All men watch porn, scientists find.

[JackRiddler]

those aren't me...

That's fucked up, considering I'd already begun engaging in a rather elaborate fantasy involving those images and certain improbable events backstage at an imaginary 911 Truth symposium. Oh well, reboot.

barracuda, sicko: That I don't believe.

9/11 Truth: Gone Wild!*

Okay, okay, to help you with all this I image-searched my own name and on the fifth page or so, finally, I found a pretty good picture of myself speaking at one of the early symposiums:



* Note: I have now irreparably damaged a whole bunch of you who have actually been to any of these events. Sorry to make you imagine backstage combinations of your favorite speakers.

Actually, a certain disinfo faction already had the idea of combining hard-core porn (and scat) with their own, genuinely sick fantasies (no plane crash at WTC and apparently most everyone in New York who says they saw one was in on the plot). But the intent of that was, obviously, to alienate and discredit.

A group in San Diego did better, girls who took pinup shots of themselves in black "Truther" tank tops, but their level of research and message left something to be desired - the formula approximately was Loose Change + Ron Paul = Truth! Which, I'm sorry, is not sexay.

The Tilda is I think from a fantasy sequence in "Female Perversions," probably the only fiction feature film to be adapted from a feminist-psychoanalytic monograph of case studies. I highly recommend.

(If you want to write a column critiquing "America's Sweetheart," you should contrast Swinton's unnominated performance in Julia with the Bullockian cardboard mommie. They have the relative substance of an anvil falling on your head - how come those are always being dropped out of windows?! - and a wet kleenex.)

The Bowie (yes, Cordelia) is from The Hunger, one of the first neo-vampire mood thingies with an unlikely cast where he is debatably second or third-sexiest after Deneuve and Susan Sarandon.

Here my random assortment of thoughts ends.

[JackRiddler]

Maybe I missed it but this thread seems to lack the observation that at this stage of the global culture's development, the most common conditioned mode of viewing everything, at least insofar as it is viewed through the electronic media, may be described as pornographic. I think this is inherent in the now almost universal and near-infinite power to reproduce images. Everything's chopped up, sexed up, blown up, and thrown about in rapid-fire scattershot, most all of it striving to maximize sensation and raise stakes in environments where everything screams for attention and viewers' capacity to grant it has been over-stimulated and overwhelmed. Advertising, as I'm hardly the first or ten-millionth to observe, is essentially pornographic: dazzle the eyes, occupy the cerebrum, capture the reptile underbrain. Constructed reality using fill lighting, makeup and standardized mannerisms, costumes and head-shots long ago came to be considered the necessary precondition for seeming real with authority, which reality often no longer does. Note that certain extremes of religious fundamentalism don't ban only pornography, but representational art altogether; iconoclasm has a long history of conceiving images in themselves as exerting a form of mind control or bad magic. This was probably what inspired the reaction of the Dogma '95 Manifesto.

Okay, enough joking. THIS is me:

[Cordelia]

Of course; David Bowie with Susan Sarandon, looking nothing like herself. I remember The Hunger--I thought it a very strange film in which Bowie was brilliant and sad. (Hey, I was thrown the other day wondering why IanEye was posting a photo of George Clooney, and people responded like it was really IanEye............so if he looks like Clooney and Jack looks like Clive Owen, I guess anything's possible, even my uncanny resemblance to Catherine Deneuve.)

I'm in a fugue state today after being awakened well after midnight by a call from a drunken co-worker of one of my castle-mates, whereupon I drifted in and out of strange dreams not unlike scenes from 'Jacob's Ladder', (or 'The Hunger') no doubt triggered by the MacDonald thread.

Back to topic......I once worked for a therapist who, I discovered by accident, watched pornography in his office with a woman I thought was a client. He said it was ok because she was a former client. I suspected she was really a prostitute visiting during office hours.

Most of the clients at the clinic were children.

[JackRiddler]

Of course; David Bowie with Susan Sarandon, looking nothing like herself.

That's not SS but some victim. DB picks'em up outside and brings them back to CD's lair for a drink. They like SS and want to graduate her instead beyond a mere snack, but she fights it...



All right, already, THIS IS ME:

[Nordic]

Okay, enough joking. THIS is me:

I didn't realize you were so short.

[JackRiddler]

I didn't realize you were so short.

It's the lighting. Makes me look more realistic.

[Nordic]

Porn might also provide a safe and vicarious form of adultery or promiscuity that satisfies the instinct to have sex with all the partners you can. One sees the "new and different" faces, bodies, experiences that one is wired to crave. Porn and fantasy can actually be helpful to a more stress-free monogamy. (Adventuring and living lies can be really stressful; lack of catharsis for the secret self can be stressful; ennui and the feeling that you're missing out can be stressful.)

But then, one of the few things I took from David Hare's not-so-good play "My Zinc Bed" was the cyncial older tycoon's assertion that monogamy and marriage was a bad idea for the young, and that marriage should only come after 35 or 40, IIRC. I think there's some truth there.

Yeah, I would certainly agree with you, if I knew anyone who fell into such a category ..... (cough cough) .....

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Okay, I'll admit it - Saint Simeon Stylites doing 39 years atop an erect pillar: that's pretty hot.

Just noticed the Twin Towers and building 7 in the background.

The last one was in February, done with a girlfriend. Nothing tasteless or crass, mind you, I've never found the explicit crotch shots tasteful at all, but quite fetishy & loads of fun.

If St. Simeon had been subjected to this kind of talk, he'd have come down sooner.

[Jeff]

The Tilda is I think from a fantasy sequence in "Female Perversions," probably the only fiction feature film to be adapted from a feminist-psychoanalytic monograph of case studies. I highly recommend.

Me, too. I mean, come on!

That's not SS but some victim.

Ann Magnuson. This man used to watch her, too.

And speaking of simple Simon, the devil wanted to determine if he was a pie man:

[AhabsOtherLeg]

~
Gawker

SEC Employees Were Masturbating to Kiddie Porn While Your Economy Tanked
[but that's okay, because SCIENTISTS FIND - ALL MEN WATCH PORN. ]

That is a great link, Username, thanks for that.

As a small addition to the point you're making, though of course it has nothing to do with child porn:



Ah, those global financial powerhouses and their loveable, forgiveable, helplessly masturbating male workforces! They're so silly!
.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

I think it is safe to say the OP is another way of saying 'all men masturbate,' because that is usually what watching porn leads to. I've been wondering about this bit of self-love and indulgence: is it wasting your chi, conditioning yourself not to take pleasure in real relationships, or a healthy stress reliever and exerciser of the prostrate, the ultimate in responsible, safe-sex?

All of the above!

From what I read, the Catholic film director Kevin Smith (of "Dogma" fame ) admits to watching a lot of porn, but says he does not masturbate to it, because he is married, and will only masturbate to the image of his own wife. I'm sure that's not actual Church teachings, but hey ho. He seems to get by that way.

But he also seems to have taken an extreme and audience-alienating interest in casting his wife in his films, so that he can direct her in sex scenes with other men.

Which no one really wants to see. Except him.

EDIT: He's okay though. I liked his protest with other hardcore Catholics against his own film:



Sadly, the film's rubbish.

So there's clearly a trade-off, or even a sliding scale, when it comes to this whole masturbating business. Over indulgence is probably bad, eventually, and in a recognisable way - it might lead to being all pervy - but total self-denial is completely and demonstrably ruinous. It leads to being Cardinal Ratzinger.

NOT MY POPE!!!

Also, if I may say so, Krafft-Ebing had much better female perversions than this thread, and he didn't even recognise women as fully sexual beings.

[Nordic]

From what I read, the Catholic film director Kevin Smith (of "Dogma" fame ) admits to watching a lot of porn, but says he does not masturbate to it, because he is married, and will only masturbate to the image of his own wife.

Yeah sure. That's what he says in public interviews. You know, the ones that his wife might read.

There's a funny scene in "I love you man" about this very subject, but I can't find it on youtube.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

The things he says about his wife in public are even worse! And she's usually standing beside him at the time.

I'm not going to pretend to be shocked by Kevin Smith though - I just think it's weird what people's hangups and blocks and rules and allowances are, because they are different from mine. And therefore categorically wrong.

I haven't seen "I Love You Man" - I'm of the opinion that he hasn't really made a good film since Clerks. Hell, he never even made that one. Is it any good?

[Nordic]

He didn't make "I love you man". There's just a scene in it where the two guys talk about masturbating, and the Paul Rudd character admits that the last time he jerked off, he did it to a picture of his fiancee. The Jason Siegel character finds this to be pathetic and disgusting. It's an OK movie, not great, but passable and sometimes pretty funny.

[Simulist]

George Costanza got off with a Glamour magazine. Does that count?