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Notes -
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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