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0 points6d0debc07112y ago0 comments

> Just look at life before porn existed. Never any healthy societies or sexual relationships then - they did not even exist. What harm could porn possibly cause anyone? Putting into someones mind a fantasy of how sex really can and should be? How could that ever cause any future sexual relationship to suffer in any way?

Sure, it could be. Might not though.

We're all gamblers when it comes to the truth, and you have to be holding some cards to be taken seriously most of the games worth playing.

Could is not a strong card. It really doesn't mean much when it comes to promoting a strong or extreme position without a high probability of harm or benefit attached to it. It's the start of an argument, not an argument of itself.

"Oh it could be... the aliens plotting to invade could be in his garage... sure it could happen that you win the lottery."

'Possibly' is like 'could' - almost directly interchangeable in fact:

"Oh it's possible... the aliens plotting to invade are possibly in his garage... sure it's possible that you win the lottery."

But, probably not.

Possibility alone is not an argument. Almost anything could possibly mess someone up, almost anything could possibly set a murderer off for instance. Have your read some mass murderers' messages? There's stuff in there like the women exercising at the gym made them realise how they'd never get anyone to love them and then they got snubbed by a woman and went mental.

So, possibly my going swimming will make someone kill someone, best not go swimming any more then!

Of course, you probable wouldn't suggest that women stop swimming because it might set some random nutjob off. Because the pleasure that many women take in swimming is taken to far outweigh a small probability of it doing so. Our rights trump the probability of their madness, people shouldn't have to live in fear that they're going to be someone's excuse. But, if the probability of madness was high - if men almost always went insane when women were swimming, if they were just physiologically unable to control themselves; well, I suspect that it wouldn't be the case that our right trumped their madness because the probability of harm would be so much higher.

Merely noting that something is possible is a potential beginning; somewhere to go and look up statistics and start measuring harms from if it seems probable enough to you on the basis of your prior and the actions you'd take on the basis of it being true or false to be worth looking into. If someone tells you there's an alien in their garrage the next step, if you think it probable enough to be worth looking into, is to go, 'Well, let's have a look then.' Not to start planning your response to the invasion fleet.

What the probability is matters. We can all imagine things possibly happening that are not implausible, yet in reality are not at all probable. And because our brains are not operating on floating point variables, we don't actually have a way to feel how small the probabilities behind various degrees of possible are. So, going with your feelings of shock about 'how could something possibly' is a bad call. To say something meaningful, in the sense that it ought to guide policy and action you have to use maths and numbers, not feelings. You have to use data, not instinct. You have to be able to promote an idea of how probable it is, not just note that it's possible.

While we're here I suppose I should note that 'Just look at life before porn... it wasn't awful.' Is not evidence for porn being bad either. It's, at best, just an argument for it not being an all surpassing good - and even there you haven't controlled for socioeconomic factors so you can't really be said to be comparing like for like. Methodologically it's not sound.

And even ignoring all that, the argument still falls down. Maybe there were some healthy relationships before porn, but the days before porn included....

Oh, you mean the days when young girls were sold off to be fucked when they had their first period?

Or perhaps you're talking about the golden era of traditional gender roles, when it was legal to rape your wife and some women were essentially prisoners in their own homes.

Or perhaps you're going more traditional, Aesop's fables:

'A woman, a spaniel and a walnut tree, The more they're beaten the better they'll be.'

Even disregarding the methodological flaws, noted above, life before porn was not good for some people. Of course there probably were some healthy relationships back then, and maybe even the majority of such relationships were healthy. Or maybe not. As I'm sure you'll agree, the numbers matter in determining quite how horrifying history is.

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Aside:

Personally, I find the unequal treatment of women in the workplace and government in history to make even the definition of healthy relationships in historical terms very difficult. Were I to define a healthy relationship it would go something like 'An equal, fair, and mutually beneficial relationship that makes those involved happy....' But how can it be equal and fair when one side has the majority of the power? We, or at least women at various points in time, were deprived of access to significant power, and thus of significant agency, from a very early age.

Imagine telling someone that the most they could aspire to was to be some man's secretary and the only way they could hope to interact with most of society was through their husband. I've no doubt you could grow to largely ignore that, if you grew up with it, but then again people grow up to largely ignore being blind too. I'm unsure under that interpretation how you'd even begin to define a healthy relationship as distinct from Stockholm Syndrome.

I wouldn't be able to take that. I wouldn't want to live in that world and I'd be constantly timid and afraid of even someone I'd otherwise love if they wielded that sort of power over me.

Which isn't to say that all historical relationships were examples of such patterns. I'm just saying that even the act of definition there is going to be very difficult. You can't really talk about healthy relationships without reference to the psychology of those involved, and that also involves references to the surrounding power structures - which will vary both with time and place. You can't meaningfully abstract over large portions of history without putting in significant work to normalise your terms across contexts.

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goggles9912y ago

Sure, it could be. Might not though. The probability is higher than almost any other type of content that can be viewed. You fail to mention this, comparing simulated rape and hardcore porn to swimming? The probabilities are not even on the same chart they are so far apart. Throw out psychology and statistics/polls and merely do a brain scan on the average person going to the beach/pool and the average person watching simulated rape or some hardcore porn. Only the latter creates a huge response in the brain and vivid memories for decades. This alone is evidence to any neurologist that porn has a high probability to create lasting effects in the brain and form brand new neural pathways which change the through process of the subject (usually permanently).

My mention of "life before porn" was not meant to be an argument that port is bad. Some comments here treat port as such a healthy, natural and helpful thing. Lets take the last 100 years of western civilization. the first without porn, the second with. What did it improve? It is hard to argue that it has benefited society as a whole, but not so hard to make an argument that it has harmed it.

6d0debc071OP12y ago

> Throw out psychology and statistics/polls and....

And you lose the ability to talk about probability in a meaningful way.

If something does create an almost unprecedentedly large response in the brain, does that make it more likely to create lasting effects in the brain and cause the formation of new neural pathways?

I don't know. You want to claim that it's highly probable but you've provided no evidence for this. I know that porn addicts brains are different, primarily in terms of the reward system in ways similar to other addictions I believe, but you'd expect that to be the case. And you've certainly not linked any probability of large responses to the probability of potential changes to the probability of any potential to harm.

If you can't put numbers on it to compare it to other things, you really have no way to talk about probability that's not just waving your hands around and going 'Look at the brain scan!' Well, so what? Even assuming that all of your premises are true, (and the probability of concurrent events is the sum of their multiples so you've lost probability at every stage whatever the actual numbers would turn out to be; complexity penalty) and these brain scans actually exist, what does that mean? Is the probability of harm five times as likely as something else, twenty? If the initial chance of harm is quite small this doesn't make much difference. Is it three orders of magnitude out?

Neurology is a complicated area of inquiry, unless you know how often a given change links up with some result, it's just a picture.

You can't forget about psychology and stats and still meaningfully make statements like 'it's not even on the same chart' you have to know where both things are to be able to talk about that sort of thing - you have to have put the work in and have the numbers.

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