peers, to go for it. And I personally never witnessed a positive outcome, either (which is not me saying that no one should live that way if they enjoy it, or that no one can find it genuinely fulfilling, healthy, and preferable). And for those with clear gender lines in the plural relationships, it was always polygynous - never polyandrous (please let me know if those terms are offensive). Felt like weaponized sexual liberation, frankly, by horny dudes, but that’s me making some possibly unfair leaps and introducing my own bias into the interpretation.
I guess more than anything else I was just struck by what felt like a wave in popularity, followed by an accompanying wave of “oh, nah fuck that actually, forever”. Was interesting to watch. Any thoughts?
(Disclaimer: this can be a thorny topic, anyone should feel free to correct anything I’ve misrepresented, misunderstood, or just been unkind about, I’m not a jerk on purpose usually).
Kinda, I’m actually polyamorous myself and most of my social circle still is. But I’ve heard of what you described. In my circles it’s been a lot more women lead and queer though. I think a lot of people jumped in without breaking their mental monogamy as well. Polyamory can be difficult, and for a lot of people especially those who jump in without thinking or who began their relationship monogamous it can be a spectacular shitshow, much like many relationships where incompatible desires are present or where people go in without knowing how to do it well.
I once had a relationship that I think a lot of my ex’s friends probably see as exactly like you described. We began monogamous, it was my first relationship and it was in the mid 10s, and within a year I realized monogamy wasn’t for me. So we opened up, then did full poly, got engaged, and she realized she couldn’t do poly. She pressured me into monogamy (I had been willing to call it quits) and I hated it. It was an ugly breakup that she likely blames on me pressuring her into polyamory. Funny enough a few months after the breakup when I wasn’t looking for anything serious I met someone else who’d recently had a breakup over wanting to stay poly, and we’re happily married with a clear mutual understanding that neither of us is open to closing the relationship.
Well thanks for the interesting perspective and I’m very glad to hear it wasn’t so one-sided everywhere, and that you’ve seen a lot more positives! Everything you said about causes of strife makes perfect sense to me and I would imagine those feature heavily for folks who try it out due to simple curiosity or pressure from a partner.
I would imagine, too, that sexual trends exhibit regionality and that they diffuse across regions over time and at uneven rates, much like any other cultural trend. Though of course a lot of cultural diffusion has gotten effectively instant thanks to tech - I remember “back in the day” you could travel from a (US) coast to the Midwest and find everyone basically 10-20 years behind cultural trends, from slang to hairstyles, to dress.
I wonder if relationships and dating and such, being a much slower process in general than changing styles of dress or speech, still have some of that interesting old-school slower diffusion, or more regional pockets anyway.
Anyway, enough baseless speculation from me - cheers and have a good one!
(Edit: I hope it didn’t sound like I’m calling your chosen romantic style itself a trend - I would never, when I call polyamory a “trend” I am referring exclusively to folks who did behave exactly as if it were any other fad that came and went, just with way heavier consequences)
There are novels that don’t measure up to the writing of visual novels.
There are comics that don’t measure up to the art of visual novels.
There are video games that are less engaging than visual novels.
Broad generalizations like this are so useless. It’s okay that you play one or two visual novels and they weren’t for you. I don’t particularly like visual novels either, but to discredit an entire genre because of it is just ignorant. I’ve played some visual novels that were excellent and pushed the boundaries of video games. See Slay the Princess and Doki Doki Literature Club. I’m playing Date Everything right now, it’s not exactly innovative, but I’m having fun with it.
That’s a load of crap. Visual novels are such an incredibly low bar on literally every front, if you made a comic or a novel that’s worse than a VN you’d have been actually trying to out-shit VNs.
I too claimed the games to support the cause. I randomly chose Treasure of Nadia to start and found myself really enjoying the game and story. I just finished it last week and went on to buy the developers other titles (⁀ᗢ⁀).
I would recommend it. It’s got an interesting story, problem solving, and great puzzles. There isn’t any story impacting decisions because the main character sleeps with everyone.
I’m playing the prequel to Treasure of Nadia, Lust Epidemic and don’t like it as much. It’s older and the animation isn’t as good and the story is much more rapey and cringey than TN. So it’s nice to see that the developer has grown. And also the games are connected. I’m not sure how yet, but I did meet characters from Lust Epidemic in Treasure of Nadia. I bought the latest offering from the developer, The Genesis Order, because of course it continues. But I might hold off on playing that and jump back into Expedition 33.
Man, you’re mean. You can’t recommend that without at least a warning of the box of tissues that you’ll need nearby. You’ll be responsible for water stains on desks everywhere.
The brighter purple option on the bottom gives me a flashback from one day when someone was yelling at me in Overwatch that I was not healing them, and then I died, and my death cam ended too early, so it swapped to the only living teammate. It was the person who yelled at me, emoting in the part of the map where literally nobody was. I haven’t seen that person at all for the whole match, I have no idea what they were even doing there because it took extra effort to go where they went.
I stopped playing OW in the content draught before OW2 released. But my experience back then:
As a tank
Over voice comm: Ok, we go left, to the choke. Cassidy, if you feel confident, try to take an angle from the high ground, Ana should reach you up there, but you’re alone. Get a pick, while we distract them! Spawn door opens Everyone runs away in different directions.
As a support
Tank doesn’t look for the team, constantly pushes W and nobody has ever heard of the concept of taking cover. Everyone is all over the place and health bars are melting.
As a DPS
Tank doesn’t communicate, bee lines to the choke, puts shield there and somehow their keyboard breaks, so they stand still shielding the choke, waiting for their shield to break and health bar to melt.
Sounds familiar. Sometimes when I play tank, I want to engage, so I turn around, confirm that my entire team is with me, and then I die alone on the point because in this second they decided that what we need is 4 flanks, lol. When it happens, I usually don’t even know how they left so fast. Also people who think that cover means blanket apparently, because they stand out in the open waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too far from any corner and then flame you for not shielding/healing them because it’s 100% your fault that this Cassidy engaged 1vs 5 in the middle of the room. Safe positioning? Hell no, support diff, tank diff, second dps diff, your mother diff, everything diff besides the player who does this because what could go wrong 😆 I also had situations when the tank was seeing that I play a squishy slow support/dps and when they saw that somebody decided to dive us, that person just dismantled the shield and left me there to be melted. I once was flamed by an Orisa who somehow matched all of these descriptions, so I watched the replay from their perspective and that person was not even moving the camera around, just going ahead in a straight line and kept getting flanked by players outside their field of view, but it was our fault for not healing them… amazing…
Based on the author, the bi pride flag pie chart, and the community logo, I thought this was post was about gay dating and, while a little baffling, I cordially invite you all to share my misinterpretation and think about telling your partner “I can’t heal you through walls”
I’ve gotten easily $200 worth of value out of it, and if mine broke I’d buy another one. Sometimes niche things deserve the extra price. It’s more of a problem of the world draining everyone’s disposable income for niche things like these.
congratulations on starting your journey with adult games!
i’ve found my way to it via visual novels. my initial thought were like they’re almost the same as any “teenage-romance book” but with more interaction so what could go wrong, right?
totally agree with you that there’s a lot of stigma going on around sexuality that makes people miss out on good games.
If you’re open to a platformer, the only explicitly adult game I’ve tried is FlipWitch. The gimmick is that you can change your sex, with certain obstacles only able to be passed through by a specific sex. You also have clothing that can only be worn by each sex, and certain NPCs won’t interact unless you’re wearing certain items. It’s a solid metroidvania, and while it’s not going to blow you away, I still enjoyed my time with it.
Oh yeah, I saw that one earlier and threw it on my wishlist for later. It looks pretty good. I picked up Scarlet Maiden instead for now, which is also a pixel-based naughty game, but looks to be a roguelite and is supposed to have great gameplay too.
bin.pol.social
Najnowsze