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Notes -
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.
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