It's been a good, long while since I last spent time combing through the highlights of this thread. I'll recuse myself from responding to months-old highlights I wanted to add my $0.02 to, and instead contribute something about m*les that drove me up a wall recently.
I fucking hate the crabs-in-a-bucket mentality that moids have whenever someone in their circle of friends, IRL or online, decides to actually quit pornography. To be sure: the reasons are almost always self-centred, it's about quitting for their betterment and not primarily driven by the horrifying exploitation of women and children at all levels, from studio-grade productions to self-produced amateur shit. That is detestable in itself, but I would argue that as long as the man in question makes an earnest effort to quit, succeeds, and stays clean, that is a victory worth celebrating... or at least congratulating. I know dudes who had serious issues with hard drugs who got clean and stayed clean to this day, and they certainly weren't motivated by the endless chain of exploitation, suffering, and violence that perpetuate amphetamine, cocaine, and opioid abuse. There's absolutely nothing controversial about that, and most guys I know would gleefully celebrate such milestones of sobriety while pointing out that it's good that they're off the junk once and for all. I personally view it as "kick the junk first, then stay clean, then atone for your callousness toward the exploitation that enabled your addiction later."
Go anywhere near porn, however, and suddenly it's a fucking screeching contest over which scrote can bellow and bluster about why porn isn't that bad, why targeting porn sites for age verification is a slippery slope, freedom of speech laws, release valves for latent sex offenders, the list goes on and on. It doesn't matter how well you can deconstruct the argument because a gooner's a gooner at the end of the day. Someone in the group chat says "hey guys, I'm quitting porn because I have a problem that's consuming my life," and the next thing you know, there's a fucking onslaught of thirst traps, ecchi, outright hentai, big booty Latina reels, "I HAVE A MIGHTY NEED" and Ron Simmons DAMN! GIFs in response, etc, and it's fucking aggravating. Yeah, far be it from a maladjusted SOB in the group chat trying to seek solidarity and brotherhood from people he has proximity toward. Post memes of Marcus Aurelius as a Wojak extolling the virtues of stoicism, get into dry ass conversations about the latest political happening, but then post memes of alt e-girls where their link's in the fucking bio, and of course it leads to a goddamn OnlyFans.
What fucking incentive is there to even bother seeking refuge and solidarity in the scrotes you interact with most if they're so brain-rotted from a lifetime of constant porn consumption since they were in 5th/6th grade? You rock the boat too much, they fucking bring you back in line to make sure that the same, fucked-up status quo is maintained. There's no fucking reason why any sensible man who actually wants to make good on the desire to quit porn once and for all to even bother telling another man, regardless of whether or not he's your ride or day since day 1. Obviously, the solution is to ditch the "friend" group altogether and find new douchebags to hang out with, but therein lies the problem: the plague of pornography addiction and consumption is so fucking omnipresent that it's nearly impossible to find someone who's willing to humour you, let alone provide a courtesy of not spamming group chats and the general Discord server chat with fucking pornography.
Will all moids and scrotes ultimately end up like Giggly Goonclown? Probably not. But for every 1 publicly visible gooner under the age of 25, there's like 100 more dudes out there who outwardly profess seething hatred toward pornography, demand its banning, and then jump through hoops via VPN or Tor to get their fix. Religion's a contentious subject to talk about these days, but like... there's a fucking reason why lust is a cardinal sin in basically every goddamn religious tradition on the planet. Not to mention that you're already like 2-3 steps shy of becoming exactly like Giggly Goonclown if you're literally skulking through OnlyFans rip sites, tube sites, hentai sites, and skulking lewd Instagram pages to get your fix. I get absolutely no fucking joy in being this venomous, I want to believe in that old dharmic cliche of how the capacities for infinite good and infinite evil exists within the hearts of all sentient beings, but internet pornography itself became the strongest veil of Maya that these delusional freaks refuse to lift. Hell... I'm 90% sure they'd fucking fetishise their own fucking descent into hedonistic psychosis if given a platform to spread their shame.
To be clear: I ain't holier than any other jack-off I'm ranting about. If anything, I'm just as fallible, fickle, and fucked-up as any other douchebag. What I take exception to is the fucking hypocrisy and the genuine desire to be enabled in all their worst tendencies.
