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I met up with a friend recently who I was giving my copy of "Why does he do that" to borrow because she was with me when I bought it and was interested. When I handed it to her she was flipping through it and dog-eared the page that talks about porn. I noticed and asked why she picked that page and she made a comment about how she didn't understand why men liked porn and thought that it probably had societal repercussions or something like that. We got into a discussion (kinda me ranting tbh bc I feel like I can't talk to anyone about any of this) about it briefly and I was so excited to find someone who shared that view with me but was also a feminist.
This exchange got me thinking about back when I found FDS back at the end of 2021. I was going through a divorce, and my views had been changing from very conservative and basically mysoginistic to more feminist because of how unequal my marriage had been. I started reading more about feminism online, and it validated how I felt in my marriage, but I had such trouble agreeing with liberal feminists on porn. I remember when FDS popped into my Reddit recommendations and I clicked on it and saw everyone unashamedly bashing porn, I was so excited. Id finally found a place where I felt like my views aligned, and this ultimately led me on my radical feminist journey.
100% agreed. It was a paradigm shift for me to realize with FDS’s help that porn is not healthy or acceptable. I had absorbed the “cool girl” philosophy that all men watch it and it’s not a big deal, and my boyfriends had always watched it while I never did. It was incredibly liberating and empowering to refuse to date men who watched porn, and to even understand how to vet for that and find a man who does not watch it. But it’s now also a heavy burden to understand how disturbing and destructive its omnipresence is.
Absolutely. I loathe it and this is the only place where I can unapologetically say it. I hate how normalized and accepted it is and how pornified life has become.
Omg same! It was so random how I stumbled onto reddit and then onto FDS. And I really connected with the bashing of porn. That was huge for me because nowhere in my life have I ever been in a space that spoke to what I was feeling. And that started my de-programming journey of patriarchial gaslighting.
Same ♥️
I used to be very conservative as well, so I can relate to your experience a bit. I’m still religious, but I stay away from that ultra-conservative form of Christianity that obsesses over gender roles. I had something of a mild nervous breakdown earlier this year once I decided to break away from trad culture and subsequently realized how much I’d been brainwashed my entire life.
Porn and the shaming of those like me who are sexually reserved are why I always thought feminism was evil. Then I learned that lib feminism is just a perversion of root feminism.
I'm too disappointed in men to want to date any of them right now, but I do love the FDS community for the reasons you outlined!
I can't believe how brainwashed we have been for so long as women to accept this degrading stuff (porn) as "normal". So glad I found my people here.
Second-wave feminist here ... I am appalled that you thought ANY kind of feminism was PRO-porn! Why did you (and others here) think this? Seriously, I'd like to understand how the women's liberation movement got so ... fucked up.