Mental Masturbation on Porn

https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/the-logic-of-envy

Teach says that Porn is the means of escaping the need to fantasize, and hence "take action."

Generally I think Teach is full of shit.

I had a girl friend once who believed that fantasizing about women was as "bad" (for you and women and society) as any kind of porn, in effect, they are equivalent.

It is, roughly, my idea that they are indeed equivalent.

Few have a strong enough imagination to get anywhere at all.  I can, I can fantasize to the point of orgasm without any porn, but I can also tell you that it is incredibly hard work, often subject to getting derailed by fear, or falling away from fatigue.  So if you want to get the job done reliably, it's not easy to rely on it and I'm glad I don't have to.  Still, orgasm doesn't usually doesn't work without a lot of fantasy throughout and profoundly at the end.  So porn is like the sip of water your allowed to drink after each lap of the marathon, you might make it otherwise, but maybe not.  Noam Chomsky described porn as like having better eyeglasses.

I've sometimes myself even pondered if it were better to always be forced to fantasize, and hence strengthen the 'muscles' of fantasization.

But porn, being produced and sold by other people, may actually have just as much if not more socially redeeming value.  Effectively, it comes pre-screened and approved by others.  Here are the real (or fake) women you can fantasize about having sex with, not the monsters and demons of your imagination who will take you places nobody else knows.  Though as I've said, you probably won't get there without your imagination anyway.  It's not a mechanical process.  Synapses in your brain are ultimately what need firing.

Porn is like the snorkel in which you can keep on breathing air from the world outside of you until you meet yourself.

Teach is obviously a narcissist, and his "thinking" is often disgusting. 

While proclaiming the necessity of porn he demeans it and the people who use it, including himself.

However the same might be said for his critics, including commenter Guttermouth who writes:

2) I have so much professional, anecdotal, and epidemiological experience about men with porn that I find the assertion that porn has nothing to do with addiction offensively stupid, and I'm very reluctant to just call things "stupid" without qualification. I have seen otherwise pretty reasonable, decent men's lives absolutely annihilated by porn addiction, and it doesn't take long to see that most of them are the kind of people prone to getting addicted to lots of stuff.

Guttermouth's own Substack begins with the "warning":

If I sound awful, there's a very good chance I'm fucking with you. If you can't tell, it probably doesn't matter.

Reading Guttermouth further is indeed being fucked with, and not in a good way.  (But it may have some value nonetheless.  If you thought you were mentally ill, just read the blog by the antiporn shrink.)

Speaking as the man on the outside looking in, it seems to me that people have had (and maybe still) great sex, marriage, children, and all the things that are supposed to be good for one's soul can be just as unhappy as anyone else.  So why are they keeping it all to themselves, and knocking my tree too?  Apparently all the good things in life don't in themselves create a path away from being narcissistic.