After recent insights on Self we should be able to answer this definitively. Using AI we can generate images exactly for this purpose complying with GDPR!
Firstly what does Pornography mean? It comes from the Greek pornē (prostitute) and graphein (write). As I have understood it this means images of prostitutes. pornē means a women who either for personal gain, or just unlawful sin offers her body.
Take this softcore image.
The key thing to note is that she is apparently offering her body to the viewer. In a more extreme image she may be having her body taken for the viewer. So consent is not essential.
Now another variant is the "voyeur". Here the viewer is completely unknown to the person of interest. However this completely depersonalises them and makes them into a full object. There is no reciprocity. This is actually dangerous as it begins the path to indifference for the object. In extreme cases violence and snuff it means the viewer has no link to the object of suffering.
And then there is hardcore sex.
So what do they all have in common?
The absolute thing to notice is the presence of the object of desire in these picture, in these cases it is the woman.
This places the object of desire in the frame of vision of the viewer. It contains it and it gives it a graspable shape. Hence the "graphy" part of porno-graphy.
We feel we can reach out and touch the object, we feel it is available, and most importantly in the image we can control it.
But this is not the most important element. The most important element is the bit missing: the consumer of pornography!
Where are they?
Well in the hard core image the viewer experiences the woman vicariously through the actions of the male in the field of vision. Or indeed for a female viewer through the experiences of the female in the picture. In many ways this is more healthy pornography particularly if the relationship between those pictured is mutual and supportive.
But the viewer may seem excluded from the intimate embrace of a couple. So I wonder if there is an automatic tendency for the male in the field to show allegiance to the viewer by breaking the bond with the female. This automatically leads to images of dysfunctional sex and leads to the porno side of "pornography": she is not a partner to the man, she is a woman giving her body away to him for money or illegally. Built into the structure of the sex being for a viewer (possibly paying) the woman is necessarily excluded.
So we are beginning to see how the presence of the camera and a viewer automatically makes the sex, in pornography, dysfunctional and the relationship with female broken (in male audience porn, the same is true is any other audience porn).
Now we get to the real insights.
It is easier to see in the hard core picture. That male, who we identity with, is a model for our self. We inhabit their body and in so doing are set up in relation to the object of desire. This fulfils our fundamental belief that we are an object our self who will be the agent of sex, will have sex with the woman, will achieve this goal and will benefit from the pleasure, prestige, power and whatever else we feel we are lacking.
The issue here is not just that we wish to gain pleasure, there are many things we may wish to gain, one in particular is status and power. If we think of how abusive language works it is based around sex: go f*ck yourself, f*ck off, w@anker, t*sser, dick, tw@t it us all about the power inherent in sex and for those who cannot get sex self-pleasure is considered a low status thing. This is literally the same as rival deer rutting to secure mating rights to woman, and I think women do respond to the same logic (altho feminists will say this is brainwashing by men) but there is animal predident for sexual structures to be as we find them with men fighting it out and women flocking to the successful males. Regardless it makes sex a minefield of desires and wishes all of which we hang upon an image of our self.
That image of our self I will try and show is what makes all the pictures above.
The first picture is a woman noticing and appreciating the viewer: the view is validated, accepted and loved. This supports the self image of someone who believes they need to be worthwhile, but who lacks this belief. A woman accepting them is their desire and being accepted frees their energy.
For the voyeur there is a very poor self image, someone who hides from themselves who cannot face being seen. They hate them self, and so in hiding they can paradoxically encounter the object of desire without being present. It is too good to be true. At some stage this person will have to encounter the woman, or break the desire. It is unstable and will not end well.
Finally the vicarious ego needs to see themselves as object in relation to the object of desire. They can fulfil the encounter through someone else. I read somewhere that a porn star said he did it so all the men out there who have been hurt by women can get one back on the women. Sex here is like a battle ground between men and women, desire is a complex conflict with people giving, taking, and stealing with hurt being generated and vengeance, revenge and battle lines drawn. Sex rapidly descends from just being vicarious to porn stars being soldiers defending the male egos who view.
We have in all cases the viewer having a solid view of them self. Someone solid who desires, and imagines rewards coming back to satisfy that desire. And then that imaged person is not fulfilled they are viewed as empty and having lost, literally in US language are a "loser", and a void is created that needs to be filled by fair means or foul. What began as simple desire now enters a battle stage where women are required to submit to male power and hand over the good either fairly or illegally.
Hopefully we can see how the imposition of an imaginary self, a belief in a self pawn (pun intended), who we account the successes and failure of begins the whole toxic nature of sex that leads to porn.
If we use this for enlightenment then. We acknowledge sexual desire. Fantastic women are awesome and desirable. But when we view a woman and feel that desire we simple do this. The desire is a natural response to seeing something attractive. We don't always feel desire, it happens in certain circumstances and then it will goes away. Most importantly no one has this desire, and no one wins or loses if the desire is fulfilled or not. This game of accounting our successful desire satisfaction is a stupid game we play.
So we are a loser and never get what we want. So be it, I only think this thought for 5 secs and it is gone. And when it is gone I am no more a loser. It is that meaningless. Then there is tomorrow and a new day.
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Now there is another side to this but I wonder having tried it if it is that important. Perhaps later on this journey it is worth exploring.
Is a woman really desirable? Monks are often taken to autopsy to see the "real" nature of the body.
If we think a bit things are not what they seem.
Sexual perversions can find that sexually attractive, I wonder if this isn't just rebellion. It is precisely because it is taboo that it comes exciting. And that is ego too because we are told we are not allowed, so we rebel and move our self into the forbidden land. This makes us special because we are leaving the crowd. Deeply embedded in this behaviour is a view of oneself as special and different and allowed to do different behaviour. Being "perverted" actually supports the idea of a special self.
But ignoring that there is not much attractive about this. Hard calcified bones and really not much there. Yet this is at the core of the pictures above.
When we take it apart we see things are not as they seem.
This is where desire on analysis--when we are ready to analyse-- becomes a great disappointment. we work for years to get the money for a flash car, we drive it for a while and then the thrill starts to go. We sell it and get another, or we put it in the garage to try and store that initial enthusiasm. But if we are honest it is not the same as when we as when we first drove it.
Desire is like this it is never quite good enough. This is what Buddhists call Dukkha. Desire promises to make us complete and happy, but satisfaction is never quite there. We are always left a bit unsatisfied. Desire eventually becomes a disappointment.
Other thoughts from this blog are also interesting. Are women attractive? Well for men they have an attractiveness that is different compared to women (ignoring homosexual). So it means the "attractiveness" is not IN the woman, it is also in the viewer. Beauty requires subject AND object to come together. So is the object beautiful? Literally depends who is asking!!
However and this is where I am cautious. I have recently been pointed in a slightly different direction.
More important than anything above is happiness. Not absolute eternal bliss but just happiness. Buddha called this middle path. We do not indulge, we do not punish. We are just happy. Warren Buffett attributes his age and health to Coca Cola because it makes him happy. There is truth. Being unhappy is the most dangerous to our healthy and well being! They say Coca Cola is bad for you, but not as bas for you as unhappiness.
Any why do we need to be happy? Well that is the important bit. It is not like porn so we can enjoy that happiness. That is turning it back on itself. Quite the opposite, it is so that we can begin the path of letting go and being free.
In the context of this blog then. Women cause happiness through sexual desire. BUT the essence is that we use this happiness to give up ourselves. The concern in porn is that its structures seek to strengthen the sense of self and that we are recipients of gratification and pleasure, and that women are giving this to us, and that we need it. This begins a very toxic path of slavery and unhappiness for ourself.
Properly we go the other way. That woman at the top is loving for us, she can support us and make us happy, and she can begin to show us that we do not need to grasp at happiness and hold at satisfaction, for there is no loss at not being satisfied, and we are not to hate our self for not being satisfied, and even if women reject us this does not matter because there is no one there to be rejected.
She can help us into the present moment where the past and future does not exist and can only be built through thoughts and memories, and all we have is what is unfolding in the present.
And by developing love and compassion, care and joy for this present moment and those we encounter in it we can start to let go. And down this road indeed are wonderful things.
So unfortunately porn is bad. Handled unwisely it is dangerous and toxic. It all depends how much the viewer brings them self into the pron. The more they do this, they more that self is likely to be cemented and become a weight that drags them down.
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SO where this goes from bad to worse is Gender Wars.
The problem of toxic damaging relationships is not to do with men.
The problem comes from people becoming fixated on mental constructions.
What is a mental construction?
This is literally like a sculptor making a statue and then falling in love with it.
Humans do not realise that their brains are like sculptors and cinemas and have the power to make the world.
Without getting into anything complex consider the old illustration of the rope on the chair.
As if we need more proof, look at the power of AI to sculpt the world
What is this? In half light it could easily be mistaken for a snake. A snake is dangerous and we panic.
But where is the snake if it is really a rope? The thing to notice is the "snake" is no less real for it being a rope. When we are tricked into seeing a snake, it is as good as a snake. And that is the point the "snakiness" is something we bring to the rope, and that is all that matters. Once we think it is a snake then we panic. So even if it is a snake, it looks exactly the same.
The difference comes down to deeper thinking. We can start a full investigation to gather all the evidence and we can decide much more accurately what is "really" there. But this "really" does not explain what seeing a snake is like, even if it is a rope. When we say our minds have the power to make the world we do not means they have the power to make snakes out of thin air that will crawl across the floor and bite us. What we mean is we have the power to make snakes out of rope or anything else!
It is these "snakes we make" these mentiserpens that are the ones that worry us and fill our world. The ones that bite are quite different, they land us in hospital or in a grave, or perhaps nothing at all and really we don't know until the day comes, and in being titally unpredictable they are quite different from mentiserpens which we are always afraid of and which embody pure danger and fear all the time. This is not a toxin of the body, but a much more debilitating toxin of the mind that we can't get away from. A snake has to actually bite us to deliver its toxin. That rope can have us in terror without even being a snake!
Now the most important mentiserpens is "me." Exactly like snakes that bite the real "me" is totally unpredictable and we don't know until the day, which is quite different from the idea we have of our self which is imbued with unchangeable essences and ideas. Not knowing the mind can make these phantasma renders us very vulnerable and easily tricked. And in fact the toxin of the self lies in the fixed idea we have of our self and others.
So returning to the top of the section the source of all the toxins is not men and women, although men and women can break our hearts, abuse us and even kill us, the real source of toxin is when we create a fixed sculpture of our self and set it down to "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"
You see once we make this statue we are absolutely vulnerable. And we will start to waste our time protecting it.
Wake up! Who made it, and who is looking at it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The self that we imagine and through which we model the world, is just an empty model and statue. The self is the one who is invisible, the one who made it and who observes it and who accounts what happens to it as good or bad.
Bad philosophy equates the model in mind with the mind. This is clearly absurd--vast amount of this blog looking into that.
Exactly what the model of self is is actually vast. Everything in this picture above is actually the model of self! We know that because the real self is looking!!!
Hard to believe that the arms and legs there are actually mental constructions. In one sense they are not in that there are real arms and legs on the beach being looked at, the mental construction is when we come to think they are "mine" or part of "me." That then is 100% statue making! The real self is looking and constructing all this, including seeing the real arms and legs. It cannot actually be thought about, because the real self is the one doing that thinking and mental constructive statue sculpting too!
And back to sex and gender. In that picture above we see a male body. Someone will look at that and think "that is me" and this is the same process as looking at the rope and seeing "snake." It is a mental process regardless whether it is true or not. We are not interested in whether it is true, we are only interesting in recognising that fact that it is me! Perhaps it is AI and there is no one there.
So when men and women see pornography and see images, and even when they engage in sexual activity in reality this is just bodies doing things. ALL the mistakes happen when we start to think this discrete bodies are people, whether they are me or you. Like the porn pictures above all the problems lie in how we project our self into the image, how we think about and model our relationship with the women, how we model them. All the problems comes from this overlay where we use the material in the images to build fixed statues of our self and other people.
The simple thing to always remember is we are always the one looking and thinking, we are never the one in the picture. And the same applies to everyone else.
The only word of caution is that "being the one looking" instantly becomes a new statue but it is a start. The moment we see our self grasping at a new fixed version of our self (like "I am the one looking") remember to ask "who is thinking that?" This will always keep us (and everyone else) out of shot.
In a recent blog it was noted that people are not male or female, we are outside the shot and so there is nothing to call male or female. But it is exactly because we are neither that we are free to just accept what we see. Modern transgender issues all arise because people start identifying with what they see and start building fixed view of them self based on this (and other things).
In a similar way being "outside the shot" we are actually nothing which makes us free to accept everything. This is freedom.
Usually we do not and support things we see like we are watching a football match. And it is these fixed side, and identities and statue that we make which become the whole issue.
So men and women are never a problem. What is a problem in ALL cases is people building solid ideas about these and becoming fixated on them especially seeing things as "me."
From this comes all the toxicity.
And as can be seen modern designs to protect "women" and hunt down dangerous "men" are really constructed within the problem space. The whole thing is designed to be toxic as women become fixated on themselves as women, and perceive themselves as vulnerable and victimised entities. Sure women do get hurt, but like snakes the bites are actually quite rare and deaths even rarer. The real problem is women becoming fixed on images of violence and ideas about it being linked to women.
Likewise men are victims of equal violence in that they too struggle to find happiness and struggle to protect this statue or doll of self they have created. Men suffer all the same "slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune" and generate exactly the same toxic relationship. The only difference it seems is that when men express toxic relationships the evidence is more physical. Men have penises, men can rape. No woman can rape no matter how evil and toxic. Men can suffer unknowingly bring up someone else's child, no woman can ever do this. It is inequalities like this which is totally ignored by modern sexual discourse that is fixed on crude ideas of men and women.
In reality there is only one real suffering here and it is just that everyone is prone to attaching to an image of them self and then vicariously understanding the world through that statue as if it really was them! From here all the toxicity of the energy in relationship and sex develops.
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