everyone's always "what about choking" like porn invented it
No? What it does is aggressively promote and reinforce certain images and ideas. It's a society of the spectacle thing, encouraging people to relate to the world not in terms of material reality but its relation to media representations.
yeah, no-one ever got hurt from heresay allegations about sexacts and print media.
???
people weren't sexual ignorants before you could stream porn, your great grandmother heard of all kinds of kinks & fetishes in her time, and probably engaged in a few
Alright, this is a complete tangent -- I chose choking in part because it's an obvious thing, unlike some fetishes -- but you're again completely obfuscating the reality here. The sheer volume of fetish material someone like myself has been exposed to versus the average person my age two generations ago are wildly different. Yeah, there was basic BDSM and common paraphilias and so on, but unless you are a researcher of some kind you are basically dependent on the fetishes you experience, what you hear about from word of mouth, and what you get from the media. That accessibility of information in that last category has intensified an inconceivable amount with the internet.
More significantly -- and this is something observed again and again in other contexts, including incels specifically -- the internet lets people at the margins of society find like-minded (or impressionable) people and congregate where otherwise they might be under a much greater pressure to assimilate to the local culture more thoroughly. This is not strictly a bad thing for many obvious reasons, but it's also created reactionary identity groups like incels and other sexually-backward cliques who have been emboldened in various ways to commit violence against women.
Yes, you can find some sort of approximation of PUA material in books in the '80s and even some grifters who assembled in-person meetings, but that's nothing like the contemporary redpill cults in terms of sheer numbers.
the range of activities someone can get psychologically addicted to is so wide i think it requires some motivated reasoning to take a specific indictment seriously. if you can be addicted to normal activities, even activities viewed as healthy, i cannot entertain someone becoming addicted to something as sufficient evidence for it being bad.
People can develop addictions to healthy things; I think the most famous example is exercise, which is kind of a rare addiction afaik but whatever. That said, addiction does not just fall from the aether, it needs a basis. A lot of the stranger addictions you hear about have much more to do with that person's pre-existing neurodivergence than to a viable propensity among most people. Exercise is addicting because it can be intense, exciting, done at a regular basis, ties in to body image and self esteem, etc. It has a confluence of properties that make it easy to happen. General internet addiction is typically tied to the extreme lack of effort, relatively high level of stimulation, and again very regular use. Pornography, well, I think it's about the same as a split between the general internet addiction and a masturbation addiction (oh yeah, masturbating at least once a week is healthy in men, so that one counts for the earlier thing), but stands out for the way that it impacts relationships, e.g. often the sufferer is so desensitized to arousing imagery that they find it more difficult or impossible to get an erection by normal means.
I'm sure that porn addicts existed in the days when mags were all one could access, but I'm almost as certain that it was much rarer because the sheer volume and breadth of material one can access now without even leaving their bedroom is just incomparable to previous states.
No? What it does is aggressively promote and reinforce certain images and ideas. It's a society of the spectacle thing, encouraging people to relate to the world not in terms of material reality but its relation to media representations.
???
Alright, this is a complete tangent -- I chose choking in part because it's an obvious thing, unlike some fetishes -- but you're again completely obfuscating the reality here. The sheer volume of fetish material someone like myself has been exposed to versus the average person my age two generations ago are wildly different. Yeah, there was basic BDSM and common paraphilias and so on, but unless you are a researcher of some kind you are basically dependent on the fetishes you experience, what you hear about from word of mouth, and what you get from the media. That accessibility of information in that last category has intensified an inconceivable amount with the internet.
More significantly -- and this is something observed again and again in other contexts, including incels specifically -- the internet lets people at the margins of society find like-minded (or impressionable) people and congregate where otherwise they might be under a much greater pressure to assimilate to the local culture more thoroughly. This is not strictly a bad thing for many obvious reasons, but it's also created reactionary identity groups like incels and other sexually-backward cliques who have been emboldened in various ways to commit violence against women.
Yes, you can find some sort of approximation of PUA material in books in the '80s and even some grifters who assembled in-person meetings, but that's nothing like the contemporary redpill cults in terms of sheer numbers.
People can develop addictions to healthy things; I think the most famous example is exercise, which is kind of a rare addiction afaik but whatever. That said, addiction does not just fall from the aether, it needs a basis. A lot of the stranger addictions you hear about have much more to do with that person's pre-existing neurodivergence than to a viable propensity among most people. Exercise is addicting because it can be intense, exciting, done at a regular basis, ties in to body image and self esteem, etc. It has a confluence of properties that make it easy to happen. General internet addiction is typically tied to the extreme lack of effort, relatively high level of stimulation, and again very regular use. Pornography, well, I think it's about the same as a split between the general internet addiction and a masturbation addiction (oh yeah, masturbating at least once a week is healthy in men, so that one counts for the earlier thing), but stands out for the way that it impacts relationships, e.g. often the sufferer is so desensitized to arousing imagery that they find it more difficult or impossible to get an erection by normal means.
I'm sure that porn addicts existed in the days when mags were all one could access, but I'm almost as certain that it was much rarer because the sheer volume and breadth of material one can access now without even leaving their bedroom is just incomparable to previous states.