Letters to the Editor
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The Addictive Personality
Recently I went to the doctor for treatment of back pain (which was pretty severe), and after some consultation, my doctor (who knows me pretty well) gave me prescription for some pretty heavy-duty pain killers that are strongly controlled due to the fact they're very much in demand by certain people with certain addictions.
I'd read some info on this particular pain killer and asked my doctor, "I've heard that these can be quite addictive, many people warn against taking these."
And he responded, "Yeah, but you don't seem to have a very addictive personality. Just take them as prescribed for a couple of days and let me know if they help or not, this is just to reduce the inflammation and pain so that your physical therapy will be more effective."
Now, perhaps my doctor was is just cavalier but I like to think he knows a bit about me (as a regular patient) and respected me.
I realize this is not really all that great an analogy to porn use, but I was struck by Cary's comments -- if you replace the word "porn" with "booze" and "into my pants" with "into my stomach" and "molest" with ... well, figure it out.
I admire Cary greatly, and I drink, but I'm not an alcoholic.
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Re-wiring your brain for fun and profit
I think it is sad that men don't realize that porn re-trains their brains away from real-world sexuality and toward false imagery and exploitation, which they thereafter have to pay for, being that porn is a product and not a real expression of sex. The drug analogy absolutely works. What is more, men who bring degrading, objectifying porn imagery and behaviors into real relationships often sadden and disgust the women they are with, souring their real world sex lives even further-- they literally can't have normal sex anymore. The porn industry re-wired their brains for profit, and trashed their real sex lives in the process.
Think about that for a minute. Sound like any drug you know?
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if less-evolved animals could publish porn...
... there'd be magazines and websites covered with pictures of dog behinds and monkey crotches all over creation. But they can't.
Men are competent in publishing in a variety of media, so there's porn.
It's bigger than them, they can't help it.
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Porn addiction
I agree completely with Anonymous (above, and no relation). Real sex involves all the senses, especially touch and smell, but porno sex is all visuals and sound effects. Human sexuality is a delicate thing, and the long term effects of becoming habituated to the latter are risky.
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These issues tend to polarize...
...but I think Cary's advice is worthwhile.
If anyone read the Times Science articles on sex yesterday, the recurring theme is that arousal is not a cognitive act. We don't choose what turns us on. At best we respond to it.
However, we also generally only get the tip of the iceberg when it comes to self-awareness, and even this is spun to favor potentially rewarding behavior. You can read an example of recent research on this phenomenon on sciam.com (Scientific American).
That's where porn is problematic, in my opinion. Biologically-speaking it is so basically and powerfully rewarding. We literally wouldn't be here today if our ancestors didn't get turned on by the sight and sounds of sex. (It's important to note that porn can't deliver the feel or smell, a shortcoming to some, a safety to others. Don't get too comfortable. Technology always delivers.) And presumably we've been selected from among the lines of those who liked it the most.
So you can argue for a love of movies or art as being similarly addictive, but neither of these, not even alcohol, plays so strongly or directly to our evolutionary heritage. The *average* adult male thinks about sex how many times a day? The average adult female? The average TV show references it how many times? The average advertisement? and on and on. Seems to me we're mostly just functioning sexaholics.
In fact, we don't even think about food as much as we do about sex. Rather, we eat our fill and then go on with our day. I've heard male lab rats will continue to go at it until they collapse as long as they have a fresh supply of partners. And if you've never had several willing partners together in a single room, I can tell you that's pretty much been my experience, too. You start to wonder where the 'off' switch is.
So what is this desire that's nearest to us? Is it what's most essentially human, or just a natural outgrowth of the logic of evolution now available to us for review? In other words, can we get free of it long enough to take a good look at it? Probably not. The 24/7 availability of porn certainly doesn't help.
I think those of us on these pages who put their faith in free choice harbor naive hopes about the freedom of our choices. So when Cary talks about porn as an invader, I'm inclined to agree with him. The trick is, we've got two feet for walking. One's up in the air while one's on the ground. What's closest to us at one time can be an invader at another.
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Free choice?
I think those of us on these pages who put their faith in free choice harbor naive hopes about the freedom of our choices.
True, but that goes for pretty much everything, existentially speaking: Our "freedom" to do things or think things or feel things is not absolute, it's relative to many other things in our lives.
Something not many people have concerned themselves so far here is the definition of "porn." Cary speaks of "porn" and the LW speaks of "porn," and just what was her boyfriend looking at? What are the images that are reaching into Cary's pants?
Is an image of a beautiful woman nude, porn? If she's kissing another woman? Another man? Pleasuring herself?
I'm guessing that it's something like the old saying, "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it." Thus we have what we might loosely describe as "hardcore" or "softcore" or "erotica" or whatever, and people figure out their own reaction and thus decide what "porn" is to them.
Regarding the idea that "porn" has all these particular focused effects: From what I can tell about our current culture, it's focused on sex and sexual "status," however you want to define that. It's much more insidious than porn, and open acceptance of porn as simple "right to the crotch" arousal is, to me, a much more healthy way of living than the way we couch so much of our societal images, status, etc. on sexual status.
Yeah, sex is really what it's all about, and we Americans do it pretty badly (just as we helped start the trend towards global obesity with our food choices). I've lived overseas for a while and you might be amazed at the choice of "porn" that is available, easily available, to the general public. And yet these cultures don't manifest the kind of symptoms that Cary and others see in porn, globally speaking.
So porn is a convenient thing to blame for the fact that our society has a whole bunch of issues that it really has no idea how to deal with.