Inedible wrote: ↑Sat Oct 10, 2020 8:45 pm
Call me crazy, but we need a new thread about porn. It should be about what it is we really want when we look at it. The good qualities. Why? Because we know it is "wrong" and do it anyway. There has to be some serious benefit in there to outweigh the costs. Ignoring that side of the equation is why it is difficult to quit.
The fact that we do something doesn't mean that there is a benefit to it. There may be a payoff or a reason why we choose it, but that's different from there being a benefit. In the case of pornography, we have evolved to have sexual desires because that is what keeps the species going. Even under optimal conditions, nature doesn't care about your benefit in giving you a set of glands and hormones. Nature just wants you to take part in an impregnation-event, and doesn't care how much you suffer in the process.
Porn is what happens when people work out how to short-circuit that scenario. Instead of our hormones driving us into the fraught process of mate-selection and impregnation, they can be made to drive us into rapid repetitive discharge of meaningless sensations. Pleasurable, pointless, frequently laden with negative emotions like shame and guilt, and energy-sapping. We think there is a "benefit" because we have evolved to be jerked around by our hormones.