Is porn the problem, or is it just a lack of moderation?

Discussion in 'Rebooting - Porn Addiction Recovery' started by Caleb Murdock, Jul 6, 2016.

  1. sexytime

    sexytime Fapstronaut

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    Is porn the problem, or is it just a lack of moderation?

    Porn is the problem. It is impossible to moderate it at a young age. I don't think you experience the level of pleasure we do today.
    I have heard countless people say it, it becomes better when we get older because we tend to have lower sex drives.

    Is smoking the problem, or is it just a lack of moderation?

    I hope you understand what point I am trying to make. Some people keep the porn under control, but it doesn't work for everyone. To try and control porn use is just not worth it. It's better to discard it from your life.

    Supposed I tried to use porn moderately, I would still be like, "just one more video, just one more, oh she looks hot I wonder what is special in this video" It never ends. There are countless porn videos out there. I'll get stuck in a loop and my daily activities get affected. It makes me think about sex 24/7. That is not normal. Normal human beings have other responsibilities, other things to do.
     
  2. Junaidi83

    Junaidi83 Fapstronaut

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    Our body may be adult, but our "mind" maybe still on "adolescence" lvl.

    And porn should be only availabe for people who have "adult" mind
     
  3. Tantra_Shaft

    Tantra_Shaft Fapstronaut

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    I actually think most porn is the result of sexual repression, and the major religions of the world (christianity, islam, judaism...) have played a major part in that (just the fact that countries like pakistan are the major porn consumers is a proof of that). Imagine living in a world that is fully sexually liberated (not the pseudo liberation that you see in western countries, where it is OK to have sex with someone you just met in a night club because you always have the excuse of "being drunk", while all the other time you have to pretend that there was something behind your having sex with some one e.g. "I thought it will lead to a relationship"). I am talking about a world where a scenario like this is accepted as normal: a guy sees a girl on the street, starts talking to her, and if he is attracted to her and she is also attracted to him, and they are not busy, they go somewhere and have sex and enjoy every part of it, without any expectation of a follow up romantic relationship, without any "reputation damage" of either the man or the woman because they just have sex with someone they don't know. And by sex, I am not talking about a 5-10 min of in and outs, but an open and deep connection between the involved parties which ends up in a bliss rather that an orgasm that lasts few seconds (and believe me, as I have experienced myself few times, if both the man and woman are not ashamed of sex due to their deep unconscious life long programming by society, you don't need to know a person for ages to have a blissful and fulfilling sexual experience with someone).

    Anyways, what I am trying to say is that if many people are having a fantastic sex life, with as many partners as they want, the interest in porn will diminish tremendously (I am not saying monogamy is to blame, but there are a lot of people who are not fulfilled with one partner and just staying in a marriage or relationship just because that is the norm...or they are cheating on the side when they get the chance). Not only in porn, but also in many other material things. Think of typical ads we see every day on TV, billboards, etc.. , what do they have in common. Beautiful women in sexy dresses. They are drinking the alcohol with you, they are sitting on the passenger seat as you drive, they are looking at you with open mouth and wet lips as you walk by in your new clothes, they are jumping on you as you pass by wearing your new ax smell,....... We are being continuously programmed to buy and buy, subconsciously thinking we will have abundance of beautiful women/partners if we acquire these material things.

    I believe that if most people in the world were sexually liberated and satisfied, porn and consumerism will still exist, but at a much reduced level than that of now and of quite different nature.
     
  4. Caleb Murdock

    Caleb Murdock Fapstronaut

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    I'll do it in the next couple days, and I'll post the new language here.
     
  5. Caleb Murdock

    Caleb Murdock Fapstronaut

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    Sexytime, I have a lot of thoughts about what you said. Whatever we do and/or get exposed to becomes our "oxygen". You didn't explicitly say this, but you seem to be suggesting that we can control what becomes our "oxygen" and what doesn't. I'm not sure that we really have that much control.

    I am a very visual person. If I don't have a partner, then "seeing" a naked man allows me to HAVE that man visually, do you see what I mean? If I don't have a man in reality, at least I can have a man visually. So looking at porn is a way of having the person you are looking at. It is vicarious sex, even if you don't masturbate.

    In the same way, watching TV is a way of having company, though no one is actually there with you. An alcoholic might have a non-alcoholic beer or ale in an attempt to imagine that he is having alcohol. Eating low-calorie food is a way for an over-eater to over-eat vicariously. It is all vicarious.

    If I don't look at porn for more than about four hours a week, that's not a matter of "control". Looking at porn brings my excitement to a peak, and then I jerk off, and then I'm done. There's no point at which I have to stop myself; it naturally comes to a conclusion. So there is no "control" involved. I indulge in it until it has served its purpose.

    The same is true of alcohol: If I drink too much, I don't like the way it feels, so I stop drinking at a certain point. True alcoholics don't reach that point of "too much". As I've said, my addiction is food. I don't "naturally" stop eating at a certain point. Even if I'm not full, I may still want to eat more. It is in the area of food where I DO have to exercise self-control.

    I don't fully understand your point when you ask if it is normal to have sex five times a week. For young married couples and new lovers, it is often normal. However, whether or not it's normal, I do think that it is normal for a person's body to release built-up sexual energy. As I said in a previous note, I have a friend who has no interest in sex, but he jerks off once a day simply to release the accumulated sexual energy. There IS a physical process at work, not just a psychological process.
     
  6. Caleb Murdock

    Caleb Murdock Fapstronaut

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    Tantra, you said so many complex things. I agree that repression plays a huge role in the use of porn. If you live in a sexually repressed culture or family, you'll be tempted to indulge in sex vicariously, and that's where porn comes in. (In my case, my family wasn't sexually repressed. However, I've used porn a lot because my relationships were infrequent.) As I said to Sexytime, so much of what humans do is vicarious. However, the vicarious activity itself can increase the desire for either more of the vicarious activity or for the real thing itself, in this case real sex. That's why using porn may sometimes lead to sex crimes. I also believe that spending five hours a day at violent computer games will increase a person's aggressiveness and may result in real aggression. For some people, however, there is no need to go beyond the vicarious activity.

    By the way, I had no idea that a lot of porn was used in Pakistan. I find that amazing.

    I don't think there's such a thing as full sexual liberation for humans. Our culture is too complex. The scene that you described of the man and woman being naturally attracted to each other and having sex spontaneously is complicated by the fact that women have to worry about pregnancy (not to mention male predators). Even though we have birth control now, I think it's in the nature of women to be cautious about having sex. Actually, what you described doesn't sound to me like an ideal social circumstance but a fantasy, the fantasy that men have of sex without complications. Sadly, sex usually comes with lots of social complications. Ironically, the experience of blissful sex with a stranger is something that gay men often have because they have no worries about procreation.

    I saw a program about monkeys which was very interesting. There is a huge amount of social tension in most monkey groups -- constant fighting over hierarchy, etc. Monkeys, they have found, have very high stress levels. The lower-ranked males have most of the stress, but all of them are stressed to some extent. But there is one species of monkeys which make love constantly, and the stress levels in those monkeys is much lower.

    One of the problems with your Utopian view of the world is that humans are too complex to achieve it. We are more like the monkeys which don't make a lot of love than we are like the monkeys which do make a lot of love. In addition to that, humans comes in a broader spectrum of ugly to beautiful. Unlike animals, which are all well-exercised and not fat, and which all have coats of fur to cover their imperfections, the imperfections of human beings are plain to see.
     
  7. Caleb Murdock

    Caleb Murdock Fapstronaut

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    I've already admitted that I was wrong, that for people with a true porn addiction, moderation is impossible. When I first came to this forum, I was skeptical that such a thing as a porn addiction even existed, but now I accept that it does.
     
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  8. Tantra_Shaft

    Tantra_Shaft Fapstronaut

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    Caleb, I recommend you to read the book Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan.

    If I remember correctly, the main premise of the book is that marriage and monogamy are not actually human nature and we are more like the bonobo monkeys that you mentioned above (the ones that fuck around and are less stressed). Marriage and monogamy became prevalent with the advent of agriculture, private property and organized religions. Before that, for almost 190,000 years or so as homo sapiens, we lived in communal settings where there was no husbands and wives, and even a single man was not accounted to be the father of a baby (as women were free to have sex with anyone in the community, and some even thought the more sex a woman have with guys with different traits, the resulting baby will get all a conglomeration of all these traits and have better chances of survival).

    Have a look at this interview with the author:
     
  9. Caleb Murdock

    Caleb Murdock Fapstronaut

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    Unfortunately, I don't have sound on my computer, so I can't listen to an interview. I have speakers, but I never got around to connecting them, and I can't do it right now.

    Are you sure about your facts about ancient humans? Do we really know what ancient humans did? I suspect that the situation was similar to what it is today: Some individuals tended towards monogamy, and some didn't. Just because we were less "civilized" than we are today doesn't mean that we didn't have individual characters and preferences. Some people would have found their soul mates, while some had multiple partners. (Actually, we may have been a lot more civilized then than we are now. We have become very effective killing machines in recent years.)

    I'm going to switch the topic a little and tell you that I'm a religious person, and that my religious views are based on something called the Seth Material, the readings of a trance medium named Jane Roberts who died in 1984. Roberts channelled a soul or spirit who called himself Seth. Seth said some very interesting things about mankind. He said that we were once much more spiritual than we are today, and that everyone had highly developed abilities which included telepathy and astral projection. He said that communication was always done on a telepathic level. But then mankind as whole decided to experiment with materiality, so we went into a materialistic phase in which we lost our ability to reach into each other's minds. Losing the telepathy made us feel isolated and made us suspicious of each other since we didn't know what the other person was feeling. We as humans are so proud of our language abilities, but language is simply an inferior substitute for telepathy, which is a much more effective communication method. Seth didn't say this, but I presume that it was around the time that language began to develop -- perhaps 6,000 years ago? -- that mankind's experiment with materiality began in earnest. Without telepathy, we had to find another way to communicate.

    If we had telepathy today, it would eliminate bigotry. For example, white people who have no understanding of what it feels like to be black in America could simply share thoughts with a black person and immediately understand how they felt. Telepathy would also make your Utopian vision possible. A man and a woman could meet, share thoughts, and instantly know if they were compatible. They could then be intimate without any fear. Their relationship could last for as long as they had something to share. Some relationships would last a lifetime, and some wouldn't.

    Telepathy would also eliminate war, since war can only result when there are misunderstandings or opposing purposes between groups. You can't kill someone whose feelings you can experience.

    As long as I'm on this topic, I should tell you that Seth said that those drawings in Central America which can only be seen from the air were created to help children learn to project their astral bodies.

    Well, either you like what I just said, or you think I'm a total flake, but I thought I would share it since I believe it.
     
    Last edited: Jul 10, 2016
  10. sexytime

    sexytime Fapstronaut

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    bro, you are going the wrong direction. You have given the right facts but your understanding of it is wrong. Having sex with someone you find attractive and just met is simply an animalistic behavior. This is immoral although it has become the norm. Sexual repression is necessary in order to maintain equality. Is it fair for your wife that you commit adultery ? Or is it fair to you if your wife goes out and has sex with others who she met and thought are attractive?

    This is morally wrong. Your relationship gets ruined. There will be no intimacy between the two. Therefore these are unlawful sexual acts. Similarly there are other reasons as to why open sex isn't allowed in religion. I don't know about Christianity and Judaism but Islam tells us why and tells us how to protect ourselves.

    You might argue, what about before marriage ? I say it is nothing different. It's not all about sex sex sex. A women and yourself deserves respect. If I believe what you are saying, I would be fucking chicks 24/7 because there are a lot of attractive chicks anyone would die to bang.

    Look there, if you believe in religion, you will believe it is the work of the devil. Slowly he has worked his way and influenced people and business to spread filth everywhere. His motive is to steer you away from the right path, what is people's excuse ? It's only business. What happens a few years later ? it becomes normal and things start to get more extreme. All I can say is, you will see if you live longer, how disgusting this world is going to get even though it is pretty disgusting already.
     
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  11. Caleb Murdock

    Caleb Murdock Fapstronaut

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    Don't forget that we are animals -- intelligent animals, yes, but still animals. Many animals copulate freely with whatever partner is available. I get the feeling that Tantra isn't married.

    I think that you are proving Tantra's point that religion screws us up; it puts a moral stigma on sex (as you demonstrate so well). I hope you don't really believe in the devil -- that's kind of like believing in Santa Claus.

    I'm going to bed. I'll check in later.
     
  12. sexytime

    sexytime Fapstronaut

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    Eating your own shit is animalistic or murdering in cold blood is animalistic. Hell even racial stereotyping is animalistic in nature.
    If the argument is that free sex is good/okay because animals do it, then its one that has flaws beyond logic
     
  13. Caleb Murdock

    Caleb Murdock Fapstronaut

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    That wasn't exactly what I was saying.

    First, humans murder much more than animals do. The more socially complex an animal is, the more it is likely to do antisocial things. As for racial stereotyping, I don't see how that applies to animals. They tend to stay within their species.

    I don't know of any animal that eats its own shit. Elephants sometimes eat the shit of other elephants, but that is a good thing because it helps youngsters to establish a proper intestinal microbiome.

    The argument isn't that free sex is okay because animals do it; I was simply pointing out that we ARE animals and are still subject to our animal heritage, which explains some of our behavior.

    Sexytime, you seem to be stuck in a moralistic world. I'm guessing that you are from a religious family. Your comments support Tantra's point that religion screws us up sexually.
     
    Last edited: Jul 10, 2016
  14. Tantra_Shaft

    Tantra_Shaft Fapstronaut

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    First of all, it has not become normal as you seem to imply above. Yes, some people get shit fucked drunk and have one night stands. But I am referring to the case where both the man and woman are fully sober and consciously decide, well I am really attracted to him/her and want to enjoy a moment together. There is nothing immoral and wrong about this.

    And you brought the marriage thing out of nowhere. I am not against marriage, monogamy, or even celibacy. What I think is wrong is the whole society being forced into believing monogamy is the best way and the only way for us humans (even those who are a bit slutty and sleep around are under the impression that this is a temporary thing and they will stop it "when they settle down"). I know some couples who are into open marriage/relationship, and I have witnessed them having a fantastic relationship that is mostly devoid of jealousy. Romantic dreaming, putting all the responsibility of one's happiness on some idealized partner that will complete us, then making them promise they will never dare to leave us, and forbidding them to do anything that could make them happy, unless we are at the center of it...that is the current definition of love. A guy who murders his wife because she left him for another person is said to have committed a "love crime"...and most probably before he killed her he has uttered some stuff like "I loved you so much, I gave you everything, how can you do this to me?"...ooops, I am drifting, but I think our whole conception of love and relationship needs a real re-thinking.

    And don't get me started with respect. Because how can you say you respect someone if you force them to suppress what they want under the disguise of morality, religion, ...? I respect you so much, I think you should not open your legs to anyone but me. I love you so much, if you dare to flirt with another guy, I am gonna beat the shit out of you.

    And believe me, if the situation I described above becomes normal, you wouldn't be banging hot chicks 24/7. First of all, not all hot chicks will be attracted to you (sorry about that :). Secondly, when you have abundance, you actually become very picky (just think of the poor man who is eating everything thrown at him with the rich man who has to read every food label before he can trust to put it in his mouth). And also when it becomes normal, it will stop becoming an obsession. If I am starving and get access to food randomly once in a while, all I would do will be fantasizing about delicious food. If you are full and have secure, abundant source of food, food will stop be something you obsess about, but rather something you enjoy. Sex will be the same.

    I don't really want to go to the stuff about devil and God, because such discussions usually gets out of hand...
     
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  15. Caleb Murdock

    Caleb Murdock Fapstronaut

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    You've said a lot of insightful things in your post, especially in this paragraph. Humans explode with rage, lust, etc., after long periods of repressing themselves, so repression is the problem. If we were a little more like animals, who are completely spontaneous, I think we would be more at peace. The problem, of course, is that in civil society we are expected to be civil at every moment.

    Also, when people have too much choice, they do become selective. The reason, I think, why some people become addicted to porn is that porn isn't the real thing; it's a substitute, it's vicarious. There are, however, some very attractive younger people who become addicted to sex. I'd be curious to know, however, whether they were really having all that much sex, or whether they were just having more than people think is acceptable.
     
    Last edited: Jul 12, 2016
  16. Yesodi

    Yesodi Distinguished Fapstronaut

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    As I've written before, this turns out to be NOT TRUE (per Snopes).
     
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