When watching porn, the consumer is reacting entirely towards the significance of the observed and heard scenes, withsensory inputbeing as limited as the area of thepenis which isbeing 'jerked off'. Regulationof the Self means 'the regulationof the functions of the Self' the ways a human experiences itself and the world around it are under itsdirect, frequently unconscious, control. Sometimes this internal self regulation includes attempts (futile, frompsychoanalytic perspective) to escape the Self.
Immersinghimself into pornography allows the male human
to stop experiencinghis Self in the everydaysense. This facilitation of loss of Self asa
phenomenon, makes the experience akin to watching a nonporn movie, toplaying chess, to
drinking alcohol, to taking drugs, to playing a computer game,
to reading a book. The choice of 'porn' assuch - allows the viewer to not just escape
himself for a while, but to achieve it specifically through a
situationwhichbrings intense arousal (confused with pleasure in an
increasinglyvisible manner in our civilization), an
'adrenaline trip', the mechanics of which
dependon the visual representation of dominationand humiliation ofa femalehuman.
A distinction between the 'disappearance of the Self' through sexual or masturbatoryacts and
the consuming of nonpornbooks and films, is
that with a film orbook the internal dialogues
of the subject are overwritten byinformation fromthe outside, but 'yesterday' and
'tomorrow' still exist - within the worldof the
fictional characters. Within the adrenaline trip
of sexual arousal 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' fade away to a much stronger extent.
Porn makesthe Self disappear more effectively then masturbationalone
-during masturbation there is needed aneffort in maintaining arousal
by adequate fantasies, while when watching porn, ideally the only mental effort
needed from the consumer is to decide at which point to masturbate more vigorously. Bothrealtime
sex, masturbation and masturbation + porn allow the male in question to experience a sort of freedom. From
asocial psychology perspective, this is freedom from alienation, from the abyss of nothingness below
the thin ice onwhich the individual stands. From a more individual perspective, this
'freedom' has to do with evading the emotional effects of
the initial Ego forming shocks from the outside, which
have been inflicted in childhood.
These shocks originallyfacilitate the
appearance of reflex repression of manifestation of the child's impulses -
bodily function, sadistic, overtlyemotional and
otherwise - and aresimultaneously the border of the 'Ego', dividingit from
the 'Id', and also the fuel of the internalized authority - the 'Superego'. For
the duration of the adrenaline trips of various intensities, producedby the
acts of watching porn, independent masturbation, or realtime
sex, ideallythe harsh and persecuting Superego hasdisappeared
- in some cases alsobecause the active male has completelymerged
with it, there is also no 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow', with all their corresponding pressures
- and the anxiety and pain fromthe deepest mental strata is played out without being felt as such.
The trauma is redirected to sexual arousal. Boththe sociological and individual oriented
interpretation of the function of those acts lead to the purpose of
evasionof huge amounts of
unrecognized anxietyand pain. From the moment in its childhood when the little
human learns to not experience certain things which are 'bad' and 'unreal', it begins tensing itself
mentallyand physicallyin order not to feel the correspondingemotions, and becomes
an organism interrupted in many parts by muscle andbiocurrent
blockages, with a psyche fragmented into many autonomousareas of whichthe official
"Me" is a tiny and dysfunctional part.