Funny, I was just listening to a serious piece on NPR this morning about how internet porn is causing an epidemic of erectile dysfunction in teen boys. Considering our history of blaming various diseases on masturbation, it really makes me wonder whether it's just another reefer-madness-esque round of the same thing.
I beg to differ. (Since we're all talking frankly in this thread about masturbation.) Masturbation is what makes porn porn. Without the threat of masturbation, porn would just be boring medical images. (I say this without wandering into the subject of whether the porn industry has side effects like human trafficking or objectification of women, etc. Those are bad, but it's a different question. The question at hand is whether it medically harms the "self-abuser".)
Masturbation may be a necessary condition for porn, but not the other way round. People have been masturbating without external stimuli for a long, long time: the imagination is a very powerful thing.
Yeah not as powerful as hard core porn of every category and fetish available instantly on your smart phone under the covers. Porn is definitely causing multiple problems in young people.
Indeed! I'm slightly shocked by the casual implication that our masturbatory world is the same as that of our ancestors -- excluding my Dad, who can indeed use the internet, I think that the argument could be made that I have seen more boobs than nearly all my ancestors put together. Further, access to this infinite-boob parade is trivial, requiring neither the acquisition of a new skin-mag nor spending resources on wining and dining a lady. People have been masturbating since time immemorial, but I don't think it's unreasonable to see the rise of internet porn as a new development. Nor is it unreasonable to cast porn in the role of refined sugar or mindless TV -- an exploitation of our natural drives, a concentration of 'value' impossible on the savannah.
> I have seen more boobs than nearly all my ancestors put together
> an exploitation of our natural drives
It's too bad we can't go back and ask any of your ancestors from, say 100K years ago to a few hundred years ago, because I think you might find that being super obsessed with boobs isn't actually a natural thing. It might, in fact, be a product of the same Victorian culture the original article was about.
Eh, an interesting comment. I assume you merely skimmed mine, because I was only using the term 'boobs' to refer to getting to see a naked lady without any of the usual cultural impediments (wooing, dating, even tracking down and negotiating for the services of a hooker). It seemed very clear in context. I'm well aware that fixation on breasts isn't natural in the context of human anthropological development, yet the fetishization of boobs is common enough today that I thought it an appropriate metaphor for 'faux sexual contact that's good enough for the lizard-brain yet functionally "free"'.
The thrust (if you will) of your comment is either an extended triumphant riff on my poor choice of the concept 'boobs' (and possibly trying to shame those who do fetishize boobs), or it's an attempt to distract from my comment's thesis -- namely, that the profusion of modern free porno might actually be having an effect on us. I don't think that's ridiculous. I'm well aware that many a society has had pornographic materials under varying aegises, but many were furtive and socially, if not legally, prohibited.
I don't think it's unreasonable to claim that our society has the lowest barrier to access, the highest quality, and the largest diversity of pornographic materials in the history of humanity. Further, this profusion of porno is comparatively recent. Are we supposed to believe that this can't be having an effect on us? I presume you have a stronger argument than merely implying that I'm super obsessed with boobs (and that some Victorian aspect of my maturbatory habits are to blame).
Maybe, but what effect, and is it "harm"? The NPR thing was quick to pivot on the idea that being overfed on porn is making teenagers impotent, but that's been a mainstay of propaganda campaigns for time immemorial. Off the top of my head, I can recall seeing PSAs in my youth that marijuana causes low sperm count, steroids make your testicles shrink, and smoking and drinking cause impotence. Maybe they do, but the reason they're calling it out versus, say, increased risk of heart disease, is that it's a scare campaign.
Sure is tendentious inference from n=20 psych undergrads around there.
Edit: And by the mind behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, yet! Tendentious inference from n=20 psych undergrads is more or less his claim to fame and life's work, so it's no real surprise to see it here. But you want to approach this kind of thing with a somewhat critical eye.
In my own relationship world, I've had dry spells, and I've had periods of abundance. I've had enjoyable relationships, and .... "less than fully satisfying" relationships. "Exercising" with others -- even those with whom I was not fully invested in -- is much more satisfying than going solo.
These old prohibitionists certainly didn't understand that not everyone finds it easy to find someone else to exercise with.
Plenty of horny people got in my cab... Horny men were easy to spot - sometimes they were going to meet up with someone else, sometimes to/from a strip club, sometimes to the porn shop, sometimes to the sex club... Sometimes women had a glow about them - because of where they were going, because of where they were coming from... There were three women who found me to be intriguing. I wasn't expecting that, I never heard from them again.
Most of these masturbation prohibitions were on men, but I know that women get frustrated too. Most of them internalize it, or find a new boy-friend. I had to provide counseling for one of these women, one night. That diary was titled The Difference Between Boys and Girls:
That's not how (modern) science works. The null hypothesis is that there is no causal relationship between masturbation and (ailment of choice). Until such a link has been proven, there is no reason to believe it exists.
I'm curious whether this was specifically a late 18th through 19th century thing, or if there have been other times/places where similar beliefs were prevalent.
iirc the Victorian view on masturbation is the reason of the popularity of circumcision in the US (and Anglo-Saxon world but mostly US didn't reverse course).
I don't know why this is down-voted, the page seems pretty solid, even including an interesting academic article: "Men Ejaculate Larger Volumes of Semen, More Motile Sperm, and More Quickly when Exposed to Images of Novel Women (2015)"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs40806-015-0022-...
Also be aware that it does not condemn masturbation (which IIRC is healthy), but rather masturbation _for hours_ kept alive by watching endless variety of internet porn, which seems to cause erectile dysfunction.
The process bears a conceptual resemblance to exposure to more novel and avant-garde art. Such thing changes one's tastes to value even more novelty at the expense of traditional aesthetic, causing the "modern art" that people exposed to less novelty dislike or mock.
Many of the religious ideas about masturbation were wrong, e.g. that it caused blindness. These ideas were created by priests who felt guilty about masturbating.
Many of the modern ideas about masturbation are also wrong, e.g. that it is 'healthy'. These are merely scientistic attempts to reverse the former shaming and guilt.
For me the question remains: is masturbation any better or worse than taking drugs?
Is your only life goal to survive long enough to reproduce? If you want more than that out of life, it's at least plausible that you might need to second guess some of your natural instincts.
Perhaps those who wanted more than that out of life had less genetic fitness than those who wanted exactly that out of life, so most people want that out of life.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how to explain the presence of homosexuality in a population when the theory of evolution predicts that any such trait (which leads to much lower genetic fitness) would have disappeared a long time ago. How does it stay at this level from generation to generation?
The basic flaw in this is that there's no straightforward heritability for homosexuality, so regardless of the evolutionary pressures, it's not something that could be obviously 'selected against'.
Homosexual men throughout history did reproduce, though. In many ancient societies, norms were such that you had kids (if you survived long enough), and what you did with other men on the side was more or less your business. The Romans had a lot of gay sex, but didn't have a concept of a gay man, rather an effeminate man (who liked to bottom). So homosexuality is not really a puzzle that begs for a solution. The reality is, that the reasons we have sex do not have much to do with reproduction. Western society is still rather prudish about acknowledging this.
It's worth pointing out also, men generally pass their genes on a whole lot less than women do. Genetic evidence shows women were twice as likely as men to reproduce. So it's not like being heterosexual meant you'd have kids, being homosexual meant you wouldn't. I guess monogamy would reduce the disparity between men and women here.
I think I recall some articles about studies that showed that homosexual people (that don't reproduce themselves) are useful as caretakers for close relatives as they want to ensure the survival of similar genes.
Your question is similar to the question why old humans don't just die off when they can't reproduce anymore. This is most obvious with women when they enter menopause but also the quality of sperm declines with men with age.
They are either useful to some extent to reproduction or improving the survival rate of the offspring, or at least the evolutionary pressure is too small to eradicate these traits.
But as we have descended from group animals, I suspect the former.
A gene survives and spreads if the gene helps increase the average fitness of the part of the population having the gene.
There is nothing about evolution that requires a gene to benefit any given individual. There are plenty of species where individuals are metaphorically "thrown under the bus" for the survival of genetically similar enough individuals to be worth it.
And for any given individual, a gene that confers high fitness on the population it exists in as a whole can still be disastrous in certain configurations.
An example of that would be the sickle-cell trait, which causes lots of deaths amongst those unlucky enough to get it from both parents, as it leaves them prone to sickle cell anaemia and related problems.
It survives in many regions such as West Africa because while receiving it from both parents cuts an average 20-40 years of your life expectancy in developed countries, "just" having the trait from one parent is a net positive because it makes it a lot less likely you will get malaria, which is a far bigger killer in countries with poor healthcare.
This is the convoluted way of saying that you can't look at the effect on individual survival - there can be convoluted mechanisms that makes a gene that makes your copies less likely to be propagated more fit on average.
explain the presence of homosexuality in a population when the theory of evolution predicts that any such trait (which leads to much lower genetic fitness) would have disappeared a long time ago
one's homosexuality may improve fitness of one's family: if we're brothers and i'm homosexual, we won't be splitting resources between your and my children, and i'll be an extra "parent" looking after your kids. genetically speaking, that is still a (qualified) success for me.
also, genes don't give a damn about individual's reproduction, and local optima are rampant.
Re: homosexually, there are several possibilites. A plausible explanation is that it's linked with genes that confer fitness to siblings. As with most traits, however, it's likely to have both heritable as well as environmental antecedents.
Reproduction and dying off is not our natural instinct, it's not the strategy chosen by our genes. Humans have evolved to form families, communities and rich cultural systems to serve our "selfish genes". To see the reproduction maximizing strategy in action, you can look at other forms of life.
>Our natural instincts are not to die after we reproduce.
Well of course not, since we might be reproduce more if we stay alive longer. And we do start to die around the time we start to lose fertility, which isn't an "instinct" to die, but clearly our bodies are not adapted to live longer.
You think we're not adapted to live longer because it takes us 60+ years to die after the only ~14 to become fertile? That seems like evidence of us being adapted to live longer. We are actually the longest-lived land mammal on the planet. So why on Earth would you conclude the opposite?
It's absurd to think we evolved "rightly" either. Also, what about our environment? We clearly didnt evolve with concrete and steel, asphalt and gasoline.
Yup. Apologies if it sounded like I was suggesting that. I just wanted to communicate that there's no "wrong" way for things to evolve. Evolution just is.
> Many of the modern ideas about masturbation are also wrong, e.g. that it is 'healthy'. These are merely scientistic attempts to reverse the former shaming and guilt.
Your post would have been less downvoted if you provided thoughtful rational for your analogy between "drugs" and masturbation. Also, HN generally doesn't have a favorable opinion of the the way drug prohibition currently exists in the U.S., so that adds another complication to the comparison.
Well, at the very least, all the neurochemicals involved are endogenous. That's got to count for something. As to the rest, I figure that if God meant humans to masturbate, He'd have made our arms long enough so we could reach our genitals.
Saying someone who masturbates is going to become a sex/porn addict is just as bad as preists saying it leads to blindness. Really your post sounds like someone confused by their own shame.
Edit - Example from the mid-19th century: https://books.google.com/books?id=AiEDAAAAQAAJ&dq=%22self-po...