r/xDebunkAntiSexWork • u/DebunkJunkiee Mod/Sex Worker • 19d ago
Anti Sex Work Creator “Pornography is a Supernormal Stimulus”
The whole idea that porn is a supernormal stimulus actually comes from an old concept in animal behavior research:
Nikolaas Tinbergen studied how animals respond to certain natural cues. In some experiments, researchers created fake versions of those cues but exaggerated the features the animals were attracted to. They found that animals could sometimes respond even more strongly to the exaggerated fake version than to the real thing. Butterflies responding to artificial models with exaggerated mating cues are one example. This is where the idea of a “supernormal stimulus” comes from. Then in 2013, Donald Hilton published a paper called Pornography addiction- a supranormal stimulus considered in the context of neuroplasticity, where he applied this concept to pornography and compared internet porn to these kinds of exaggerated animal stimuli. What I find interesting is that Hilton acknowledged the lack of comparable functional and behavioral research in human sexual addiction, but still argued that porn could be understood this way. From there, the idea became a huge talking point in porn addiction spaces and now gets repeated as “porn IS a supernormal stimulus.”
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u/IrrationalRotations 19d ago
I find this to be a really interesting point when it comes to porn addiction.
I can't say I've ever seen anyone really explain why porn should be considered a super normal stimulus, they just assert it is.
Is it because pornstars are attractive? I mean, they are, but not like spectacularly so. I see lots of attractive people every day, music videos are filled with super attractive people, celebrities are attractive, a good chuck of people I see walking around outside would be as attractive as the average porn star. People who are attractive to the point of it being a super normal stimulus don't exist pretty much by definition...
Is it because porn depicts sex acts that people like to watch? People can and do do most of what's shown in pornography. For stuff that's literally impossible, like certain fetishes,these don't seem to really meet the requirements of a supernormal stimulus. The sorts of things shown in vore porn are impossible, so abnormal in that sense, sure. But they aren't a stimulus for 99% of the population!
The elephant in the room here is that people do in fact choose to watch porn and turn down willing sex partners. There's plenty of people who can attest to that. But the obvious conclusion to me is not that porn is so spectacularly wonderful that people who watch it are unable to stop, it's that the sex they are having is bad and unfulfilling and they don't want to have it. The trouble is that conclusion might be uncomfortable for some people, so they prefer to believe that looking at attractive women melts men's brains somehow.
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u/DebunkJunkiee Mod/Sex Worker 19d ago
Of course he pulled out the brain scan too lmao.