The Solitary Vice: Victorian Views on Masturbation
mimimatthews.com
mimimatthews.com
Edit - Example from the mid-19th century: https://books.google.com/books?id=AiEDAAAAQAAJ&dq=%22self-po...
Edit: And by the mind behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, yet! Tendentious inference from n=20 psych undergrads is more or less his claim to fame and life's work, so it's no real surprise to see it here. But you want to approach this kind of thing with a somewhat critical eye.
> an exploitation of our natural drives
It's too bad we can't go back and ask any of your ancestors from, say 100K years ago to a few hundred years ago, because I think you might find that being super obsessed with boobs isn't actually a natural thing. It might, in fact, be a product of the same Victorian culture the original article was about.
The thrust (if you will) of your comment is either an extended triumphant riff on my poor choice of the concept 'boobs' (and possibly trying to shame those who do fetishize boobs), or it's an attempt to distract from my comment's thesis -- namely, that the profusion of modern free porno might actually be having an effect on us. I don't think that's ridiculous. I'm well aware that many a society has had pornographic materials under varying aegises, but many were furtive and socially, if not legally, prohibited.
I don't think it's unreasonable to claim that our society has the lowest barrier to access, the highest quality, and the largest diversity of pornographic materials in the history of humanity. Further, this profusion of porno is comparatively recent. Are we supposed to believe that this can't be having an effect on us? I presume you have a stronger argument than merely implying that I'm super obsessed with boobs (and that some Victorian aspect of my maturbatory habits are to blame).
Maybe, but what effect, and is it "harm"? The NPR thing was quick to pivot on the idea that being overfed on porn is making teenagers impotent, but that's been a mainstay of propaganda campaigns for time immemorial. Off the top of my head, I can recall seeing PSAs in my youth that marijuana causes low sperm count, steroids make your testicles shrink, and smoking and drinking cause impotence. Maybe they do, but the reason they're calling it out versus, say, increased risk of heart disease, is that it's a scare campaign.
These old prohibitionists certainly didn't understand that not everyone finds it easy to find someone else to exercise with.
Plenty of horny people got in my cab... Horny men were easy to spot - sometimes they were going to meet up with someone else, sometimes to/from a strip club, sometimes to the porn shop, sometimes to the sex club... Sometimes women had a glow about them - because of where they were going, because of where they were coming from... There were three women who found me to be intriguing. I wasn't expecting that, I never heard from them again.
Most of these masturbation prohibitions were on men, but I know that women get frustrated too. Most of them internalize it, or find a new boy-friend. I had to provide counseling for one of these women, one night. That diary was titled The Difference Between Boys and Girls:
http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys-...
The fact of "spilling the seed" was later interpreted as the sin by some christian churches, but there are other interpretations.
Also be aware that it does not condemn masturbation (which IIRC is healthy), but rather masturbation _for hours_ kept alive by watching endless variety of internet porn, which seems to cause erectile dysfunction.
The process bears a conceptual resemblance to exposure to more novel and avant-garde art. Such thing changes one's tastes to value even more novelty at the expense of traditional aesthetic, causing the "modern art" that people exposed to less novelty dislike or mock.
Many of the modern ideas about masturbation are also wrong, e.g. that it is 'healthy'. These are merely scientistic attempts to reverse the former shaming and guilt.
For me the question remains: is masturbation any better or worse than taking drugs?
It's absurd to think we evolved "wrongly" and need to fight natural tendencies.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how to explain the presence of homosexuality in a population when the theory of evolution predicts that any such trait (which leads to much lower genetic fitness) would have disappeared a long time ago. How does it stay at this level from generation to generation?
Your question is similar to the question why old humans don't just die off when they can't reproduce anymore. This is most obvious with women when they enter menopause but also the quality of sperm declines with men with age.
They are either useful to some extent to reproduction or improving the survival rate of the offspring, or at least the evolutionary pressure is too small to eradicate these traits.
But as we have descended from group animals, I suspect the former.
one's homosexuality may improve fitness of one's family: if we're brothers and i'm homosexual, we won't be splitting resources between your and my children, and i'll be an extra "parent" looking after your kids. genetically speaking, that is still a (qualified) success for me.
also, genes don't give a damn about individual's reproduction, and local optima are rampant.
edit: what siblings have said.
Homosexual men throughout history did reproduce, though. In many ancient societies, norms were such that you had kids (if you survived long enough), and what you did with other men on the side was more or less your business. The Romans had a lot of gay sex, but didn't have a concept of a gay man, rather an effeminate man (who liked to bottom). So homosexuality is not really a puzzle that begs for a solution. The reality is, that the reasons we have sex do not have much to do with reproduction. Western society is still rather prudish about acknowledging this.
It's worth pointing out also, men generally pass their genes on a whole lot less than women do. Genetic evidence shows women were twice as likely as men to reproduce. So it's not like being heterosexual meant you'd have kids, being homosexual meant you wouldn't. I guess monogamy would reduce the disparity between men and women here.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-09/uoa-ges091604...
There is nothing about evolution that requires a gene to benefit any given individual. There are plenty of species where individuals are metaphorically "thrown under the bus" for the survival of genetically similar enough individuals to be worth it.
And for any given individual, a gene that confers high fitness on the population it exists in as a whole can still be disastrous in certain configurations.
An example of that would be the sickle-cell trait, which causes lots of deaths amongst those unlucky enough to get it from both parents, as it leaves them prone to sickle cell anaemia and related problems.
It survives in many regions such as West Africa because while receiving it from both parents cuts an average 20-40 years of your life expectancy in developed countries, "just" having the trait from one parent is a net positive because it makes it a lot less likely you will get malaria, which is a far bigger killer in countries with poor healthcare.
This is the convoluted way of saying that you can't look at the effect on individual survival - there can be convoluted mechanisms that makes a gene that makes your copies less likely to be propagated more fit on average.
Besides: http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessma...
We execute the adaptations we already have, we do not optimize for evolutionary goals. We have no obligation to pay them any mind whatsoever.
Well of course not, since we might be reproduce more if we stay alive longer. And we do start to die around the time we start to lose fertility, which isn't an "instinct" to die, but clearly our bodies are not adapted to live longer.
Why are they wrong? Could you elaborate?