Anybody Else Think Porn is Weird?
- Thread starter Sab
- Start date
Hi Sab,
I'm glad I actually found SOMEONE who asked the same question.
I have some hypotheses about WHY the porn industry enjoys seeming
immunity from the ills that threaten almost every enterprise.
Before I go on, I must say that for the last 12 years of my life (every since the internet went mainstream) I'v been a prolific porn surfer and watcher.
After I moved out to California and started doing retouching and graphic design, (about 4 years ago) the print ad industry got hit hard by the migration
(by consumers) to web based outlets, this hit the photography processing and print sector in LA hard, and several huge commercial labs closed down I worked at one of them, it was weird to see this landmark lab gutted from the inside out, all due to the web and cheap digital photography.
So I looked for work and found a job with a web contractor that was building a new "portal" for Digital Playground. I basically worked on-site at DP for nearly a year retouching scene after scene after scene for 8 to 10 hours a day.
The pay was good, and at first I liked getting my fill of all the porn I could take in. But something happened to me after about 2 months of work.
The sex scenes stopped provoking me into arousal, and remember, this was on site, so the video editors were constantly scrubbing source footage with the sounds of sexual intercourse and moaning all day long.
Yeah... I started to realize that really porn is just like you seemed to have alluded to "kept alive by more than production values and creativity"
My suggestion is that you invest some time in learning about our innate neurology as it pertains to "motivation and reward", specifically do some research on the "nucleus accumbens".
Then look up dopamine.
Serious stuff.
After working with DP, some time later, I landed a job working for a company called Bluebird America. They were just starting up and at the
time I was researching ADD, as I suspected being a sufferer, (not the anecdotal ADD/ADHD of pop-culture which is really psuedo-ADD in that it can be stimulated by certain types of TV or Radio/Media and manifested behaviorally. This psuedo-ADD fades away after the stimulus is gone, but the real deal with chemically based imbalances and their behavioral consequences that don't go away no matter what you try behaviorally)
So while at bluebird, I was treating my ADD with the most widely prescribed med. I won't go into detail but it is the most powerful medication and has been used for the last 40 years to treat various disorders related to attention, as well as motivation, and even sometimes used to treat narcolepsy (sudden onset sleep disorder).
For the first time not only could I focus clearly, but I was "liberated" from my sex drive. I say "liberated" because for guys like me, with an innate dopamine shortage (we already generate or metabolize too little dopamine as it is, hence the ADD symptoms) the drive to have sex is not just "I like to fuck", it's more like "OH my god, I need to have sex NOW!"
It's all well and good in a relationship, since my gf at the time was sort of the same way, but as a lifelong condition? No thank you!
So after all these years of watching porn and totally knowing that I'd shut it off in an instant if my brain gave me the "ok" signal. Now I know.
The porn industry would shrink to perhaps 1/100th it's current revenue (12 billion dollars in 2008, more than the entire mainstream film industry in the same year, it's grown since then) if the human reward and motivation circuits in the brain could be made to "smoothly ramp up and ramp down".
The way our reward systems work now in most normal people is that there is a quick ramp up and hence the thoughts to go get food or sex or (whatever) are powerful and show up quickly not giving us much time to rationally think it through. When this system is placated or buffered by having the demand signals fed to it lessen (if your brain is already getting dopamine via a pill, or via nicotine mediated release) then the nucleus accumbens releases it's dopamine more smoothly and in constant fashion.
This foils the "craving" behaviors which naturally result in response to a shortage of dopamine, and the decrease of those behaviors can have a devastating impact on the business models of:
The Porn industry
The Alcohol industry
The Tobacco industry
The Junk Food industry
Now obviously, addictive personalities do exist (thank goodness mine isn't one of them, otherwise the drug that treats my ADD would be worse than
constantly seeking sexual gratification) so these industries will always have business, but nowhere near the levels they enjoy.
Also anytime stress is elevated, these industries enjoy increased revenue.
There are more details about sex of course, it's not all about dopamine, there are many many more factors. There's the psychological analysis of sex as conquest for example. Taken out of it's purely biological context sex is:
Sex triggers the same system in our brains that is triggered by our food seeking behaviors, AND mammalian breasts are a source of food for their young. We can't help but be driven to seek them out.
Sex is also:
One of the biggest if not THE biggest ego-gratifications available to men.
The word "fuck" comes from germanic and it's alter forms come from indo-european roots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck#Older_etymology
In summary, to fuck, means to, copulate or strike, or plow.
The indo-european roots include "fist" and "strike" as well.
Now which one of those four meanings is NOT a negative usage?
Obviously copulate is the most neutral. However the other three are obviously related to a negative interaction, in short, it's a fight.
NOT only do you get the visceral, physical pleasure of striking your partner pretty hard in the only way that is seemingly renewable
in that it doesn't cause the woman to be damaged physically (i.e. punching, and other forms of assault that damage the opponent)
but taken in the biological context even after the incident is over YOUR DNA continues to survive and grow inside a host which will
then go on to care for your descendant(s).
Think about it for a moment, that's a pretty huge "win" for any side of a fight. Now obviously in our age, it's not seen as a "fight"
but you MUST remember that our machinery evolved SLOWLY, and continues to evolve SLOWLY. Whereas our consciousness can move as fast as our actions can enable it. Simply put, our bodies are evolving at the speed of sound, while our consciousness is moving at the speed of light or faster. The further we are removed from our biological contexts, the more weird and difficult to understand our drives and behaviors will become, but that is a post for another day.
For men, and I'll count myself in this, the ego-gratifying aspect of sex
(if you gave me a penile desensitizer which would knock out my sensations)
is the act of forcing yourself onto and into your partner and being immediately rewarded for it by either their notes of pleasure or for some of you their grimaces (which backs of the idea that sex is a "fight").
Then there's the effect of "shocking" the other person during penetration, what guy doesn't feel good when what he says is backed up
immediately by some proving event and then the other side of the interaction is shocked at this. Now take that series of events i.e.
1.) presentation of something by side A
2.) corroborating evidence or event is sensed by side B
3.) side B is shocked at the evidence or event and adjusts to the new circumstance
Now put those three steps in a loop and repeat that loop a few dozen times during a typical sexual encounter.
Looks like "high fructose corn syrup" of the sexual kind to me...
The implications go much deeper and get more insidious for the sex as a negative "defacement or destruction" metaphor. Look at the biological consequences of sexual intercourse. One party is changed dramatically over the course of nearly a year (the woman), and furthermore this change acts to further not only the party's own genes (DNA of the mother) but it ALSO allows the genes of the man to go along with ZERO biological consequences.
Again, forget for a moment that we live in a civil society, that's NOT the world your nucleus accumbens evolved in. It's not even the world your not-so-distant ancestors inhabited going back 500 years to the middle ages where a man could go around impregnating women with nowhere near the consequences he would face today. After all there was no phone system, no internet, and if he was a "hit and run" type, he could travel from city to city if he planned his movements in advance, without getting caught.
It's only in our information age that sex has been de-fanged and made
safe for mass consumption. Such was decidedly NOT the case for the world that our sexual systems started in.
Now here's the rub, our brains have NOT figured out the difference.
Not in an evolutionary sense that is, our bodies still urge us to find
a female, almost any female, and to fuck her. Then the same biology that
drives us into the sexual encounter then also causes us to "back out" and
figure out a way to "escape", which coincides with the male drive to fertilize
as many females as possible, which of course is a behavior shaped by our genes in order to ensure their survival.
So for a man, to not have sex, is on a biological level, to DIE.
Take a deep seated psychologically driven behavior to NOT DIE, and tie that
chemically to one of the most intense pleasures a man can experience.
THEN add modern society's rules and regulations (with their ensuing consequences for breaking those rules) regarding the respect of each individual's person and property, and you have a perfect storm for the
porn industry.
Give men an accessible way out of this bio-psychological need vs sociological stalemate, and you'll make billions.
Don't get me wrong, I love sex too, but I'll happily tell you that there's a "huge" difference between real life sex and porn.
Real sex in my book is always better than porn because unlike a fantasy,
real sex actually comes with a companion who I'm going to assume you
like to spend time with anyway because in my experience I certainly have
chosen to seek out only those women I'd like to hang out with anyway.
There are few things worse than that "oh my god! What have I done?!!!" feeling right after finishing up with a woman you have NO attraction to
outside of sexual play.
I'm not passing any judgement here, I'm just as guilty as the next guy.
At times it's made my enjoyment of sex much better, since I KNOW why I
enjoy certain types of woman vs other types, I imagine it's a turn on for a
lucid enough partner as well, to know what's going on in your head when you fuck.
In case you're wondering, the biology for women is totally different in regards to sex. In general, what turns you on is not what turns her on.
Women evolved to fulfill a totally different goal biologically, thus it only makes sense that their systems will be specifically adapted to aid them in
the fulfillment of that goal. Needless to say "it ain't hit 'n run".
In short, YES, your suspicion is founded, there IS a deeper mystery here and if you take the blue pill, this rabbit hole is a doozy!
I hope this helps you out a bit.
I'm glad I actually found SOMEONE who asked the same question.
I have some hypotheses about WHY the porn industry enjoys seeming
immunity from the ills that threaten almost every enterprise.
Before I go on, I must say that for the last 12 years of my life (every since the internet went mainstream) I'v been a prolific porn surfer and watcher.
After I moved out to California and started doing retouching and graphic design, (about 4 years ago) the print ad industry got hit hard by the migration
(by consumers) to web based outlets, this hit the photography processing and print sector in LA hard, and several huge commercial labs closed down I worked at one of them, it was weird to see this landmark lab gutted from the inside out, all due to the web and cheap digital photography.
So I looked for work and found a job with a web contractor that was building a new "portal" for Digital Playground. I basically worked on-site at DP for nearly a year retouching scene after scene after scene for 8 to 10 hours a day.
The pay was good, and at first I liked getting my fill of all the porn I could take in. But something happened to me after about 2 months of work.
The sex scenes stopped provoking me into arousal, and remember, this was on site, so the video editors were constantly scrubbing source footage with the sounds of sexual intercourse and moaning all day long.
Yeah... I started to realize that really porn is just like you seemed to have alluded to "kept alive by more than production values and creativity"
My suggestion is that you invest some time in learning about our innate neurology as it pertains to "motivation and reward", specifically do some research on the "nucleus accumbens".
Then look up dopamine.
Serious stuff.
After working with DP, some time later, I landed a job working for a company called Bluebird America. They were just starting up and at the
time I was researching ADD, as I suspected being a sufferer, (not the anecdotal ADD/ADHD of pop-culture which is really psuedo-ADD in that it can be stimulated by certain types of TV or Radio/Media and manifested behaviorally. This psuedo-ADD fades away after the stimulus is gone, but the real deal with chemically based imbalances and their behavioral consequences that don't go away no matter what you try behaviorally)
So while at bluebird, I was treating my ADD with the most widely prescribed med. I won't go into detail but it is the most powerful medication and has been used for the last 40 years to treat various disorders related to attention, as well as motivation, and even sometimes used to treat narcolepsy (sudden onset sleep disorder).
For the first time not only could I focus clearly, but I was "liberated" from my sex drive. I say "liberated" because for guys like me, with an innate dopamine shortage (we already generate or metabolize too little dopamine as it is, hence the ADD symptoms) the drive to have sex is not just "I like to fuck", it's more like "OH my god, I need to have sex NOW!"
It's all well and good in a relationship, since my gf at the time was sort of the same way, but as a lifelong condition? No thank you!
So after all these years of watching porn and totally knowing that I'd shut it off in an instant if my brain gave me the "ok" signal. Now I know.
The porn industry would shrink to perhaps 1/100th it's current revenue (12 billion dollars in 2008, more than the entire mainstream film industry in the same year, it's grown since then) if the human reward and motivation circuits in the brain could be made to "smoothly ramp up and ramp down".
The way our reward systems work now in most normal people is that there is a quick ramp up and hence the thoughts to go get food or sex or (whatever) are powerful and show up quickly not giving us much time to rationally think it through. When this system is placated or buffered by having the demand signals fed to it lessen (if your brain is already getting dopamine via a pill, or via nicotine mediated release) then the nucleus accumbens releases it's dopamine more smoothly and in constant fashion.
This foils the "craving" behaviors which naturally result in response to a shortage of dopamine, and the decrease of those behaviors can have a devastating impact on the business models of:
The Porn industry
The Alcohol industry
The Tobacco industry
The Junk Food industry
Now obviously, addictive personalities do exist (thank goodness mine isn't one of them, otherwise the drug that treats my ADD would be worse than
constantly seeking sexual gratification) so these industries will always have business, but nowhere near the levels they enjoy.
Also anytime stress is elevated, these industries enjoy increased revenue.
There are more details about sex of course, it's not all about dopamine, there are many many more factors. There's the psychological analysis of sex as conquest for example. Taken out of it's purely biological context sex is:
Sex triggers the same system in our brains that is triggered by our food seeking behaviors, AND mammalian breasts are a source of food for their young. We can't help but be driven to seek them out.
Sex is also:
One of the biggest if not THE biggest ego-gratifications available to men.
The word "fuck" comes from germanic and it's alter forms come from indo-european roots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck#Older_etymology
In summary, to fuck, means to, copulate or strike, or plow.
The indo-european roots include "fist" and "strike" as well.
Now which one of those four meanings is NOT a negative usage?
Obviously copulate is the most neutral. However the other three are obviously related to a negative interaction, in short, it's a fight.
NOT only do you get the visceral, physical pleasure of striking your partner pretty hard in the only way that is seemingly renewable
in that it doesn't cause the woman to be damaged physically (i.e. punching, and other forms of assault that damage the opponent)
but taken in the biological context even after the incident is over YOUR DNA continues to survive and grow inside a host which will
then go on to care for your descendant(s).
Think about it for a moment, that's a pretty huge "win" for any side of a fight. Now obviously in our age, it's not seen as a "fight"
but you MUST remember that our machinery evolved SLOWLY, and continues to evolve SLOWLY. Whereas our consciousness can move as fast as our actions can enable it. Simply put, our bodies are evolving at the speed of sound, while our consciousness is moving at the speed of light or faster. The further we are removed from our biological contexts, the more weird and difficult to understand our drives and behaviors will become, but that is a post for another day.
For men, and I'll count myself in this, the ego-gratifying aspect of sex
(if you gave me a penile desensitizer which would knock out my sensations)
is the act of forcing yourself onto and into your partner and being immediately rewarded for it by either their notes of pleasure or for some of you their grimaces (which backs of the idea that sex is a "fight").
Then there's the effect of "shocking" the other person during penetration, what guy doesn't feel good when what he says is backed up
immediately by some proving event and then the other side of the interaction is shocked at this. Now take that series of events i.e.
1.) presentation of something by side A
2.) corroborating evidence or event is sensed by side B
3.) side B is shocked at the evidence or event and adjusts to the new circumstance
Now put those three steps in a loop and repeat that loop a few dozen times during a typical sexual encounter.
Looks like "high fructose corn syrup" of the sexual kind to me...
The implications go much deeper and get more insidious for the sex as a negative "defacement or destruction" metaphor. Look at the biological consequences of sexual intercourse. One party is changed dramatically over the course of nearly a year (the woman), and furthermore this change acts to further not only the party's own genes (DNA of the mother) but it ALSO allows the genes of the man to go along with ZERO biological consequences.
Again, forget for a moment that we live in a civil society, that's NOT the world your nucleus accumbens evolved in. It's not even the world your not-so-distant ancestors inhabited going back 500 years to the middle ages where a man could go around impregnating women with nowhere near the consequences he would face today. After all there was no phone system, no internet, and if he was a "hit and run" type, he could travel from city to city if he planned his movements in advance, without getting caught.
It's only in our information age that sex has been de-fanged and made
safe for mass consumption. Such was decidedly NOT the case for the world that our sexual systems started in.
Now here's the rub, our brains have NOT figured out the difference.
Not in an evolutionary sense that is, our bodies still urge us to find
a female, almost any female, and to fuck her. Then the same biology that
drives us into the sexual encounter then also causes us to "back out" and
figure out a way to "escape", which coincides with the male drive to fertilize
as many females as possible, which of course is a behavior shaped by our genes in order to ensure their survival.
So for a man, to not have sex, is on a biological level, to DIE.
Take a deep seated psychologically driven behavior to NOT DIE, and tie that
chemically to one of the most intense pleasures a man can experience.
THEN add modern society's rules and regulations (with their ensuing consequences for breaking those rules) regarding the respect of each individual's person and property, and you have a perfect storm for the
porn industry.
Give men an accessible way out of this bio-psychological need vs sociological stalemate, and you'll make billions.
Don't get me wrong, I love sex too, but I'll happily tell you that there's a "huge" difference between real life sex and porn.
Real sex in my book is always better than porn because unlike a fantasy,
real sex actually comes with a companion who I'm going to assume you
like to spend time with anyway because in my experience I certainly have
chosen to seek out only those women I'd like to hang out with anyway.
There are few things worse than that "oh my god! What have I done?!!!" feeling right after finishing up with a woman you have NO attraction to
outside of sexual play.
I'm not passing any judgement here, I'm just as guilty as the next guy.
At times it's made my enjoyment of sex much better, since I KNOW why I
enjoy certain types of woman vs other types, I imagine it's a turn on for a
lucid enough partner as well, to know what's going on in your head when you fuck.
In case you're wondering, the biology for women is totally different in regards to sex. In general, what turns you on is not what turns her on.
Women evolved to fulfill a totally different goal biologically, thus it only makes sense that their systems will be specifically adapted to aid them in
the fulfillment of that goal. Needless to say "it ain't hit 'n run".
In short, YES, your suspicion is founded, there IS a deeper mystery here and if you take the blue pill, this rabbit hole is a doozy!
I hope this helps you out a bit.
meesterperfect
Hiliary 2020
it all boils down to whoremoans.
thats the real reason we watch, sexual whoremoans.
whoremoans are the driving force in our behavior , both sexual and non sexual.
thats the real reason we watch, sexual whoremoans.
whoremoans are the driving force in our behavior , both sexual and non sexual.
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