The Five Knuckle Shuffle

I’ve only ever known about this phrase in its vulgar sense and I was surprised to learn today (thanks Google) that it was a signature move of the wrestler John Cena.

I have no idea what this wrestling move is, but the dark and filthy gutter that is my mind immediately wondered whether hand jobs were a legal move in professional wrestling.

So why am I thinking about this today?

I spotted the following Tweet (I think some people are calling them an ‘X’ now - yukk) referenced on my feed :

And here's the kicker, as well. When a gay man *does* say they have slept with a trans man, then people like this gatekeep their gayness and say they can't be gay because they slept with a trans man. You aren't the arbiter of who is gay and who isn't. (emphasis mine)

Yes, buttercup, we are.

As a straight person you know you’re not gay because you know you’re NOT that. As a gay person you know you’re not straight because you know you’re NOT that.

You can call yourself a conservative, but if you vote socialist all your life, then you’re not one. We ‘define’ ourselves as much by what we are not, as by what we are.

There are many opinions expressed about porn - but one thing we know is that, similarly to the “world’s oldest profession”, it might be the world’s oldest picture. It’s probably been with us since we first learned to draw.

Personally I find porn a bit boring (no pun intended). All the movies have the same ending.

If you’ve ever watched any porn you will immediately notice two things (at least)

1. There’s very little sense of character building or development

2. There’s rather a lot of focus on the genitalia

I’m not even going to try to disentangle the (t)horny question of whether porn is a good or bad thing. It’s almost certainly not a good thing to watch too much of it. I have no idea whether there’s some ‘safe’ limit below which it can be quite beneficial. I’ll leave all that sort of stuff to the psychologists.

The average porn movie can quite categorically NOT be described as a romance with naughty bits.

As far as I understand it, porn is not exactly what one would describe as a “niche” market. Whatever formula the porn producers have hit upon, it sells - and it sells real well. We can think of it as a kind of indicator of what turns people on¹.

But how are we to square the widespread “use” of porn, with its focus on genitalia, with the “progressive” claim that if you’re interested in genitalia, you’re some kind of genital fetishist? I can pretty much guarantee porn is not watched because of its in-depth character building and relationship development.

Love triangles are a feature in a lot of rom-coms and such. In porn movies they have different kinds of love triangles.

When I was younger I classed myself as a “socialist” - and in many respects I still would. But as I grew older I realized that much of my political thinking, such as it was, really boiled down to “wouldn’t it be nice, if everyone was nice”.

I was basing my thinking more on how I would like people to be, rather than on how they actually are. If there’s one reason for the abject failure of Communism, and why it needs to be forced upon people, it’s this. It fails to come even remotely close to addressing people as they actually are.

The progressives and gender activists make the same mistake, probably because the whole ‘woke’ movement and strategy has far too many parallels with Marxist/Communist ideology to be entirely accidental.

There may be a few people who can entirely disregard genitalia when it comes to physical attraction, but for the vast majority of humankind it simply doesn’t work that way. Evolution didn’t really give us much of a choice in the matter.

It’s true that men and women, on average, will have different drivers and different things that turn them on but, let’s face it, there’s only so much of Mr Floppy you’ll put up with².

It should, of course, go without saying that genitalia are not the only thing that matters when it comes to physical attraction - but they are, if the evidence of porn is to be considered, a rather significant component of that attraction - and, again, the level of significance probably varies, on average, between men and women.

I don’t know what conception of humanity the ‘woke’ have in their heads, but it seems to bear as little resemblance to reality as porn does to real relationships.

1. I’ve no idea whether things have changed in terms of male vs female attitudes to porn, but by “people”, let’s face it, I’m probably talking more about blokes here.

2. This is much more true at the start of any relationship. If you’ve been with someone for 30 years and the dreaded droop happens regularly, it’s probably something you’ll work out together.