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Did porn warp me forever?

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Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#231

Post by droidist2 »

a_bonobo wrote: post #50
Skoofoo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Porn isn't bad, it's a part of society now and has been for a long while Logically speaking, that doesn't mean it's not a bad thing. EDIT: Porn is indeed almost a staple of Western society, but note that Western culture is also very image-focused and has high rates of divorce and eating disorders among women.

>Porn is indeed almost a staple of Western society I present to you, old Japanese porn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s... And here's a documentary about ancient Egyptian porn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7HttHvJ8Gc And here's a book about Mesopotamian porn: http://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_erotic_reliefs_of... What I want to say is that porn is not only a staple of Western…

Saying it's a staple of Western society is not saying it's not a staple of other societies.

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#232

Post by jrockway »

nashequilibrium wrote: post #180
VigUi7vv8G2 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Each time you view something new, your brain gives a hit of dopamine. Oh dear god. That is not how dopamine works. Dopamine is a chemical that your brain secretes when you are trying to get something, not once you get it - so when you're hungry, for example, you'll have higher dopamine levels. Then when you eat, they go back down. The actual sensation of higher dopamine levels is stress and anxiousness - it actuall…

These kinds of comments prevent people expressing their feelings because of fear that every word, every technical detail will be analysed and if you are incorrect, someone will come down really hard on you and at the same time take away from the crux of the conversation. You may be right in the issues you point out but you are too harsh and not compassionate. A HN member has taken their time to share something person…

The problem is the amateur diagnosis, incorrect explanation of brain chemistry and the psychology of addiction, and the ridiculous conclusion. If he just told a story, fine. But that was but a tiny portion of the comment. The rest was hearsay and pseudoscience.

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#233

Post by Wintamute »

rdtsc wrote: post #203
jaggederest wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were also clearly incorrect . No matter how hard their struggle is, it's akin to linking vaccines to autism - no amount of personal pain overrides factual inaccuracy . It's an extremely important part of public discourse that incorrectness be called out, in a polite way, but clearly and forcefully. This is akin to 'balancing' a debate about evolution by having an evolutionary biologist there and a doctor of theo…

They were incorrect on a side detail "shot of dopamine equals pleasure". That is not the main crux of the comment and latching onto that side detail and throwing "Fuck this and fuck that" around is is insulting the person and doesn't add anything to the discussion. Even after the original author politely answered and noticed the correction the insults continued with "this is not acceptable" . > Just because there is…

Couldn't agree more. Well done for stating this. I'm not sure where some of these aggressive comments are coming from, but despite claiming to want to improve the quality of the discussion they achieve precisely the opposite. Compassion/tolerance/understanding and accuracy are not mutually exclusive.

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#234

Post by Udo »

konstruktor wrote: post #207

The language he uses to talk about his experiences sounds extremely judgmental and puritan. It seems to me that his problem is not pornography but guilt tripping himself.

Definitely. Apparently, his puritan hangups are also themselves sexualized - no wonder the real world doesn't do it for him. I find both the article itself and the discussion of it here on HN surprisingly weird and alien. I hope I'm not the only one...

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#235

Post by grandpa »

apl wrote: post #230
rdtsc wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were incorrect on a side detail "shot of dopamine equals pleasure". That is not the main crux of the comment and latching onto that side detail and throwing "Fuck this and fuck that" around is is insulting the person and doesn't add anything to the discussion. Even after the original author politely answered and noticed the correction the insults continued with "this is not acceptable" . > Just because there is…

> They were incorrect on a side detail (...) Doesn't cover it at all. OP gives a mechanistic account of how the construct of "porn addiction" works and how it affects people; there isn't much to his post other than that. His mechanistic account happens to be incorrect, or at the very least sufficiently misguided to be worthless, and people call him out on that.

I think the concern is not that people called him out when he was wrong, but that one person phrased it very rudely.

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#236

Post by jimzvz »

lmm wrote: post #31
FrojoS wrote: post #14

Does it make sense to teach this to children? Just like "Smoking isn't good for your health."(which I believe worked for me) you could teach "Porn isn't good for you, if you want to enjoy sex."

I think the problem is our society's denigration of sex. We see it as consisting inherently of that mix of thrill and shame - when you're a teenager growing up in America, you're told to feel that way about any nudity, never mind penetration. So you come to associate arousal with this guilt - you never experience the one without the other - and then when you're looking for something to turn you on you're already feel…

I think the problem is our society's denigration of sex.

Is this really true anymore? It seems that the majority of the media consumed by young people carries the message that sex is extremely important and if you are not doing it with everyone in every way, you are brainwashed by religious or moral beliefs.

Obviously there is denigration of sex from many sources but which of these sources actually have an impact on young people?

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#237

Post by tommorris »

Well, if we're all just going to trade anecdotes at each other, I may as well do so too. Unlike the author of the original piece, I'm happy to use my real name.

I looked at porn on the Internet as a teenager. I'm gay and back then I was deep in the closet. And I grew up when Section 28 was still in force. It was a law passed in the 80s that said schools "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality... [or] promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".

In practice, that meant the sex education we got in schools didn't cover those of us with a preference for what the law called unacceptable "pretended" relationships.

Back then, it it was still dialup and early broadband. No high-quality video, so it was almost all pictures. But porn gave to a lot of gay kids the reassurance and sexual freedom that society more generally was unwilling to even see or mention. Porn was a paracetamol for loneliness: it didn't solve it, but it eased the pain. You opened the newspaper and every time they mentioned something related to being gay, it was framed as some giant moral debate, a culture war, a political football. But on the Internet, there wasn't any of that bullshit, just sex and porn and other people (albeit behind screen names). If schools don't want to teach the gay kids about their sexuality, then the Internet and porn will do it for them.

My friends didn't need the Internet: probably every school in the country has an underground trade in porn, whether it's Internet-based, magazines, hacking satellite/cable TV, whatever. Heterosexual teenage boys will get their hands on images of naked ladies and distribute/trade them. That's just how it is.

Access to porn throughout my teenage years made life bearable. And, at risk of oversharing, the thing I find most attractive in porn isn't the whips and chains, as the author says, but simple expressions of real, genuine emotional intimacy.

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#239

Post by rmk2 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #200
kjackson2012 wrote: post #195

As long as people realize that porn itself is a caricature of sex, then it's fine. Usually sex is a lot more clumsy, and a lot shorter than any of the porn movies you find on the web. Guys with huge penises that take 45 mins to climax, women with huge breasts that love to get finished on, etc, is not how most of the world is. It's certainly exciting to see, but it's totally unrealistic. It's sort of like martial arts…

> Hopefully the kids growing up today realize this. Martial arts - maybe. But if your never had sex and your only education on the topic is porn, then how could you know how it really looks like? And then you have your first, and second, and third time, and you feel a bit disappointed that it didn't feel or look like you expected, and even if you realize that porn is a caricature, you're still left wondering, how muc…

Since you already linked to Cindy Gallop, there is also the associated website: http://makelovenotporn.com/

Re: Did porn warp me forever?

#240

Post by kagl »

_ddkb wrote: post #85

I 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 had a completely different view, and will give an anecdote.

I was feeling awful about not being able to stop looking at porn after figuring out how to masturbate when I was in my mid-twenties. Two years after I had started I tried to kill myself, unfortunately it was very clumsy.

A few days after the suicide event I got very sick, vomiting for days, and since I was worried about being in pain for the rest of my life, I told someone. This ended up with me going to the psychologist and then a mental ward after he got worried about me. This led to me seeing a psychologist who specialized in sexuality.

Here is the gist of what he told me: * Something made me lose my trust in people. * My childhood was totally fucked up. * That there was no problem in looking at porn * That masturbating to porn made me feel alive after being dead or something to that effect

He also gave me the assignment to masturbate every day. He did say it would be a problem if that was all or most of what I did.

It seems to me that it wasn't the porn that was the problem but the guilt I had associated with it, which lead me to remove myself from groups I was involved with then, because I thought I was "too crap" and that I was somehow destroying the groups I was in because of subtle differences in my behaviour from masturbating to porn.

Another huge problem was that I had made a New Year's resolution which was: get a girlfriend inclusive-or get happy inclusive-or die. With that I spent some time over the two years before the attempt looking at ways to suicide. I don't make New Year's resolutions any more.

The suicide attempt changed me for life, in that I feel worse, and have no desire to do anything after that, like create music, social things. Going out to public events just made me angry. I get angry much more easily now, and have a bit of a facial tick, and are somewhat sexually dysfunctional compared to before.

Anyway, it's my opinion that, porn is not a large problem but worrying about it is. But, that depends, I guess.

Note: I created this account just to reply to this. I haven't posted before, because I have felt too unqualified. The main point of the post is what the psychologist told me.

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