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Porn, E-Mail, And Human Contact

What online pornography and virtual friendships have in common
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Yesterday I met an old friend for coffee. Though we’ve been pals for almost 30 years, we haven’t gotten together even once since I moved to Baton Rouge three years ago. Both of us acknowledged that this was crazy, but you know how life is, etc.

After a while we finally left the table, and stood in the parking lot continuing our conversation. Finally we said goodbye. I got into my car, cranked the engine, and saw on the dashboard the time. We had spent nearly three hours together! I had been so engrossed in conversation I hadn’t noticed.

I almost never do things like this — get together with friends face to face, I mean. It’s not because I don’t want to, certainly, but I have to concede that I don’t try very hard to make it happen.

It is a familiar hypothesis that young men today don’t make the same efforts that they did in the past to court women because the ease with which hardcore pornography is available to them satisfies their immediate erotic desires. I have a feeling that the same kind of thing is at work with me and maintaining friendships.

I work at home, alone, and am in frequent contact via e-mail and text with people all over the world, all day. I am very, very grateful for this. My life would be immeasurably worse if I didn’t have these contacts. That said, I feel pretty confident that these friendships mediated by the Internet serve to diminish my natural desire to make face-to-face connections with others.

If I had no laptop or smartphone, and the only text-based connection I had to others was via snail-mail letter, I am certain that I would be … the kind of man my father was: one who left the house and did things in the real world, with real people. But I’m not, and though I really and truly would love to have more personal contact with friends in my life, it’s almost certainly the case that the rich correspondence I maintain throughout the day with friends far away takes the edge off.

Please note that I am not comparing e-mailing among friends with pornography, except in the narrow sense that both simulate real human contact, and thereby alleviate just enough the desire for companionship that ought to move us out of our comfortable bubbles.

Have you noticed this with yourself?

UPDATE: Matt in VA comments:

I would put it more specifically this way:

Porn allows people to find and consume imagery that taps into their specific, often *very* specific desires, fetishes, paraphilias, etc., and over time it can cause the porn viewer to need even more specific or even more extreme and taboo imagery in order to achieve the same level of arousal.

You might start out knowing you like dark-eyed and dark-haired women and might end up over the years becoming unable to get fully aroused unless you can find a new video of a Persian woman between the ages of 18 and 25 rubbing balloons between her breasts and then popping them under her stiletto heels. (Or you might end up fixated on something much less, much much less (relatively) innocuous).

At the same time, the internet and social media allows people to find other people who share the same outlook, worldview, specific tastes, specific anxieties, etc., to a degree people probably could not do before even if they lived in NYC or LA or London. Indeed, one can find a whole little crew of people all interested in the same highly niche subculture. Now, it would be silly to say that people just innately *have* these innate tastes, worldviews, etc.; people copy each other and people learn from each other and people mimic each other and people react against each other. But the internet allows you to find people who you “existentially identity with,” even if you end up influencing each other and changing each other somewhat, in a way that didn’t really exist before. You used to have to make do with whoever was around you, whoever shared your community.

It has a similar effect that porn has — you maybe used to be able to do stuff and have fun with people who were, in retrospect, pretty different from you, but after being Very Online for too long you find that you can only relate to people who share your understanding that Western Civilization made its fatal wrong turn with the Treaty of Westphalia and not a moment sooner or later in history than that. The fools who think we should go back to the 1950s! The idiots who want to revive paganism! And of course normies who think things are OK as they are — can’t even think of them, even to criticize them.

One can see the connection in the fact that today there are 914 different political types (anarcho-primitivists, American teens who pretend to be into Juche Thought, God knows what else) and 1,072 different sexualities. In both cases we see atomization at work. Massive worldwide connection serves to rip and tear apart the fabric of smaller communities and to sever unchosen bonds as we seek that which most uniquely speaks to our “inner selves”. But really we are probably closest to our “inner selves,” as elusive and possibly imaginary as they are, at the start. We find that in chasing them they go deeper, they hide more, they get further and further away and one day we wake up and find that we have turned ourselves into different people than we started out being because in chasing those glimpses of that “inner self” we actually travelled a lot of ground, perhaps far in a direction that we never should have gone. Porn use does change people, even if they always had something within them that did make them seek it out in the first place; and I think the discovery that one can find people who see things the way one does, and who are perhaps much, much better at expressing that worldview, can cause us to become unable to relate to and connect to others around us and, paradoxically, leave us that much more isolated and alone.

There have always been people who had perhaps some of their very deepest and most meaningful relationships by letter. So I don’t know. Maybe I am exaggerating things. But I do feel like so much of the world today has this kind of “feel” to it — that the online world is steadily becoming more “real” than the real world, that more and more people increasingly feel that what “matters” is what happens online. That will surely have significant effects.

(We don’t, for that matter, think enough about the effects that television has had on us. I see very little self-awareness about the significance of television on our society, especially during the 1950s through the 2000s.)

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