The tragedy of tractor porn addiction

any internet users don't know that computer network sysadmins have a special piece of software that automatically shows them what images their users are downloading. I tested it once a few years ago when I was running a network.

Oh my goodness. People with Ph.D. degrees are supposed to be above that sort of thing.

That software has a harder time now, but humans are still the same. Females are programmed to want to appear sexy, which may account for all those scary fish lips we're seeing. One commentator said some of them have “so many face piercings that they look like they fell into a tackle box.” Others have so many tattoos it looks like they got stuck in a printing press. Males are pro­gram­med to seek out fertile females. And that's what this amounts to: fertility displays and sexual competition, and it can be pretty embarrassing.

Explicit images of tractors, many with large posteriors, in various poses are widely available [Screenshot of Bing image search]

In the UK, a MP for Tiverton and Honiton named Neil Parish resigned last week after being seen watching “tractor porn” in the House of Commons. He claimed he was trying to reach a tractor site but mistyped it and landed somewhere else by mistake.* Then he clicked on it again.

Now, I have no particular interest in porn, even if it involves John Deeres (which I have to admit have a pretty shady reputation according to one plumbing contractor I talked to), but by American standards, his mistake was obvious: instead of feigning outrage at the discovery that such a thing really existed, he actually told the truth. No wonder they threw him out.

The tut-tutting from feminists and Labour MPs could be heard all the way across the Atlantic. Daily Mail tut-tutter Sarah Vine wrote

Back then, the NSPCC [the UK National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children] estimated that, as a direct influence of online porn, two in five girls aged between 13 and 17 had suffered sexual coercion of some sort. In an analysis of data from a single month back in December 2013, 44,000 primary school children in Britain, aged between six and 11, were found to have visited an adult website.

Unfortunately for Ms Vine, the use of statistics by activist groups to make their case is no longer as persuasive as it once was thanks to the epidemic of feminists using fake statistics to exaggerate the extent of sexual assault and rape on college campuses.

So I did my own search for pornography. It turns out that Pubmed, that sizzling source for science, has 2774 articles on it, though I have to say most of it is hardly tittilating. One good article is from Jorge Cardoso et al. ^[1] who hypothesized that pornography use is not just sensation seeking, but also may indicate difficulties in emotion regulation, loneliness, and perceived stress.

Meanwhile, intersectional feminists ^[2] say porn is empowering:

Scant research has explored the benefits of using pornography among women, though research does indicate several potential benefits, including increased sexual self-esteem, sexual knowledge, and sexual communication. Research suggests that women may maximize these benefits when they perceive pornography to be authentic.

The problem with this study was that the authors could only find 24 women who admitted watching porn, and of these 19 claimed to be something other than heterosexual.

Porn is a substitute for sex. My theory is that its use escalates during periods of low demographic fertility as nature's attempt to compensate. There's evidence that high testosterone is associated with thicker cortical gray matter in boys's brains, but thinner gray matter in girls.^[3] In males, the amygdala, which detects emotional valence, also increases in size with higher testosterone levels. In females, testosterone makes the hippocampus (which is important in spatial memory) bigger instead. So maybe we could speculate that porn viewers are actually trying to make parts of their cerebral cortex bigger. Just throwing that out there, though it's hard to see where tractors come in.

If porn has too few barriers, so does anti-porn. Do what the neo-Puritans demand and everyone will eventually be in burqas. As for new laws, we already have laws against child abuse and assault. Try enforcing those once in a while instead of creating new ones that will only be found unconstitutional.

Freedom of speech is absolute. The freedom to strike undignified poses wearing tossed salad with balsamic vinaigrette, even if you identify as a tractor, shall not be infringed. That's not in the Constitution, but maybe it should be.

*Update: His friends claim he was looking at Dominator combine harvesters like the one Jeremy Clarkson converted into a snowplow.

may 01 2022, 7:45 am