Ask A Genius 1083: The Future of Pornified Pleasure
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/16
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Next topic: the future of arousal, addictions, pleasure, partnership, and pornography. A lot of P’s there.
Rick Rosner: Let’s start with porn. So, in the novel I’m writing about the future, I initially had Russia trying to destabilize the West by infecting our porn and making it fill every consumer with perversion and self-loathing. I’m rethinking that because, looking at AI porn, it evolves so fast that I’m not sure even a malign actor can keep up with it. Yes, porn can get so messed up so fast that the Russians trying to make it even more messed up might have trouble doing that.
And it’s evolving fast without direct access to our brains. We have to consume porn the way we’ve always consumed it—via our eyes and ears. But at some point in the future, if we’ve got information links in our heads that are two-way, making for a more intimate connection between information and us, porn could get extra messed up extra fast because it’s got access to your whole brain. It can present scenarios and images to you in real time, judge how effective they are, and evolve what it’s presenting without your conscious control. If it’s pinging off your “boner space,” it could get messed up fast.
One of the things I envision in the future is when your boner space is entirely incinerated—when you’ve consumed so much porn that only the most messed-up stuff works, and even then only barely—they can do the equivalent of electroshock. They can get in there and blast away at your mental boner space, clean it out, and start you anew.
When I first started looking at naked ladies, the first thing I saw in 1969, when I was 9 years old, was a deck of topless lady playing cards. The photos must have been taken in the 1950s. Maybe some kid stole it out of his dad’s nightstand or something. And then we’d go searching for Playboy magazines. It wasn’t until 1972 that Playboy first showed pubes. Until then, it wasn’t that the women they showed didn’t have pubes—it’s just that they didn’t show that area at all. Everyone was turned away from the camera. So, what you saw in Playboy was tame.
And now, 55 years later, Playboy magazine, which doesn’t exist anymore, got out-pornographized for not being nasty enough. My writing partner and I used to pitch to the Playboy TV channel back in the ’90s, and they didn’t know what to do. They were so confused. They couldn’t decide between trying to remain classy and maintain the Playboy brand or going full hardcore pornography. They didn’t know which way to go, and things were changing so fast, getting so nasty so quickly, that they couldn’t keep up. So, they went out of business. They lost their niche.
Anyway, getting your brain cleaned out might allow a jaded old perv to return to a state of wholesomeness where an actual person’s butt or a picture of a pretty lady in a bikini might, for a little while, be able to arouse them. But that cleaned-out brain would probably fill up and get pervy again—a process that has taken decades in today’s people might happen much faster in future people because of the bombardment of turbo porn. So even when you’re cleaned out, your boner space might go back to being filled up, and you may become jaded again within, say, eight months.
Maybe some people will try to ration their exposure to sexualized images after getting cleaned out, and maybe they can go 18 months before they’re back to being fully jaded. But pornography of the future will be fast-changing and depressing in its perversity. One thing I’ll write about is “stacked perversity,” where people who’ve been exposed to too much of it—likely a significant chunk of the population—will need ultra-hard IQ problems to get off. These might involve solving eight problems in one, where you decode one thing and use the result to decode another, layer after layer, like a Russian doll of difficulty.
That’s miserable to solve. It’s not a true measure of IQ—it’s a measure of how much busy work you’ll slog through to get to the answer. It’s about how obsessed you are. The porn of the future will have stacked perversity too. You’ll take one scenario and, with the help of AI, add further perverse elements until it’s a stack of pancakes of perversity, eight pancakes deep. Pornography for jaded people will be about sneaking up on yourself with some unexpected new perversity. That’s no way to be.
We’ve talked about how humans and primates, in their natural settings, don’t get to “jizz” anywhere near the number of times we do. A, you die sooner, and B, the opportunities for sex or seeing sexual images are a millionth of what we have now. So, we’re caught in this porn trap.
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
License & Copyright
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.
In-Sight Publishing 