This is not news. Why on Earth was this upvoted?
To get it up. :)
Did porn warp me forever?
101–110 of 347 posts
Re: Did porn warp me forever?
#102I know this is outing myself but this is my personal experience. I won't post anonymously in case anyone wants to contact me. I came to the realization about 2 years that I am addicted to porn. For anyone out there struggling with the same thing, it can get better and yes, it is probably having a negative influence on your life. Previously I would look about once per week but in the past 6 months, I have probably vie…
"I am addicted to porn"..."I would look about once per week"
It seems odd to me that being addicted to porn would go with only looking "about once per week". I think I understand how this could still be technically an addiction, but compared to other addictions and - I imagine - especially porn addictions, it seems rather bizarre. Certainly if pornography was only being consumed once a week then the rate of let's call it "stimulation inflation" can't have been that high, or can it? Could you elaborate?
Re: Did porn warp me forever?
#103I know this is outing myself but this is my personal experience. I won't post anonymously in case anyone wants to contact me. I came to the realization about 2 years that I am addicted to porn. For anyone out there struggling with the same thing, it can get better and yes, it is probably having a negative influence on your life. Previously I would look about once per week but in the past 6 months, I have probably vie…
> I am addicted to porn. ... I would look about once per week...
I don't understand: this seems incongruous. Watching pornography once a week doesn't come across as an uncontrolled, impulse behaviour. How does one suffer from an addiction and satisfy it but once a week?
Do forgive me if I come across as doubting your word. That is not my intention in the least.
Re: Did porn warp me forever?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are few arguments that I have more disdain for than the one that somehow because our brains (or bodies) haven't experienced something before, they aren't built to cope with it. It's not like we are, or have ever been, built for a single temperature, type of sex, kind of food, etc. Our bodies and minds are adaptable , and while we can try to logically reason about how our minds and bodies adapt to certain stimul…
Lets cut this BS argument short: Who is driving a car? I thought so. There were no cars, planes, or McDs in the Savannah either yet somehow we cope with those things. Personally I dont think porn comes close what the Romans were actually doing...
And a lot of people die from cars. Clearly it's because we were never meant to have them.
Re: Did porn warp me forever?
#105It'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…
I don't need a bigger kick, but a sexy kick. Porn are unsexy, which is why I am using them less and less these day.
Re: Did porn warp me forever?
#106I suspect that the article is fictional and is written by a 44-year old female writer.
Re: Did porn warp me forever?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any research that proves your claim: "Porn isn't good for you if you want to enjoy sex."? Porn has only made sex better for me.
It seems that there is: http://yourbrainonporn.com/why-do-i-find-porn-more-exciting-...
I'm sure that site has no bias what so ever.
Re: Did porn warp me forever?
#108From my favorite Paul Graham essay,
The Acceleration of Addictiveness
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
" Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. [...]
As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed."
So yes, porn has always existed. So has smoking. But, industrial cigarettes and broadband porn streaming are "more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors." and hence they are more dangerous.
PS: Just to clarify, Pg did not mention porn addiction in his essay. He does mention Internet addiction, though.
Re: Did porn warp me forever?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alain de Botton has written about it, too: "A brain originally designed to cope with nothing more tempting than an occasional glimpse of a tribesperson across the savannah is lost with what’s now on offer on the net at the click of a button: when confronted with offers to participate continuously in scenarios outstripping any that could be dreamt up by the diseased mind of the Marquis de Sade. There is nothing robust…
While the Marquis de Sade had an unusual penchant for buggery (which was illegal at the time) and blasphemy (also illegal), he himself was certainly not "diseased of the mind". You could consider him an early Libertarian, fighting for freedom above anything else. He was a humanist opposed to the death penalty (very much used at the time). His writings are provocative, and his mind was certainly unusual, but you also…
There's no standard definition of having a "diseased mind," but I think a case can be made that his sexual compulsions were pathological. He was hardly unique in having enemies in eighteenth century France, but he couldn't stop himself from handing his enemies one excuse after another to lock him up, often for crimes that we still find repugnant today. (I don't know what your source is for the idea that he never hurt anybody.) It isn't like eighteenth century aristocrats were held to high standards in their treatment of servants and prostitutes. A man who couldn't live within those limitations would have found the twenty-first century even less hospitable to his compulsions.
Re: Did porn warp me forever?
#110I know this is outing myself but this is my personal experience. I won't post anonymously in case anyone wants to contact me. I came to the realization about 2 years that I am addicted to porn. For anyone out there struggling with the same thing, it can get better and yes, it is probably having a negative influence on your life. Previously I would look about once per week but in the past 6 months, I have probably vie…
What you are relating isn't scientific information, though it may help you in some way, it isn't necessarily accurate or helpful to others.
You have oversimplified the function of dopamine to the point that you have said something misleading. It isn't a drug. You also get a "hit" of dopamine when there is a loud, surprising noise, and any number of similar situations. Including good, natural situations. Including normal sex. This doesn't mean that "your dopamine levels get out of whack".
When you say that 'life just becomes more dull' and 'distracting yourself from negative emotions' it sounds like you are describing dysthymia or depression more than anything specific to porn. The link between monoamines (like dopamine) and depression has been known at least since MAOIs were first prescribed for depression. Of course, if you feel terrible about yourself for looking at porn once a week then that won't help any ongoing problem you have with negative self-image and depression.
Edit: in other words, I suspect (though I can't at all prove) that you have the arrow of causality reversed, and it wasn't porn causing your depression