Society feels so porn obsessed these days

I'm really sorry to hear this, OP. I have the feeling that I am at least a couple of decades older than you and I really feel for women of your age / younger / teenagers like my DDs. Not just the watching and discussing of porn but that the men seem to have no boundaries about where / when they talk about it. Personally I would feel a sense of violation if this came up on my Whatsapp etc.
Can you start challenging them on what they say and do?

We can’t turn the tide I don’t think. It’s horrible but it’s capitalism. The commodification of sex.

How I hate how porn and ‘sex work’ is not only acceptable but is celebrated. Depressing.

OP, this is all so grim, it really is. How do we turn the tide? I think it has to be a combination of things; some of the suggestions already made, and women consistently speaking out and not buying into or going along with this bullshit. Those of us with less to lose and more life experience (already had our kids / in relationships / stable livelihoods) can do so much more easily and this is how clever all of this shit is. Those who speak out can easily be dismissed as prudes / past it because of how society already views us. Do these idiots honestly believe all these women on OF love it and are simply being paid to do what they love anyway? Do they think their barber loves standing on his feet all day for low pay making small talk too? Don't they realise that part of the job is making people feel comfortable? How much business would you get on OF if you went on and said, 'here I am humiliating myself for your enjoyment because my parents can't afford to support me through uni and I'm desperate for a better life.' Sadly and perversely probably still quite a bit actually!

I appreciate that narratives around sex being shameful are not healthy or helpful but that shouldn't mean all sex under all circumstances should be celebrated. These pathetic losers need to be told, clearly, by those close to them just how vile they are.

I recognise it is easy for me; I have my family, my partner, my career, I am not in any way dependent on men seeing me as a good egg or whatever and I genuinely do not care. I cannot imagine a scenario where any man I know would share their views of porn or porn stars or OF or whatever with me either face to face or in a WA group. They would all know exactly what reaction they would get. This is the problem; these idiots really don't seem to grasp how vile this is and I too am baffled as to how we got here. I generally try hard to have empathy and understanding but I honestly do hope that all these men you have described here develop serious erectile dysfunction and are miserable for it.

Sons are now pimping out their mothers:

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9538737/Son-19-set-Onlyfans-account-saucy-mother-pocket-profits.html

Who knows how much truth there is to this and how much is just PR but the way porn and sex work is mentioned in such a matter of fact way

The number of women who now work in the industry (in one way or another) is hard to get your head around

I find the thought staggering just how much porn there is. There must be several million women in the world who have been in some sort of porn video. But you never hear from them.

I was just reading a Pink News article about a young gay porn star who has died tragically young (22). It was so weird how it was reported as if working in the porn industry is just another career choice that a young person might make.

"AVN reported Riley was born and raised in Dallas, Texas and reportedly wanted to be involved in the adult film industry from a young age."

www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/05/14/gay-porn-star-alex-riley-dies-22-helix-studios/

It all sounds... empty and unfulfilling doesn't it.

It almost seems as though people don’t have a notion of what romantic, love-sex feels like given that porn/ making money from having sex with other people ‘because you like sex’ seems to be considered the norm instead. This age group traditionally was the romantic one.

It is very interesting to read your post because it is almost beyond my comprehension.

Though I am much much older, as you would guess, I had a perfectly bohemian background and at university spent plenty of time around a lot of young, university men. It was the era of new freedoms too, so I am not speaking from the point of view of someone who was not part of the equivalent world several generations ago.

Relationships were seemingly more intense emotionally with sex that was not just a process of separate titillation and orgasm which (apparently) needs kink to create sensation judging by the porn and what is being copied from it.

For all that was wrong then too - and of course there were rapes, prostitution, under age sex, harassment, unmentioned child abuse- who would guess that all along there was a state of privilege among this group in some ways compared to now.

I really dislike to use a woman’s sexual attractiveness in a negative way, but would these men be so happy if it was Bella Emberg who was paying for dick pics or sex? That’s the reality of sex work and the reverse equivalent.

Something for your mates OP...

filia.org.uk/latest-news/2021/5/12/onlyfans-the-path-to-legitimising-pornography

I agree. Just recently I was at dinner at some friends' and a (single) guy who was there, who I had met not 10 minutes prior, started casually talking about porn and kink as if it were some sort of cultural milieu like film or literature. And recently, some male colleagues have started making some off-colour, porn-related jokes in a group work chat. Is it the pandemic? I found both very bizarre and wonder if these men think that we find that totally normal? It instantly makes me imagine them spending the last year of lockdown furiously masturbating in a grubby apartment to images of women being degraded, and I see them in a much creepier, more pathetic light.

I would also suggest FDS - sure, maybe some of the rhetoric might be a bit angry but there's also a lot of humour and it's nice to see a large community of women who are done with the idea that porn, SW, one night stands etc are empowering for women.

That is interesting H20Conoisseur.

Do you think these same men would feel at ease if their girlfriends were doing OF? Or do people not tend to have love relationships so to speak?

Yes I'd be interested in what they had to say to that point.

“Worldgonecrazy

Keep reminding the men that they can do gay only fans work”

Do you know if anyone has pointed this out to the men in your WA groups H20conoisseur?

Keep reminding the men that they can do gay only fans work and It doesn’t matter if they find the customer sexually repulsive as that’s how the women feel too,

I think a lot of men still believe women find most of them sexually attractive.

Maybe reminding them of the reality of what the women are actually doing to make money will make them start thinking a bit more?

I hope all the investigations taking place as a result of Everyone's Invited will highlight the issues with porn. The schools are fighting a losing battle with the wider culture.

“SmokedDuck
Anytime something as powerful as the sex drive is given what seems like total consequence free space, and no really coherent, inherent ethical constraints, you have a high chance that it will become out of control.“

Yes, I agree. Anything so easily affecting the primitive, highly sensitive, delicate, limbic system(? If I have the correct region of the brain) can lead to desensitisation and loss of control.

It is like food with sugar but no nutrition. The addictive process is partly a sort of starvation. The more you get the hungrier you are.

No relationship, no human contact, no even potential procreation, no achievement to go with the sex, no need to compete against other men, no energy to sublimate towards achieving some goal must eventually mean emptiness.

I was wondering, if the sexual instinct is a form of energy that drives men on, in an abstract way, to try to be the best, to be vigorous, to strive for things in life, what happens when that energy is all dissipated inwards towards the self in front of a screen?

Will impossible bridges still be built etc?

What do men feel like who can’t control their own mind but instead are ruled by their physiological trigger responses to content someone else has set up for them?

What happens to their own imagination and dreams?