On todays episode our hero attempts to explain the “puppy girl” while trying to sound sane. This subculture has become quite prominent in online trans feminine spaces, so she hopes to figure out why that is. Using an excellent paper published last year, anecdotal evidence, and the occasional first-hand account, she gets to the root of what it means to fully embrace becoming a puppy. Trans voices are needed more now than ever, and some of them just so happen to bark.

Drawing a one-to-one correspondence between media consumption and behavior is always dicey—and never more so than when a high percentage of the audience is consuming a very different text than the one that is there. And it’s important to take a step back and check for alternate interpretations of the media we’re criticizing. All too often, feminist critiques of heterosexual porn wind up saying more about our views of women and sex than they do about the porn itself.

In conclusion: porn research is very bad and we don’t know anything. So it goes.

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/polysemy-and-porn

If a straight woman has made a somewhat blatant indication of interest—she’s put her head on your shoulder, or given you her contact information, or asked you to a movie—you might freak the fuck out, because a woman being interested in you is an impossibility, a violation of the previous laws of social interaction and perhaps reality.

What do the female fantasies of bad boys, danger, violence, and taboo all have in common? Permission to be horny.

Apparently a classic in certain circles.

The 2010s messaging that women never wanted men to talk to them was driven by a minority of extreme introverts. Modern-day singles are paying the price.

see: https://archive.is/20260105115224/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/01/12/the-boyosphere

Wynn’s video makes use of the idea that the psychological “point” of kink can be to enable oneself to enjoy sexuality. This is how a lot of folks understand fantasies of submission and dominance — if you deal with a lot of shame or other baggage around your desires or the act of sex, having these things forced on you is pretty convenient! And if that’s the case, for most of us, playing the dominant would be directly counterproductive, giving us more reasons to worry! She draws an analogy to the way in which Anastasia of Fifty Shades is repeatedly given extravagant gifts against her will, enabling a fantasy of wealth without violating deeply-held boundaries around humility and propriety.

Fire post.

via: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/sex-with-your-husband-isnt-labor

Another day, another article attempting to intellectualize what is essentially the straight woman version of “ugh, my bitch wife.”

Crazy premise. In strong tension with Doyle, “Wife Guy.”

When it’s “punching up” to pretend the other gender’s loneliness crisis is self-imposed

Maybe the problem truly is with capitalism in that the nature of consensual sex relies on a supply-demand dynamic.

It’s easier to “de-center” men if you don’t want to have sex with them

More notes on heterofatalism, a la Garnett, “The Trouble With Wanting Men.”

Great comment from @polytropos365182:

Being in love, or even just being “down bad” for somebody, is a really vulnerable— and in many cases, humiliating— emotional experience. I think that often, resenting the gender that you’re attracted to, with or without an ideological rationalization, is a defense mechanism driven by fear of that vulnerability, or a way to palliate the psychic wound of humiliation. The really tough thing is that (as any gay person could tell you), things like rejection, getting dumped, infidelity, etc are personal, not structural. You won’t escape them by abolishing the patriarchy or leveling the longhouse.

Everything shared is fair, but maybe instead it would be better for this kind of guy to not get married and find an aligned sex partner. I dunno. Like, it kinda feels like author’s saying men should intentionally develop an attraction to their partners, and that seems a little LessWrong-y to me. Also feel a connection to Doyle, “Wife Guy.”

One commenter, @jessumsica, puts it best:

There are men who like women and men who like to fuck women. You’ve got to find the middle of the Venn diagram.

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/three-cheers-for-the-tomboy-chaser

Waifus are a very well-known part of anime culture. So many have strong opinions on them, and yet very few know the full story.

One of most people’s biggest complaints about anime is the abundance of fanservice. But what is it? And is it always bad? Let’s take a deep dive into anime fanservice and find out.

This is a good video, and I especially appreciate its sex-positivity, but I do wish the author applied more of a feminist lens. People reacting poorly to fanservice as a concept goes far beyond it being utilized poorly and Puritanism, me thinks.

Emphasis my own:

I tried to find the useful information in the original post, and I think I probably succeeded, but the stuff about how Men And Women Are Just Different (on average, yes yes of course on average, anyway THEY’RE JUST DIFFERENT) gave me hives. Within- versus between-group differences!! Finding the good points felt like trying to pick out chocolate chips that someone poured over a bowl of overcooked brussels sprouts; the chocolate inevitably still tasted like rotten eggs. There’s got to be a way to hold simultaneously the ideas that people of all genders are very similar and that it’s fine and good to want to be a successful specimen of your gender specifically.

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/contra-a-review-of-dating-men-in/

I would like to believe there is something purposeful, resistant, even radical in the heterofatalist mode, but the more I voice it, the more I am inclined to agree with Seresin that it can produce nothing but more of itself. “Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem,” he writes. “It doesn’t make sense to extricate your own straight experience from straightness as an institution.” It isn’t that my friend needs to find “some other way to live”; it’s that we all do. But instead of looking for it, we disaffected women “perform” for one another this mutually enabling kind of maintenance, periodically off-gassing some of the shame and frustration of dating men and then chugging along with the status quo.

At first I thought was going to be some pseudo-feminist drivel. but then it turned out to be quite honest and vulnerable. In a sense, it does a good job of summarizing much of what I learned about gender in 2025. Introduces the concept of “heterofatalism.”