First off, I want to point out that this is somewhat mature subject matter so if you don’t think you can read it without giggling to yourself, you might want to stop here. I don’t think my words are definitive in the least, more like musings, but I do think I’m onto something.
While the connection between pornography and the basic psychology between men and women may be obvious, sit back and think about it for a moment. Is it really?
There aren’t a lot of interpersonal relationships in pornography beyond the corporeal anyway. Really, porn sex is almost a violent act as it’s reduced to the basic mechanics with the addition of uncomfortable positions and odd situating. About the only positive point is that a guy in a porno is more likely to perform cunnilingus in porn than in real life. The same of the reciprocal to such and really, that’s kind of a shame.
The biological action is pretty much what porn focuses on – and not just with the embarrassing close-ups I mean. But that’s really where the connection seems to be made.
In the introduction to Prehistoric Psychobabble, I spoke of he reptilian brain (called the id by Sigmund Freud) and my preference to refer to it as the infant mind. So let’s start there.
If you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it starts with survival or the basic needs for such anyway.
From a biological standpoint, there are about four real requirements for survival – food, water, shelter and procreation.
Food and water often comes down to the ability to obtain such. I often joke that basic physiology reveals me as a predator because of the eyes on the front of my head for seeking rather than on the sides for evading and canines. But many predators have strongly peripheral binocular vision so that’s not really much of a tell. Add to that the fact that human’s canines aren’t particularly pronounced, and haven’t been for centuries, and you realize how flimsy that argument is as well.
No, our basic design is that of an omnivore. We have the ability and genetic predisposition to seek out both animal and vegetable protein.
This means that by our very makeup we’re intended, as are all living things, to compete for nutrients.
As we have become more adept at obtaining these basic needs, we have been able to drop our guards to a limited extent, but the nature is still there. The subconscious belief that we are competing for the basics is still there. And as money has become part of the picture, competition for such has entered the fray as well.
All animals have this drive to a certain extent. There is this need for self-preservation, but we’ve no proof that they seek ill to befall others unless as a direct result of confrontation. That is just a case of survival instinct so selfishness isn’t really part of the proceedings.
Humans, on the other hand, do have the tendency of wishing ill on the others. We label them in whatever way we choose which is where prejudices are able to take a stronger root. (The detection of differences is another animal trait as almost all animals can tell slight differences and tend to treat “others” differently.) The root is already there, but so too is the ability to reason. It is already there for us and other higher order animals or else problem-solving skills would be unable to take root either.
So we tag on ethnic slurs, we separate based on pigment, sex, religion – our minds are constantly seeking to relegate that around us into compartments and we see each other as things to be neatly categorized as well.
Now here is where I think the mind becomes more like that of an infant.
We are all willing to accept, as a rote, that infants know how the mother is feeling. We’ve all been told such and studies show that the child is attuned to mother’s moods and such. Not only that, but we also know that children commonly display an affection for their mother from an early age and a love is born.
But the suckling child therefore knows that the mother is hurting when she becomes chaffed, if milk production isn’t keeping pace with the growing child or when the teeth begin to come in. So this infant is aware that seeking sustenance is causing another pain. Not just any other, but the person that means more to it than anything else in the world. On a certain level, their mother is their world.
It’s not greed, don’t get me wrong. I did think that this was a certain level of evil for some time but I’ve come to believe that it’s a natural, indeed to a certain extent necessary aggression.
But to call that part of our brain that stores the aggression and darkest parts of our minds the reptilian brain, is silly. Reptiles operate purely on instinct and therefore have no real understanding that what they are doing is causing any harm. It’s a lack of progression in thinking that I’m referring too.
Psychologists have said for years that there is a point where people become aware that the world goes on when they close their eyes. The acceptance of such is one of the reasons that young children are supposed to suddenly develop aversions to sleep as they’re afraid of what they’re missing. But the infant understands that its eyes may be closed, but their mother is still there. So the realization may be there, but really, it’s just a progression into a higher thinking level. And I hold that we are somewhat unique in questioning that there is anyone or anything else there to begin with, putting the infant mind on a higher plane than that of the reptile.
But there’s still the question of the knowledge that gaining sustenance is hurting mom.
This progression of this aggression is necessary for us to make the jump to eating animals and therefore allowing us a significant source of protein. But it also allows us to wish ill on others.
I sometimes think it silly to liken higher thinking to such a thing. But then I think, are we truly doing evil if we don’t know we’re harming another?
Whales have no idea how many countless krill they kill on a daily basis. Could they do so if they thought of each of them as a unique and individual being?
So we’re left to see the idea of the infant mind being of a higher order, but slightly more aggressive than the reptilian mind, specifically because it can reason and therefore know that the consequences for it’s actions will be paid for by another.
In Freud’s terms, I think that this function lies between the id and the superego, leaning toward the id. But it serves as the conduit between these two components of our consciousness. So the lower thinking portion will have the dark thought; the infant mind refines it and then it comes to our conscious thoughts.
The comedy series Scrubs did a great job of showing this actually. One character had a boyfriend and her male friend asked her to study something with him, or something like that. When the male friend was asked what he thought was going to happen he imagined himself and the young lady on a rowboat. They move closer, as if to kiss, and then we see that the boyfriend is tied up on the bottom of the boat, the pair toss him over the side to his death and then embrace.
Silly, of course, but it shows the thoughts that flash in a person’s head. The idea of causing harm to another to get what we want is one of the things that separates us from the animals. We know we’re hurting the other person.
But it’s not confined to pain, it’s actually the basis of rationalizing almost anything. And it can take all sorts of forms.
Which brings us back to porn and procreation.
In order to survive we need food, water, shelter and to procreate thereby surviving by passing our genes along the way. Food and water, we covered, shelter, is pretty much all around us but procreation … the basic principles of hunting and gathering no longer quite apply.
Oh, they’re there to some extent, but procreation requires that the other party agree to such. And at first I thought that was the point behind porn.
Speaking with a pal, he said something along the lines of being able to believe that women would do that in reference to what they’d seen in a porn film. That seemed logical to me. In truth, it’s the case to a large extent. But I think it’s more than that now. (Odd how insomnia and a wish to occupy a bored mind lets ideas bounce and bake in your mind.)
I think porn plays to that place where id and infant meet. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of our minds we see these images and a teeny portion of our mind allows us to think it’s real. To those that self gratify while watching, it becomes harder to distinguish where the reality of the situation ends. Not in the super ego or ego, it’s quite clear there, but deeper.
For the most part, this boils down to porn representing actual sex to that tiny portion of the mind. To that small expanse driven to spread the genetic material. Which also explains why men tend to gravitate more toward porn than women as some conjecture that males look to spread their seed over a broader spectrum than women. Owed mostly to the investment in gestation and the ability for the woman to know the child is theirs. Recent studies support the idea of the child looking more like the father in the first 3 years owing to the idea that this makes the father feel more of a connection.
The idea has been percolating in my mind, for the past month or so, that this is where the connection is made. Meaning that porn predominantly prospers per proliferation predisposition. :D
Basically, porn makes people think they have had sex in the deep recesses of their mind and so sex is readily available for cover price.
Of course, it could all just be that guys likes neekid womens.
Kind of rambling I know, but I usually just write stuff on the fly and this is no exception. The concepts have been running in my head for quite a while now, and the connection locked about a month and a half ago. I’d been looking for a reason to step back into the Pre-Psych topic and knew that I wanted to start with an explanation of the infant and reptilian minds. While I believe the two distinct, I think that they’re often referred to as one and the same in pop psychology. And I believe it’s a disservice for humans to not own up to our vices. How else can we face and try to overcome them/
And one last thing. While I think we all have these thought processes inside us, I also believe that we have the ability to overcome them. Dark thought always percolate in the recesses of our minds after all, its’ what we do with that, and our willingness to look beyond ourselves that truly make us human. Why else does light shine so bright in the darkness?
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