Episode 119: A Brief History of Values

These actors come to you dead, desiccated piles of driftwood gnawed by abusive parents and alcoholism filled with false pride and edamame.

The great and boss has spoken. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Who are you? Who are you? A very bad man. I'm a very good man. Good man. They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man. Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man just a very bad wizard.

Welcome to very bad wizards. I'm Tamela Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, according to a recent study, japanese men are obsessed with tickling porn, with 10% of all porn searches in Japan featuring the word tickling. So now I'm confused, because I thought you were Argentinian, you know?

I'm David Pizarro from Cornell University. I divide sexual fetishes into two categories. Ones are ones that I can intuitively understand how somebody would get like, it's not my thing, but I get it.

My husband wants me to breastfeed him.

Yeah, well, no, tickling I can't grock that. I could understand spanking and whipping and bondage. I could understand probably the weirdest physical stuff. But tickling? What is that? What kind of evolutionary process would have given rise to that?

It's a phenomenon, apparently. Someone recommended this documentary called Tickling.

I have not seen it, but I've heard good things about it.

Yeah, I've heard good things about it, too. It is a strange phenomenon and the individual differences when it comes to tastes in porn. As we're about to talk about in our opening segment, we have a big episode today, almost too big. It's too big.

Just for the record, not that there's anything wrong with tickling porn.

No. For our listeners who are into it, you're in good company, especially amongst I.

Mean, 10% is a lot like more than 10% of pornhub searches by young Japanese men. I don't know how he splits young or whatever.

I almost don't. So we're going to talk about an interview with this guy, Seth Stevens, Davidowitz, who looked at all the Google searches for porn and sort of assembled some interesting data about people's porn habits and their sexual inclinations in general. So that's what we're going to talk about in the first segment. And in the second segment, we're going to talk about debunking shift a little bit, maybe. I don't know. Is it a shift, right. Debunking arguments and genealogical arguments when it comes to ethics, and we'll explain what those terms mean in the second segment. But that's what we're going to talk about then. But we saw this interview on Vox.com, and we thought this is kind of in our wheelhouse.

Porn tickling breastfeeding guy Seth Stevens Davidowitz wrote this is, I guess, part of what he reports in his book called Everybody Lies, which is more broadly about using big data to tell what people really care about. But the gist is this. He says, look, all these sex surveys about sexual interests and desires, more so than probably a lot of domains, they're all pretty flawed. Like if you're relying on people to honestly report what they like. But porn, I think he compellingly argues, is like, you wouldn't keep watching something you weren't into. Porn has that feature where it's not like you're reading a conservative newspaper if you're liberal or vice versa, where you're just like, oh, I'm interested in what the other no, like, I just wouldn't watch tickling porn.

I would just never it wouldn't get clicked on. Except maybe out of curiosity, like, what the fuck is this? Or whatever.

It's a pretty good marker of what you're into.

So he summarizes it and this is an interview by Sean Illing. They summarize it more gay men in the closet than we think. Many men prefer overweight women to skinny women, but don't act on it because of social pressure.

Sorry. That one will get us to a point that I want to make about what it really means to I agree.

I think we had the same thought reading married Women disproportionately worried. Like a big Google search for married women is, is my husband gay? A lot of women, straight women watch lesbian porn. That's awesome. Except that statistic does not include my own.

Have you looked at her search history?

That's the point of I mean, then it's really perverse because she knows that that would not be a problem for me. And then finally that porn featuring violence against women is way more popular among women than it is among men. So that's one of those this is.

Where we have to read the book because I am curious what it means if it is just SNM porn where the women are bound. That's totally phrased to be the headline that makes people see but anyway yeah, no, that's right.

In some ways it wouldn't be that surprising. Like, it's not like women didn't disproportionately buy 50 Shades of Gray. Right?

Right. Yeah, exactly. Okay, here is the one that Stevens Davidwitz says there are still sexual preferences that people hide today, even in socially liberal places. About one in 100 porn searches are for the elderly. Hundreds of thousands of young men are predominantly attracted to elderly women, but very few young men are in relationships with elderly women. And maybe this actually so there is like a question there about whether or not these men wish they were in relationships with elderly women.

Similar with the overweight with the overweight one.

Right. So is it just that you sort of look for stuff that you couldn't normally find in your everyday life? Is porn causing a push for the weirder and weirder? In some sense, I think porn creates a preference that you might not have known that you had. It's like if you've never eaten lots of different foods and all of a sudden, every day you have at your disposal every single kind of food from the whole world. You might actually be raised in Minnesota and develop a taste for Chinese food from this particular province in China. Right.

Here's what he says. Porn featuring overweight women is surprisingly common among men, but dating sites data says that almost all men try to date skinny women, so they actually don't try to date the people they're attracted to. And he says that this is inefficient there's all these single men and single overweight women who would be sexually compatible, but they don't date. And when the man tries and fails to date a skinny woman, dumb, because he's not even as attracted to her as he would be to an overweight.

Okay, so well, it's because of the.

Social pressure of it like that's the reason that they're not and Illing says that's a tragedy. Yeah.

Okay. So I do not know author Seth Stevens Davidovitz at all, but there seems to be a lack of subtlety in his understanding of what desire is.

Right.

To call it inefficient is a weird thing because there is a way in which I believe that those men are it is also right to say they don't desire overweight women. The social pressure. I don't think what it's doing is making them go out with skinny girls and the whole time they're like, damn, if only society let me date, like, overweight women. If they really wanted to, they could totally do it. And they would. They actually would. Or at least they would on Tinder or something, where it's like only one night stand stuff. There is something about desire that seems to be missed in this. Very confident I agree.

Yeah. That it doesn't just take into account what you're sexually attracted to on porn. Right. I was just thinking this as you could rephrase that. A lot of men are clearly from porn searches are sexually attracted to babysitters. Right. And there are a lot of babysitters who are attracted to so it's so inefficient