Cognition porn and discursive dehumanisation
by Jacob Phillips, Artillery Row:
Cultural and political discourse can follow the reductive yet seductive logic of pornography.
If I wanted to maximise clicks, I could suggest this piece is subtitled something like “How the Regime made your Ideas into Porn”, make frequent mention of the WOKE MOB, and then position the argument around how an anti-woke position is better for real anti-racism/feminism/LGB rights (“all identitarianism is bad, but some identitarianism is better than others”).
I’d then just need to pepper the mix with just enough spiciness to offer a plausible chance of cancellation of some sort, and then, if that doesn’t happen, claim the ideas herein are a “gateway drug” bringing readers a little closer toward a widening of the Overton Window.
This sort of discourse closely mirrors the logic of pornography. But ideas are not images, and cognition — the means by which we conceive knowledge — isn’t meant to function like sexual desire at all, especially not sexual desire in one of its most deleterious expressions.
When I say “the logic of porn”, I am extrapolating from a pattern of engagement confirmed by the empirical evidence. In the first place, there’s the frustration of the itch some might expect porn to scratch. On the most superficial level, studies show that sexual fulfilment is lowest among those who view porn most frequently, and highest among those who never partake. More significantly, there is a direct correlation between loneliness and the frequency of porn use. No, correlation is not causation, but at the very least this shows that porn doesn’t help with loneliness, while strongly suggesting it makes it worse.
Then there’s the tendency toward dehumanised views of others. Pornography changes people’s perceptions of others – it is an understatement to say it tends towards objectified and demoralised representations of human beings, and this means impressionable minds have extremely unedifying imagery implanted on their minds, threatening to become normative in sexual encounters. This has numerous impacts on real relationships, of course.
Most damningly, there’s the disruption of the neurological reward circuitry by which dopamine is released in response to apparent satisfactions. Levels of dopamine similar to those associated with cocaine use are released by viewing porn — hence its tendency to be highly addictive. Even more damningly, there is evidence that a more impactful “hit” is needed to release dopamine, the more that porn is used. Regular viewers then have their own Overton Window widened the more they look at the stuff — slipping further and further into viewing more obscene and extreme content.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
