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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Also, in the absence of porn people will just jerk off to non-porn naked women, and then almost-naked women, and then mostly-clothed women. (in current modern conditions, upon which that depends very finely. no idea if hunter gatherers masturbate or how often, etc). Or they'd just torrent it. A better argument would probably be directly against masturbation as opposed to for banning it.

Due to the nature of human habit and memory, obtaining satisfaction from a woman promotes and orients a man’s sexuality toward women, and not oneself

Why isn't this also true of masturbation? It orients one towards women because it's images of them!

Old World Monkeys and Apes masturbate so I think it's safe to assume that every version of our ancestors spanked the monkey.

But, frequency - i've seen a video of a monkey sucking its own dick, and some humans do that, but neither is common for either. Is masturbation a once-daily or once-weekly thing for monkeys and apes?

Monkeys are notorious for jacking off (as well as shit-flinging) at the zoo -- if it's common enough to see at a random zoo visit I would think that they do it quite a bit? Auto-fellatio is probably anatomically easier for monkeys, which might explain why humans don't do it so much; also the known problem of being more like sucking dick than getting a blowjob. (which is presumably less of an issue if you're a monkey)

Also, in the absence of porn people will just jerk off to non-porn naked women, and then almost-naked women, and then mostly-clothed women

Do you think they'd do it as often? This sounds similar to saying that if you ban fast food people will just gorge themselves on healthy food, except they'd also probably stop gorging altogether.

It's not obvious that all the anti-porn arguments differentiate that much between masturbating 1x/day and 1x/2 days, tbh. And - from various reading, it seems like, when given access only to 'sexy women' magazines, people still did it very often.

And the problem is it's just complicated - both fast food and health food share issues like having poor nutrient content and tasting mediocre that, locally, lead people to fast food (people say "eat your vegetables", but store-bought vegetables taste flavorless. Heirloom varieties, grown well, of the same often taste great. So replacing fast food (and a store-bought prepared dinner, or even making your own white bread loaf with butter, is still pretty bad) with healthy food still leave people wanting the bad food.

The frequency or characteristics of masturbation could similarly depend on society, but depend on more things than just 'pictures available'. Or maybe it really just is 'pics available'. Wonder if any primitive-ish societies keep around any cosmo magazines.

They absolutely will. Maybe not if you ban sugar entirely.

I should rephrase.

Assuming you can enforce a ban, the further you go along the spectrum of ruling out easy, tasty, addictive, unhealthy foods: the less likely people are to gorge themselves.

And the same for porn, the further you go along the spectrum of removing the easiest, most stimulating porn, the less likely people will be to overindulge.

Yes, marginal effects do matter. Their effects are often a lot less than the perfect solutions one might hope for, but I suspect that it's rare that they have no or negative effect - perhaps compared to what expected, it might feel that way.