Clickbait title, incredibly thought-provoking piece on the nature of ... everything? Culture, society, the inner landscape of the current moment?
Masturbation may be the most perfect symbol of our current malaise-modernity. It is now possible for us to take all kinds of natural impulses, responsibilities, and fears that are intended to push us out into relationship and interaction, and turn them inward.
We're social primates, but what it means to be social has got really fucked up, with consequences we're only beginning to understand. Great read.
You know, I read things like this, and I can feel myself bucking against it. I want to say this is just more of "the kids these days" kind of thinking. Because I do believe that the times change -- just as the kids these days are all influencers, 50 Cent said he was just tyrin' to get his email on, and kids in the 80s were tying up the phone lines, and before that the Fonz was in to civil rights -- seems to me a bit rich that this one time the youth are screwed up, when before all their horrible proclivities turned out to be fondly remembered.
But. C S Lewis also said this: "Just as, if we stripped the armour off a medieval knight or the lace off a Caroline courtier, we should find beneath them an anatomy identical with our own, so, it is held, if we strip off from Virgil his Roman imperialism, from Sidney his code of honour, from Lucretius his Epicurean philosophy, and from all who have it their religion, we shall find the Unchanging Human Heart, and on this we are to concentrate."
Lewis didn't buy it, I don't think. And it is possible that we are dementing ourselves. That our cultures can cripple us, change our traits, our biology even -- that the tiktok scrolling, goon-cave hiding, influencer supporting folly of this generation is something different, something that will do irreparable harm.
Going back on myself again, though, I doubt (perhaps unfairly) that the writers of these articles have spent very much time cock in hand. Thing is, there are addicts and there are people who write about addicts, and rarely are they the same. And the pronouncements about addicts made by the non-addicts are rarely worth very much when it comes to understanding what's gong on with the addicts.
Continuing on this concept of the theory of the unchanging human heart, Lewis says "For the truth is that when you have stripped off what the human heart actually was in this or that culture, you are left with a miserable abstraction totally unlike the life really lived by any human being." I would say the same is true for the goonerization of life argument: when the whole culture is said to be gooners, absorbed in self-love, we've stopped talking about people at all.
I'm still so stuck in my addiction, I can't help but recognize the smeagol in the influencer and the gooner. The screens are our downfall, but I live so much of my life through the screen, how can I but hope they are our salvation, too?
yeah.
From Luciano Floridi's book The Fourth Revolution:
I assume that salvation will be brought about, insofar as it ever is, using the tools available, even as the same ones destroy us.
I hope you find it.
Wow, is that powerful!
Precisely. Let's do all we can to prevent them be our ruin, for we really don't have any other way
Trust a Japanese to hold the record for the world’s longest masturbation session
Wild
I feel similarly concerned about these topics, but I also remind myself that every generation has been concerned by the poisoning effects of this that or other social trend on the next generation. Will the kids be okay? Historically, they have been...(?) Or not, depending on whose values you're using to judge.
It's a hard line to walk. Civilization isn't dead and people aren't zombie cannibals, so in a sense the cries of alarm have been cries of wolf for the last two thousand years.
On the other hand, a bunch of stuff is legit awful. Maybe a good metric is: how do young people, who aren't anchored in the pasts the adults have, feel about it? It seems like, in this case, they feel bad. So maybe there's something to it this time.
Wow keep having fun. After that's what counts at the end of day.
The temptation is always to file strange or extreme subcultures away as aberrations as if they are disconnected from anything we would call mainstream life. But in reality they are often exaggerated symptoms of forces already present in the wider world.
The notion of turning outward drives much of what we have historically seen as healthy human functioning. Social bonds family formation even the small interactions of community all involve stepping outside ourselves and engaging with something unpredictable and resistant to our total control. Inverting that into pure interiority and control whether through compulsive sexual behavior or endless digital self stimulation changes the rules of the game. It creates a parallel life free of the friction that makes real relationships meaningful and often difficult. That absence of friction might be the most dangerous part because it erodes resilience and strips away the mechanisms we have evolved both psychologically and socially to mediate between self and others.
C S Lewis’s suspicion of the concept of an unchanging human heart becomes relevant here because if cultural patterns can reshape not just our habits but potentially our mental and even physiological wiring then there is no guarantee that behaviors like this remain only fringe. It is not that humanity has suddenly lost its essence but rather that the conditions under which that essence operates have shifted so profoundly that it may begin to express itself in unfamiliar distorted ways.
Trivia: The idea that it's totally universal and everyone does it may itself a kind of cultural bias on the part of the high-frequency masturbation cultures:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130105014944/https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/where-masturbation-and-homosexuality-do-not-exist/265849/