Another Great Time-Waster

Last year, I was searching the internet for a certain scene in a movie but wasn't having any luck finding it. After checking again later on, I stumbled upon something called a “reaction video” where a person or persons use a camera to record their experience watching a television show or film. Such videos feature short clips of the program's content or they partially obscure the image of the TV show or movie in question to avoid copyright infringement but often the gist of your favorite scenes remain intact. To me, it was like watching an abridged version of what I had already seen with enough content remaining to still make it an enjoyable experience.

After searching around, I found the particular scene I was looking for. However, I was very intrigued by the person reacting to it because this was their first time watching the movie. They were young and had never seen or heard anything about this film before so watching them react to it was like fondly remembering my first time seeing this movie. I'd laugh when they laughed, I'd be blown away when they noticed a small clue in the film that I had missed, I'd feel closeness when they agreed with my opinion, and I'd roll my eyes if they totally misunderstood something.

After watching this reaction video, I began to wonder how other YouTube users reacted when they watched the same movie for the first time. Falling down this rabbit hole was pretty easy. I think these videos gave me a sense of validation too because these young people thought a movie made in the early 1990s was way better than anything Hollywood produced nowadays. In fact, a few of them even lamented, “I wish we had movies like this today.” Oh how I shared that viewpoint! It's been many, many years since I've gone to an actual movie theater and felt that sense of magic that was so common back in my youth. Unfortunately, most mainstream movies now are plagued by cheesy franchises, bad writing, and an over-reliance on crappy CGI.

After watching several of these reaction videos, I wondered how these people would react to other movies and TV shows that were my favorites. Soon, I was searching entire playlists on YouTube to pick out which videos I wanted to see next. Each one was usually 30 to 40 minutes long so it did take a big bite out of what little free time I had. However, with my 3^rd shift job leaving me tired all the time, this seemed to be the perfect distraction before going back to work.

Some reaction videos were hosted by just one person while others featured groups of people together. Some of my favorite videos were hosted by husband and wife teams who were a little on the geeky side and it was amazing how well they got along and were in tune with each other. I said to myself, “I'd want a wife like that.”

To make money, these people had Patreon accounts and for a fee, members could watch these videos ahead of everyone else. They could also see exclusive content not available for public viewing which often included reaction to the entire movie. Some “reactors” had day jobs while others managed to make it their full time job. Now if you had told me when I was in my 20s that there would be people who got paid to sit on their butts and watch their favorite TV shows and movies all day long, I would have thought you were crazy. My years as a couch potato back then never got me much of anything!

I sometimes wonder about the ethics of all of this. A screenwriter, a director, actors and a whole bunch of other people behind the camera put in long hours to create these movies and TV shows and now other people were making money off of their creativity under the pretext of fair use. What also started to bother me was how invested I became in these reaction videos. I probably laughed more by watching them than I had laughed hanging out with friends in recent years. I felt more emotions from watching online videos than I did from interacting with others in real life.  The internet was already a great time-waster but now I found one more thing to whittle away my days.

For Lent this year, I chose to give up watching all reaction videos. It's been manageable but not easy as new content comes out every week and Easter is still far away. I think Lent is a very important time for self-reflection that allows us to examine our faults and think about the areas of our lives where we can do better. It bothered me that these videos were filling a void in my life that should not have been there in the first place. These reactors weren't my friends but I was certainly looking forward to seeing them as if we were.  Also of great concern was this pattern of work, eat, sleep that was taking over my life and leaving so little time to do anything productive around the house especially since my job wasn't very fulfilling or profitable.

Is society so starved of meaningful connections that we have to turn to the online world? While there's no going back, I sometimes think about how life was like before the internet, smartphones and other electronic trappings. We may not have had information on demand, but we seemed to be living life in the moment more often instead of craving emotions from the strangers on our screens.

Salt On An Open Wound

Some of the “friends” on my Facebook page are anything but friends and it still amazes me how people you have almost no connection with will think it's totally appropriate to send along a friend request. I find such relationships (if you can call them that) are rarely balanced. Several years ago, I was chatting on a public Facebook page when a woman who I had gone to middle school with saw what I wrote and asked if I was a former classmate of hers. I said yes and in no time she was sending me that friend request. I thought it was strange she reached out to me because in middle school I had almost no interactions with her.

Despite my better judgment, I accepted her request and we reminisced on the messenger for a little while about the teachers and fellow students we once knew. After this initial contact, we stopped interacting for the most part. Her path in life as a married woman with adult children was as different from my life as her hobbies, political beliefs and favorite music were. Whenever she posted anything to Facebook, it never resonated with me. Whenever I posted something, she rarely reacted. So now two people with little in common had a connection that seemed to serve no purpose.

She would often post photos of her many social activities whether it was vacationing with her husband or going to a concert with friends. As a lonely single guy, I found this content to be annoying to look at. Every now and then she'd post a video from one of her favorite 80s heavy metal bands thinking it made her look like a rebel. A few times, I'd post a song from some obscure dark metal or goth band to see if I'd get a reaction from her. I never did.

This Valentine's Day she posted two memes and really bothered me. The first said: “I LOVE MY HUSBAND EVERY DAY. NOT JUST ON VALENTINE'S DAY.” Hey, that's great for you but there are people out there who have never been married and don't have anyone to love romantically.

The second meme was more vulgar and reminded me of why many Massachusetts residents live up to the nickname Masshole. It said:

 This person had lost their mother many years ago and I suspect she posted this as a way of saying we needed to put our problems into perspective. However, I lost my dad years ago too so even though we shared the same kind of pain, her post still angered me. Not only did I think it trivialized the real pain of loneliness, the vulgarity of her post was like a giant up yours to single people in general. I found these words to be incredibly insulting and had to respond in the comments section by saying, “At some point in their lives most people have had a mother on Mother's Day and a father on Father's Day but there are some people who have NEVER had anyone to love on Valentine's Day. This post is like salt on an open wound.”

It was so easy for someone who was happily married for such a long time to be critical of those who still longed for even a fraction of the kind of love she enjoyed. I was ready to call her out on that point and many more. After signing out of Facebook, I braced myself for yet another keyboard war but when I signed back in later on that night, she had not said anything. This was the other reaction I anticipated.

It was easier for her to ignore what I wrote than to admit she might have crossed a line. This “friend” thought it was better to answer with silence than to ask why I thought she was being insensitive. The lack of any response made me wonder why I even had her on my Facebook page in the first place. This same person would sometimes post about the importance of seeing the warning signs of mental illness and depression in those around you. Too bad she didn't take her own advice.

To add further insult to injury, one of her friends responded to my comments by saying she understood what I was going through. Then she talked about how she was unattached on Valentine's Day just like me. If you thought this might have been the start of a romantic relationship, think again. As this woman continued to describe herself, she dug herself deep into a hole she couldn't climb out of. She described herself as being weird. (Ladies, if you think that's a terrible opening line for a guy, then you shouldn't use it either!) Then she talked about her dysfunctional relationship with her parents and then mentioned being divorced with kids. Needless to say, I didn't respond to her comments.

Interactions like these illustrate why I think Facebook has cheapened the art of having meaningful connections with others.  My "friend" might not have intended to be meanspirited but often times people who have never experienced prolonged loneliness and isolation have no clue how insensitive they can be.

The Church Has A Point About Porn

It's a very interesting thing when the Catholic Church and various online sex and relationship coaches find themselves in agreement since the former preaches modesty and saving the sex act for marriage while the latter embraces hedonism and sexual experimentation. Yet in this instance, both camps warn against the dangers of pornography.

From the online coach's point of view, porn creates a warped view of sex because what is shown is not very realistic at all. Instead of tenderness and intimacy, sex in pornography is cold and mechanical. The act itself becomes purely self-serving and takes into account camera angles and lighting more than it does the woman's pleasure or well-being. These coaches warn men: If you try to emulate what's seen in porn, chances are you'll have a pretty unhealthy sex life. A married friend of mine confirmed this by telling me, “Sex in real life is not like porn at all.”

The other thing these online coaches warn about is pornography's addictive nature. Much like a drug, that exciting feeling you get from those initial viewings tends to wane over time so you keep having to raise the bar to prevent boredom from setting in. This usually means seeking out novelty and fetishism just to feel any kind of sexual excitement at all. Therein lies the trap. You're mentally conditioning yourself to find desire in sex that does very little to please a woman.

One of these online coaches put it this way: In the old days when men lived much of their lives without easy access to pornography, they'd be turned on by just seeing the bare shoulder of a woman. Compare that to the modern guy with a porn addiction who has seen just about every sex act imaginable and it's still not enough. Another online coach admitted porn destroyed his sex drive because he became too focused on one particular fetish and couldn't get turned on any other way. He has since stopped watching pornography and found that over time, his sex drive has recovered. I feel sorry for younger generations because they have instant access to so much while my generation had to settle for still photos every once in a great while. You could say both realities are bad but at least we used our imaginations instead of mindlessly staring at a screen.

In the previous blog entry, I mentioned recording some softcore Cinemax movies with my friend's VCR back in the 1990s. After their novelty wore off, I put these tapes in a box and never watched them again. Many years later, I thought about an actresses who appeared in one of these movies and decided to look her up. To my shock and sadness, she was dead. Her acting career had declined, she endured a string of marriages and a few months after giving birth to a daughter, she killed herself. The more details I discovered about this person's life, the more I realized what a troubled soul she was. Suddenly, that sex scene of hers could never be seen the same way ever again.

Part of the Church's reasoning behind its negative view of pornography is that it robs people of their basic human dignity. This actress was a real person with real hopes and dreams and problems. That movie dehumanized her by reducing her to nothing more than a sex object for men's desires. After looking up another actress from those movies, I learned she had been raped as a child. Some of these actresses are very broken people and the porn industry feeds on exploiting them. Is this the kind of thing good Christian men should be supporting?

A few years ago, my parish had a lecture on Catholic values and for one exercise, we were asked to turn to the person in the pew next to us and stare into their eyes for a minute. While doing this, some of us couldn't help but to crack a smile. If the eyes were the window to the soul, we chuckled at the joy of another human being. In that moment, the person next to me was no longer just a stranger. The lecture then continued by saying the Church believed each one of us had worth and value since we were all created in God's image.

As we live life, it's so easy to dehumanize our fellow man. I might have a few choice words for the guy who cut me off in traffic without ever knowing his motivations. I might make a threat assessment on a group of teenagers walking toward me in a dimly lit subway station. It's part of our “animal brain” way of thinking and sometimes we can't help it. Other times we can. Do we see the soul behind the face of that actress in the porn movie? She was someone's daughter. She might be someone's mother. How would we feel about her sex scene if that was our daughter in that movie?

While I do believe in having a healthy fantasy life and that we shouldn't be too hard on our young people who are still trying to figure life out, we must always be on guard that our fantasies aren't actually harming us in the long run or supporting an industry that is incredibly harmful to people. Most importantly, we must make sure to embrace the wisdom of the Church by trying to see the dignity of each and every one of us.

Running Into the Arms of Porn

           Howard Wolowitz                

I must have lived a very sheltered life because even in my early-20s, I had never seen pornographic videos before. Nude photos in an old magazine or a racy sex scene in a movie was all that I had ever known. I was so pathetic back then, I remember lusting after commercials for a pay-per-view program called The Bikini Open but since we didn't have cable television, there was no way I could have seen it. Yet, when my brother found a stash of “x-rated” videos hidden in the trunk of my dad's car, I refused to watch them because I felt it crossed a line.

As I entered my mid-20s, finding a girlfriend was still a very elusive thing. Not helping the situation were a few aspects of my life that seriously handicapped the odds of being successful at dating. I was out of college, underemployed, too shy to regularly go out to clubs and bars and somewhat of a geek. My hobbies were either dominated by grumpy old men or involved spending a lot of time alone. With very few quality friendships, I usually hung out with people who often annoyed me or weren't the best influence. One friend in particular tended to make morally questionable choices. We had grown up together since the second grade and loved playing army, watching science fiction, and riding our bikes back then but as we got older, he smoked pot, slept around and watched porn.

As a few more years passed with still with no girlfriend in sight, that friend now had a few premium channels on cable and out of curiosity, I watched some of those 1990s softcore Cinemax movies. I found it laughable that these programs actually had plots which were usually terrible because 99% of all guys watched these movies just for the women. These Cinemax movies aired late at night so with the help of my TV Guide, I'd have him program his VCR to record a few for me.

Perhaps I should not have done this but I liked to call these movies “junk food for the soul.” If you were a starving man and the only thing around to eat was an unhealthy candy bar, you'd eat the candy bar no matter how bad it was for you. Maybe you'd regret it later on but in that moment, you didn't want to starve to death. That's the way I thought about these videos. After feeling so lonely for so long, at least these Cinemax movies made me feel something other than emptiness. They reminded me that I was a sexual being filled with passions that I wanted to share with another. Like that candy bar, I often felt regret after watching these videos because I had wasted so much time and they were no substitute for a relationship with a real woman.

It would have been so nice to have a girlfriend in my mid-20s because all that wasted time could have been spent building a relationship with her, passing new milestones together and trying to figure out how to love another human being romantically. Even though well-meaning people would tell me, “There's someone for everyone.” and “You'll meet the right one soon.” none of their words seemed to ring true.

Now inching into my late-20s, that bad influence of a friend started watching hardcore porn and if he had it playing in the background, I didn't tell him to turn it off. (I was still pretty clueless about what actual sexual intercourse even looked like.)  Around this time, a friend of a friend who I saw occasionally was also starting to become a bad influence. He was a couch potato, totally unsuccessful with women and watched porn too. If the choice was to sit at home and do nothing or get together with these people, I'd usually hang out with them even though I prayed to God for better friends. Sadly, my prayers were never answered as I entered my 30s.

Years ago, a woman in an online Catholic chat room posted a video of a priest's sermon where he decried pornography by saying it was the number one cause of why men didn't want to enter the priesthood. I thought it was typical of what was wrong with our Church today. Firstly, this man of the cloth's primary concern was with men not becoming priests but he didn't seem to care about the single men who desired Holy Matrimony. There was also talk of how porn destroyed marriages and families. Again, he missed the mark when it came to singles.

Secondly, (and this is something many Catholic women do all the time) he underestimated how strong an average guy's sexual desires really were. If men don't get what they want out of life, they'll usually look for an outlet somewhere else even if it's detrimental to them in the long term. There's no way I ever wanted to hang out with loser friends in my 20s and watch porn yet here we were.

During this online chat, I brought up the character of Howard Wolowitz from the TV sitcom Big Bang Theory and explained how he was creepy and obsessed with porn because he was so lonely. When a good strong woman entered his life, he turned himself around, got rid of the porn, and became one of the most well-adjusted characters on the show. I made the case that yes, while there are inept creepers out there who will never change, many men would rather not embrace porn. We tend to see it as a last resort when the only other option is to feel dead inside.

I got slammed for sharing this opinion and one guy accused me of justifying the porn industry. I wasn't doing anything of the sort. I was merely saying that when Catholics complain about men like me but do nothing practical to help change such behaviors, they risk sending us running into the arms of porn.