Do you have actual evidence for saying porn is a drug, or are you just repeating one of the usual anti-porn, slippery-slope, moral panic arguments?
Porn really isn't like narcotics; there are no "porn receptors" in your brain that you're blowing out from overusing it. I also don't buy "gateway drug" arguments, since they're really a Fallacy of the Excluded Middle: How do you know the "gateway drug" causes the escalation in use, rather than some other factor you haven't taken into account? (You don't.)
On topic, I'm not sure, given how much of a biological determinist and gender essentialist ESR is, that I'm willing to buy any of his arguments on porn, either.
I'm not any of those camps, nor trying to cause a moral panic or explain how porn might be bad. But using porn *does* activate pleasure receptors, and trains the recipient appropriately, leading to some drug-like effects.
The escalation argument is based on anecdotal and personal evidence, for porn and other outlets; while connection of it to porn specifically is non-scientific (to my knowledge), the evidence of the decay of effect on repeated exposure to a stimulus -- for psychological reasons, rather than the physiological reasons associated with, e.g., narcotics -- *is* a scientifically defensible conclusion, and I feel justified in applying it to porn.
I don't think I intended to imply that using porn would lead to use of other drugs.
Perhaps my definition of "drug" is broader than you're used to; that's very possible. It's also possible my arguments only apply to a subset of porn, or a subset of users. I'm sure not against porn in general, I'm just trying to explain how random sampling can over-represent a small but active subpopulation.
That is to say, the problem with porn is not that it makes men into worse and worse consumers as time goes on due to an addiction effect, it's that porn - like any other kind of exposure to any other kind of thing- teaches your brin patterns. If you see violence on television, your brain becomes inured to the horrificness of violence. SImilarly with porn, when teens start viewing porn - as has become more common over the past few decades with earlier exposure to these kinds of media - the behavior portrayed is normalized - thus the increasing normalization, for example, of anal sex and "cum shots" in a woman's face for example, as normative behavior. This leads to a cycle in which what becomes normal is more and more outre. There's lots of good sociological work on this out there.
(no subject)
Porn really isn't like narcotics; there are no "porn receptors" in your brain that you're blowing out from overusing it. I also don't buy "gateway drug" arguments, since they're really a Fallacy of the Excluded Middle: How do you know the "gateway drug" causes the escalation in use, rather than some other factor you haven't taken into account? (You don't.)
On topic, I'm not sure, given how much of a biological determinist and gender essentialist ESR is, that I'm willing to buy any of his arguments on porn, either.
(no subject)
The escalation argument is based on anecdotal and personal evidence, for porn and other outlets; while connection of it to porn specifically is non-scientific (to my knowledge), the evidence of the decay of effect on repeated exposure to a stimulus -- for psychological reasons, rather than the physiological reasons associated with, e.g., narcotics -- *is* a scientifically defensible conclusion, and I feel justified in applying it to porn.
I don't think I intended to imply that using porn would lead to use of other drugs.
Perhaps my definition of "drug" is broader than you're used to; that's very possible. It's also possible my arguments only apply to a subset of porn, or a subset of users. I'm sure not against porn in general, I'm just trying to explain how random sampling can over-represent a small but active subpopulation.
Porn doesn't act like a drug, it acts like a mentor...