I have to disagree. Porn definitely does change your tastes. People crave new stimuli, and people adapt. When people watch porn, they eventually adapt to what they're into, and what's originally stimulating becomes boring. They crave new stimuli and may develop a new kink. This is something Dr. K has talked about and I've observed in man…
I have to disagree. Porn definitely does change your tastes. People crave new stimuli, and people adapt. When people watch porn, they eventually adapt to what they're into, and what's originally stimulating becomes boring. They crave new stimuli and may develop a new kink. This is something Dr. K has talked about and I've observed in many people (though this is anecdotal and also influenced by my own bias)
With the big Mac analogy. People first eating fast food will start with just the hamburger or cheeseburger. Then they'll go up to a double cheeseburger, a quarter pounder, a double quarter pounder, etc. Or if you're a regular big Mac eater, you'll eventually want to maybe try the McChicken or the filet o fish or even burger king. Why? Because variety is the spice of life and you want to try something new and maybe you'll end up liking it!
I totaly disagree with your theory and I never observed something like this in real life. It always felt like some kind of made up argument used by far right activists just like post abortion syndrome. If you think that porn or fast food works like that (like drugs) then please explain why rl sex or homemade food or any other life activity is free from that slippery slope? I'm actually kind of freak when it comes to data hoarding and year ago I summed up my 20 years of porn usage. I watched 41,2k porn videos (over 8000h total) and you know what? Now in mid 30' I watch exactly the same type of stuff I watched as teenager and never ever went into anything more hardcore than threesomes, blowjobs and glamporn in general. After watching 41k vids I should be total porn junkie and perv by now (and 99% of my friends who did the same) while I'm not, even my daily fap scheme lowered down from as much as 4-8 orgasms per day around 20y to 1 or less by now in mid 30. Simple biology and selfregulation, completly different from addiction to artificial substances.
It's funny in general how some people treat "porn" like some kind of monolith with 0 user control over what one's watching. It's like saying that "movies" are harmful because you know, today you go to the cinema to watch some Marvel's blockbuster and tomorrow you download snuff movies from dark web. :D I never had any problem with deciding what to watch and watch turns me on both with porn and ordinary cinematography.
Real life sex and homemade food can happen in the same way. People will go from being into vanilla things to bdsm because normal sex gets boring or they want something more stimulating. This happens especially when sex is devalued via casual hookups instead of an intimate relation between two people. When the focus becomes the pleasure instead of the relationship, then there can be escalation of interests to seek out more pleasure. Hell, even in boomer relationships you see it to a lesser degree, where they try role-play or different outfits or scenarios. It's the same concept. Sex gets boring, so they spice it up.
And you do see the same thing in home cooking. If you make just rice and beans all day every day you get bored. That's why there's such a variety of food at supermarkets, because people want something new every once in a while because what they have gets boring. If that wasn't true, we'd all be eating the same thing every day. The same DOES apply to home cooking and the same DOES apply to irl sex.
I can't say the same for myself. I started at around 11 and I'm 19. It's gotten better in terms of quantity but not in quality. I've went from vanilla stuff to extreme things like rape, murder, gore, etc. Then I realized this is fucked and that's when I started cutting back. Now I'm still into bad things just in a lesser extent. I can say with absolute certainty that porn did it gradually because when I had encountered these things when younger I was repulsed. But after I became fully addicted, I eventually came to like those things.
So maybe it's just a thing in heavy porn users and not casual ones.
Porn is the viewers choice what they want to watch, but sometimes we get manipulated. Like how advertising uses certain language, imagery, and colors, we can have our tastes shifted by the media we consume. It's the viewers choice at the end of the day, but their choice isn't isolated.
Think of this as well. What forms our preferences? Our values and behaviors, right? Well what forms those? Our experiences. How do we know what we've experienced? From our memories. But if our memories are clogged with things like media, your behavior is therefore directly influenced BY media and what media wants you to do.
Again, Dr. K made a wonderful video on this all that I highly encourage you to watch if you genuinely want to understand my point of view. Part of the reason I'm this passionate about the subject is because like I said porn addiction is something I've had since I was 11, literally spending 6+ hours a day every day jerking off. I still have the habit and porn and sex have ruined my ability to form relationships and interact with people and I've only recently started to get back on the right path.
I'm not gonna deny your experiences but you must admit your case is rather unique. Some people may be vulnerable for such exposition, especially if we take into account that you started very early in digital era with limitless ocean of porn across internet while your taste didn't have chance to develop itself. I started earlier than that, around 8, but all I had access to were clothing catalogs with swimsuit ads. :P I even rememeber that on my first pc with DOS I used to draw naked women and fapped to them. Then I've had just few magazines and literally 1 VHS tape until I got internet first time in 2003 as 15y. Then I started data hoarding but despite 2 decades of definitely heavy usage I still skip even anal scenes simply because I find them as disgusting as back then in teenage years. I must admit though that I'm exceptionally immune to addiction and developing tolerance in general, I hardly ever get bored with things. You mentioned experiments with homemade food, well absolutely honestly I eat exactly the same meals everyday for last 10 years. Moreover I never eat sweets, sure occasionally I like chips, burgers, pizzas, but never ever had taste for sugar. I heard such condition negatively correlates with alcoholism, but who knows, maybe other addictions too.
However me being unusual is one thing, but porn usage at 90%+ rate among men is a fact and those with problems are just barely visible minority. Before porn era there were such people too and what caused their extreme habits? How it is that during wars there are so many rapists, even among men who in normal conditions wouldn't commit any crime? Porn is just convenient scapegoat and while in some cases it may be the one and only reason someone discovered his inner beast in general itsn't source of a problem. Not so long time ago I read article about guy like you and he with an army of psychologists blamed porn for everything that went wrong in his life but reading carefully everyone could see that his story was pure example of ecclesiogenic neurosis. Huge conflict between his porn habits and deeply religious parents caused extreme lack of self esteem and self-hatred which pushed him into harder and harder stuff. I would encourage you to look deeper into your experiences and current problems because finding real source of them could be crucial to get proper help. Again - I'm not denying that porn could play huge role in your addiction to extreme stuff but it may not be the only factor but rather mix of those that alone would be harmless.
And one more thing - you should be ready to accept that your preferences could develop in the same way even without porn at all. It's important because as long as you treat it only as defect you can't overcome your personal life problems and you make yoursef vulnerable for somatization of even bigger ones. Your value as a human has nothing to do with being average and meeting social expectations. No matter what shaped you this way you can still be happy person in happy relationship even if your bedroom gonna be "bit" more kinky. At 19 you just start to build your abilities of forming relationships and interacting with people, it's totaly normal you may feel lost and come across some problems. Good you're working on it and I'm sure you gonna meet your goals. Keep up on the right track and never give up!
Yep. Been into the same stuff I've been into when I was a teen (in the 90s! Shudder!). The whole escalation theory is the same one can see when conservative culture folks talked about video games, movies, music . .even dancing, going back decades.
Yeah, this is the male version of the high-bodycount “throwing a hot dog down a hallway” myth. Hell, at least once a year, I return to the best scene in the first porn I ever saw... in 1990.
Maybe it is worth asking: do women require ever bigger, more powerful, and faster-vibrating sex toys? If so, is it because they get bored—or because they get nerve-damaged?
"People crave new stimuli, and people adapt. When people watch porn, they eventually adapt to what they're into, and what's originally stimulating becomes boring. They crave new stimuli and may develop a new kink."
This is just a product of unhealthy sexual repression, not a normal phenomenon. When you stop shaming yourself for being a sexual being and accept that porn is normal and natural, that craving for more and more extreme things disappears.
Objection. I was perfectly fine with, if not proud of, my sexuality, sex drive, and porn habits. I felt no shame or repression. Yet during this period is where these interests developed the worst, and only when they developed to an extreme degree did I begin to repress my sexuality and begin to recover. When I was fully open and liberalized about sex, that's where I developed kinks for hurting, dismembering, kidnapping, stalking, abusing, and goring people. Only recently have I begun to recover with repressive habits.
Unhealthy sexual repression doesn't lead to these things, it cures these things. But again, maybe I'm an extremely niche case that should be studied by medical professionals. But they'll never get their hands on me since involuntary institutionalization bars me from ever owning a firearm and I would rather die than not be allowed to own guns.
Yes, that's extremely niche and not caused by porn, and you should be seeing medical professionals and should not own guns. But you already know all that.
I support the right to bear arms and communities being ready to defend themselves against invasion and authoritarian governments and all that, but I also have depression and know that the most responsible thing for me personally is to not own them.
I have to disagree. Porn definitely does change your tastes. People crave new stimuli, and people adapt. When people watch porn, they eventually adapt to what they're into, and what's originally stimulating becomes boring. They crave new stimuli and may develop a new kink. This is something Dr. K has talked about and I've observed in many people (though this is anecdotal and also influenced by my own bias)
With the big Mac analogy. People first eating fast food will start with just the hamburger or cheeseburger. Then they'll go up to a double cheeseburger, a quarter pounder, a double quarter pounder, etc. Or if you're a regular big Mac eater, you'll eventually want to maybe try the McChicken or the filet o fish or even burger king. Why? Because variety is the spice of life and you want to try something new and maybe you'll end up liking it!
I totaly disagree with your theory and I never observed something like this in real life. It always felt like some kind of made up argument used by far right activists just like post abortion syndrome. If you think that porn or fast food works like that (like drugs) then please explain why rl sex or homemade food or any other life activity is free from that slippery slope? I'm actually kind of freak when it comes to data hoarding and year ago I summed up my 20 years of porn usage. I watched 41,2k porn videos (over 8000h total) and you know what? Now in mid 30' I watch exactly the same type of stuff I watched as teenager and never ever went into anything more hardcore than threesomes, blowjobs and glamporn in general. After watching 41k vids I should be total porn junkie and perv by now (and 99% of my friends who did the same) while I'm not, even my daily fap scheme lowered down from as much as 4-8 orgasms per day around 20y to 1 or less by now in mid 30. Simple biology and selfregulation, completly different from addiction to artificial substances.
It's funny in general how some people treat "porn" like some kind of monolith with 0 user control over what one's watching. It's like saying that "movies" are harmful because you know, today you go to the cinema to watch some Marvel's blockbuster and tomorrow you download snuff movies from dark web. :D I never had any problem with deciding what to watch and watch turns me on both with porn and ordinary cinematography.
Real life sex and homemade food can happen in the same way. People will go from being into vanilla things to bdsm because normal sex gets boring or they want something more stimulating. This happens especially when sex is devalued via casual hookups instead of an intimate relation between two people. When the focus becomes the pleasure instead of the relationship, then there can be escalation of interests to seek out more pleasure. Hell, even in boomer relationships you see it to a lesser degree, where they try role-play or different outfits or scenarios. It's the same concept. Sex gets boring, so they spice it up.
And you do see the same thing in home cooking. If you make just rice and beans all day every day you get bored. That's why there's such a variety of food at supermarkets, because people want something new every once in a while because what they have gets boring. If that wasn't true, we'd all be eating the same thing every day. The same DOES apply to home cooking and the same DOES apply to irl sex.
I can't say the same for myself. I started at around 11 and I'm 19. It's gotten better in terms of quantity but not in quality. I've went from vanilla stuff to extreme things like rape, murder, gore, etc. Then I realized this is fucked and that's when I started cutting back. Now I'm still into bad things just in a lesser extent. I can say with absolute certainty that porn did it gradually because when I had encountered these things when younger I was repulsed. But after I became fully addicted, I eventually came to like those things.
So maybe it's just a thing in heavy porn users and not casual ones.
Porn is the viewers choice what they want to watch, but sometimes we get manipulated. Like how advertising uses certain language, imagery, and colors, we can have our tastes shifted by the media we consume. It's the viewers choice at the end of the day, but their choice isn't isolated.
Think of this as well. What forms our preferences? Our values and behaviors, right? Well what forms those? Our experiences. How do we know what we've experienced? From our memories. But if our memories are clogged with things like media, your behavior is therefore directly influenced BY media and what media wants you to do.
Again, Dr. K made a wonderful video on this all that I highly encourage you to watch if you genuinely want to understand my point of view. Part of the reason I'm this passionate about the subject is because like I said porn addiction is something I've had since I was 11, literally spending 6+ hours a day every day jerking off. I still have the habit and porn and sex have ruined my ability to form relationships and interact with people and I've only recently started to get back on the right path.
I'm not gonna deny your experiences but you must admit your case is rather unique. Some people may be vulnerable for such exposition, especially if we take into account that you started very early in digital era with limitless ocean of porn across internet while your taste didn't have chance to develop itself. I started earlier than that, around 8, but all I had access to were clothing catalogs with swimsuit ads. :P I even rememeber that on my first pc with DOS I used to draw naked women and fapped to them. Then I've had just few magazines and literally 1 VHS tape until I got internet first time in 2003 as 15y. Then I started data hoarding but despite 2 decades of definitely heavy usage I still skip even anal scenes simply because I find them as disgusting as back then in teenage years. I must admit though that I'm exceptionally immune to addiction and developing tolerance in general, I hardly ever get bored with things. You mentioned experiments with homemade food, well absolutely honestly I eat exactly the same meals everyday for last 10 years. Moreover I never eat sweets, sure occasionally I like chips, burgers, pizzas, but never ever had taste for sugar. I heard such condition negatively correlates with alcoholism, but who knows, maybe other addictions too.
However me being unusual is one thing, but porn usage at 90%+ rate among men is a fact and those with problems are just barely visible minority. Before porn era there were such people too and what caused their extreme habits? How it is that during wars there are so many rapists, even among men who in normal conditions wouldn't commit any crime? Porn is just convenient scapegoat and while in some cases it may be the one and only reason someone discovered his inner beast in general itsn't source of a problem. Not so long time ago I read article about guy like you and he with an army of psychologists blamed porn for everything that went wrong in his life but reading carefully everyone could see that his story was pure example of ecclesiogenic neurosis. Huge conflict between his porn habits and deeply religious parents caused extreme lack of self esteem and self-hatred which pushed him into harder and harder stuff. I would encourage you to look deeper into your experiences and current problems because finding real source of them could be crucial to get proper help. Again - I'm not denying that porn could play huge role in your addiction to extreme stuff but it may not be the only factor but rather mix of those that alone would be harmless.
And one more thing - you should be ready to accept that your preferences could develop in the same way even without porn at all. It's important because as long as you treat it only as defect you can't overcome your personal life problems and you make yoursef vulnerable for somatization of even bigger ones. Your value as a human has nothing to do with being average and meeting social expectations. No matter what shaped you this way you can still be happy person in happy relationship even if your bedroom gonna be "bit" more kinky. At 19 you just start to build your abilities of forming relationships and interacting with people, it's totaly normal you may feel lost and come across some problems. Good you're working on it and I'm sure you gonna meet your goals. Keep up on the right track and never give up!
Cheers!
"I must admit though that I'm exceptionally immune to addiction and developing tolerance in general, I hardly ever get bored with things."
You are the outlier.
Yep. Been into the same stuff I've been into when I was a teen (in the 90s! Shudder!). The whole escalation theory is the same one can see when conservative culture folks talked about video games, movies, music . .even dancing, going back decades.
Yeah, this is the male version of the high-bodycount “throwing a hot dog down a hallway” myth. Hell, at least once a year, I return to the best scene in the first porn I ever saw... in 1990.
Maybe it is worth asking: do women require ever bigger, more powerful, and faster-vibrating sex toys? If so, is it because they get bored—or because they get nerve-damaged?
Used to be made by far right activists. Nowadays, it's also made by far left and not so far left ones... at least where I live.
"People crave new stimuli, and people adapt. When people watch porn, they eventually adapt to what they're into, and what's originally stimulating becomes boring. They crave new stimuli and may develop a new kink."
This is just a product of unhealthy sexual repression, not a normal phenomenon. When you stop shaming yourself for being a sexual being and accept that porn is normal and natural, that craving for more and more extreme things disappears.
Objection. I was perfectly fine with, if not proud of, my sexuality, sex drive, and porn habits. I felt no shame or repression. Yet during this period is where these interests developed the worst, and only when they developed to an extreme degree did I begin to repress my sexuality and begin to recover. When I was fully open and liberalized about sex, that's where I developed kinks for hurting, dismembering, kidnapping, stalking, abusing, and goring people. Only recently have I begun to recover with repressive habits.
Unhealthy sexual repression doesn't lead to these things, it cures these things. But again, maybe I'm an extremely niche case that should be studied by medical professionals. But they'll never get their hands on me since involuntary institutionalization bars me from ever owning a firearm and I would rather die than not be allowed to own guns.
Yes, that's extremely niche and not caused by porn, and you should be seeing medical professionals and should not own guns. But you already know all that.
I support the right to bear arms and communities being ready to defend themselves against invasion and authoritarian governments and all that, but I also have depression and know that the most responsible thing for me personally is to not own them.
It's hilarious how far the "rationalist" community will go to deny the existence of reality.