Dying for Sex
More celebrated selfishness, OnlyFans addiction, post-Christian politics and more in this week's roundup.
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Dying for Sex
When Molly Kochan was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer, she chose an unusual path: she decided to divorce her husband and embark on a series of sexual adventures before she died. She turned her adventures into a podcast called Dying for Sex, and a book Screw Cancer: Becoming Whole. The publishers blurb for the book says:
When Molly is diagnosed as terminal with Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer at age 42, she realizes for the first time that "life is short" is more than some stupid cliché. With this new ticking-clock hanging over her head Molly make a decision . . . to start living HER LIFE. She leaves her husband and goes on a quest, searching for life's answers via a sexual journey of exploration. She juggles dozens of online suitors and brings kinks and fetishes into the real world, all while dealing with the ups and downs of her cancer treatment.
You can read more about her story at Time magazine.
Dying for Sex has now been turned into an eight part miniseries on Hulu. The New York Times says of it:
“Pain is political; pleasure is political,” says Sonya (Esco Jouléy), Molly’s palliative care social worker and sage. The medical care one receives, the sexual attentiveness one enjoys, the perceived legitimacy of one’s ideas — these are all woven together.
Or as New York magazine put it:
Dying for Sex comes at a fascinating time. We’re living under an openly fascistic government whose express goal is to wrench any remaining agency, sexual or otherwise, from anyone who is not a white man with an upsetting hairline. Yet we’re suddenly surrounded by stories, fictional or otherwise, about women over 40 f—ing their way to self-actualization.
All the pearl clutching over the manosphere stands in stark contrast to the applause given to the mainstream cultural product depicting women behaving selfishly and pursuing a life of sexual abandon.
See also:
Addicted to OnlyFans
OnlyFans is a Patreon/Substack like platform allowing fans to support their favorite creator. Only in their case, the creators are mostly producing porn. Some men are now apparently addicted to OnlyFans.
It turned out her boyfriend was addicted to OnlyFans. He subscribed to around 40 women’s accounts and spent hundreds a month, plus tips of around $150 in exchange for videos made just for him. Evelyn has no issue with pornography; it’s the messages that felt like betrayal. She found one he’d sent while grocery shopping. “I just wanted to say hi,” he had written. “I’m in the Costco bathroom and my girlfriend is waiting outside for me.” To another woman, he’d send frequent compliments, and he even messaged her to say “Merry Christmas” during the holidays.
According to sex therapists, OnlyFans addiction — when compulsive purchases on interactive sex sites spiral out of control — has become worryingly common. Though it has similarities to characteristics of porn, sex, gambling, and shopping addictions, the unique factor seems to be that OnlyFans, and similar sites such as Chaturbate, provide parasocial fantasy. Subscribers like Evelyn’s boyfriend pay not only for pleasure but for companionship, or for the comforting illusion of it. “People certainly feel in love with the women they’re interacting with,” says Nancy Tricamo, a psychotherapist in New York City and the clinical director at the Center for Intimacy Recovery. “It becomes a relationship in their mind.”
Related in the Guardian: Are porn algorithms feeding a generation of paedophiles – or creating one?
The Decline of Religion
Matthew Yglesias is a liberal pundit who is a secular Jew. He made some interesting observation on the decline of morals in politics.
Robert Frodeman: Do you have, or have you seen a good account that explains the decline in political morals in the US over the last 20 years? Actions that would have ended any other politician's career leave Trump untouched. For instance, could it be tied to the creation of the internet, in the sense that it promulgated sexual license (eg, Pornhub) as well as unvetted information? Or perhaps as a reaction to the failed attempt to impeach Clinton?
Yglesias: I do think that Bill Clinton’s ability to rally Democrats to his side after he was caught doing something legitimately bad plays a role in this story.
But I think it largely comes down to the decline of religion.
Lots of old-fashioned thinkers were worried that without fear of hell, there would be no way to enforce moral standards of conflict. I think highbrow secular-minded people tend to dismiss this. It is certainly possible to have and live by a serious moral code without being religious. At the same time, I think it turns out that in practice, religious motives were doing a fair amount to prop up moral and ethical standards. That’s in part due to sincere belief, and in part due to the fact that religious traditions had a kind of conformity-inducing impact. Whether or not you personally truly believed that wrong conduct would damn your immortal soul to hell, you knew that lots of other people in your community either sincerely believed that or else felt that they should pretend to believe it, so you would suffer negative judgment in their eyes.
This is very much aligned with what I have described as the social outcomes of the “negative world.” It’s always good to see some outside confirmation. I wrote a piece on Trump and a post-Christian America right after the election.
The Walls Are Closing In
Calvin University professor James K. A. Smith wrote an interesting op-ed wanting to disassociate the school from the Christian Reformed Church denomination that owns it. He wants professors to not have to adhere to the church’s confessions.
The CRC is the rare denomination that was becoming more liberal and turned in a more conservative direction, or at least arrested its leftward drift. It is now the more liberal churches that are leaving the denomination.
It’s interesting to see the developments here. There is a network of conservative churches in the CRC called Abide, but they seem to be fairly low key. What’s looks to have happened is that, without much fanfare or bombast or public lambasting of liberals, the conservative have simply slowly and methodically worked via the church’s institutional mechanics to enforce a harder conservative line on the confessions.
Now that the denomination appears to have largely completed this with regards to churches, it’s moving on to the denominational colleges. Smith wants out because the walls are closing in on Calvin University.
Whether the denomination continues putting the squeeze on them is to be determined, but the CRC is a very interesting case study to look at in terms of contemporary conservative institutional victories.
The Great Dechurching
Jim Davis and Michael Graham, authors of the book The Great Dechurching, gave an interesting recent talk on their findings at a meeting of the Fellowship Community, a network within the PCUSA. It’s a good précis of their findings should you prefer audiovisual form to books.
Best of the Web
Amber Lapp: America’s Missing Men - The stories beyond the rise of untimely deaths
NYT: They Want More Babies. Now They Have Friends in the White House.
Dean Ball: How I Work - Interesting thoughts on his personal career by my former colleague - “I like to answer questions whose answers I do not know. I like to gather context where it appears to be lacking. There are $20 bills lying all over the ground. I simply pick them up.”
Arthur Brooks/The Atlantic: A Defense Against Gaslighting Sociopaths
NYT: The Career Meltdown for Gen X Creatives
The Atlantic: What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get
Yahoo/Fox News: New bombshell study reveals 'assassination culture' spreading on the left under President Trump
The Atlantic: The Catholics Who Have to Worship Somewhere Else - How the Latin Mass split the Church
New Content and Media Mentions
I was mentioned in First Things, Religion News Service and by Katelyn Beaty.
New this week:
Rome’s Strategic Play for Protestant Elites - How Catholic apologetics target evangelicals amid a broader decline in membership
The Logic of Ditching Broken Institutions - The strategic dilemmas driving us to exit rather than reform
My podcast this week was with William Wolfe on faith, politics, and Southern Baptists.
And my Member only podcast was on the evangelical business ethos.
Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.
Does anyone know if there have been any male versions of the “I’m fed up with my marriage and want to have a sexual adventure” narrative turned into a book or TV series? I can’t think of any.
A couple of thoughts:
"We’re living under an openly fascistic government whose express goal is to wrench any remaining agency, sexual or otherwise, from anyone who is not a white man with an upsetting hairline."
While I'm not surprised that to see political and social brainrot go together, it always astounds me that people can say things like this with a straight face. Of all the places where the current administration is engaging in authoritarian behavior, people's bedroom activities are at the bottom of the list.
Meanwhile, as to the woman in the article on OnlyFans who said she was okay with the pornography but was upset by the messaging between her SO and the pornographers (because that is what these women are)--lady, either you're lying to avoid being thought of as a prude, or you really don't get what cheating means or how it works.