Why Do We Like Porn?

Did you ever do that thing where you think about a particular word or phrase for so long it starts to lose all meaning? Think about the word... well, the word “word.” Just mull that one word over in your head for a bit.

Word... word... word... word... Word is, actually, a word, which, were I smoking pot right now, would probably blow my mind. Word word word. Wordwordwordword. Word is actually “sword” but without the ‘s’.

If you keep thinking about it long enough the word “word” will stop meaning anything, and you’ll sort of have to reboot your mind, and think about something else for a while before coming back to it to remember that “word” is actually a word that has meaning.

There are lots of things that we can over-think like that. Why do humans like art, for example? Or music? If we do that same type of over thinking we get to a place where we’re thinking, “Art is just pictures of things – why do we like art so much when we can just look at the things themselves? And music is just sounds! Hell, we can’t even agree on what types of sounds sound the best – some people like country and others like classical and others like Bollywood soundtracks. So why do we all claim to like music?” And when we get to the place where we’re in that over-thinking frame of mind this makes a certain kind of sense, but most of the time we know that it’s foolish. We humans, as a race, like music, and we like art. We can think about the whys and the wherefores all we want, but it doesn’t change the fact that we like art and music.

And we also like food. And again, like art and music, our taste in food is very subjective. I like burgers, and crab, and I love a good steak and single malt scotch. I can stand beer (though it’s not my go-to drink), and I hate squash with a passion unrivaled by any previous form of hate known to man. I can take or leave ice cream. I love rice pudding, and practically get an erection from tapioca pudding. (Slight exaggeration on that one, but it gets the point across.) I’m sure that people reading this have their own likes and dislikes, which may overlap with mine in some places but not in others. It’s possible (though highly unlikely) that there are even people out there who like... eugh... squash.

I just threw up in my mouth a little on that last point. I only tell you this fact so you’ll know that I suffer for my blog.

So we like art, which is just pictures of things (sometimes representational, sometimes more esoteric), and we like music, which is just sounds. We like eating food, which is good because we need that to live. And we also tend to enjoy sex. Boy do we EVER enjoy sex! We love that shit. Sex is the bomb, yo. (There’s even a song called “Sex Bomb.” I have no idea what it’s about, but the title has stuck with me.)

But then it gets weird: Not only do we like sex, but we like to see other people having sex. Hence porn. (Hence this blog.) What’s that all about? As I think I raised in a previous post (though I couldn’t find the reference), you won’t find people madly downloading videos of other people eating food. That’s just not a thing. You’ll never bust into a teenager’s bedroom to find them on their bed surrounded by snacks, with a video on their tablet of fat people having a feast. But it’s not at all unrealistic to think that you might bust into a teenager’s bedroom to find them on their bed surrounded by lotion with a video on their tablet of sexy people fucking. If you do find them watching a video of people and food, it’s probably sex-related, and the people are probably using the food in a sexual way, not just eating it. Or maybe it’s sexy girls eating hot dogs or something – people have all kinds of kinks – but the point is that it’s still, at the end of the day, more about sex than about the food.
So my question is: what’s up with that? Why are we turned on by watching other people enjoying the act of sex, but don’t get similar enjoyment out of watching other people enjoying their food? Why are there activities that we can enjoy vicariously by watching others do them, but other activities which we don’t get that kind of vicarious enjoyment from?
For instance:

• Having Sex: Watching other people have sex is called porn, and as a society we love it. LOVE it. A large proportion of any first-world nation’s economy is spent on porn. A large proportion of any given day in my life is spent consuming porn in one form or another.
• Eating & Drinking: We don’t seem to get any vicarious enjoyment out of watching other people eat or drink. We download recipes so that we can make food for ourselves and eat it, but we don't sit around watching other people eat.
• Kissing: It’s not all that exciting to watch other people kissing, in and of itself. As a hetero dude I enjoy seeing girls kissing other girls, because when you throw the lesbian element into the equation it becomes much more arousing – but it also falls back into the porn category.
• Sleeping: I love sleeping, but I can’t imagine anything more boring than watching other people sleeping. Wait, yes I can, and it’s...
• Reading: I love to read almost as much as I love to sleep, but watching someone else reading a book is the only thing I can think of that would be more boring than watching someone else sleep.
• Sports: We definitely get a lot of vicarious enjoyment from watching others play sports. In terms of money spent, sports are probably the only thing on this list that come close to rivalling porn.

So I leave this post no closer to an answer than I was when I started it. I don’t know why we like watching other people have sex, or like watching other people play sports, but don’t similarly enjoy watching other people sleep or eat or drink.

But I also don’t plan to overthink it. Regardless of why I like porn, the fact is that I do. I like it enough to have spent time writing this post, and then searching the net for erotic pictures to go along with it.