Porn Movies in Our Minds | Jesse Bering

The evolutionary argument that we are, uh, or that men are ejaculating because they're making room for better quality sperm cells, fresher sperm cells, and getting rid of the old, um, does have a lot of currency, I think. But it also poses a bit of a problem from an adaptive perspective, uh, across species.

Because we do seem to be the most masturbatory species of them all. We masturbate much more than other animals. That's not to say that other animals don't, you know, play with themselves or dogs don't, you know, mount people's legs. But we seem to be unique in the sense of, uh, using our manual appendages to actually arrive at orgasm.

So, masturbation to completion seems to be the key here in terms of a possible unique aspect of, uh, human sexual behavior. What I argue in the book is that this is the reason this is unique to human beings: it is because we have a fairly advanced social cognitive system that allows us to basically play back scenes in our heads like a dirty movie theater.

Where, you know, we're going through things that we experienced in the course of our, our daily lives or, um, pornographic images that we saw on the Internet or something like that. I really don't think there's anything too outrageous in terms of what you can concoct in your head for the purposes of masturbation. At least, that is something that, uh, maybe I don't know if we should take pride in that, but it is something that does seem to be, uh, special to human beings.

Not only are we, uh, visualizing these erotic scenes when we're masturbating, but we also use our imagination in this way when we're, you know, actually having sex with other people. Especially people that we're not particularly attracted to or we're not as aroused by them as we would like to be.

Oftentimes, we introduce a whole roster of other players in our heads as we're having sex with that person, uh, just to bring us to orgasm. Lots of people have sex without the lights on; it's not that hard to do, really. But, uh, it's certainly something that most people acknowledge doing, at least at some point in their lives. Especially the longer you get into a marriage, the sort of, uh, romantic erotic fatigue inevitably occurs.

Um, we don't oftentimes share that with the partner in terms of what we're imagining in our heads as we're having sex. But, uh, chances are they're probably doing the same thing with us. So, I don't think that they should, you know, we should really take it too personally.

A lot of people who have paraphilia use this type of mechanism as well to somehow escape the, uh, the very limited type of stimulus or arousal, erotic target that attracts them. If they're only attracted to horses, for example, well, maybe they can be in a successful marriage if they're thinking about horses as they're having sex with their wives.

Sure, the wife wouldn't really want to hear that, but from an evolutionary perspective, at least it can get them to obtain an orgasm and to perpetuate their genes.