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.
The assumptions and conclusions in the fiction may be accurate, yet a hidden dimension remains shrouded in mystery. Community is indeed essential, as well as the dopamine hit. Still, the Doctor has missed the mark regarding the observer, the Doctor, affecting the situation and what physical contact in boxing represents.
The young man’s choice of boxing isn’t coincidental. In his quest to reconnect with his true self, 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 choice of physical conflict. However, there was a third choice that wasn’t considered.
Examine the young man’s behavior objectively by removing the unwarranted values concerning porn as compensatory for some other activity or need, and the dimension that it represents in his life becomes apparent, haptic communication––nonverbal communication through touch, which includes physical and platonic intimacy.
Boxing, seen from this vantage, is a healthy form of touch akin to “intimate terrorism,” which encompasses the sadistic thrill of surviving punishment.
