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ninetyninenine 7 days ago

You know. I used to be all about what you're going for. But I realized that porn to a certain extent is like cocaine. It's possibly one of the drivers for world wide declining population. Tons of dudes satisfying themselves without the urge to go out and do the real thing. There's growing science about this too.

I don't like the conservative angle which is to be "proper" or it's against god, but from the scientific side this stuff is bad.

Now I also agree that censorship is bad too and on a moral level this stuff doesn't harm anyone morally.

I'm still a staunch 90s liberal, but over time I'm starting to realize that there's an evolutionary reason why conservative values exist. Humans weren't designed to live in a world of only fans where every girl who's slightly hot can gain so much power over hundreds of men. Like there are 4th - 10th order effects here that go past morality.

I mentioned the population problem right, that's just one example. We have no idea wtf is causing it. But we do know that the population issue correlates with so many changes in society, and it's a big freaking deal.

Another thing is rising womens power. I'm all for it. It's moral and right to give women equal rights and equal power, but humanity has never encountered such a scenario. It's always the men that lead the hunt and the family and they were the bread winners for millions of years. Were humans evolved to support such changes? Like if we satisfy every moral imperative in our primitive brains and build a utopia but human biology was never meant for utopia is it right?

That's the problem. The population is declining. We don't know why. But we do know everything is different.

So I know I got off on a huge tangent here. But i feel porn is one of these things. It's right to keep it open and free, but it's causing unexpected side effects. Most of us were not meant to deal with that level of extreme hedonism.

jjaksic 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know if porn really affects population growth. There are so many other factors that do that to a much greater extent, such as: 1) gender equality and women working, 2) education, 3) contraception, 4) lower child mortality, 5) the fact that 200 years ago kids were an asset (free labor on the farm and support in old age) but today they're just a huge expense, 6) the fact that even a few decades ago child care consumed much less time as kids could be left to play outside, but today you have to supervise them 24/7 at least until they're 12. Etc etc. people don't have kids for a long list of reasons, none of which has to do with men watching so much porn they can't have sex even once.

But even if that was true, who's to say that population has to keep growing? There's 8 billion of us, isn't that enough? Housing prices are through the roof and most young people can't even hope to be able to afford a house. Human population has doubled about 4 times in the last 100 years. If it doubles yet again there's going to be 16 billion of us. Do you think the world and humanity can sustain infinite exponential growth? I don't think so. The only reasons to want population growth is because the pension system is a Ponzi scheme, but that's a completely different problem.

I also find it interesting that on one hand the argument against porn is, "porn is bad because it encourages X behavior in real life", but then another is "porn is bad because it discourages sex in real life".

ninetyninenine 6 days ago | parent [-]

>But even if that was true, who's to say that population has to keep growing?

The issue is bigger then that. It's weird though. First for context, when population grows, that growth is compounding usually. There's an acceleration.

Now that the population is in freefall, the freefall is also compounding. Like there are structural impacts that will effect most of the asian countries (where this problem will hit first) that will effect them economically.

Aerroon 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>It's possibly one of the drivers for world wide declining population.

Porn is illegal in South Korea, yet it's the country with the lowest fertility rate. If anything, this suggests a reverse of the correlation.

xigoi 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Tons of dudes satisfying themselves without the urge to go out and do the real thing.

As one of the “dudes satisfying themselves”, I’d happily “do the real thing” if that was an option. This is like complaining that people play spaceship simulator games instead of going out to drive an actual spaceship.

ninetyninenine 4 days ago | parent [-]

Think about it this way. If porn didn’t exist your will power to do the real thing would balloon. You would scale mountains to get it.

Like your sex drive would amp up to the point where you would spend the effort to ride the space ship.

xigoi 3 days ago | parent [-]

> You would scale mountains to get it.

You say that as if it was a good thing.

ninetyninenine 3 days ago | parent [-]

it is a good thing. Ironically hard effort leads to happiness. A life spent scaling mountains is happier then a life spent on the couch.

It's just where you are right now, the happiness part is not apparent. It's because it's a long term thing.

If porn or computers or TV or junk food didn't exist, you'd have nothing better to do then for mind numbing self improvement. Miserable, but in the long term you end up building something that makes you happier and more fulfilled. You build up resistance to the short term pain. And eventually depending on your case, the pain disappears completely. You start to enjoy scaling the mountain.

xigoi 3 days ago | parent [-]

With sex specifically, the results are inversely proportional to the effort. Putting a lot of time into seducing a woman is seen as desperate and creepy. The men who are getting laid the most just walk into a bar and women throw themselves at them.

ninetyninenine 3 days ago | parent [-]

They get rejected too. They become numb to that pain. Eventually they get laid.

Part of the pain is getting seen as desperate and creepy. The goal is to become numb to this. To not care.

DSingularity 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Population is declining for some societies but not others.

The older I get the more I start to believe that industrialization and pervasive technological adoption have come with a cost to humanity that maybe we don’t want to bear.

Aerroon 6 days ago | parent [-]

I think it's declining across the board. Some societies just haven't caught up to the decline yet. This is why immigration will never solve the problem either.