171: Humping the Invisible Turkey

[Chris LaVigne]

Humping the Invisible Turkey

"In the 1960s, researchers from the Pennsylvania State University discovered they could easily trick male turkeys into mating with the stuffed dummy of a female turkey. More surprisingly, and somewhat pathetically, the males performed the same behavior even as the researchers disassembled the dummy. It got to the point where if the researchers held up a fake female head on a stick, the males would still try to hump the spot of air where the nonexistent female's backside should have been.

"Male turkeys getting turned on by fake females sounds silly, but what about men getting turned on by fake women - say, female videogame characters?"

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[AceDiamond]

Very interesting article and a good read. It's nice to see people apply psychology to something that most people would just chalk up to "lack of a life" and move on.

 

[AuntyEthel]

"Male turkeys getting turned on by fake females sounds silly, but what about men getting turned on by fake women - say, female videogame characters?"

I bet if you count the number of men who've wanked over Lara Croft, they'd fill the whole of China.

 

[Beery]

... and there's nothing at all wrong with that. If a guy wants to masturbate to pixels, it's a whole lot less harmful than almost any other activity. Heck, it's even less harmful than masturbating over real porn - with hentai at least you know that no-one was forced into prostitution in order to make the image.

 

[HertzaHaeon]

Firstly, women also use porn. There's no exclusive male brain phenomena at work here. Take a look at all the fanfics, slash and yaoi out there. It's different, but still porn designed to primarily arouse. Women don't get as many obviously sexy videogame men to get turned on by, but let's not forget the rivers of lady spunk that have flowed because of hunks like Sepiroth. I'm sure they'd do it more if they could.

Secondly, getting aroused by an image is not primitive or strange. If you read comics theory for example you'll see how the brain perceives such images. It's not a problem, it's a great feature of the brain. What if images, words and symbols held no meaning because they're not "real"? There wouldn't be any art or even imagination. The same mechanics that allows you to fantasize about Lara Croft allows you to fantasize about real people. But even if your boyfriend or girlfriend is real, a fantasy about them on a lonely night is as unreal as many virtual characters. The boundary between reality and fantasy isn't absolute for even a healthy mind, and that's a good thing. It's because we can see life in dead pixels that we can enjoy games at all. Sex is no different from any emotion or thought that can be dressed up in an imaginary costume. It shouldn't be treated differently or as a sign of male simplicity.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

There's a big difference between cognitive porn and tactile porn. In the same way there's a difference between the woman you love and the woman you lust after.

Also works for the other three gender-orientations.

The problem is when you believe the two are the same; and most of the "ZOMG SEX IS SO WRONG" campaigners don't get that.

 

[Hunde Des Krieg]

it isn't the fact that they aren't real, because the mind extrapolates them into an image of a real person, instead of the actual picture you are really thinking of a person that is the same as the picture.

 

[SimuLord]

Fun fact: Typing "Sims 2 Smaz" into Google produces this Escapist article as the second result and Smaz's site (in German, and it seems to be a broken link) eighth.

 

[MorkFromOrk]

There is a whole multi-billion dollar a year industry built around sexually arousing men from images. We've gone from "...no substitute for a real woman" to photoshopped celebrity heads on naked bodies getting huge amount of hits on the web. I actually believe the minds of today's generation of men have been rewired to actually prefer graphic representation of women than real live women.

 

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

Haha, this actually is my favorite article on here. It reminds me of "Modern Marvels" episode about the sex industry.

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

Someone made a GTA sex game just recently, got this off Rock Paper Shotgun.

http://bonetown.com/disclaimer.html

Personally? Has anyone ever noticed how Wii Fit actually encourages sexual tension with the instructor? After hitting about 60 hours, the Wii Fit girl undid her pony tail for me. All my exercises with her are now with her hair down and I swear she smiles more often. The game has also blissfully stopped trying to make me work out with the male instructor. There's no way in Hell I'm going to look at a generic video game guy's ass while I'm standing in downward dog. Equally strange are the moments where Wii Fit Girl walks into the gym yawning and complaining about staying out too late last night. Personalizing the characters in a game are one thing...but creating virtual sexual tension with your gym instructor is quite another.

Plus, c'mon...her voice is really hot.

 

[Nerdfury]

The Escapist Magazine: Now linking you to hentai porn!

 

[Unholykrumpet]

Someone made a GTA sex game just recently, got this off Rock Paper Shotgun.

http://bonetown.com/disclaimer.html

Uh...that's just...weird. "You start with fat girls, and move on to hot babes"
...What has the world come to?

 

[ellimist337]

let's face it- who doesn't want to hump a fake turkey head on a stick?

 

[clubhaus]

Very interesting article. I guess it takes all kinds to make the world go round.

 

[Sylocat]

Interesting explanation, but it seemed that the article consisted mainly of two paragraphs' worth of text describing why men (and only men?) find this stuff arousing, interspersed between pages of filler, and a couple of H-artists saying a few words about their work. It was still a good read, but it could have been a good page shorter.

 

[Hiroshi Mishima]

"Do I think a guy is going to turn down sex with a real girl to have sex with a videogame girl? I think probably not."

There is a funtamental problem with that statement, and that problem is the fact that there are a great deal many guys (probably within a specific age group I'll bet) who actually do find women of a strictly non-real sense to be more appealing than the those of the flesh-and-blood type. Why? Because that's all they're seeing.

I can not count the number of large breasted girls I have found within video games over the last 10-13 years - since the advent of 3-D graphics and consoles like the playstation or Saturn - and that means that there have been millions of young boys all over the world growing up looking at these fantastically appealing (I suppose) women. Add that into the Hollywood image of the perfect woman, as compared to the more modest and down to earth types which are often perceived as "Hollywood Homely", and it wouldn't surprise me at all to meet a man who thinks the perfect sex partner has D class breasts, blonde hair (or a non-typical colour ala anime women) and just oozes sex from every pore. You also have the growing porn and hentai industry, which allows these boys to see their favourite video game gal doing gods only knows what with each other (or themselves if you want to read into that one H-artist's comments).

It's not only plausible that men exist who would not want the average woman they see on the street because she doesn't look anything like what he wants.

I'm not saying that this is the case with all men, but I am saying that the quoted statement isn't actually completely factual.


Personally, when I was young I actually found myself developing crushes on some video game females. But it was never a lustful crush, rather a romantic one, caused because the characters were well written and believable to the point where I felt sorry for them if something bad happened. There's a difference between feeling emotionally attached to a non-real character and wanting to drag them into a room and shag their brains out.

It is just a pity most Hentai fans don't realize that while there may be no "real" person involved in what is being done to those poor girls, the images themselves are often of deprevity and rape to otherwise innocent girls (and sadly this includes girls under the age of 13). You can't tell me it's okay to wank off to a 10 year old girl getting attacked by her father, or a tentacle monster.

 

[mattaui]

This article does cover a lot of ground, and while it generally speaks to the obvious (most men like pornography, in any way, shape or form), it does delve dangerously into equivocating a pinup or softcore porn with images of child monster rape (a lot of hentai).

To say that enjoying _all_ kinds of pornography is simply normal and acceptable is to blur the line between mere mental sexual stimulation and enjoying acts depicting sexual violence.

 

[Girlysprite]

Hiroshi, you make some good points there. The images of 'fantasy women' doesn't only affect guys, but girls too, sometimes with disastrous effects.

 

[Dark Crusader]

... and there's nothing at all wrong with that. If a guy wants to masturbate to pixels, it's a whole lot less harmful than almost any other activity. Heck, it's even less harmful than masturbating over real porn - with hentai at least you know that no-one was forced into prostitution in order to make the image.

Forced? Except in the cases of the most extreme websites, I think not. Even then, I think not.
If you see a girl on a website doing porn, she's most likely being paid quite well.
There are a few that this isn't true for(but might be, you never know with the internet), such as real-ex Girlfriends(I've seen it floating around a couple of times).

Also as someone above said, this isn't a strictly male phenomania, it also occurs with woman. I do think that it's more likely for woman to be using their imagination more(such as story porn).

In any case I feel that realising pent-up sexual energy on porn is alot less harmful than keeping them stored up inside, that age-old saying of 'Don't bottle your emotions up inside, let them out.'