Social Media's Pornographic Subterfuge

Desire Digest 008: Not another Sabrina Carpenter essay, why IG models are lying about having Down syndrome and some thoughts on "Adolescence."

Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

You might notice that the URL looks a bit different. I recently bought a new domain to redirect to this here newsletter: www.sexual-culture.com. A clean and simple representation of what I write about here! I bought it to circumvent some of the suppression of Substack we see on Twitter, and also just because I thought I should own that domain. You can still find me at magdalene.substack.com, and for now, I’ll be remaining as Many Such Cases.

I am also just about to hit 15,000 total subscribers, which I am ecstatic about. I have so much more lined up for the coming weeks, including a few of my longest pieces yet. For now, I have just a quick one from me this week. Thank you all for being here.

Why Instagram Is Filled With Fake Porn Ads

an unfortunate YouTube video documenting the below phenomenon

A few weeks back I wrote that the Tech Oligarchy Is Stealing Your Sexuality. Whenever I write about this sort of thing — algorithms — I run the risk of outing myself as the pervert in question. Whatever weird thing I find on Reels, for example, has at least partially been curated for me in mind, with Instagram assessing my behavior on the app to get my attention. If your whole “Explore” page is entirely women with big butts, it is probably because you’re often clicking on pictures of women with big butts. And I mean, guilty! Right now, though, my feed is mainly what’s new at Trader Joe’s, critical theory memes, fitness content and yes, the occasional baddie. But if I were to give a few swipes through, I’d quickly find content that I wouldn’t say aligns much with my personal interests at all… like, say, balloon fetishism, or women promoting OnlyFans content who appear to have Down syndrome.

Now obviously, it’s totally possible that my Instagram has clocked me as a sex writer. These are all topics that are at least interesting to me on a professional level. But when I poke around the Explore pages of others or see what people are talking about on X, I quickly learn that a lot of people’s feeds are starting to look the same. The balloon fetish stuff, or content where people are put inside giant inflatable suits, is mostly harmless and novel. The Down syndrome stuff, however, tells me a bit of a different story.

The problem isn’t that women with Down syndrome are utilizing their sexuality for profit — though that would undoubtedly provide a plethora of ethical questions to consider. The problem is that the women with Down syndrome in these videos do not actually exist. Instead, someone out there is taking videos of women without Down syndrome and editing their faces. Some women might even be doing this with their own videos.

In the similar theme, women in their 20s are making videos claiming to be in their 50s, and cis women are putting bulges in their shorts and pretending to be trans. I’m not actually sure much of the target audience of these videos is supposed to be aroused. All of these lies have one explicit purpose: to get clicks. The more people who view the video and stare at it long enough trying to figure out if what’s being said is genuine, the more people will ultimately click the link in the bio and pay for an OnlyFans subscription where the content is similarly fake — even if that follow-through rate is microscopic, it’s still something.

Meanwhile, the apps themselves know you’re being deceived. They know that there is some sort of off element that makes people look at the video just a little too long, and every additional second they’ve got your attention is another second they can hold over you.

There is obviously some portion of these videos that are intended to arouse, but again I don’t believe that is the primary goal. I don’t think that these Down syndrome edits are primarily meant to bank on a fetish for intellectual disabilities or to further proliferate one. Instead, they are shared and grow popular on Instagram out of a sort of morbid curiosity. The taboos are just off-limits enough, the edits, effects and lies just within the far realm of believability. And maybe with all this, some desire or fetishization does emerge. But like the rest of the tech oligarchy’s grip on our attention and sexuality, it is not rooted in anything real.

Not Another Sabrina Carpenter Essay

Enough has probably already been said about Sabrina Carpenter, the Polly Pocket-esque pop singer who flaunts a fun and flirty cartoonish type of sexuality. At a recent show in Paris, she was photographed miming the “Eiffel Tower” sex act involving two men. A lot of people found it to be anti-feminist, accusing Carpenter of using her sexuality for male attention. Some called her “hypersexual” and “male centric” and said her behavior wasn’t liberating.

My unsolicited take is that sex and sexuality do not have to be liberating. We do not somehow “owe” it to other women to position every act of pleasure as empowering or improving the feminist cause. Yes, of course some women do subject themselves to the male gaze and male desires in a way that does harm other women and themselves. Sabrina Carpenter posing around on stage for an audience that is almost definitely not straight men is not a case of this. I think she’s really just making a joke! Women are allowed to do that! Even about sex!

Nevertheless, I don’t personally find her all that erotic. Her displays of sexuality, from these sorts of moves to her cute outfits, are all referential. She’s suggesting a look someone else already wore, an ironic sex position, a common innuendo. There’s nothing fresh in the “desire” on display. And that is also totally fine.

Yes, I Am Also Watching Adolescence

I’m not done with it yet, but like everyone else, I too have been watching the British drama new to Netflix Adolescence. For the unfamiliar, the mini-series follows the aftermath of a 13-year-old boy who allegedly stabbed a female classmate to death after being radicalized by the furthest reaches of the Manosphere online. All the usual conceptual subjects are mentioned: Andrew Tate, the belief that 80 percent of women are attracted to only 20 percent of the men, et cetera. I don’t quite yet know what to make of it all, but I’ve appreciated thus far that the show doesn’t try to identify a scapegoat. The boy wasn’t simply born rotten, nor does he have a bad home life. He was eased into digital hatred much in the way we fear any developing mind potentially could.

The show’s co-creator and writer Jack Thorne “said he drew from smaller, more hidden influences when piecing together Jamie’s worldview,” per The Washington Post. “Not Tate, but all the people regurgitating and remixing his ideas. Not the video that has 3 million hits, but the one that has 2,000. Not ‘the top of the waterfall,’ as Thorne put it, ‘but the middle and bottom.’”

It’s easy to disregard everything Andrew Tate says. What becomes a bigger challenge is disregarding how his same line of thinking gets distilled into the mainstream, in places where we can’t immediately even read him as the source. It’s these cases we can’t disregard. We are probably not all collectively under threat of being stabbed, but our friends, family and children are nevertheless still subject to the possibility of dictating their lives according to an Internet-driven gender animosity. We can’t just throw up our hands and say the Gender War is impacting someone else. It’s impacting you.