We don't need to explain why teens are pervs

I was feeling nostalgic the other day listening to Matthew Yglesias and Cartoons Hate Her have a podcast discussion about the good old days.

I feel like we all accept that there’s like a certain age cohort of us where we were all on AIM, either catfishing middle-aged men or purporting to be middle-aged men who were being catfished, right? And like, it’s like a very narrow layer cake of American society that actually had that experience. But it was quite universal.

I wasn’t on the internet in 1998, but I was in the early 2000’s, and I had the exact same experience. Chat sites like Omegle, obviously. But like, this was happening anywhere there was a chat window, right? It was definitely happening on World of Warcraft.

My nostalgia trip aside, the point was that we all got up to really weird stuff online as teens, because we were teens, which is to say, little sweaty creeps. It’s kinda weird to think about that as an adult constantly doing discourse about Porn Online and The Kids These Days. There’s a sort of… fragility? we assume of kids growing up today, and that’s probably just part of being an adult, but like, I was on 4chan in middle school and I’m not an Andrew Tate guy today. Anyhow.

Tova | Disrupting Nicely’s “The Darker Reason Gen Z Is Obsessed With Incest Porn” speculates about “why, among a generation too young to remember 9/11, incest porn had become so oddly ubiquitous.” I actually think there’s something interesting here—Gustavo Turner’s 2019 piece “My Stepdad’s Huge Dataset” convincingly argues that the shift was metrics driven: most people didn’t watch incest porn “in my day,” but people who paid for porn sure did. It’s an interesting parable about something adjacent to Goodhart’s Law. So, out of the gate I was not buying the framing that demand drove this change—but, it’s certainly the case that Gen Z watches more of it now, and she’s interested in what that says about/does to their psychology. She thinks it’s down to social alienation.

Watching the way my brother interacts with his friends, his disinterest in real connection. It’s not hard to understand why 26 percent of Gen Z are reported to have romantic or sexual experiences with AI.

I’m skeptical.

Again, hitting pause before we get to the incest: I do not believe you need to explain why 26 percent of Gen Z are reported to have romantic or sexual experiences with AI. Quickly googling, about half of Americans report having watched porn; about half of millennials and Gen Z have read fanfiction. As already discussed, about everybody% of American youths were catfishing each other on AIM back in the day. My assumption is that 1/4th of Gen Z having sexted ChatGPT is an underestimate. Teens are gross!

I feel like the analysis of the actual porn at hand kinda speaks for itself:

The first is the naïve/awakening dynamic: the young girl who is passively wanted not for any actions, but for her lack of awareness of her own sexual appeal.

The second is the initiator/expert dynamic: The stepbrother is positioned as the authority based on little more than age or proximity.

It’s straight porn. There is a woman, present, available. There is a man, POV, acting. It’s really not something that needs explaining. It would be more work not to replicate this script. There is something to be analyzed in the fantasy of a woman, naive and awakening; a man, assertive, in control. But it’s been analyzed to death and back because it’s one of the most common romance plots there is. It’s Twilight! It’s most of BookTok! It is certainly most porn.

Funny, the CHH/Yglesias analysis worried society has gotten too vanilla. Or, more specifically, there’s this weird world in which people are talking about extreme sex acts in very childish, sanitized ways; at the same time, depictions of morally ambiguous acts or mistakes made out of ignorance seem much less common. They suggest that this, not alienation or narrative tropes, might be behind the weirdness with which we find ourselves treating sex. We’ve become accepting of basically everything other than the idea that we could screw up.

Tbh I didn’t mean to end this cutely, but it occurs to me that Tova’s piece is kinda representative of that. Maybe I’m telling on myself, but is this really that weird?

“Would you have sex with your adopted brother if he wasn’t gay?”

Zar’s question is so disorienting that I nearly choke on my bubble tea. Of all the things I expect my 24-year-old friend to ask me in an East Village boba shop, this isn’t one of them.

…

I laugh, still catching my breath. “Where did you even get that question from?”

Emma smirks. “Porn?.”

I glance between them. “The kiddies are watching incest porn now?”

Tova, I genuinely don’t mean to judge, but your last article was “How to Make Sucking Dick Fun for the Sucker.”1 There is no way on earth that this was a revelation to you, let alone something that scandalized you in this way. What is the need to psychoanalyze “kiddies”—that is to say, a twenty-four year old woman—on the basis of watching this stuff?