Porn is a neural-visual stimulant and gooners are the addicts. I can't divorce myself from consuming it. Trapped in its grip perhaps until I die.
>>84974268porn is a symptom though, not the problem The problem is you can't get an average woman to give pussy to the average guy anymore thus porn is born alongside high fructose sugar, netflix and video games to sedate the masses.Until such a time where this problem is truly resolved, porn won't disappear.
>>84974320>porn is a symptom though, not the problem. it is both. the problem with porn as sedation isn't unique to porn, it's the same problem as the other sedatives listed. it converts an unmet need into a managed craving rather than resolving the underlying condition.high-speed internet porn delivers supernormal stimuli at a rate and variety no real sexual encounter can match, which for some users appears to downregulate dopamine receptor sensitivity over time. the clinical presentation looks similar to other behavioral addictions: escalating consumption, tolerance, and in some cases difficulty achieving arousal with real partners. the basic drive toward sex and intimacy exists to motivate pair bonding, which is a complex, effortful, socially risky process. porn short-circuits that by delivering the physiological reward (orgasm, some degree of intimacy simulation through visual cues) without requiring any of the costly behaviors the drive was designed to motivate. it's enough to take the edge off the motivational pressure without actually resolving the underlying need.a fully unmet need creates discomfort strong enough to motivate behavior change. a fully met need removes the drive entirely. a half-met need is the worst outcome because it keeps you in a kind of managed dissatisfaction that's uncomfortable enough to seek relief but not uncomfortable enough to do the hard thing. (1/2)
>>84974320>>84974441this is actually the same dynamic that makes doom-scrolling so addicting, social media delivers just enough social contact to blunt the loneliness without providing what would actually resolve it.sex with a real partner meets needs porn can't do: physical co-regulation, being known by someone, reciprocal vulnerability, the particular neurochemistry of oxytocin released through actual touch. porn provides none of that, but the orgasm releases enough tension that the motivation to go find those things drops. so you end up with people who are sexually relieved but relationally starving, and because the two drives are adjacent enough to blur together, the starvation doesn't always register clearly as a distinct unmet need.porn was also already culturally embedded and commercially massive before the dating conditions incels describe even emerged. the more defensible version of the argument is that the current delivery mechanism turbocharged an existing behavior at exactly the same time that social atomization and dating app dynamics were making real connection harder.the golden age of porn was the early 1970s, when deep throat played in mainstream cinemas and drew general audiences. vhs in the late 1970s moved it into private homes, and by the early 1980s pornographic content accounted for the majority of videotape sales in the us. this was happening during a period when marriage rates were still relatively high and the incel phenomenon as a cultural force didn't exist yet.pre-internet porn required effort. going to a theater, renting from a store, etc. the internet eliminated all of that, and the tube site model after 2004 made it not just accessible but free, infinite, and anonymous. the dopamine mechanic shifted dramatically not when porn appeared but when the delivery mechanism became instantaneous and bottomless.it's more so two variables that share a common cause and then compound each other once they're both in play.(2/2)
>>84974268They still can't figure out where to find porn "addiction" in the brain btw.
>>84974441>>84974449Interesting analysis, thanks. I'm not sure there is a solution generally, but the dynamics you explain make sense. The solution personally seems to be to consume less porn.
>>84974454They are idiots and disingenuous.
>>84974454partially true,. porn addiction doesn't currently have a clean consensus neurological signature the way substance addiction does. the DSM doesn't recognize it as a formal diagnosis, and the ICD-11 classifies it under "compulsive sexual behavior disorder" rather than addiction proper. si if you go looking for "porn addiction" as a discrete, well-mapped brain phenomenon, you won't find it. but that doesn't mean there's not evidence of it at all. fMRI studies have found reward circuit activation in self-identified compulsive users that looks similar to substance use disorders, but the methodology is contested and sample sizes are often small. self-reported addiction correlates more strongly with moral disapproval of one's own use than with actual consumption levels, meaning someone who watches relatively little but feels guilty is more likely to call themselves addicted than a heavy user without moral conflict. that doesn't mean the phenomenon isn't real, though, just means the label is doing some work that isn't purely neurological, and that the full picture is more complicated.
>>84974454>>84974611there are way more clues in the behavioral side of it, versus the neurological side. the pattern looks like addiction at the behavioral level regardless of what the brain imaging shows. tolerance is the most documented: users consistently report needing more novel, more extreme, or more specific content over time to achieve the same level of arousal they got from simpler material initially. it's the same escalation you see in substance use, and it's hard to explain without some kind of desensitization process happening underneath it.compulsivity us the second marker. people report continuing use despite genuine motivation to stop, failed quit attempts, and use that bleeds into time they intended for other things. that pattern of failed volitional control is behaviorally indistinguishable from other compulsive behaviors regardless of whether the underlying mechanism gets called addiction.the withdrawal-adjacent experience: irritability, difficulty concentrating, preoccupation, and flattened motivation during abstinence, which typically resolve after resumed use. again, the mechanism is debated but the reported phenomenology is consistent across a large number of self-reporting users.it's works on the operant conditioning framework (picrel). variable reward schedules, which porn delivers almost perfectly through infinite scroll and novel content, are the most powerful conditioning mechanism known in behavioral psychology. it's the same shit as slot machines, and it doesn't require a neurological consensus to explain why the behavioral pattern develops and persists the way it does.
>>84974449>>84974441>>84974449>social media delivers just enough social contact to blunt the loneliness without providing what would actually resolve itYou're under the very common and fallacious assumption that if porn didn't exist, hypergamy and all these issues causing a huge amount of men to be single wouldn't exist and men would somehow start getting girlfriends. Porn for incels isn't a distraction or alternative; its a cope that alleviates at best. This kind of fallacy is very common same as conservatives who say that we should stop giving money to homeless or poor people because then they would go hungry and start getting jobs, but based on hundreds of years of experience this isn't actually what happens, since many of them are disabled or unable to work for whatever reason and the job market is extremely limited.
>>84974731i didn't actually make that claim, you're jumping ahead. i also don't really fall into either of the two-party ways of thinking and don't see the homeless situation that way. the argument wasn't "remove porn and men start getting girlfriends," it was that porn functions as a partial need-satisfier that blunts the motivational pressure to seek connection without resolving the underlying deficit. those are different claims and the second one doesn't require the first to be true.the conservative argument fails because it assumes removing the cope creates the conditions for the problem to be solved, when the structural barriers to solving it remain unchanged. agreed. but the counter-argument doesn't mean copes are neutral either. a cope that makes an unbearable situation bearable is also a cope that makes an unchangeable situation feel less urgent to change, and whether that's net positive or negative depends entirely on whether the situation is actually unchangeable. for some incels, the structural barriers probably are that fixed and the cope is genuinely the most functional available option. for others the situation has more play and the sedation is part of what's keeping them from finding it.the answer is probably that it varies by person and the situation rather than porn being uniformly harmful or uniformly neutral. "porn is fine because the underlying problem would exist anyway" removes the interaction effect the same way the phrase "porn is causing the problem" overstates the causal direction.
>>84974822>it was that porn functions as a partial need-satisfier that blunts the motivational pressure to seek connection without resolving the underlying deficit.I disagree honestly. If anything porn is proven to lower your inhibition and impulse control, raise sex drive which in all likelihood would make you want a gf more and increase a desire for a gf. But I agree with you porn has alot more effects on your brain than just sexuality a porn-optimized brain is less reliant on the frontal lobe so its harder for them to focus on long term tasks and makes your brain far more susceptible to addiction and short term gratification.Ironically quitting porn would probably make it harder for people to get a partner, but it might make them crave sex and having a partner less so it might make them happier; though more romantically unsuccessful as its better to be pornbrained and low inhib than a high inhib anxious overthinking freak.
>>84974861the lowered inhibition point is partially supported, but i'd separate out the mechanisms a bit. lowered inhibition and raised sex drive aren't the same thing as increased motivation to pursue a real partner. what the research actually shows is that high porn use tends to increase sexual appetite in a generalized sense while simultaneously making real-world initiation harder, not easier, because the gap between the frictionless reward of porn and the effortful, rejection-risking process of actual courtship widens. more drive doesn't automatically translate into more directed behavior toward the harder target when the easier one is still available.the prefrontal cortex is exactly what you need for the long game of building a relationship: impulse regulation, delayed gratification, tolerating ambiguity, sustained attention. if chronic porn use is genuinely downregulating frontal involvement in reward processing, the downstream effects aren't limited to sexuality at all. it's a broad cognitive and motivational tax that makes everything requiring sustained effort harder, which is a much bigger deal than just erectile function or arousal thresholds.higher inhibition without the other pieces in place doesn't automatically produce better outcomes, it can just produce more anxious, more self-aware failure. which loops back to the earlier point that the cope and the underlying problem are entangled.
Good. Society deserves to go down in flames. What did it ever do for us.
Porn is weird. Like it has supernatural properties.
>>84975167it gave you all comforts you recognize today, but i also understand the evils and the sentiment. unfortunately, there's not much we can do to change it individually, so we must focus on the things we can change.
>>84975131>the prefrontal cortex is exactly what you need for the long game of building a relationship: impulse regulation, delayed gratification, tolerating ambiguity, sustained attention. if chronic porn use is genuinely downregulating frontal involvement in reward processing, the downstream effects aren't limited to sexuality at all. it's a broad cognitive and motivational tax that makes everything requiring sustained effort harder, which is a much bigger deal than just erectile function or arousal thresholds.>higher inhibition without the other pieces in place doesn't automatically produce better outcomes, it can just produce more anxious, more self-aware failure. which loops back to the earlier point that the cope and the underlying problem are entangled.Wrong by every study and metric conducted since the 70s, but okay. Basically every paper shows that lower inhibition corresponds to greater amount of sex partners AND better relationship outlooks for men. This is pretty basic stuff same reason low IQ men are so successful with women.
>>84974268Porn is UNIRONICALLY bASED AS SHIT AND WE NEED MORE OF IT IN THE WORLD.
>>84975945well, no, because that claim is partially supported but you're conflating a few different things that the research actually separates out.what the literature consistently shows is that unrestricted sociosexuality - meaning a lower threshold for casual sex without commitment - correlates with more lifetime sexual partners and earlier sexual debut. that's well-documented going back to simpson and gangestad's sociosexual orientation inventory work in the early 90s. lower inhibition toward casual sex does predict more casual sex, which is not a surprising finding.where it gets complicated is the leap to "better relationship outcomes." the same research shows unrestricted sociosexuality correlates with higher infidelity rates, lower mate retention effort, and less investment in long-term partnerships, which aren't obviously "better relationship outlooks" depending on what you're measuring. and the low IQ point mixes up social inhibition with cognitive inhibition, which are different constructs. social inhibition involves behavioral and emotional regulation in response to external social threats, cognitive inhibition involves attentional and executive control to manage internal mental noise. what looks like "success" in low-inhibition men is often specifically short-term mating success, and the research is pretty clear that long-term relationship stability tracks differently, correlating more with agreeableness, emotional stability, and yes, frontal lobe mediated impulse regulation. so the original point about prefrontal involvement wasn't wrong, it was just talking about a different outcome than the one you're describing.
>>84975998Maybe, we've had this discussion many times I don't disagree with what you say and you make a good argument. Fundamentally I still think you give bad advice for how to escape virgin/loserdom because it is my belief and ardent observation that short-term mating success is without a doubt the bottleneck that most young men are getting stuck at and why they're struggling so much, its really the failure to launch if they just bypassed this milestone unless they're severely mentally ill or abusive which most virgin incel men are NOTThe long-term situation that follows after is relatively trivial in difficult by comparison men really are just struggling from a lack of options and you also neglect that short term mating success literally provides all of the things you said like more confidence, happier more social aptitude etc its very natural for one person to focus on short term success find a good partner and switch to the alternate configuration. What you're suggesting or talking about inhibition for example results in slightly better long term mating success at the expense of dramatically reduced short term mating success. Speaking more practically everyone who wasn't born yesterday knows that the only competitive and effective mating strategy is to instantly like out/polarize a girl, sex her and if she refuses move on and repeat until it works and you have a gf. PUAs have been talking about this and the danger of onetitis or not quickly moving on for ages. Not to mention if you're always in a relationship all the time, even if they ON AVERAGE lower quality simply being and invested in a relationship and being in the game for longer means you're more likely to clear the bar and win.I hate you say it but your observations and theory that proposes an alternative for proven PUA strats are theoretically interesting but practically worthless.
the advice i've been giving isn't really a competing mating strategy, it's more a framework for how to think about the situation. the actionable version of what i've been saying looks less like "here's how to get girls" and more like "here's how to stop the ideology from making the actual problem harder to solve."which does have practical downstream effects. someone who drops the blackpill framing stops pre-rejecting himself before he's even tried. someone who understands the half-met need mechanism might be more motivated to actually seek out real connection rather than staying comfortable. someone who stops flattening women into abstractions is probably going to be less weird and more readable in actual interactions, which matters a lot at the early stages you're describing.you're right that none of that is a launch strategy. but a lot of men in these spaces aren't failing to launch because they lack technique, they're failing to launch because the ideological framework they're operating inside is actively telling them not to bother. dismantling that is the prerequisite, not the alternative.(1/3)
>>84976261>>84976686but you're making a fair point. the bottleneck observation is probably right for a lot of men, and if short-term mating success builds the confidence, social calibration, and reference experiences that make everything downstream easier, then the sequencing argument holds up reasonably well. i'm not going to pretend otherwise.where i'll argue is on the mechanism rather than the outcome. the PUA framing of polarize fast, move on fast, stay in the game is behaviorally sound as a volume strategy, and you're right that time in the game compounds. the inhibition piece i was pointing at wasn't really about slowing down or being more cautious, it was about whether porn-induced frontal downregulation specifically makes the initiation and persistence part harder, not easier, which is a different claim than "high inhibition men do better."the place we probably actually disagree is on how transferable the short-term configuration is to the long-term one. you're describing it as a relatively natural switch once the milestone is cleared. my instinct is that the habits, the attachment patterns, and the reward calibration built in the short-term phase don't always transfer well, and sometimes actively interfere with the switch. but that's probably more individual variation than a universal rule, and for men who are genuinely just stuck at the launch problem, getting into the game at all is probably more important than optimizing for what comes after.
>>84976261>>84976707**section 3:**the polarize fast, move on fast strategy is genuinely well-documented as effective for short-term volume, and i'm not going to argue against the basic mechanics of it. but "the only competitive and effective strategy" is maybe not the only solution.what it's actually describing is a high-rejection-tolerance, numbers-based approach that works well for men who already have enough baseline social confidence and calibration to execute it without it feeling like repeated humiliation. for a lot of the men we've been talking about, the bottleneck isn't that they don't know the strategy, it's that the repeated rejection loop without the psychological backing to absorb it tends to either collapse into the blackpill or produce increasingly desperate execution that reads badly in the interactions themselves.the strategy also selects pretty heavily for a specific type of woman and a specific context. it works better in environments with high social throughput, bars, apps, college settings, and less well in smaller social ecosystems where burning a connection has lasting costs. so it's a real and useful strategy with a specific user profile and a specific operating environment, not a universal prescription.(3/4 actually, oops)
>>84976686the honest practical addendum to it is probably: the strategy works, and the thing that makes it work better is the internal state you bring to it, which is where the framework stuff actually becomes practical rather than theoretical.the alternative isn't a softer version of the same strategy. it's a different environment entirely. repeated low-stakes exposure over time, shared activity contexts, hobby groups, classes, volunteer work, sports leagues, anything where you're occupying the same space as people with a shared investment in something that isn't meeting people, tends to produce a different kind of relational dynamic. attraction that develops through genuine familiarity and repeated interaction works differently, and it selects for compatibility in ways that the volume strategy doesn't.this matters practically because a lot of men who struggle with the polarize-fast approach aren't failing because they lack confidence in the abstract, they're failing because cold approach in a transactional environment is a genuinely difficult skill that rewards a very specific personality profile. finding an environment where your natural way of being is an asset rather than a liability isn't settling for less, it's just better resource allocation. the men who do well long-term are often the ones who stopped trying to win a game that wasn't built for them and found one that was.(4/4, please excuse my formatting errors, word limit always fucks with me and i want my replies to be easily readable)
>>84976734Yes well I think that the other thing I'd like to add and why blackpillers are partially right is because looks are everything no matter what environment in, especially in the typical PUA strategy which is the only strategy that's actually worth doing. Looks will probably be an up to 20-100x multiplier or potential retardant for whether it will succeed or not this is realistically the hardest bottleneck for most incels to overcome. The best and most straightforward, in fact the only path that makes sense to ascension in terms of time/return is focusing on your physical appearance as much as possible and then polarizing and pursuing as many women as possible. If you look like this, the strategy will be 1000x more effect and if you're too ugly especially with increasingly competitive standards where men see the bottom 80% of men as unattractive then even doing the best possible strategy you're gonna be getting questionable or suboptimal returns for your investment. It might still work, but looks are the factor where it becomes exponentially better or easier in terms of time and effort investment so incels are absolutely right that for all intents and purposes: looks are everything.
>>84976734>tends to produce a different kind of relational dynamic. attraction that develops through genuine familiarity and repeated interaction works differently, and it selects for compatibility in ways that the volume strategy doesn't.Questionable. I think this is just speculation and not really and basis for this in real life. From my observation people meeting from shared friend groups or hobbies seem just as compatible or incompatible as people met from random events. I think really the only relevant factor for finding compatible or good people is just the amount of relationships so the optimal strategy would be to try and get and discard as many women as possible, still the most efficient strategy in every possible regard.The only main downside I will say is that you will filter out a certain demographic of women by employing the PUA strategy so if your type is exactly 'that kind' of woman, they're you might be out of luck. But in my opinion those women tend to be prudish, mentally ill and not really interested in a relationship and when they are they join the market/cock carousel like everyone else, so I don't think you're missing out on much.
>>84974611>>84974619tldr: no we can't see it like we can see real addiction but a small amount of us feel it is real so it's real
>>84975925>i gave you good so i can treat you however i wantCommon belief, thankfully the TFR will never recover.
>>84976782i can agree with all of this, if you choose to play that game. there's some things that i find faulty with PUA thinking, though:women with anxious attachment or low self-esteem are more responsive to the push-pull dynamic that most PUA technique is built around, because the intermittent reinforcement pattern projects onto an existing wound around validation and approval. the hot-cold cycle that PUA deliberately engineers feel familiar rather than alarming to someone who grew up in an inconsistent attachment environment.women who are new to an area, recently out of a relationship, or socially isolated have a smaller support network to reality-check against, which makes the manufactured intimacy of rapport-building techniques work better, than on someone with stable social grounding.women with less relationship experience have less reference points for recognizing when a dynamic is being deliberately engineered. the techniques read as natural charisma rather than a script.personality research suggests women higher in openness and lower in conscientiousness are more receptive to novel social experiences and less likely to apply deliberate scrutiny to an interaction as it unfolds.this profile overlaps heavily with people who are already in a vulnerable position, which is the ethical critique of PUA as a system. the techniques work best on the people who can least afford to be on the receiving end of them.if your techniques work for you, then you're most likely only going to get ladies who have issues. if you can find an environment where you don't have to use these techniques and can rely more heavily on natural forms of attraction, then you up your odds significantly. there is not guarantee that when you get a girl, you'll keep her. and the pool of women you're pulling from, who will lay you immediately, are not likely to be wife material. i guess if sex is your only goal, keep doing it, but a stable, longterm relationship is unlikely to come of it.
>>84976782Nestea oh my gosh nestea come back nestea why are you fuze now...
>>84976833the actual state of the research isn't "a small amount of us feel it's real," it's that the behavioral markers (tolerance, compulsivity, failed quit attempts, withdrawal-adjacent experience) are consistently documented, the mechanistic debate is about whether "addiction" is the right taxonomic label for those markers, not whether the markers exist.so, the disagreement in the literature is a naming dispute more than an existence dispute, and collapsing that into "some people just feel it's real" misrepresents what's actually being argued.
>>84976854>>i gave you good so i can treat you however i want>Common belief, thankfully the TFR will never recover.you're being disingenuous. that's not at all what i'm saying, i'm not "advocating for society" or whatever.
>>84976782sorry if this causes confusion, but i have a bit more to say and should have continued in my last post. one of the underappreciated advantages of the shared context environment is that looks become a less dominant filter at the point of initial evaluation. cold approach in a transactional setting is essentially a snap judgment situation, and physical appearance carries disproportionate weight precisely because there's nothing else to go on yet. in a context where you're already occupying the same space as someone repeatedly, where she's already seen how you move through the world, how you treat people, how you show up to things you care about, the initial physical threshold matters less because it's not doing the same screening work.what fills that gap is a different set of signals, and this is where things like being in decent shape, being disciplined, having genuine interests and competence in something, actually start to compound in ways they don't in a volume strategy. these things read differently in an environment where someone has time to observe them. a man who shows up consistently, who's visibly put effort into himself without performing it, who's good at something and comfortable in that context, generates a kind of attraction that doesn't have a cold approach equivalent because it accumulates over time rather than having to work in a single interaction.the practical implication is that investment in yourself, physical, social, skill-based, has a higher return in environments where people have time to notice it. it doesn't make looks irrelevant, but it changes what's doing the heavy lifting. which means the men who are most disadvantaged by purely looks-gated initial screening are also the ones who stand to gain the most from shifting the environment they're operating in.
>>84974268LITERALLY EVERYTHING IS A "NEURO-STIMULANT." IT COMES FREE WITH YOUR FUCKING BEING ALIVE. BEING HORNY AND RESPONDING TO SEXUAL STIMULI IS NORMAL. FUCK I HATE YOU NOFAP CULTISTS SO FUCKING MUCH. TEACHING NORMIES NEUROSCIENCE TERMINOLOGY WAS A MISTAKE.
