how did "step" porn become so popular when we did such a good job keeping scat and insest porn out of the mainstream for so long

Submitted ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Harpsist@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

Apologies for title spelling errors. Apparently the title box doesn’t arouse autocomplete or spell check.

Seriously. For my entire life I’ve been able to look at any random porn site and know I wasn’t going to see various things : children, rape, insest, scat, etc etc.

When the fuck did incest porn become acceptable? Let alone mainstream?

There’s not even an opinion to NOT see it. (but I’m given the option to not see gay porn)

Like. I don’t care that it exists. I’m not shaming anyone for being into it but

I DON’T WANT TO SEE IT ON MY FUCKING PORN LISTS

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Drusas@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
My guess is that it appeals to a sizable minority of people while at the same time not turning off the majority of people because they know it's just actors who aren't truly related.

I prefer my porn not to have any story to it at all, but that doesn't stop me from watching the stuff which hamfists a story into it. I just skip to what I want to see.

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- AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah, I think it’s this. Scat porn, for comparison, turns off most people so having a bunch of it up on a main page is going to hurt traffic. I’m guessing there must have been some legal issue that turned all the incest porn into step incest porn, but regardless most people probably don’t care if a scene starts with someone calling the other person “step brother” or something. Some people probably actually prefer that. So the benefits outweigh the negatives for the sites.
  
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  - bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    I’m guessing there must have been some legal issue that turned all the incest porn into step incest porn
    
    I believe in some jurisdictions it’s illegal to depict nuclear incest in porn, even though it’s fictional.
    
    Also I would speculate that the actual fetish comes from the fact that a decent amount of people would have had a step-sibling added to their family during their adolescence, which could have influenced their fantasies and taboos. If you’re a 13 year old boy and suddenly there is a 14 year old girl living in your house that you aren’t blood-related to, it could easily lead to some weird fantasies popping into your head.
    
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- surewhynotlem@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  I prefer my porn not to have any story to it at al
  
  I need at least three hours of complex plot to even get hard.
  
  I saw the extended Lord of the Rings in the theater. They had to replace my seat afterwards.
  
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  - captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    To quote John Carmack: “Story in a [video] game is like story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” Said the technical guy behind DOOM.
    
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- DrQuint@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I guess this is why Cheating/NTR porn is also so regional in terms of popularity. Because how much it turns off others fluctuates and it lingers on the border.
  
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  - Drusas@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    What does NTR stand for?
    
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Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Usually the main difference between normal porn and “step-porn” is just the title of the video. Content stays exactly the same.

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- ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Which is odd because if they changed the title and dialogue then normal people would watch it
  
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  - didnt_readit@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I assume most “normal” people do watch it anyway which is why it’s all over every porn site. If only people into that fetish watched it and it hurt traffic they wouldn’t plaster it all over every front page…
    
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  - guacupado@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    People are probably just looking at the thumbnails. I think it’s safe to say most aren’t watching for the plot.
    
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  - BigPotato@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Do… Do you actually look at the title and listen to the dialogue?
    
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- guacupado@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  At this point I doubt people are actually searching it but that it’s become such a meme that they just throw it on the title.
  
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- fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s this.
  
  Like film some sex and make a few different cuts from the same footage.
  
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DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Well it isn’t incest which makes it taboo only on a surface level. Beyond that, it’s a quick setup to a story for young or young-looking actors as well as an easy, built-in explanation for someone to walk in on them and get an “exposed” element to their narrative.

Basically it’s just cheap and convenient writing. Be disgusted if you want but even within their little narrative it’s not incest so you’re getting your featers riled up over nothing.

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- CraigeryTheKid@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  yeah it seems like just a VERY quick way to say “the girl is cute and young-looking, typically petite, in a house/bedroom setting”.
  
  you can say all that, or “step”.
  
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  - captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Even “the girl next door” takes longer to set up.
    
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  - DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Exactly. It’s just narrative shorthand. I’m sure there are some people getting there jollies from the narrative side but those’ll be the ones who don’t have the impulse to turn the volume down when the Brattysis intro gets to the “You’re the best big brother…” part.
    
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- diffcalculus@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  My step mom’s step cousin
  
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notaviking@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think step porn is so popular because it basically establishes a relationship beforehand, even though it is familial. This gives our guy or whatever proxy for the audience they use a preexisting relationship (creates a taboo and and a reason why they know each other), proximity and opportunities for interaction, no need to go to a bar or whatever (makes the script easy to explain why they are forced together in a situation.

I think it makes creating porn easier since it quickly explains why these two or more people are around each other in a lonely house or hotel room (ease of filming venue), gives them a preexisting relationship with maybe hidden desire (no wooing or any modern prerequisites before meeting a potential sexual partner), it’s a bit taboo but easily ignored by the majority of the audience, and finally an established easy premise to follow and write with a lot of variation to the formula.

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- otp@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Man, are that many people actually watching porn for the plot?
  
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  - BruceTwarzen@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I actually do. Like i don't need a movie or a backstory or anything, but just two people fucking seems boring and leaves nothing to the imagination.
    
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  - ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You’re weird if you don’t
    
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c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Because it’s the easiest way to fulfill a niche while doing absolutely nothing that requires effort.

Content wise it’s the same as anything else, they just change the title and the actors say “step bro” like ten times in the intro and then it’s just normal porn.

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corus_kt@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Most vanilla kink

From the view of the actors too - if you had to pick a kink to act in/start in, it would probably be this one. Not too extreme, not too niche.

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- DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Getting dirty has never been so surgically clean.
  
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Red_October@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Part of what drives Porn, what makes one setting or situation more popular than another, is taboo. Having just enough of a sense of “naughtiness” in a situation that it makes it more exciting, without going so far as to be offensive to the senses and take the viewer out of it. A generally successful way to do that is to take a normal situation that people are familiar with, something that wasn’t sexy, and make it sexy and pornify it.

As an example, imagine you’ve… ordered a pizza, or had some sort of workman come to repair something at your home. Pretty normal, right? But have you ever paid for that service with sex? Normal, relatable situation, made sexy. Now this is a cloche these days because it’s been done to death, but at it’s advent the “Pay for thing/get paid for thing with sex” trope wasn’t just new, it was Thrilling. It also stops short of presenting the impression of full on prostitution, the goods or services were not presented with the intent to buy sex, which makes it feel less… dirty, to the average viewer. It’s taboo, relatable, but not entirely repulsive.

Now, the “Step” concept is the new hotness. Lots of us, maybe most of us, have step-family, so it’s widely relatable. Also we generally don’t seriously consider sex with step-family, making it taboo. Finally it always stops at STEP family, not blood relatives, so it’s arguably not really incest, meaning it’s not so broadly repulsive. It makes a condition that we can see ourselves in, it’s even more naughty than just sex, but it just manages to dodge the most objectionable subject that it’s so close to.

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adaveinthelife@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Because you can just mute it and it becomes regular porn, so it does double duty.

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skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
[deleted]
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- Cryophilia@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Partially due to how difficult it is to make accounts now, everything is tied to some form of identification, and truly anonymous accounts have a shit ton of hoops to jump through to deter trolls and bots.
  
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southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Supposedly, it was accidental.

Early on, porn sites were less moderated, and thus more friendly to niche kinks.

But this meant people randomly looking would run across those niche kinks, click on them because it’s effectively shock bait, which skewed views. The porn makers saw this increase in views, figured they hit a gold mine, and incest porn took off. As the internet got more moderated, the taboo kinda pushed regular incest to the side, with some sites outright banning it eventually. This left step-porn stuck in the dryer, and the effect spun out of control.

Mind you, this is from some random article I read a few years ago, so it’s second hand and unsourced, so grain of salt, etc.

That being said, it jibes with what I’ve seen over the years. I’ve never been a big porn user, but even a dilettante like me could see trends in what sites were showing up front. I wanna say the step-porn started showing up in otherwise unrelated searches maybe eight years ago? And it was visible as far back as something like 2005ish as something you’d run across on porn sites.

Mind you, I don’t have any issues with step-porn or regular incest porn; it’s almost 100% fake anyway. I don’t kink shame, even with the really “gross” stuff like scat, as long as I don’t have to see it unintentionally. If it was real incest porn, I’d not want to see it, but as long as it’s consenting adults, I ain’t hating. Step-porn that’s real is just regular porn where the performers already knew each other well, it isn’t incest in the important ways.

But, dude, that you’ve never run across any of the ugly stuff just shows how much the internet has changed. There was a time when just being in a non sex related chat room could expose you to some pretty bad stuff. Shit, I still can’t get some of the things I saw back in the very early internet days out of my head.

You’d just be talking about random shit, maybe a movie or whatever, and a proto-troll would dump images of kids, or gore, or both, plus whatever else they had saved up. It took a while before videos could be done like that, and thanks be to the tech gods that there were better tools to reduce that kind of fucked up shit on a given chat. But you’d still get clips dumped in of things you can’t erase from your head.

By the time commercial porn sites came along, they were able to limit the worst of it, and did. But before that, it was a risky thing to run searches that included some words that would pull hits from porn sites that were either unmoderated, or were intended to host the bad stuff. Ffs, there was a time when trying to figure out how to light a photo you intended to take of a kid was just horrifying.

As much as I hate Google, they really did reduce that, then eliminate it to the point that it really isn’t possible to find such things on purpose, much less having it show up like that. Well, I assume so, anyway. Afaik, all that shit went underground, and you can actually search for the Nabokov novel without getting your eyes and soul tainted.

Jfc, I really am glad y’all younger netizens didn’t have to go through that era.

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- speck@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  This left step-porn stuck in the dryer, and the effect spun out of control.
  
  Love this line
  
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- DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Just to tack onto the ending sentiment. To anyone into the anime scene, be wary about sites like paheal. They still have basically no filtering (if any at all) so it’s very easy to encounter goro and other niche kinks that make a lot of people want to bleach their eyes. If you don’t know what goro is, don’t look it up because you most likely didn’t want to know in the first place.
  
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  - diffcalculus@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    … But not I’m suuuuuuper curious
    
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  - Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    so it’s very easy to encounter goro and other niche kinks that make a lot of people want to bleach their eyes.
    
    Once. Then you add the offending tag(s) to your blacklist or include -whatever in your searches. Sites like that are kind of extreme about thorough image tagging which is handy when there are things you strongly don’t want to see.
    
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boatsnhos931@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Does this guy really think the actors are related in any way? 😭

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- guacupado@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  No. He’s asking why so many clip titles have “step” in it.
  
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  - boatsnhos931@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    How do you know stepbro
    
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JTskulk@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Real talk: I found myself watching step family porn because it’s really good for some reason. I don’t give a shit about the story and skip past it. I don’t have any step siblings and don’t have any familial fantasies or anything weird. I just think the women that end up starring in these look hot. I honestly don’t know why.

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- captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I have a theory: The camerawork/cinematography is better.
  
  Historically, there’s been a divide between softcore and hardcore porn. Softcore porn generally features R or NC-17 rated nudity and some simulated sex acts with a lot of effort put into the cinematography to make sure the camera never goes crotchwards. These kinda rely on a suspension of disbelief, often bolstered with more of a story focus, some are basically soap operas.
  
  Hardcore porn on the other hand features genuine non-simulated sex acts by definition, and the producers seem to have an attitude of “if we’re going through the trouble to have real sex in our movies, by god’s cock ring we’re going to SHOW real sex in our movies.” So the camera ends up at all kinds of stupid angles - way low looking up, titled to one side to better fit tall humans onto the wide frame, or downright gynecological close-ups that go on for minutes at a time.
  
  The step-sibling genre on the other hand…these usually do feature genuine sex acts, but they’re playing to a kink that…isn’t visual. The aspect that makes this not a vanilla movie is the actress occasionally remembers to say the words “I can’t believe I’m fucking my step-brother.” So that pressure to zoom way into the crotchal region seems to be relieved. The camera stays upright at eye level across the room. Close-ups are few and far between or totally absent; the actors probably do that thing where they lean to the side to “show their work” but we don’t plunge in to get a good look at the wrinkles and razor burn. So what ends up on the screen is two people having sex rather than a penis going into various holes.
  
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- BruceTwarzen@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I wonder if the whole step sibling porn only works for people without step siblings. Like when i was a horny teenager and talked to my horny teenager friends, a lot of them where only childs or had a brother and told me that having a sister would be so hot. No, it really isn't there is less than 0 sexual tension of any shape or form in a normal brother/sister relationship.
  
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AquaTofana@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ve heard the theory that porn these days is so over the top and intense a lot of the times, that you can just turn off the sound to step porn and get more moderate, missionary, “plain” style porn if that’s your jam.

I have zero opinion either way, as I read my porn, this is just a hypothesis I’ve heard 🤷‍♀️

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- Son_of_dad@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Honestly I hate how much porn includes anal. It’s a turn off for me, and I hate how anal obsessed the porn industry is. I like the more plain stuff too, and we’re living in a golden age of great quality amateur, self posted porn.
  
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  - olbaidiablo@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’ve gone full circle to the really bad quality amateur stuff as it seems much less fake to me.
    
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  - PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Strangling, too, eww. Or even butt slaps - why?! I’d never! Instant off button.
    
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themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Glasses Morty sacrificed something valuable.

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ApathyTree@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The most logical answer to this that I’ve come across is production value.

There is a lot of porn out there, and a lot of it is not very good quality for one reason or another. Now go back a decade or more, and remember it was worse then.

Niche fetish porn, however, was typically pretty high quality because that’s what people were paying good money for. It never started out as free.

Because you can, if needed, just skip the talking bit to ignore the incestuous plot lines, it’s basically just straight vanilla porn, that was what people went looking for. It was the closest to vanilla you could get with the high production quality of fetish studios.

Not understanding the why, production companies saw the spike in that specific result and started making more of it, then it started getting memed, and here we are.

Idk if it’s true, but it makes the most sense to me, considering when it started to gain popularity.

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Nemo@midwest.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Step porn is incest porn in a bad fake moustache.

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- littlebluespark@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m thinking that a bad mustache is harder to tell from a bad fake mustache.
  
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frezik@midwest.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Scat is a place where credit card processors draw a line. It’s vetoed and never produced except in a few very niche cases.

Source: when you listen to kink.com pre and post interviews, you pick up some things about the industry.

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Hotspur@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I feel like originally it was a semi-safe taboo to break that made a standard porn setup seem more forbidden/risqué. It always seemed weird, like how many people have step siblings that also fantasize about them sexually, how big could this be? But it just kept on coming, so to speak.

Now I think it’s just a meme/SEO thing, where you have to include it even if the video is not even pretending to be about that. Also it happened around the same time that websites were pushing/pivoting into more content creator type things, and so it’s probably related to that as well. Like the annoying face+exaggerated reaction thing on YouTube…

Either way, always seemed whacky that everything the sites serve is almost completely step-porn on the front page.

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Chickenstalker@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Who’s “we”, kimosabe?

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JoBo@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Your title talks about “step” porn but the post is about incest.

Step-relatives are not biological relatives, so not the same as incest. And I’d guess the reason it is popular is because a lot of people have a lot of inappropriate thoughts about members of their step-family, and because there is still an element of taboo which gets some people off.

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- WarmSoda@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  They use “step” as a way to say “oh no it’s totally not incest fantasy”.
  
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- bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  By the amount of step porn I would estimate the number of people with step family members to be much larger than it actually is.
  
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wahming@monyet.cc ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

For my entire life I’ve been able to look at any random porn site and know I wasn’t going to see various things : <…> rape, incest

I see you’re not a JAV fan.

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Atin@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The actresses are usually better looking

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PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Weird cluster of socially isolated weirdos who get off on the taboo and/or actually want to fuck a relative but know it would end in like the worst way imaginable if that became known.

Basically picture an entire demographic of George Michael Bluths

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Vespair@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I answered this in another thread, so I’m just gonna copy and paste my answer here. Sorry if the context comes off slightly odd, like I said it was originally elsewhere:

I’ve thought about the topic and I think I can answer why there has been a rise in step-porn.

I think it’s pretty simple: people are more isolated, and people now socialize online.

We’re simply seeing less of each other than we ever have (especially during the pandemic, but this isn’t specific just to that timeline). Whereas we used to go out and socialize and develop crushes in the real world, for a lot of people, especially a lot of young men, these days the vast majority, if not all, of the non-online social interactions they’re having with the opposite sex are within their own homes. And while our brains may be adapting to this new internet landscape well enough, I think our bodies are still lagging behind. When you’re an 18 year with raging hormones, the sexual drive extends beyond the reasonable brain. And so it attaches to what your libido recognizes as the other sexually viable candidates regularly in your sphere of influence: the women inside your own home. And thus they develop crushes on their mothers, their siblings, their stepsiblings, and are turned on by pornography that lets them indulge in this taboo but still very real crush.

And to be clear, I am attempting to explain the phenomenon, I am not attempting to excuse or justify it. Incest is gross and faux/step-incest may be biologically better but is still pretty socially/culturally fucked.

I’m just glad I grew up in the 90s before our lives had moved so heavily online.

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Mnemnosyne@lemmynsfw.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Incest porn that was actually labeled as such was pretty common about 15 years ago. By which I mean pretend incest, the performers were not really related but were pretending to be.

But there was some case where a woman was posting porn of herself and her son that got really well known. After that, I’m not sure whether because of some new legislation or because of just covering asses, they started calling it step-incest instead of pretending it was real.

In my totally anecdotal experience, incest was getting pretty popular before that time, then it dropped off for a while, and is now picking up steam again. I’m even starting to see slightly more stuff that pretends to be real incest again instead of the stupid step-incest.

It would be nice if it was easier to filter out what you don’t like though.

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Jakdracula@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The story is ludicrous.

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- MIDItheKID@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah, I miss the old days when the stories were substantial. Like when a whore steals your lemons.
  
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- ZagamTheVile@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m still waiting to see if he fixed the cable.
  
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HawlSera@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They’re not related so it’s not weird

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ghostdoggtv@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Funny thing to be mad about but yeah, annoying.

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reverendsteveii@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
for some poeple, taboo is the fetish. whatever it is, as long as it’s forbidden

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willya@lemmyf.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’d say probably due to the divorce rates and large amount of blended families.

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- frezik@midwest.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Divorce rates have dropped sharply over the past few decades.
  
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  - willya@lemmyf.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Really? Is that because less are getting married or I’m living in another reailty? Seems to be all that anyone ever talks about.
    
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