Competition and porn

I caught a couple of people talking on the radio today about Roman gladiators, and American Gladiators. Specifically, the host asked some sort of "expert" to explain why people watch other people fight. I wasn't really listening anyway, and I was just about to get out of the car, so I turned the radio off and didn't hear the response.

This little bit of talk radio, however, was an audio aperitif for the hungry maw of my data-digesting brain, and it got me thinking. Why do people enjoy watching other people fight? What was it about the action on the blood-soaked sands of the Coloseum, and what is it about the much more sterile activities of the American Gladiators television show, that makes people want to watch?

It is easy to assume the cynical pose, and call upon that lovely, awkward German word, "schadenfreude" (literally, "damage joy"). The cynic says that people enjoy watching other's pain, that man's inhumanity to man is inherent in the human psyche. I think, though, that such a summation is highly oversimplified -- the philosophical equivalent of shrug and a "whatever..." before attention returns to the ongoing Halo 3 or NHL 2008 game.

For a deeper perspective, we'll have to broaden the scope of inquiry. It seems to me that, in many ways, the gladiatorial games (both ancient and modern) share much with other spectatorial diversions: namely, the competition. Be it American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, baseball, soccer, polo, chess, cheese throwing, 100m dash, bowling, or anything involving two or more people trying to pound the crap out of each other (which obviously includes hockey and football), all of these forms of popular entertainment have one thing in common: competition.

(Incidentally, did you know that the word "spectator" not only refers to "one who looks on or watches", but also to "a woman's pump usually having contrasting colors with a perforated design at the toe and sometimes heel"? Spectators are shoes? It boggles the mind.)

People like watching competition. Why else would anyone sit through three straight days of the same cricket game? Humans derive pleasure from the observation of competitive endeavours. It doesn't even have to be other humans competing: greyhound races, robot battles, cockfights, anything that pits something seemingly self-willed against something else will do. (In fact, some people even enjoy the kinds of competition that have nothing to do with self-willed actions, such as watching water droplets roll down a window pane. I remember, in my youth, many enjoyable hours spent watching two sticks tossed into a river or stream, as they raced from their splashdown to some arbitrary finish line.)

So, what gets people off about watching competition? Well, a lot of it seems to boil down to a form of projection, the ability of humans to imagine or project themselves into a situation in which they are not actually taking part. Daydreams are an obvious form of projection, putting oneself into a scenario cut from whole cloth. But people project all the time, into all sorts of situations, both desirable and un-.

Pornography is a perfect example. Clearly, viewing pornographic images has absolutely no reproductive value, in and of itself. So why do representations of reproductively-suggestive situations arouse people? It's that darn projection stuff -- viewing sex is just like thinking about sex, and both required projecting yourself into a situation in which you are not actually involved.

Projection itself is a function of the human brain's ability to plan for the future, to make predictions about what may or could happen and take appropriate actions to effect or avoid those predictions. This is a crucial survival skill, one that sets humans apart from just about every other animal, and one of the four primary adaptations that allowed humans to gain such a stupendous global dominance. (What are the other three? Language (and the generalization capabilities that our language capacity engenders), opposable thumbs, and walking on two legs.)

Needless to say, this makes projection a very powerful part of the human mind. No wonder, then, that this same ability gets linked into our pleasure centres (as well as our pain centres) in such an integral manner.

But wait, how does projection tie into the enjoyment one gets from viewing competions? Simple. By identifying with the competitors, we get to share in the thrill, the rush of adrenaline and endorphins, that the actual participants experience. Why do you supposed people get so excited when "their team" wins, and so bummed out when they back a loser. I mean, really, the Superbowl, the Stanley Cup Finals, the season finale of American Idol, none of them really matter, except to the winner(s). Yet I sure was disappointed when Clay Aiken and Bo Bice came in second, and I felt pretty awesome for having backed Fantasia Barrino and Taylor Hicks.

Who knew that such wholesome entertainment as Skating With The Stars had so much in common with smut?

Hg