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Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Alain de Botton has written about it, too:

"A brain originally designed to cope with nothing more tempting than an occasional glimpse of a tribesperson across the savannah is lost with what’s now on offer on the net at the click of a button: when confronted with offers to participate continuously in scenarios outstripping any that could be dreamt up by the diseased mind of the Marquis de Sade. There is nothing robust enough in our psychological make-up to compensate for developments in our technological capacities."

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/12/26/why-we-should-limi...

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There are few arguments that I have more disdain for than the one that somehow because our brains (or bodies) haven't experienced something before, they aren't built to cope with it. It's not like we are, or have ever been, built for a single temperature, type of sex, kind of food, etc. Our bodies and minds are adaptable, and while we can try to logically reason about how our minds and bodies adapt to certain stimuli, we are still guessing at best.

To address the particular hogwash in that editorial, glimpse a tribesperson across the savannah? Human beings were living in groups with topless women tens of millenia ago. So it doesn't even stand on those grounds.

I imagine that, aside from porn (and maybe even including it - or most of it), our modern sex lives are a faint shadow of what our prehistoric ancestors got up to.

Look at what the bonobos do with each other - and we're more creative.

We're also too damn creative at using sex (or deprivation thereof) to control others. I see no reason to assume that's a recent invention.

Lets cut this BS argument short: Who is driving a car?

I thought so.

There were no cars, planes, or McDs in the Savannah either yet somehow we cope with those things. Personally I dont think porn comes close what the Romans were actually doing...

And a lot of people die from cars. Clearly it's because we were never meant to have them.

</sarcasm>

He doesn't explicitly present the evolutionary argument as compelling evidence that we're helpless against pornography. In context, it can just as easily be read as an explanation for why it is plausible. If you don't buy it as evidence, you don't have to read it that way. A few paragraphs later, he appeals to experience, saying:

"It is perhaps only people who haven’t felt the full power of sex over their logical selves who can remain uncensorious and liberally 'modern' on the subject. Philosophies of sexual liberation appeal mostly to people who don’t have anything too destructive or weird that that they wish to do once they have been liberated.

"However, anyone who has experienced the power of sex in general and internet pornography in particular to reroute our priorities is unlikely to be so sanguine about liberty."

I don't want to keep quoting passages, so I encourage you to read the whole thing.

While the Marquis de Sade had an unusual penchant for buggery (which was illegal at the time) and blasphemy (also illegal), he himself was certainly not "diseased of the mind". You could consider him an early Libertarian, fighting for freedom above anything else. He was a humanist opposed to the death penalty (very much used at the time). His writings are provocative, and his mind was certainly unusual, but you also have to consider that he wrote most of his work while imprisoned (32 years of his life!) and frustration certainly played a big part in the excesses that haunted him.

By the way, the word 'sadism' comes from his name, but he himself never actually physically hurt anyone. He was very much perceived as a threat by the successive governments of the time as he had no respect for authority and didn't hesitate to put himself in danger for speaking his mind and denouncing the hypocrisy of the society he lived in.

He would be very much at home here today. A larger than life hero.

He never physically hurt anyone?! His first scandal was for imprisoning and assaulting a woman, and plenty more of that followed. See Wikipedia for a quick overview:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade#Scandals_and_im...

Also, if 120 Days in Sodom is not a work of a diseased mind, I'd be curious to find out what you think is. I'm sure 32 years in prison sucks, but would most people get relief by graphically daydreaming about torturing their own children to death?

Wow, I knew about the story of a man who shouted at passers by and was thus moved from the Bastille to a different prison just two weeks (slightly less) before it was stormed and all prisoners were released (all being seven if I remember correctly), and that he was then terrified that his writing had been lost, but never realised it was Sade before.

Given his personal life it certainly doesn't seem impossible that he was fantasising about what he wrote, but isn't it always a possibility that he wasn't too? It's possible to write fiction that you wouldn't want to happen in real life, after all.

There's no standard definition of having a "diseased mind," but I think a case can be made that his sexual compulsions were pathological. He was hardly unique in having enemies in eighteenth century France, but he couldn't stop himself from handing his enemies one excuse after another to lock him up, often for crimes that we still find repugnant today. (I don't know what your source is for the idea that he never hurt anybody.) It isn't like eighteenth century aristocrats were held to high standards in their treatment of servants and prostitutes. A man who couldn't live within those limitations would have found the twenty-first century even less hospitable to his compulsions.

Outstripping the Marquis? I've only read a few pages of his work, and I dare say a lot of porn doesn't come close.

"who might once have had a peek inside Playboy or caught a preview of a naughty film on the television channel of a hotel"

This does not go well with the fact from OP article that every boy after ten is exposed to hardcore pornography on the internet. If it's true, people who "once have had a peek" do not exist and the author of the article you quoted fools us.

Having said that, my main reaction to that kind of reasoning is on the lines of "We're going to watch porn anyway, you won't stop us (and by us I mean everyone) and that's what we are going to do boo hoo. So what can you do? With your religion schmeligion and morals schmorals? Even if we hurt us in the process, so what? You can't do anything about this."

Seriously, he's like a parent who thinks he's going to tell us what to do. But he doesn't have any ways to make us listen. And no ways at all to affect the situation. So why bother at all?

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