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Comment by shadowfiend | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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