Just trying it

Hi.
I will try the following experiment : nothing sexual for one week, then next Wednesday if I don't feel like shit (which is very unlikely to happen, but I cannot allow that) I'll try one month, and if after one month I feel like I improved in some kind of way I'll go for 90 days in total. By nothing sexual I mean : no masturbation, no pornography, no sex (why not try that too ? I have no girlfriend at the moment) and none of what you call "edging".
Now why ? Well, first thing I'd like to say is that I don't really feel like I have the problems people describe here. Maybe the way I was raised has something to do with it, maybe it is the system of thought I'm developing which logically leads to that. But I don't have any moral problem with anything related to sexuality, even the most extreme, it doesn't disgust me (as long as it's strange, weird art - I of course feel disgusted by violent movies and all that) and doesn't affect me with the feelings usually associated with "transgression".
Still, I feel like I have lately developed a compulsive relation to pornography, and even violent pornography - this "level of tolerance" thing I've seen talked about. And, as I almost pointed out, I usually feel very bad watching even a remotely violent movie - and since it doesn't keep me from punching someone in the face if I need to, I'd like to stay that way. So now is the best time to try what you advocate for. I'd like to know if there is more than relieving culturally-induced shame and neurological stuff in your experiments ; I'm curious to see the extents of the improvement.

(btw excuse my "french guy" english - no pun intended)

 

I agree. All I'm saying is, people's "own particular sense of morality" doesn't come from anywhere. It is true that nowadays popular medias are spreading a message of self indulgence and false sexual liberation. But it's also true that the very practices this messages is defending are contradictory with some other of its ethical stances, mostly because the cultural industry is trying no to provide a defined ideology but to "keep all together" incompatible ones. You cannot really at the same time have the classical, "literary" vision of love and the "sexual liberation" one which was born in opposition to the first one (see Beauvoir and first wave feminists, and their critic of the notion of love as fusion, and of passionate love in literature). I'm not saying I'm for any of these ideas, I just think that people are experiencing contradictory feelings nowadays partly (partly) because our cultural education is defending contradictory ideologies as if they were compatible.
btw, I've been reading a few threads and I'm glad people are open to discussions here.

 

Well, I suppose you won't be willing to read all of this shit I'm gonna write, but...
First, your explanation of why masturbation would be bad is a teleological one. And I don't think teleological explanations "of the way our body is the way it is" have ever been satisfying (e.g., we have sperm to impregnate, so we shouldn't masturbate. But masturbation produces dopamine, dopamine is good, so we should masturbate), and that mostly because, if you know a little about evolution, you know there is no teleology of nature : nature doesn't actually "work" and isn't in any way "balanced". If you take modern theories of evolution by themselves, for example, useless things - such as masturbation - don't "naturally disappear". At all. Most of the time, the selection process depends so much on a few features, that even when secondary ones are affected, it is not to provide the best "performances". If it was the case, animals would be simple, almost immortal organisms, and not the bizarre bodies with strange and compulsive behaviors they are. In fact, wastes of resource are everywhere in nature, mostly because each organism willing to maximize its resources is going to do it at the expense of others.

And this very idea of a "waste of resource", by itself, is nowhere to be found in old biology or theories of evolution - it comes from way more modern visions of bodies as seeking "homeostasis", that is, basically, reacting to stimuli in order to maintain a balance ; so that you conceive bodies as systems of information taking measures, without conscious goals (which means this theory itself doesn't actually require any teleological conception this time). That's called cybernetic. But it doesn't even imply yet that, as humans, we should try to facilitate these information exchanges, that we should aim for this homeostasis - in fact, humans are most of the time at least partially destroying themselves in order to achieve better things. You need, on top of all that, another theory, such as basic utilitarianism, to provide you with a moral which places on top of all other values "happiness", and to equate this happiness with said homeostasis - and that's not so easy, since particular pleasures can be provided by things which disturbs an organism.

That's all the theory that is necessary in order to make simple statements such as "masturbating is a waste of resource (and therefore, it's bad)". Now, I know that you haven't learned all that shit (and really, good for you !), and that you maybe don't even agree with it, but that's the cultural bias of modern discourses on bodies. And so you see where I'm going with all this : it is cultural to use these kind of biological arguments, of course not in the sense of "western" or "rap" culture, but in the sense this word takes in opposition to nature. And that's part of the reasons why I don't accept those - because yes, I've got other reasons, but also have other things to do today than bore you with all that talk...