Crab Bucket Nun Porn

Apologies in advance if this rubs you the wrong way…

“Everything in life is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
– Oscar Wilde

Nun and Mormon porn, and anything else trafficking in innocence and ‘moral purity’, represent the sexualised expression of the crab bucket.

The crab bucket mentality is based in the resentment of success. It says ‘if I cannot have it, then neither can anybody else.’ Allegedly, a whole bunch of the crabs, if placed in a bucket, will deliberately stop any other crab from escaping by dragging it back down to the lowest level. As a result, the entire collective suffers. In Australia it’s called ‘tall poppy syndrome’ and in Japan, despite the country’s legendarily competitive corporate culture, is associated with the proverb, ‘The nail that sticks out gets hammered down’.

Pervasive crab bucket mentality ensures that nobody is allowed to prosper, and in turn stunts the group’s perspective and advancement. This manifests in human expressions of envy, spite, and bitterness. Sabotaging another person’s success, belittling someone’s achievements, and other self-defeating protections of the cultural status quo by deliberately reducing everything to mere mediocrity.

Nuns, Mormons, and particularly orthodox branches of mainstream faiths exemplify some of the less integrated groups in modern society. With regards to the current subject, it’s no surprise that they are also tied to traditional conservative religious doctrine. To excessively simplify a complex subject down to a degree that will probably raise a few hackles, not without valid reason, religion is largely concerned with public concepts of morality and ethics. Thus, any religious body naturally sets itself up as a de facto moral authority which in turn attempts to dictate the ‘correct’ set of views and actions in public life. This in turn tends to, deliberately or otherwise, signal to outgroups, that members of any ingroup are inherently morally superior, or at least perceive themselves as such, consciously or unconsciously.

How does that relate to shagging pretend nuns? Nuns represent a perceived position of moral or ethical superiority. The Mormon communities, and other equivalent religious sects – parent faith irrelevant, represent much the same thing. While this is not as prevalent a belief in our modern secular world, it might be considered that, by the moralistic paradigms at work within those communities, they would still perceive themselves as acting in a way that they associate with an elevated moral standard. Regardless of whether we agree with these ideas, we might nonetheless perceive them as being convinced that they were ‘more’ moral than ourselves.

We might just accept that members of various groups may perceive things differently to ourselves and leave them to it – after all, this is not anything new and their opinions probably don’t have any impact on our lives. However, we might also take offense to their self-appointed position above us in an arbitrary moral hierarchy, even if that perceived hierarchy has no tangible manifestation. There are numerous reasons that might influence our capacity to take offence at this posture, but for the current purpose, the prime motivator – conscious or otherwise – would be the way in which the concept of morality, more specifically the broadly agreed scale that a given society manifests or creates, influences our self-perception and perceived relative social status. Naturally, people will rank higher or lower and this moral score will be combined with other social scores, to a modern western society the economic ranking being the most important. The aggregate of all these scores contributes to a person’s perceived position in said hierarchy. So we can view the preoccupation with morality and ethics as one social status signifier amongst others, contributing to a broader ‘meta’ status game score.

As many moral and ethical systems derive or attribute ‘good’ to self-denial, we have the basis for a perceived correlation between greater moral value or worth, and fewer indulgences. The catch is that most, if not all, of the behaviours from which one gains moral currency through denial, are also very natural and general core to fundamental human experience – anger, lust, avarice, etc. You can’t really opt out of them, hence denial has such elevated perceived value.

So if we think that, right or wrong, people are looking down on us for indulging in elements of a psyche that we both share, we might come to resent those people. Then we might seek to bring those people down a peg or remove them from their high horses. A sort of ironic ego defence in reaction to an ego defence. Failing the ability to do this directly, we might find some catharsis in simulations thereof.

Where pornographic representations of respected people are concerned, the draw is not primarily sexual, the draw is retributive, it is in the simulated downfall of that individual, who in turn stands proxy for their group. The consumer is less interested in the traditionally erotic content; touch, penetration, erogenous zones, orgasm, etc., than they are in the eroticism of socio-psychological content. The content that is eroticised in these scenarios is the implied fall from grace.

Given that a lot of contemporary social discourse is bound up with concerns about morality and ethics, as the role of faith declines in a world where the ‘gaps’ in which the God thereof often used to operate, shrinks in the face of our growing body of knowledge and ease of access to education; might we see an emergence of more socially-based crab-bucket pornography? Liberal vs conservative porn, libertarians ‘sharing’, puns on vegans enjoying ‘meat’, the ACAB crowd searching for police-themed content, minimum wage vs wealth, and so on. All manner of oppositional spectacle can be imagined. Conceptually distasteful as any of this might be, if this sort of pornography is less concerned with eroticism and more concerned with the imagined degradation of a perceived enemy, we should expect to see the ‘adult entertainment’ industry respond as the market shifts, in ways that might previously have been considered niche, unprofitable, or weird. Isn’t that interesting?