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In this episode, we discuss porn.
Participants: Yassine, Interversity, Neophos, Xantos.
Links:
E016: The Banality of Catgirls (The Bailey)
Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (Behavioral Sciences)
How Pornography Can Ruin Your Sex Life (Mark Manson)
Does too much pornography numb us to sexual pleasure? (Aeon Magazine)
The great porn experiment (TEDx)
Hikikomori (Wikipedia)
The Effects Of Too Much Porn: "He's Just Not That Into Anyone" (The Last Psychiatrist)
Hard Core (The Atlantic)
Recorded 2022-12-18 | Uploaded 2023-01-12
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Notes -
Thoughts about the last two episodes. (Great show by the way!)
There is a story that comes up a lot on the topic of superstimuli. It goes something like this. 40th percentile person Joaquim Expemplar uses media and drugs in his formative years. Because games, porn, and weed satisfy Joaquim's basic needs, he feels okay about his life and is unmotivated to pursue achievements and authentic relationships. Over time, by indulging himself in peace, Joaquim stagnates into becoming a 20th percentile person, then a 10th percentile person, and then one day he wakes up and finds he's a big failure who is compulsively using superstimuli to distract himself from the squalor of his life.
This story makes a lot of sense. But recently, I think the causal chain is getting reversed here. Mine isn't an original hypothesis, but it's worth restating.
People who are living even mediocre lives don't fall into the trap by playing more and more videogames, taking harder and harder drugs, and watching more and more porn. Every teenage boy is trying drugs and playing videogames and watching porn a lot. Nine out of ten times, this behavior decreases to a healthy(er) equilibrium after the boy grows up, gets in an LTR, joins the workforce, etc. Now, it could be that the other boy was genetically predisposed to get wrecked by superstimulus. But it seems to me the only people who ultimately became addicted are those whose lives were already decisively moving in the direction of FUBAR before they started dosing.
n=1 sample. I spent five years in a pit after college. The need to write an 100 page capstone threw me into an anxiety crisis that spiraled out of control. I just barely finished the required task a year after graduation. I was too afraid to interview, so I ended up staying at a dreary dead end job as an on-call substitute teacher. I actually inbox-ignored a good job offer from a professor because I found myself too humiliated for him to learn what happened to me. I couldn't bring myself to go out and socialize, visit family, etc. After work I would religiously play Europa Univeralis III (for the sense of an interesting job), then watch a slice of life anime (for a sense of friendship and going outside to do fun things), and of course masturbate to porn afterwards.
You can say that, if I hadn't had access to these things, I would have been more motivated to get out of the pit. That doesn't seem right to me. I have reflected on this and I'm convinced that, all those years ago, had there been a fitocratc revolution in the late 00s and a public health inquisition shut down all the porn sites, arrested the hosts of Nyaa Torrents, and installed firmware in my computer to block eu3.exe from loading, I doubt I would have formed healthy habits to fill the vacuum.
I was like a mouse caught in the airbubble of an upside-down cup. The mouse treads water without knowing which way to swim to reach the big blue sky again. Sometimes, the mouse may try treading water even harder, elevating its body momentarily out of the water. But this can't work, so the mouse eventually tires and collapses, back to bobbing its nose to breathe.
Realistically, I was in the pit because I was terrified, not because I was unmotivated. Without these replacements I likely would have exited stage left.
That is my personal experience. But I also think I pretty sensitive to changes in people I've known in life longitudinally, and I can't think of any cases of people who were doing okay in life, and then went off the deep end into a superstimulus rabbit hole. For example, a second cousin I know who's been in and out of rehab for years was a marginalized weirdo, friendless, and withdrawn when he was eight. You can't tell me drugs ruined him. He was already ruined.
Superstimulus, in this story, is just bread and circuses for the broken-hearted. Things like porn and pizza are not existential threats. The existential threat is the mismatch between a technological society's requirements and human social and cognitive reality. This puts people in a position where porn and pizza really are their best option.
One thing I noticed is that, among my acquaintances, those who do go down the rabbit hole of drugs, porn, and video games are all men.
Now that might be just my social circle but the difference is quite striking. I have several explanations as to why:
Male and female dysfunctions are different. It is more socially acceptable to spend hours on instagram than hours gaming.
We are wired not to see female losers as losers. Women have intrinsic value, men only insofar they accomplish and provide something. A woman who doesn't accomplish anything is still a woman, therefore intrinsically valuable, therefore not a loser.
Greater male variability hypothesis: There are more male geniuses, but also more male dumbasses.
Glass floor: women have better support systems/ social support and don't fall as deep
Superstimuli are geared towards male taste. I know much fewer female potheads / video game junkies. Superstimuli for women (e.g. instagram) seem to be harmful in less obvious ways
Not only do we not see female losers as losers, but I think that often we fail to perceive them at all. A third of homeless people are female, for instance, but the prototypical homeless person in the public consciousness is almost invariably male. I think there's also a recent upswing in young male dysfunction owing to the collapse of masculine-coded blue-collar work. Service sector jobs code as more feminine and better pair with female agreeability, while males chaff under the subservience required of them.
Are they sleeping on the streets though or are they bouncing around couches?
Sometimes they really are on the street (usually obese, weird looking, skeletal, etc.), but I think people tune them out because they don't enjoy contemplating unfeminine women. They are actively unwholesome in ways that slovenly men are not. It is the dual edge of the women are wonderful trope.
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