

Ran Gavrieli: "Why I stopped watching porn"  TEDx - atmosx
http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Why-I-Stopped-Watching-Porn-Ran;search%3Atag%3A%22israel%22

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thenerdfiles
You know what? Here goes.

I've watched porn off and on for years, maybe about 11 or 12 now? I'm 28 now.

Bear with me. This relates.

As a kid I grew up under the mistaken belief that I had HIV/AIDS. I'm not sure
if this is a common thing for you folks, but for me — from the ages of 6 to 13
— I believed I had a highly stigmatized disease.

After "exploring the bodies" of two other young boys, their naked bodies and
their penises, in a closet of my mother's bedroom, I left that situation
without any meaning or capacity to understand. The strict immediate feeling I
recall from that situation, which haunts me to this day, is that something
quite trivial happened. I thought their penises were interesting, and as
friends that they were interesting. I was not particularly attracted to them,
as I was 6. In a very strong way, I thought of them as just like me, and the
entire event was more exploratory than sexual.

I wasn't a very "street smart" kid, so to speak, but I could read at an 11th
grade level in the 3rd grade. Letters and words simply made sense, and I could
blaze through all sorts of sentences, sentences ranging from the domains of
paleontology to technical manuals. I picked up a long list of dinosaur names
and weird terms like "Automatic Torque Control System". My mother an
overworked engineer living in the South, a quite rigid Baptist woman deeply
committed to a traditionalistic faith. "Faggot" was a word she used with its
most poignant pejorative meaning.

Shortly after my escapede with my male friends, I found myself watching
television here and there in the early 90s. Whenever I needed a rest from my
LEGO-labrynth of a room, I'd think to myself "I need something less mentally
stimulating". You know the feeling, of wanting to watch a dumb action flick
and all that. I'd literally spend 14-16 hours a day with LEGO, to myself,
already quite solitary beyond my brief list of friends. Sometimes I'd go days
without eating or sleeping, contriving some thing, dismantling the idea, going
at it again, engineering my room into a universe that exactly met my
specification. I couldn't sleep sometimes, unless I arranged the pieces
perfectly together, squeezed them tightly again and again, or at least
imagined what pieces would need to exist in order for me to complete my idea.

But I digress — the point here is that media become a means of peace from
myself. However, for my restricted social mind and my over fledgling
intelligence (again, we're talking 6 here), the media sensationalism of
HIV/AIDS turn'd me into from a solitary, perhaps even arguably "autistic"
child (I'd rock, throw fits if others touched my LEGOs, slam my head into
trees, desks, walls, engaging in this peculiar wrist writhing activity — which
I still do today, with this unsettling third-person onlooker feeling, and so
on), from something a bit askew... into something much more troubling, much
more foreign to what people, I honestly even believe, can, well, believe to
exist.

After I had acquired the idea that my mother was vehemently opposed to
whatever it was the television sensationalized, this particular disease — a
disease —, I became detached and removed from human reality almost over night.
I thought to myself literally daily that I made the gravest mistake possible,
and that no one could ever know. I had associated my act of exploration with
the contraction of this disease — I fell pray to a very terrible ill-logic.

I never drank after others. I strove my best not even to touch others. Hugging
became a sin. My grandmother grew to despise me because I'd "never kiss" her.
My was alienated by my avoidance, and my non-participatory attitude. I avoided
other kids. I frequently gave non-responses to other people. Talking become a
chore for me, particularly a chore not to confess in passing that I had done
something wrong. I thought eye contact would give me away. I thought getting
too close to any person would ruin my chances at least having a happy life
alone, without ridicule or hatred. Each day as I absorbed myself in my own
thoughts of some inevitable death either of the disease or hatred. LEGOs were
honestly the only thing that kept me mentally stimulated or at least
distracted from my own fate. God quickly became a Divine Comedian, with whom
I'd engage in discourse, banter, madness, and with every emotion from hatred
to guilt. When I came across the Book of Job later in life, it was chillingly
accurate, and it made me exceptionally angry.

At one point the idea faded. I got smarter, and I learned that I had not
contracted the disease.

But by this period, I realized something else was amiss. There was an error,
of a very big sort. Around the age of 13, I realized that I was on a planet,
rife with social life. The most immediate thought was that I had a lot of
catching up to do.

In high school, I found myself gravitating toward the "socially awkward"
group. The band kids, the self-professed rejects and minorities. The oddballs.
The gamers. I distinctly recall at the age of 16 being in a room with some of
these friends, where suddenly during our video gaming session, a porn magazine
was revealed. I experienced no erection, and there was no interest. These
pictures of women, naked and such — your typical work of gaudy pornographic
material. I found it charming, almost endearing primarily that I was in a room
with other males, and everyone was cool about the situation. I played Soul
Calibur or Smash Brothers or whatever game we were into that week, against a
friend, another flipped through pictures of naked men and women, another
friend toggled the two activities. Then the day ended, as normal.

Here's then, when I got an idea. There's something "normal" about porn. I had
come to the realization that in order to "fix" myself, I needed to "be normal"
just as I was then. Guys looking at naked chicks, and not really thinking much
of it. We said "she's hot" here and there, or "that's corny". It reminded me
very much of my experience at 6 or so.

I left that experience thinking, "This porn stuff can help me in some way."
And that's when it happened. I found myself strongly interested in this
material, but I was after something. Sure, yes, I found it arousing — but then
that was secondary to some more basic initiative: "this is normal. I am
normal. I can do this."

I found myself spending hours a day looking at porn. I always tried to find
just the "right" porn. The Internet became a well brimming with material. The
"right" porn consisted of these scenarios that started off 'real' and then
ended in this rather unexceptional way. There was a lot of POV as well — not
necessarily interested in the people participating but their parts. My own
penis is slightly disfigured from my circumcision — well, asymmetrical. It's
not a jarring or grotesque disfigurement. As a kid I thought it was upsetting,
and brought concern. It's essentially a seemingly incomplete job.

But the people and the themes never really interested me. I often found myself
looking for the "right" penis, the "right" vagina, the right complexion
(regardless of race), the "right" people. It went everywhere, from race A-on-
race Z to race Z-on-raceA, and then back again. I found myself trying to
figure out quickly what I am to do, and just how much was necessary for a
"normal" experience. I always knew that anything beyond hardcore porn was
beyond my needs, that fetish porn was beyond my needs. I wanted something that
gave me what I thought everyone else had already figured out. Gradually it
warped into something bigger — not in terms of the content I accepted, which
always ranged from softcore to POV to roleplay (for years, it was a lot of
role-play — I even spent years going into RP chatrooms with "sex" topics and
working up my capacity to describe these sexual activities), but in terms of
the commitment and preoccupation, the amount of time spent.

I want to be clear here. At no point did I think "This is was people do
normally" — I was looking at the situation as someone who had a lot of
catching up to do, and who _strove to be normal_. I wanted people to believe
that I "got along" with sexual activity, that I understood what it was about —
and that I wasn't obsessed with something more fundamental: fitting in.

~~~
thenerdfiles
PIII.

Now.

I've recently found myself having committed a drunken act with someone else by
the same first name who was also drunk. Of course this statement of
drunkenness does not justify my actions. You could say this act was wreckless.
You could also say that it was motivated by some latent sexist urge. It was in
fact my set of actions that brought it about. Some people have suggested that
I am a sociopath, people who hardly know me. It started off as a
miscommunication which turned into me becoming overly excited and reaching for
more than was consenually agree in a moment of ecstasy. I hurt a person, to
whom I have given apologies — and who has pardoned my actions on multiple
occasions. She said "I just want things to be normal." This is not a
paraphrase. It was a second-night stand that this happened, with a girl I
found incredibly charming.

However, one friend of hers who caught the news made a very interesting
assumption of me. He accosted me with the assumption that I was a porn addict,
and had confessed that he too had given up porn, years ago. I immediately
responded by showing him a porn app I briefly collaborated with a friend on.
One of the main purposes of the porn app was to show that porn can be curated
through small-network algorithms such that the "extreme" fetish stuff is
eliminated by default in virtue of democratic principles. His response was "I
cannot believe you're showing me porn right now."

Now.

It just so happens that I've never really been interested in fetish porn, and
that I find "extreme" sexual activity deplorable. Pedophilia, deplorable. Rape
is absolutely repugnant to me. Rarely I've looked at hardcore porn, but it's
almost always with curiosity — I usually find myself in a reflective mood,
knowing full well that this is staged. And sometimes it completely ruins my
mood if I download some clip that goes just a notch over my personal
threshold. What I find most surprising in myself is that I do not throw all of
porn out on account of these offenses, and I do, and always will, consider
them offenses. I become angry with myself, surely, and sometimes such offenses
have compelled me not to view porn for weeks on end, if I find something
distasteful — because I clicked on a thumbnail that led to a scene that is
stronger in content than I would prefer. Do I ban the whole porn
studio's/producer's material? Well, I _never actually_ commit myself to porn
beyond downloading maybe 10-20 clips and then deleting them afterwards. I'm
_that_ kind of downloader.

Digressing again. I have always found myself on the "libertarian" side of
things, having marched with social justice groups, argued in defence of
feminism, argued religiously against arguments like "child prostitution as an
economic alternative to child labor". I find such reasoning sickening. I agree
with John Stuart Mill that nothing in our institution of law can grant women
any powers that nature has not already given, nor should we legislate against
women. I believe women are fantastic, and I actually grew up with only that
single Baptist mother (though she did bring abusive men into our home now and
then in my youth). I am the type of person who independently of any of this
has stuff like The Categorical Imperative committed to memory — along with
Kafka poems and various philosophers on ethics. I just happen to be a
Spinozist.

This may seem like a lot of coincidence, but I don't care. Is child porn on
the same level as adult porn? Is it all "just prostitution"? I don't know the
answer to these questions. But I do know something from a personal vantage:
Did porn bring it about that I hurt someone, and is the view that it's
"prostitution" actually relevant to peoples' complicated lives that can be
directed and compeled by a multitude of factors? I maintain that the view that
"porn is not the problem, we are".

I'm saying this in the face of someone, Gavrieli, is who making broadstrokes
about an industry, completely ignoring gay porn and softcore and roleplay — in
the face of someone who seems to be pinning a lot on an industry, when I know
from personal experience, that porn didn't make me hurt anyone. I was hurt,
and I just so happen to be male. And I just so happened to do something that,
when put into conversational form, shared as such, turns into a "regular porn
result." When that is just not the truth. I will personally admit that I hurt
someone, but porn had nothing to do with it. And I strongly believe that the
way people like Gavrieli say "all porn is like X" but has to recant, chuckle,
and recollect his words so that he can make sense to his audience... THAT is
the problem. He's talking about porn as he has experienced it — and that's
totally valid. But to say that porn has NO "light touching" or NO "involvement
of hands"?

I'm sorry... I understand that we're all trying to cultivate and grow the
right kind of society here... But allowing such undisciplined modes of
criticism to hand-wave and make bad arguments, entertaining ficticious
assumptions and myopic perspectives? I will stop and be first to say, even if
it is in defense of porn, — I will be the first philosopher to put his neck on
the damn line so that at least I can envision a future that is palatable,
knowing that I deep down am not evil or out to hurt anymore, in defense of
porn I will say DEFINE YOUR TERMS.

And adding to this: _Hurt people hurt people_.

—

[0]: [http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/women-who-
stray/201305/p...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/women-who-
stray/201305/porn-is-not-the-problem-you-are)

[1]: [http://www.khou.com/news/crime/Young-Pearland-woman-
murdered...](http://www.khou.com/news/crime/Young-Pearland-woman-murdered-in-
Germany-129414893.html)

