Recently I was talking online in a thread that turned to porn and trotted out the old "Porn causes addiction, and people seek harder porn as they might seek harder drugs" line. I mentioned that this was never the case with me. I don't look at porn nearly as much as I used to, for one, and for another, I'm not hopelessly obsessed with gonzo (which is where I'd definitely be these days if the theory were true.) I've also observed similar things in my lovers: we like certain things and go looking for those things, rather than "graduating" from our own preferences to those of our porny overlords.
The response was pithy snark:
Dude, over time everyone’s fantasies are dictated by porn. They may seek their own fantasies out at first, but porn use tends to escalate in nearly everyone.Bleak indeed! I guess I'll be jilling off to Max Hardcore when I'm sixty, then. Maybe the process is just slow.
Of course, I asked for the proof, and got an answer: Simply consult the almighty Google!
There have been so many studies about people’s porn use “escalating” that I’m sure you could Google a few thousand. Porn is more like drugs or booze than books; it’s a taboo, it’s tied to pleasure, etc. That means escalation is very, very likely. And I can tell you that every dude I know who is willing to discuss his porn use will admit to escalation.You can't make this shit up.
That's the thing that gets me, really. These people feel totally comfortable stating something as fact, but when pressed can't even remember the name of any study that even supposedly proves them right.
Where I come from that's called believing old wives' tales, and about as silly as thinking that waving dead chickens over warts will cure them, but apparently it's been proven to them...
Oh, but on this one, Nine Deuce and her pals are absolutely correct....to a point. A very, very small one.
ReplyDeleteIt may be that men who have never been exposed to porn, but do have certain sexual fantasies hardwired into their brain, will discover porn that plays to their fantasies; then they will discover other images that cater to fantasies that they never thought they had, which piques their interests in more porn, which leads to more discovery of still more porn which taps new undiscovered fantasies...et cetera, et cetera, and so forth.
Where they go haywire and off the cliff, however, is that none of this means that men will automatically revert themselves to going to the Max Hardcore/gonzo/JM Productions school of porn. That specific brand is "arousing" only to certain groups of men who are directly..shall we say, "stimulated" by that particular brand of porn. Most of the majority of men exposed to that particular brand are more than capable of rejecting and repudiating it as absolutely distasteful and diametrical to their interests....and highly non-arousing.
And let's not confuse "porn use" with the "slippery slope" theory, either.....just because I discover and jerk off to Nina Hartley does not transfer into me going straight into Lizzie Borden material.
But, of course....they know better because they know all men. Yeah, right.
And Google is a respository of truth?? Yeah, sure...I'm sure I can find thousand of articles "proving" that the CIA planned the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, that the Bilderburgers conspired with the Nigerians, ACORN, and FDR to blow up the credit markets, and that Elvis is alive and well living inside Rush Limbaugh's resort compound. Honest and for true. ;-)
Anthony
sigh. Stop acting like Gonzo is the great Evil y'all.
ReplyDeleteSome of us LIKE gonzo, you know. And have only ever watched gonzo, or found softer stuff to not be our thing. *I* am directly stimulated by Gonzo, thanks.
I am of the mind, porn wise, that people gravitate towards what arouses them, and then, they tend to stay there. And as usual, we know the opposition does not believe in PROOF.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, Ren....
ReplyDeleteI never said that "gonzo" was evil, or even that those who like such were in any way evil.
I simply said that not everyone -- especially every man -- exposed to gonzo would innately find it to be their favorite....and some would even find it distasteful.
This is in direct opposition to the inanity that Trin was talking about, where men are assumed to automatically go from Playboy pictorals to Penthouse spreads to cable porn to Internet porn to Meathole porn....merely because they happen to be men who desire to rape women.
Everyone has his/her own tastes and likes..and all should be respected.
Anthony
Ren:
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you're responding to me or to her, but if me... I wasn't saying gonzo is bad, as I don't actually think it is. I just don't find myself any more or any less interested or not interested in it than before.
Possibly more, but that's not due to increased excitement at the idea so much as it is a better understanding of what it's about now that I know people who like it or are in it.
Not at all the same as "I can't get off on vanilla porn any more." I actually *can* get off on porn that's *far* milder than my usual fantasies.
"It may be that men who have never been exposed to porn, but do have certain sexual fantasies hardwired into their brain, will discover porn that plays to their fantasies; then they will discover other images that cater to fantasies that they never thought they had, which piques their interests in more porn, which leads to more discovery of still more porn which taps new undiscovered fantasies..."
ReplyDeleteOh, yeah, I do think it's possible to run into something you wouldn't think you'd like and discover you do. I just don't think that's necessarily pernicious or indicative of addiction.
CAN people be perniciously addicted to porn? Yeah. Does this fact prove anything by itself? No.
Trin:
ReplyDeleteAgreed and acknowledged...but my point was less about potential addiction and more about changing tastes for those just discovering porn. As in, someone looking for, say, big boob porn and discovering an untapped desire for, say, "MILF porn", and so on.
Anthony
"Agreed and acknowledged...but my point was less about potential addiction and more about changing tastes for those just discovering porn. As in, someone looking for, say, big boob porn and discovering an untapped desire for, say, "MILF porn", and so on."
ReplyDeleteYou mean humans are complicated and not one-trick ponies?
SAY IT AIN'T SO ANTHONY
I am just annoyed with gonzo, specifically, being used as the "problematic" example of what porn actually, you know, could be bad or dangerous or whatever. I do not see how it is any more so than a great deal of BDSM porn, or tamer "damsel in distress" porn, or a whole lot of other porn.
ReplyDeleteGonzo is blatant and in your face. Yes. That is not necessarily a bad thing.
"Gonzo is blatant and in your face. Yes. That is not necessarily a bad thing."
ReplyDeleteI don't disagree. I meant to comment on the whole "all roads lead to Rome, which by the way is GONZO OMG EW" thing.
Yeah, and I am perplexed as to why gonzo is always the OMG EWW!
ReplyDelete"Yeah, and I am perplexed as to why gonzo is always the OMG EWW!"
ReplyDeleteI don't know.
Maybe Gonzo porn is connected more to their "Eww" factor because it looks so much more like "real" violence against women. BDSM porn is very ritualised, and may not trigger that "violence" trigger quite so hard.
ReplyDeleteBut then, I have never watched Gonzo porn - I hit the 12 steps before I discovered that particular genre.
Hi, Anony. Are you the same Anony posting at ND's?
ReplyDeleteI am indeed! Well-spotted! :)
ReplyDeleteDo you mind my asking you some questions then? Like I said over at ND's, for a very long time I assumed porn addiction didn't even exist, so I'm really curious. But I don't want to pry, or to dredge up difficult or triggering memories, so please let me know if I can ask.
ReplyDeleteI'm happy for you to ask questions - I'll tell you if I'm not comfortable answering any given question. I'm going through Step 4 right now anyway, so I'm in an introspective mood. :)
ReplyDeleteOkay. I guesss my question is this: Is an addiction just something that happens with some people who don't expect it, do you think, or is it the result of some emotional response others don't have?
ReplyDeleteI guess I don't understand because for me, the first time I looked at porn I did it with a lover, and the reason I liked it was because I liked the novelty of pretending other people were around, but it wasn't really this "I don't like women" thing or this "I can't relate to real people" thing -- I had one touching me at the time!
So I guess... I don't know. Is it just that arousal becomes difficult over time (something else I don't understand much -- my libido fluctuates but usually when it's up it's up and when it's down it's down, pretty much regardless of the rest of the universe) or is it something else?
I guess that's whyt he whole examination thing annoys me so bad. Because for ME, I always *thought* the people who said porn is degrading to women and women don't like it knew more than me, and must be right. And when I *saw* it, I was like "wow, this is cheesy and obviously made for an audience that isn't me, but... these people who say things about how women know in our guts how gross it is... uh, that's not exactly what I think is going on right now."
ReplyDeleteAnd I wasn't interested in finding BDSM porn because I don't like women, or because other porn bored me. I was interested in that because *that's how I have sex*. I actually am pretty amusingly boring in the porn I've particularly liked, to be honest.
I'm not entirely sure, but I lean towards the emotional response angle.
ReplyDeleteI guess... here's the thing, right. When you watch porn, you probably get not just the sexual arousal, but something of an emotional reaction, yes? You don't just watch it because it arouses you, you watch it because emotionally, you feel positive about it.
When I watched it, I wasn't caring about that emotional good feeling. I didn't really hit an emotional response when watching porn, quite the opposite, in fact. All that mattered was the physical arousal. In fact, when I look closer, I was watching porn exactly for that feeling - because I was usually unhappy with my life, and the porn deadened the negative feelings. So, Porn let me escape the negative emotions, with an added bonus of good physical feelings when I jerked off.
And don't get me wrong - it's not like I couldn't get off without porn. It's not that porn was essential to my sex life, it's that porn was being used as a way of circumnventing crappy feelings about my life. If we had to be honest, it's probably more accurate to just call it a sex addiction, but my behaviour was very heavily weighed towards the sexual experiences I had with porn, so that's where I centre it. When I had sex with my partners, there wasn't nearly so much of an addictive pattern in my behaviour with them.
Does that answer your question? Your post was a little confusing, and I'm not sure I got the crux of your question out of it all.
Anony -- it answers some of my question, yeah. Can you tell me what I said that confused you?
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm not sure what you mean by "the positive feeling," either. When I first saw it, I was very nervous -- I assumed I would respond to it by taking offense, since I'd been taught that women see it as degrading.
Or do you just mean most people don't do things they dislike unless there's some kind of compulsion behind it?
So... what do you mean exactly?
I'll also be honest - I wasn't looking for porn because I didn't like women either. I looked because the arousal I got from porn was directly related to the novelty of the porn, and so, I kept looking in new directions. And honestly, I wasn't a big fan of most BDSM porn, especially during the last year or so of my acting out. It was novelty, not cruelty, that was my guiding force in porn searching.
ReplyDeleteHmm... I may be talking through my ass about the positive feeling thang (I don't feel it, so I was guessing a bit). I guess I'm talking more about that general feeling of enjoyment that most people get out of entertainment in general. When you're watching something you like, you're usually having fun while you're doing it. I on the other hand, don't think I ever was. I got pleasure out of it, but no real enjoyment out of it, I guess is the best way to describe it.
ReplyDeleteThe confusion was mostly because the second paragraph of your question post didn't seem to continue on from the first paragraph. I'm not sure exactly what confused me, but the three paragraphs all seemed to be mismatched with each other. Sorry, can't be more specific than that.
The other thing I don't understand is why the progression goes the way it does. I mean, for me, good BDSM porn is more interesting than good vanilla porn, but that's becasue I'm a sadomasochist. I guess I don't really get what is being "ramped up." General intensity of what's depicted? But on what kind of scale? I mean, if vanilla is sex to me and BDSM is torture, why would I come to want to see that? It confuses me.
ReplyDeleteANony
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what confused you, but *maybe* it's this:
When I hear about addictions like alcoholism, much of the theory seems to be that people simply have a predisposition to develop physical dependency really quickly.
But sex isn't (or maybe it is and I'm confused) like an exogenous drug that the body comes to crave, so I was wondering if it's something hardwired like that or if it has to do with some personal problem, or some combination.
When looking for those personal factors, a lot of pop-psych articles suggest that it has to do with some fear of actual partnered sex, or some inability to be close in partnered sex. I was saying that I don't understand that myself, because for me porn was usually an adjunct to partnered sex.
I don't quite understand where the progression came from either. I do know that even when I wasn't actively spiralling downward, I never had "favourite" porn movies for very long. They'd have a shelf-life of about a few weeks, and then I would get bored of them and start finding more, newer porn.
ReplyDeleteHence why I think the progression was partly a quest for novelty, although why novelty was so important I don't have a particularly good handle on. Perhaps watching the same thing over and over meant my brain wasn't kept busy during viewings, and the deadening was for my thoughts as well as my feelings (I'm a very anxious person by nature, so bad feelings tended to manifest in internal-critic attacks).
And honestly? A lot of porn is very samey, especially when you're as indiscriminate as I was. There's a formula there, it sells, it floods the market. So, new genres let you see variations on those formulas, get you seeing something that feels different. But after a while, perhaps the similarities in more mainstream genres start getting to you - so you start looking outside the mainstream, right into more extreme porn genres.
This is pretty off-the-cuff at this point, but it seems about right for me. I obviously can't speak for other addicts here.
"And honestly? A lot of porn is very samey, especially when you're as indiscriminate as I was. There's a formula there, it sells, it floods the market. So, new genres let you see variations on those formulas, get you seeing something that feels different. But after a while, perhaps the similarities in more mainstream genres start getting to you - so you start looking outside the mainstream, right into more extreme porn genres."
ReplyDeleteThat makes sense to me. If I'd been watching it all the time, yeah, I might have felt that way too. Personally I didn't really, because even when I was a lot more interested in porn in general than I am now, what I tended to like tended to be rather weird/clever/creative couple's tapes.
*shrug*
And nowadays I look for things that are generally interesting to me, as much as arousing. I don't tend to like things I don't get something out of. I'm picky about even mindless entertainment.
*shrug*
"But sex isn't (or maybe it is and I'm confused) like an exogenous drug that the body comes to crave, so I was wondering if it's something hardwired like that or if it has to do with some personal problem, or some combination."
ReplyDeleteAh, that does make that paragraph make more sense, thankyou.
My view? Sex doesn't rely on exogenous drugs - but there are a lot of chemical reactions in the brain that go on during sex, and there's obviously the lots of endorphins that come from sexual climax. If there is a predisposition to chemical dependence, that might be where it resides. In my case? I dunno. I'm not emotionally in a place where I'd experiment with anything other than alcohol, and I don't seem to binge-drink myself. But perhaps it's a heightened learning response to pleasurable sensations? That might also explain it for narcotics, although not for alcohol so far as I know.
"When looking for those personal factors, a lot of pop-psych articles suggest that it has to do with some fear of actual partnered sex, or some inability to be close in partnered sex."
I've also heard this theory, and it's probably true in some cases, maybe even in mine. I don't have the healthiest attitudes to my sexuality, and I went through a lot of very terrible experiences with sex. But, (and here's the but), the addiction probably started long before those experiences. I still have difficulties relaxing during sex, even when I'm in a submissive mood.
Thing is, addiction is usually tagged by behaviours rather than cause, so these views as well as others are probably varying degrees of correct in different cases.
"Thing is, addiction is usually tagged by behaviours rather than cause, so these views as well as others are probably varying degrees of correct in different cases."
ReplyDelete*nods* I'm not saying not. Just wondering about it. :)
Fair enough! :)
ReplyDeleteas a librarian, reading what they said about googling for search results and taking that as gospel made me do a facepalm.
ReplyDelete