The Doctor continues:
"When you study people addicted to pornography, they're not actually after the pornography. It's not about sex. It's about a temporary spike of dopamine in the brain. So, he needed extreme stimulation and titillation of pornography to get that dopamine spike so he could feel alive. He just wanted to feel like a normal human being. That's all he wanted."
Community is indeed essential, as well as the dopamine hit. But the Doctor has missed the mark in his role as observer by assuming that, in our society, normality is something other than being disconnected from who you are. And what physical contact in boxing represents.
The young man’s choice of boxing isn’t coincidental. In his quest to reconnect with his need for intimacy, a decision had to be made. Trapped in the accepted violence of our society, what it came down to was not whether to be in pain or not, but in which kind of pain to choose — the pain of self-suppression or the pain of physical conflict. However, a third option wasn’t considered.
The third option requires examining the young man’s behavior objectively by removing the unwarranted values concerning porn. Given our society’s acceptance of the priority of vision, viewing porn isn’t necessarily chronic compulsive behavior despite its harmful consequences. Instead, to see porn is to be in “touch” with it, in a relationship that is not physical or sexual but psychologically intimate.
Boxing, seen from this vantage, is also touch akin to “intimate terrorism,” which encompasses the sadistic thrill of surviving its punishment.
