Cultural Exercises

This is so cool! I remember dreaming of building this sort of thing when I was young.

The damaging effect of porn. As of this should be surprising to anyone!

Everyone knows advertising works by changing peoples perceptions of certain products. Very few ads these days simply work to inform about the details of a product. Instead they work carefully to cultivate an attitude in the consumer, to foster an approach to the product, based on a desire to “act’ a certain way. Businesses spend billions of dollars doing this for brands. Yet certain academics or groups with particular social agendas have for decades claimed porn has “no effect” on users minds and attitudes.

Well hello? What planet do you live on?

Pornography is not the same as being sexually liberated. As this study shows, pornography essentially is about women being sexually commodified - even women who are not the freely-consenting performers in pornographic products.

Feminists can and should uphold the right of women to their sexuality, and to not have their sexual nature determined by churches or other institutions. But that is not the same as insisting that sexuality is “value-free”. Because “value-free” is precisely commodification, objectification. This is not what we want to be teaching young men and women.

It follows exactly my comments on the earlier post about how our brains work. Certain brain states are activated and others are shut down through the training that comes from exposure to un-censured (as opposed to un-censored) pornographic images.

It is shame, in a good way, that modifies our response to behaviours and teaches us what is right and wrong. It is shame that teaches us that other people are living moral agents, not tools or objects to be used.

Women who aspire to a world where they are no longer viewed by men as objects to be used and perhaps abused, should let the men and boys around them know, “I don’t want a pornified lover”. It is not being “a prude”. It is being a real radical - a rebel and a leader and a genuine feminist. This does not mean they deny themself the right to sexual fulfilment. It means they really do reject the toxic notion that porn instills, that they and any woman is simply a body, an object, to be used for sexual gratification by men.

And men who are sincere when they claim they are “for women’s rights” and supportive of the “feminist” cause also need to stop kidding themselves that they can be “for women” while being a “porn consumer”. They need to break the porn habit themselves, as well as let their male friends know “I want to love women, not pixellate them”.

We can do this. It just starts with individual choices. Private choices.

I would love someone to turn this slogan into a meme:

“Kiss a non-pornified lover, cherish the difference”

corbarr:

ohfuckitszombieoprah:

Pictures of scantily dressed women cause a region of the male brain associated with tool use to light up, a new brain-scan study reveals.

This is from a few years ago and it still terrifies me. The part of the brain associated with empathy for other humans literally. shuts. down.

Studies like this make me wonder if my own (male) brain behaves in this way. I’d like to think it doesn’t, but it probably does…

I’m afraid to say you are probably right.

Articles like this convince me more and more that what feminists and politicians need to do is study some genuine biology and neuroscience.

The field of evolutionary psychology, for instance, merges very well with Jungian psychology, and is revealing how the human psyche contains many pre-programmed patterns of behaviour and response to various situations, which have enabled our ancestors to more successfully survive and reproduce. In particular, they were more effective from a survival and reproductive point of view in the ancient past, when humans lived in constant danger. Sadly many of these patterns of behaviour are inappropriate for living in harmony in the modern social word. Yet we are exposed to stimuli which can trigger them.

It is possible to train our personality to ignore these “ancient demons” that reside in our psyche - to not make them part of our self - but that takes discipline to avoid the triggers. And it also needs self-awareness and an understanding of what these feelings are, where they come from, and hence why they should be suppressed. Hence the need for all men and all women to have an understanding of the sciences of evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Some great introductory books: “Sex Genes and Rock” by Australian professor, Rob Brooks, is a very conceptually easy work for a non-scientist to follow, and Rob outlines some of the political implications. A somewhat harder slog (but worth the effort) is Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”. He can be quite confrontational, but always reasonable. He has another book recently, “The Better Angels of our Nature” which I believe confronts the evolutionary psychology of evil, and how culture can overcome it. I haven’t yet read that but will soon.

Another excellent book to help you understand your brain and the way certain images and stimuli can cause other parts of it to “shut down” is Iain McGilchrist’s “The Master and the Emissary”. This is a paradigm-shifting book. Totally mind blowing - literally. He is a psychiatrist and the work has a lot of heavy neuroscience, but it is there to demonstrate the facts.

These are all works by scientists, so none of them is based on just academic theory and utopian dreams. And to be honest the failure of traditional feminism is not due to the resistance of the patriarchy (without denying there is a patriarchy which has been strongly resistive) but to ignorance of how human behaviour - male and female - is influenced by deep psychological remnants, and how any genuine progress toward equality of men and women in society must be based on open-acknowledgement of these inherited flaws, and then constructing effective social and cultural environments that can allow us to overcome them.

The failure of communism had less to do with capitalist and bourgeois resistance, than the incompatibility of communism ideology with human nature. It failed from within - from within human psychology. Where communism still exists - China, for instance - it does so because it is accommodating itself to these internal “givens” of human nature (the desire to own property, for instance).

I count myself a feminist - but that is because I count myself a humanist. And genuine scientifically-literate humanism is based on accepting what is given in human nature, then striving to mold and perfect it through culture.

Where could this lead? Well, in light of the scientific facts mentioned in the above article, that male brains - at a subconscious, and hence not consciously controllable level - can shut down certain empathetic regions by the simple fact of looking a scantily clad females, I would suggest a scientifically-literate feminism would change from the traditional “pro-porn” stance, because it would see that is not compatible with training male brains to see women as living equal partners instead of “objects” or “tools for use”.

Don’t feel bad if as a male you realize you too have these psychological flaws. It is a hangover from our ancestors. But the great news is it is possible to deliberately avoid putting yourself in situations where these psychological triggers are aroused. You can train yourself to reject pornified images. You can indeed be a modern man. But it comes through making certain choices, and to know what those choices should be, you will need the help of evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists - not old-wave feminists.