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Did porn warp me forever?

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Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#61

Post by jacoblyles »

psykotic wrote: post #56
jacoblyles wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Porn isn't bad, it's a part of society now and has been for a long while" Are you sure about that? It seems that widespread, easy access to porn is something very new. Before the internet, you would have to go through some embarrassing procedure at a checkout counter to purchase just a few pornographic items. The amount of free porn I could access in the next hour would have cost me thousands of dollars in the 1980…

> We have normalized porn very recently and it is just a piece of modernist faith that it is harmless Do you abstain from television, computers, rock and roll, role playing, comic books and video games by this same line of FUD? Mass media has the power to create unrealistic expectations. Someone growing up in the age of Petrarch and Dante had unrealistic expectations of romantic love. It's easy to imagine that someon…

Some of it. For example, the average American watches 5 hours of TV a day. That will kill you. I watch about 1 hour

Video games are very addictive to me. After playing Starcraft for 16 hours straight one saturday, I carefully watch and moderate my video game play and have deleted most games from my system.

In your battle to live a meaningful, purposeful life, the peddlers of superstimuli are your enemy.

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#63

Post by groovy2shoes »

jrockway wrote: post #36

I'm sure there are people who have never watched porn that don't particularly enjoy sex either. This sounds like all other articles that generalize one anecdote to data.

And I have a converse anecdote: after having had sex, I don't enjoy porn anymore. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#65

Post by guard-of-terra »

jacoblyles wrote: post #52
nicholassmith wrote: post #32

It's one of those things that can rapidly spiral, you start needing a bigger kick to keep it interesting. The problem being it is incredibly difficult to talk about, it's something parents will start needing to discuss with their kids straight up. Porn isn't bad, it's a part of society now and has been for a long while, but it's the same way drugs aren't necessarily bad unless you start needing a bigger and bigger ki…

>"Porn isn't bad, it's a part of society now and has been for a long while" Are you sure about that? It seems that widespread, easy access to porn is something very new. Before the internet, you would have to go through some embarrassing procedure at a checkout counter to purchase just a few pornographic items. The amount of free porn I could access in the next hour would have cost me thousands of dollars in the 1980…

Let's pretend we figured out porn is kinda bad. Our next steps?

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#66

Post by psykotic »

jacoblyles wrote: post #61
psykotic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have normalized porn very recently and it is just a piece of modernist faith that it is harmless Do you abstain from television, computers, rock and roll, role playing, comic books and video games by this same line of FUD? Mass media has the power to create unrealistic expectations. Someone growing up in the age of Petrarch and Dante had unrealistic expectations of romantic love. It's easy to imagine that someon…

Some of it. For example, the average American watches 5 hours of TV a day. That will kill you. I watch about 1 hour Video games are very addictive to me. After playing Starcraft for 16 hours straight one saturday, I carefully watch and moderate my video game play and have deleted most games from my system. In your battle to live a meaningful, purposeful life, the peddlers of superstimuli are your enemy.

Good for you--I mean that. My addictive superstimulus is learning new things with no practical relevance my work, like orbital mechanics or calendrical calculations. When I catch myself going on extended binges, I try to extricate myself by consciously directing my time and energy elsewhere. But it would be silly of me to indict textbooks as harmful objects. Any hardcore procrastinator knows that the focus is incidental and essentially arbitrary.

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#67

Post by vy8vWJlco »

jrockway wrote: post #36

I'm sure there are people who have never watched porn that don't particularly enjoy sex either. This sounds like all other articles that generalize one anecdote to data.

TL;DR: self-love heals all wounds.

From the outset (and still at the end), he frames porn as deviant so you know what his overwhelming internal language is. (Porn didn't put that in him, he was taught it.) He then takes a cold-turkey approach to change and self-moderation (and why not - everyone's made a New Year's resolution...). Like abstinence (and over eating, and anger management, and the list goes on) though, extreme denial often (though not always; everyone's different, but often...) leads to extreme periods of indulgence followed by acute shame (remember that New Years resolution?). I think his thoughts and feeling say more about his environment and his ingrained attitudes than they do about the effect of watching porn. (I and every guy I know watched more porn than TV during their early teens. Their respective perviness has more to do with their self-image than anything... The ones who think of themselves as freaks, present themselves as freaks, even though they have identical interests to others...) It sounds like he thinks he has to hide, even from himself, which sounds like a self-acceptance issue to me. For starters, it might be productive for him to seek more relationships that give him stronger feelings of acceptance. (Which he is: "What helped the most was talking to friends, particularly women, who have had more positive relationships with masturbation." In other words, he needs a companion who likes similar things sexually... No surprise there.) He even admits at the end that he has an addictive personality, but ultimately assigns the blame on porn when he's in full control. Or at least he would be if he came to terms with having genitals like everyone else. It could have just as easily been food, or coffee, or the Sears catalog... He'd still have to learn to live with himself. At 23 that's still happening quite a bit, but his article is a social commentary. Unfortunately he's too close to the issue to see that he's the only one responsible for his own self-image and feelings of self-worth.

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#68

Post by andrewflnr »

psykotic wrote: post #56
jacoblyles wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Porn isn't bad, it's a part of society now and has been for a long while" Are you sure about that? It seems that widespread, easy access to porn is something very new. Before the internet, you would have to go through some embarrassing procedure at a checkout counter to purchase just a few pornographic items. The amount of free porn I could access in the next hour would have cost me thousands of dollars in the 1980…

> We have normalized porn very recently and it is just a piece of modernist faith that it is harmless Do you abstain from television, computers, rock and roll, role playing, comic books and video games by this same line of FUD? Mass media has the power to create unrealistic expectations. Someone growing up in the age of Petrarch and Dante had unrealistic expectations of romantic love. It's easy to imagine that someon…

You have made a couple unfounded assumptions. One, that the GP, abstains from porn and two, that the fact that it's not clear that it's harmless is the reason for it. They were responding to a specific claim of the GGP, that porn is harmless.

Respond to what people actually say. If you really need to respond to something unsaid, make it explicit. Anything else is a strawman fallacy.

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#69

Post by klibertp »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #59
ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about responsible parenting teaching our children the concepts of boundaries and moderation?

I doubt you can apply moderation to your sex life. You can moderate your intake of cookies; but limiting yourself to one kind of porn and not the other doesn't feel a working solution. You can try to limit your porn consumption to once per a period of time (a week?) but I bet it will make the symptoms worse.

It's perfectly possible to limit yourself to one kind of porn - just find the kind of porn you really enjoy and use it for when you can't do it in a bedroom.

There is a very fancy word for being addicted to being intoxicated, no matter with what (I forgot the word for now). Being addicted to all kinds of porn at once seems similar - and, frankly, equally rare.

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#70

Post by waxjar »

jrockway wrote: post #36

I'm sure there are people who have never watched porn that don't particularly enjoy sex either. This sounds like all other articles that generalize one anecdote to data.

Came across this yesterday: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/porn-study-scrapped-.... I found it amusing.
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