"You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet": The Alarming Ascent of TransPorn

When I can't fall asleep, there are two things that usually do the trick and make my eyes go heavy: praying the rosary, and reading any kind of statistical data. 

But every now and again, a particular statistic will make me sit up and do a double take, and that was certainly the case when I heard that pornography under the "transgender" category (aka, TransPorn) increased in popularity by 75% over the past year. That makes it the 7th most popular category worldwide and the 3rd most popular in the U.S. Like Planned Parenthood's research arm (the Guttermacher Institute, which reports abortion data), this comes straight from the proverbial horse's mouth--PornHub, the Amazon of Porn.

I'm going to write that again, because it didn't quite sink in for me the first time and made it hard to fall back asleep:

Pornography under the "transgender" (aka, TransPorn) category increased in popularity by 75% over the past year. That makes it the 7th most popular category worldwide and the 3rd most popular in the U.S. 

We used to think the nuclear family (married mother and father with children) was normal, and that while there were exceptions (divorced parents, second marriages, widowed spouses, etc), this was the norm. Now, in the general populace, the nuclear family is the exception and minority. Sadly, you are an anomaly if you live in such an arrangement. 

You could make a similar case (in a twisted kind of way, if you'll allow me the liberty) with porn. Vanilla, straight, male on female intercourse was largely the meat and potatoes of the porn industry a few decades ago. Pornography is not good, but in terms of the natural appetite, this orientation was more or less "normal." Sure, there were always kinky sub-genres, but they were just that. 

Now, if you're into straight, vanilla, missionary style porn and that's what you order exclusively from the menu, you're like the kid from the nuclear family--a complete anomaly among the general populace of porn viewers. 

With the commercialization of pornography, studios have had to diversify their portfolio and respond to changing tastes and market data. It's like the cereal companies that keep having to add NEW! and NOW WITH MORE MARSHMALLOWS! marketing slogans to the boxes to keep sales up. Porn is a moral epidemic, a public health contagion, and a sinful misuse of our sexual nature. But we can't forget that it is also a product, designed in a free market for public consumption. 

But this acceleration of inversion (and perversion) of the "normal" sexual appetite--a 75% increase in popularity in the last year alone--is simply staggering, not to mention disconcertingly unnerving. And here's another crazy stat: while men viewed porn tagged as "trans" 22% more than women, women on “straight” Pornhub viewed the “trans male” sub-category 115% more than men. 

Folks, this is not normal, and it is certainly not of the God above.

If pornography is the commodification and exploitation of genitalia removed from the human person, then wouldn't it make sense that we have been reduced to such animalistic sexual reductionism? What does it matter if the breasts you are seeing belong naturally on a woman or are artificially constructed on a man? As long as you are able to rub off according to the porn-du-jour, isn't that what matters in the end? Porn producers use Alinsky-type tactics to exploit the good and natural, God-given human appetite for sex as such:

ISOLATE IT

OBJECTIFY IT

USE IT

DISCARD IT

Rinse and repeat.

Of course, this has been happening since the beginning of time with prostitution, pimps and madames, and the Romans were no strangers to sexual perversion (which they normalized in their culture). But like the advent of the internet, the speed with which this pandemic has metastasized and warped the minds (and bodies) or our culture is simply astounding.  

For porn companies, the capitalization on the trans-tsunami is simply catching the wave while it is at its crest. As big-business, they are concerned with expanding market share. After all, why limit yourself to 50% of the populace (men) when there are untapped markets (women) who may be open to exploration? Another interesting thing to note is that these sub-genres are not competitors in the way K-Mart might compete with Sears or Boscovs. It's all porn, albeit in different flavors. 

No, the only competitor in this marketplace of degradation is Chastity--and she is vastly outnumbered. Those who refuse to be a consumer and chose abstinence instead are fighting on multiple fronts--against their own appetites and concupiscence; against the cultural tide; against their peers; and against the spamming porn peddlers themselves. To succeed, they must be intentional, day in and day out, and must also rely on (and be disposed towards) grace in addition to the exercise of the will. 

As a product-variant, the trans phenomenon is an effective multiplier. Combined with fetishes and a dizzying combination of "gender-fluid" and FtM/MtF scenarios, you are suddenly not limited to "gay porn" and "inter-racial" porn and "MILF" porn, but an infinite cocktail of every conceivable combination.

This is so beyond the Emperor not wearing any clothes. 

If you think all of this is completely nefarious, you are not off base. But it is only because you have the eyes to see the physical and spiritual reality, while the rest of the world is completely blind and will suffer for it. What a perversion is today becomes simply a different flavor tomorrow. 

The Father of Lies sows the seeds of confusion, and as many an exorcist has noted, his reign is coming to a close so he is throwing everything at us all at once in a last ditch effort to drag as many souls to Hell with him as he can in the short time he has left. Things will probably get worse before they get better, but let's face it--things are pretty bad now. This may explain, from a spiritual perspective, this acceleration and normalization of something that is completely not normal, not healthy, and not good. Those qualities have Satan's handiwork written all over them. As a conniving and supremely intelligent entity, he too is looking to expand his market share--to the young, the innocent, and to the Church herself--and will use anything at his disposal to confuse, corrupt, and condemn as many souls as he can to make them eternal consumers in Hell. As Fr. John Hardon was fond of saying,

"Ordinary Catholic families cannot survive. They must be extra-ordinary families. They must be heroic Catholic families. Ordinary Catholic families are no match for the devil as he uses the media of communication to secularize and desacralize modern society. No less than ordinary individual Catholics can survive, so ordinary Catholic families cannot survive. They have no choice. They must either be holy -- which means sanctified -- or they will disappear."

The scary thing is, this stuff is hard to walk back from. As I wrote in The Healing of Memory, God can restore us by grace even when we have fallen victim to pornography use by our own volition, if we are firm and committed in wanting to live lives of virtue and chastity. But apart from the miraculous, you don't just wake up one day from a year of watching trans porn and suddenly know how to have a normal, healthy sexual relationship. The extent to which one's mind can be warped and sexual response affected by this digital refuse should not be underestimated. 

The only real response to porn--trans or otherwise--is simply to opt out and refuse to be a consumer. It's not a social boycott or a social-media outrage campaign that will force the hand of the porn execs, but a spiritual commitment to chastity. Starve the beast. Refuse to play the game. Focus your sexual energy exclusively on your spouse, and do so in a way that does not use them for selfish ends. Don't be like a dumb ox led to slaughter. Remember: this is not normal. 

Related:

The Walls of the Playground: In Defense of Vanilla Sex

Porn And The New Spiritual Health Crisis

Throw Her Out

Fifty Shades Of Rage

 As an occasional consumer of online pornography in my twenties, I still remember the emotional/mental patterns and behavior that accompanied it.

First, the external use of pornography as a dopamine gorge was usually triggered by an inverse internal discontent—ie, you were stressed, bored, lonely, etc. That feeling is undesirable, so you are looking to counteract it with something else, a few byte-sized portions of virtual alternative.

Next you pull up a chair and sit down with the online menu in front of you and discern what fancies your palate that evening. The anticipation itself injects an excitement into your otherwise lackluster existence in that moment. Part of the excitement comes from the fact that you’re engaging in something you know is not very good for you. Hunger is the sweetest sauce, as they say. It’s titillating, and the fact that it’s wrong is just extra icing on the creme puff.

There’s an unspoken understanding as well between you, the consumer, and the unfaced supplier: you are looking for the eternal, while settling for the temporal. That’s okay—it’s written into the virtual contract. Each time you think to yourself, “maybe I’ll get more than I bargained for this time.” But each time you return to your own room, your own bed, your own self. You left for a bit…but you’re still here. 

And so you return tomorrow, or next week, to the buffet once more (just once more!), hungry again, excited again, hopeful again, disappointed again…hungry again. And so on and so forth.

So, the funny thing is that having broken out of this cycle by God’s grace twelve years ago and never having returned, I see there are a bunch of cousins of sexual pornography still hanging around. They are a bit more dressed up, with a higher perceived degree of righteous moral standing, a little younger. But they still behave in the same manner—they still peddle in dopamine hits, still capitalize on our inner strife and malcontent, still promise things without delivering, still leave us feeling a little bit…hungry.

Louis CK had this brilliant diatribe on Conan I saw a few years ago that I think just captures the essence of what I’m talking about here:

“I think these things are toxic, especially for kids...they don't look at people when they talk to them and they don't build empathy. You know, kids are mean, and it's 'cause they're trying it out. They look at a kid and they go, 'you're fat,' and then they see the kid's face scrunch up and they go, 'oh, that doesn't feel good to make a person do that.' But they got to start with doing the mean thing. But when they write 'you're fat,' then they just go, 'mmm, that was fun, I like that.'

You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That's being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it's all for nothing and that you're alone. It's down there.

And sometimes when things clear away, you're not watching anything, you're in your car, and you start going, 'oh no, here it comes. That I'm alone.' It's starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it...

That's why we text and drive. I look around, pretty much 100 percent of the people driving are texting. And they're killing, everybody's murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don't want to be alone for a second because it's so hard.

And I go, 'oh, I'm getting sad, gotta get the phone and write "hi" to like 50 people'...then I said, 'you know what, don't. Just be sad. Just let the sadness, stand in the way of it, and let it hit you like a truck.'

And I let it come, and I just started to feel 'oh my God,'and I pulled over and I just cried like a bitch. I cried so much. And it was beautiful. Sadness is poetic. You're lucky to live sad moments.

And then I had happy feelings. Because when you let yourself feel sad, your body has antibodies, it has happiness that comes rushing in to meet the sadness. So I was grateful to feel sad, and then I met it with true, profound happiness. It was such a trip.

The thing is, because we don't want that first bit of sad, we push it away with a little phone or a jack-off or the food. You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product, and then you die. So that's why I don't want to get a phone for my kids.”

I used to see this in myself while on social media, and in some of my online friends as well—this unsettled need to stoke fires, to fling words, to get reactions, to indict others, to stir the pot. As everyone knows, negative/tragic/scandalous posts gets more hits, likes, comments, etc than the good-Samaritan type tales. And while liberals seemed to have their share of it, I really think it’s those on the right that are hooked on the rage sauce, the righteous indignation….the outrage porn.

And there’s no shortage of things to get outraged about in the Church and the world. But like sexual pornography, attention-seeking outrage porn numbs you after a while. You may not even realize it, until, like habitual users of porn find out, you suddenly have ED at 28 years old. With outrage porn, you just become flaccid to real tragedies, real injustices in the world. Because you’ve been soaking your dopamine receptors for so long in it, it’s harder to get your ire up due to overuse. We weren’t meant to take in all the injustices and tragedies across the globe in online sittings day after day, just like we weren’t meant to see thousands of pictures of naked bodies in our lifetime. 

Outrage porn can be addicting, especially for people to reach beyond the walls of their homes. It’s kind of like a warm compress—you get a little bored with the tasks in front of you, the people in front of you, the sad in front of you, so you “push it away with a little bit of phone, a little (proverbial) jack-off, a little food.” Essentially, a little distraction from what’s in front of you. And because it’s righteous and kosher and sanctioned, even though you know you have that kind of guilty pleasure receptor going off in the midst of shit-posting, you do it anyway. The way you tell yourself this is the last time looking at porn online, but you know you’ll be right back to it next Friday night. 

At least with sexual pornography, it’s clear it’s wrong and there’s no excuse for it. With outrage posting, everybody’s feeding it, and everyone is seemingly righteous, so it doesn’t really seem like it’s harmful or disquieting to the soul. It promises to accomplish something, resolve something, bring justice. And sometimes, when it’s done appropriately and responsibly, it can and does. 

Edit: I just came across the clip of Liv Boeree speaking on Lex Fridman ("Social Media Is Dangerous", 25 Aug 2022), a few days after I wrote this post and she says it brilliantly, so it's not just me noticing this it seems. Minute 16:00-18:00:

"All everyone is trying to do within the system is to maximize what's getting them the most attention because they're just trying to make money in order to keep their thing going. And it's not just about attention on the internet, it's about engagement (comment, retweet, etc). And of all the seven main emotions, the emotion that happens to be the most useful for the internet is anger. Because anger is such an active emotion...if someone is disgusted or fearful, they're less likely to engage. But if they're enraged by something, it taps into that tribalism mentality. The attention economy [to feed this Moloch] is rage." 

Outrage never sleeps, is never sated, always needs willing participants. But it’s also subtle. If you’re getting off on the interaction, feeding it, dinging receptors in your brain every time you see a red “1” reaction, feeling like you should stop but the outrage feels good and righteous…maybe it’s time to pause and take stock of what you’re doing and why. 

When you consider leaving porn, like St Augustine’s sirens trying to keep him from the shores of Continence, you think you cannot possibly live without it. Then you leave it, and you’re still alive. I think people addicted to outrage porn can trust they can and will live (and thrive) without engaging in it anymore. And maybe find that elusive peace in the process.