Image: “Barrels of Money” by Victor Dubreuil (ca. 1890s)

You Know It When You See It

The Obscene from Porn to Crypto

by David Herz (Paris, France)

To Porn or Not to Porn

In 2002, US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was asked by NATO ambassadors what it would take to prove that Iraq had given up its weapons of mass destruction. “It’s like the judge said about pornography,” he told the closed-door audience, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”^[1] With this stunning simile, Wolfowitz justified the US invasion of Iraq and the subsequent destabilization of much of the Middle East—two processes he later distanced himself from, though we won’t give him the benefit of that big doubt.

Let’s begin our inquiry into pornography, then, with the assumption that we needn’t go far, that we can do without investigations, academic or profane, because the thing in question is something we “know when we see it.” One elegant etymology tells us the word pornography arose from the tracings left in the sand by prostitutes to guide their customers to an undisclosed trysting place. The literal etymology—writing about prostitutes—seems to wish it could just wash its hands of the whole question.

From the outset, we would like to stress our belief that pornography has no value other than the pecuniary from which its participants benefit. Its social damage has been documented for decades and is only aggravated by its free and simple online availability. The correlation with lower self-esteem and other personality disorders in women and aggressiveness in men, as well as an insistence on debasing the sexual act, is evident. And yet, internet viewers of porn are more numerous than visitors to Amazon, Twitter, and Netflix combined. 30% of all data transmitted through the internet is pornography.^[2]

What is the draw, whence its power?

Hormones: Is This Really Me?

We mustn’t underestimate—and probably can’t overestimate—the pull and power of testosterone and estradiol in our bodies.^[3] These hormones are surely among the most puissant signaling molecules that we have, and in the undisciplined man, testosterone has been a plague for world leaders and movie producers, businessmen and men who should never have been fathers, for as long as we’ve had records of human behavior. As an early reference, we can take Judah in Genesis 38,^[4] who took his daughter-in-law Tamar for a harlot and was about to have her stoned once she became pregnant by him until she MeTooed him into admitting he’d slept with her. He hadn’t recognized her during the act because she’d covered her face—testosterone, clearly, isn’t driven by face recognition.

If you declare yourself unfettered by morality and common human decency, be you a CEO, a tinhorn dictator, or simply someone in a position of authority and power and ready to abuse them, you can grant yourself the right to relieve your every sexual urge. Men from Mao Tse Tung to Harvey Weinstein—perhaps the historical champion being Genghis Khan, with 16 million descendants^[5]—have felt the overweening need to have their weenies relieved, and have blithely offered themselves the means of never remaining frustrated for long. Those were the mores and the days—at least in most every place and time that humans have ever lived.

This traditional way for humans in power to satisfy themselves—and we should include, in this group, both sexes and anything in between, a well-known female example being Emperor Claudius’ third wife Messalina, though there may be a fair amount of character assassination involved—has generally ended well for men, meaning they’ve suffered no consequences. Until our 21^st century, that is, when what men have traditionally gotten away with thankfully receives judicial reprisal, or at the very least bad press, at the very least in some parts of the world. The MeToo movement in China, which began shortly after its US counterpart, has met with uneven success^[6] and much state hostility. As the 2021 example of tennis player Peng Shuai^[7] demonstrates, you must be careful whom, where, and when you accuse. France’s undiplomatic MeToo equivalent was “balance ton porc” (turn in your pig, the pig in question being the generally male sexual abuser), and did not attract quite the same following.

But the drive is still there. Our sexual drive, our unquenchable desire.

Desire, Ponzi, Crypto

The reason a beam of light bends when it enters water is that it “knows” a straight line is not always the fastest way to get somewhere. We humans know this too, and have planned our air travel routes accordingly—pull a string between two spots on the globe, and unless they’re close together, the geodesic will have you follow a more or less elliptical route. Desire, however, doesn’t know. It draws a straight line, no matter the terrain, the circumstances, those constant micro-warnings reality is always throwing at us, if only we acknowledged them. It wants instant, rapid, straight-ahead gratification.

Desire drives and doesn’t consider. It’s at the heart of the Ponzi scheme, which knows, but doesn’t disclose, that we desire more, often with as little effort as possible; the human path of least resistance to the biggest gain. As Jorge Stolfi explains,

Crypto Ponzis sustain their expectation of profitability by technical and economic obfuscation, and claims about an indefinite future, rather than by a single and simple lie that implies constant income. Thus, even when new investments—and consequently the immediate “payoffs”—drop by 80% or more, as happened to BTC between 2017-12 and 2018-12, there will be a band of faithful investors who will continue to put all their spare money into the game, firmly believing that the price will “eventually” rise again and “go to the moon.” And this money will be enough to keep the blockchain alive, even if with a lower hashrate. That is why even the most obviously broken cryptocurrencies can survive multiple crashes and years of dropping prices, and only die if and when the price finally reaches zero.^[8]

The lure of cryptocurrency, like the lure of lucre in any form, is strong and warmly held in our minds, along with the image of lusted-after things procured with little or no effort, along with the imagined condition of the royal and the rich, wherever they may throne. A crook of the pinkie and the hot bubble bath is drawn… Simply desiring does the trick.

Desire begets desire in a state of constant excitability and greed where the means to its satisfaction are—or appear to be—at hand, as with a gerbil on its exercise wheel made transparent by its spin velocity, manifesting the cheese in that clear, illusory space just beyond the spin as the rodent speeds up its frenzied pattering, never getting any closer to the prize. Should the gerbil drop from exhaustion or stop giving the wheel momentum, the cheese appears through the bars, but when it hops off, the cheese has once again receded into a distant, numinous background.

The ready availability of porn keeps its users on the wheel. We don’t need to speak of addiction, since we “know it when we see it,” even if our age may require a neuronal correlate to testify to its empirical veracity.

Porn on the Brain

While it isn’t our intention to discuss the merits and demerits of porn, our casting it in the mold of cryptocurrency seems to imply that we don’t like it. “Does Watching A Lot Of Porn Give You ‘Pea’ Brain?”^[9] was the queasy question posed by Laura Simmons in one recent article. Less of anything than the norm in a brain is usually cause for concern—though, as Simmons points out, if porn aficionados are concerned about a shrinking organ, it probably isn’t that one. As the study cited by Simmons, authored by Simone Kühn and Jürgen Gallinat, concludes:

The negative association of self-reported pornography consumption with the right striatum (caudate) volume, left striatum (putamen) activation during cue reactivity, and lower functional connectivity of the right caudate to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex could reflect change in neural plasticity as a consequence of an intense stimulation of the reward system, together with a lower top-down modulation of prefrontal cortical areas. Alternatively, it could be a precondition that makes pornography consumption more rewarding.^[10]

“Taken together,” Kühn and Gallinat assert, “one may be tempted to assume that the frequent brain activation caused by pornography exposure might lead to wearing and down regulation of the underlying brain structure.” In other words, there is a part of your brain that is ready to be addressed and reinforced by porn and that, upon viewing more and more porn, reinforces your attraction to porn.

But since we seem to be moving dangerously close to scientific terrain here, let’s try to leave old Paul behind and establish a definition of just what porn is. Here’s what Merriam & Webster have to say on the matter:

1. The depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement
2. Material (such as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitemen
3. The depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction^[11]

Let’s tie our chariot to definition number three and that quick, intense, emotional reaction, the one associated with anything from pleasure to addiction, an addiction to pleasure, or, as Lou Reed puts it in “Heroin”:

I don’t know just where I’m going
But I’m gonna try for the kingdom, if I can
‘Cause it makes me feel like I’m a man
When I put a spike into my vein
And I’ll tell ya, things aren’t quite the same
When I’m rushing on my run
And I feel just like Jesus’ son
And I guess that I just don’t know
And I guess that I just don’t know

Feeling like Jesus’ son when you’re rushing on your run sounds like that exquisite and falsely unbearable pleasure right before orgasm. And while the intensity of that excitement may not be as easily renewable as that procured through pornography and successful speculation in crypto, the context is. We are plowing and seeding the same arable tract in our brain with tools and seeds from a closely circumscribed aesthetic spectrum. The excitement is tied to a single, simple, and repeated stimulus, unconnected to history, philosophy, art, and the myriad other things that make us humanly rich.

On to the Obscene

The obscene has been qualified thus in US jurisprudence: “whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest.”^[12] The 1^st amendment of the US Constitution does not protect your right of free speech if you appeal purely to prurient interest—now, as to who decides the purity or your prurient interest, we won’t discuss that here.

A brutal example of how crypto partakes in the obscene was given in Texas during the infamous winter storm of 2020. “Texas was gasping for electricity,” Gabriel J.X. Dance writes for the New York Times. “Winter Storm Uri had knocked out power plants across the state, leaving tens of thousands of homes in icy darkness.”^[13] The Texas Department of State Health Service counted 246 deaths from the storm,^[14] while Buzzfeed News found “between 426 and 978,” with the “best estimate” being that “702 people were killed.”^[15] In other words, a great many people died.

Meanwhile, in the husk of a onetime aluminum smelting plant an hour outside of Austin, row upon row of computers were using enough electricity to power about 6,500 homes as they raced to earn Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency.^[16]

Up to this point, we have focused on the excitement of prurient desires, uncontrolled passions, enforcing or being reinforced by the same groove in the brain, as being shared by regular consumers of pornography and those animating the world of cryptocurrency.  Let us now offer more of what both pursuits have in common, namely that they are humanly obscene in the deepest-felt meaning of the word, in their disrespect for human vulnerability and need.

In Texas, the computers kept running until just after midnight. Then the state’s power grid operator ordered them shut off, under an agreement that allowed it to do so if the system was about to fail. In return, it began paying the Bitcoin company, Bitdeer, an average of $175,000 an hour to keep the computers offline. Over the next four days, Bitdeer would make more than $18 million for not operating, from fees ultimately paid by Texans who had endured the storm.^[17]

On a Venn diagram mapping pornography and the above spawn belched forth by the so-called financial industry, then, the cleanest point of intersection is obscenity. And it is in obscenity that these two intersect even with the French generals who condemned Dreyfus in 1894, and then again in 1899. As Lucien Lévy-Bruhl observed of the latter in 1926,^[18] they are all driven by excitative lust and a desire to meld faith-driven, lucky-star, my-country-right-or-wrong speculation—it will work, I believe so, it has worked till now—and a “firm” basis in reality either delimited or opened up by statistics.

China, at least, had the decency to ban Bitcoin mining in 2021 due to its power consumption.

Quod erat demonstrandum

The pleasure we derive from beauty, art, a football victory by our favorite team—but not the Schadenfreude flowering venomously at the suffering of those we dislike—is not obscene. And neither is the pleasure we derive from the erotic, although in lovemaking, there are many acts that, taken out of context, may appear pornographic.

Pornography appeals to our most powerful instincts, the ones that bend us to the very preservation of our species. We do not know of any studies revealing changes in “neural plasticity” resulting from “overexposure” to cryptocurrency speculation. Nonetheless, it follows similar excitatory passages in our being, and its very existence and maintenance require behavior that is profoundly obscene.

In an age where rhetoric is no longer taught, we mustn’t be surprised that its basic fallacies—ad hominem, straw man, slippery slope, argumentum ad ignorantiam, petitio principii—are blithely employed to lead and stultify the masses. And the same is true for the drives that capture our attention and focus our pleasure; they too can be, and are being, harnessed, exploited, mined.

Lou may guess that he just doesn’t know, but when we see it, we know. And we should know better.

^[1] “DoD News Briefing – Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz and Gen. Pace” (21 November 2001), The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, Lilian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School [19 June 2024]. Original dialogue as follows:

Q: “Mr. — excuse me, Mr. Secretary? In what ways will states that sponsor terrorism be expected to credibly demonstrate to Washington that they no longer sponsor terrorism in order to avoid sharing in the terrorists’ fate?”

Wolfowitz: “I think it was Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, when asked to define pornography, said, ‘I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.’ And I think we will know it when we see countries out of the business of sponsoring terrorism.”

^[2] Gail Dines, “Is porn immoral? That doesn’t matter: It’s a public health crisis,” The Washington Post, 8 April 2016 [19 June 2024].

^[3] Maurand Cappelletti and Kim Wallen, “Increasing women’s sexual desire: The comparative effectiveness of estrogens and androgens,” Hormones and Behavior 78 (Feb 2016): 178-193.

^[4] See the Sefaria website [19 June 2024].

^[5] Hillary Mayell, “Genghis Khan a Prolific Lover, DNA Data Implies,” National Geographic, 14 February 2003 [19 June 2024].

^[6] “MeToo movement in China,” Wikipedia, 15 June 2024 [19 June 2024].

^[7] “Peng Shuai,” Wikipedia, 9 June 2024 [19 June 2024].

^[8] Jorge Stolfi, “Bitcoin is a Ponzi,” 1 February 2021 [19 June 2024]. As Stolfi points out, Bitcoin has also been described as Ponzi-like by experts such as economist Nouriel Roubini of NYU, Kaushik Basu of the World Bank, investment analyst David Webb, and former World Bank president, physician and anthropologist Jim Yong Kim.

^[9] Laura Simmons, “Does Watching A Lot Of Porn Give You “Pea” Brain?” IFLSCience, 5 May 2023 [19 June 2024].

^[10] Simone Kühn and Jürgen Gallinat, “Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity Associated With Pornography Consumption: The Brain on Porn,” JAMA Psychiatry 71.7 (2014): 827-834 [19 June 2024].

^[11] “Pornography,” Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2024 [19 June 2024].

^[12] “Obscene,” Online Etymology Dictionary, 2024 [19 June 2024]. The cited source is Justice William Brennan, “Roth v. United States,” 24 June 1957.

^[13] Gabriel J.X. Dance, “The Real-World Costs of the Digital Race for Bitcoin,” New York Times, 9 April 2023 [19 June 2024].

^[14] Patrick Svitek, “Texas puts final estimate of winter storm death toll at 246,” The Texas Tribune, 2 January 2022 [19 June 2024].

^[15] Peter Aldhous, Stephanie M. Lee, and Zahra Hijri, “The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says,” Buzzfeed News, 27 May 2021 [19 June 2024].

^[16] Dance, “The Real-World Costs.”

^[17] Dance, “The Real-World Costs.”

^[18] See Frédérick Keck, Préparer l’Imprévisible : Lévy-Bruhl et les sciences de la vigilance, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2023.