Is Porn Bad for you?
There’s a hilarious reason for that — researchers can’t find
enough men who haven’t watched porn in order to form a comparison group!
However, there’s some mileage to the idea and it warrants further study.
Wilson’s premise is one that I discussed previously in the
Tugging the Human Instinct post from a while back. Actually the same reasoning
can be applied to much that’s fucked up about modern life (and points to the
solutions too). It goes like this:
Our culture has evolved far more quickly than our biology.
We’re no longer living in the environment that we’re most suited for. Parts of
our brain are wired to respond to certain things that were beneficial to our
survival and replication. Our culture now rewards people (monetarily) if they
can find ways to activate these areas with superstimuli, which tend to come
with negative side effects. Pornography, particularly online pornography, is
one such superstimulus.
To be more specific, we’re adapted for life in 100-150
strong tribes, who would occasionally come into contact with other similarly
sized wandering tribes (this is where our instincts towards in-group out-group
behaviour stems from, be it my sports team is better than yours, my marital art
is more effective than yours, my religion is the true one, and so on). I don’t
know how many tribes you’d bump into as a hunter-gatherer, but given a life
expectancy of around 30 and excluding women below breeding age, you’d probably
see no more than a few thousand women, and only maybe 60 or so on a regular
basis.
If you go to a porn site, you can see 60 women of
above-average attractiveness in a few minutes. This overloads your brain in a
sense, tricking it into thinking you’re part of the hottest tribe ever!
And if you get bored of one woman, you can load another up
in a second. This level of novelty is also a superstimulus. It’s this
combination of availability and instant novelty that creates the dependence and
the psychological issues.
There’s a little more to it that that neurologically, but
that’s the gist of it. If you’re interested in learning more, check out
Wilson’s TED talk, conveniently located right here:
The Great Porn Experiment: Gary Wilson at TEDxGlasgow
It’s ironic that he did a TED talk, since if there’s such a
thing as “Information Porn,” that site is its biggest pimp!
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