As society has changed with technology, areas that are typically considered to be biological, animal, and human, are now pervaded by technology. This can creep up on a society as they are taken in by their pull of novelty. New lingo, acronyms, and terms are created as the new technology begins to mediate what was once just a human to human transaction. One example I remember from years ago was in a bar, and a guy there was hunched over like he had his fill of beer. His female partner walked out of the bathroom, put her hand on his shoulder next to his drooped head, and said “pussy-licking.” He slowly shuffled out of the bar to finish off his night.
Shark Attack 3: https://youtu.be/Xi-OQfjfSVY
The way Hollywood, fashion, and how powerful people create memes, trends, labels, terminology, and influences, Pornography now has seeped into mainstream culture as well. Looking at a site like Top Websites shows that pornography sites compete with social media and news sites, which many consider to be other forms of “porn.” In keeping with the theme of this series, one of the easiest replacements for intimate relationships is pornography, and newly emerging Artificial Intelligence partners.
Top Websites: https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/
In a world of regular divorce, fewer marriages, and the strait-jacket feeling coming from a society that wants to exploit you, delay your pleasure, and increase your frustration, tension, and depression, people often need quick outlets, or replacements for the big areas of life that need to work well in order to be happy: Work and Love. When either one, or both are compromised and inauthentic, the need for replacements increases. In Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain, William M. Struthers focuses on low self-worth and a need for human intimacy. When the mind becomes defective in those areas an identity can form around replacements.
“Something about pornography pulls and pushes at the male soul. The pull is easy to identify. The naked female form can be hypnotizing. A woman’s willingness to participate in a sexual act or to expose her nakedness is alluring to men. The awareness of one’s own sexuality, the longing to know, to experience something as good wells up from deep within. An image begins to pick up steam the longer we look upon it.”
Like all replacements, there’s a deadening of pleasure and happiness because the replacement only has so many emotional colors. “Pornography corrupts the ability to be intimate. It pulls consumers and producers in with the promise of intimacy, but fails to deliver the connection between two human beings.” Pornography is limited, but if one doesn’t like one’s environment, one’s relationships, or doesn’t have any authentic intimate relationships, a replacement like pornography can suddenly seem alluring. In Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred, Stoller explains this lack of spice in sexual subcomponents that aim to find a replacement for quick release. “To need to reduce another person to a breast or a penis or a bit of cloth before one can succeed in concentrating one’s lust is very sad-and dangerous; such severe failure of potency and degradation of lovingness only augment the other processes that today disintegrate one’s humanity.”
The feeling of worthlessness
Throughout all these reviews on this blog, Psychoanalysis constantly drums in the importance of appreciation starting with the mother, and in a sense the mother’s goal is convincing the child to like themselves. They are worthy of love. Many children receive this amply, but social forces outside the family, especially in school, workplaces, the money and lifestyle they can provide, and the competition with others to financially create a world of excitement and comfort to attract partners, can leave many people in the “worthless” bucket. If you are poor, you are also sexually unattractive. This need to be recognized by others in order to feel good about oneself is a narcissistic need that is very powerful, and when received, is a signal that one is doing well in the tribe.
“Men share with women the same basic needs of humanity. The need for intimacy, to be known and to know, to be close, affirmed, loved; all are human needs. The need for intimacy requires that we understand who we are and share that with those we long to be known by. As we become more intimate, the other speaks into us things about ourselves that we could not possibly know from the inside. We allow the one we are intimate with to discover us in ways we could not do on our own, and we do so with them. It’s a process that develops and deepens over time. We know ourselves more fully because we are known more fully.”
For Struthers, authentic sexuality has a sanctity for both partners, whereas with pornography, it’s all about using, dehumanization, and an individualistic perspective above all else. Yet this individualism can’t be easily ignored. No matter how one tries to have a collective experience there’s an element of self-esteem in wanting others to love us as a way to convince ourselves to like ourselves. “At the core of shame is the belief that the individual is not worthy of love.” As long as people feel unworthy of love, it can be a difficult road to rebuild the self when there are few social cues to trigger it. Fake appreciation also doesn’t cut it. It has to be genuinely earned for one to feel that social reward.
Struthers takes a Christian approach which is to help people in shame to turn to sanctification by finding an inherent worth through spirituality. For example, many people masochistically work themselves to death, try to create extravagant lifestyles to buy attention from others just so they can feel that they are worthy of love. “Shame only offers the lie of worthlessness, and a sense of worthlessness creates fertile soil for the continued exercising of sexual brokenness.” This social trap is one where one becomes a slave to social cues, and if those social cues don’t arrive, then the sense of self remains broken.
My Testimony | Pornography Addiction, Suicidal Thoughts, & How God Transformed My Heart – Jara: https://youtu.be/cRExYJj8Wrg
Independent emotional feeding is a recurring theme on this blog, and is partly why some people find it disorganized. The way to see the organization in many of these articles is how psychological development has to start in the gutter and work through dark periods of life, and once those problems are sorted out with more independent sources of pleasure, one then can move into positive psychology to create those life highlights one truly wants without pathology, or with less pathology. Without the foundation, the latter positive psychology endeavors crumble to the ground. For example, a lot of anger and bitterness decreases when one can see basic progress and momentum in one’s life. Low self-esteem can also give way when people are able to engage in interesting jobs and hobbies. One can give oneself appreciation cues through those activities. It’s a way to find one’s strengths and then eventually share them with others who genuinely appreciate those strengths.
Parmenides: https://youtu.be/dWdVTN5LQKs
Recidivism: https://psychreviews.org/perversion-part-6-recidivism/
The novelty seeking brain
Yet this hijacking of the brain is easy to achieve, and how it happens is explained by Gary Wilson in, Your Brain on Porn. Gary views the motivational part of the brain as a natural wanting that keeps people alert for what increases survival and procreation. “The pleasure of climax appears to arise from opioids, so think of dopamine as wanting and opioids as liking. As psychologist Susan Weinschenk explained, ‘dopamine causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search’. Yet ‘the dopamine system is stronger than the opioid system. We seek more than we are satisfied…Seeking is more likely to keep us alive than sitting around in a satisfied stupor.’ Addiction may be thought of as wanting run amok.”
The boredom and a need for novelty can eventually lead one to move into stranger tastes. Some of those border on or move into the illegal such as child pornography, incest, or rape scenarios. Others lead to places where people want to do things they normally would find gross when actually presented with these scenarios in real life with full detail. For example, if a pornographic video has someone sexually moaning while being pissed on, a person might just be turned on by the imitation of savoring that the porn actor is providing, but when actually presented with a person trying to urinate on the subject in real life, will the subject find it as arousing in all that realistic detail? Of course some daring types would do it, but it would be a small percentage of viewers.
Ass eating review – Vanessa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFdW46GYdf8
Mindfulness: Letting Go: https://youtu.be/iekCpuNqmek
Long periods of abstinence
The solution in many of these books is abstinence to regain sensitivity to living a full life, but it’s not easy and it takes time to rewire. “You cannot go back in time to a ‘restore point’, or erase all the data, as you would when you wipe clean a computer’s hard drive. However, many people do reverse their porn-related problems by giving the brain a well deserved rest from porn, porn fantasy and porn substitutes. And often the metaphor is a useful part of the process. After all, the problematic behaviours and symptoms of porn addiction are material in nature. They are inscribed in the structures of the brain. By changing behaviour we change those structures. Over time new ways of life are reflected in changes in brain function.”
Trying old interests that provided pleasure and comfort, or trying new interests, can provide what Freud calls Sublimation, where pleasure is gained in areas that don’t have to lead to orgasm. When people find their passions again, get into Flow states, and even to get to the point of forgetting about eating, sex, or substances for long periods of time, natural tiredness of activities can reveal a well rested sexual potential. One man in recovery admitted that there was a subtle, but powerful change. “When I got back from a conference yesterday I was exhausted physically and mentally. But this time I discovered an inner reservoir of energy I never expected to find. The sex was incredible, passionate, and unbelievable. I felt like I was 20 years old all over again. After 5 years of being ‘too tired’ to have sex in times like these I now know the problem isn’t about fading chemistry with my wife but about wasting my sexual energy fapping to porn all the time.”
Of course it’s not easy to give up a strong habit when the mind is used to regulating emotions with orgasm. “When you remove a source of pleasure from the brain, it is like taking away the leg of a table. The whole thing becomes rocky and unstable. The brain has two options: one, to make you hurt like hell in every way it can think of to ‘encourage’ you to put the table leg back again, or two, to accept that the table leg is really gone, and figure out how to re-balance without it. Of course, it tries Option One first. Then, after a while, it gets to work on Option Two, all while still pushing Option One. Eventually, it seems like the brain re-balances, giving up on Option One, and fully succeeding at Option Two.”
Sublimation – Freud: https://youtu.be/dcht85_CLGo
Flow – Csikszentmihalyi: https://youtu.be/qpeIf8Zcriw
Total Replacements
The rub with all these solutions to pornography addiction is the steadily increasing cultural pressure to have technology be a sex replacement beyond screens, images, and sound. It can actually replace the love interest entirely! The way all technology has aided us humans, and the appreciation we have for the technology, can be a thankfulness that creates a bond with what are essentially non-sentient beings. Once technology creates human voices that control what is helpful to us, it’s easy to feel a stronger emotional bond. This reminds me of Harry Harlow’s tests on maternal deprivation with monkeys. When deprived of a mother, any form of technology that was more comforting and soothing than another could be a treated as a social replacement, but of course it’s a pale comparison.
Harry Harlow, Monkey Love Experiments: https://www.simplypsychology.org/harlow-monkey.html
In The Age of Perversion Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture, Knafo, and Lo Bosco describe how these technologies have gotten under our skin already. “Not surprisingly, many technological marvels are a response to the universal human need for connection. For example, some people spend hours every day on Facebook, laboring under the illusion that they have hundreds of ‘friends.’ What kind of people are we becoming as we incorporate and develop intimate relationships with machines?”
The authors provide a list of ways technology has invaded our social connectivity as of today. “D. W. Winnicott was the first to point out the phenomenon of relational objects. He brought attention to the infant who soothes itself and finds comfort in its baby blanket and teddy bear, and to the child who creates an imaginary friend. This occurrence demonstrates that people are hardwired to use objects and imagination in a relational manner. The natural tendency to do so carries over in people’s attachment to their smartphones and car’s navigation systems. Dr. Knafo once had a patient whose jealous wife forced him to change the navigator’s voice from female to male. Another patient refused to sell his car because he was deeply attached to its female-voiced guidance system! The only difference between Winnicott’s transitional objects and the technological objects people develop attachments to is that the latter are not meant to be abandoned. Thus, technology is norming relational objects as an acceptable alternative to human-to-human interaction.”
Her trailer: https://youtu.be/ne6p6MfLBxc
Other examples include the use of online dating, apps like Grindr, Blendr, and Tinder, the cultural phenomenon of sending naked pictures to people, the increasing intermediation of human interaction with screens, and of course, pornography. “Face-to-face contact is rapidly being replaced with electronic connectivity. Our society has incorporated and has been incorporated by the Internet. The Internet provides a subculture for people to find each other, share their lives, escape isolation – and get sex. Forty million adult Americans regularly visit erotic Internet websites. Sixty percent of all visits on the Internet involve sexual purpose, which makes looking for sex the topic most researched online. One in three visitors to sex sites is a woman.”
With broken relationships that happen with regularity, and with people who struggle to create and maintain intimate relationships, the moment is ripe for technology to try and fill that gap, and also make a lot of money. “The sex-doll industry is burgeoning, and high-end silicone love dolls are being manufactured in the United States, Japan, and Germany and sold briskly on the Web. There are even sex-doll brothels and escort services! Though many people are repelled by the idea of replacing a human sexual partner with a doll or robot, others claim that this trend can help save marriages, and stop the spread of STDs, human sex trafficking, and loneliness…Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishigoro created Geminoid F, a female android that expresses and responds to basic emotions and behaviors. Likewise, David Hanson is making robots with extremely realistic and subtle human expressions that compel us to engage them in meaningful interaction. His aim is to create ‘character machines’ that not only achieve intelligence, but also wisdom, compassion, and creativity. Such machines, he predicts, will surpass us in their brilliance within a little more than a decade, and help us to solve life’s big problems…Engineer Douglas Hines created Roxxxy, the first ‘robot girlfriend’ who boasts a personality and conversational ability…David Levy, a well-known AI expert, boldly claims that in less than 40 years, marriage to robots will be legal in some states. He states, ‘I am firmly convinced there will be a huge demand from people who have a void in their lives because they have no one to love, and no one who loves them…I think that will be a terrific service to mankind.’ Many on the vanguard of robotics and AI share his vision of relationships with fully functional robots within that time frame.”
Rachael and Deckard – Bladerunner: https://youtu.be/IjO8wsjPqbg
Lars and the real world trailer: https://youtu.be/XNcs9DrKYRU
Blade Runner 2049 – Replicant Chicas: https://youtu.be/2u7mdXKLAAc
The problem with this technology is an addiction to passive consumption. What is lost is that pleasure in concentration, Flow as described many times before, like when one finishes a good day’s work. The ability to develop skills needed in the world and to find meaning in the work one does and also to develop relationship skills are a big chunk of the pleasures humans look for. To wipe out any work appreciation is to remove a lot of a human’s sense of themselves and to leave an empty feeling gut. This includes the work required to maintain healthy relationships. A world where people can manage technology in such a way where romantic interests don’t have an independent mind would actually be boring and a world like this would be a self-made emotional desert. This reminded me of the ending of the movie Dark City, and how disturbed I felt about a romantic love interest not choosing the main character from their own volition and how empty that would be. I know it’s a complex movie and there are many interpretations, but the Filmchat review below resonates.
“Over the course of the film, Murdoch discovers that the world he lives in is a complete fake, created by similarly superpowered aliens who kidnapped a bunch of human beings some time ago and began playing with their memories and identities in order to see if there was anything consistent about these people — anything resembling a soul — that could not be reduced to the simple programming of their brains. By the end of the film, Murdoch has defeated the aliens, and he uses his superpower — which none of the other human beings seem to have — to re-create the world as he sees fit. Now, in one sense, this would seem to be a happy ending. Murdoch has been trapped in a dark, dreary city for the entirety of the film, wishing that he could visit a bright and cheery place called Shell Beach — and at the end of the film, Murdoch finally gets to go there. However, the reason he gets to go there is because he has created Shell Beach for himself. And lingering over the ‘happy ending’ is the question of whether Murdoch can ever truly be happy in a world that, apart from the personalities of its citizens, offers him no surprises, no otherness, so long as it remains a projection of his own wishes and desires.”
In The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, by Nicholas Carr, he notices that inability to find concentration and Flow in a fake world with no challenge. He reviewed Robert Frost’s Mowing, and gets the sense that one of the great pleasures in life is to develop a skill with concentration and to master it.
Mowing – Robert Frost: https://poets.org/poem/mowing
Since relationships require skills, it’s understandable that there would be a desire to replace bad relationships with artificial intelligence that is programmed for more security and predictability. Yet, a certain amount of unpredictability, and especially an Otherness of intention from a partner, is required to keep some sort of interesting tension. Partners can be surprised by their mutual developments. For personalities that require more zing and competition from a partner, unexpected behaviours can add spice. The lead singer from The Cure, Robert Smith, talked about how awkward human relationships can also work for some people. “Smith told The Face that he had once left a video camera running in their home ‘and after a couple of hours you forget that it’s on and I was quite horrified at the amount of rubbish we say to each other. It’s like listening to mental people…I feel more natural in the company of people who are mentally unbalanced because you’re always more alert, wondering what they’re going to do next…'”
Robert Smith Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Smith_(musician)
How hard it is to be happy most of the time
What is often missing in these withering attempts at finding happiness is the typical desire that Buddhists call Becoming. It’s the faculty of “wanting to be somebody,” or in reality, “wanting to have pleasure.” Creating a becoming in the mind based on drawbacks of desires, by vividly imagining problems with addictions for example, is a good place to start, but to be balanced, to take the typical desire that advertisers manipulate, and to direct it for oneself, towards pleasures that are socially acceptable of course, can be a way to create a self-directing mind, and to enhance a sense of self that does feel liberating. One can fine tune the mind without needing an authority figure to provide appreciation, which always creates a sense of slavery and shame when appreciation is withheld.
Seeing drawbacks in addictions is important, but to overdo visions of drawbacks against good desires, and even ones that are laudable, can be a form of self-sabotage. Those who have bad pasts also struggle with memories of the past, even if they are irrelevant for what a person is to do next. The ability to create positive visions that one wants to enter into is an important skill. One of the best recent explainers of this method is Esther Hicks from the Law of Attraction fame. People can masochistically resist what is good for them, and there’s only so much time you need to look at drawbacks before it’s counter-productive and turns into a negative identity. Hicks understands that what you keep your mind on grows and inserts an identity connected with those envisioned psychological worlds as they build emotional momentum. At some point there has to be something worth growing and acting upon, especially since the past can’t be changed. When the mind is in depression, shame, feeling in between or feeling daunted, the healthy desire needs more development and growth.
“Step into that dream state where there is no resistance…It makes you more determined that you are going to do ‘more of that.’ Stop beating up on yourself when you are in negative emotion…Step 1: Contrast causes you to know what you don’t want and what you do want…Step 2: When you ask it is given. When you ask, Source becomes vibrationally equivalent with what you asked for. You may call that a dream state because it has not yet manifested. We call it a reality that you are not really that adept at tuning into…Step 3 is you find yourself in a non-resistant moment where you can receive inspiration, impulses, and pleasurable thoughts that are about ‘that.’ Step 4 is being really good at Step 3. Step 4 is what you may accomplish as a result of this conversation. It’s understanding where the energies are. It’s understanding what non-resistance is. It’s understanding that resistance is a normal thing. It’s understanding that resistance isn’t a bad thing, but that it’s not the thing you want to be doing all the time. Step 4 is being so good at knowing what negative emotion means and finding more opportunity to get out ahead of it. Step 4, which is mastery of alignment, is understanding that there is a realm where no resistance exists, where your inner being is, and your inner being is focused on everything you want, and has that momentum really going well. You’re learning the tools getting you up to speed with ‘that’. Meditation is the best tool of all. When you quiet your mind, your vibration rises, and you tune into that.”
Don’t Try To Improve Your Reality, Just Daydream – Esther Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeuRKrI8iBQ
The value of imagery in meditation is how it affects emotions, and therefore motivation. It takes a lot of practice, because we’re more practiced in following suggestions from others, but a few successes that give that sense of personal control can help to create that feeling of agency that so many people who feel out of control want to feel. With repetition, old triggers of past conditioning now don’t have to be resisted, they can be compared to better visions in the mind, and through repetition, new positive triggers can manifest and squeeze out the old conditioning, leaving only a memory of an old identity that was shed.
Both the understanding of drawbacks, and having better choices to aim our wishes upon, are what will direct people away from needing replacements, and to look for healthy challenges in human relationships that add the needed excitement. It doesn’t mean taking on too much risk, like being caught in the cycle of abuse, but knowing that adding a little risk is better than living in an automated fun-room where romantic partners are programmed for you. In a way it’s a perverted, but distant way of having sex with the engineers and software programmers who programmed their preferences into the sex robot, who are in turn fucking you with their ideas and saying “I love you” while collecting their money.
For those who are targeted as lonely people who must resort to robots, I would say that having emotional relationships with hobbies and interests will still be more beneficial than resorting to a robot to talk to. The act of creating is also one of the best ways of connecting with others, even if only through social media or other electronic platforms. To create, and to see one’s progress, is required to maintain a healthy sense of self, and will be needed regardless whether someone is in an intimate human relationship or not. When people can entertain themselves, it reduces a lot of the burden on a relationship where one demands that the other “PLEASE ME!” Often hobbies and interests are what makes a person more attractive, and how a person recharges their batteries when they are tired of pleasing others. It’s what feeds people emotionally when they are in between relationships, and for some people, it can be the only place where they can exert their own power on the environment and see a positive result.
Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain by William Struthers: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781458765550/
Your Brain on Porn by Gary Wilson: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780993161605/
The Age of Perversion Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture by Knafo, and Lo Bosco: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781138849211/
Perversion Psychoanalytic Perspectives by Nobus and Downing: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367325909/
The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393240764/
Sex and Porn Addiction Healing and Recovery A Practical Daily Reader for Sex and Porn Addicts by Scott Brassart: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781699045626/
Treating Pornography Addiction The Essential Tools for Recovery by Ph.D. Kevin B. Skinner: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780977220809/
Clinical and Theoretical Aspects of Perversion The Illusory Bond by Juan Pablo Jiménez, Rodolfo Moguillansky: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855758070/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/