A porn shop like Amazing.net might promise to “excite your life”, but what are the real roots of happiness? David Bornstein explores the subject for World Ark, the magazine of Heifer International.
From “Pursuing Happiness”, by David Bornstein:
Americans enjoy an “inalienable right” to pursue happiness. But, according to studies, over the past half centruy, despite our affluence and technological advances, we have grown no happier and may even have become less so…Most porn, we would argue, taps into self-interested, prestige-seeking parts of the brain. The viewer is stimulated by seeing someone else used and degraded. This satisfaction is fleeting, however. When it fades, the viewer craves more porn. From the porn merchant’s point of view, a profitable addiction cycle is born.
One of the most intriguing findings in the literature on happiness is that human beings are not designed to make themselves happy. The unconscious mind “was shaped by natural selection to win at the game of life,” notes Jonathan Haidt, in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis. “[P]art of its strategy is to impress others, gain their admiration, and rise in relative rank. [Our unconscious mind] cares about prestige, not happiness, and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is prestigious.”
However, the kinds of things commonly associated with prestige–the things we think will make us happy–financial success, fame, winning awards–do not actually provide a lasting sense of well-being, as Daniel Gilbert explains in his best-selling book, Stumbling on Happiness. No matter how much we acquire, we soon want more…
Consider the past 50 years in America. Compared to our grandparents, we are amazingly wealthy… And yet over the same period, the divorce rate has doubled, suicide has tripled and violent crime has quadrupled…
…in polls, more Americans than ever say that they don’t trust strangers…
Can happiness be successfully pursued in a self-interested fashion?
…Recently, I asked some social entrepreneurs about the things that made them feel most happy and unhappy. Not one spoke of money, position or status…
Perhaps the strongest theme was “actualizing and witnessing the growth of others’ potential”–using your life to enable the life in others to flourish.
Conversely, the greatest sadness, other than losing loved ones, came when human beings failed to listen respectfully to one another and degraded or betrayed one another, when teams fought internally and, in general, when the feeling of trust and unity with others, and the world, was injured in some way.
The unifying force behind so many of these elements, noted Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka, the leading global fellowship of social entrepreneurs, was “love and respect–in action.” Happiness was not consciously pursued, but it clearly emerged naturally, as an unintended by-product.
See also:
Jim Citrin: “Building Success Beyond Personal Gain” (12/11/07)
Over the past two decades I’ve had the opportunity to advise and recruit many extraordinary individuals. Often, these are people who have reached the pinnacle of success. Yet what’s become clear to me is that reaching even the highest-profile, highest-paid, or highest-prestige positions isn’t what’s most important…
So what is it that everyone is searching for? A legacy…
…true success is achieved when you devote your energies to something you’re passionate about that benefits others. Those who have amassed great wealth, power, and fame are remembered not for the achievements they racked up for themselves, but for the success they bestowed upon the world at large…
The more you can transcend personal achievement and enhance the lives of others, the more your positive impact spreads.
I Was a ‘Self-Esteem Vampire’: A Woman’s Journey Out of Watching Porn (explicit language)
I asked myself honestly, what was I getting out of porn? The answer surprised me. It terrified me. It shamed me…
I was getting a sense of power from watching the humiliation and degradation of the women on the screen.
I was claiming power, the all-elusive power that women strive for their entire lives, from degrading and enjoying the degradation of other women. I had absorbed a lesson from the patriarchy: women are easy to degrade, weaker, and more vulnerable, so much so that even another woman can take their power. Watching women being slapped and hurt was filling that void within me that was taken so many years before by men. It allowed me to feel powerful and in control…
Video Presentation: A Content Analysis of 50 of Today’s Top Selling Porn Films (explicit language)
Ana Bridges: So how many scenes didn’t contain aggression? About 10%…
For verbal aggression, by far namecalling and insulting were the most common types. They were seen in almost half of scenes…
Gagging and choking were much, much more common than any of us thought when we first walked into this project.
…in couples research we know that couples, even couples who fight a lot, as long as there’s a lot of good in the relationship, about five times more good than bad, they actually do pretty well.
Less than 10% of the videos showed any kind of a positive act, and that included kissing… caressing happened maybe twice. Something like a verbal compliment, ‘Gosh, you look pretty’, not, ‘Slut bitch, come over here,’ that happened maybe five times in the 304 scenes. So we have a ratio of positive to negative behaviors of 1 to 9, which is not a sustainable, happy relationship.
Improv Resource Center: True Porn Clerk Stories (explicit language)
A lot of fetishizing has to do with unwitting or unwilling participants, and that runs pretty hard up against my “whatever floats your boat” policy…
I don’t understand the need to degrade someone. But that need is definitely, sadly out there. One of our best-renting titles of long standing is called Grudge Fuck.* It rents right back out as soon as we can replace the tag. Every time…
Rocco’s Animal Trainer series, I’m told, traditionally ends with Rocco fucking a woman up the ass while he shoves her head into a toilet and flushes…
Gail Dines Presents: Pornography and Pop Culture (explicit)
“Now, one of the latest things that’s been going on for a few years is ATM, Ass-To-Mouth. Now this is about a man ramming his penis into a woman’s anus and then going straight into her mouth. And the joke is she has to eat shit. Now as Bob [Jensen] once put it really well, there is no sexual arousal heightened by going from anus to mouth outside of the humiliation and debasement of that woman. What else is this about?…
Lizzy Borden: We don’t shoot “all the lovey-dovey stuff that there’s not a big market for” (explicit language)
Q: So what is this scene going to have in it that’s controversial?
A: A girl being kidnapped, being forced to have sex against her will, being degraded. Being called “a cunt, a whore, a slut, a piece of shit.” Then being butchered at the end, and spit on. She’s being degraded…
The Psychology of Porn for Men
Bill Margold, one of the industry’s longest-serving film performers, was interviewed in 1991 by psychoanalyst Robert Stoller for his book Porn: Myths For The Twentieth Century. Margold made no attempt to gloss over the realities. “My whole reason for being in this industry is to satisfy the des
ire of the men in the world who basically don’t care much for women and want to see the men in my industry getting even with the women they couldn’t have when they were growing up. So we come on a woman’s face or brutalise her sexually: we’re getting even for lost dreams…”
Research Paper: “Cruelty’s rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators”
Deliberate infliction of pain, as with any other decisive manifestation of interpersonal power, enhances the status of the perpetrator. Accordingly, the initiation and coordination of punishment in the family-level and local group would have facilitated the emergence of a leadership figure, whose willingness to injure would have created a reputation for ferocity with significant resource access benefits for that individual… Today as in the past, aggression linked to a readiness to inflict pain is a route to prestige, leadership, and social mastery that entrains survival and reproductive benefits… Cruelty attributions may elevate status, leadership, and sexual attraction ratings more, for example, than attributions of physical strength or intelligence…
The strong routinely use pain as punishment (from the Latin poena, penalty) in their dealings with the weak – masters with slaves, adults with children, and men with women…
A hallmark of cruelty is its rapid escalation, from a slap to a punch to the smashing of bones and teeth, from teasing to murder: the closing scenes of Pasolini’s Salo illustrate the frenzy of the torturer inflamed by the terror and pain of his victims… A hypothesis worth investigating is whether the gratifications of perpetrators are dopaminergic and fuelled by opioid release. Second, though victims’ distress can inhibit violence (Blair 1997), their fear and pain may also escalate the perpetrator’s savagery, paralleling the predator’s escalating ferocity in the prey’s death struggle as its terror and its vocalisations mount…
Cruelty as an instrument of social control in the form of elaborate, state-sponsored entertainments (Coleman 1990; Wistrand 1992) reached its apogee in the late Roman Republic and early Empire…
As the neurobiology of predation predicts, blood and death have erotic force. Barton (1993) writes that the raging sexuality of the arena came to a focus in the gladiator’s scarred body, and Rome’s prostitutes gathered at the arena exits, where they did a brisk trade…
“Dominance, Aggression, and Violence in Male-Centered Porn”
[T]he more cellular memories (biological and physiological processes) that pornographers can link their porn to throughout the male brain and body, the greater chance they have of addicting their viewers. And the more naturally occurring drugs/hormones (especially testosterone, but also adrenaline, epinephrine, and others) flowing in the male mindbody during viewing, the more narrow will be his focus, the more intense his sexual/mindbody arousal, the more deeply the images will be imprinted in his memory, and the greater his addiction.
Pornographers achieve this combination of a high number of mindbody links and maximum drug/hormone release by mixing sexual images with male dominance, aggression and violent images intended to shock and stimulate simultaneously. Porn scenes ranging from simple “male in control” to aggression, rape, torture and murder, abound in Internet porn geared to the male viewer.
These kinds of images link sexual arousal in the male mindbody with emotions of shock, anger, confusion, violence and domination which cause the male mindbody to release enormous amounts of additional testosterone, which further increase male narrowing, loss of reason, feelings of aggression, and sexual drive and arousal.
What Porn Is: Selections from Mainstream Porn (explicit language)
[Robert Jensen:] …Given the ease with which video can be edited, why did the producers not edit out those expressions [pain, shame, despair]? There are two possible answers. One, they may view these kinds of expressions of pain by the women as of no consequence to the viewers’ interest, and hence of no consequence to the goal of maximizing sales; women’s pain is neutral. The second possibility is that the producers have reason to believe that viewers like the expressions of pain; women’s pain helps sales…
…from my research, both through these content analysis projects and my reading of material from the industry, it seems clear that mainstream heterosexual pornography is getting more, not less, cruel…
Sex…has an emotional component, and emotions are infinitely variable. There are only so many ways people can rub bodies together, but endless are they ways different people can feel about rubbing bodies together in different times, places, and contexts. When most non-pornographic films, such as a typical Hollywood romance, deal with sex they draw on the emotions most commonly connected with sex, love and affection. But pornography doesn’t, because films that exist to provide sexual stimulation for men in this culture wouldn’t work if the sex were presented in the context of loving and affectionate relationships. Men typically consume pornography specifically to avoid love and affection.
National Feminist Antipornography Movement
“As Jerome Tanner put it during a pornography directors’ roundtable discussion featured in Adult Video News, ‘People just want it harder, harder, and harder, because like Ron said, what are you gonna do next?’ Another director, Jules Jordan, was blunt about his task: ‘[O]ne of the things about today’s porn and the extreme market, the gonzo market, so many fans want to see so much more extreme stuff that I’m always trying to figure out ways to do something different. But it seems everybody wants to see a girl doing a d.p. [double penetration] now or a gangbang. For certain girls, that’s great, and I like to see that for certain people, but a lot of fans are becoming a lot more demanding about wanting to see the more extreme stuff. It’s definitely brought porn somewhere, but I don’t know where it’s headed from there.’
Kara Nox, adult film star, on “What don’t you like about porn?”
A: …Mostly, it’s the attitude among many men that I’m subhuman. The degradation of women is getting worse. Conditions for women on set are becoming more and more dangerous. As porn grows, more men with Neanderthalean views of women are getting power as talent, and producers. The results are increased acceptance of violence onset. Women face enough danger outside of porn. It seems as though many of the men we fear are now doing porn, and they legitimize their misogyny by saying it’s for entertainment value. That scares the shit out of me, because it means there are even more troglodytes watching this, and geting off on women being hurt.
Kink.com: Bondage Porn Gone Chillingly, Cheerfully Corporate (explicit language)
“Our powerless girls scream as they are tied up and forced to have sex over and over. Are they screams for help or do they really just want more?”
Testimony from Northampton Shelter for Battered Women: Half of Abusers Use Pornography as a Part of the Abuse (explicit)
We have recently begun to formally ask the battered women who call us whether the abuser uses pornography and from this we co
nservatively estimate that at least 1/2 of the abusers use pornography as a part of the abuse. Battering is based on an issue of power and control, with the abuser using all kinds of methods to continually assert his power and control over the woman.