Comment by xwkd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xwkd | Hacker News Reader

I truly appreciate your recognition of the problem and your sincere attempt at rectifying some of the behaviors that every generation is struggling with right now. I'd like to share some of my own personal experiences with the hope that it might influence your efforts in a positive direction.

The reason that I don't watch porn anymore has very little to do with personal discipline and more to do with a reframing of the people that produce it. Porn commoditizes a powerful part of the human experience. It is, in effect, prostitution. In order to recognize this, I had to have enough life experience to understand what sex is and is not, how people trade parts of their soul for money, and how people compartmentalize and lie to themselves. I also had to understand something about what keeps that machine running. That takes time.

I used to watch a lot of porn. I'm not sure that I would be able to fully convey and distill all the lessons I've learned since then to a version of myself that is 15 years younger and internally screaming for the kind of gratification that sex can bring. The only real way to absorb everything that you need to know is by actually living the experience. I needed to relate to people, to get messy and make mistakes and actually live and learn lessons about myself that you can't absorb through a computer monitor. Women are different when they're actually there with you in a way that you can smell, taste, and touch.

Once you realize that the heart is involved and that's the way that it should be, then you start to look at the Riley Reids or Sasha Greys of the world through a different lens. You see what they've sacrificed. It's not sexy anymore.

Sex is just an activity. It's a workout and feels fun and exciting. The fact that you think a person sacrifices their heart for sex mean you don't have a healthy relationship with it. It's not a one sided thing, of giving or taking, it's consensually shared between people.

Sex can be, and I think should be, an emotionally fulfilling experience, but it's not a requirement as long as each person gets their needs met.

I can appreciate that you have a different view from mine, but I am feeling like you didn't quite understand what I wrote. That's okay. Your judgement is totally valid, and I hope that as your view evolves, you continue to publish it.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of porn that is created without using real actors, like drawing or writing, which reframes the commodity as something the author did because they like drawing or writing, not because they sacrificed their physical body and entered an actual industry. Many of these works have themes of sex positivity and belonging, and so my mind creates an exception for them, because I make the excuse that "it's not pornography at the lowest level, it's art with the occasional pornographic content."

Maybe those artists sacrificed something too, but I don't see how it's any different from any average author sacrificing his life to write an all-ages novel.

The worst thing about porn addiction is that there are no physical dealers or substances involved. As long as your body is intact, all you need to become addicted is a screen and enough privacy, two things that are almost always available right before you go to sleep. And even without a screen, you can still use your imagination. Getting past that means finding other things in life to do that are more satisfying.

May I posit that, while they technically meet the definition of "pornography" in most dictionaries (and sometimes common use) that written erotic stories simply are in a different category altogether in many ways? Now, as a fair disclaimer, I personally have no moral objection to people getting erotic pleasure or stimulation from such media, in the abstract. I think it might actually be a net-healthy thing in some limited contexts.

But I do worry about how what sex acts are depicted as normal might scramble our interpersonal relationships. I worry about how implausibly beautiful people might damage our self-esteem. And the increasing integration into "endless scrolling" with a social aspect and the clicky-clicky dopamine feedback cycle is the death blow.

Most of these concerns are close to nil with an erotic short story, by comparison. To brutally chop this down to a simple idea: Monkey see, monkey do. Monkey think abstractly through imagination, monkey imagine but not see and so not do.

After all, don't you think it's telling that, while teen girls are hooked on the image-pornography of fake stardom lives on Instagram, and teen boys are hooked on OnlyFans content and half-clad Twitch streamers, that there is (to my knowledge) no epidemic of compulsive erotic story writing and reading to go with it? Oh, I'm sure some people do spend 12 hours a day at that, but it seems not to tickle our brains in quite the same way. Such things are merely sporadically titillating, not horrifically and compulsively addictive, at least for the typical person.

thanks for sharing your experience. this is helpful!

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