[If you’re reading this post not in the day I have written it, check the publishing date… it is a joke written for April’s Fools day!]
Today I have made a shocking discovery that I think all the VR community should be aware of because millions of lives are at a risk: VR Porn can have very bad consequences for your health.
In an article published yesterday on Nature, doctor Jonathan Seens has revealed the result of its research that has gone on for the last two years. And the results are pretty shocking: immersive porn, seen through a virtual reality headset, cause permanent brain, and sometimes body, damage.
Reading the article, I discovered that there is a very clear scientific reason behind this. Precedent studies have already shown that VR shuts down some zones of the hippocampus responsible for the navigation inside environments.
When the content is adult entertainment, the brain triggers various neurons and release various hormones, the heart rate increases and a very strong reaction of all the body arises. Immersive porn is different from pancake porn because it is more realistic, so the brain expects a real sexual intercourse, that anyway doesn’t happen. This causes a very complicated reaction inside some areas of our most important organ, that get triggered for the excitement then turn off because nothing happens then trigger again for the images, and so on. This turn-on-turn-off behaviour follow the equation
y = |sin(x)| + 5*exp(-x^100)*cos(x) from -3 to 3 (plot here)
As a lamp that gets turned on and off continuously, neurons start electrocuting, and slowly the brain dies. What is truly worrisome is that even after the movies have been seen, neurons continuous to explode like pop corns in a pan for months or even years.
I contacted doctor Seens, because I was worried since “a friend of mine” has watched this kind of content, and he confirmed to me these results. “Millions of people are at risk. Even just a VR adult movie can be enough to ruin your life” he says “that’s why we are already working with various governments to start some laws to prohibit VR adult entertainment”.
I asked him if there is any difference with regards to the VR headset used to watch this kind of content: “The more the realism offered by the device, the worse the effect. Cheap Cardboards are the most harmless of all, since looking through their blurry plastic lenses you have not clear if you’re looking at a nipple or at a potato. One of our testers was excited looking adult content in a Cardboard, later to discover he was just seeing the sample 360 movie about Afghan farmers. We are also researching on AR headsets, and we have some early results that say that adult entertainment movies watched on Magic Leap, thanks to its photonic-wafer-lightfield-nunchucks optical system, have a so strong realism that some brains have started melting in front of us“.
I was put in touch with Richard, 18 years old, that was one of the subjects of this research. “You know, I’m a teenager, and I am single since Molly left me for a drug dealer, and I have my necessities. But I couldn’t think that my passion for midgets with horses could have ruined my life this much.” he says. “A friend of mine told me about this VR porn thing, so I convinced my parents to buy me an Oculus Quest. Of course, I couldn’t tell them what was the real reason, so I made them see all those inspiring speeches by Alvin Wang Graylin on the future of mankind and how VR can make the world a better place. They cried and immediately bought me headset. But months later, blood started coming out from my ears and eyes and after that, my life has been a true hell”.
The article goes deeper, explaining to us why the Quest may always be sold out, a problem that started even before the coronavirus outbreak. It seems that the Chinese workers at headsets factories have to spend at work all the day, and they can’t meet their wives for a long time. So sometimes they take a headset and… well, you know, they entertain themselves. But some time later, they can’t work well anymore because the damages caused by this kind of content, and all these workers having sick leaves are impacting the production rates of VR factories. A similar reasoning explains while Valve Index controllers have so poor manufacturing: semi-blind workers can’t assemble them well. And we all wonder if also the bosses of these big companies may be affected.
The research by Seens, MD has already reached the main porn producers of our ecosystem. VRPorn.com has decided to temporarily suspend its activity, while Sex Like Real has just been rebranded to Cats Like Real, a VR experience where you can always have cats close to you and pet them. “In any case, it’s always about a pussy”, says its CEO.
Doctor Seens invite you all not to underestimate this problem, and do not lie to yourself saying that you have never watched such content and you have your headset “to work”. There is not a clear therapy, but there are some things that have proven to have some effects in “resetting” your brain for having seen porn, like watching every day 5 times that episode of Murder She Wrote where Jessica Fletcher wears a VR headset or dancing every day for 2 hours like Napoleon Dynamite (that is similar to young Michael Abrash, as Victor Riddel says). This doesn’t solve completely the problem but helps in slowing the disease.
He also says that he is very worried, because now that we are in quarantine, many people are forced to “stay at home” and do “some exercise”, and they may mistake what kind of exercise they should do. We may have many new cases of brains melted in the next months.
In any case, whoever of you has watched VR adult movies in the latest 2 years, even just once, should contact Doctor Seens via e-mail, specifying as subject “I AM A VR SINNER” (caps required) writing exactly the type of porn watched, and the platform. A link is also much appreciated. We will all try to help you. Together we can win.
(Header image by Brazzers. But you already knew that)