Welcome to the blow job wars!

As a decorated veteran, I am here to help

At this point, a normal person might be asking, “Natalia, what in the crispy hell are you talking about? What is wrong with you?”

Thank God I am in the business of restoring and supporting normality, because we cannot do that without carefully studying the enemy, which is internet craziness.

To sum up this particular episode of crazy, many people have become very upset about sexual innuendo in a recent Sabrina Carpenter performance (she referenced the Eiffel Tower position in Paris with two male backup dancers; get it?). People, young people in particular, are calling it degrading, disgusting, whorish, and harmful to women everywhere, even women who don’t know who the hell Sabrina Carpenter is.

It’s so bad that the great CHH was compelled to gently but firmly point out that sex doesn’t have to be “empowering” for women to enjoy participating in it. As she succinctly put it, “‘I’m horny’ is a good enough reason.”

The great thing about being old, meanwhile, is that I remember when the online blow job wars first erupted among feminists when the internet became easily available to all (those wars still happened before too, we just didn’t have the internet beaming them straight to our poor, overloaded brains at great speeds).

At the time, it was radfems versus the sex positives, or the “sex pozzies,” as they were sometimes called, and it was just as crazy what’s happening today (I can’t load the original post that started it properly, but here is Rebecca Traister summing it up all the way back in 2006):

You see, kids, history repeats itself:

Now, before I get into the meat of the issue (heh heh heh sorry, I mean, not sorry), please understand that I don’t have a personal problem with Twisty from 2006, and I don’t have a personal problem with Muzzie in 2025.

These are women navigating the world of sex as they see fit, and calling them names or being otherwise mad at them is ridiculous.

I think it’s great for people to interrogate culture and sexuality. And I think it’s great to question a public performance if you find it questionable.

Here’s the thing, though: Twisty’s post about blow jobs was very niche. As Rebecca sums up above, it got 230 responses, which isn’t bad, but it’s hardly a cultural firestorm, it’s just an argument on a feminist blog, for people who are into feminist blogs.

Now look at the combined number of views, likes, bookmarks, retweets, and responses to Muzzie’s tweet above. Even if Twitter inflates some of those view counts due to bot activity and other issues on the platform, we can still see how in the social media world, ideas spread faster, including ideas that may be damaging and disturbing to us.

As I’ve said before, and will continue to say, young people are having less sex and it’s not good for them. It’s a sign of loneliness. It results in unhappiness. It’s SAD, as Vice President Donald Trump would say. (What? Take it up with Elon Musk if you are bothered)

Unfortunately, the blow job wars just reinforce the fact that hanging out and getting naked is terrifying if you’re a woman and a villainous if you’re a man. Most normal women don’t like to be terrified, and most normal men don’t want to be the villain in someone else’s story.

When Andrea Dworkin, who famously believed that consent to sex was just a fig leaf placed upon male violence against women, published Intercourse back in the 1980s, she was vilified - sometimes very unfairly - but her ideas are enjoying a resurgence today, especially among Gen Z.

Now, back when I was young and stupid, I had very little patience for Dworkin. I mean, she seemed so bitter! So angry! So poorly dressed! Who has the time to be this bitter and angry when you’re young? Today I give her much more grace - she was a survivor of horrific sexual violence, and she wrote what she knew. She was passionate, graphic, and unapologetic.

My first encounter with sexual violence came when I was just seven years old, as a goddamn first grader, and yes, it shaped my life in many ways; I just didn’t want to admit this in my twenties. Today, I understand where Dworkin is coming from, and frankly I feel that many of us owe her an apology, myself included.

To see what I mean, consider the case of Neil Gaiman. As Kat Rosenfield argues, consent is meaningless when a rich, powerful man whom a younger woman DEPENDS ON FOR HER LIVELIHOOD wants to do horrible, violent, degrading things to her. “She consented” is absolutely used as a fig leaf by violent people - it was being used back when Dworkin was writing bangers, and it’s being used today. It breaks lives. It leaves big, ugly scars that act like roadmaps to where it all went wrong.

At the Normie Restoration we can acknowledge a terrible reality without dooming about it, however. Dooming is easy, any loser with a laptop can do it. Approaching a terrible reality in holistic and helpful ways on the other hand? This is where the work lies.

First of all, most men are not Neil Gaiman. Or Andrew Tate for that matter. I don’t just mean that most men don’t have fat stacks of cash and fanatical fanbases.

Most men are not rapists. But the rapists that do exist out there tend to be prolific.

My own experiences confirm this data.

When I was younger, I focused on being the best girlfriend and then wife that I could be. I was relatively sexually conservative, I strove to be a good girl, I was dutiful and pliant, and had two long term relationships, one a wonderful one and the other one was my marriage, which was a David Cronenberg-like horrorshow.

As I got older, as I became free, I allowed myself the luxury of selfishness and became a woman who enjoyed the company of men and gorgeous women, and didn’t get too attached. I cavorted. I danced on rooftops. I made eyes at dudes in bars and then strode over, swaying my hips in whatever clingy dress I was fond of at the time, and asked for their numbers.

My friends called me a “pirate” and tried not to laugh too hard when I inevitably showed up to the backyard barbecue with a new guy. “Hello, Rob!” they’d say. “This one’s Randy,” I corrected them, fully in my Bill-Nighy-at-the-end-of-Love-Actually era. Sometimes I’d cry for five minutes over some dude, or woman, but then I’d wipe my tears and go get ready to go out with someone new. My life became full of stars and bars and whatever else I wanted in that moment.

There was only one man, one man in a dazzling kaleidoscope of Robs and Randys and Codys and Davids, men who worked with their hands and men who advised Congress, men who rode motorcycles and men who painted watercolors, who broke my trust and became violent and aggressive. Not only did I make him pay, but I also ended up connecting to other women who knew of his behavior. And they all confirmed the same thing: He was prolific, he was habitually violent, and I was simply the first woman in his path of destruction who filed a police report.

“One is too many!” you’re going to say, and I agree. Funnily enough, on paper, he was an honorable single father, a leader at his job, and we had friends in common. My creep radar was also down because I had recently buried my father. Our first date had been lovely, and when we went on our second date and he started getting weird in the middle of said date, I brushed it off. I missed the warning signs. But it didn’t break me, nor did it break the beautiful life I had fought so hard for. Why would I let some dick-faced jackalope do that to my precious existence?

I’m not telling you this because I want you to know how resilient I am (although, hell yes, I am resilient, and I take pride in that), I am telling you this because, and this is very important now:

You can’t let scary stories and social media noise to influence your life to an absurd degree.

You know why we’re sitting here talking about the blow job wars? Because the algorithm loves them.

The algorithm doesn’t just love negativity, it loves provocative negativity. Get a bunch of people yelling “slut!” and “you’re catering to male rapists!” at Sabrina Carpenter, and the likes and views will roll in like a blood moon tide.

Learning to see beyond that is crucial for the glorious Normie Restoration. It is crucial if we are to stay sane.

This one time last year, I was driving a car in the middle of a storm and my old windshield wipers, which I’d forgotten to replace, were not performing well. I remembered what an old boyfriend once told me, “Look beyond the rain droplets.” I refocused my gaze and kept refocusing it and got home safely.

What I want you to do is something similar: Start looking beyond the rain droplets. Look at the road ahead.

The blow job wars, or any other kind of wars, will always occur on social media, because social media was designed to connect us to too many people all at once, and it’s cooking our brains and making us lonelier and more hostile to each other.

We don’t HAVE to let it, however. I scrolled and took note of what was happening and had fun with the discourse, took some screenshots to use as visual aids for you guys later, and then I took my dog for a nice long walk, listened to the wind in the pines as it dragged in the spring, gossiped with my neighbor, and shifted my attention to a cute guy in my DMs after I came home.

Think of it as changing channels. It is a useful habit. If you’re going down an internet rabbit hole and getting really fired up, learn to notice when it becomes overwhelming, and go do something else instead.

This doesn’t mean NOT CARING about rape or any other issue. It means understanding that you cannot be effective or helpful if you’re not hitting pause, and looking at the context, and going to do something you like.

I realize that a lot of my advice boils down to “go tf outside,” but that’s because I’m right.

Please pass this post on to whoever needs to read it, and keep looking past those rain droplets as needed <3