Did porn warp me forever?
salon.com
salon.com
Supposedly, Kinsey's wife said something like "I never see my husband since he took such an interest in sex". In other words, he spent so much time studying sex in an intellectual, analytical way that he stopped bothering to make time for actual sex and relating with his wife. People interested in studying human psychology frequently strike me as seriously hung up. Therapy was useful to me for a time in trying to get over my own hang ups. More useful was spending time with men who liked having actual sex with actual women rather than talking about it in some abstract, analytical fashion.
"Forever" is a really long time. Sexual preferences can change. Pavlovian response is learned behavior. If you don't like the stimulus that makes you drool currently, you can retrain yourself. I am glad the author is actually trying to do that instead of merely blaming his issue on porn/the internet as I have seen other articles do.
* (Not intending to slam all psychologists or psych majors. My observation is anecdotal and admits to bias.)
I don't think you can attribute this specifically to psychology, it's sort of applicable to every science. You have someone like Neil Degrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan to every emotionless, numbers-only physicist who doesn't sleep with his wife.
It's a personal choice, whether to accept life as a mystery and study it as such or consider it a problem that needs to be solved analytically and without emotion.
That said, yes, when I worked in a psychiatry department I worked around the most miserly, insane people I've ever met. They were more cold and soulless than the homeless people we were treating. I got out of there right quick.
My personal experience can only be limited, but I haven't found the statement to be true. Of the dozens and dozens of mental health professionals I've studied with or worked with, most are totally typical, adjusted people.
Since most humans are messed up in one way or another, you're probably as likely to find as many 'crazy' lawyers or programmers as you are therapists. When you meet a counsellor who's off the confirmation bias kicks in.
Edit: Reminds me I read somewhere once that there is as much drug addiction and child neglect in upperclass two career families as in the ghetto. It sounds like he grew up in a two career family where no one was paying much attention to anything he did.
What if his parents stopped paying attention because he wanted absolutely nothing to do with them and made it known?
That's how I started treating my parents (one career household: pop worked; mom did everything else) at twelve years old and it wore them down after four years. I still feel quite guilty about it, as they were and are excellent parents.
But I seem to have crazy good parenting instincts. So my high expectations are probably a tad unreasonable in some sense.
The difference between internet porn and porn from the past is just the abundance of new material that there is. Each time you view something new, your brain gives a hit of dopamine. In fact, porn addicts are not really addicted to porn, they're addicted to the chemical sensations that their brain provides. At the basic level, it really is not much different from any other addiction. Old, offline porn is different in that it gets stale pretty quickly. There are only so many times you can look at a magazine or video without it getting boring.
The problem with this is that your dopamine levels get out of whack. You need a higher and higher amount to feel satisfied. This is how people get roped in. This also caused normal, life things that were once enjoyable to become less so, such as hanging out with friends or programming. Life just becomes more dull. In fact, now that I have learned about this, whenever I see a post on HN about how someone has lost their interest in programming or other activities, the first thing I think of is probably this person has a porn addiction. It's not a far stretch seeing as how most of HN is young men. Having drastically reduced the amount I see, I have noticed many benefits in my life including better health and ability to focus better.
Porn, like other addictions, are also a way of masking stress and a way of distracting yourself from negative emotions. Dr. Gabor Mate has done great research linking addictions of any kind to stresses in the body. Porn gives a way to temporarily release the stress but puts the person in a vicious cycle of causing more long-term stress.
Personally, I use the recovery information from http://www.feedtherightwolf.org. It has been the only thing I have across which can really break the cycle.
As someone else pointed out the videos from http://yourbrainonporn.com/your-brain-on-porn-series will really help you understand what is going on in your brain.
You have oversimplified the function of dopamine to the point that you have said something misleading. It isn't a drug. You also get a "hit" of dopamine when there is a loud, surprising noise, and any number of similar situations. Including good, natural situations. Including normal sex. This doesn't mean that "your dopamine levels get out of whack".
When you say that 'life just becomes more dull' and 'distracting yourself from negative emotions' it sounds like you are describing dysthymia or depression more than anything specific to porn. The link between monoamines (like dopamine) and depression has been known at least since MAOIs were first prescribed for depression. Of course, if you feel terrible about yourself for looking at porn once a week then that won't help any ongoing problem you have with negative self-image and depression.
Edit: in other words, I suspect (though I can't at all prove) that you have the arrow of causality reversed, and it wasn't porn causing your depression
Yes, I am also aware of how I got involved with this. It goes back many years and this realization has helped me to identify reasons why I have sought this out as a solution.
As I mentioned, Dr. Gabor Mate's research and books have been helpful to me. He has worked with drug addicts in Vancouver and has, in many cases, linked addiction to ongoing stress in a person's life especially when they are young. In a way of dealing with the stress, the person turns to an addictive substance which provides a temporary relief which the person can get hooked on quite easily.
The orgasms gotten through pornography aren't any stronger than those found 'in nature'---this isn't heroine.
You have missed the entire point.
Orgasm lasts a few seconds.
Porn addiction is not about orgasms its about porn. The viewing, searching, clicking from tab to tab on tube sites. Starting in early adolescence, training ones brain to need a certain level of stimulation. For some - hours a day.
Dopamine responds to novelty and anticipation, and is elevated to near orgasmic levels during sexual excitement.
Read the start here article on that site, and you will see that all addictions involve the same fundamental brain changes which are caused by a specific set of genes, all activated by the accumulation one molecule deltafosb. This is indisputable.
You will also see about 300 links to citations on that one page.
This is more obsessive-compulsive behavior than porn-specific.
OCD and addiction each have unique set of brain changes.
Again, its already been established that both behavioral addiction ad drug addictions involves the same basic mechanisms, same brain changes: downregulation of dopamine & D2 receptors, sensitization, hypofronatlity, altered cerebral white matter, altered CRF and stress response, etc. These do not occur in OCD.
Accumulation of One molecule activates the addition process - deltafosb. This does not occur in OCD
Read the START here article on yourbrainonporn and follow all the links. You will find links to articles covering the new DSM-5 which created a behavioral addictions category and to The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM). America’s top addiction experts at ASAM released their sweeping new definition of addiction which states that sexual behavior addictions exist and involve the same basic mechanisms as substance addiction.
Oh dear god. That is not how dopamine works. Dopamine is a chemical that your brain secretes when you are trying to get something, not once you get it - so when you're hungry, for example, you'll have higher dopamine levels. Then when you eat, they go back down. The actual sensation of higher dopamine levels is stress and anxiousness - it actually doesn't feel good at all.
Here's an NYT article talking about the common misconception: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/science/27angier.html?_r=0
> they're addicted to the chemical sensations that their brain provides.
EVERY experience is a "chemical sensation" in the brain. Good. Bad. Whatever.
> In fact, now that I have learned about this, whenever I see a post on HN about how someone has lost their interest in programming or other activities, the first thing I think of is probably this person has a porn addiction.
What the fuck? This is the dumbest thing I've read in a while. There could be a million things that cause a loss of interest in programming. Maybe they got girlfriends or started families? Maybe they suck at it, and just realized that?
It sounds like you used to be obsessed with porn, and now you're obsessed with "porn addiction"
Your content was helpful and your points are important; you could have done the same without being mean.
Oh, you would? How dare everyone on the internet not cater to your expectations.
Someone from the community shared a story of personal struggle. They didn't hide behind a pseudonym, and it was probably a hard decision for them. They also, did in hopes it would help someone else.
They might not have used precise definitions or scientifically correct terms but they were honest and civil and even after you insulted them.
No matter how hard their struggle is, it's akin to linking vaccines to autism - no amount of personal pain overrides factual inaccuracy.
It's an extremely important part of public discourse that incorrectness be called out, in a polite way, but clearly and forcefully.
This is akin to 'balancing' a debate about evolution by having an evolutionary biologist there and a doctor of theology there. Just because there is debate does not mean that there is not a clearly correct answer.
> Just because there is debate does not mean that there is not a clearly correct answer.
The correct answer in this case doesn't really matter for the main point if we are talking about the dopamine. Which, from what I see is the clearly factually incorrect statement. Latching unnecessarily unto inconsequential details and derailing the conversion is also called trolling and bullying and will get the message downvoted or flagged.
One of the things I love about HN is that incorrect opinions are quickly corrected by people in the know, often with providing proper citations. However, what is quite often missing, is civility. Moreover, in this case one should be exceptionally polite, given the very personal nature of the OP's post and the courage to attach his name to his writing.
I recommend everyone (myself included) to re-read "How to Win Friends and Influence People", even if they don't think they have a problem with being polite. I keep re-reading this book and everytime I do I see something more to correct (it has already heavily influenced the way I write e-mails to people).
"I'm a content creator. My content is criticizing other people's content."
In my opinion, he was right to criticize. If he hadn't, I'd be going around telling people about how my brain is becoming dopamine tolerant due to the bursts of it I get every time I watch porn. I'm glad I know that's not true.
What VigUi7vv8G2 is saying about dopamine might be correct but his tone is anti-social.
He could have left "Oh dear god." and "What the fuck? This is the dumbest thing I've read in a while." out of it and it would have been a perfect helpful response.
From the guidelines for this forum:
"That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Even if someone is incorrect, I think they deserve a more respectful and constructive response than that. We can do better than that here.
Hmm, maybe that explains why whenever I get this rush of anticipation whenever I think about playing Starcraft, but when I actually play it I just end up stressed and anxious.
The rush of fiero when you kick ass, or the amazement when you lose, washes over this at the end and gives you an emotional exclamation point to remember for the next time you think about playing: you're anticipating the end of the game.
It seems odd to me that being addicted to porn would go with only looking "about once per week". I think I understand how this could still be technically an addiction, but compared to other addictions and - I imagine - especially porn addictions, it seems rather bizarre. Certainly if pornography was only being consumed once a week then the rate of let's call it "stimulation inflation" can't have been that high, or can it? Could you elaborate?
This definitely fit with my experience. It was definitely a cycle for me. Alcoholics do not have to have a drink every day to be an alcoholic. In fact, one of the points of the AA program that people need to learn is they are always an alcoholic.
In my experience, I would just feel an uncontrollable urge which would lead me to view porn. Once I started, I would be in a trance-like state which is common from other experience I have read about. What kind of really hit home is hearing a non-addict say something like he would view porn for 15-20 minutes and then it would get boring and he would stop. That is the complete opposite of me, and other addicts. Once we start, it becomes almost impossible to stop until we are completely "drunk." In my experience, I would notice that I would put so much stress on my body, that it would really take me about a week to recover and feel normal, and then the cycle would start again.
Edit: I can't respond to your comment below but thanks for your follow up.
I don't know how I feel yet about the idea that someone is always an addict. I do know the fact that AA believes and teaches it is absolutely no reason to consider it to be factual.
>Some examples of a Higher Power can include: a sponsor, the group in general, a (big G or little g) god, a door knob. The principle is about believing in something greater than yourself.
No, it is not. Four of the steps use the word use the word "God", 1 uses only the word "Him" (and that obviously refers to the same thing), and 1 uses the word "Power" (notice the upper case).
The claim that these are intended to be anything "greater" than yourself such as a sponsor or the group clearly is not what is intended (and, from what I have heard, not what is taught). I don't know what the hell your door knob comment is about - I assume it was for comic effect.
http://www.aa.org/en_pdfs/smf-121_en.pdf Read the steps. A sponsor is not going to remove our shortcoming or character defects. We don't pray to the group so that we might know their will. You're either ignorant of the actual teachings or being extremely disingenuous.
Some examples of a Higher Power can include: a sponsor, the group in general, a (big G or little g) god, a door knob. The principle is about believing in something greater than yourself.
edit: AA has its roots in Christianity, however being in AA doesn't mean you have to be a Christian or a theist.
"I would notice that I would put so much stress on my body, that it would really take me about a week to recover and feel normal, and then the cycle would start again" sounds, well, pretty wild and probably jolly good fun to be honest, but I can see how that could be problematic as a regular and difficult-to-resist habit rearing its head every week or so.
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD005032/alcoholics-anonymous-....
I would encourage you to see a psychologist and possibly get a referral for a psychiatrist to get a real diagnosis. The deceptive thing about these mangled pop-sci porn addiction tropes is that they try to get people with these problems to believe that their issues are a normal reaction to the evils of pornography (and if you did deeper Maria and Gary in general believe this about orgasms, even during sex), when it reality they could be a symptom of a host of psychological issues and disorders.
If it truly is an addiction, you should be not self-treating it on the internet.
Why would one continue to watch it afterwards? One can't be addicted to porn under my definition, but just to doing "that". This can of course be addictive and negatively affect one's life. Also the stimulus surely can get weaker and weaker thus leading to "harder" porn each time which looks like a bad cycle
For a better perspective on issues relating to having an addictive personality, I recommend The Compass of Pleasure by neuroscientist David J. Linden for understanding reward-theory that dominates the psychology research now.
I don't doubt that some people have legitimate problems worsened by pornography use, but I would say that they would benefit highly from seeing a therapist rather than following some of these more shaky theories. I've known young men who are thinking they have issues with dopamine, when in reality many of them have issues with shame, anxiety, and communication. I do believe porn addicts exist, but I think it is worth getting diagnosed by a professional who can rule out other causes.
I don't understand: this seems incongruous. Watching pornography once a week doesn't come across as an uncontrolled, impulse behaviour. How does one suffer from an addiction and satisfy it but once a week?
Do forgive me if I come across as doubting your word. That is not my intention in the least.
This is America: if you like something, it's probably bad for you.
(Less sarcastically: I remember reading that addicts don't enjoy their addiction anymore; they do it because they have to keep doing it. Kind of like me and "someone is wrong on the Internet".)
> I remember reading that addicts don't enjoy their addiction anymore; they do it because they have to keep doing it.
Yes, I can relate to this. At the beginning it may not have been an addiction but it did morph into one over several years.
> I am addicted to porn. ... I would look about once per week...
Might as well have said:
> I am addicted to heroin. ... I would shoot up about once per week...
I guess the point is simply that you did something that harmed your life, but you couldn't stop, eh?
It's strange that the word "addict" conjured up so many images of drugs and alcohol that I unconsciously threw the proper definition of the term right out the window.
hmmmm no. It is an addiction if you cannot do WITHOUT it and you cannot stop doing/taking it; and you feel terrible one way or the other without it and the only release is having/taking it. And when you start typical toxic behaviors like making excuses "one last time" and the likes.
Just because you enjoy something a lot doesn't make it an addiction. From all mattm said, he probably isn't addicted but put the label "addiction" on some other thing he is suffering from.
But if I didn't get to the pub on Sunday evening it ate me up inside - I NEEDED those 3 cigarettes and I couldn't cope without them.
It wasn't the quantity, it was how I dealt with being denied that was the issue.
> The difference between internet porn and porn from the past is just the abundance of new material that there is. (...) At the basic level, it really is not much different from any other addiction. Old, offline porn is different in that it gets stale pretty quickly. There are only so many times you can look at a magazine or video without it getting boring.
I think this is the key point (and dopamine-related discussions only distract from it). I also came to the realization that the big part of the problem is the same thing that keeps many addicted to Hacker News or Reddit - it's that whenever you look, there's always fresh new content, so it never gets boring.
Commendations should be made for his acknowledgement of the addiction, and making it public so others might realize too. I don't think identity has anything to do with this.
Actually, it might. From the original comment: "I won't post anonymously in case anyone wants to contact me" which means that if someone is struggling with a similar addiction, or wants to learn more about it, they can contact him and benefit from the additional information or context.
It might impact him negatively, but it might help others. That's what I mean by saying he's brave.
This is probably worth your read. Even if you disagree, your "addiction" is being shoehorned into the disease model and the unhealthy patterns don't necessarily meet the same standard.
I looked at porn on the Internet as a teenager. I'm gay and back then I was deep in the closet. And I grew up when Section 28 was still in force. It was a law passed in the 80s that said schools "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality... [or] promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".
In practice, that meant the sex education we got in schools didn't cover those of us with a preference for what the law called unacceptable "pretended" relationships.
Back then, it it was still dialup and early broadband. No high-quality video, so it was almost all pictures. But porn gave to a lot of gay kids the reassurance and sexual freedom that society more generally was unwilling to even see or mention. Porn was a paracetamol for loneliness: it didn't solve it, but it eased the pain. You opened the newspaper and every time they mentioned something related to being gay, it was framed as some giant moral debate, a culture war, a political football. But on the Internet, there wasn't any of that bullshit, just sex and porn and other people (albeit behind screen names). If schools don't want to teach the gay kids about their sexuality, then the Internet and porn will do it for them.
My friends didn't need the Internet: probably every school in the country has an underground trade in porn, whether it's Internet-based, magazines, hacking satellite/cable TV, whatever. Heterosexual teenage boys will get their hands on images of naked ladies and distribute/trade them. That's just how it is.
Access to porn throughout my teenage years made life bearable. And, at risk of oversharing, the thing I find most attractive in porn isn't the whips and chains, as the author says, but simple expressions of real, genuine emotional intimacy.
http://www.skidmore.edu/~flip/Site/Lab/Entries/2007/1/31_For...
I then tried to quit again. I went 5 days, and then 4 days, and then gave up on the idea, resigning myself to immense sexual activity. Every month or so, I'll go on a complete rampage with as many as 10 orgasms a day for 2-3 days, rarely coming out of my room. Sometimes it even interferes with food.
My sexual tastes have grown increasingly complex, sometimes illegal, sometimes not outwardly sexual at all (example, the thought of loneliness in a girl). It has changed how I look at nearly everything, but I'm not ready to conclude that it has been for the worse.
I had sex for the first time this week. I didn't climax. My parter had no issues but I was completely uninterested, which is interesting because I had been looking forward (greatly) to the encounter for more than a week. But when it finally happened... complete disinterest. I did my best to think of porn and at least play along, but part of me felt that was more rude than just failing to climax so I sat back and let my partner enjoy her share. ED was no issue.
It's worth adding that I had never met the girl before, seen pics and talked via phone but never met in person. I had little (if any) emotional attraction to the girl, and for this reason specifically I'm not very worried. It just caught my attention because I would never have guessed that a 19yo boy would go through 40 minutes of sex with an attractive girl and not climax.
Since then I've been more motivated to quit, but I'm still not ready to conclude that porn has been a negative or bad experience. It has consistently given me a lot to think about, especially watching my interests and needs shift over the past few years. I've noticed a better control over my need for porn but it's only been a few days.
Instead of stopping cold, rate limit yourself. You already have a solid baseline of your current frequency. Pick something a bit less and don't go over that for a week. Figure out some strategies for coping; I'd suggest going for long walks to public places. Note that you've achieved that milestone and step it down another notch the next week.
You don't have to go all the way to zero unless you want to, either. Demonstrating to yourself that you've got a measure of control is important.
I don't understand why sex has become this generation's absolute number 1 priority, the one thing everyone defines themselves almost religiously through and reads way too much into. Everyone has seen "group action" and gets off on borderline cartoon rape and, to quote SouthPark, Japanese girls vomiting on each other... at the same time people are so alienated from each other they can barely look at others in a pub or start talking to people, so then they flock to "pickup artists" and countless self-help books teaching them yet more ways of "getting into someone else's pants" and then all they are left with is the urgent, defining feeling of having to "perform" and live up to an allegedly commonly-agreed-upon standard - instead of valuing actual human interaction and truly accepting one self and others and feeling welcome and whole in another person's presence.
Porning all day is over doing it, but still is far better than syphilis and herpes and AIDS and surprise pregnancy jealousy and heartbreak and all the jazz that comes with immature sex outside of a committed relationship.
It's sort of like martial arts. Real martial arts isn't guys jumping 30 ft at each other, or fighting 10 opponents at once, doing somersaults, etc. If kids go to martial arts training expecting this, they will be sorely disappointed. Most martial arts is practicing moves over and over again. It's tedious and boring for those that are expecting Jackie Chan or Jet Li. Over the course of many years, you can get to a certain level of expertise. But the martial arts movies are essentially a caricature.
Hopefully the kids growing up today realize this.
Martial arts - maybe. But if your never had sex and your only education on the topic is porn, then how could you know how it really looks like? And then you have your first, and second, and third time, and you feel a bit disappointed that it didn't feel or look like you expected, and even if you realize that porn is a caricature, you're still left wondering, how much of the difference between porn and real life is because of lack of realism in videos, and how much is because of your deficiencies.
It's a real problem and it's sad that the only sexual education kids usually get comes from porn.
EDIT
There was a TED talk about this topic once, [0]. While her site doesn't have much content and I don't recall the book being very insightful (though definitely an interesting read), she raises some good points so I recommend the video (it's 4 minutes).
Ref: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaCt6qUL_Pk&feature=share
I'm a father of 3 girls. I'm teaching them all how to defend themselves with and without a gun.
Sexual violence towards women existed well before any porn ever existed. For example, the vikings raped and pillaged. I'm pretty sure they didn't have porn available to motivate them. There are many more examples. Rape has been a constant in history and was not uncommon well before porn became readily available.
In fact, a search for "rape vs porn" suggests that it reduces rape:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2006/1...
A good friend's job is specifically to monitor internet purchases of all manner of things that break bank and payment processor Terms of Service. While there is quite a lot of distressing porn that includes violence towards women (simulated or otherwise), "most" is an exaggeration. Interestingly enough, most of the people who manually verify compliance seem to be women.
This article is timely because the author is on the leading edge of a generation of men whose sexual education during their adolescent years was characterized by unprecedented access to pornography. The world has never seen the result of this being the case for millions of men. It's a father's job to prepare his children to engage in the world they will live in. You can be sure I'm keeping my eye on how having a Big Porn industry will play out for our generation, to give my kids the best chance they have to thrive in theirs.
I speak out at times on forums when women are calling for the death penalty for rape and things like that. I don't think teaching girls to hate, fear, and assault men is a good way to protect them. I think it damages their chances of creating a healthy relationship.Teach them how to recognize disrespect and sidestep it. Teach them men are human too. Teach them about respectful consent. Teach them to honor their right to choose.
I am fine with being willing and able to break bones if necessary. But I am not so fine with the starting assumption of hostility, distrust, and so on or actively promoting that as a firstline defense. A much better firstline defense is raising them in an environment of mutual consent. I wrote some about that here:
http://www.kidslikemine.com/2012/06/13/an-invisible-shield-h...
The author's fetish is with the anxiety of getting caught. He's making anxiety porn by watching something so extreme that it's guaranteed to offend anyone who catches him. The author has connected the anxiety of being caught with sexual desires in his head. It's actually a very common fetish.
" Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. [...]
As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed."
So yes, porn has always existed. So has smoking. But, industrial cigarettes and broadband porn streaming are "more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors." and hence they are more dangerous.
PS: Just to clarify, Pg did not mention porn addiction in his essay. He does mention Internet addiction, though.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorde...
and "super-stimulus":
http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_...
Growing up in Las Vegas I had a pretty unconventional view of sex, and was completely caught off guard by the emotions that came with my first actual sexual experience.
hehe. Blew it.
Porn is such a non-issue in my life. It's soulless and empty as it should be, but it's also human sexual nature at its rawest. I'm glad we live in an era where we can freely and easily experience it.
Anecdotally, I find their arguments compelling.
"A brain originally designed to cope with nothing more tempting than an occasional glimpse of a tribesperson across the savannah is lost with what’s now on offer on the net at the click of a button: when confronted with offers to participate continuously in scenarios outstripping any that could be dreamt up by the diseased mind of the Marquis de Sade. There is nothing robust enough in our psychological make-up to compensate for developments in our technological capacities."
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/12/26/why-we-should-limi...
To address the particular hogwash in that editorial, glimpse a tribesperson across the savannah? Human beings were living in groups with topless women tens of millenia ago. So it doesn't even stand on those grounds.
I thought so.
There were no cars, planes, or McDs in the Savannah either yet somehow we cope with those things. Personally I dont think porn comes close what the Romans were actually doing...
</sarcasm>
"It is perhaps only people who haven’t felt the full power of sex over their logical selves who can remain uncensorious and liberally 'modern' on the subject. Philosophies of sexual liberation appeal mostly to people who don’t have anything too destructive or weird that that they wish to do once they have been liberated.
"However, anyone who has experienced the power of sex in general and internet pornography in particular to reroute our priorities is unlikely to be so sanguine about liberty."
I don't want to keep quoting passages, so I encourage you to read the whole thing.
Look at what the bonobos do with each other - and we're more creative.
By the way, the word 'sadism' comes from his name, but he himself never actually physically hurt anyone. He was very much perceived as a threat by the successive governments of the time as he had no respect for authority and didn't hesitate to put himself in danger for speaking his mind and denouncing the hypocrisy of the society he lived in.
He would be very much at home here today. A larger than life hero.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade#Scandals_and_im...
Also, if 120 Days in Sodom is not a work of a diseased mind, I'd be curious to find out what you think is. I'm sure 32 years in prison sucks, but would most people get relief by graphically daydreaming about torturing their own children to death?
Given his personal life it certainly doesn't seem impossible that he was fantasising about what he wrote, but isn't it always a possibility that he wasn't too? It's possible to write fiction that you wouldn't want to happen in real life, after all.
This does not go well with the fact from OP article that every boy after ten is exposed to hardcore pornography on the internet. If it's true, people who "once have had a peek" do not exist and the author of the article you quoted fools us.
Having said that, my main reaction to that kind of reasoning is on the lines of "We're going to watch porn anyway, you won't stop us (and by us I mean everyone) and that's what we are going to do boo hoo. So what can you do? With your religion schmeligion and morals schmorals? Even if we hurt us in the process, so what? You can't do anything about this."
Seriously, he's like a parent who thinks he's going to tell us what to do. But he doesn't have any ways to make us listen. And no ways at all to affect the situation. So why bother at all?
I've seen several comments that have opposed what I would call the Church & Moral perspective on porn, without really having an example of what that perspective is. Let me put forth a few claims, so those of you who would disagree with them have something concrete to which to attach your arguments.
FWIW, I'm a religious person. I've been married for 9 years, and I've only ever been physically intimate with my wife. I accept that that deeply colors my perception of the world and this issue specifically.
Here are my claims:
- Porn is designed to be "used" by an individual to satisfy themselves sexually.
- Especially when encountered at a formative age (such as the author's and my own), porn greatly influences your perception of "good sex".
- Pornography and sexual intimacy are diametrically opposed.
- Sexual intimacy is more satisfying, on the whole, than porn.
- There is no such thing as "harmless porn".
Finally, a standing invitation. If you ever want more information on the mainstream evangelical Christian viewpoint on pornography, or my viewpoint specifically, feel free to email me at donspauldingii at googlemail dot com
While much porn isn't of particularly good quality, lots of porn is designed for couples. And it's great! You should try it with your wife.
Again, you've been watching the wrong porn. Plenty depicts beautiful sexual intimacy.
Having used porn myself for the majority of my life, and for almost the entirety of my marriage, I have quite a number of empirical data points of its affects on me and my sexuality. I will say that my wife and I need much less of the influence of porn on our sex life, not more.
Your anecdotes don't require disproving. They are just your anecdotes about your particular personality and calling them "empirical" does not give them any more expandability to the whole.
My "empirical" remark was simply to explain that I have enough knowledge about myself to draw the conclusion that engaging in pornography would not help my marriage. I wasn't expanding it to the whole in any way there.
I think it's necessary to learn to live with and love your lusts if you want to be in control of them. "Know thyself."
Porn isn't bad, it's a part of society now and has been for a long while, but it's the same way drugs aren't necessarily bad unless you start needing a bigger and bigger kick.
Are you sure about that? It seems that widespread, easy access to porn is something very new. Before the internet, you would have to go through some embarrassing procedure at a checkout counter to purchase just a few pornographic items.
The amount of free porn I could access in the next hour would have cost me thousands of dollars in the 1980s.
We have normalized porn very recently and it is just a piece of modernist faith that it is harmless.
Do you abstain from television, computers, rock and roll, role playing, comic books and video games by this same line of FUD?
Mass media has the power to create unrealistic expectations. Someone growing up in the age of Petrarch and Dante had unrealistic expectations of romantic love. It's easy to imagine that someone growing up in the age of internet porn would have unrealistic expectations of sex. Beyond that, I'd have to see hard, consistent evidence before I'd write off porn as especially harmful.
Video games are very addictive to me. After playing Starcraft for 16 hours straight one saturday, I carefully watch and moderate my video game play and have deleted most games from my system.
In your battle to live a meaningful, purposeful life, the peddlers of superstimuli are your enemy.
Respond to what people actually say. If you really need to respond to something unsaid, make it explicit. Anything else is a strawman fallacy.
> They were responding to a specific claim of the GGP, that porn is harmless.
Speaking of strawmen, it was Jacob who used the word harmless. Nicholas went so far as to draw an analogy with drugs concerning the effects of responsible versus irresponsible use. When he said porn wasn't bad, he clearly didn't mean that it is harmless in an absolute sense but was expressing a nuanced point of view.
I've had some first hand experience on that count, though not as extreme as the linked article.
You haven't clearly defined what you mean by harmful. Does it ruin otherwise healthy relationships on a massive scale? Does it teach impressionable young men that all women want to fuck them, leading to violence? Those seem like typical charges brought against porn. Were they true I'd agree there would be cause for serious concern. I haven't seen the data to back up these claims. If it exists, let's see it. Porn is widespread enough that you'd expect the large-scale statistical effects to be manifest.
Which is true of everything. How do you know eating chicken is harmless? What about cellphones? What about under arm deodorant? Laundry Detergent?
There are tons and tons of new things added to society all the time.
The only reason anyone has a problem with porn is because some people have moral hangups about it.
It's one of those things that can rapidly spiral, you
start needing a bigger kick to keep it interesting.
I have no idea if these claims are true or trying to justify what they've done but it seems relevant and worth mentioning. Here is an AMA from a wife of one such man: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/15b3vt/iam_the_wife_of...
Logically speaking, that doesn't mean it's not a bad thing.
EDIT: Porn is indeed almost a staple of Western society, but note that Western culture is also very image-focused and has high rates of divorce and eating disorders among women.
I present to you, old Japanese porn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s...
And here's a documentary about ancient Egyptian porn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7HttHvJ8Gc
And here's a book about Mesopotamian porn: http://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_erotic_reliefs_of...
What I want to say is that porn is not only a staple of Western culture, it's a staple of humanity.
http://www.japanese-buddhism.com/giant-pink-penis-festival.h...
The Japanese have had a penis festival since the 1600's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maypole#Scandinavia
"The central part played by young children in the celebration emphasize the procreation aspect of the celebration"
We've had celebrations and representations of sexuality throught history.
The Romans took to this a climax (pun intended)
http://www.mariamilani.com/ancient_rome/Ancient_Roman_Orgy.h...
Interesting thing is in most of these historical cases, there is a strong authoritarian push to stop these festivals to keep from corrupting people. This is the wheel of history coming around again.
Even 20 years ago porn was too expensive for the average person to afford very much of it.
They could afford it, they could not afford to hoard and stream it at will. The mechanics have not changed significantly, even as we spend more time searching for "novel" mp3s and video.
Do we have a "problem" with Netflix? Pandora? I spend constant (wasted) hours cataloging and retagging my music collection.
I am curious though, was your upbringing liberal regarding sex, or was it considered a taboo as well? For me, it was very much even taboo to think about it, even though I later found out this is terribly hypocritical considering those telling us it was taboo were doing it just as much as we would eventually. I even got in trouble for uttering the word "condom" once, almost to the same extent as for saying "fuck", which seems utterly ridiculous to me now. I'm curious if sex having been taboo for so many years is actually what makes it more stimulating, or if it's just a difference in sexuality from person to person.
I think the article speaks more to the issue with recovery and the issues surrounding "getting back to neutral."
This problem exists. He explains in laymen's terms a simple Pavlovian response that requires more and more brain stimulation to achieve the same level of dopamine needed for ejaculation.
I'm not a neuroscientist, but I bet someone out there can explain it better than I can.
For everyone who doesn't like their relationship to porn, there are other people who don't like that they got diseases, or got pregnant without a plan. But we don't pathologize this.
Let's be careful not to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Kellogg, who used the trappings of science to push predetermined conclusions in a campaign against harmless sexuality.
It can happen a million different ways; for the author, it was (probably) porn.
The author's already found the solution - we need to separate sexuality from guilt and shame, to be able to feel aroused and wholesome at the same time. But it's hard to do that after you've already fallen down the spiral. We need to make our children's first experiences of arousal feel natural and wholesome - which means more openness, more embracing of sexuality in artforms that are going to portray it positively. But that's a hard sell to middle America.
That's part of the puritanical and (maybe any religious) mind control. People need to feel guilty so they self-police themselves, and it also has to be something that is common (such as sex) so everyone is always guilty. Guilty people are vulnerable and easily controlled.
This has to be planted early in the childhood, then it sort of becomes automatic and not that easy to unlearn. Even rationally if some admit there is nothing wrong with this or that, they'll still feel guilty -- it because it becomes part of their personality.
Is this really true anymore? It seems that the majority of the media consumed by young people carries the message that sex is extremely important and if you are not doing it with everyone in every way, you are brainwashed by religious or moral beliefs.
Obviously there is denigration of sex from many sources but which of these sources actually have an impact on young people?
Sex as necessary for social station is not being sex-positive.
You seem to not pay attention to our lawmakers, our newsmedia, and have many conversations with the persons around you.
Putting the "its not good for you" label on it also makes it immediately more interesting than it should be. Increases the guilty pleasure and so on.
The guy in the article - maybe he would have erectile problems never having watched porn too. Performance anxiety is normal.
One thing I am sure about: The cure for bad sex is lots of sex.
I think Skoofoo is spot on.
And that's from only reading the first couple sentences.
In my opinion it's important to know the symptoms of any addiction in case you see those patterns in your own or your peer's behaviors.
We have tested and tasted too much, lover--
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
the knowledge we stole but could not use.
For me, in this day and age, its really hard to say one way or the other. How poorly done and/or wrong will it be, and is having it done that way better than nothing? I can't know, but I suspect that with societal attitudes on sex, "some porn is fine, how much is too much is different for everybody and here's how to tell where the line is" is too complicated of a message to effectively communicate. If it is even allowed to be communicated at all. Don't forget widespread acceptance of "abstinence only" rubbish isn't far behind us, I'm reminded of this every time I visit family in the South and see the big labels on every gas station condom dispenser reminding me that the only real way to avoid HIV/AIDS is monogamy and abstinence before marriage. Whereas growing up in the North, we didn't even have those dispensers. I suspect their presence is related to the greater taboos about sex in those areas, but in the north I was never scared away from buying rubbers at the counter when I was young.
I try not to lie to children, if at all possible.
I've never tried to smoke so I can't really compare.
Nope, it wasn't the porn.
I see a general male catharsis that borders on the neurotic. Society demands verile/potent men who can, at the same time, subjugate themselves fully to society and their mates.
Really . . . What a wanker!
Seriously though, where is the discussion happening about the link between porn and the degradation of women? Is there just no argument against it, or does HN not even realize it's there?
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIE.htm...
". . . if equality is what you want and what you care about, then you have to fight for the institutions that will make it socially real. It is not just a matter of your attitude. You can't think it and make it exist. You can't try sometimes, when it works to your advantage, and throw it out the rest of the time. Equality is a discipline. It is a way of life."
Concerning distribution: is there anybody stupid enough to ask for an never-ending, positional "war on porn"? As if wars on drugs and on pirates wasn't enough
As for the production aspect, as I said, there are women in porn who view it as a women's rights issue, ie who is to say what women can and can't do with their bodies.
For example, the previous life story article ending with a question mark on Salon was "Can I date a Republican?", and the clear answer from the article is "yes."
The one before that is "Should the terminally ill control their deaths?" and the author's statement is "A year after my mother's uncomfortable decline, it's a question with which I'm still wrestling", but it's clear that the author supports people learning more about the options for palliative care over attempts at staying alive for as long as possible. I'll put this as a "yes."
Then there's the quoted question '“Are you on the cover of a magazine?”', where the answer is definitely "yes", but this too doesn't fit Betteridge's law.
And "Was I selfish to have fertility treatments?", where the author states "I honestly don’t think my choice was any more selfish than anyone’s choice to have a child." So that's a "no." But there wa s a while when she worried about the question.
I think you get the idea.
And yes, it was not made for opinion pieces or personal narratives and, like in the examples you give, doesn't generally work in these situations.
My intention was just to point out that it happens to apply here because the headline is childish link bait.
The author covers in the piece that it wasn't really porn that lead to this and it's not going to be "forever" either if he does something about it.
That doesn't apply here, because "if he does something about it" is a different cause than not having enough information.
It looks like you say that it "happens to apply here" because 1) the answer is no, and 2) it's "childish link bait." Why not then just say "No. This is childish link bait."?
Suppose the NM governor wrote an op-ed piece "Should I stay the death penalty?", which outlines her ongoing thoughts both for and against commuting the sentence for the last two people on NM's death row. Suppose you are ardently pro-death penalty, support RepealTheRepeal, and believe that only fools would be against it. You could quite justifiably answer "no" to that headline and believe the title to be "childish link bait." But you would be wrong to say that Betteridge's Law applies.
I think the misunderstanding here is that you are looking Betteridge's Law as more of a pseudo-law that has specific constraints and I'm looking at is as shorthand for a specific critique of bad writing, which I think does apply here even though, as you stated, it was not created to apply to personal writing.
The difference is that most of the examples you are giving of personal writing are subjective and/or value judgements that have no factual answer to the headline question. This one does have an answer, the answer is "no" and the author knew the answer was "no".
Anyway, clearly a better comment for me to have made would have been "Although it doesn't apply here this post makes me think of Betteridge's Law!" but it's much less pithy.
"You can't tell the players from the fans"
Could someone give me a summary of the article?
The fact that an average person can't summit Everest while a practiced climber can is not a disparagement on the former.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/internet-porn-men-p...
Do check out my venture https://makelovenotporn.tv/ 'Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference.'
* fundamentally true; not correct, but fundamentally true.
Pirate Bay and other trackers, for example.
BTB, I am not talking about blocking porn, just users should go through a password wall. Also the users should be able to change this default setting if they like. This is not much different from the password protection for adult content offered by many cable tv companies.
His problems with porn is just his problems. I suggest dealing with it.
The whole point of the article was that it was not "just his problem", and beyond missing that point, the poster responds to a straw man not even hinted at in the article.
His inability to "deal with it" was the purpose of the article!
I experimented with porn growing up, and certainly saw somethings I wish I hadn't, but I have never had trouble getting it up for a real girl either.
He does not condemn porn. He questions what it means to have a natural sexuality when "Sexiness is always constructed — it used to be normatively hot to be fat and pale! " His problem is not that he has "demons", but that "I feel estranged from my sexuality, like it’s somebody else’s."
The piece comes across to me as very self reflective, asking '(why) is this a problem?' 'What would I be like in not for Y (porn)', and so forth.
I do not see any clear path to a police state (and I like to think of myself as (relativly) extremely biased to seeing a police state).
He's projecting his other issues on pornography, though. All of these issues will continue to exist unanswered long after he abandons porno.
But it seems to me that winter is coming and we all might be heading to a police state. And I don't see how his article can't be used as a brick in the wall constructed by people not really caring about us (but only about "demons" in their heads") between us and free speech, freedom of expression and sometimes physical freedom.
That's what I'm fearing.
I'm about 5 years older than the article poster. I haven't had unfiltered Internet since way before puberty, but I knew where my dad kept the tapes and magazines and I've had the Internet connection by the time I was 15-16. Either I was too young to care or old enough to know where to find it.
I don't think my parents would have added anything to either of our lives by filtering the Internet connection. They spent enough time trying to push me away from computers, which in hindsight I think they'd admit was folly since it was this "addiction" which I used to dig myself out of a childhood of poverty.
Anyway part of that time was used looking at porn, more of it on on-line games and a bit of it learning interesting things. Other than turning into a geek, I don't really think I'm messed up in any special way.
We now have two data points running contrary from each other. I see no significant evidence to suggest porn is really the problem it's make it out to be.
(Because dealing with fear without treating harmful things being feared seems pointless)
That perspective brings us to a different question: What can we do to ensure safe and positive sexual development in children without censoring the web and imposing our generation's morals on the next?
People who take the banned of protecting children from porn usually do this not from the safety & positivity point of view but from church & "morals" one. That's the most putrid, patronizing and hypicritical kind of people available; moreover, they don't see (or care) the relation of law and its effect (those two rarely match perfectly, sometimes not at all) and naturally they push for the measures I listed.
People who could ask this question never get any saying.
what the web has to do with it? as a teenager I could buy hardcore porn magazines without any problems.
Are you really making this argument on HN of all places? That behaviour doesn't have the ability to fluctuate wildly with only small differences in friction (not a pun!)?
You can moderate your intake of cookies; but limiting yourself to one kind of porn and not the other doesn't feel a working solution.
You can try to limit your porn consumption to once per a period of time (a week?) but I bet it will make the symptoms worse.
There is a very fancy word for being addicted to being intoxicated, no matter with what (I forgot the word for now). Being addicted to all kinds of porn at once seems similar - and, frankly, equally rare.