Porn and…NLP?
NLP is everywhere, even in the most unsuspected places.
In 2006 the porn industry made a profit of 57,000,000,000$ around the world, 13,000,000,000$ of them only in the United States. If you were surprised by these figures, just have a look through the net to check how thriving this business is for some.
But who are the porn consumers? According to the surveys the average consumer is a young man who watches pornographic videos on the internet. But, what about women? Do they consume pornographic stuff too? They do, though to a lesser degree. Why? I think there may be a great many different reasons to it, but one of them comes to my mind: most pornographic material has been thought by and for men.
It was only a few days ago that I explained the concept of representational systems in Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) to a group of people (most of them women, by the way) at an Effective Communication workshop. Representational systems are the ways in which we experience the world. These are sense-based, so we talk about the visual, auditory, kinesthetic
(touching and internal sensory experiences), olfactory and gustatory representational systems. It means that our own map of reality is built upon a database of images, sounds, touch and internal sensations, smells and flavours which are combined at different proportions. I can show it by just asking you to recall your last holidays. Do it now and you will realize that images, sounds and sensations come to your mind. But that’s not it. Everyone of us shows preference, depending on the context, for one of these representational systems. Thus we talk about visual, auditive and kinesthetic people (since these are the major representational systems for most people).
When a visual person recalls or imagines a situation, his mind is filled with images that can modify his internal sensory experiences (his emotions). Something similar happens to the auditory type. In this case recalling means filling one’s mind with sounds, voices and melodies that modify the emotions too. The same thing applies to the kinesthetic type with internal and external body sensations.
Back to the communication workshop, I decided to make a question to illustrate this concept: What is most stimulating for you? Watching images, hearing words or whispers, feeling caresses? After a few seconds of surprise and a bit of embarassment some of them started to give their answers. While I was listening to them, I had an intuition and decided to make the same question to other people. And then a pattern kept repeating itself: men (who are mostly more visual) are more stimulated with images, whereas women (who generally combine the auditory and kinesthetic components better) get more stimulated with words, whispers and caresses.
This far reached we may understand why the porn industry (which is mostly image-based) has men as its main consumers. As you can check: NLP is everywhere, even in the most unsuspected places.
Translation by Susanna Palau
