Ask A Genius 841: Porn, and Shame and Guilty Culture
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/06/04
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Porn is increasingly weird in two ways. One way is that there’s so much porn that guys have wrecked their pouring centers, have just fried them looking at too much porn. So porn has to get more and more perverse and extreme for guys who’ve seen too much porn to use it because part of sex is novelty. I don’t know like if you’re a Christian in a loving relationship over 30 years with the same woman. Is that an actual thing where you can actually get a boner and ejaculate over having a loving Christian relation sexual relationship? I don’t know but in my experience you need novelty and that’s pretty obvious. Anybody who’s looked at porn over the past 50 years as I have and any other guy has, knows that porn has gotten weirder and creepier and more gonzo. Gonzo is actually a term for a type of porn where there’s no redeeming, no plot, just like aggressive, horrible, people just brutalizing each other.
Though brutalizing each other is another form of porn where there’s actual brutality. Anyway, porn is fucked up and increasingly so but the thing I want to talk about which is less obvious is how weird is porn in general because porn is shameful and porn has to be a little shameful to work. Part of what makes porn dirty and able to make you horny is its shamefulness and dirtiness and that’s so freaking weird because it shows something that you’re supposed to do as a human being. You’re supposed to have sex and reproduce. You’re supposed to find a partner, get married, and do these shameful things with them. So everybody who’s a normal person in the world, a normal adult person is supposed to be doing porn stuff but porn is shameful and in fact you’re a weirdo if you’re an adult who’s not doing porn stuff, who’s not having sex. So that’s just a weird dimension.
Porn is nasty and filthy and people who make porn are nasty and filthy and should be kind of scorned the less so now than like in the 60s. In the 60s it wasn’t even acceptable to be a playboy centerfold. It was only the lowest of the low people, the most desperate who had actual sex on camera and that stuff couldn’t be found until the very end of the 60s in any kind of arena that any upstanding person could easily find but that’s all historic. I’m just saying it’s weird that that porn is shameful yet in our lives as adults not having sex is itself a little shameful and that’s just a weird paradox; it’s too strong a term but contrast. Comments?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Nothing.
Rosner: Okay. Is that a reasonable point or am I just making something out of nothing?
Jacobsen: It’s fair in the sense of the shame and guilt around it. I think that comes from a long history of Abrahamic religions a lot of the time. We don’t come with an intrinsic sense of shame about the human body. I think there’s a certain modesty about the human body that we have that’s innate but I think the larger inculcation has been for a very long time which probably really peaked during the Victorian era in the West,which was this strong Puritanism which is a lot of shame, guilt, and disgust with the human body which is just doom. It’s just another organism.
Rosner: Is shame being an amplifier of horniness? Is shame making you horny? Is that a cultural thing? Would you argue that get under Abrahamic, Judeo-Christian, plus Muslim I guess religions? Is that what Abrahamic is?
Jacobsen: All major religions kind of are Abrahamic; following the line of Judaism, Christianity, then Islam.
Rosner: Okay. The people in India; they put up lots of porn-y stuff in a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago. And people in China; lots of porn, like really ancient porn in China; drawings of people fucking and sculptures and carvings. Are people not under Abrahamic religions just forthrightly you having sex like its not shameful? I don’t know if you know, I mean can you have entire civilizations where people just go ahead and have sex and it’s not shameful?
Jacobsen: I think in regular circumstances whatever the hell that means. I think that the sort of neural circuitry devoted to sexual activity is in some sense self-regulatory. So there’s sort of a moderation to it. I think with new digital technologies and certain sort of acute subcultures you can find through history there’s an intensity on either end where there’s no sex and intense fear and shame about it even to the point of like women during the Medieval Era there was fear of them having vagina dentate.
Rosner: Yeah, my fraternity paddle, we had to make paddles in our fraternity and I took a Barbie doll I think and then I took a plastic dinosaur head and I put the Barbie on the paddle and then I gave her a very toothy vagina via a T-Rex head which seemed very appropriate to the way Frat Boys think and I was a frat boy.
Jacobsen: So there’s that and the opposite end is really, it’s not necessarily Sodom and Gomorrah but it’s sort of these acute subcultures where there is basically free love. I think for the United States subculture of like Timothy Leary or Ram Dass and all those people were a really good example of that where they were trying to get rid of the shame culture around it.
Rosner: I feel what’s behind some of what you’re saying is that in an uncivilized culture, that’s like a culture that doesn’t have the wherewithal to produce a lot of cultural material say before Gutenberg, that people’s sexuality was naturally regulated. The guys might get horny every two or three days and so would women and they would just have sex on kind of a schedule that we might consider relaxed compared to us in our porn-ified culture. Is that part of what you’re saying?
Jacobsen: I mean I think it’s an interplay of systems like the neural systems self-regulate internally and within an interpersonal and social dynamics.
Rosner: It might be possible in a naturally regulated unporn-ified system that people would just go ahead and have sex every so often, every few days, every week, or whatever.
Jacobsen: Those social systems might be ritualized as well were sort of the Elders of the society guide thing. I don’t mean like Orthodox Jewish matchmakers that are looking at the family history and all that stuff, the things that aren’t codified. They don’t have any sort of rigidity past 80 years or 60 years whatever the lifetime the old people might be in the culture.
Rosner: So there might be less shaming though some shaming and less connection between shame and horniness. A feudal culture where you work all day in the fields, or as shoemakers which is also your house, you’re making shoes in your house, your wife’s helping and then you go to bed when it gets dark mostly or when you don’t want to burn too much of a candle, you’re in bed next to your wife and every few nights you’re like somebody reaches for somebody’s junk and you do it and nobody’s thinking of it as nobody’s got a spank bank or anything. You’re not thinking while you’re banging your wife, “I’m fucking this whore…” You’re like it’s just my wife and we’re doing this. It feels good, I like the way she looks. Is that kind of maybe a possibility?
Jacobsen: Yeah I mean there’s no search history. It’s basically what you have is what you get. And people get old and die and with them those norms die too. And so there’s a generation born generation change. So nothing’s codified in the sense of written or the current modes of sort of digital storage.
Rosner: I also have another argument that you can maybe have sex without the current connection we have between sex being dirty though maybe not but like when a dog fucks another dog or a chimp fucks another chimp I’m not convinced that the guy chimp fucking the lady chimp is thinking “Oh my God, what a fucking slut this dirty slut this lady monkey is” I mean it’s possible, I don’t know but it seems weird. It also doesn’t seem weird if in a lot of species I feel like sex is stolen, that guys look for sexual opportunities with female partners who may not be as willing as they might be to have sex with a more Alpha.
Anyway guys are being a little rape-y in a lot of animal species and so maybe there is some idea of dirtiness like, “I’m doing a thing I’m not supposed to. I’m lower in the hierarchy and I’m fucking this high status lady monkey because I caught her under this banyan tree” or I don’t know what. So I mean I could see it going either way. Animals either don’t need filthiness of sex to get horny or maybe sometimes they do. I mean certainly iguanas are fucking. I don’t think Iguana’s thought patterns are sufficiently sophisticated that boy iguana is like “Oh my God, this fucking lady whore iguana is such a slut, oh my God.”
[Recording End]
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