The original lettuce sex story was most certainly not an Aristotelian thing. This is a fiasco! Perhaps I need to fix this by posing for a picture shirtless holding a head of lettuce. The integrity of our categorial scheme may depend on it.

Well, wasn’t the original lettuce sex story an Aristotelian thing? Or ancient Greek anyway?

I’ve often wondered about this, actually, but I really don’t know the Poetics the way I should, so I’m reluctant to even attempt an answer. I would guess that the relevant account of purging also seems to require a certain actual distance – it’s relevant that the king we’re watching isn’t really our king, isn’t really a king at all, but rather an actor, and the people dying on screen aren’t really dying. Otherwise, there’s no purgation – just horror.

Contrast that with porn, which, unless it’s really lame, involves actual people boning, and many of us value realism here, at least of a sort. Wanking to porn seems to me a different kind of involvement with the material, and so I think it’s just too much of a stretch to try to apply Aristotle’s thoughts about the one subject to something so different. After all, Aristotle didn’t say (as far as I can remember) that it’s awesome to go to see public fights, since that involves negative emotion that you might be able to purge by shouting things at the fighters. He meant his theory to apply to the theatre, not more generally.

As for purging excess emotions, of course Aristotle doesn’t think that sexual desire is bad in itself, so long as it doesn’t get out of control. It’s probably important to be clear about why this sort of thing is supposed to be bad from Aristotle’s perspective. It probably isn’t the reason I think porn is so morally questionable: feminist concerns about the whole business.

On to the second part of the question: Simplifying irresponsibly, yeah, it’s true that you might say that Aristotle tends to think of behavior of a certain sort as leading to further habituation of the soul that strengthens the tendency to the original behaviour. That’s why you should be good, and why acquiring a virtue – which is a certain sort of character trait – is very much a matter of repeatedly acting in a certain way (as opposed to simply attending really good ethics lectures). Again simplifying irresponsibly you might contrast this with a Freudian hydrolic model of the psyche in which certain channels of energy can be diverted along different streams (e.g., my thwarted desire to shag can be sublimated into a desire to write the Great Canadian Novel). But the streams themselves aren’t lessened, they’re only diverted; the phenomenon of habituation that Aristotle stresses so much is, on this account of human psychology, somewhat misleading, in as much as habituation is supposed to imply some fundamental transformation of the original drives.

OK, so now if that’s Aristotle’s general approach, you can see why he might be anti-relief, if he thought that indulging frequently in wanking turned you into a . . . wanker, and that was a bad thing.

But again, I’m reluctant to say anything for sure here, since I can’t remember if he says anything special about masturbation in the biological writings. It seems entirely possible to me that he could go either way on the issue.

Sorry to be so totally unconvincing/uninformed.