Lesser Pleasures

Reading Audrey Lorde got me thinking about levels of pleasure. She explains an "erotic" "joy" as a mixture of chaotic naturalist impulse and educated evaluation. I like this inception of pleasure... mixing intelligent evaluation with impulse. Of course this gets complicated when socialization stains our impulses with teachings and expectations (i.e. sexual desire and food). But the key is understanding your thought, ideas, and what gives you pleasure so you can act basically out of impulse due to the understanding you have formulated of yourself and your understanding of pleasure. Lorde eventually talks about pornography. Lorde states that porn recreates emotion but does so without any "feeling."
This obviously is true. Porn is a simulation lacking true experience and emotional involvement. So this seems to build a guideline for lesser pleasures. Those things which remove one's true ability to experience emotions become seemingly lesser pleasure. Porn simulates sex but does not directly engage the viewer. The viewer is an object in itself, at the will of the images shown... basically you can't control the porn from frame to frame therefore you are not directly involved or even choosing what comes next. Now I know we all enjoy our share of lesser pleasures and I'm certainly no different. My love for music could be scrutinized in this way, but there is an argument for music as not a lesser pleasure. I would only consider a lesser pleasure morally problematic only when 1. the lesser pleasure takes over a great deal of your time;as the center and only focus of your time. 2 the lesser pleasure severely removes the feeling self from the rational self. 3. the lesser pleasure is not seen as a lesser pleasure but as something morally defendable and pertinent.
1. Lesser pleasures are simulations of reality. they do not truly encompass the actual emotion charge that is necessary to give a true feeling of comprehensive satisfaction. The lesser pleasure is poorly thrown together as a mass product unwilling to compromise an of its parts to recognize a person as a whole. Its appeal is based around a single or few capacities of pleasure. Since it is aimed at lower and ultimately unfaciltating ideas of pleasure it should not be seen as a way to focus one's time. If one wishes to obtain a great deal of pleasure they are mistaken if they believe that a great deal of lesser pleasure will compensate for the lack of any true evaluated pleasure. Lesser pleasures can never reciprocate any type of incited emotion or pleasure properly. Thus the lesser pleasure objectifies the user providing no appreciation of emotional return. This inability to recognize pleasure, makes the lesser pleasures fall short of true experiencing erotic pleasure.
2. While lesser pleasures are largely an attempt to separate the self and engage it in a simulated emotional act, sometimes these separations are not fully acknowledged. A good example of this is video games. the game is modeled as a lesser pleasure. It creates unreal emotional circumstances without feeling and embraces the user as the guider of such false emotional direction. games can be pleasurable but when one takes the emotional state of the game or its competitive nature as true feeling one has clearly broken the contract of lesser pleasures. Lesser pleasures operate in a manner in which they are conceived with a great deal of impersonability. They are all exact replicas of one another designed for any consumer. So for a user to become emotionally attached (whether it be through anger, over determination, narcissism, etc.) to something designed to merely act as and upon you objectively is clearly a misunderstanding of the purposes of this lesser pleasure. Instead of enjoying its minor pleasure and simulations, taking it to true emotional expression is a bad way of understanding the objective relationship.
3. 1 and 2 tie into the idea that one may misunderstand a lesser pleasure as a form of true emotional experience. In this case the pleasure seeker knows nothing of the lesser pleasure and finds it to be the foremost pleasure of one's life. this problem varies from person to person but in all cases the lesser pleasures become a key ingredient to the manner in which the person experiences pleasure. Therefore their base f pleasure is constructed around a system meant to simulate emotion and doing it without being able to engage true feeling. There is so much separation and control involved that one is not meant to be morally encompassing. Allowing such unemotionally sincere lesser pleasures to dictate pleasure understanding is to allow an object with no emotional capacity or human understanding to manipulate the social perception of satisfaction and enjoyment. something the lesser pleasure can never know anything of or about.

I'm not an advocate for telling people how they should find pleasure but there are some serious cultural issues that should be evaluated by our society. Such things have been termed as excess culture or "excremental culture." In these cases ideas of self are sold and manipulated by manufacturers of lesser pleasures. these things are time consuming and act as opiates for the population. Just something to think about. I have some work to do myself here and there but lesser pleasures are not necessarily bad, but they are bad if not correctly recognized as such. The key to recognizing these lesser pleasures is seeing that these models do not have the capacity to comprehend human emotion. Thus subjecting one's emotional state to such systems is to leave one's emotional understanding to a non-rational and unreasoning object.