There's an additional issue with pornography which is not often discussed, which is that remember guys in particular, the brain is a learning prediction machine.
And if I'm not trying to say that all pornography is bad, but there are good data to support the idea that if your brain learns to be aroused by watching other people have sex, it is not necessarily gonna carry over to the ability to get aroused when you're one-on-one with somebody else, right?
Especially young kids who are consuming a lot of pornography.
The brain is learning sexual arousal to other people having sex.
So you're gonna program yourself into being a voyeur.
Or just create challenges in sexual interactions with a real partner.
Mary Harrington has the three laws of porno dynamics.
And the second law of porno dynamics is the law of fap entropy.
And it says that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more intense over time.
And I think that this is sort of speaking to that ever, ever sort of escalating amount of the wildness that you need to watch in order to get an ever decreasing stimulus that comes back.
Yeah.
And, you know, here I'm approaching this only through the lens of biology.
Right.
I'm not a.
You know, I'm not a psychologist and I'm certainly not political in any way, at least not.
I have ideas about politics, but I just don't discuss them publicly.
But the idea here is that, you know, I'm not saying pornography as a stimulus is bad or good.
What I'm saying is it in its availability and its extreme forms.
It's a very potent stimulus, and very potent stimuli of any kind extremely palatable food, extreme pornography, extreme experiences like bungee cord jumping, those set a threshold for dopamine release.
Ana will tell you that, and I'm sure she did that.
The higher the dopamine peak, the bigger the drop afterwards.
And it's not that you drop to baseline, you drop below baseline.
So again, it's not, these things aren't good or bad.
They just have to be controlled in a way, because when people are pursuing dopamine peaks over and over and over and they aren't getting them, typically it's because they've been pursuing that activity far too often.
And you're saying perhaps take a break from that and there may be an ability for yourself, your system, to reset.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean in theory, all the things that we're talking about with pornography could be superimposed onto food, or could be superimposed onto real sex.
Right.
That one also has to be cautious there.
Right.
But.
The cycling back and forth between dopamine and low dopamine states.
Dopamine fasting, as it were, but maybe just low dopamine states.
These are natural rhythms that existed in the nervous system.
We had to remember what the dopaminergic system is there for.
I'll say it again, I wasn't consulted at the design phase, but we know as a generic form of motivation and pursuit.
You can imagine the human or the animal that's hungry or thirsty.
It needs energy to go pursue the thing.
So the idea that you have to eat in order to get energy, that's true, but you need energy in order to get the thing to eat.
So our nervous system has energy also.
That's dopamine and epinephrine.
Yes, we use glucose and glycogen, et cetera when we're pursuing things.
But the idea here is you're pursuing something and then, either by smell or by sight, you think you're on the right track.
So you go down that track and then, ah, there it is.
You know, you get some berries or you get.
You know, let's get prehistoric about this, or you get to kill the prey and eat it.
And then it gives you energy to continue this pursuit or to reproduce.
I mean there's a reason why humans and other animals seek out reproduction is that every species, but certainly humans, have two innate desires built into them, whether or not they decide to actualize this or not.
Is the desire to protect young and make more of its own species.
Every successful species does that.
Even if people don't have children in general, people care about children because of what they represent.
Very few people dislike children.
I mean, there are a few mutants out there that dislike children, but you always worry about those kinds of people.
What's happening, people?
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