So, I was invited by the bosses at Substack to participate in a live debate on sex and technology, held in Chicago two weeks from now. If you’re in the Windy City and want to check it out, you can get a free ticket here.
It should be a blast. Other participants are:
Aella
Kate Lindsay
Blassie
Kat Rosenfield
Noelle Purdue
Sean Monahan
Katherine Dee
I haven’t met any of these people personally, but I know most of them by reputation. (In 2023, I listed the best books I read that year, and the winner was Kat Rosenfield’s No One Will Miss Her). I will be the least cool person on stage, but I hope to win over the audience with my sweet Canadian earnestness.
Aella and I will be debating Blassie and Katherine Dee, and the topic is (something like) “Has porn and social media changed the nature of sexual desire or are our desires innate?”. Blassie and Katherine will argue in favor of the change side; Aella and I will push for innateness. I’m pretty sure Aella and I are right, but it’s not really my area, and I figure I’ll have to come up with some actual arguments. Please send some my way.
It’ll be taped, and the participants get to release the video later on to our paid subscribers—so become a paid subscriber! BUT I’m only releasing the video if I don’t make an ass of myself, so it’s a sort of 50/50 proposition. Your best bet is to show up in person.
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I was shocked to see you on the poster when they dropped it. Three internet-brained chronic poasters, plus Paul Bloom. They better not be taking advantage of you to lend respectability to this debate.
Here's a potentially helpful analogous question. Has the availability of hyperpalatable foods changed the nature of gastronomic desire, or is gastronomic desire innate? Here, it doesn't seem at all tempting--does it?--to say that the availability of pizza, milk shakes, french fries, and the like, has changed the nature of our desire for food. Rather, we were always attuned to sugar, salt, and fat, and hyperpalatable foods work by taking advantage of relatively fixed and unchanging biological facts about the human palate. (Of course, there's plenty of room for cultural variation with regards to certain flavors. But there's no culture where kids react to broccoli the way they do to ice cream.)
I'd suggest that porn and social media are to sexual desire as hyperpalatable foods are to gastronomic desire. That is, it's more illuminating to understand the social and psychological effects of porn and social media by conceiving of them as involving a novel stimulus acting on relatively stable, innate "tastes", than to think of the novel stimulus as rewriting human nature.
Also, in both the cases of sexual desire, and desire for food, you can give reasonably compelling evolutionary just-so-stories that make sense of the broad outlines of why we like sugar, fat, salt, as well as symmetrical faces, clear skin, low waist-to-hip ratios, and the like.