Porn as Digital Darwinism
The Race to the Bottom in Sexual Free Market Dynamics
“It was something like…” she struggled to remember what exactly her friend had said earlier that day in the office. “A Fido?”
“You mean a findom?” I asked.
“Findom?”
“Financial dominatrix,” I clarified.
Her eyes lit up when I said it. That was exactly it. My friend had just been recanting to the table a story of her coworker who’d shown her a clip of a man in pigtails with hastily applied lipstick, crying “Spank me, Mommy” into the camera lens.
“How much did she make?” Someone at the table asked.
“$12,000.”
Everyone at the table was stunned. The idea that someone could make such a sum was impressive, and the woman neither revealed her face nor removed any of her clothes. I might’ve been the only one that was appalled. I myself had never crossed the threshold of paying for internet pornography when I still used it. I find that most men who still do generally have the same attitude. The aspect I found most appalling was the envy among the table for the producer of this content. Is she just a woman working a side job to get some extra cash? Or is she exploiting a sick man who is paying for the privilege of being exploited?
No one starts a “journey” of sexual exploration by recording themselves crying for their mother. This man made his way down from vanilla porn to its more extreme categories, chasing the rush he’d received when he first started using & came upon a dead end that required him to cross the threshold into commissioning content that spoke directly to his fetishes. The question I had to be the one to ask the table was “how much of this was his fault?”
The answer is most of it, as it seems unlikely that he’d been forcibly strapped to a chair and made to watch increasingly more extreme categories of pornography. He had to type in the URL himself, but it’s certainly no help that this man, along with all men, find themselves trapped within an evolutionary mismatch. Pornography is a hypernormal stimulus featuring women with highly exaggerated features designed to make them more desirable. The human male was never equipped to deal with the variety that streaming internet porn provides him. As your brain cannot tell the difference between a window and a screen, your body perceives the image as reality. Understanding the brain as a machine designed for optimization, the full body rush of an orgasm tells your brain more of that, please and strengthens the neural pathways that led to such an occurrence.
If you are the type of man that would allow yourself to fall into this hole, then perhaps your genes are not fit for persistence in the gene pool and internet porn creates a new selection mechanism by which human males will have to adapt. It’s obvious to me that overuse of internet porn can lead to downstream effects like loss of motivation for achievement and social connection. Diana Fleischman calls this the "uncanny vuvla" effect. The dopamine rush you’re giving yourself with each porn induced orgasm is training your brain to reinforce the activity of staying isolated with your computer, since by doing so you are achieving your evolutionary prime directive. There is no one educating young men about this new selection pressure, and most people I’ve spoken with who think of us as completely removed from evolutionary history seem to regard such a thing as a nonissue.
I think there’s a cultural assumption about pornography that’s stuck in the 1970s, as in, its the sort of thing one will get bored of and will move on to different activities. The sheer variety available online that caters to every perverse taste one could ever have ensures that a user could effectively scroll themselves into the same hole the man in my friend’s story did. If we accept the evolutionary idea that this a new selection mechanism, then the shrinking pool of qualified men for available women should come as no surprise, but we find ourselves facing a demographic crisis as human replacement rates plummet across Western countries. Just using the United States as an example, the fertility rate peaked at 3.5 in 1958 and plummeted with the introduction of the birth control pill, reaching an all-time low of 1.7 in 1978. It slowly rose to about 2.0 in the 1990s and stayed relatively steady until 2008 when it started dropping to its current place at 1.7 today. The year before this decline began, PornHub.com went live. Correlation isn’t causation by any means, but I’ll let you be the judge of that one.
I’m not going to pretend that compulsive users of pornography are _addicted_ in a physical sense. There are no physical withdrawal symptoms that come from cutting porn like there are with drugs such as heroin or alcohol. You wouldn’t be caught dead opening a porn site on your computer if you had a friend or family member looking over your shoulder, which means that you maintain some level of self control. Compulsive porn use is a disease of decadence, and for that, I can understand the blasé attitude toward men suffering from such a sickness. However, do not be mistaken: internet pornography is a dark art in which everyone involved from its users to its producers are perpetuating the single most perniciously evil drug mankind has yet devised.
Should we stand idly by & allow men to fall into these digital traps? Do these men not deserve help if they are willing to receive it? What could be done to better educate our weakest on the dark roads these paths will lead? My concern is that our culture of silent compliance with those shouting loudest about sex positivity leads to assertions that even asking questions like these are the merely t he ghostly echoes of a puritanical culture & shaming tactics of religious fanatics. As someone who identifies as an agnostic, I can assure you that shame is a useful tool in this regard in minimizing behavior that’s harmful to all parties involved.
“But everyone’s consenting!” I can hear the Tumblr feminists I grew up around shouting in a back corner of my mind. Just because everyone is consenting does not mean that it’s right.
Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind relays a mildly humorous example about a man who walks into a grocery store, buys a fully cooked chicken, takes it home, takes off all of his clothes and proceeds to have sex with the chicken. That slimy feeling you have right now after reading that is precisely because you know its wrong, even if no one is _technically_ being harmed; and if you are the type to pretend that it doesn’t bother you, please seek professional help of the non-affirmative variety. The man in my friend’s story may have paid to have the pleasure of pleasuring himself to being financially dominated, but he’s hurting himself every time he does that because he’s chasing something that is clearly lacking in his life.
There is one aspect that no one at the table thought about when it comes to porn use and it a reveals a distressing observation about how detached this culture of casual sex is from what an orgasm really is. It is the evolutionary motivation mechanism for connection with another human being—which this man was trying to accomplish through the transactional relationship he’d created. He’d sat in the role of voyeur for so long, lacking the connection he lusted over with every girl that came across his screen, that he was willing to pay serious sums of cash just to have the girl on the other side acknowledge his existence.
I’m reminded of a conversation from The Butterfly Effect, writer Jon Ronson’s podcast investigating the downstream effects of making streaming porn freely accessible online. In the third episode, he interviews both a producer of bespoke porn and, via email, its commissioner.
“What happened in your life to compel you to commission customs that involve bondage and gremlins?” Jon asked of the man. The producer read his response:
My mom left when I was 5. I only have 2 memories of her at all. My younger brother and I sitting on her luggage in the closet, trying to keep her from picking it up & shortly after, being in a neighbor’s front yard with both of my brothers (both younger) and my neighbor’s Mom, watching my Mother walked up the street with a suitcase in her hands. I have no recollection at all of how this may have affected my Dad, nor do I recall anything about how my brother’s felt. I think we were just too young to know how to discuss our feelings… My youngest brother told me years later that he always felt it was his fault that Mom left. He would’ve been 18 months old at the time. I don’t recall my Dad ever trying to explain what happened, so I did not know when I was young why Mom left. Mom was just gone. I do know now that she had some sort of mental disorder that led her to believe that she was a bad person and not capable of being a mother. [13:12-14:38]
This was the response he _willfully_ offered, only after he’d been asked. Will the man seeking financial domination while crying for his mother ever be asked this question? Will he ever have the self-awareness to ask it of himself? I made the attempt to reach out to the woman in question so I could interview both her and any of her clientele that would be willing to answer my questions, but after our mutual connection understood my stance as against the line of work she was in—she rescinded the offer to connect us.
I used to subscribe to the libertarian ideal that if someone wants to pursue sex work, it ought to be brought out of criminality so women can get the proper care they need when engaging in such an activity. After reading Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, I’ve had a change of heart. While you will never find me arguing for legislative solutions over what someone should be allowed to do with their own body, I will definitively say that financializing the sexual functions of the human body is wrong and it degrades the humanity everyone involved. Despite this, the industry continues to grow because there continues to be significant demand. A culture that tolerates such a thing is clearly a culture with a sickness. Until the root cause of a sickness that demands medication with pornography is addressed, the problem will only continue to get worse.
This was originally published on my personal blog in May of 2023, a blog which Squarespace is currently holding hostage behind another annual renewal fee.
Somewhat deeper in my religious tradition now a couple years later, I’m struck by the cruelty in a premise such as the discarding of humans weak enough to succumb to this technology. It denies the dignity in the human person, and the forces that would motivate the purveyors of such technology in the first place. People can be victims and worthy of life to, it’s not for me to judge — although I think I was fair in asserting I was not the person to make that judgment in the first place. That falls on the man upstairs, as all judgments do.
I leave the piece here in tact in the interest in preserving a library of my writing. If you would like to read what’s coming next, subscribe below.