Do we care? The next thing he will suggest: let's censor, let's break the web, let's put people in the jail, let's force parents to spy on their children, let's take parenting rights from ones who don't. Let's create a police state because he doesn't like porn.
His problems with porn is just his problems. I suggest dealing with it.
To be fair it's not the uncommon proposed answer, so if he's not responding to the article specifically, in general he'll probably still have a point for a lot of people who agree with the tone.
I'm about 5 years older than the article poster. I haven't had unfiltered Internet since way before puberty, but I knew where my dad kept the tapes and magazines and I've had the Internet connection by the time I was 15-16. Either I was too young to care or old enough to know where to find it.
I don't think my parents would have added anything to either of our lives by filtering the Internet connection. They spent enough time trying to push me away from computers, which in hindsight I think they'd admit was folly since it was this "addiction" which I used to dig myself out of a childhood of poverty.
Anyway part of that time was used looking at porn, more of it on on-line games and a bit of it learning interesting things. Other than turning into a geek, I don't really think I'm messed up in any special way.
We now have two data points running contrary from each other. I see no significant evidence to suggest porn is really the problem it's make it out to be.
While I agree entirely with you, another point the author of the article is making is that his problems may be typical in kids growing up with the world wide web at their fingertips.
That perspective brings us to a different question: What can we do to ensure safe and positive sexual development in children without censoring the web and imposing our generation's morals on the next?
People who take the banned of protecting children from porn usually do this not from the safety & positivity point of view but from church & "morals" one. That's the most putrid, patronizing and hypicritical kind of people available; moreover, they don't see (or care) the relation of law and its effect (those two rarely match perfectly, sometimes not at all) and naturally they push for the measures I listed.
People who could ask this question never get any saying.
> While I agree entirely with you, another point the author of the article is making is that his problems may be typical in kids growing up with the world wide web at their fingertips.
what the web has to do with it? as a teenager I could buy hardcore porn magazines without any problems.
Right, and because I could buy reference books as a kid without any problems that means that the web has not enabled me to learn more subjects in more depth in less time and meant that I don't spend more time learning than I did before?
Are you really making this argument on HN of all places? That behaviour doesn't have the ability to fluctuate wildly with only small differences in friction (not a pun!)?
It's perfectly possible to limit yourself to one kind of porn - just find the kind of porn you really enjoy and use it for when you can't do it in a bedroom.
There is a very fancy word for being addicted to being intoxicated, no matter with what (I forgot the word for now). Being addicted to all kinds of porn at once seems similar - and, frankly, equally rare.
I find it hard to imagine how such a comment could be written having read the article.
The whole point of the article was that it was not "just his problem", and beyond missing that point, the poster responds to a straw man not even hinted at in the article.
His inability to "deal with it" was the purpose of the article!
He does not condemn porn. He questions what it means to have a natural sexuality when "Sexiness is always constructed — it used to be normatively hot to be fat and pale! "
His problem is not that he has "demons", but that "I feel estranged from my sexuality, like it’s somebody else’s."
The piece comes across to me as very self reflective, asking '(why) is this a problem?' 'What would I be like in not for Y (porn)', and so forth.
I do not see any clear path to a police state (and I like to think of myself as (relativly) extremely biased to seeing a police state).
But it seems to me that winter is coming and we all might be heading to a police state. And I don't see how his article can't be used as a brick in the wall constructed by people not really caring about us (but only about "demons" in their heads") between us and free speech, freedom of expression and sometimes physical freedom.
Yep, that's the problem. You start seeing a bunch of articles like this for a few months, and then someone in power will say "This is such a terrible problem, why don't we put some sensible restrictions on porn. For the children."
"He does not condemn porn. He questions what it means to have a natural sexuality when "Sexiness is always constructed — it used to be normatively hot to be fat and pale! " His problem is not that he has "demons", but that "I feel estranged from my sexuality, like it’s somebody else’s.""
He's projecting his other issues on pornography, though. All of these issues will continue to exist unanswered long after he abandons porno.
Does it make sense to teach this to children? Just like "Smoking isn't good for your health."(which I believe worked for me) you could teach "Porn isn't good for you, if you want to enjoy sex."
Porn is an instant pleasure. Enjoying sex in eight years (earlier if you're lucky but don't cross your fingers just yet) does not compare very well to that.
I've never tried to smoke so I can't really compare.
"Porn is an instant pleasure. Enjoying sex in eight years (earlier if you're lucky but don't cross your fingers just yet) does not compare very well to that"
I'm glad you've discovered masturbation, but what does this have to do with the topic at hand?
It'd make more sense to go broader and teach that due to how our brains work, all pleasure becomes diluted the more we have. Therefore, it is desirable to avoid living in unrestricted excess, be it with drugs, sex, food, or what have you. One should have control over their pleasures, not the other way around.
We have tested and tasted too much, lover--
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
the knowledge we stole but could not use.
I think the problem is our society's denigration of sex. We see it as consisting inherently of that mix of thrill and shame - when you're a teenager growing up in America, you're told to feel that way about any nudity, never mind penetration. So you come to associate arousal with this guilt - you never experience the one without the other - and then when you're looking for something to turn you on you're already feeling guilty, and there's a part of you that wants to. So you step a little deeper into the pool of fetishes, find something a little stronger (and I'm pleased that the author's actually given some realistic examples here), something that makes you feel guilty and ashamed and is all the more erotic for it. But the interest half-life for porn is tiny; what was dangerous boundary-pushing last week is pedestrian today. It's a feedback loop, one that can only possibly end somewhere unpleasant.
The author's already found the solution - we need to separate sexuality from guilt and shame, to be able to feel aroused and wholesome at the same time. But it's hard to do that after you've already fallen down the spiral. We need to make our children's first experiences of arousal feel natural and wholesome - which means more openness, more embracing of sexuality in artforms that are going to portray it positively. But that's a hard sell to middle America.
> So you come to associate arousal with this guilt
That's part of the puritanical and (maybe any religious) mind control. People need to feel guilty so they self-police themselves, and it also has to be something that is common (such as sex) so everyone is always guilty. Guilty people are vulnerable and easily controlled.
This has to be planted early in the childhood, then it sort of becomes automatic and not that easy to unlearn. Even rationally if some admit there is nothing wrong with this or that, they'll still feel guilty -- it because it becomes part of their personality.
I think the problem is our society's denigration of sex.
Is this really true anymore? It seems that the majority of the media consumed by young people carries the message that sex is extremely important and if you are not doing it with everyone in every way, you are brainwashed by religious or moral beliefs.
Obviously there is denigration of sex from many sources but which of these sources actually have an impact on young people?
I said society, not media. My own experience is that I felt very guilty and followed much the same path as the author - but then I was a geeky kid with few friends and a lot of respect for my (relatively old and catholic) parents. I wonder how popular/trendy the author was in high school, and whether those who were had a different experience.
"It seems that the majority of the media consumed by young people carries the message that sex is extremely important and if you are not doing it with everyone in every way, you are brainwashed by religious or moral beliefs."
Sex as necessary for social station is not being sex-positive.
I upvoted you, so I think you had some good points. I don't think, however, that our society denigrates sex. I think that what has happened was a cultural response to STDs, and the problem of rearing children. People (in my opinion) naturally pursue what makes them feel good, and sex is our number one feel-good activity. So we've been struggling with how to control it. You see the problems of unrestrained sex now with AIDS, herpes, new antibiotic resistant strains of clap, the rise of single-parent families, etc.
Not that I know. Bad wording from my side, I was only thinking about teens (like the case of the author). Some day research might tell us, until then, you better avoid a risk to your child.
I dont think it makes it better or worse at all, with the exception of certain girls who like to watch it to get in the mood in which case its certainly a force for the better.
Putting the "its not good for you" label on it also makes it immediately more interesting than it should be. Increases the guilty pleasure and so on.
The guy in the article - maybe he would have erectile problems never having watched porn too. Performance anxiety is normal.
One thing I am sure about: The cure for bad sex is lots of sex.
You know you've chosen the right side of an argument when everyone one the other side links to a single quack website backed up by anecdotes from "An Internet User".
Is it not true that many informative articles start with anecdotes to illustrate the subject at hand? If you have a problem with the science in the article, please explain; it would help me understand the flaws you are talking about.
The study on addiction linked to covers addiction to injections of MPH. It goes on to say that injected MPH and oral MPH have completely different effects. It follows that none of this generalizes to viewing pornography, seeing how the delivery mechanism is a factor in addiction and the study does not cover viewed material in any manner.
And that's from only reading the first couple sentences.
Mere bias does not invalidate an argument. As males we are naturally biased to believing porn is harmless. However it can be a real addiction to some (not all of course).
In my opinion it's important to know the symptoms of any addiction in case you see those patterns in your own or your peer's behaviors.
No, because that is ludicrous. A porn addiction is bad for you, but watching other people fuck isn't necessarily bad. Just like certain electronic components exhibit weird properties when taken to extreme levels, we wouldn't write off using op-amps because they go funky when abused.
It makes sense, if taught properly. But I would expect this to be yet another thing taught with the "daddy knows best" attitude that speaks in simplistic absolutes to make sure they instill their desired outcome rather than share a proper perspective with plenty of nuance and hope that the children come to the same conclusions as the person teaching. That is a very dangerous road to take. It depends on the message being correct, and the child to never rebel from that message when they wise up to the fact they weren't given the full picture and never succumb to their desires.
For me, in this day and age, its really hard to say one way or the other. How poorly done and/or wrong will it be, and is having it done that way better than nothing? I can't know, but I suspect that with societal attitudes on sex, "some porn is fine, how much is too much is different for everybody and here's how to tell where the line is" is too complicated of a message to effectively communicate. If it is even allowed to be communicated at all. Don't forget widespread acceptance of "abstinence only" rubbish isn't far behind us, I'm reminded of this every time I visit family in the South and see the big labels on every gas station condom dispenser reminding me that the only real way to avoid HIV/AIDS is monogamy and abstinence before marriage. Whereas growing up in the North, we didn't even have those dispensers. I suspect their presence is related to the greater taboos about sex in those areas, but in the north I was never scared away from buying rubbers at the counter when I was young.
The author is concerned that his sexuality has been irreparably damaged by his adolescent pornographic pursuits, and that youths with similar unfettered access to pornography, lacking guidance or education, are in danger of repeating his experience.
There are people from every walk of life frequenting HN these days. I'm guessing the world of online porn can be pretty disturbing for the uninitiated.
The fact that an average person can't summit Everest while a practiced climber can is not a disparagement on the former.
There is a subreddit with dozens of thousands of people with the goal of quitting porn/masturbating. http://www.reddit.com/r/nofap
I am concerned about the future. Augmented reality is just around the corner, and virtual sex is almost certainly in our future. How would easy access to an unlimited amount of all types of "sex" imaginable affect society?
Nope. You can't knee-jerk exclaim "Betteridge's law" when you see a "?". It's meant for news articles. This article is an introspective "life story" article and doesn't meet the preconditions.
For example, the previous life story article ending with a question mark on Salon was "Can I date a Republican?", and the clear answer from the article is "yes."
The one before that is "Should the terminally ill control their deaths?" and the author's statement is "A year after my mother's uncomfortable decline, it's a question with which I'm still wrestling", but it's clear that the author supports people learning more about the options for palliative care over attempts at staying alive for as long as possible. I'll put this as a "yes."
Then there's the quoted question '“Are you on the cover of a magazine?”', where the answer is definitely "yes", but this too doesn't fit Betteridge's law.
And "Was I selfish to have fertility treatments?", where the author states "I honestly don’t think my choice was any more selfish than anyone’s choice to have a child." So that's a "no." But there wa s a while when she worried about the question.
In the case of Betteridge's Law the point being made is that if someone has actual evidence then the headline reflects the evidence. It states the fact that there is new knowledge about something. If it's just speculation or useless fluff then they add a question mark.
And yes, it was not made for opinion pieces or personal narratives and, like in the examples you give, doesn't generally work in these situations.
My intention was just to point out that it happens to apply here because the headline is childish link bait.
The author covers in the piece that it wasn't really porn that lead to this and it's not going to be "forever" either if he does something about it.
I can't tell from your response if you think that Betteridge's Law applies here or not. Betteridge's Law describes articles where an author wants to write a specific story but doesn't have the information to back up the point, and/or doesn't want to do the research to get that information.
That doesn't apply here, because "if he does something about it" is a different cause than not having enough information.
It looks like you say that it "happens to apply here" because 1) the answer is no, and 2) it's "childish link bait." Why not then just say "No. This is childish link bait."?
Suppose the NM governor wrote an op-ed piece "Should I stay the death penalty?", which outlines her ongoing thoughts both for and against commuting the sentence for the last two people on NM's death row. Suppose you are ardently pro-death penalty, support RepealTheRepeal, and believe that only fools would be against it. You could quite justifiably answer "no" to that headline and believe the title to be "childish link bait." But you would be wrong to say that Betteridge's Law applies.
Betteridges's "Law" doesn't apply to stories like this for all the reasons you stated. I referenced it because all the critiques of writing that Betteridge's Law implies apply here.
I think the misunderstanding here is that you are looking Betteridge's Law as more of a pseudo-law that has specific constraints and I'm looking at is as shorthand for a specific critique of bad writing, which I think does apply here even though, as you stated, it was not created to apply to personal writing.
The difference is that most of the examples you are giving of personal writing are subjective and/or value judgements that have no factual answer to the headline question. This one does have an answer, the answer is "no" and the author knew the answer was "no".
Anyway, clearly a better comment for me to have made would have been "Although it doesn't apply here this post makes me think of Betteridge's Law!" but it's much less pithy.
Actually their specific mission is to avoid masturbation. I don't think there is anything wrong with masturbation. In fact sometimes, particularly as a male, it helps to improve your focus if you release occasionally. For someone who isn't in a relationship or a position to have sex on a fairly regular basis (read: me, living in a basement, working every waking hour on a combination of vitamins and adderall) it helps every few days. Some argue, and to an extent I agree, that it also helps to avoid it. Your body builds more testosterone during a period of abstinence. Apparently only up until about 7 days, where that begins to trail off. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins won't let his band mates have sex before a show, so they let out their energy on stage.
That being said, porn definitely fucks with your head. Just stay away from it. I've never been one of these guys who watches it more and more and more and more. I can't even imagine being desensitized to sex or imagining porn during sex. That's a serious problem. Anyway, the nofap guys talk about this stuff a lot so I'd encourage anyone interested in this to head over there as there are lots of other interesting resources that point out why porn is bad and how it fucks with your brain. In the end it's purely chemical, where you become accustomed to the dopamine response that you receive from watching porn, so you need more and more and more. Like any other addiction or dependence. At some point what you have is not enough and you need more.
It's one of those things that can rapidly spiral, you start needing a bigger kick to keep it interesting. The problem being it is incredibly difficult to talk about, it's something parents will start needing to discuss with their kids straight up.
Porn isn't bad, it's a part of society now and has been for a long while, but it's the same way drugs aren't necessarily bad unless you start needing a bigger and bigger kick.
Yes, but porn can sometimes be the worst drug. Sometimes I find the analogy between porn and drugs to add more obfuscation to my thoughts than clarity.
They're very similar in some respects, both trigger pleasure and reward centres creating a similar level of craving. Not a wholy physical dependency, but certainly a mental one over time.
> Porn isn't bad, it's a part of society now and has been for a long while
Logically speaking, that doesn't mean it's not a bad thing.
EDIT: Porn is indeed almost a staple of Western society, but note that Western culture is also very image-focused and has high rates of divorce and eating disorders among women.
True, I should have been clearer, I don't believe it is a bad thing by nature, and it's been part of society for long enough that we've not all become degenerates.
"Even 20 years ago porn was too expensive for the average person to afford very much of it."
They could afford it, they could not afford to hoard and stream it at will. The mechanics have not changed significantly, even as we spend more time searching for "novel" mp3s and video.
Do we have a "problem" with Netflix? Pandora? I spend constant (wasted) hours cataloging and retagging my music collection.
Interesting thing is in most of these historical cases, there is a strong authoritarian push to stop these festivals to keep from corrupting people. This is the wheel of history coming around again.
It's one of those things that can rapidly spiral, you
start needing a bigger kick to keep it interesting.
There's been a couple of AMAs on reddit recently from people that have been convicted of possession of child porn (and other illegal material), quite a few have claimed exactly this to be the cause. They're not interested in the subject (children), they're interested in the "shocking" nature of the pornography, how it's something new to experience and it stems from their addiction to feeling something, eventually they become numb to watching a man and a woman having sex, so they move on to... and eventually end up with things like children, mutilation and bestiality (and other such "horrifying") things.
>"Porn isn't bad, it's a part of society now and has been for a long while"
Are you sure about that? It seems that widespread, easy access to porn is something very new. Before the internet, you would have to go through some embarrassing procedure at a checkout counter to purchase just a few pornographic items.
The amount of free porn I could access in the next hour would have cost me thousands of dollars in the 1980s.
We have normalized porn very recently and it is just a piece of modernist faith that it is harmless.
> We have normalized porn very recently and it is just a piece of modernist faith that it is harmless
Do you abstain from television, computers, rock and roll, role playing, comic books and video games by this same line of FUD?
Mass media has the power to create unrealistic expectations. Someone growing up in the age of Petrarch and Dante had unrealistic expectations of romantic love. It's easy to imagine that someone growing up in the age of internet porn would have unrealistic expectations of sex. Beyond that, I'd have to see hard, consistent evidence before I'd write off porn as especially harmful.
Some of it. For example, the average American watches 5 hours of TV a day. That will kill you. I watch about 1 hour
Video games are very addictive to me. After playing Starcraft for 16 hours straight one saturday, I carefully watch and moderate my video game play and have deleted most games from my system.
In your battle to live a meaningful, purposeful life, the peddlers of superstimuli are your enemy.
Good for you--I mean that. My addictive superstimulus is learning new things with no practical relevance my work, like orbital mechanics or calendrical calculations. When I catch myself going on extended binges, I try to extricate myself by consciously directing my time and energy elsewhere. But it would be silly of me to indict textbooks as harmful objects. Any hardcore procrastinator knows that the focus is incidental and essentially arbitrary.
He never specified a time frame--Watching 5 hours of TV will kill you over x number of years (also it's clear he meant the resulting inactivity will kill you).
You have made a couple unfounded assumptions. One, that the GP, abstains from porn and two, that the fact that it's not clear that it's harmless is the reason for it. They were responding to a specific claim of the GGP, that porn is harmless.
Respond to what people actually say. If you really need to respond to something unsaid, make it explicit. Anything else is a strawman fallacy.
I accept your point while submitting that everyone in this thread, yourself included, fails this stringent test:
> They were responding to a specific claim of the GGP, that porn is harmless.
Speaking of strawmen, it was Jacob who used the word harmless. Nicholas went so far as to draw an analogy with drugs concerning the effects of responsible versus irresponsible use. When he said porn wasn't bad, he clearly didn't mean that it is harmless in an absolute sense but was expressing a nuanced point of view.
You're right that Nicholas's comment was more nuanced than I gave him credit for. However, he paints the picture that porn has been with our society forever and that its effects are known and tolerable. I would argue that its widespread availability is an extremely novel phenomena and that its effects are unknown and likely harmful.
I've had some first hand experience on that count, though not as extreme as the linked article.
> However, he paints the picture that porn has been with our society forever and that its effects are known and tolerable. I would argue that its widespread availability is an extremely novel phenomena and that its effects are unknown and likely harmful.
You haven't clearly defined what you mean by harmful. Does it ruin otherwise healthy relationships on a massive scale? Does it teach impressionable young men that all women want to fuck them, leading to violence? Those seem like typical charges brought against porn. Were they true I'd agree there would be cause for serious concern. I haven't seen the data to back up these claims. If it exists, let's see it. Porn is widespread enough that you'd expect the large-scale statistical effects to be manifest.
>"Porn is widespread enough that you'd expect the large-scale statistical effects to be manifest."
There is certainly a modern syndrome around the nexus of sex, relationships, and family (less stable relationships, fewer children raised in stable homes, fewer children, more sex, more sexual culture, technology that lowers the cost of sex, easy access to porn). It's hard to know which pieces of the syndrome are causes and which are effects.
But if you don't see anything broken with modern relationships, you aren't paying attention to the statistics. Since the 1960s things have certainly changed at a rapid rate and some of that change is clearly for the worse.
Children raised in single-parent homes, children born out of marriage, and rates of divorce all started skyrocketing in the 60s. The upper class has been less effected, as Charles Murray's book "Coming Apart" shows. Divorce, single-parenthood, and other symptoms of sexual liberation went up slightly for the upper class in the 60s and then leveled off. But in the lower classes the standard family has become the exception to the norm.
Again, I'm not saying porn or a less repressed culture are causative, but they are part of the syndrome we observe that sex is less serious and more pervasive, relationships are more temporary, and children grow up in more chaotic homes at a distinct disadvantage to children that grow up in stable homes. The family is disappearing for a large portion of the population. Marriage is later. Children are fewer - especially for the upper class. You have more wealth in the country and more children being raised in poverty by a single parent.
I think you're conflating two very different things. One is a growing bifurcation between rich and poor. The other is what you might call "sexual liberation", though it's much wider than that.
For instance, a higher divorce rate is not necessarily bad. Decades ago, women had fewer rights in marriage and there was a cultural expectation for marriages to stay together, no matter how unhealthy, unhappy, or sometimes even abusive the marriage happened to be. As recently as the 1970's, the law had no concept of spousal rape--in other words, it was perfectly legal for a husband to rape his wife. Today, not only can women escape from marriages that are bad for them, but married couples can mutually agree that the marriage is no longer serving their or their childrens' needs.
I also find little to complain about in a lower birthrate. The bifurcation by class is troubling, but the net trend is towards zero or negative population growth. This doesn't necessarily indicate the disappearance of family, but rather a slight adjustment from more of an r-selection strategy to more of a K-selection strategy.
Conflating these issues as a "syndrome" is a little too simplistic and tendentious towards an ill-founded social conservatism.
I don't see how anybody could look at the social changes of the last 50 years and see all good or all bad. I don't. Certainly at some point the human population needs to stop growing or we will have to begin colonizing other planets. So a lower birthrate is in some ways good, even if it causes other problems.
On the other hand, when couples decide that their marriage "is no longer serving ... their childrens' needs", they are most likely wrong. Children grow up with fewer problems if their parents stay together, on average. Easier divorce in cases of abuse is good. But how common is that out of the 50% of first marriages that break up? Divorce in cases of boredom have a high cost on children with little social benefit.
In many ways we are better off than our parents and grandparents. But I don't think cheap sex and disposable relationships represent an advance.
The magnitude of it is new. The normalization of it is new. A marriage means a lot less than it used to. It's a status symbol, or a source of entertainment that can be disregarded when it no longer entertains.
"The normalization of it is new. A marriage means a lot less than it used to. It's a status symbol, or a source of entertainment that can be disregarded when it no longer entertains."
And thank goodness for that. You have an overinflated opinion of what marriage "used to mean". People having an out from abuse and misery is worth it all. Your efforts to shame the divorced are moralizing, not "for the children". Marriages are not happy because they're forced through law and social stigma. The option to leave is freedom.
It need not be outright abuse for it to be an unhealthy relationship. If your marriage is characterized by constant bickering, or by a partner who stays long hours at work followed by long hours at the bar every day just to avoid a spouse they have grown to detest, there may not be any actual abuse but it's hard to see that as a healthy environment to raise a child in. Unfortunately, these are exactly the kinds of things that are difficult to capture in statistics, particularly the very broad statistics you're discussing.
It's also hard to see why decreased birthrates, delayed marriage, and delayed childbirth are bad moves. High birthrates and family formation early in life are more of an r-strategy. Moving to a K-strategy is better for the children you do have, which is the entire point. As a side effect, maybe young people have to find outlets other than marrying at age 16 and having babies to satisfy their sexual urges, but what's the harm in that?
You could plausibly say that most of the harm, in terms of single mothers, comes from the war on drugs, which affects minorities and the lower classes the most. It's two-faced for conservatives to point at certain communities for having so many children out of wedlock while locking up alarming proportions of their men for victimless crimes and turning them into hardened criminals.
Fundamentally, I think people more qualified to make decisions about their own families and relationships than the Pope, the government, or you and I.
Either those "unhealthy relationships" are incredibly uncommon as a proportion of marriages, or it is better for children to live in a marriage with an "unhealthy relationship" than a straight-up broken home.
Decreased birthrates pose problems for current economic systems which are premised on taxing the young to pay for the old. Later children are more likely to have birth defects. But like I said, ultimately it is necessary, so it is a mixed bag.
I totally agree with you on the War on Drugs. A legal system that sends 28% of black males to at least one year of prison undoubtably has something to do with why 80% of black children in the US grow up without fathers, and that undoubtably has something to do with why 28% of black males in the US spend at least a year in prison.
I think it's hard to discuss these statistics in any detail without even looking at them, but this isn't a controlled experiment. If the worst marriages selectively end in divorce, you're comparing single parenthood to the marriages that are healthy enough to continue, not to the marriages the children would have actually been raised in.
Feel free to email me if you want to continue this discussion. It's interesting and I'm enjoying it, but it's grown into a bit of a tangent.
More equality for women? That has improved.
Access to abortion? That has improved?
Domestic abuse and assault in sexual relationship? Are there any good statistics on these trends?
Courts upholding child support agreements with force of law. Don't pay your child support and see what happens.
The reason something may appear broken with modern relationships is the fact we are looking at them thru historical perspective, when it was much less likely a person could survive and raise children while not married. The fact is so many things have changed (at least in the U.S. where I am) in the last 50 year the chain of causality is likely impossible to unwrap.
Unfortunately, as far as I know children of single-parent families do worse in education, earnings, the legal system, and in other ways, so the breakdown of the family has immense social costs.
You will notice that the upper class still marries before they have children.
We don't know whether these children will do better or worse in an unhappy married family. And certainly we don't have reasons to think that marriage (the piece of paper) is the casuation for the gap, not merely a correlation.
The most parsimonious way to interpret the data is that divorce is bad for children. But we can add epicycles to some other secular hedonist theory and make it fit.
The most parsimonious way is also a most uninformative one.
For example, you can figure out that being rich and healthy is better than being poor and sick.
Also: you say "divorce is bad for children" when a good share of those children were born by mothers who aren't in a marriage and never were (at least not with the father).
What about those cases? "divorce" is not applicable to those.
"Porn isn't bad" is close enough to "porn is harmless" that I see little point in distinguishing them. not(P < 0) === P >= 0. I guess I don't see the nuance. I'll definitely admit to failing my test sometimes. It's easy to be sure you know what someone really meant.
Porn is not bad as long as you keep in mind that its a bunch of BS. If you want sex better to spend your time on adult friend finder or similar. Or make a lot of money; theyll never admit but girls like money.
This reads more of a commentary of how sex, masturbation, and porn are viewed in our culture as something that is shameful and wrong. While you can't go anywhere without seeing violence glorified, but also discussed in our custure. Guys skull getting blown off in a movie - acceptable, tolerated, laughed at. Guy with a penis in a movie - wrong, disgraceful, embarrassing, and no one talks about it, especially families.
What's the solution? I don't know, but I think tackling the problem from an early age is important. Adventure Time is the best example of a kids cartoon I can think of that deals with girlfriends, kissing, etc.. while still containing the stereotypical violence of a childrens cartoon.
Aside, porn to me is like violence in media. It's enjoyable, but at the same time absurd. And for most people (I hope) it's an easy distinction that how people in porn and movies act is different from real life.
I'm sure there are people who have never watched porn that don't particularly enjoy sex either. This sounds like all other articles that generalize one anecdote to data.
Pretty sure the entire piece was anecdotal. I see no call to action indicating that he believes we need to take up some sort of communal mantle to protect our young ones. He just wonders if he blew it for himself.
From the outset (and still at the end), he frames porn as deviant so you know what his overwhelming internal language is. (Porn didn't put that in him, he was taught it.) He then takes a cold-turkey approach to change and self-moderation (and why not - everyone's made a New Year's resolution...). Like abstinence (and over eating, and anger management, and the list goes on) though, extreme denial often (though not always; everyone's different, but often...) leads to extreme periods of indulgence followed by acute shame (remember that New Years resolution?). I think his thoughts and feeling say more about his environment and his ingrained attitudes than they do about the effect of watching porn. (I and every guy I know watched more porn than TV during their early teens. Their respective perviness has more to do with their self-image than anything... The ones who think of themselves as freaks, present themselves as freaks, even though they have identical interests to others...) It sounds like he thinks he has to hide, even from himself, which sounds like a self-acceptance issue to me. For starters, it might be productive for him to seek more relationships that give him stronger feelings of acceptance. (Which he is: "What helped the most was talking to friends, particularly women, who have had more positive relationships with masturbation." In other words, he needs a companion who likes similar things sexually... No surprise there.) He even admits at the end that he has an addictive personality, but ultimately assigns the blame on porn when he's in full control. Or at least he would be if he came to terms with having genitals like everyone else. It could have just as easily been food, or coffee, or the Sears catalog... He'd still have to learn to live with himself. At 23 that's still happening quite a bit, but his article is a social commentary. Unfortunately he's too close to the issue to see that he's the only one responsible for his own self-image and feelings of self-worth.
I remember reading sexual advice for couples from the pre internet era, and they cover many of the 'issues' described in the article and how to turn it into a positive experience. The impression I am getting is that he's never felt comfortable discussing it before, because of the guilt situation, hence why he hasn't realised how normal it is.
100% agree and only this to add... sexual interest can go up or down depending on your partner and life situation. This is regardless of love, interest or what-not. For me, I went from one relationship where I (a male) was faking it to another where I couldn't last 5 minutes.
Porn is such a non-issue in my life. It's soulless and empty as it should be, but it's also human sexual nature at its rawest. I'm glad we live in an era where we can freely and easily experience it.
Looks like the author was accurate in how uncomfortable we are as a society to talk about the role of porn in our lives.
I think the article speaks more to the issue with recovery and the issues surrounding "getting back to neutral."
This problem exists. He explains in laymen's terms a simple Pavlovian response that requires more and more brain stimulation to achieve the same level of dopamine needed for ejaculation.
I'm not a neuroscientist, but I bet someone out there can explain it better than I can.
Some people don't like how they use porn. But, some people don't like how they use normal sex. And in both cases, the problem isn't porn or sex but that the person doesn't like their relationship to porn or sex; that it is interfering with their lives. This isn't true for everyone and it certainly isn't unique to porn.
For everyone who doesn't like their relationship to porn, there are other people who don't like that they got diseases, or got pregnant without a plan. But we don't pathologize this.
Let's be careful not to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Kellogg, who used the trappings of science to push predetermined conclusions in a campaign against harmless sexuality.
Fair point. In my opinion, I don't think this is by any means a "new" problem, its just another way addiction manifests itself as a byproduct of how accessible pornography has become.
It can happen a million different ways; for the author, it was (probably) porn.
"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."
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:
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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?
So they're like the Amish (living without modern conveniences)...
In all seriousness, there's definitely a "born-again" feeling running through both sites ("not that there's anything wrong with that!"). I don't consider porn/masturbation a moral issue, so I notice that it's often portrayed that way ("you'll go blind/to hell"...)
For people with addictive personalities, finding self-control can be an especially good thing, and refraining from sex in general certainly has a stimulant effect: it will ramp up your sex drive (for example "curing" ED... because, you know: blue balls), and it can have similar effects to extreme exercise. (Don't be surprised by the mood swings.) I don't know if I'd say that a self-imposed state of extreme sensitivity resulting from sexual sensory deprivation is any more natural or unnatural or especially useful than the other. In the short term, you may smell nicer to ladies (if you're a male) because you are giving off the right stuff. In the long term (from my own experiences) one has a tendency to act like a Neanderthal, even thinking about sex more than "usual" as a result of deprivation. I think people's leanings towards extreme "resolutions" say more about the cultural values that lead them to see just how long they can hold their breath (or not masturbate), as opposed to the effects of that restraint. Basically, I think you get these behaviors and experiments in self-control when young people can't think of any better way to get laid or stop procrastinating (compete in a world they are still new in). Sometimes people try getting an edge by edging, literally.
Makes some valid points, but some of the evidence he uses in the talk reminds me of evangelical christians tv hosts - 'Just look at this testimonial! While on the porn he dropped out of college twice, was fired twice, was taking paxil, ritalin, and tried several anti-anxiety pills. BUT once he gave up porn he doesn't need those pills, has no depression or anxiety, and frankly...he feels like a stud!'
The testimonial was after 2 months, which is about the longest I've ever restrained myself personally and frankly, by that point, I thought about nothing else. I felt like a stud alright. Everything was hyper-arousing. It just wasn't sustainable for me. It was fun, but I probably would have been arrested for public indecency if I tried for 3 months.
I think it's necessary to learn to live with and love your lusts if you want to be in control of them. "Know thyself."
I had similar thoughts on this very topic when I was around 17 years old, I think, and still a virgin. I was thinking that maybe watching all this porn made me into a pervert, who is never going to have a fulfilling love life. I even tried not to masturbate for an extended period of time (I don't think this was all that healthy) just like the author. I watched tons of porn; it wasn't a hot topic for discussion in my peer group, but I knew that almost everyone watched it too. And when I say "tons" I mean it - I remember entire days filled with porn and almost nothing else. Oh, how ashamed I should be!
Or not.
Because here I am, more than a decade later, in a happy relationship with a woman for almost ten years, having done things the author would almost certainly classify as "things that [he] wouldn’t have dreamed of doing" and guess what? Those things, beside feeling really good (well, most of the time...) helped me understand myself and my partner much better than before. I'd argue that 'those things' are in part why we are happy together for this long and probably will be for many, many years to come. And I wouldn't even know about "those things" were it not for porn; maybe I'd try to reinvent them, but we all know how much better it is to use available library than to write your own from scratch. And it's safer, too.
I'm a pervert. Oh, how perverted I am (and how ashamed I should be!). I won't bore (or excite, depends on an age I suppose) you with details, suffice it to say that my partner and I both carry a triskelion. I must be a double pervert, because I feel not a bit of shame, nor guilt.
The thing with porn is that it gives you many paths to choose from. Half of these paths are artificial and not fulfilling at all, half of them, while genuine and based on very real human traits, are strictly forbidden by cultural norms. The problem with the second half is that almost everyone, given a freedom of choice, would subscribe to one of those paths (fetishes, styles of making love) but almost no one is granted such freedom: especially when we're young and sensitive about "what others think".
The author is worrying about what exactly? That classical, missionary style sex does not turn him on? Neither does it turn me on. And it's somehow a bad thing? Well, it is not - it just means that missionary style is not his fetish (nor mine). I would advice him to stop bothering innocent women, go back to porn and stare at it hard, long enough to understand what his fetish is - and then find a partner who shares the same fetish. It's really that simple. Just not easy at all.
Or he can pretend that he's normal, whatever this means, live a life of frustration and spend a small fortune on psychologists.
While it's obvious that porn is not about love, it is, by definition, about sex which is one of the things that love consists of. Watching porn as a teenager helps in determining an answer to a very important question, namely: "how do you want to f^&k in the future?" - which, in turn, is a part of an answer to a bigger, more important question: "how do you want to love in the future?" It's really not obvious at all that you have to love a person of another gender and it's not at all necessary to have sex with your loved one in a missionary style position. I wish more people realized this.
There are people who watch a huge amount of porn but have a perfectly healthy sex life and relationship with women. It's about understanding what it is and it's context, and realising that there's a difference between that and reality.
I agree and I'm the same. I can relate to many of the stories told by the author, however I find real sex immensely more exciting, to the extent that even when viewing porn I will often fantasize about sex I've actually had. I also think more about women I meet and date than I do about porn I've watched (and I've watched pretty much everything there is).
I am curious though, was your upbringing liberal regarding sex, or was it considered a taboo as well? For me, it was very much even taboo to think about it, even though I later found out this is terribly hypocritical considering those telling us it was taboo were doing it just as much as we would eventually. I even got in trouble for uttering the word "condom" once, almost to the same extent as for saying "fuck", which seems utterly ridiculous to me now. I'm curious if sex having been taboo for so many years is actually what makes it more stimulating, or if it's just a difference in sexuality from person to person.
I remember reading just a couple of weeks back about how this issue goes away after abstaining from porn for a month or two. They called it "porn detox" I think.
The author said he went cold-turkey for months at a time to little effect. I'm sure that approach helps some people, but I'd wager there are a lot of variables here.
Assuming there is such a state, calling it detox implies it's normal or good. I'd be curious what, if any, physiological changes result to reduce the influence of one's sex drive. If so, why not "simply" auto-castration? (If the goal is to reject one's drives...)
I see a general male catharsis that borders on the neurotic. Society demands verile/potent men who can, at the same time, subjugate themselves fully to society and their mates.
Both his parents were psychologists.* Any psych major knows the old saw that you probably got bad stuff like this from your parents. Some of the psych majors I have personally known struck me as folks who had no clue how humans work and were hoping to get a clue by majoring in it. When I went to GIS school, this observation was reinforced by a classmate who had a Master's in Psychology and was looking to change careers because of the lunacy of the people around her.
Supposedly, Kinsey's wife said something like "I never see my husband since he took such an interest in sex". In other words, he spent so much time studying sex in an intellectual, analytical way that he stopped bothering to make time for actual sex and relating with his wife. People interested in studying human psychology frequently strike me as seriously hung up. Therapy was useful to me for a time in trying to get over my own hang ups. More useful was spending time with men who liked having actual sex with actual women rather than talking about it in some abstract, analytical fashion.
"Forever" is a really long time. Sexual preferences can change. Pavlovian response is learned behavior. If you don't like the stimulus that makes you drool currently, you can retrain yourself. I am glad the author is actually trying to do that instead of merely blaming his issue on porn/the internet as I have seen other articles do.
* (Not intending to slam all psychologists or psych majors. My observation is anecdotal and admits to bias.)
I would confirm that from my observation and interaction over the years as well. I wonder if there has been any study in that area that proves or disproves.
Seems maybe his scientist parents didn't teach him about correlation and causation either. There are many guys who have trouble with "real" sex because of insecurity or any number of other fears that have nothing to do with/were not caused by looking at porn.
He talks about how taboo porn was at home and that it was exciting chiefly because it was forbidden. I would guess his parents didn't have a great marriage and didn't model a healthy intimate relationship for him. Sounds like sex was a big unspoken issue in the household. Also, what the hell was a kid in elementary school doing burning XXX CD's to share with some clique in-crowd? They obviously were an elite group, with access to tech and so on. They were savvy enough to rename the CD's something they could talk about in public, which started a trend of unclued acquaintances buying the real music CD's they used as code names, which became part of the in joke.
Edit: Reminds me I read somewhere once that there is as much drug addiction and child neglect in upperclass two career families as in the ghetto. It sounds like he grew up in a two career family where no one was paying much attention to anything he did.
> It sounds like he grew up in a two career family where no one was paying much attention to anything he did.
What if his parents stopped paying attention because he wanted absolutely nothing to do with them and made it known?
That's how I started treating my parents (one career household: pop worked; mom did everything else) at twelve years old and it wore them down after four years. I still feel quite guilty about it, as they were and are excellent parents.
Well, I would personally still view that as a failure on the parents part. My youngest is extremely introverted. He would put an axe through my face if I doted on him like I doted on his older brother. I learned to respect his need for space at a very early age, when he was a toddler. He shares with me when he damn well feels like it. But we still have a good relationship, because I realized he was different from me and from his brother. Giving him his space was unnatural for me. Doting was easier. But he still loves me because I didn't dote. I backed off.
But I seem to have crazy good parenting instincts. So my high expectations are probably a tad unreasonable in some sense.
Great point. As someone who has been studying psychology for a while now, you're completely right that people tend to diverge into one of two paths. On the one side you have people like Skinner who become completely robotic and excessively scientific, on the other side you have Jung who still maintained the mystery and excitement of life in his writings and musings.
I don't think you can attribute this specifically to psychology, it's sort of applicable to every science. You have someone like Neil Degrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan to every emotionless, numbers-only physicist who doesn't sleep with his wife.
It's a personal choice, whether to accept life as a mystery and study it as such or consider it a problem that needs to be solved analytically and without emotion.
That said, yes, when I worked in a psychiatry department I worked around the most miserly, insane people I've ever met. They were more cold and soulless than the homeless people we were treating. I got out of there right quick.
I work as a counsellor and I've heard the 'therapists are all crazy themselves' stereotype a million times.
My personal experience can only be limited, but I haven't found the statement to be true. Of the dozens and dozens of mental health professionals I've studied with or worked with, most are totally typical, adjusted people.
Since most humans are messed up in one way or another, you're probably as likely to find as many 'crazy' lawyers or programmers as you are therapists. When you meet a counsellor who's off the confirmation bias kicks in.
porn — especially the porn I was watching — just had to be taboo.
The author's fetish is with the anxiety of getting caught. He's making anxiety porn by watching something so extreme that it's guaranteed to offend anyone who catches him. The author has connected the anxiety of being caught with sexual desires in his head. It's actually a very common fetish.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadHis problems with porn is just his problems. I suggest dealing with it.
(Because dealing with fear without treating harmful things being feared seems pointless)
I'm about 5 years older than the article poster. I haven't had unfiltered Internet since way before puberty, but I knew where my dad kept the tapes and magazines and I've had the Internet connection by the time I was 15-16. Either I was too young to care or old enough to know where to find it.
I don't think my parents would have added anything to either of our lives by filtering the Internet connection. They spent enough time trying to push me away from computers, which in hindsight I think they'd admit was folly since it was this "addiction" which I used to dig myself out of a childhood of poverty.
Anyway part of that time was used looking at porn, more of it on on-line games and a bit of it learning interesting things. Other than turning into a geek, I don't really think I'm messed up in any special way.
We now have two data points running contrary from each other. I see no significant evidence to suggest porn is really the problem it's make it out to be.
That perspective brings us to a different question: What can we do to ensure safe and positive sexual development in children without censoring the web and imposing our generation's morals on the next?
People who take the banned of protecting children from porn usually do this not from the safety & positivity point of view but from church & "morals" one. That's the most putrid, patronizing and hypicritical kind of people available; moreover, they don't see (or care) the relation of law and its effect (those two rarely match perfectly, sometimes not at all) and naturally they push for the measures I listed.
People who could ask this question never get any saying.
what the web has to do with it? as a teenager I could buy hardcore porn magazines without any problems.
Are you really making this argument on HN of all places? That behaviour doesn't have the ability to fluctuate wildly with only small differences in friction (not a pun!)?
You can moderate your intake of cookies; but limiting yourself to one kind of porn and not the other doesn't feel a working solution.
You can try to limit your porn consumption to once per a period of time (a week?) but I bet it will make the symptoms worse.
There is a very fancy word for being addicted to being intoxicated, no matter with what (I forgot the word for now). Being addicted to all kinds of porn at once seems similar - and, frankly, equally rare.
The whole point of the article was that it was not "just his problem", and beyond missing that point, the poster responds to a straw man not even hinted at in the article.
His inability to "deal with it" was the purpose of the article!
I experimented with porn growing up, and certainly saw somethings I wish I hadn't, but I have never had trouble getting it up for a real girl either.
He does not condemn porn. He questions what it means to have a natural sexuality when "Sexiness is always constructed — it used to be normatively hot to be fat and pale! " His problem is not that he has "demons", but that "I feel estranged from my sexuality, like it’s somebody else’s."
The piece comes across to me as very self reflective, asking '(why) is this a problem?' 'What would I be like in not for Y (porn)', and so forth.
I do not see any clear path to a police state (and I like to think of myself as (relativly) extremely biased to seeing a police state).
But it seems to me that winter is coming and we all might be heading to a police state. And I don't see how his article can't be used as a brick in the wall constructed by people not really caring about us (but only about "demons" in their heads") between us and free speech, freedom of expression and sometimes physical freedom.
That's what I'm fearing.
He's projecting his other issues on pornography, though. All of these issues will continue to exist unanswered long after he abandons porno.
I've never tried to smoke so I can't really compare.
I'm glad you've discovered masturbation, but what does this have to do with the topic at hand?
The author's already found the solution - we need to separate sexuality from guilt and shame, to be able to feel aroused and wholesome at the same time. But it's hard to do that after you've already fallen down the spiral. We need to make our children's first experiences of arousal feel natural and wholesome - which means more openness, more embracing of sexuality in artforms that are going to portray it positively. But that's a hard sell to middle America.
That's part of the puritanical and (maybe any religious) mind control. People need to feel guilty so they self-police themselves, and it also has to be something that is common (such as sex) so everyone is always guilty. Guilty people are vulnerable and easily controlled.
This has to be planted early in the childhood, then it sort of becomes automatic and not that easy to unlearn. Even rationally if some admit there is nothing wrong with this or that, they'll still feel guilty -- it because it becomes part of their personality.
Is this really true anymore? It seems that the majority of the media consumed by young people carries the message that sex is extremely important and if you are not doing it with everyone in every way, you are brainwashed by religious or moral beliefs.
Obviously there is denigration of sex from many sources but which of these sources actually have an impact on young people?
Sex as necessary for social station is not being sex-positive.
You seem to not pay attention to our lawmakers, our newsmedia, and have many conversations with the persons around you.
I think Skoofoo is spot on.
Putting the "its not good for you" label on it also makes it immediately more interesting than it should be. Increases the guilty pleasure and so on.
The guy in the article - maybe he would have erectile problems never having watched porn too. Performance anxiety is normal.
One thing I am sure about: The cure for bad sex is lots of sex.
And that's from only reading the first couple sentences.
In my opinion it's important to know the symptoms of any addiction in case you see those patterns in your own or your peer's behaviors.
For me, in this day and age, its really hard to say one way or the other. How poorly done and/or wrong will it be, and is having it done that way better than nothing? I can't know, but I suspect that with societal attitudes on sex, "some porn is fine, how much is too much is different for everybody and here's how to tell where the line is" is too complicated of a message to effectively communicate. If it is even allowed to be communicated at all. Don't forget widespread acceptance of "abstinence only" rubbish isn't far behind us, I'm reminded of this every time I visit family in the South and see the big labels on every gas station condom dispenser reminding me that the only real way to avoid HIV/AIDS is monogamy and abstinence before marriage. Whereas growing up in the North, we didn't even have those dispensers. I suspect their presence is related to the greater taboos about sex in those areas, but in the north I was never scared away from buying rubbers at the counter when I was young.
I try not to lie to children, if at all possible.
Could someone give me a summary of the article?
The fact that an average person can't summit Everest while a practiced climber can is not a disparagement on the former.
I am concerned about the future. Augmented reality is just around the corner, and virtual sex is almost certainly in our future. How would easy access to an unlimited amount of all types of "sex" imaginable affect society?
For example, the previous life story article ending with a question mark on Salon was "Can I date a Republican?", and the clear answer from the article is "yes."
The one before that is "Should the terminally ill control their deaths?" and the author's statement is "A year after my mother's uncomfortable decline, it's a question with which I'm still wrestling", but it's clear that the author supports people learning more about the options for palliative care over attempts at staying alive for as long as possible. I'll put this as a "yes."
Then there's the quoted question '“Are you on the cover of a magazine?”', where the answer is definitely "yes", but this too doesn't fit Betteridge's law.
And "Was I selfish to have fertility treatments?", where the author states "I honestly don’t think my choice was any more selfish than anyone’s choice to have a child." So that's a "no." But there wa s a while when she worried about the question.
I think you get the idea.
And yes, it was not made for opinion pieces or personal narratives and, like in the examples you give, doesn't generally work in these situations.
My intention was just to point out that it happens to apply here because the headline is childish link bait.
The author covers in the piece that it wasn't really porn that lead to this and it's not going to be "forever" either if he does something about it.
That doesn't apply here, because "if he does something about it" is a different cause than not having enough information.
It looks like you say that it "happens to apply here" because 1) the answer is no, and 2) it's "childish link bait." Why not then just say "No. This is childish link bait."?
Suppose the NM governor wrote an op-ed piece "Should I stay the death penalty?", which outlines her ongoing thoughts both for and against commuting the sentence for the last two people on NM's death row. Suppose you are ardently pro-death penalty, support RepealTheRepeal, and believe that only fools would be against it. You could quite justifiably answer "no" to that headline and believe the title to be "childish link bait." But you would be wrong to say that Betteridge's Law applies.
I think the misunderstanding here is that you are looking Betteridge's Law as more of a pseudo-law that has specific constraints and I'm looking at is as shorthand for a specific critique of bad writing, which I think does apply here even though, as you stated, it was not created to apply to personal writing.
The difference is that most of the examples you are giving of personal writing are subjective and/or value judgements that have no factual answer to the headline question. This one does have an answer, the answer is "no" and the author knew the answer was "no".
Anyway, clearly a better comment for me to have made would have been "Although it doesn't apply here this post makes me think of Betteridge's Law!" but it's much less pithy.
http://reddit.com/r/nofap
Actually their specific mission is to avoid masturbation. I don't think there is anything wrong with masturbation. In fact sometimes, particularly as a male, it helps to improve your focus if you release occasionally. For someone who isn't in a relationship or a position to have sex on a fairly regular basis (read: me, living in a basement, working every waking hour on a combination of vitamins and adderall) it helps every few days. Some argue, and to an extent I agree, that it also helps to avoid it. Your body builds more testosterone during a period of abstinence. Apparently only up until about 7 days, where that begins to trail off. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins won't let his band mates have sex before a show, so they let out their energy on stage.
That being said, porn definitely fucks with your head. Just stay away from it. I've never been one of these guys who watches it more and more and more and more. I can't even imagine being desensitized to sex or imagining porn during sex. That's a serious problem. Anyway, the nofap guys talk about this stuff a lot so I'd encourage anyone interested in this to head over there as there are lots of other interesting resources that point out why porn is bad and how it fucks with your brain. In the end it's purely chemical, where you become accustomed to the dopamine response that you receive from watching porn, so you need more and more and more. Like any other addiction or dependence. At some point what you have is not enough and you need more.
Porn isn't bad, it's a part of society now and has been for a long while, but it's the same way drugs aren't necessarily bad unless you start needing a bigger and bigger kick.
Logically speaking, that doesn't mean it's not a bad thing.
EDIT: Porn is indeed almost a staple of Western society, but note that Western culture is also very image-focused and has high rates of divorce and eating disorders among women.
I present to you, old Japanese porn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s...
And here's a documentary about ancient Egyptian porn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7HttHvJ8Gc
And here's a book about Mesopotamian porn: http://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_erotic_reliefs_of...
What I want to say is that porn is not only a staple of Western culture, it's a staple of humanity.
Even 20 years ago porn was too expensive for the average person to afford very much of it.
They could afford it, they could not afford to hoard and stream it at will. The mechanics have not changed significantly, even as we spend more time searching for "novel" mp3s and video.
Do we have a "problem" with Netflix? Pandora? I spend constant (wasted) hours cataloging and retagging my music collection.
http://www.japanese-buddhism.com/giant-pink-penis-festival.h...
The Japanese have had a penis festival since the 1600's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maypole#Scandinavia
"The central part played by young children in the celebration emphasize the procreation aspect of the celebration"
We've had celebrations and representations of sexuality throught history.
The Romans took to this a climax (pun intended)
http://www.mariamilani.com/ancient_rome/Ancient_Roman_Orgy.h...
Interesting thing is in most of these historical cases, there is a strong authoritarian push to stop these festivals to keep from corrupting people. This is the wheel of history coming around again.
I have no idea if these claims are true or trying to justify what they've done but it seems relevant and worth mentioning. Here is an AMA from a wife of one such man: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/15b3vt/iam_the_wife_of...
Are you sure about that? It seems that widespread, easy access to porn is something very new. Before the internet, you would have to go through some embarrassing procedure at a checkout counter to purchase just a few pornographic items.
The amount of free porn I could access in the next hour would have cost me thousands of dollars in the 1980s.
We have normalized porn very recently and it is just a piece of modernist faith that it is harmless.
Do you abstain from television, computers, rock and roll, role playing, comic books and video games by this same line of FUD?
Mass media has the power to create unrealistic expectations. Someone growing up in the age of Petrarch and Dante had unrealistic expectations of romantic love. It's easy to imagine that someone growing up in the age of internet porn would have unrealistic expectations of sex. Beyond that, I'd have to see hard, consistent evidence before I'd write off porn as especially harmful.
Video games are very addictive to me. After playing Starcraft for 16 hours straight one saturday, I carefully watch and moderate my video game play and have deleted most games from my system.
In your battle to live a meaningful, purposeful life, the peddlers of superstimuli are your enemy.
Respond to what people actually say. If you really need to respond to something unsaid, make it explicit. Anything else is a strawman fallacy.
> They were responding to a specific claim of the GGP, that porn is harmless.
Speaking of strawmen, it was Jacob who used the word harmless. Nicholas went so far as to draw an analogy with drugs concerning the effects of responsible versus irresponsible use. When he said porn wasn't bad, he clearly didn't mean that it is harmless in an absolute sense but was expressing a nuanced point of view.
I've had some first hand experience on that count, though not as extreme as the linked article.
You haven't clearly defined what you mean by harmful. Does it ruin otherwise healthy relationships on a massive scale? Does it teach impressionable young men that all women want to fuck them, leading to violence? Those seem like typical charges brought against porn. Were they true I'd agree there would be cause for serious concern. I haven't seen the data to back up these claims. If it exists, let's see it. Porn is widespread enough that you'd expect the large-scale statistical effects to be manifest.
There is certainly a modern syndrome around the nexus of sex, relationships, and family (less stable relationships, fewer children raised in stable homes, fewer children, more sex, more sexual culture, technology that lowers the cost of sex, easy access to porn). It's hard to know which pieces of the syndrome are causes and which are effects.
But if you don't see anything broken with modern relationships, you aren't paying attention to the statistics. Since the 1960s things have certainly changed at a rapid rate and some of that change is clearly for the worse.
Today, you have stats like this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103235/Most-childre... or this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/health/13mothers.html?_r=0
Again, I'm not saying porn or a less repressed culture are causative, but they are part of the syndrome we observe that sex is less serious and more pervasive, relationships are more temporary, and children grow up in more chaotic homes at a distinct disadvantage to children that grow up in stable homes. The family is disappearing for a large portion of the population. Marriage is later. Children are fewer - especially for the upper class. You have more wealth in the country and more children being raised in poverty by a single parent.
For instance, a higher divorce rate is not necessarily bad. Decades ago, women had fewer rights in marriage and there was a cultural expectation for marriages to stay together, no matter how unhealthy, unhappy, or sometimes even abusive the marriage happened to be. As recently as the 1970's, the law had no concept of spousal rape--in other words, it was perfectly legal for a husband to rape his wife. Today, not only can women escape from marriages that are bad for them, but married couples can mutually agree that the marriage is no longer serving their or their childrens' needs.
I also find little to complain about in a lower birthrate. The bifurcation by class is troubling, but the net trend is towards zero or negative population growth. This doesn't necessarily indicate the disappearance of family, but rather a slight adjustment from more of an r-selection strategy to more of a K-selection strategy.
Conflating these issues as a "syndrome" is a little too simplistic and tendentious towards an ill-founded social conservatism.
On the other hand, when couples decide that their marriage "is no longer serving ... their childrens' needs", they are most likely wrong. Children grow up with fewer problems if their parents stay together, on average. Easier divorce in cases of abuse is good. But how common is that out of the 50% of first marriages that break up? Divorce in cases of boredom have a high cost on children with little social benefit.
In many ways we are better off than our parents and grandparents. But I don't think cheap sex and disposable relationships represent an advance.
Neither are new. The only difference is that the woman isn't shamed into poverty if she gets out of them without a shotgun marriage.
And thank goodness for that. You have an overinflated opinion of what marriage "used to mean". People having an out from abuse and misery is worth it all. Your efforts to shame the divorced are moralizing, not "for the children". Marriages are not happy because they're forced through law and social stigma. The option to leave is freedom.
It's also hard to see why decreased birthrates, delayed marriage, and delayed childbirth are bad moves. High birthrates and family formation early in life are more of an r-strategy. Moving to a K-strategy is better for the children you do have, which is the entire point. As a side effect, maybe young people have to find outlets other than marrying at age 16 and having babies to satisfy their sexual urges, but what's the harm in that?
You could plausibly say that most of the harm, in terms of single mothers, comes from the war on drugs, which affects minorities and the lower classes the most. It's two-faced for conservatives to point at certain communities for having so many children out of wedlock while locking up alarming proportions of their men for victimless crimes and turning them into hardened criminals.
Fundamentally, I think people more qualified to make decisions about their own families and relationships than the Pope, the government, or you and I.
Decreased birthrates pose problems for current economic systems which are premised on taxing the young to pay for the old. Later children are more likely to have birth defects. But like I said, ultimately it is necessary, so it is a mixed bag.
I totally agree with you on the War on Drugs. A legal system that sends 28% of black males to at least one year of prison undoubtably has something to do with why 80% of black children in the US grow up without fathers, and that undoubtably has something to do with why 28% of black males in the US spend at least a year in prison.
Feel free to email me if you want to continue this discussion. It's interesting and I'm enjoying it, but it's grown into a bit of a tangent.
More equality for women? That has improved. Access to abortion? That has improved? Domestic abuse and assault in sexual relationship? Are there any good statistics on these trends? Courts upholding child support agreements with force of law. Don't pay your child support and see what happens.
The reason something may appear broken with modern relationships is the fact we are looking at them thru historical perspective, when it was much less likely a person could survive and raise children while not married. The fact is so many things have changed (at least in the U.S. where I am) in the last 50 year the chain of causality is likely impossible to unwrap.
You will notice that the upper class still marries before they have children.
Also: you say "divorce is bad for children" when a good share of those children were born by mothers who aren't in a marriage and never were (at least not with the father).
What about those cases? "divorce" is not applicable to those.
Which is true of everything. How do you know eating chicken is harmless? What about cellphones? What about under arm deodorant? Laundry Detergent?
There are tons and tons of new things added to society all the time.
The only reason anyone has a problem with porn is because some people have moral hangups about it.
What's the solution? I don't know, but I think tackling the problem from an early age is important. Adventure Time is the best example of a kids cartoon I can think of that deals with girlfriends, kissing, etc.. while still containing the stereotypical violence of a childrens cartoon.
Aside, porn to me is like violence in media. It's enjoyable, but at the same time absurd. And for most people (I hope) it's an easy distinction that how people in porn and movies act is different from real life.
hehe. Blew it.
From the outset (and still at the end), he frames porn as deviant so you know what his overwhelming internal language is. (Porn didn't put that in him, he was taught it.) He then takes a cold-turkey approach to change and self-moderation (and why not - everyone's made a New Year's resolution...). Like abstinence (and over eating, and anger management, and the list goes on) though, extreme denial often (though not always; everyone's different, but often...) leads to extreme periods of indulgence followed by acute shame (remember that New Years resolution?). I think his thoughts and feeling say more about his environment and his ingrained attitudes than they do about the effect of watching porn. (I and every guy I know watched more porn than TV during their early teens. Their respective perviness has more to do with their self-image than anything... The ones who think of themselves as freaks, present themselves as freaks, even though they have identical interests to others...) It sounds like he thinks he has to hide, even from himself, which sounds like a self-acceptance issue to me. For starters, it might be productive for him to seek more relationships that give him stronger feelings of acceptance. (Which he is: "What helped the most was talking to friends, particularly women, who have had more positive relationships with masturbation." In other words, he needs a companion who likes similar things sexually... No surprise there.) He even admits at the end that he has an addictive personality, but ultimately assigns the blame on porn when he's in full control. Or at least he would be if he came to terms with having genitals like everyone else. It could have just as easily been food, or coffee, or the Sears catalog... He'd still have to learn to live with himself. At 23 that's still happening quite a bit, but his article is a social commentary. Unfortunately he's too close to the issue to see that he's the only one responsible for his own self-image and feelings of self-worth.
Porn is such a non-issue in my life. It's soulless and empty as it should be, but it's also human sexual nature at its rawest. I'm glad we live in an era where we can freely and easily experience it.
I think the article speaks more to the issue with recovery and the issues surrounding "getting back to neutral."
This problem exists. He explains in laymen's terms a simple Pavlovian response that requires more and more brain stimulation to achieve the same level of dopamine needed for ejaculation.
I'm not a neuroscientist, but I bet someone out there can explain it better than I can.
For everyone who doesn't like their relationship to porn, there are other people who don't like that they got diseases, or got pregnant without a plan. But we don't pathologize this.
Let's be careful not to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Kellogg, who used the trappings of science to push predetermined conclusions in a campaign against harmless sexuality.
It can happen a million different ways; for the author, it was (probably) porn.
Anecdotally, I find their arguments compelling.
"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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
Look at what the bonobos do with each other - and we're more creative.
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...
</sarcasm>
"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.
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?
In all seriousness, there's definitely a "born-again" feeling running through both sites ("not that there's anything wrong with that!"). I don't consider porn/masturbation a moral issue, so I notice that it's often portrayed that way ("you'll go blind/to hell"...)
For people with addictive personalities, finding self-control can be an especially good thing, and refraining from sex in general certainly has a stimulant effect: it will ramp up your sex drive (for example "curing" ED... because, you know: blue balls), and it can have similar effects to extreme exercise. (Don't be surprised by the mood swings.) I don't know if I'd say that a self-imposed state of extreme sensitivity resulting from sexual sensory deprivation is any more natural or unnatural or especially useful than the other. In the short term, you may smell nicer to ladies (if you're a male) because you are giving off the right stuff. In the long term (from my own experiences) one has a tendency to act like a Neanderthal, even thinking about sex more than "usual" as a result of deprivation. I think people's leanings towards extreme "resolutions" say more about the cultural values that lead them to see just how long they can hold their breath (or not masturbate), as opposed to the effects of that restraint. Basically, I think you get these behaviors and experiments in self-control when young people can't think of any better way to get laid or stop procrastinating (compete in a world they are still new in). Sometimes people try getting an edge by edging, literally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KvgtEnABY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU
I think it's necessary to learn to live with and love your lusts if you want to be in control of them. "Know thyself."
Or not.
Because here I am, more than a decade later, in a happy relationship with a woman for almost ten years, having done things the author would almost certainly classify as "things that [he] wouldn’t have dreamed of doing" and guess what? Those things, beside feeling really good (well, most of the time...) helped me understand myself and my partner much better than before. I'd argue that 'those things' are in part why we are happy together for this long and probably will be for many, many years to come. And I wouldn't even know about "those things" were it not for porn; maybe I'd try to reinvent them, but we all know how much better it is to use available library than to write your own from scratch. And it's safer, too.
I'm a pervert. Oh, how perverted I am (and how ashamed I should be!). I won't bore (or excite, depends on an age I suppose) you with details, suffice it to say that my partner and I both carry a triskelion. I must be a double pervert, because I feel not a bit of shame, nor guilt.
The thing with porn is that it gives you many paths to choose from. Half of these paths are artificial and not fulfilling at all, half of them, while genuine and based on very real human traits, are strictly forbidden by cultural norms. The problem with the second half is that almost everyone, given a freedom of choice, would subscribe to one of those paths (fetishes, styles of making love) but almost no one is granted such freedom: especially when we're young and sensitive about "what others think".
The author is worrying about what exactly? That classical, missionary style sex does not turn him on? Neither does it turn me on. And it's somehow a bad thing? Well, it is not - it just means that missionary style is not his fetish (nor mine). I would advice him to stop bothering innocent women, go back to porn and stare at it hard, long enough to understand what his fetish is - and then find a partner who shares the same fetish. It's really that simple. Just not easy at all.
Or he can pretend that he's normal, whatever this means, live a life of frustration and spend a small fortune on psychologists.
While it's obvious that porn is not about love, it is, by definition, about sex which is one of the things that love consists of. Watching porn as a teenager helps in determining an answer to a very important question, namely: "how do you want to f^&k in the future?" - which, in turn, is a part of an answer to a bigger, more important question: "how do you want to love in the future?" It's really not obvious at all that you have to love a person of another gender and it's not at all necessary to have sex with your loved one in a missionary style position. I wish more people realized this.
I am curious though, was your upbringing liberal regarding sex, or was it considered a taboo as well? For me, it was very much even taboo to think about it, even though I later found out this is terribly hypocritical considering those telling us it was taboo were doing it just as much as we would eventually. I even got in trouble for uttering the word "condom" once, almost to the same extent as for saying "fuck", which seems utterly ridiculous to me now. I'm curious if sex having been taboo for so many years is actually what makes it more stimulating, or if it's just a difference in sexuality from person to person.
I see a general male catharsis that borders on the neurotic. Society demands verile/potent men who can, at the same time, subjugate themselves fully to society and their mates.
Supposedly, Kinsey's wife said something like "I never see my husband since he took such an interest in sex". In other words, he spent so much time studying sex in an intellectual, analytical way that he stopped bothering to make time for actual sex and relating with his wife. People interested in studying human psychology frequently strike me as seriously hung up. Therapy was useful to me for a time in trying to get over my own hang ups. More useful was spending time with men who liked having actual sex with actual women rather than talking about it in some abstract, analytical fashion.
"Forever" is a really long time. Sexual preferences can change. Pavlovian response is learned behavior. If you don't like the stimulus that makes you drool currently, you can retrain yourself. I am glad the author is actually trying to do that instead of merely blaming his issue on porn/the internet as I have seen other articles do.
* (Not intending to slam all psychologists or psych majors. My observation is anecdotal and admits to bias.)
Edit: Reminds me I read somewhere once that there is as much drug addiction and child neglect in upperclass two career families as in the ghetto. It sounds like he grew up in a two career family where no one was paying much attention to anything he did.
What if his parents stopped paying attention because he wanted absolutely nothing to do with them and made it known?
That's how I started treating my parents (one career household: pop worked; mom did everything else) at twelve years old and it wore them down after four years. I still feel quite guilty about it, as they were and are excellent parents.
But I seem to have crazy good parenting instincts. So my high expectations are probably a tad unreasonable in some sense.
I don't think you can attribute this specifically to psychology, it's sort of applicable to every science. You have someone like Neil Degrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan to every emotionless, numbers-only physicist who doesn't sleep with his wife.
It's a personal choice, whether to accept life as a mystery and study it as such or consider it a problem that needs to be solved analytically and without emotion.
That said, yes, when I worked in a psychiatry department I worked around the most miserly, insane people I've ever met. They were more cold and soulless than the homeless people we were treating. I got out of there right quick.
My personal experience can only be limited, but I haven't found the statement to be true. Of the dozens and dozens of mental health professionals I've studied with or worked with, most are totally typical, adjusted people.
Since most humans are messed up in one way or another, you're probably as likely to find as many 'crazy' lawyers or programmers as you are therapists. When you meet a counsellor who's off the confirmation bias kicks in.
The author's fetish is with the anxiety of getting caught. He's making anxiety porn by watching something so extreme that it's guaranteed to offend anyone who catches him. The author has connected the anxiety of being caught with sexual desires in his head. It's actually a very common fetish.