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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32148 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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I genuinely have no idea why anyone would prefer porn over sex.

Ease. No need to get your partner in the mood, no need to pleasure your partner, you get to focus solely on your own pleasure when you want to be pleasured and you're done when you want to be done.

My personal controversial belief about this is that people are often against porn for this very reason. They want actual sex to be like this, where you focus solely on your own pleasure. Porn "raises the bar" in a way that makes them uncomfortable about their own performance.

No need to get your partner in the mood, no need to pleasure your partner

These are two of the main enjoyable activities in sex, though.

It's a specific instance of the more general loving vs. being loved distinction. Being loved by someone isn't a tremendously enjoyable experience in itself, because it's passive. Loving someone, insofar as your actions tend to succeed, is about as enjoyable as life gets, because it's active and you can recognise the meaningfulness of your actions towards a valued goal.

See also being rich vs. getting rich, being famous vs. getting famous, being academically successful vs. getting academically successful etc. Most of the enjoyment comes from recognising that your actions are helping you to achieve a valued goal.

If you don't have a sexual partner, then your actions aren't meaningful for the goal of achieving intimacy with a sexual partner, and hence they lose most of their meaning. Hence "masturbatory" as a metaphor for "meaningless".

It's still more work. Like cooking a steak vs having a microwavable meal for dinner. The sex/steak's going to be better, but if you don't feel like putting in more than a lazy five minutes in, the porn/microwave is the choice people will go for.

But whether the time over five minutes is worth it is not independent of people's evaluations of the end goal.

In Love and Friendship, Allan Bloom argued that the net effect of Freud, Kinsey, and the pseudo-scientification of sexuality was to de-eroticise a lot of American culture. There was more open sexuality in the culture, but less of a sense of majesty to the sexuality, and hence a loss of eroticism. Perhaps the appeal to pornography to people is not that they have been desensitized to real-world sexual activities by pornographic experiences, but that they have lost the hope of a genuinely erotic experience in the real-world.

I did say "availability aside". Yes, sex is harder to get - but when you can get it, it blows porn out of the water. That is why the "people are having less sex because of porn" hypothesis doesn't ring true to me, because that hypothesis basically says that people are willingly forgoing a superior experience for an inferior one.

Even if your partner is happy to have sex and all you need to do is ask, the reasons I listed are reasons why someone might not want to.

I disagree. I cannot envision someone seriously citing those reasons to not have sex in favor of having a wank. I certainly never would.

I don't get that much sex, but I don't find it as vastly pleasurable as you do. There's a decent chance that this is because I've wanked too much and have desensitized my penis, but whatever, it's reality now for me. If I had a partner who rarely would initiate sex, but would always say yes if I initiated- I imagine I'd have sex lots in the beginning of the relationship, then the experience would get a bit stale and I'd go down to a couple times a week.

I agree. Allan Bloom once said that sado-masochism was a substitute for natural eroticism when people had lost any hope for the latter, e.g. even if you are being abused and deprived by someone, or you are abusing/depriving them in various ways, that's at least some sort of connection, and humans will often prefer even painful and tormented connections to loneliness.

I think that the same dynamic appears in many other parts of life. For example, I have done volunteer work where I met many abused/formerly abused women, and they had always lost hope of a loving relationship with anyone other than their abuser.

Porn, and masturbation more generally, seems to be an instance of the same phenomenon: a substitute activity for when people don't think that they can have the alternative. Note that the alternative is not just sex, but intimacy. A lot of porn users think that they could use prostitutes, unattractive partners, and so on, but don't see that as a path to intimacy. Or they see intimate relationships as too much work, like those men who see sex as a burden of pleasing their partner, rather than as a fun and spiritual (for lack of a better word) activity.

Christian thinkers were really on to something when they said that hope was the most important virtue.

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