image transcript:
Anonymous asked:
is it true that porn of any kind (erotica, audio, pics, etc) rots the brain? like, is there any truth to the idea that I’m damaging my brain permanently? I mainly like to read erotica on tumblr or ao3. I’ve also seen people refer to anyone who likes any type of porn as degenerates and sex pests.
batmanisagatewaydrug answered:
is this what we’re doing now. we’re calling people degenerates just for reading horny fanfic.
besties we are never ever never ever never ever never escaping conservative christianity.
sure whatever. porn rots holes in your brain. anything that makes you feel good is bad actually. if you derive joy from movies or food or seeing your friends that’s also deeply suspect and you should probably go to confession about it. if I’m being totally honest we should not stop with porn, having sex with other people is pretty fucked up. kind of predatory to desire another person carnally. probably we should all just go live in caves and think about god until we die a celibate death.
in my undergrad classes we talked about how periods of (relative) social progress are often followed by sharp conservative backlash, and I didn’t really get it until I lived through it with the 2016 election. and like a fucking goober I thought “well, at least this is as bad as it will ever get iny lifetime,” because I could never in ten million years could have predicted the protestant comeback tour convincing people that they’re psychologically diseased sex criminals if they so much as think about nutting
end of transcript
All this talk of porn is bad for you or rots your brain, but I never hear any evidence, or even fully fleshed out reasoning.
If it’s inherently harmful, I expect to see the inherent harm. Closest I get is seeing a few particular scenarios of an unhealthy relationship with it or people telling me there’s some invisible harm I can’t see and they can’t show me (bit unfalsifiable, don’t you think?).
Showing brain rot requires showing that it has an effect on the brain/mind (which it probably does, as almost any activity will) AND that effect is net bad. Again, I’ve never seen much evidence that the effect is inherently bad.
As long as you’re managing it right - noticing any affects and deciding if that’s worth stopping over - I trust you to regulate yourself. Everybody’s different, so who am I to say something is bad for everyone or that nobody can have a healthy relationship with something?