this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
856 points (98.5% liked)
Not The Onion
20984 readers
2659 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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.
Project 2025 literally has as one of its planks the idea that simply living life as a trans person is a pornographic act. This belief comes from men who see being trans and being pornographic as one and the same. Where do you think that belief comes from?
Not from transporn. That's for sure. These assholes watching transporn is a symptom of what makes people believe in maga, nationalism and project 2025 in the first place. The porn comes after the indoctrination.
Hold on... Hold on. I know. But think about it. If you're some bloke pulling your pud to transporn and liking it you're not going to all of the sudden become a conservative.
But if you're a maga asshole conservative and you're being bombarded by anti trans bullshit and go on the internet, you know... Just to take a look to see what the fuss is all about... Then all of the sudden dang that's hot where's the jergens.
🤷
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 don't know, I'm very sex-positive and I enjoy porn. Sometimes I even learn new things I like from it. I don't think for a minute that it's real and I would not apply it to vanilla people (my more kinky friends however yes if I know they're into something).
I don't really think my stepsister will get stuck in the washing machine. Does it form sexual behaviour and practices? Probably yes. I'm sure a lot of people try squirting now, which was popularised in porn. Is that bad? No, I don't think so at all. Why would it be? Sex knows fashions just like other human behaviour.
It's not about people thinking whether it's fiction or not, it's about whether porn is the only way these people will be confronted to something they don't know and have biases against and, yes, porn is fiction, but you're presuming that everybody has a sane approach to fiction. Have you not been in a post-truth regime enough, yet?
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.
I'm talking about you. You are the problematic person in this exchange, especially exhibited by your need to insult and demean the other user because of your refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of their points and push your logical leaps and over-generalization that trans porn consumption is necessarily awful.
I never said trans porn or watching porn was awful. It's not about the content, in that case. It's about the audience.
What audience?
... Are we commenting on the same topic? In that case, american republicans
I'm an American. I've voted Republican.
So I must necessarily hate trans people or something if I watch trans porn? Is that your thesis?
Well, you do hate trans people and other minorities if you've voted for your current fascist president and his fascist Project 2025, yes.
Once again, you choose not to understand what is right in front of your eyes, so you're either:
1)Straight american brainrotten male, 2)autistic and need precise scientific references to believe something (too bad your president has forbidden it). 3) Conservative and incapable of good faith.
You are making a very specific claim, so support it. Otherwise you're just talking out of your ass, which you objectively are.
It is beyond obvious that you have a very strong bias against whatever you believe America is, and you are using the exact same tactic a MAGA conservative uses to support their ideology, which makes you no better. You even brought up autism, which is offensive and completely out of context.
Now, with that said, do you have any way to refute my claim that objectification is a downstream effect of MAGA indoctrination?
Nah, I'm talking as a homosexual man exposed to the same kind of effects than the trans person poster: funjoshi fiction, or how straight women appropriate male homosexuality to make and project their uninformed and socially unrealistic fantasies, make a profit off it and shape the perception of the mass about male homosexuality, erasing centuries of oppression as if we had no history (or were all 14 y.o. cocky teenage girls in adult male bodies). Fiction is not real, but when it's all you get and accept as a representation of a community, it is bound to influence one's perception of said community, like propaganda does.
Autism is not offensive, it's a reality. Some people are autistic and function differently.
Objectification isn't a product of maga indoctrination, it is a human phenomenon shared by the entirety of the political spectrum. With liberals, for instance, it exists through tokenization of minorities, for a comforting feeling of moral superiority while doing nothing to help. With right-wing people, it allows to deny the humanity of the targeted minority, reinforcing demonization and the creation of an "enemy from within".
I do have a problem with americans and can't wait for them to finish crumbling. They've hurt the world enough.