Might Porn Cause Societal Collapse?
I have tried to be as careful as possible and only to lay out carefully-drawn scientific arguments. We can, and should, debate morality, but we should be clear about facts. And in a world where a million articles claim everything and its opposite on the basis of some “study,” I wanted to be as precise as possible about what we can
know scientifically about porn, with a high degree of certainty, versus things we can strongly suspect, albeit not prove.
We
know what porn does to the brain, because the medical science is solid. Because social science is much softer, we can’t
know for certain what causal impacts porn has on society, if any. But once we realize that we have to be much more humble in this area, we can still make prudential judgments.
Remember the sex recession? It seems that Japan is a precursor in all kinds of recession: just as it went first into the zero interest rate economic environment that the rest of the rich world has been experiencing since 2008, and which looks more like a new permanent state with each passing day, Japan also entered its sex recession a decade before us. Japan also got broadband internet earlier than the rest of the world. Could it be that Japan is an example of what’s likely to happen to us if we don’t do something about porn addiction?
Since Japan got broadband internet, the younger generations have gone through significant social changes. “In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015, 43 percent of people in this age group were, and the share who said they did not intend to get married had risen, too. (Not that marriage was any guarantee of sexual frequency: A related survey found that 47 percent of married people hadn’t had sex in at least a month.),”
The Atlantic’s Kate Julian wrote in her article on the sex recession.
In Japan, this new generation of sexless men—and the Japanese sex recession is caused by
men’s lack of interest, to the vocal dismay of young Japanese women, if media reports are to be trusted—are known as
soushoku danshi, literally “grass-eating men”—in a word,
herbivores. The epithet was originally coined by a frustrated female columnist but, incredibly, the herbivores aren’t offended and most of them are happy to identify as such.
Given Japan’s population decline, the herbivores, who have become a massive subculture, are a subject of national debate in Japan,
Slate’s Alexandra Harney
reports. And what seems to define the herbivores is not just that they have no interest in sex, it’s that they don’t seem to be interested in much of anything at all.
They tend to live with their parents. After all, it’s hard to find a place to live when you don’t have a steady job, which herbivores say they don’t look for, because they’re not interested in a professional career. Not that they’re opting out of productive society to focus on, say, art, or activism, or some other form of creativity or counter-culture. Apparently, one of the few hobbies that seem to be popular among herbivores is . . . going on walks. To be fair, walking is an important part of digestion for ruminants.
What herbivores do seem to be interested in is spending the vast majority of their time alone, on the internet. Herbivores who have a social life keep it restricted to a small circle of friends. While the Japanese used to be notorious for their national obsession with tourism, they don’t like to travel abroad. They have created a new market for
yaoi, a Japanese genre of bodice ripper-style romance portraying homoerotic relationships between men; while
yaoi’s audience has traditionally been female, the male herbivores like
yaoi.
Countless explanations are proffered for the herbivore phenomenon, from cultural to economic, and it makes intuitive sense that some of those factors would be at play. Nevertheless, I find it striking that everything we know about the herbivores matches with what we know about online porn addiction, in particular reduced libido and overuse of the internet. We also know that Japan has growing markets for sex toys for men, but not for women, as well as for extreme and homoerotic pornography, which is consistent with a population that’s been desensitized to normal sex stimulus by online porn addiction.
Beyond sexuality, the herbivores seem strikingly like a generation of men suffering from hypofrontality, the neurological disease caused by porn addiction. It seems that their key problem is an inability to commit, whether to a career or a woman. Commitment requires abilities enabled by the prefrontal cortex, like self-mastery, correctly weighing risk and reward, and projecting oneself into the future. Becoming financially independent, visiting a foreign country, moving out of your parents’ apartment, going to parties, meeting new people, asking a girl out—what all these things have in common is that while young men generally want to do them, they can also be intimidating; and it is the executive function of the brain located in the prefrontal cortex that makes it possible to get over the hump of initial reluctance that comes from the lower parts of the brain.
With Japan on the road to self-extinction in part as a result of its males’ lack of interest in sex or marriage, it’s hard not to think of Nietzsche’s parable of the Last Man, his nightmare scenario for the fate that would await Western civilization after the Death of God if it did not embrace the way of the
Übermensch: the last man lives a life of comfort, has all his appetites satisfied, embraces conformity and rejects conflict, and seeks nothing more, incapable as he is of imagination, or initiative, or creativity, or originality, or risk-taking. The Last Man, in short, is man returned to something like an animal state, though not that of a carnivore. Nietzsche compares him to an insect, but herbivore fits quite well. In Nietzsche’s terrifying phrase, the Last Man believes he has discovered happiness.
Again, it’s impossible to prove scientifically that the herbivore phenomenon is caused by widespread porn addiction. But one thing is certainly very suggestive: there’s no explanation for why, if the herbivore trend is caused by some broader cultural or socioeconomic trends, it should be such an overwhelmingly
male phenomenon. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Is Japan a harbinger of the future? Are we on the road to becoming a herbivore civilization? Or, to take another analogy, becoming like the helpless people on the spaceship in “WALL-E,” except we never got around to actually creating the AI and robots that enabled their pointless, ghastly lives of fake pleasure?
Perhaps it sounds hyperbolic. But what we do know is that large numbers of our civilization are hooked on a drug that has profound effects on the brain, which we mostly don’t understand, except that everything we understand is negative and alarming. And we are just ten years into the process. If we don’t act, pretty soon the next generation will be a generation that largely got hooked on this brain-eating drug as children, whose brains are uniquely vulnerable. It seems perfectly reasonable and consistent with the evidence as we have it to be deeply alarmed. Indeed, what seems supremely irrational is our bizarre complacency about something which, at some level, we all know to be happening.
A Massive Experiment On Our Brains
Another way to approach the question of how to respond is to note that we—the entire advanced world, and soon the whole world, as the prices of smartphones and broadband in developing countries keep dropping—are running a massive, unprecedented experiment on our own brains. Scientists do understand a few things about the brain, but only a few. The human brain is by far the most complex thing in the known Universe, and we are subjecting half of the human population at best, to an unprecedented kind of drug.
As I write this, the FDA is reportedly considering a complete ban on e-cigarettes. Imagine if, say, a popular health supplement was shown to, oh, increase the rate of ED among young men by some percentage,
let alone several orders of magnitude, or be as addictive as cocaine in large segments of the population. Surely some spotlight-hogging prosecutor would have the company’s owners doing a nationally-televised perp walk before you could say “Four Loko”—unless, of course, he was himself getting high on the stuff and was too ashamed to take a public stand.
An analogy might be in order here: climate change. There are some things we know scientifically to be true: we know that greenhouse gases lead to higher temperatures all else equal; we know that humans are emitting more and more greenhouse gases; we know that temperatures are increasing; we know that greenhouse gases are increasing to unprecedented levels.
We don’t
know, scientifically, precisely, what that means for the future. Earth is much too complex an organism for us to be able to predict with high confidence what climate change will mean, specifically—indeed, the best justification for alarm is precisely the fact that we are in uncharted territory when it comes to levels of greenhouse gases and temperatures. This is why the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which represents the scientific consensus on climate change, provides not predictions of the future impact of climate change, but
probability distributions (read them if you don’t believe me).
On the basis of the current state of science, we have a
preponderance of evidence leading to a rationally
justified belief that never-before-seen levels of greenhouse gases and temperature increases create an
unacceptable level of risk of negative outcomes, including catastrophic outcomes, so that
some kind of collective action (putting aside angry debates on what kind of action) is justified to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The Earth is much too complex for us to understand it completely, and this is actually the best argument for why it’s reckless to pump it full of chemicals at unprecedented levels. After all, we don’t have an Earth 2. (And yes, paradoxically given conservatives’ reluctance to embrace ambitious action on climate change, this is an inherently conservative argument.)
You can see where I’m going: however precious Earth is, so are our brains; however complex Earth is, so much so are our brains, which are the most complex artifacts in the known universe. I don’t see why the same logic doesn’t apply.
The stakes are comparably high, the logic for action is the same, and yet these respective causes get wildly divergent levels of public attention and political capital.
It took a long time between the moment when the evidence for smoking’s link to lung cancer and a whole host of negative health outcomes became incontrovertible. And it took a long time between that moment and when we as a society accepted that evidence and decided to act. This was in part due to legitimate scientific questions early on, in part due to the influence of greedy, monied interests, and in part because of misguided pseudo-libertarian rhetoric. But also in part because so many people were reluctant to admit that their beloved, pleasurable habit, was in reality a destructive addiction—and they were all the more reluctant to admit it because they knew, deep down, that it was the truth.
I still smoke. But, at least, I have stopped lying to myself about why I do it. It’s time we as a society stopped lying to ourselves about what has become the biggest threat to public health.
It's not from a lack of desire, it's a scheduling conflict when your wife is a nurse working evenings. Still, I find my tastes and appetite are roughly the same as they were 20 years ago. I've never felt the need to explore other genres of porn as the article suggests. For addicts that's not the case, as the same stuff is never enough as the article essentially said. I think for casual consumers of porn you don't need to explore and you can be fine even viewing the same content over and over. 
