It’s just watching a movie, right? How could that rewrite the course of human development?
Today, let’s talk about a major event unfolding right under our noses—one we haven’t really been paying much attention to:
Pornographic films may be rewriting the course of human history.
It’s just watching a movie, right? How could that rewrite the course of human development? Isn’t that a bit exaggerated?
Well, let me walk you through this wild idea.
The Pornographic Internet
Let’s start with some data and see just how widespread pornographic films have become.
These figures come from the book Male Decline, which I mentioned when we talked about “Games Swallowing Reality.”
The book tells us that over the past 20-plus years, as the internet rose and spread, pornographic films spread with it, forming a gigantic industry of truly terrifying scale online.
- In 1997, just six years after the birth of the World Wide Web, there were already around 900 online pornography websites.
- By 2005, nearly 13,500 full-length commercial pornographic films had been released onto the market, while Hollywood released only a little over 600 films that year.
- In 2013 alone, one famous overseas pornographic-film website received 15 billion visits, averaging 1.68 million visits per hour.
- Today, the number of new pornographic films made each year is simply impossible to count accurately.
Are Pornographic Films “For Men Only”?
Pornographic films have viewers of both sexes, but of course the majority are men.
That’s not to say women are born without an interest in pornographic films; it’s just that most films currently aren’t made with women’s tastes in mind.
Instant Arousal vs. Arousal That Takes Time
The mechanisms that trigger desire in men and women when it comes to sex aren’t quite the same.
For men, it’s called instant arousal.
A flash of exposed skin, a flirtatious look, a soft, suggestive gasp—that’s enough to turn a man on. And those are exactly the things pornographic films can obviously provide.
For women, the mechanism is called arousal that takes time.
A single cue often isn’t enough to stir a woman’s desire. It takes a sexy atmosphere to get things moving. Creating that atmosphere may require more than just handsome men and beautiful women—it takes coordination among the writing, directing, and acting. And there probably still aren’t that many pornographic films that meet that standard.
So whatever effect pornographic films ultimately have, they basically act directly on men rather than women—at least for now.
So let’s see what pornographic films are actually doing to men.
Over the past few years, a whole pile of books and documentaries in China and abroad have criticized pornographic films and online pornography, including the copy of Male Decline I’m holding here. They fiercely condemn the way rampant pornographic films poison young men.
Their firepower is basically concentrated on two points: after watching too many films, young men:
- lose interest in real sex;
- lose patience with pursuing love.
Let’s start with declining sexual desire.
Declining Sexual Desire
An Italian study found that from 2005 to 2013, the proportion of Italian adolescents reporting reduced sexual desire soared from 1.7% to over 10%. This happened to be exactly the period when internet pornography exploded.
Japan’s situation is much the same. In this superpower of the pornographic-film world, declining sexual desire among young people has become a major problem—one that nearly affects the continuation of the population. One survey says that more than one-third of Japanese males aged 16 to 19 have no interest in sex at all.
Japanese even have a specific term for men who aren’t interested in sex: herbivore men; by contrast, men who remain interested in sex are carnivore men.
So why does watching too many films make sexual desire decline?
Because once the brain realizes you keep watching the same kind of thing, it activates a protective mechanism and lowers its own level of excitement. It wants to save energy for new stimuli.
So you’re very excited by a dirty movie on day one, but by day ten, similar material barely gets a reaction. Yet you still want that rush. What do you do?
You have to crank up the intensity.
Once you get used to extreme material, the perfectly normal sex available in real life starts to seem bland and tasteless.
Love Becomes Hard to Find
What worries many people even more is that pornographic films may also destroy love in the real world.
Pursuing a girl takes patience. A few decades ago, when young men and women were dating, there was often a familiar pattern:
At first, the woman thought the man seemed unreliable. But he kept pursuing her, shamelessly hanging in there, and eventually won her over.
And today? Today’s typical pattern is:
A guy pursues a girl, and the moment she says “no,” he doesn’t hesitate for even a second—he turns around and walks away.
I’ve got three thousand beauties in my hard drive’s harem. Why waste so much effort on you?
If you want intimate contact with the beauties in your hard drive’s harem, you can skip practically all the romance and communication of love in the real world—even kissing and caressing. How simple and direct.
Even if pornographic films haven’t spared you those steps, you can always fast-forward. So men accustomed to the fast-forward mode of pornographic films lose their patience for pursuing love as well.
Adult Film Actresses Rewrite the Course of Civilization
Pornographic films have destroyed men’s ability to enjoy real sex and their ability to pursue love in the real world—this is the basic argument of that whole pile of books and lectures criticizing pornographic films.
But they rarely take the result one step further. It’s as if the impact of pornographic films stops at making men lose interest in women in the real world.
But is that really all? Why not open up the imagination a little further?
Among all the material I’ve read, Male Decline seems to be the only one that pushes the reasoning half a step further.
After combining it with some other material and taking that step all the way, I arrived at the slightly exaggerated conclusion I mentioned at the beginning:
The true consequences of pornographic films may go far beyond the narrow realm of “sex.” They may even have destroyed half of the driving force behind the development of human civilization.
How can I say that?
Scarce Sexual Resources
Because throughout the millions of years of human evolution, sex was always an extremely scarce resource for our male ancestors.
One biologist discovered through genetic testing that the overall sex ratio among our ancestors was roughly 67% female and only 33% male. In other words, throughout history, only some of the men who won the brutal struggle for survival had the chance to mate with multiple women and leave descendants behind.
One statistic says that on lands once conquered by the Mongol Empire, as many as 8% of people today may be descendants of Genghis Khan. So, for all I know, among the people listening to this program, roughly one in ten may be able to trace their family tree back several generations to Genghis Khan.
But apart from successful men like Genghis Khan, most men throughout history actually went extinct. They have no descendants today.
So, over the long river of history, men had to claw their way upward with everything they had in order to leave descendants.
If you don’t fight like your life depends on it, your line dies out.
Men throughout history have done all sorts of bizarre things and left all kinds of marks and varied legacies in civilization. But at the end of the day, the most primitive force driving them was really the desire to gain better and more mating opportunities.
When sexual resources are scarce, men take risks and create. Sometimes that force is destructive, but more often it also drives civilization forward. And the most fundamental premise behind all of this is:
Sex is scarce. There isn’t enough of it.
I think this is one of the deepest background conditions underlying the development of human civilization.
Sexual Resources Are No Longer Scarce
But now? There are three thousand beauties in your hard drive’s harem. Sex is no longer a scarce resource.
This deepest background condition of human civilization has made a complete 180-degree reversal!
If men feel they can effortlessly have sex with attractive women—even if it’s only virtual sex with an adult film actress in their hard drive—how much motivation will they have left to strive, take risks, and create?
That’s immeasurably more serious than simply not pursuing women in the real world.
If women can hold up half the sky, and women created half of human civilization, then surely men created the other half, right? So when adult film actresses arrive in our hard drives, the driving force behind this half of civilization’s development may be drastically weakened.
Human beings may have evolved, like most animals in the world, in an environment where pleasure was scarce. Not just the familiar idea of resource scarcity; I think more important is pleasure scarcity.
Ultimately, the human brain was designed for this kind of pleasure-scarce environment. The human psychological structure, too, adapted to survive in such an environment.
But the rampant spread of pornographic films gives us more pleasure than we even have time to enjoy. Its arrival may mean that humanity is undergoing a major transition from pleasure scarcity to pleasure abundance.
A Very Dirty Experiment
And the transition has only just begun; it’s nowhere near complete.
Why? Because even if your hard drive is so full of adult film actresses that you can’t watch them all, let me put it bluntly: the pleasure of masturbating to pornographic films is still vastly different from real sex. For now, adult film actresses are really winning through sheer quantity.
I once read a very dirty paper. In its experiment, researchers recruited a group of men and women. One group was locked in a dark room to masturbate; the other brought their boyfriend or girlfriend into a dark room and had sex.
Then they tested the prolactin levels in the blood of both groups.
Prolactin sounds like a female hormone, but it’s actually present in both men and women. It’s an indicator of pleasure. The higher the prolactin level, the more intense the pleasure from the preceding sexual activity or masturbation.
The experiment found that prolactin levels after real sex were far higher than after masturbation:
Sex produced five times as much prolactin as masturbation.
This shows that the pleasure brought by real sex still surpasses virtual sex like masturbation.
So, at this stage, even if pursuing a goddess in the real world takes five years, while getting intimate with the goddess in your hard drive takes no more than five minutes from powering on, shut-ins still retain their motivation to pursue real women in the real world—and their motivation to compete and get ahead there.
Virtual Reality
But, hey, who knows what the future holds? This situation could soon be overturned. Because virtual reality is just around the corner.
Today, when we watch porn on a computer screen, our brains can still recognize that it’s fake, so the pleasure has a hard time surpassing real sex.
But once devices emerge that link virtual reality with stimulation of the sexual organs, the situation could be completely reversed.
Devices that use a virtual-reality headset to present the visuals while synchronized stimulation equipment stimulates the sexual organs are already in development.
Just imagine: once this kind of device is mature, will our brains still believe that the virtual sex it presents is fake?
It could be a hundred times more stimulating than real sex!
When that day comes, the pleasure the hard-drive goddess brings to shut-in guys will completely crush real sex, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
When that day arrives, I seriously doubt how many men will still want to pursue women in the real world—and how many will still be willing to take risks and create things in it.
By then, the way human men and women relate to each other, the way humans reproduce, and even the driving force behind the progress of civilization could all undergo earth-shaking changes.
Are we ready for a transformation like that?
Sources and data mentioned in the article
1. That really dirty experiment
Brody, S., & Krüger, T. H. (2006). The post-orgasmic prolactin increase following intercourse is greater than following masturbation and suggests greater satiety. Biological psychology, 71(3), 312-315.
2. Other data sources
All other data in the article is quoted from The Decline of Men.
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