Lately there seems to be an abundance of anecdotal and research evidence to refrain from masturbation/quit porn. I am not sure that the evidence is conclusive enough for me to believe the validity of the claims. The touted benefits are impressive, while the potential cons seem minimal. I would be interested in some counter arguments and if not too personal, I’d like to know the thoughts of those who have participated in quitting masturbation/porn.
I quit porn three weeks ago and attempted to quit masturbation but failed. Subjectively I notice that I’m paying more attention to the women around me (and also having better orgasms when I do masturbate). My main reason for doing this was not so much that I found the research convincing as that the fact that people were even thinking about porn in this particular way helped me reorient my attitude towards porn from “it’s harmless” to “it’s a superstimulus, it may be causing a hedonic treadmill, and I should be wary of it in the same way that I’m now wary of sugar.” (There’s also a second reason which is personal.)
I like sixes_and_sevens’ hypothesis. Here’s another one: a smallish number of people really do have a serious porn addiction and really do benefit substantially from quitting cold turkey, but they’re atypical. (I don’t think I fall into this category, but I still think this is an interesting experiment to run.)
General comment: I think many people on LW have an implicit standard for adopting potential self-improvements that is way too high. When you’re asking for conclusive scientific evidence, you’re asking for something in the neighborhood of a 90% probability of success or higher. I think you should be willing to take probabilities of success in the neighborhood of 10% or lower in cases where the costs are sufficiently low. If you try out enough self-improvements, one of them may improve your life enough to have been worth all of the other failures (again, in cases where the costs are low). Plus, I think it’s useful to make a habit out of changing your habits (think of it as simulated annealing on your life). Otherwise, you may just get better and better at arguing yourself out of changing anything.
In other words, I think people should be less risk-averse with respect to potential self-improvements. Anna thinks something like this is particularly likely to be a failure mode of people with a math background, where the demands for probability of correctness are much higher than in most of life.
On a slightly related note, vibrators like the Hitachi Magic Wand are probably a superstimulus for women analogous to porn for men. (of course, anyone can enjoy either type, but that is less common)
Also I agree with your general comment about self improvements, especially since it is hard to find techniques/habits that work for everyone.
I think many people on LW have an implicit standard for adopting potential self-improvements that is way too high.
I thought that the opposite was true, in that LW regulars tended to be eager to try any suggested self-improvement idea that anybody had spent more than a few sentences offering anecdotal support for. Though that might just be overgeneralizing from my own habits.
Hmm. My impression is that people here are very willing to try anti-akrasia ideas but not very willing to try other kinds of ideas. I could be mistaken though.
This is also my impression. People are willing to discuss anti-akrasia since Eliezer talked about it, but otherwise people have an unfortunate allief that any advise older than a couple decades is superstition.
I cannot reach the site from where I am now, but try to look at The Last Psychiatrist blog, it has an article right about that. Its main point is that there’s a problem that cause both porn addiction and difficulties with sexual relationships, so that they’re not directly related. I have to say that my experience agrees with that: I haven’t any particular problem with my sexuality, and quitting porn for a couple of months did not had any noticeable positive or negative effect.
I am not sure that the evidence is conclusive enough for me to believe the validity of the claims.
I don’t either. The anecdotal evidence is the usual crap that you’ll see for anything, and the research they cite is equivocal or only distantly related or worse (someone linked a blog post arguing for this on LW in the past and I pointed out that most of the points were awful and one study actually showed the opposite of what they thought it showed, although I can’t seem to refind this comment right now).
There’s a big difference between the physical act of masturbation, which is probably harmless and good for you in moderate amounts, and the mental act of watching porn, which seems to be what people are advocating refraining from.
Also, r/nofap is weirdly cult-like from what I’ve seen and probably not a good resource. For example, this is the highest upvoted post that’s not a funny picture, and it seems to be making very, very exaggerated claims about the benefits of not jacking off: “If you actually stop jerking off, and I mean STOP—eliminate it as a possibilty from your life (as I and many others have) - your sex starved brain and testicles will literally lead you out into the world and between the legs of a female. It just HAPPENS. Try it, you numbskull. You’ll see that I speak the truth.”
There’s a big difference between the physical act of masturbation, which is probably harmless and good for you in moderate amounts, and the mental act of watching porn, which seems to be what people are advocating refraining from.
Oh. I didn’t notice the difference, because I automatically assumed those two acts to be connected.
So, would that mean that masturbation without watching porn is healthy and harmless, but masturbation with watching porn is harmful? Sounds like an easy setup for a scientific experiment.
Uhhh… perhaps the best solution would be to masturbate while solving problems of algebra, just to make sure to avoid the sin of superstimulus. (Unless algebraic equations count as superstimulus too, in which case I am doomed completely.)
This whole topic feels extremely suspicious to me. We have two crowds shouting their messages (“masturbation is completely safe and healthy, no bad side effects ever”, “porn is a dopamine addiction to superstimulus and will destroy your mind”), both of them claim to have science on their side, and imagining the world where both are correct does not make much sense.
To be honest, I suspect that both crowds are exaggerating and filtering the evidence. I also suspect that the actual reasons which created these crowds are something like this—“Watching porn and masturbation is something that low-status males do, because high-status males get real sex. Let’s criticize the low-status thing. Oh wait, women masturbate too; and we can’t criticize that, because criticizing women would be sexist! Also, religion criticized masturbation, so we should actually promote it, just to show how open-minded we are. But porn is safe to criticize, because that’s mostly a male thing. Therefore masturbation is perfectly okay, especially for a female, but porn is bad, and masturbation with porn is also bad. Other kinds of superstimuli, such as romantic stories for women, don’t associate with low status, therefore we should ignore them in our debate about the dangers of superstimuli. Let’s focus on criticizing the low-status things.”
I really don’t understand how imagining “porn is a superstimulus because it allows you to instantly watch amazing sex that conforms to your personal taste. and therefore makes real sex seem less enjoyable” and “masturbation is not physically unhealthy, nor will it make real sex seem less enjoyable, and not walking around with blue balls all the time will make you a little happier, and ‘practicing’ for sex occasionally will make the act easier” leads to a world that doesn’t make sense. I think it makes much more sense than your conspiracy theory against low-status males.
And romantic stories for woman seem to obviously not be a superstimulus in the same way porn might be? (For one, outside the realm of porn, TV is fairly addictive and literature isn’t.) There are diagnosed porn addicts whose addiction is ruining their lives, but I’ve never heard of any romantic novel addicts.
My reasoning is that if porn is seriously harmful and masturbation is absolutely harmless, there should be some aspect present at porn, but absent at masturbation and everyday life, which causes the harm. I have problem pointing out precisely what exactly that aspect would be.
Too much conforming to my personal taste? That’s already true for masturbation. Unlike at real sex, I can decide when, how often, for how long or short time, etc. But I am supposed to believe that none of this is a superstimulus, and it cannot make real sex less enjoyable even a bit. I am also supposed to believe that the similarities between masturbation and sex will help practising and make the act easier, but the differences are absolutely inconsequential.
Seeing too many sexy ladies that I can’t have sex with, some of them could be even more attractive than my partner? Well, I see sexy ladies when I walk down the street. And in the summer I will see even more. On the beach, still more. (I am not sure whether nudist beach is already beyond the limits, or not.) But I am supposed to believe that as long as I don’t see their nipples or something, it is completely safe. But if I see a nipple, my brain will release the waves of dopamine and my mind will be ruined. (If I understand the definition of porn correctly, seeing a naked sexy lady on a picture is already porn, even if she is not doing anything with anyone, am I right? And even limiting oneself to that kind of porn would be already harmful.)
All of that together? So if I see a sexy lady on the beach, and then I go home and masturbate thinking about her, that’s completely harmless. However, if I make a picture of her, and then at home I look at the picture, especially if the picture was taken at the nudist beach, that is harmful; the mere looking is harmful, even if I don’t touch myself.
Sorry for exaggerations, but this is how those theories feel to me, when taken together. I can imagine making convincing arguments for each of them separately. I just have trouble imagining a reasonable model which would explain both of them at the same time. Why a visual superstimulus ruins the real sex, but a tactile one is completely harmless.
Compared with that, a hypothesis “it is popular to slander low-status behavior, and the rest is rationalization” seems more likely.
Honestly, dude, you seem to be sort of engaging in black-and-white thinking that I wouldn’t expect from a LW reader. Yes, a noncentral example of porn use such as “looking at a candid picture of a nude woman and not touching your dick” is almost definitely harmless. A much more central example of porn use, however, is a guy who has been jacking off to porn four times a week since he was about thirteen, and has in that time seen probably hundreds of porn videos, of which he has selected a few that appeal very specifically to his particular tastes, which he watches regularly. There’s obviously no boundary where as soon as you do something labeled “watching porn” your brain will “release waves of dopamine and ruin your mind”. But it doesn’t seem hard to imagine that maybe that guy would be healthier if he changed his habits and started jacking off to his imagination (which he would probably end up doing much less frequently, I imagine), and “don’t jack off to anything but your imagination” is a much, much more effective rule to precommit to than “stop watching porn if you get the feeling that you might be falling for a superstimulus”, or whatever.
Honestly, dude, you seem to be sort of engaging in black-and-white thinking that I wouldn’t expect from a LW reader.
Ironically, I imagined myself as making fun of other people’s black-and-white thinking. (Masturbation completely healthy and harmless: in the skeptics discussion I linked. Porn: superstimulus ruining one’s mind and life.) I tried to find out how exactly the world would look like for people who believe both of these things; mostly because nobody here tried to contradict either of them. What would be the logical consequences of these beliefs—because people are often not aware of logical consequences of the beliefs they already have.
To me, both these beliefs feel like exaggerations, and they also feel contradictory, although technically they are not speaking about exactly the same thing. One kind of superstimulus is perfectly safe, other kind of superstimulus is addictive—is this an inconsistent approach to superstimuli, or a claim that these superstimuli are of a different nature?
I am thankful for two contributors willing to bite the bullet and describe what could the world look like if both beliefs were true. TheOtherDave said that actions controlled by one’s own mind (masturbation) could have smaller effect than actions not controlled by one’s own mind (watching a porn movie), just like it is difficult to tickle oneself. Qiaochu_Yuan said that some actions have natural limit where a human must stop (masturbation), while other actions have no such limit and can be prolonged indefinitely (watching porn), just like you can’t eat the whole day, but you can play a computer game the whole day. -- Both of these answers make sense and I did not realize that.
And that’s essentially all I wanted from this topic. (Unless someone would give me a pointer to a scientific study concerned with differences between masturbation without porn and masturbation with porn, in terms of addiction and behavioral change.)
I have problem pointing out precisely what exactly that aspect would be.
You can continuously watch porn in the same way that you can continuously play World of Warcraft. You can’t continuously masturbate in the same way that you can’t continuously eat pizza.
“Porn” is too vague. Are you talking about a quick 5-minute session or a marathon lasting several hours? If you’ve never done the latter, consider that some people might. The effects of the two are likely to be quite different, especially if the latter is a frequent occurrence.
Also, it’s not at all popular among my friend groups to slander porn. That’s seen as sex-negative, which is one reason I never got around to thinking about porn as potentially harmful until quite recently.
Generally, when people claim something is harmless, they don’t mean that it’s “absolutely harmless”. Playing videogames is harmful if you do it to the exclusion of eating, sleeping, and excreting, but one would not normally say that videogames are harmful based on them being harmful under such conditions. It is entirely possible to claim that porn is harmful, and that masturbation under similar circumstances (such as masturbating to mental images of people) is also harmful, while still consistently insisting that masturbation is harmless.
I guess that according to such people the problem is not porn per se, but the addiction to porn. Looking at ladies on the beach and going home and masturbating once isn’t problematic, but if you do that for 10% of your waking time for years… And ‘don’t watch porn’ makes for a better Schelling point than ‘don’t watch more than half an hour of porn a week’, for someone who’s trying to quit.
While I agree with your ultimate conclusion, it’s not that implausible that synchronously controlled self-stimulation (which IME most masturbation is, though I suppose it depends on what you’re into) is less stimulating than asychronously controlled self-stimulation (e.g., programming a pattern of changing frequencies on a vibrator, or downloading a bunch of porn and queuing a slideshow on my desktop, or visiting a series of previously selected websites with changing content), for many of the same reasons that I can’t tickle myself effectively with my fingers but can easily be tickled by inanimate objects.
If that turns out to be true, I would expect a not-very-rigorous analysis to conclude “masturbation is less stimulating than porn”, since asynchronously controlled masturbation is relatively rare, as is synchronously controlled porn.
We have two crowds shouting their messages (“masturbation is completely safe and healthy, no bad side effects ever”, “porn is a dopamine addiction to superstimulus and will destroy your mind”), both of them claim to have science on their side, and imagining the world where both are correct does not make much sense.
Really? I can imagine a world where plenty of things that might be considered addictive are quite safe and healthy, as long as you do them in moderation—and what counts as “moderation” may well be different among different people. E.g. some people might be highly sensitive to addiction, so that their only alternative is quitting the habit entirely.
When you say “eliminate it as a possibility from your life”, I get quite confused as to how this is managed. Take on as many roommates as possible and keep bathrooms on strict timers to minimize opportunities to do it in private? I’ve heard of people using sorts of cages to make doing it absurdly difficult and/or painful, but the one set of anecdotes I came across didn’t make it sound particularly effective.
It just sounds like you’re saying it’s within most people’s abilities to make masturbation practically impossible, which I find a much more difficult claim to believe than the assertion about the results.
First of all, I can’t tell if you realize that it’s not me saying it, it’s a quote that I selected for its absurdity.
But more importantly, I think he just means that the thought of jacking off no longer occurs to him or seems like something he has any reason to do, just like the idea of going to the store and buying cigarettes doesn’t really seem like a possibility to non-smokers. I don’t think he’s talking about wearing a chastity belt or anything.
Oh! I read that with a screen reader with punctuation turned off, so completely failed to notice that the last chunk of it was in quotes! Though I probably should have noticed something was up, if I’d compared it more carefully to the previous sentence, which makes two incredibly obvious posts I got completely wrong yesterday. :( Thanks for clarifying!
This page has some links to studies and informed-seeming medical opinions on the effects of porn. [comment retraction test; looks like there’s no way to reverse retraction]
I’ve never watched porn on a regular basis for about a decade, so I won’t comment about that. As for masturbation, IME there’s an optimum: too much of it (more than a couple of times a week for me—YMMV) seems to cause apathy and increase my need for sleep, but too little (less than once a week) makes it harder for me to focussedly think about anything other than women, and to fall asleep; and after ten days or so I can feel physical discomfort in my testicles (which takes hours to go away even after I eventually masturbate).
Pretty sure there’s quite a bit of variation in the optimum. I hit the “can’t concentrate on anything else” point at between 48 and 72 hours, and I don’t experience either apathy or greater sleep need.
Yeah, the optimum used to be shorter for me, too. It’s like I get habituated to [whatever happens when I don’t masturbate for a while] so that I need more to get the same positive effects, the way I do with (say) caffeine.
Lately there seems to be an abundance of anecdotal and research evidence to refrain from masturbation/quit porn. I am not sure that the evidence is conclusive enough for me to believe the validity of the claims. The touted benefits are impressive, while the potential cons seem minimal. I would be interested in some counter arguments and if not too personal, I’d like to know the thoughts of those who have participated in quitting masturbation/porn.
I quit porn three weeks ago and attempted to quit masturbation but failed. Subjectively I notice that I’m paying more attention to the women around me (and also having better orgasms when I do masturbate). My main reason for doing this was not so much that I found the research convincing as that the fact that people were even thinking about porn in this particular way helped me reorient my attitude towards porn from “it’s harmless” to “it’s a superstimulus, it may be causing a hedonic treadmill, and I should be wary of it in the same way that I’m now wary of sugar.” (There’s also a second reason which is personal.)
I like sixes_and_sevens’ hypothesis. Here’s another one: a smallish number of people really do have a serious porn addiction and really do benefit substantially from quitting cold turkey, but they’re atypical. (I don’t think I fall into this category, but I still think this is an interesting experiment to run.)
General comment: I think many people on LW have an implicit standard for adopting potential self-improvements that is way too high. When you’re asking for conclusive scientific evidence, you’re asking for something in the neighborhood of a 90% probability of success or higher. I think you should be willing to take probabilities of success in the neighborhood of 10% or lower in cases where the costs are sufficiently low. If you try out enough self-improvements, one of them may improve your life enough to have been worth all of the other failures (again, in cases where the costs are low). Plus, I think it’s useful to make a habit out of changing your habits (think of it as simulated annealing on your life). Otherwise, you may just get better and better at arguing yourself out of changing anything.
In other words, I think people should be less risk-averse with respect to potential self-improvements. Anna thinks something like this is particularly likely to be a failure mode of people with a math background, where the demands for probability of correctness are much higher than in most of life.
People on LW have a habit of treating posts as if LW were a peer-reviewed journal rather than a place to play with ideas.
On a slightly related note, vibrators like the Hitachi Magic Wand are probably a superstimulus for women analogous to porn for men. (of course, anyone can enjoy either type, but that is less common)
Also I agree with your general comment about self improvements, especially since it is hard to find techniques/habits that work for everyone.
Yes, but make sure to count all the costs, incl. opportunity costs, in there.
Agreed. But the opportunity cost of quitting porn, for example, is negative: it’s actually saving me time.
I thought that the opposite was true, in that LW regulars tended to be eager to try any suggested self-improvement idea that anybody had spent more than a few sentences offering anecdotal support for. Though that might just be overgeneralizing from my own habits.
Hmm. My impression is that people here are very willing to try anti-akrasia ideas but not very willing to try other kinds of ideas. I could be mistaken though.
This is also my impression. People are willing to discuss anti-akrasia since Eliezer talked about it, but otherwise people have an unfortunate allief that any advise older than a couple decades is superstition.
Hypothesis: arbitrary long-term acts of self-control improve personal well-being, regardless of the benefits of the specific act.
See also: Lent.
I cannot reach the site from where I am now, but try to look at The Last Psychiatrist blog, it has an article right about that. Its main point is that there’s a problem that cause both porn addiction and difficulties with sexual relationships, so that they’re not directly related. I have to say that my experience agrees with that: I haven’t any particular problem with my sexuality, and quitting porn for a couple of months did not had any noticeable positive or negative effect.
I don’t either. The anecdotal evidence is the usual crap that you’ll see for anything, and the research they cite is equivocal or only distantly related or worse (someone linked a blog post arguing for this on LW in the past and I pointed out that most of the points were awful and one study actually showed the opposite of what they thought it showed, although I can’t seem to refind this comment right now).
On skeptics.stackexchange.com, the only answer on this topic is that masturbation is completely harmless.
There’s a big difference between the physical act of masturbation, which is probably harmless and good for you in moderate amounts, and the mental act of watching porn, which seems to be what people are advocating refraining from.
Also, r/nofap is weirdly cult-like from what I’ve seen and probably not a good resource. For example, this is the highest upvoted post that’s not a funny picture, and it seems to be making very, very exaggerated claims about the benefits of not jacking off: “If you actually stop jerking off, and I mean STOP—eliminate it as a possibilty from your life (as I and many others have) - your sex starved brain and testicles will literally lead you out into the world and between the legs of a female. It just HAPPENS. Try it, you numbskull. You’ll see that I speak the truth.”
Oh. I didn’t notice the difference, because I automatically assumed those two acts to be connected.
So, would that mean that masturbation without watching porn is healthy and harmless, but masturbation with watching porn is harmful? Sounds like an easy setup for a scientific experiment.
But what if you’re imagining porn?
Uhhh… perhaps the best solution would be to masturbate while solving problems of algebra, just to make sure to avoid the sin of superstimulus. (Unless algebraic equations count as superstimulus too, in which case I am doomed completely.)
This whole topic feels extremely suspicious to me. We have two crowds shouting their messages (“masturbation is completely safe and healthy, no bad side effects ever”, “porn is a dopamine addiction to superstimulus and will destroy your mind”), both of them claim to have science on their side, and imagining the world where both are correct does not make much sense.
To be honest, I suspect that both crowds are exaggerating and filtering the evidence. I also suspect that the actual reasons which created these crowds are something like this—“Watching porn and masturbation is something that low-status males do, because high-status males get real sex. Let’s criticize the low-status thing. Oh wait, women masturbate too; and we can’t criticize that, because criticizing women would be sexist! Also, religion criticized masturbation, so we should actually promote it, just to show how open-minded we are. But porn is safe to criticize, because that’s mostly a male thing. Therefore masturbation is perfectly okay, especially for a female, but porn is bad, and masturbation with porn is also bad. Other kinds of superstimuli, such as romantic stories for women, don’t associate with low status, therefore we should ignore them in our debate about the dangers of superstimuli. Let’s focus on criticizing the low-status things.”
Romance novels are low status. They just aren’t as low status as porn.
I really don’t understand how imagining “porn is a superstimulus because it allows you to instantly watch amazing sex that conforms to your personal taste. and therefore makes real sex seem less enjoyable” and “masturbation is not physically unhealthy, nor will it make real sex seem less enjoyable, and not walking around with blue balls all the time will make you a little happier, and ‘practicing’ for sex occasionally will make the act easier” leads to a world that doesn’t make sense. I think it makes much more sense than your conspiracy theory against low-status males.
And romantic stories for woman seem to obviously not be a superstimulus in the same way porn might be? (For one, outside the realm of porn, TV is fairly addictive and literature isn’t.) There are diagnosed porn addicts whose addiction is ruining their lives, but I’ve never heard of any romantic novel addicts.
My reasoning is that if porn is seriously harmful and masturbation is absolutely harmless, there should be some aspect present at porn, but absent at masturbation and everyday life, which causes the harm. I have problem pointing out precisely what exactly that aspect would be.
Too much conforming to my personal taste? That’s already true for masturbation. Unlike at real sex, I can decide when, how often, for how long or short time, etc. But I am supposed to believe that none of this is a superstimulus, and it cannot make real sex less enjoyable even a bit. I am also supposed to believe that the similarities between masturbation and sex will help practising and make the act easier, but the differences are absolutely inconsequential.
Seeing too many sexy ladies that I can’t have sex with, some of them could be even more attractive than my partner? Well, I see sexy ladies when I walk down the street. And in the summer I will see even more. On the beach, still more. (I am not sure whether nudist beach is already beyond the limits, or not.) But I am supposed to believe that as long as I don’t see their nipples or something, it is completely safe. But if I see a nipple, my brain will release the waves of dopamine and my mind will be ruined. (If I understand the definition of porn correctly, seeing a naked sexy lady on a picture is already porn, even if she is not doing anything with anyone, am I right? And even limiting oneself to that kind of porn would be already harmful.)
All of that together? So if I see a sexy lady on the beach, and then I go home and masturbate thinking about her, that’s completely harmless. However, if I make a picture of her, and then at home I look at the picture, especially if the picture was taken at the nudist beach, that is harmful; the mere looking is harmful, even if I don’t touch myself.
Sorry for exaggerations, but this is how those theories feel to me, when taken together. I can imagine making convincing arguments for each of them separately. I just have trouble imagining a reasonable model which would explain both of them at the same time. Why a visual superstimulus ruins the real sex, but a tactile one is completely harmless.
Compared with that, a hypothesis “it is popular to slander low-status behavior, and the rest is rationalization” seems more likely.
Honestly, dude, you seem to be sort of engaging in black-and-white thinking that I wouldn’t expect from a LW reader. Yes, a noncentral example of porn use such as “looking at a candid picture of a nude woman and not touching your dick” is almost definitely harmless. A much more central example of porn use, however, is a guy who has been jacking off to porn four times a week since he was about thirteen, and has in that time seen probably hundreds of porn videos, of which he has selected a few that appeal very specifically to his particular tastes, which he watches regularly. There’s obviously no boundary where as soon as you do something labeled “watching porn” your brain will “release waves of dopamine and ruin your mind”. But it doesn’t seem hard to imagine that maybe that guy would be healthier if he changed his habits and started jacking off to his imagination (which he would probably end up doing much less frequently, I imagine), and “don’t jack off to anything but your imagination” is a much, much more effective rule to precommit to than “stop watching porn if you get the feeling that you might be falling for a superstimulus”, or whatever.
Ironically, I imagined myself as making fun of other people’s black-and-white thinking. (Masturbation completely healthy and harmless: in the skeptics discussion I linked. Porn: superstimulus ruining one’s mind and life.) I tried to find out how exactly the world would look like for people who believe both of these things; mostly because nobody here tried to contradict either of them. What would be the logical consequences of these beliefs—because people are often not aware of logical consequences of the beliefs they already have.
To me, both these beliefs feel like exaggerations, and they also feel contradictory, although technically they are not speaking about exactly the same thing. One kind of superstimulus is perfectly safe, other kind of superstimulus is addictive—is this an inconsistent approach to superstimuli, or a claim that these superstimuli are of a different nature?
I am thankful for two contributors willing to bite the bullet and describe what could the world look like if both beliefs were true. TheOtherDave said that actions controlled by one’s own mind (masturbation) could have smaller effect than actions not controlled by one’s own mind (watching a porn movie), just like it is difficult to tickle oneself. Qiaochu_Yuan said that some actions have natural limit where a human must stop (masturbation), while other actions have no such limit and can be prolonged indefinitely (watching porn), just like you can’t eat the whole day, but you can play a computer game the whole day. -- Both of these answers make sense and I did not realize that.
And that’s essentially all I wanted from this topic. (Unless someone would give me a pointer to a scientific study concerned with differences between masturbation without porn and masturbation with porn, in terms of addiction and behavioral change.)
You can continuously watch porn in the same way that you can continuously play World of Warcraft. You can’t continuously masturbate in the same way that you can’t continuously eat pizza.
“Porn” is too vague. Are you talking about a quick 5-minute session or a marathon lasting several hours? If you’ve never done the latter, consider that some people might. The effects of the two are likely to be quite different, especially if the latter is a frequent occurrence.
Also, it’s not at all popular among my friend groups to slander porn. That’s seen as sex-negative, which is one reason I never got around to thinking about porn as potentially harmful until quite recently.
It may be that masturbation has satiation much more than looking at pictures does.
Generally, when people claim something is harmless, they don’t mean that it’s “absolutely harmless”. Playing videogames is harmful if you do it to the exclusion of eating, sleeping, and excreting, but one would not normally say that videogames are harmful based on them being harmful under such conditions. It is entirely possible to claim that porn is harmful, and that masturbation under similar circumstances (such as masturbating to mental images of people) is also harmful, while still consistently insisting that masturbation is harmless.
I guess that according to such people the problem is not porn per se, but the addiction to porn. Looking at ladies on the beach and going home and masturbating once isn’t problematic, but if you do that for 10% of your waking time for years… And ‘don’t watch porn’ makes for a better Schelling point than ‘don’t watch more than half an hour of porn a week’, for someone who’s trying to quit.
While I agree with your ultimate conclusion, it’s not that implausible that synchronously controlled self-stimulation (which IME most masturbation is, though I suppose it depends on what you’re into) is less stimulating than asychronously controlled self-stimulation (e.g., programming a pattern of changing frequencies on a vibrator, or downloading a bunch of porn and queuing a slideshow on my desktop, or visiting a series of previously selected websites with changing content), for many of the same reasons that I can’t tickle myself effectively with my fingers but can easily be tickled by inanimate objects.
If that turns out to be true, I would expect a not-very-rigorous analysis to conclude “masturbation is less stimulating than porn”, since asynchronously controlled masturbation is relatively rare, as is synchronously controlled porn.
Literature isn’t addictive? I think I’m going to have to disagree with you there. (And TV isn’t addictive for me, personally, at -all-.)
Additionally, a Google search on “romance novel addiction” suggests there are such addicts.
Really? I can imagine a world where plenty of things that might be considered addictive are quite safe and healthy, as long as you do them in moderation—and what counts as “moderation” may well be different among different people. E.g. some people might be highly sensitive to addiction, so that their only alternative is quitting the habit entirely.
When you say “eliminate it as a possibility from your life”, I get quite confused as to how this is managed. Take on as many roommates as possible and keep bathrooms on strict timers to minimize opportunities to do it in private? I’ve heard of people using sorts of cages to make doing it absurdly difficult and/or painful, but the one set of anecdotes I came across didn’t make it sound particularly effective.
It just sounds like you’re saying it’s within most people’s abilities to make masturbation practically impossible, which I find a much more difficult claim to believe than the assertion about the results.
First of all, I can’t tell if you realize that it’s not me saying it, it’s a quote that I selected for its absurdity.
But more importantly, I think he just means that the thought of jacking off no longer occurs to him or seems like something he has any reason to do, just like the idea of going to the store and buying cigarettes doesn’t really seem like a possibility to non-smokers. I don’t think he’s talking about wearing a chastity belt or anything.
Oh! I read that with a screen reader with punctuation turned off, so completely failed to notice that the last chunk of it was in quotes! Though I probably should have noticed something was up, if I’d compared it more carefully to the previous sentence, which makes two incredibly obvious posts I got completely wrong yesterday. :( Thanks for clarifying!
Meh. I just use picoeconomics for that.
This page has some links to studies and informed-seeming medical opinions on the effects of porn. [comment retraction test; looks like there’s no way to reverse retraction]
I’ve never watched porn on a regular basis for about a decade, so I won’t comment about that. As for masturbation, IME there’s an optimum: too much of it (more than a couple of times a week for me—YMMV) seems to cause apathy and increase my need for sleep, but too little (less than once a week) makes it harder for me to focussedly think about anything other than women, and to fall asleep; and after ten days or so I can feel physical discomfort in my testicles (which takes hours to go away even after I eventually masturbate).
Pretty sure there’s quite a bit of variation in the optimum. I hit the “can’t concentrate on anything else” point at between 48 and 72 hours, and I don’t experience either apathy or greater sleep need.
Yeah, the optimum used to be shorter for me, too. It’s like I get habituated to [whatever happens when I don’t masturbate for a while] so that I need more to get the same positive effects, the way I do with (say) caffeine.