{{Translation of ask:

“porn is a cheap knockoff version of something else” okay Mr. brain genius please tell me where i can find the real life people being inflated like a balloon (and not being harmed beyond mild embarrassment in the process)? because i would very much like to find this. you have no idea how much i would like to find this. (actually, you’ve been on the internet most of your life. you probably have a pretty good idea of how much i’d like to find this.)}}

eightyonekilograms:

oligetcetera-deactivated2023072:

On the contrary, this is a delightfully unique ask! Thanks, even if I can’t give a satisfying answer. But since you did:

Nyevtug, fb svefg, V jnag gb gunax lbh orpnhfr guvf jnf n ernyvgl purpx ntnvafg zl fhccbfvgvbaf. Gur fgngrzrag nf V bevtvanyyl znqr vg qbrfa’g fgnaq hc gb zhpu fpehgval; abg whfg va pnfrf yvxr lbhef ohg va rira gur zbfg znvafgernz gnfgr. Snagnfvrf nera’g ernyvgl be rira n cbbe irefvba bs ernyvgl, naq gurer ner cyragl bs pnfrf jurer gurl’er npgviryl orggre; pregnvayl gur onqarff qbrfa’g sybj bire: vg jbhyq or na hahfhny zbanzbebhf crefba jub qvqa’g fbzrgvzrf snagnfvmr nobhg bgure crbcyr, rira gubhtu purngvat vf jebat; gur oybbqyhfg vaqhytrq va fubbgref be zrtnybznavn va fgengrtl tnzrf jbhyq or qnatrebhf va nabgure pbagrkg ohg svar va vg, naq fb ba. V jba’g fnl vg arire pneevrf bire nf na veba cevapvcyr ohg pregnvayl V jbhyqa’g ybbx ng na vasyngvba srgvfu nfxnapr va gur fnzr jnl V zvtug fbzrbar jvgu rynobengr snagnfvrf bs gbeghevat fgenatref gb qrngu, rira gubhtu npghnyyl vasyngvat fbzrbar jbhyq or onq, nf lbh abgr. V yvxr tevzqnex ECTf naq gurl’er gurve bja tbbq guvat naq abg n cnyr ersyrpgvba bs npghny tevz qnexarff, juvpu vf onq.

Jung V guvax V jbhyq fgvyy fgnaq ol vf gung V guvax cbeabtencul, ng gur irel yrnfg va gur zbqny pnfr, vf n fhcrefgvzhyhf va n jnl V frr xvaq bs rirelguvat geraqvat gbjneqf. Cbeabtencul vf cebonoyl yrff qnatrebhf guna zbfg bgure fhcrefgvzhyv bs guvf fbeg orpnhfr hayrff lbh tb bss gur qrrc raq lbh’er abg fcraqvat sberire ba vg, nygubhtu V guvax gurer’f na vapragvir tenqvrag gbjneqf gung. Jura zl qnq pnzr bire ur jbhyq whfg ynl ba gur pbhpu naq jngpu Snvy Nezl ivqrbf sbe ubhef; boivbhfyl gurer’f n ovttre vffhr gurer jvgu yvxr jbexcynpr rkunhfgvba (qhqr arrqf gb ergver) ohg vg frrzf jbefr.

Be gb chg vg zber pbapergryl naq yvzvgvat guvatf gb zl bja pnfr, V guvax zl bja fgvzhyhf (une) gb dhvg cbea pbyq ghexrl jnf yvxr qvfpbirevat ba erqqvg gurfr yvxr cebterffviryl zber naq zber rssvpvrag qryvirel zrpunavfzf, sebz nzvanxrq bs zl lbhgu juvpu jbhyq pbyyngr cvpf sebz bgure fvgrf ba gb gur ghor fvgrf naq erqqvgc naq erqqvgyvfg sbe qvfpbirel hagvy gurer jnf whfg bar jurer vg znpuvar yrneavatrq jung lbh hcibgrq naq fubjrq lbh zber naq zber bs gung, naq V qrpvqrq, “shpx, V’ir nyjnlf orra onq ng frys-pbageby, V’z ab zngpu sbe guvf.” V qba’g yvxr gur zrqvpnyvmvat ynathntr bs “nqqvpgvba” ohg gurer vf qrsvavgryl n curabzrabybtl bs “uhu V jvfu V unqa’g qbar fb zhpu bs gung, ubj pna V znxr zlfrys srry orggre nobhg vg bu k” juvpu V fgvyy srry nobhg n ybg bs guvatf bxnl zbfgyl fbpvny zrqvn jvgu yvxrf. (Urapr jul V ervapneangr urer fb bsgra. Juvpu V guvax unf npghnyyl jbexrq bhg cerggl jryy – vs V unq orra fgrnqvyl npphzhyngvat sbyybjref urer sbe n qrpnqr V guvax gung yriry bs rkcbfher jbhyq or onq.)

(Naljnl n pbhcyr lrnef yngre naq gur fpnel cbea qryvirel zrpunavfz vf abj gur rknpg zbqry lbhat crbcyr hfr gb qvfpbire nyy zrqvn, yby! Ubcr gung tbrf jryy.)

Xrrcvat hc jvgu guvf fjrnevat bss bs cbea unf orra gbhtu guvf cnfg unys lrne jurer zl cnegare nera’g dhvgr nf zngpurq va yvovqb nf jr hfrq gb or, ohg gubfr guvatf syhpghngr naq gou gur vqrn bs n “fgernx” pna or vgf bja tnzvsvrq zbgvingvba, naq fbzrgvzrf jura V’z gelvat gb tvir zlfrys n crc gnyx gung V’z zber pncnoyr guna V tvir zlfrys perqvg sbe gung’f jung V’yy pvgr, ba zl bja sbe-vagreany-hfr erfhzr.

Naljnl lbh jrer cebonoyl ubcvat sbe fbzr VEY vasyngvba gvcf juvpu V’z abg dhnyvsvrq gb tvir. (V pbhyq nfx PungTCG, ohg fb pbhyq lbh, naq V qrsvavgryl jbhyqa’g jnag gb fnl nalguvat nobhg gur zrqvpny nqivfnovyvgl bs nalguvat vg fhttrfgrq! Shaal bar gb vzntvar hfvat gur tenaqzn rkcybvg ba gubhtu yby.) Ohg znlor zl sbyybjref pna uryc – nal gnxref?

{{Translation of response:

Alright, so first, I want to thank you because this was a reality check against my suppositions. The statement as I originally made it doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny; not just in cases like yours but in even the most mainstream taste. Fantasies aren’t reality or even a poor version of reality, and there are plenty of cases where they’re actively better; certainly the badness doesn’t flow over: it would be an unusual monamorous person who didn’t sometimes fantasize about other people, even though cheating is wrong; the bloodlust indulged in shooters or megalomania in strategy games would be dangerous in another context but fine in it, and so on. I won’t say it never carries over as an iron principle but certainly I wouldn’t look at an inflation fetish askance in the same way I might someone with elaborate fantasies of torturing strangers to death, even though actually inflating someone would be bad, as you note. I like grimdark RPGs and they’re their own good thing and not a pale reflection of actual grim darkness, which is bad.

What I think I would still stand by is that I think pornography, at the very least in the modal case, is a superstimulus in a way I see kind of everything trending towards. Pornography is probably less dangerous than most other superstimuli of this sort because unless you go off the deep end you’re not spending forever on it, although I think there’s an incentive gradient towards that. When my dad came over he would just lay on the couch and watch Fail Army videos for hours; obviously there’s a bigger issue there with like workplace exhaustion (dude needs to retire) but it seems worse.

Or to put it more concretely and limiting things to my own case, I think my own stimulus (har) to quit porn cold turkey was like discovering on reddit these like progressively more and more efficient delivery mechanisms, from aminaked of my youth which would collate pics from other sites on to the tube sites and redditp and redditlist for discovery until there was just one where it machine learninged what you upvoted and showed you more and more of that, and I decided, “fuck, I’ve always been bad at self-control, I’m no match for this.” I don’t like the medicalizing language of “addiction” but there is definitely a phenomenology of “huh I wish I hadn’t done so much of that, how can I make myself feel better about it oh x” which I still feel about a lot of things okay mostly social media with likes. (Hence why I reincarnate here so often. Which I think has actually worked out pretty well – if I had been steadily accumulating followers here for a decade I think that level of exposure would be bad.)

(Anyway a couple years later and the scary porn delivery mechanism is now the exact model young people use to discover all media, lol! Hope that goes well.)

Keeping up with this swearing off of porn has been tough this past half year where my partner aren’t quite as matched in libido as we used to be, but those things fluctuate and tbh the idea of a “streak” can be its own gamified motivation, and sometimes when I’m trying to give myself a pep talk that I’m more capable than I give myself credit for that’s what I’ll cite, on my own for-internal-use resume.

Anyway you were probably hoping for some IRL inflation tips which I’m not qualified to give. (I could ask ChatGPT, but so could you, and I definitely wouldn’t want to say anything about the medical advisability of anything it suggested! Funny one to imagine using the grandma exploit on though lol.) But maybe my followers can help – any takers?}}

I do think the one defensible motivation for regulating porn (beyond the obvious workplace safety and consent issues) is the porn-as-superstimulus hypothesis, but the issue is, as you note, it’s no more a superstimulus than, like, most of the consumer entertainment economy these days, so for consistency’s sake you’d have to crack down on most everything. And maybe that’s a bullet people are willing to bite, but what doesn’t make sense is singling out porn as a unique category of evil.

I will say that the expansion of gambling (esp. sports gambling and mobile gacha) recently has been much more of a mess than I possibly-naively assumed it would be, and I have moved in the direction of being more willing to take a hard line against superstimuli than I was a couple years ago. But with pornography I don’t see any plausible regulation mechanism that doesn’t burn down a bunch of licit creative expression, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

I wrote this in tag register but it turned out *way* too long to fit in the tags, so here we go:

#I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing lately

#how in a lot of ways I’ve so far gotten off lightly

#(…so to speak)

#by‚ like‚ running the brain equivalent of Solaris

#approximately nobody bothers to write malware specifically targeted at me

#occasionally I encounter stuff broad-spectrum enough to hit me

#–I generally have to avoid letting potato chips into the house–

#but there’s so much that just whooshes right by

#(also…a while back a mobile-game company attempted to bribe me to try their freemium casino)

#(I did try it‚ because I could really do with the bribe money and I knew I could refrain from microtransactions)

#(and wow it is *incredibly* fucking disturbing just how optimised for addictiveness that fucking thing is)

#(like‚ I could feel myself having a memetic immune response to it)

#(“playing” that “game” was miserable‚ in the way that a fever is miserable)

#((let’s see who burns first, motherfucker))

#(on day 2 I bailed on the agreement)

#(they’d offered me sixty honest-to-God actual Canadian dollars)

#(–bear in mind that for sufficiently easy work‚ the wage at which I am ambivalent about whether to take a gig is about $1.50 an hour–)

#(and *that was not enough to be worth further exposure to that Hell*)

#((I am torn on whether to read Addiction by Design or whether it would just fill me with despair))

#“we’ll increasingly be defined by what we say no to‚” I recently read in a post from 2010

#( http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html )

#((“the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world‚” he also said‚ on why he didn’t own a smartphone))

#((which on the one hand sure is a thing I have heard a lot of horror stories about))

#((and on the other hand smartphones are not in fact a package deal))

#((months after I wrote it‚ I still occasionally have people come up to me and thank me for my post on offline-first smartphone setups))

#(((we had a lovely chat about Graphene)))

#anyway‚ as I was saying a few months ago

#as the process of optimisation becomes increasingly automated‚ it becomes possible to efficiently target smaller and smaller niches

#I live in a world in which the main limiting factor on how many works of pornography I can read is how many *exist*

#and in which the process of exploration is inherently aversive because statistically almost all attempts dredge up only bad works

#and all but one attempt‚ ever‚ has dredged up at most okay works

#a machine-learning upvote algorithm simply wouldn’t have enough to work with

#it’s a very different world from the one Oligo lives in

#I’m not adapted to his world

#(I mean nobody really is‚ that’s the point‚ but me less than most)

#kind of scared of the prospect of joining him there

#(I suppose I do have the advantage of an estrogen-dominant hormonal profile)

#((I’m ovulating as I write this and I have been feeling so much pity for people who are *stuck* being fertile *all of the time*‚ holy shit))

#(…but pornography‚ the actual well-done stuff‚ *itself* heightens the libido)

#(like for *days* afterward)

#(I really did not expect how affecting it would be on that front)

#((although I guess maybe I should have; maybe it’s not actually so different from general lingering effects of fiction?))

#((…mind you‚ there were a bunch of complaints when access to novels first became widespread that boiled down to “they’re superstimuli’‘‚ weren’t there))

#(like on the one hand it’s good‚ if I *want* a higher libido‚ to have options less invasive and with fewer side effects than sleep deprivation)

#(but it was also a little unnerving and seems like it might have the potential for a vicious cycle)

#((…although in fairness it turns out that the feeling of looking at a notification email for a new porn chapter is *very different* from the feeling of looking at a bag of potato chips in my cupboard))

#((something to look forward to for later‚ rather than something tempting in the moment))

#((so that seems hopeful))

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Tags:

#reply via reblog #tag rambles #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #disappointed permanent resident of The Future #nsfw text #drugs cw? #gambling

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