Porn and video game addiction are leading to 'masculinity crisis', says Stanford prison experiment psychologist

There's two generic perspectives on this. The womanly one, and the manly one. From a woman's perspective, a guy doing this is infantile. He should be working, making money, making himself into a man worth having their children, or someone else's. From a male qua male perspective, I'd say video games and porn are effects and not affects of a larger problem with masculinity in the 21st century. As Aristotle said, entertainment is diversion from the important things in life, a necessary repose, but not the aim of a noble life. Strip away war, strip away the Geneva convention, strip away camaraderie, strip away the pioneer spirit, self reliance, love of nature, the natural dichotomies of man and wife, strip away the noble discharge of masculine energy, and what do you get? You get the modern man, aching desperately for something worthy to discharge himself on, but unable even to formulate his ache in words, because the modern age has stripped him of the words. He's been given confusing values of pity, universal love, tenderness, humbleness, self-deprecation, empathy to the point of nausea, sharing to the point of self-harm, and so on. So he discharges his most primordial and inescapable values through means considered base, through the sexual release of pornography, and the violent catharsis of video games.

With porn, a man can imagine himself in charge sexually, a feeling that the feminization of the 21st century has made uncommon in actuality. Happily married men don't often have this problem with pornography, because they have this healthy sexual outlet. Video games as well as sports provide a discharge of the manly instinct for war and conflict. I play Civilization V often out of this enduring instinct in my family line for physical conflict and thinking. I'm of the genealogical line of warrior kings, and that expresses itself in a way that my warrior king ancestors might find pathetic, because there's few practical outlet for men to be men in Western civilization.

There's not a clear-cut universal solution to this outside some impractical revolution of traditional masculinity. As a man though, the only thing I can offer to my fellows is the wisdom that rights aren't given, rarely earned, and can only be reliably secured by seizing them. Seize your masculinity in any way you can. Excessive porn and video games are unworthy for the life of virtu, and I encourage you to exercise your strength and power through worthy means. Take up a sport like any of the martial arts, pick up a book, pick up outdoorsmanship, pick up weight lifting. Seize anything you can do that will allow you to look at yourself and be proud of what you've become and are becoming.

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