Winning
I vividly remember an interview I once saw with a veteran porn actor. He was an elderly man that wasn't and had never had been particularly good looking. He explained that he came into the industry at a time when the assumption was men preferred porn that depicted average looking men having sex with very attractive women. They believed men would have an easier time imagining themselves as the male in the scene and, in turn, would become more excited. It was also suggested that an average man may feel insecure or disconnected watching a Herculean male model with a penis like a baseball bat instead. This turned out to be quite a mistake, as the role of the male in the porn industry was quickly revolutionized within a few years. The "average joe" male porn stars were replaced with hyper-masculine performers with the largest dicks that could be found.
Some have suggested that the improvement in sales within the porn industry when they switched the archetype for male actors was due to more women customers. Others have suggested it was due to the increased appeal to gay men or even an unconscious degree of homosexuality in 'normal' men. I believe otherwise. I believe this provides a window into the core of what makes entertainment and popular art function.
The experience of winning boosts testosterone. This is how a silver-back gorilla actually changes the color of the hairs on its back. By experiencing winning and establishing dominance over the troop of gorillas, the alpha-male gorilla experienced a physiological change. Behavior doesn't just live in the brain...it changes the form and function of the body. Winning and losing changes a human being all the way down to how the body interprets their genetic sequencing. Though, some are more sensitive to gains and losses of variations in behavior and experience than others.
Human beings ability to use imagination is on an order of magnitude beyond anything else in known existence. It through that tool that a very odd things is possible; humans can imagine behavior and experiences and trick their biology into treating it as real. Human biological triggers struggle to make a distinction between reality and imagination, which why an athlete can impede their abilities by thinking to often of loss or failure. Not only are these feelings painful but literally weaken you.
Imagine two tribes of humans. Once has an invention called "story telling" and the other does not. The story-telling tribe creates characters that are easy to relate to and have qualities that the tribe-people admire, which creates a sense of vicariousness. Through the tribe's desire to have these positive qualities, they find it easier to have a vicarious experience through the character. The character's success or failure becomes their success or failure. The story-teller creates an epic conflict that makes success seem difficult, but that only makes the character's victory in the end seem that much more dramatic and meaningful. The better the audience relates to the character, the more epic the conflict, the more immersive the story, the greater the hormone pay-off in the brain. The tribe with story telling goes to war with the tribe without it...all things being equal, the tribe with story telling has more strength and will succeed, further increasing the hormone release and the pleasure associated with it. In the tribe people's minds, their conflict is now in the context of a greater more epic conflict, which makes it more significant.
Mythology and religion was just the natural evolution of story telling so as to better provide the testosterone boost of winning. God, creator of all existence, versus Satan, traitor and master of all things evil. Hercules, son of Zeus, the strongest man who ever lived, half-man, half-God versus the mighty Hydra. Buying into these stories and believing them with every ounce of your being bumps the degree in which their effect improves your biology and gives you the positive feelings associated with them. No win is more satisfying than winning in a religious crusade...its the natural evolution of the story-telling adaptation.
Evolving an imagination to experience victory is like evolving free hands to masturbate...it cheats the system. That testosterone is meant for the individuals capable of winning and the drop in testosterone is meant for the individuals that couldn't so they will become submissive to the alpha in the social hierarchy that existed for our ancestors. It's an accident, yet, is an extraordinarily large portion of how we perceive and experience reality.
Think about sports fan. "Oh, we're really going to have a good season this year." The person has come to see themselves as part of the competing group, which better facilitates the imagining the experience as their own, which bumps the hormone boost on victory. How else do you explain how silly people get over the winning and losing of some random people playing some arbitrary game? The team losing literally affects how their body works. After a while, people come to need it for their fix. Just like the tribes people of old, when one's real life gives us a sense of failure and inadequacy, we can look to the imagination to give us that hormone boost to make us feel like winners again.
Which comes back to what I do for a living. I sell winning. The central driving reason the video game I work on outsells all the other ones is because the speed and intensity it make people feel like they're winning. The frequency of intense fire fights that are easy for casual players to get into and win is extraordinarily high. Watch a video of someone playing Call of Duty multiplayer and watch a video of someone playing any other game in existence and you tell me which one best creates a sense of primordial, intense success. I would be willing to bet confidently that there are more testosterone swings in a Call of Duty player than any other video game. Which is why some of our biggest fans in the world are those that are the most sensitive and in need of that affect...teenage boys, athletes, out of work dads, frat guys. It makes them feel like the heroes of myth, but in a world that seems so real to them.
That isn't to say there isn't a female equivalent. I don't believe there's a gender gap in the frequency or intensity of desiring winning, except the nature of what winning is is often different. Trash romance books like 'Twilight' operate in the same way as sports and 'Call of Duty', they just play by different rules to create a similar effect. There's still building up a character that we end up vicariously living through, blowing the conflict out of proportions and resolving it all with a big, crushing win. Winning is just emotional than physical, but no less competitive or lower stakes.
All this brings me back to the question of what happened to male porn stars. The mistake that was made is that it was assumed that we perceive ourselves irrationally for what we are: average. It breaks the illusion. We reject characters that are truly average as being not us because we hate to believe that's who we are. A character that is superficially average but actually superhuman or capable of great feats is how we'd like to think of ourselves, so those are the characters that best create the vicarious effect. Like Jesus Christ. But, given the choice, we'd rather see ourselves as gods than Joe's & Jane's, which is why Herculean porn stars with giant dicks sell better than average guys. Your average male struggles to get the vicarious effect when looking at other average males sleep with attractive women, where its significantly easier with the alternative. Truth tastes more fake than fiction.
The most dangerous aspect of this dynamic is it can become addictive or give the illusion of substance. It's easy for members of the society to see everything in terms of fictionalized characters within an epic struggle of life working toward a grand resolution. Sports analogies leak into work. People quote fiction to explain events in their lives. People begin to lose their sense of the world that lives outside the bubble of winning and losing. Accepting that their life has no story arc, they are not in some epic or grand religious struggle, things do not resolve cleanly and that the successes and failures of their group, be it family, relationships or nation do not define them as individuals becomes incredibly difficult. The truth tastes more fake than fiction. They stay children in blissful ignorance, lost in fiction until it is all they know and understand.
There's a certain vicious irony in that telling people about how this work puts a dent in their ability to experience the effect. Knowledge and doubt reduce the ability to have the vicarious experience of winning and to better conflate the significance of personal victories, which reduces hormone production and perhaps creates a sense of losing to a cold and merciless universe. Perhaps that's why smart people tend to have less testosterone and are more often depressed. Human intelligence may have hit an evolutionary ceiling where any more of it breaks the hormone game, and reduces the individual's ability to compete with the believers and story tellers.
Just by reading this I may have permanently altered the composition of your behavior and physiology. To me, that feels like quite a bit of winning.
Some have suggested that the improvement in sales within the porn industry when they switched the archetype for male actors was due to more women customers. Others have suggested it was due to the increased appeal to gay men or even an unconscious degree of homosexuality in 'normal' men. I believe otherwise. I believe this provides a window into the core of what makes entertainment and popular art function.
The experience of winning boosts testosterone. This is how a silver-back gorilla actually changes the color of the hairs on its back. By experiencing winning and establishing dominance over the troop of gorillas, the alpha-male gorilla experienced a physiological change. Behavior doesn't just live in the brain...it changes the form and function of the body. Winning and losing changes a human being all the way down to how the body interprets their genetic sequencing. Though, some are more sensitive to gains and losses of variations in behavior and experience than others.
Human beings ability to use imagination is on an order of magnitude beyond anything else in known existence. It through that tool that a very odd things is possible; humans can imagine behavior and experiences and trick their biology into treating it as real. Human biological triggers struggle to make a distinction between reality and imagination, which why an athlete can impede their abilities by thinking to often of loss or failure. Not only are these feelings painful but literally weaken you.
Imagine two tribes of humans. Once has an invention called "story telling" and the other does not. The story-telling tribe creates characters that are easy to relate to and have qualities that the tribe-people admire, which creates a sense of vicariousness. Through the tribe's desire to have these positive qualities, they find it easier to have a vicarious experience through the character. The character's success or failure becomes their success or failure. The story-teller creates an epic conflict that makes success seem difficult, but that only makes the character's victory in the end seem that much more dramatic and meaningful. The better the audience relates to the character, the more epic the conflict, the more immersive the story, the greater the hormone pay-off in the brain. The tribe with story telling goes to war with the tribe without it...all things being equal, the tribe with story telling has more strength and will succeed, further increasing the hormone release and the pleasure associated with it. In the tribe people's minds, their conflict is now in the context of a greater more epic conflict, which makes it more significant.
Mythology and religion was just the natural evolution of story telling so as to better provide the testosterone boost of winning. God, creator of all existence, versus Satan, traitor and master of all things evil. Hercules, son of Zeus, the strongest man who ever lived, half-man, half-God versus the mighty Hydra. Buying into these stories and believing them with every ounce of your being bumps the degree in which their effect improves your biology and gives you the positive feelings associated with them. No win is more satisfying than winning in a religious crusade...its the natural evolution of the story-telling adaptation.
Evolving an imagination to experience victory is like evolving free hands to masturbate...it cheats the system. That testosterone is meant for the individuals capable of winning and the drop in testosterone is meant for the individuals that couldn't so they will become submissive to the alpha in the social hierarchy that existed for our ancestors. It's an accident, yet, is an extraordinarily large portion of how we perceive and experience reality.
Think about sports fan. "Oh, we're really going to have a good season this year." The person has come to see themselves as part of the competing group, which better facilitates the imagining the experience as their own, which bumps the hormone boost on victory. How else do you explain how silly people get over the winning and losing of some random people playing some arbitrary game? The team losing literally affects how their body works. After a while, people come to need it for their fix. Just like the tribes people of old, when one's real life gives us a sense of failure and inadequacy, we can look to the imagination to give us that hormone boost to make us feel like winners again.
Which comes back to what I do for a living. I sell winning. The central driving reason the video game I work on outsells all the other ones is because the speed and intensity it make people feel like they're winning. The frequency of intense fire fights that are easy for casual players to get into and win is extraordinarily high. Watch a video of someone playing Call of Duty multiplayer and watch a video of someone playing any other game in existence and you tell me which one best creates a sense of primordial, intense success. I would be willing to bet confidently that there are more testosterone swings in a Call of Duty player than any other video game. Which is why some of our biggest fans in the world are those that are the most sensitive and in need of that affect...teenage boys, athletes, out of work dads, frat guys. It makes them feel like the heroes of myth, but in a world that seems so real to them.
That isn't to say there isn't a female equivalent. I don't believe there's a gender gap in the frequency or intensity of desiring winning, except the nature of what winning is is often different. Trash romance books like 'Twilight' operate in the same way as sports and 'Call of Duty', they just play by different rules to create a similar effect. There's still building up a character that we end up vicariously living through, blowing the conflict out of proportions and resolving it all with a big, crushing win. Winning is just emotional than physical, but no less competitive or lower stakes.
All this brings me back to the question of what happened to male porn stars. The mistake that was made is that it was assumed that we perceive ourselves irrationally for what we are: average. It breaks the illusion. We reject characters that are truly average as being not us because we hate to believe that's who we are. A character that is superficially average but actually superhuman or capable of great feats is how we'd like to think of ourselves, so those are the characters that best create the vicarious effect. Like Jesus Christ. But, given the choice, we'd rather see ourselves as gods than Joe's & Jane's, which is why Herculean porn stars with giant dicks sell better than average guys. Your average male struggles to get the vicarious effect when looking at other average males sleep with attractive women, where its significantly easier with the alternative. Truth tastes more fake than fiction.
The most dangerous aspect of this dynamic is it can become addictive or give the illusion of substance. It's easy for members of the society to see everything in terms of fictionalized characters within an epic struggle of life working toward a grand resolution. Sports analogies leak into work. People quote fiction to explain events in their lives. People begin to lose their sense of the world that lives outside the bubble of winning and losing. Accepting that their life has no story arc, they are not in some epic or grand religious struggle, things do not resolve cleanly and that the successes and failures of their group, be it family, relationships or nation do not define them as individuals becomes incredibly difficult. The truth tastes more fake than fiction. They stay children in blissful ignorance, lost in fiction until it is all they know and understand.
There's a certain vicious irony in that telling people about how this work puts a dent in their ability to experience the effect. Knowledge and doubt reduce the ability to have the vicarious experience of winning and to better conflate the significance of personal victories, which reduces hormone production and perhaps creates a sense of losing to a cold and merciless universe. Perhaps that's why smart people tend to have less testosterone and are more often depressed. Human intelligence may have hit an evolutionary ceiling where any more of it breaks the hormone game, and reduces the individual's ability to compete with the believers and story tellers.
Just by reading this I may have permanently altered the composition of your behavior and physiology. To me, that feels like quite a bit of winning.