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Are Porn and Video Games Ruining a Generation?
silentbrad writes "An editorial published at CNN is titled 'The Demise of Guys: How Videogames and Porn are Ruining a Generation.' It makes the sensationalized case that not only do game addiction and porn addiction share similar characteristics, but they're also both damaging to young men, destroying their ability to connect with women, and therefore threatening the future of our entire species. A response by IGN dissects the idea that pornography and videogames are pretty much the same thing. 'The article, by psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan argues that young men are "hooked on arousal, sacrificing their schoolwork and relationships in the pursuit of getting a tech-based buzz."' Zimbardo, has danced this jig before. At the Long Beach TED conference last year he told a delighted audience that "guys are wiping out socially with girls and sexually with women." He added that young men have been so zombiefied by games and porn that they are unable to function in basic human interactions. "It's a social awkwardness like a stranger in a foreign land", he said. "They don't know what to say. They don't know what to do."'"
It's just like that horrid rock and roll music, it's ruining the entire generation
Stay at home and play video games and then beat off to porn, or go out in public and get my wallet drained by a woman who has only contempt for me. Tough choice.
That's why the became psychologists in the first place. They hope to fix the world because they identify so closely with the defects they see in everyone else.
I got here through a series of tubes
What makes a good relationship is a fucked up question.
You can answer what made the relationship between person x and person y work, but only the past tense. You won't know until it happens.
Some say that sex ruins relationships. When my wife and I met we were only concerned with one thing, sex. We have been together for 15 years with only one short separation and sex is still a cornerstone of our relationship.
A friend of mine took some psychology classes "to understand what's wrong with me."
The ones who get their answers quickly finish their degree in some other field, only the ones who have a lot of issues go for the psych degree.
I took an undergrad psychology class in the '70s (it was either that or sociology), and the instructor once said something similar to what you just wrote (he also said there wasn't a psychologist alive that there wasn't another psychologist calling him a gold-studded liar).
Like we haven't had porn and games since Ugg and his brother scrawled dirty pictures on the cave wall and played "hit the target with this rock."
This is as bad as the patent office. "But this is different! It's on a COMPUTER!!!"
Free Martian Whores!
You could just as easily argue that women who look at cute catpics and stupid youtube cats/dogs/makeup videos are also becoming "socially inept". Why is it always the "guy side" that is "doing it wrong"? --------------
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Social exclusion is widely employed by American culture and is meant to be a punishment, but video games and porn, among other things, route around that. Authoritarians are now angry that the punishment no longer works.
It's a form of confirmation bias. It's the sensationalist dolts that make it to the news, so that's why it seems we have to put up with such a high concentration of them. It's not just in psychology.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Has the dismantling of our patriarchal society has something to do with it? Maybe young men are 'checking out', be it games, porn, drugs whatever.....
love is just extroverted narcissism
That's why the became psychologists in the first place. They hope to fix the world because they identify so closely with the defects they see in everyone else.
No. People go into that field with the hopes of fixing themselves - at least that's what motivated my crazy friends and family who are in that field.
while we are at no risk of extinction (from social awkwardness anyway), and while there are plenty of well-adjusted guys playing porn and watching video games (or maybe its the other way around), there is a lot more truth to the story than many here would like to admit.
playing video games and watching porn IS a much easier and more fulfilling way to spend your time than getting shot down by girls from school. boys ARE socializing less and withdrawing more.
when i have kids, i can guarantee you that the amount of time they spend playing video games or surfing the web will be very closely watched. and they damn well won't have either of those things in their bedroom.
i don't think that porn or video games are inherently unhealthy, but i do think that they are potentially addictive in the same way that many other things are - things I would want to keep tabs on my child's access to and use of.
Just because someone did something famous some decades ago doesn't mean all their pronouncements in an op-ed count as science. It's an interesting hypothesis, but note the distinct lack of peer-reviewed papers mentioned in the article on the subject (the article mentions some peer-reviewed papers in vaguely related areas, like the big debate over violence in videogames, but nothing on this new hypothesis). It could turn out to have some truth to it; could turn out not to. It will probably turn out to be more complex than this op-ed indicates, in any case.
In short, wait for actual science. Until then it's just some speculation.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
...destroying their ability to connect with women, and therefore threatening the future of our entire species.
For 20,000 years, men have been busy beating each other and other animals to a pulp, engaging in risky behaviors, being generally anti-social, and treating women like dirt. If they're playing video games and watching porn instead of those things, I think we're going to be just fine, thanks.
And as for being unable to connect with women, they haven't been able to do that since we crawled down from the trees. Somehow, dick still manages to meet vagina. People will keep having sex no matter how bad it is, because bad sex is worse than no sex... and really, if you're going to be a straight woman, once you've weaned yourself off Disney propaganda, your standards drop dramatically. Look at how many of us married fat dudes who beach themselves on couches.
The human species is in no danger of going extinct... despite yearly predictions of the end of the world. Which is disappointing really... it means I'll probably have to pay back my student loans. -_-
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Let's see.
Social interaction with a woman in the work place can end in a career ending sexual harrassment accusation when you have a falling out and she decides to exact retribution.
Social interaction with a woman on a date leading to a sexual encounter the woman regrets after can end in a life ending rape charge.
Social interaction with a women leading to marriage and children ends in a divorce which results in your ex wife taking the house and a slice of your possesions and wealth, and leaves you with an extended obligation to support her with alimony and child support while she lives with the next guy, conveniently avoiding remarriage to leave you on the hook for as long as possible. Though child support is a legitimate obligation if you willingly and knowingly fathered them.
I seriously doubt social interaction between the sexes has ever been great. Most guys were/are just jumping through a lot of painful socially mandated hoops to satify their sexual needs.
At least its less bad now than it used to be when the societal norm was you had to marry someone for LIFE, the sex stopped being good about a week after the honeymoon and there then followed 60 years of ball and chain misery.
Of course, that model was traded for one where women have acquired a nearly completely dominant position legally, socially and in the work place, which has resulted in a situation where is probably better for men in the long run, especially financially, to avoid relationships with women all together, hence the preference for games and porn.
Unemployment and wage stagnation are ruining a generation.
. . . and before that, they were ruined by Jazz music . . . and in the 60's by LSD . . . marijuana in the 70's . . . cocaine in the 80's . . . Grunge music in the 90's . . . the Internet in the 00's . . .
Basically, anything a generation is doing for fun, is ruining them.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Psychologists don't have patients.
The article starts with the faulty premise that connecting with women is a requirement.
If a women isn't dependent on a man (thanks to increasingly equal (and in some cases exceeding) employment/opportunity/education, sperm banks, etc) for the things she desires in life, why isn't it fair game for a man to not need a women for what he desires?
I love my wife, happily married with 2 kids and I'm not a mascu-nazi, but I look at my parents generation with their greater than 50% divorce rate (with largely 1-sided devastation of the husband) and constant bombardment of the whole 'demeaning men to empower women' approach [seriously, just about any commercial in the last 40 years - the man is the moron who couldn't function w/o the woman], why would anyone want that short of being conditioned to accepting it?
I was pretty much the odd one out in a small town when I was a kid, and that was even before we got a C64 and I taught my father to use it to type papers. My parents expected me to spend time outside so I'd go up the street (literally about a quarter mile uphill) to see if the neighbor's kids felt like playing with me or throwing rocks at me to chase me back down. I ended up spending a lot of time just wandering around in the woods around the house.
Now that I'm an adult, what I find wrong with society is that "adulthood" itself is screwed up. When I was a kid, I thought growing up was about taking on responsibilities and getting work done. So wrong! It doesn't matter if you're the President or you're a drunk, what makes you an adult is how you entertain yourself. If you do anything with your leisure time more fun than reading War and Peace or putting together ships in a bottle or something, you're still a "kid".
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
"It's a social awkwardness like a stranger in a foreign land", he said. "They don't know what to say. They don't know what to do."
At least for me, this is the case, but video games and porn had NOTHING to do with it.
At the age of four I was using DOS commands better than my dad who used them at work all the time. I performed my first paid computer repair at the age of eleven, having read "Windows 95 for Dummies" cover to cover the year before. Computers and computer concepts came naturally to me, though admittedly I can't code to save my life. I did have a similar experience when it came to video editing and DJing, both of which I do on the side and make a decent chunk of change in the process. These things came naturally to me to the point where I never really had to think about what I wanted to do for a living. I knew from an extremely young age my career would involve computers and music; I never had to take one of those "what do you want to be when you grow up" tests in high school. I'd known for years.
Social graces were as foreign to me. When I explain this to people, many of them look at me sideways and can't fathom the concept that for some people, social interactions would be a learned skill, just like computers are to them. What's ironic is that when you ask them, "so what would you recommend I say to this girl, given $SITUATION", they have to stop and think about it, too. To many, it is instinct. To people like myself, it took very explicit 'study' and 'tutoring', the latter coming from several female friends over the years who have spent a lot of time and effort getting me to the point where I can mostly hold a conversation with a stranger, even the good looking ones, and not make things totally awkward.
Without those people in my life, I may or may not have learned how to socially interact effectively. What if I had not? Every social engagement would conjure up all the excitement of a Calculus exam, because it'd be guaranteed that I'd stand in a corner and be incapable of talking to anyone, utterly terrified that I'd end up talking about computers or DJ gear or NLE plug-ins - topics I know about, but are useless to basically anyone else I'd be talking to. It'd be a vicious cycle that I'd be terrified of saying or doing something stupid or awkward, then find myself actually doing so, only to reinforce my belief that it would happen next time, and find out that I was right yet again.
Compare that to video games. The rules are extremely well established; the viewer doesn't have to re-learn them each time they enter the game. They're set up so that if you fail, you can try again. You can lookup walkthroughs on Youtube or IGN. If the player fails, no one knows but themselves (unless they're playing multiplayer). They have conventions that are well understand. They can be played on the player's schedule and terms. The price is explicitly established up front (unless there is DLC, which again, is on the player's terms). The NPCs that aren't explicit enemies generally respect the player. Video games aren't played due to an expectation for life to emulate them. They are chosen because this inexhaustive list of attributes is in explicit contrast to real life.
Compare it to porn. The porn is chosen based on what the viewer desires to do at that time. It doesn't require an initial, elaborate attempt to seduce the individual in the scene. The viewer isn't competing with other people for the porn star's attention or affection, and there is absolutely no fear of rejection. Again, porn isn't watched as an expectation for life to emulate it. It's watched because life *doesn't* emulate it.
So, in summary, we are stating that individuals who frequently fail at particular tasks in real life choose environments where failure doesn't really happen. The study might correctly assume that guys who play video games and habitually watch porn are socially awkward, but the assumption that's inaccurately made is that such individuals preemptively chose it instead of attempting more conventional means of relationships, as opposed to video games and porn being the only outlet of acceptance due to a long history of failure and a dearth of alternative means to rectify social awkwardness.
playing video games and watching porn IS a much easier and more fulfilling way to spend your time than getting shot down by girls from school. boys ARE socializing less and withdrawing more.
Even if this is the case, what exactly is wrong with this? If the males in question are satisfied with the choices they've made, who cares?
I see two possible consequences if this alleged trend plays out. First, these men will reproduce less, and these tendencies will be bred out of the population. Or alternatively, females will become more accomodating to these tendencies, and being a smooth talker won't matter so much anymore. In either case, what's the problem?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
in some races good husbands are hard to find so women have more biracial babies
This is rather offensive... I've dated men of various races and plan to have biracial children with my SO, not because of any scarcity of "good men" leading me to "settle" but rather because race is not part of my criteria for love.
I love how it is always something wrong on the part of men, but that's the whole point when you get down to it.
Men are tired of women's crap.
Men are tired of American women in particular.
Men are tired of being told to "Act like a man" by women who don't want to "Act like a woman"
Men are tired of the atmosphere that has been created as of late.
Men are much more jaded by 25 because of women they've dated than ever before.
Men are tired of being treated as a pocketbook, resource, protector, etc.. and getting crapped on in return.
Men are tired of being expected to take on the dangerous jobs, longer hours, and more responsibility, but are screamed at for making more money.
Let's face it, most men don't want any part of it after a while.
Give me something to enjoy my time with, some food and let me blow my load on occasion, and my needs are generally met.
When the cost of dating a woman is more than a hooker, it's time to just get a hooker.
Video games don't nag, pester, whine and demand attention every 10 minutes.
Video games don't expect you to like all their friends, nor try to get to know all of your friends.
I don't have to buy porn dinner or take it to a movie before it'll put out.
Porn and video games don't have some irrational urge to talk about feelings and relationships every day.
Porn and video games don't start dropping hints after 6 months about moving in and/or getting married.
Simply put, again, many men are tired of women's crap, American women specifically.
There's a number of decent foreign women who know how to interact with a man while still being able to be themselves, and more guys are becoming aware of this and going for them, vs a bunch of spoiled, loud mouth, bossy, overly entitled, classless American bitches with nothing but bad attitudes.
Men may be the ones who are going for video games and porn, but women are the ones driving them to it.
Much like how these articles always seem to be written by women, or a woman leading around yet another spineless, pussy-whipped man giving a broken spirited 'Yes dear" after everything she says.
If your assessment is that men should want to settle down with women to gain access to sex then I say "screw you" and I think pron is a wonderful equalizer. I am opposed to this idea that women should have this advantage that they get to use in relationships. "You do what I want or you don't get sex." That's manipulative and thus something I feel is wrong. So if porn equalizes that, takes away than, then great.
In my opinion a relationship needs to be because you both want each other, for whatever reason(s). It needs to be a mutual thing that you connect on any number of levels. You settle down because of all that, not because women make it a requirement to have sex.
Sorry, but that's the other half of the equality equation.
That their real implication seems to be that if you aren't interested in getting married as soon as you have a stable job and fathering children, you are a reject. As though the primary purpose for men should be to provide money and genetic material for children. Nothing else matters. If a woman wishes to be a career woman and not do kids until later, or at all, that's great. If a man wants to do that he's defective.
I mean I'll take myself as an example: 31, unmarried, no kids. I own a house, have a salaried job above the median income, with a pension, and in general I'm pleased with my life. I'm certainly no "burden on society" or anything. However, since I spend my time playing video games instead of watching TV (average male watches 4.1 hours a day averaged over a week, average female 4.8 hours, I watch about 0.3 hours per day) and I am not a father, people like this journalist see me as a problem. I'm not busy propagating the species so clearly I'm a loser.
No, sorry, I don't see it that way. In fact the way I see it, we have too many people. Population growth needs to level off if we are to have a sustainable future. I don't want to see that through draconian population control measures, I'd rather see it through people self regulating. Well, I dislike kids, have ever since I was a kid, I always got along with adults better. So I don't wish to have any. However others wish to have more than two kids for a family. Works out.
I will acknowledge a problem if they can show that males are dropping out of society as a whole, as in not getting jobs, living at home, doing nothing with their lives, more with video games and/or porn as opposed to more traditional problems around that (like drugs) but that's it. If they can't show me that, and I suspect they can't, then I fail to see the problem. Video games being used in place of TV as entertainment isn't a problem, and not wanting to have a family isn't a problem (I'd argue it is a good thing for some people to feel that way).
If I'm going to be labeled as "defective" or "dysfunctional" for wanting a good life, but without kids, then fine, I'll own that label because I'm happy with who I am. If it means I never get married, I'm ok with that too. I'd love to find a woman who wants to be with someone like me, but I'm not interested or ok with trying to force a woman who wants children in to a childless relationship.
When I got my BA in psychology (in 1982) I was struck by the fact that every major theory in the history of psychology was developed by someone who had the exact problem that dominates the theory. Freud had major issues with his mom; his theory is that everyone has major issues with their mom. Jung had major issues with authority figures—Freud, specifically—and wrote how everyone has major issues with authority figures.
In my eyes, until you have a child of your own, you're still a kid. It knocks you out of the center of your universe. If you have one, you likely know what I'm talking about, and if you don't, you'll likely act all outraged. Trying to explain it is like trying to explain sex to a virgin.
But then, a lot of you probably don't understand that one either...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I know a lot of people with children who still treat their children's needs as second, while the parent remains the center. Having a child does not automatically "cure you". (And vice-versa being old does not mean you're a self-centered ass either. Lots of childless people do worthwhile things for others, rather than themselves.)
BACK TO TOPIC:
I find myself playing far fewer games than I used to. I buy them, put them on the shelf, and they collect dust.
I just don't find modern 40-hour-long games as much fun as the old arcade-style games I grew-up with. I'd sooner fast-forward through a TV show, movie, or audiobook than play a game. The long timespan makes them boring.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Even if being socially awkward has been a fairly constant percentation of the population over time, I'll toss out a theory that being socially awkward mattered less in the past. In the past, people led more geographically structured lives and had few choices. Today, people have less structure and as a result more choices. To navigate in the new world requires being able to navigate a less geographically structured existance (more changes in circles of friends due to migration, more in-home entertainment options resulting in fewer opportunities for meeting folks through repeat public casual acquaintance, etc).
It seem to me that in a more geographically structured life, when you got to be about the age where you wanted to pair off, there was generally a sizable set of people that weren't total strangers (e.g., friend of a friend, or someone that you went to school with, but never talked to, etc) that even someone who was socially awkward could reasonably expect to accidentally interact with. Today, that set of people is smaller and smaller and more social skills are required to build that set to a reasonable size to find someone compatible.
Another factor working against everyone (not just the socially awkward), is that it appears that people have many more choices today than they had in the past (e.g., partners, lifestyles, careers, geography). In this environment, some people aren't good at deciding to do anything (I think they call that analysis paralysis) and thus choose to do nothing. This can't be good especially if you are both indecisive and socially awkward... Maybe this is just new evolutionary pressure on these phenotypes.
If this theory is true, perhaps games and porn are just taking the place of the book of the neo-classic socially awkward book-worm personality. The issue isn't the games and porn per-se, but that new home entertainment options are just eroding into the geographically structured existance that helped encourage boys and girls socialize in the past creating a bigger problem for more socially awkward folks...
I remember reading an old theory about adolescent gender segregation (boys playing with boys and girls playing with girls) before puberty assists in the grooming of behaviors to support romantic attachments (e.g., dating) in later adolescence and that this transition was really the time that required the most socialization skills and tended to set behavioral patterns for the next part of your life until you had children yourself. If games and porn are interfering with this transitional development, then maybe they are somewhat to blame (but no more than books for a book-worm stereotype of an earlier era).
Nobody reasonable disagrees that this is a real problem for some people. But the claim is that they're "ruining a generation", which is very big claim.
Personally, I find it very hard to believe. I certainly know some WoW nerds, but they're a very small part of all the people I know, and I'm right in that age section.
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Your attitude is not outrageous, it's just annoying and condescending. Often parents think they've suddenly become enlightened with selflessness because they suddenly have little to no free time. However, what they're really experiencing is a type vicarious selfishness; they're being selfish for their children. Sure you might have knocked yourself knocked out of the center of the universe, but you've replaced that center with something that will insure your genetic survival. You'll do anything for your kids, right? Many will go so far as to actively harm others to gain advantages for their kids.
At the extreme would be parents who actually kill the perceived rivals of their children (see murderer cheerleader mom, or the mom who faked a MySpace boyfriend to the point that her daughter's "competition" committed suicide.) At the mundane are the obnoxious parents who lobby their teachers to give their precious genetic survival some exception to the rules. Are those kinds of behaviors "adult"? Nope, those behaviors are the same kinds of rivalries you see played out in young children.
If you ever want to actually learn what selflessness actually means, spend your days being of service to those whose survival will not propagate your own genes. Until you're willing to treat every person you encounter with the same levels of deference, empathy, and concern that you treat your children, do not continue to think that your willingness to take a bullet for your kid means you've found wisdom or perspective.
Actually I believe you're both wrong.
Also you're both mostly right.
A childs /NEEDS/ should be paramount. The problem is the bubble wrapping and the catering to the childs /WANTS/.
You know something I noticed not too long ago? A lot of children these days simply have no concept of "need". If they don't "want" to do something they won't, and see no reason they should. For instance if they don't "want" to do their school work, many of them won't. Its really quite simple, and while anecdotal to some extent, my experience with children recently has shown me that simply understanding that things that "need" to happen simply must, are the ones that are thought well of and have good work ethic.
For instance, the trash needs to be taken out. They want to have ice cream. Also a constant rewarding of needed doings with wanted items creates a similar problem.
You know something I noticed not too long ago? A lot of children these days simply have no concept of "need". If they don't "want" to do something they won't, and see no reason they should.
That isn't anything new. That's just immaturity, which (surprise) is characteristic of children. The problem in this world isn't childish children. It's childish adults.
For instance if they don't "want" to do their school work, many of them won't.
Well, speaking as a parent with actual direct experience with my kids and their friends, they have *way* more work than I did when I was their age in the 1970s.The day is so stuffed with curriculum schools have cut the lunch period to under fifteen minutes, and "study hall" is something kids have never heard of, replaced with special content boosting classes to help them through statewide testing. The time pressure has spilled over into homework. Even as elementary students they seldom had less than an hour of homework per night, and often had two.
And, if I recall what kids were like in the 70s (as opposed to how I'd like to believe we were), these kids have a work ethic far beyond anything I ever saw back then. If anything I think we've gone to far toward instilling work ethic in these kids, who don't have the self-directed time we did. Compared to my kids' highly scripted and controlled childhood, my own feels like something out of Tom Sawyer.
Where videogames fit into this picture isn't stimulation. My kids look at videogame time (strictly limited in our house) as precious decompression time. If kids reach young adulthood less socially mature (which I'm skeptical of) it's probably not gaming per se. It's more likely that so much is expected of them and so little spare time given to them they don't have enough experience directing their own activities with their friends.
my experience with children recently has shown me that simply understanding that things that "need" to happen simply must,
So far as I can see, this attitude is much more characteristic of *adult* Americans these days than it is of our kids -- at least the ones who are old enough that they should know this. We adult Americans don't want to plan for the future or to face anything unpleasant. When that neglect comes home to roost we want a quick fix and we want it yesterday. And if we can't get a quick fix we demand a scapegoat. If it is true kids are ignorant and lazy, does it make sense to believe the *kids* are responsible for their faulty education? It's not like the infants we got in this generation are somehow inferior.
But I don't think that kids today are no good. I look at the kids *I* know, and I see a generation that is brighter, more knowledgeable, and harder working than my generation was. If that's not what *you* see, then don't blame the kids. Blame the adults who raised them and the politicians you elected to set education policies..
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