Quotetweeting Porn
if you're reading it, it's for you
There is a genre of posts on X Dot Com, and other content aggregation sites too, where porn is reposted or quotetweeted, with a comment like “look at how the West has fallen”. These posts perform well, getting thousands of likes and views, often more interaction than the post by the original creator.
The stated substance of these posts is that the porn they’re showing is evil. But these posts rely on the porn they claim to disapprove of. The presence of the porn is what makes them algorithmically interesting. Readers spend time on the post because the porn keeps them there.
The presence of the porn doesn’t help the post just by serving as an example of the fallen society that the author is disparaging. The porn is the primary entertaining object of the post, with the disapproving words around it as a shield that protects the reader from realizing that they’re engaging with porn in a straightforward sense. They’re consuming the post like porn; probably not masturbating to it, but they’re looking at how pretty the girl is, watching the scene unfold.
The experience they’re having is much closer to that of watching porn than the experience of disagreeing with it. The same sentiment, expressed in a way that doesn’t share the porn and thus signalboost it, would not do nearly as well in the algorithm. Moral condemnation of porn is pretty boring to read, compared to seeing a beautiful woman with some words above her that say it’s actually bad she’s taking off her clothes.
Often these posts are paid collaborations with OnlyFans creators. Many large right-wing cultural commentary accounts engage in paid collaboration with OnlyFans creators, where they repost some of the porn that creator made and disapprove of it. Then the creator leaves a reply to the tweet with a link to their OnlyFans profile. The goal is more paid subscriptions to their content, with the disapproving tweet serving as an ad. Porn has always relied on forbidden tension, but I think that this particular type of collaboration is more sinister.
What I think is worst about this is the way the stated disapproval acts as a shield, preventing the consumer from realizing they’re engaging with porn. Especially for young men, I think this makes them feel anxious and ashamed. They think they’re disapproving of porn, while falling even deeper into pornbrain, resenting themselves for watching it even more when they consume it and disapproving the way women act about sex in real life. They think they’re creating a standard of purity for themselves while violating that purity literally in the moment they’re creating it.
Isn’t coldhealing “TikTok anthropology” the same sort of thing? Aren’t you also signalboosting TikToks that you dislike to share them with an audience? No, honestly. I like the things that I post. I don’t like every aspect of everything, but I’m also sincerely interested in the aspects that I dislike, and want to understand them. I know other people interact with the TikToks because they say they dislike them, but I think they like it too, the same way these people say they dislike the porn but actually like it.
Also not a coincidence that a huge amount of Tweets that trigger weeks-long discourse cycles on Twitter usually involve a photo/video of women. (See: swimming pool product managers, smell thesis lady.) Not to say that this is in the same 'quotetweeting porn' category in any way, but I think it's obvious that those Tweets wouldn't have gone nearly as viral if they'd been just text-based or involved just guys.