Yes, you really can break handcuffs by working the brittle links back and forth.
Yes, if you’re small enough and slippery enough, you can slip between the horizontal section of some jail cell doors.
Yes, upwards of twenty million North American Indians were killed inadvertently by disease when Europeans began settling the continent.
Yes, the Declaration of Independence ignored slavery and the rights of women, although to be fair to Thomas Jefferson, this wasn’t by his choice. Jefferson wanted to include a reference to slavery in the Declaration of Independence, but concern for the support of southern states had his proposed clause removed. Women, though, had to wait for the suffragette movement of the early 1900s before they were recognized with the right to vote.
Yes, the electromagnetic force gives atoms their structure (outside of the nucleus) and their chemical properties.
Yes, this is a silly story and shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but it has some foundation in fact.
But no, there’s no alien lunar base on the far side of the Moon, at least none that I know of.
One day, we will make contact with intelligent extraterrestrials, but they’ll be far more interested in our science than our bowel contents. As for tentacles, we’ll just have to wait and see.
If intelligent extraterrestrials ever do visit Earth, I doubt they’ll keep their presence secret. Such concepts work well in fiction, but I suspect ET will be quite open and transparent about dropping by for a cup of coffee and a chat. There’s one aspect of our culture, though, that is sure to perplex ET—porn.
Porn is a complex subject, making it easy to adopt an over-simplistic position that it is either good or bad. The reality is… porn is porn.
Is porn unhealthy? That depends on a number of factors including the type of porn, along with the mindset and maturity of the individual. For some, porn is a source of positive reinforcement, for others it’s detrimental.
All too often, pornography exploits its participants, and skews the way men and women perceive sex and intimacy.
Porn dominates the internet, but not in the way you’d think. The actual number of dedicated pornographic websites is difficult to measure, but estimates range from 4%-12%, which is surprisingly low. But it’s how often these sites are accessed that’s the real measure of interest. A 2015 survey revealed 75% of Christian men polled in the United Kingdom viewed pornography on the internet at least once a month, with 41% describing themselves as addicted to porn.
Another 2015 survey conducted by the University of Sydney, Australia, revealed the average age of first exposure to porn was a shocking 11 years old, with 80% of 15 to 17 year olds being exposed to hard core pornography online, which can mold sexual expectations in an unrealistic and emotionally unhealthy manner.
Pornhub reported 18.35 billion visits in 2014, with the number of videos viewed during these visits reaching almost 80 billion—not bad for a planet with only 7 billion people, especially considering less than half of us have access to the internet.
Some consider porn and erotica as unnatural, perhaps even dirty, and yet our desire for sex is the natural result of evolutionary selective pressure. Just as natural selection leads to traits like faster cheetahs and stronger gorillas, sexual selection leads to ornate peacock feathers for attracting mates, and deer antlers for driving off rivals. Homo sapiens are not immune to these evolutionary drivers, if anything, we are the direct result of the same processes.
Natural selection is blind, whereas sexual selection is in the eye of the beholder. Sexual selection has shaped humanity so it is no wonder sex continues to mold our collective consciousness in the form of porn and erotica.
Is porn addictive? The brain is an active, dynamic organ that changes all the time. Repeated exposure to outlandish porn can rewire the brain’s sexual circuits, but that doesn’t mean pornography is addictive, or that porn is making irreversible changes.
Cocaine is addictive for one in six people. Marijuana is addictive for anywhere from one in ten to one in twenty people. If porn is addictive, it would be for one in hundreds of thousands, so it’s not in the same league as these drugs. Yes, porn releases the same feel-good chemicals, dopamine and endorphins, but so does chocolate and music.
The reason why porn seems addictive may lie with a phenomenon called supernormal stimuli, an evolutionary adaptation that means there’s no upper limit to a good thing.
Ostrich eggs, for example, weigh up to three pounds, or just over a kilo. They’re normally six inches in diameter, or about fifteen centimeters. Paint a volleyball so it looks like an ostrich egg, and even though it’s ten inches, or roughly twenty five centimeters in diameter, an ostrich will abandon its own egg and attempt to incubate the volleyball. Why? The reason is simple. Evolution hardwires animals to see bigger and more intense stimuli as better and more desirable. This is why we can never have enough cake or candy, and may explain the allure of porn as porn overstimulates our sex drive.
Supernormal stimuli may also explain our infatuation with size when it comes to curves, hips, breasts, butts, penis length, etc, and even the general muscle tone people obsess about when it comes to abs, legs, etc.
Porn influences sexual behavior. Teenagers that haven’t had adequate sex education can be unduly influenced by unrealistic pornographic acts, and these can distort attitudes toward women. The real issue is sexual confidence. Both men and women have to have the confidence to define what they like about sex for themselves, and not feel forced into acts they’re not comfortable with, or feel compelled to live up to unrealistic ideals.
Perhaps if porn was better understood, it wouldn’t be a source of shame and would be recognized as satisfying natural desires.
What it means to be sexy has even been commercialized, with flirts and a flash of flesh becoming so ubiquitous they go almost unnoticed, weaving their way into entertainment, celebrity magazines, advertising, TV shows, and movies.
Sex sells, as the saying goes. Fifty Shades of Grey has sold over 125 million copies, putting it in the top ten best selling books of all time, a list this book will never make. And Fifty Shades is not alone, with alien/werewolf/whatever sexy romp novels dominating the Amazon charts. Perhaps, I’m a tad jealous as all the men on those book covers have six packs to die for, while I’m left with a single beer keg.
For better or for worse, we as a species have a love affair with porn and erotica. Alien Space Tentacle Porn is an opportunity for us to poke fun at ourselves and take a lighthearted look at the role of porn in society, looking at the subject through alien eyes.