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.
Culture reframes desire, but if desire were culture-made, it wouldn’t keep doing its job: reproduction. That reliability demonstrates our basic urges, leanings, and impulses have deep innate roots and suggests that for thousands of years we’ve been thinking more or less the same things. And if you want to take a different tact, lots of great writers, Roth and Updike come to mind, had all kinds of wild explorations long before porn and social!
Oh and hey folks, the chance to see Paul out of his element is yet another reason to become a paid subscriber!
I don't have much knowledge within these topics, but I think if you are arguing for innateness, you could point out that social media is ultimately updated and run based on the needs of human users, which means that such sites can only "reflect" the desires of the users passively, but not "shape" the desires actively. Social media or pornographic sites are systematically able to follow the users' tendencies, but they cannot create and popularize certain desires from scratch, considering how humans are the demand and such sites are the supply, not the other way around.
You can argue that certain behaviours might shift or become more prevalent but the level of the change does not reach far enough down to qualify as actually changing anything essential about sexual desire. What’s changed is more like fashion changes than actual changes in human nature.
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.
I like the analogy, but it seems to go against the argument I'm supposed to make, which is that our desires are unchanging. Children raised with this hyperpalatable food might find their tastes transforming, so that normal foods become bland and unsatisfying. Maybe we respond similarly to the superstimulus of porn. Add to this the problem of habituation—a frequent porn user sees a million pretty naked people and gradually becomes bored with the same old same old—and we all become pervs, preferring hentai to the real thing, developing weird fetishes, and the like.
For what it's worth, I think that's too simple. I bet a lot of people have very pervy porn tastes for the reasons above. But this doesn't extend to real life, where there are no superstimuli and no extreme habituation (well, except for the super-promiscuous). So we just stick with our normal hard-wired desires.
An analogy is with violence. I'm pretty habituated to violence in movies and it would take a lot to shock me. But I bet that if I saw someone in the real world being shot in the head (something one sees a thousand times in a John Wick movie), I'd be horrified and perhaps traumatized.
Ah maybe i misunderstood the contours of the debate. I was imagining both sides were taking for granted various contemporary social/sexual problems (young people having less sex, more ED among men, etc etc) and then arguing over how to conceive of the causes of that.
But maybe you're going to be arguing that all this stuff has been overblown?
Not necessarily. I'm going to quickly concede (because I think it's true!) that there have been big changes. Apparently, the young people aren't dating, aren't flirting, and aren't having much sex. There are also changes in self-identity--a lot more people refuse to self-categorize as male or female, and a lot more women are self-identifying as bisexual. My argument, though, is that desire hasn't changed. Crudely put, pre-internet, everyone wanted to have sex with people who looked like Sydney Sweeney and Chris Hemsworth; now, in 2025, we still want to have sex with people who look like Sydney Sweeney and Chris Hemsworth. One argument here is that, putting aside a few pounds and (for men) a bit more muscle, sex symbols (and porn stars!) look the same as they ever did.
As someone who was a veteran spectator of online diet wars (before migrating to spectate online gender wars), this is sort of my jam, so I hope you’ll indulge me :)
You may already be aware of this, but before the most recent keto craze, there was one in the early 2010’s, coinciding w/the “carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis” of obesity put forth by journalist Gary Taubes in a bestselling book of his. Naturally, many scientists took issue w/this egregious oversimplification. One of them was neuroscientist Stephan Guyenet, who pointed out that low-carb diets — like pretty much all diets — work by reducing palatability, so those employing them end up eating less. He had a blog (a proper blogspot blog — remember the days?!) where he wrote extensively on this; unfortunately, the archives seem both hard to navigate and missing those earlier posts (https://www.stephanguyenet.com/archive/).
Anyway, his thesis in those posts was that obesity is largely driven by “hyperpalatable” industrially engineered foods, whose palatability:satiety ratio is highly unnatural — in the evopsych sense that vanishingly few such things exist in nature or in traditional cuisines, and those that do take an inordinate amount of effort to obtain (and cannot be had in any appreciable quantities). Pringles vs boiled potatoes are an easy example. But also even just the effects of mechanical processing — eg, nut butters vs nuts that our ancestors had to painstakingly crack using rocks or whatever they had nearby.
There was some contingent of low-carb fanatics who went after Guyenet for the supposed circularity of defining “hyperpalatable” as “things that are overeaten” (and decided to be very personally offended at the idea that he was calling them gluttonous), when he did no such thing, even if his actual definition wasn’t fully operationalized and more along “I know it when I see it” lines (cf porn). Probably anything put into a bag after food scientists (ie, those whose job title is actually “food scientist” or some such) methodically chemically tinkered w/it is fair game for the descriptor.
I think the analogy to porn is fairly straightforward. Back in the day, there was one mythical Helen of Troy. Now, through surgical or digital (or AI) manipulation, there are “hyperpalatable” human objects of sexual desire, available in unlimited supply on any screen connected to the internet. I am a Millennial woman, and while there’s not a huge number of men w/whom I’ve personally talked (never mind more-than-talked) about these topics, I really do get the sense that on the population level, there’s very much a “before high-speed internet porn” and “after high-speed internet porn” delineation in men’s ideas about sexuality (or sexual self-conception or whatever is the correct term for these things).
@Paul S ‘s anecdote about fasting is also pretty interesting, as afaik fasting is often deliberately undertaken in religious traditions and meant to recalibrate one’s sensitivities and sensibilities — and so it's supposed to be the case that one is extra sensitive to stimuli immediately after breaking a fast. I think the same also holds for unintended fasting, such as having been lost out in the wilderness for days, etc. Barring extreme scenarios or the conscious decision to implement fasts, we seem to entirely lack these “resets” (for any conceivable appetites) today.
All that sounds spot on to me, but I can't tell whether it's good for what Paul is arguing in the debate or bad. As a former competitive debater I suppose I would advise him to try to sneakily frame the terms of the debate in such a way that accurate observations like these reinforce the position he gets to defend rather than undermine it.
So here is some further anecdotal musing, to do with as you wish:
After I woke up from the coma, I discovered I was quadriplegic. One of the particularly delightful side-effects of serious spinal cord injury is total loss of sexual function. Now I can still watch porn, but it does absolutely nothing for me, physiologically speaking. (Imagination likewise no longer connects; it is something to do with the disconnection of the autonomic system from the brain, below the level of injury.) Very occasionally I look at it, but that’s just because I like the way women look naked and it makes me feel nostalgic (well, until it makes me bitter and sad, and so go back to the Apple TV adaptation of Foundation or Substack or whatever).
However, I have noticed absolutely no change in the extent to which I find real life women attractive, or not. I still know which women I think are hot, and which women I don’t, and I generally find the same personality traits attractive (and likewise this massively influences whether I find somebody more or less attractive over time). Okay, it probably matters that I was never really a huge consumer of porn even before my life changed quite dramatically. And I experienced the loss of rock climbing as far more psychologically upsetting than the loss of sex. So yeah, I might not be your average man in these regards. Nonetheless, I experienced no psychological reset in my attitude to sex in the way that I did with my attitude to food. As I say, make of that what you will…
After I spent five weeks in a coma, and three weeks later when I was finally allowed to eat solid food again, my absolute favourite thing to eat was grapes. Could not get enough of them. Tried a bit of Cadbury's dairy milk chocolate (my previous junk favourite) and just was like…nah, gimme de grapes.
Well, that lasted a couple of weeks. Except I kept nibbling on bits of dairy milk… and before too long, I just wanted to stuff my face with dairy milk again.
Hypothesis: I went so long without solid food that my brain reset to what we might call (probably horribly inaccurately) its Neolithic homeostasis, which instinctively craved grapes and found processed sugar too sweet. My preference for chocolate over grapes is learnt, and indeed, in my case, re-learnt.
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.
Culture reframes desire, but if desire were culture-made, it wouldn’t keep doing its job: reproduction. That reliability demonstrates our basic urges, leanings, and impulses have deep innate roots and suggests that for thousands of years we’ve been thinking more or less the same things. And if you want to take a different tact, lots of great writers, Roth and Updike come to mind, had all kinds of wild explorations long before porn and social!
Oh and hey folks, the chance to see Paul out of his element is yet another reason to become a paid subscriber!
I don't have much knowledge within these topics, but I think if you are arguing for innateness, you could point out that social media is ultimately updated and run based on the needs of human users, which means that such sites can only "reflect" the desires of the users passively, but not "shape" the desires actively. Social media or pornographic sites are systematically able to follow the users' tendencies, but they cannot create and popularize certain desires from scratch, considering how humans are the demand and such sites are the supply, not the other way around.
You can argue that certain behaviours might shift or become more prevalent but the level of the change does not reach far enough down to qualify as actually changing anything essential about sexual desire. What’s changed is more like fashion changes than actual changes in human nature.
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.
I like the analogy, but it seems to go against the argument I'm supposed to make, which is that our desires are unchanging. Children raised with this hyperpalatable food might find their tastes transforming, so that normal foods become bland and unsatisfying. Maybe we respond similarly to the superstimulus of porn. Add to this the problem of habituation—a frequent porn user sees a million pretty naked people and gradually becomes bored with the same old same old—and we all become pervs, preferring hentai to the real thing, developing weird fetishes, and the like.
For what it's worth, I think that's too simple. I bet a lot of people have very pervy porn tastes for the reasons above. But this doesn't extend to real life, where there are no superstimuli and no extreme habituation (well, except for the super-promiscuous). So we just stick with our normal hard-wired desires.
An analogy is with violence. I'm pretty habituated to violence in movies and it would take a lot to shock me. But I bet that if I saw someone in the real world being shot in the head (something one sees a thousand times in a John Wick movie), I'd be horrified and perhaps traumatized.
Ah maybe i misunderstood the contours of the debate. I was imagining both sides were taking for granted various contemporary social/sexual problems (young people having less sex, more ED among men, etc etc) and then arguing over how to conceive of the causes of that.
But maybe you're going to be arguing that all this stuff has been overblown?
Not necessarily. I'm going to quickly concede (because I think it's true!) that there have been big changes. Apparently, the young people aren't dating, aren't flirting, and aren't having much sex. There are also changes in self-identity--a lot more people refuse to self-categorize as male or female, and a lot more women are self-identifying as bisexual. My argument, though, is that desire hasn't changed. Crudely put, pre-internet, everyone wanted to have sex with people who looked like Sydney Sweeney and Chris Hemsworth; now, in 2025, we still want to have sex with people who look like Sydney Sweeney and Chris Hemsworth. One argument here is that, putting aside a few pounds and (for men) a bit more muscle, sex symbols (and porn stars!) look the same as they ever did.
As someone who was a veteran spectator of online diet wars (before migrating to spectate online gender wars), this is sort of my jam, so I hope you’ll indulge me :)
You may already be aware of this, but before the most recent keto craze, there was one in the early 2010’s, coinciding w/the “carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis” of obesity put forth by journalist Gary Taubes in a bestselling book of his. Naturally, many scientists took issue w/this egregious oversimplification. One of them was neuroscientist Stephan Guyenet, who pointed out that low-carb diets — like pretty much all diets — work by reducing palatability, so those employing them end up eating less. He had a blog (a proper blogspot blog — remember the days?!) where he wrote extensively on this; unfortunately, the archives seem both hard to navigate and missing those earlier posts (https://www.stephanguyenet.com/archive/).
Anyway, his thesis in those posts was that obesity is largely driven by “hyperpalatable” industrially engineered foods, whose palatability:satiety ratio is highly unnatural — in the evopsych sense that vanishingly few such things exist in nature or in traditional cuisines, and those that do take an inordinate amount of effort to obtain (and cannot be had in any appreciable quantities). Pringles vs boiled potatoes are an easy example. But also even just the effects of mechanical processing — eg, nut butters vs nuts that our ancestors had to painstakingly crack using rocks or whatever they had nearby.
There was some contingent of low-carb fanatics who went after Guyenet for the supposed circularity of defining “hyperpalatable” as “things that are overeaten” (and decided to be very personally offended at the idea that he was calling them gluttonous), when he did no such thing, even if his actual definition wasn’t fully operationalized and more along “I know it when I see it” lines (cf porn). Probably anything put into a bag after food scientists (ie, those whose job title is actually “food scientist” or some such) methodically chemically tinkered w/it is fair game for the descriptor.
I think the analogy to porn is fairly straightforward. Back in the day, there was one mythical Helen of Troy. Now, through surgical or digital (or AI) manipulation, there are “hyperpalatable” human objects of sexual desire, available in unlimited supply on any screen connected to the internet. I am a Millennial woman, and while there’s not a huge number of men w/whom I’ve personally talked (never mind more-than-talked) about these topics, I really do get the sense that on the population level, there’s very much a “before high-speed internet porn” and “after high-speed internet porn” delineation in men’s ideas about sexuality (or sexual self-conception or whatever is the correct term for these things).
@Paul S ‘s anecdote about fasting is also pretty interesting, as afaik fasting is often deliberately undertaken in religious traditions and meant to recalibrate one’s sensitivities and sensibilities — and so it's supposed to be the case that one is extra sensitive to stimuli immediately after breaking a fast. I think the same also holds for unintended fasting, such as having been lost out in the wilderness for days, etc. Barring extreme scenarios or the conscious decision to implement fasts, we seem to entirely lack these “resets” (for any conceivable appetites) today.
All that sounds spot on to me, but I can't tell whether it's good for what Paul is arguing in the debate or bad. As a former competitive debater I suppose I would advise him to try to sneakily frame the terms of the debate in such a way that accurate observations like these reinforce the position he gets to defend rather than undermine it.
So here is some further anecdotal musing, to do with as you wish:
After I woke up from the coma, I discovered I was quadriplegic. One of the particularly delightful side-effects of serious spinal cord injury is total loss of sexual function. Now I can still watch porn, but it does absolutely nothing for me, physiologically speaking. (Imagination likewise no longer connects; it is something to do with the disconnection of the autonomic system from the brain, below the level of injury.) Very occasionally I look at it, but that’s just because I like the way women look naked and it makes me feel nostalgic (well, until it makes me bitter and sad, and so go back to the Apple TV adaptation of Foundation or Substack or whatever).
However, I have noticed absolutely no change in the extent to which I find real life women attractive, or not. I still know which women I think are hot, and which women I don’t, and I generally find the same personality traits attractive (and likewise this massively influences whether I find somebody more or less attractive over time). Okay, it probably matters that I was never really a huge consumer of porn even before my life changed quite dramatically. And I experienced the loss of rock climbing as far more psychologically upsetting than the loss of sex. So yeah, I might not be your average man in these regards. Nonetheless, I experienced no psychological reset in my attitude to sex in the way that I did with my attitude to food. As I say, make of that what you will…
So here's an (interesting?) anecdote for you.
After I spent five weeks in a coma, and three weeks later when I was finally allowed to eat solid food again, my absolute favourite thing to eat was grapes. Could not get enough of them. Tried a bit of Cadbury's dairy milk chocolate (my previous junk favourite) and just was like…nah, gimme de grapes.
Well, that lasted a couple of weeks. Except I kept nibbling on bits of dairy milk… and before too long, I just wanted to stuff my face with dairy milk again.
Hypothesis: I went so long without solid food that my brain reset to what we might call (probably horribly inaccurately) its Neolithic homeostasis, which instinctively craved grapes and found processed sugar too sweet. My preference for chocolate over grapes is learnt, and indeed, in my case, re-learnt.
Make of that what you will!
Huh! I always imagined cave men would go wild over processed chocolate, but maybe not!
Well they would…just not straight away! I think?