Is Porn Bad for You?

[compared2what?]

Like I tell my wife, we can argue about this in the morning.


Does that work?

No, but it doesn't fail as bad as saying other things.

Hmm. Well, I certainly don't want to fail and am definitely not trying to displease or disappoint you.

But I'm not sure what failure would be from your point of view, so I fear that I might be about to fail epically, and apologize for it in advance if that turns out to be the case. I swear, I'll be doing the best I can by the standards I am familiar with, though. Okay?

Okay. Or at least so I hope. Because in all events, the one thing I am sure about it that I have an honest difference of opinion with you, wrt both substance and perspective. Nevertheless, I'm not disagreeing in order to be disagreeable or to score points, just in order to communicate.

whose minds were to be purged of all the natural decencies, all the laboriously acquired inhibitions of traditional civilization.

Natural decencies or acquired inhibitions? If the words mean anything, they are opposites. Huxley without elaboration lists them as synonyms. Perhaps he picked up the contradiction from de Sade? More likely, he's a product of his barely post-Victorian time, and can't but help laboriously see his inhibitions as natural.

No doubt. Just as we are products or our post-modern time, and can't help but see any inhibitory force as an unnatural shackle on our manufactured passions.

Okay. (Or so I again hope.) That' as good a staring point as any, albeit a little misrepresentative insofar as I couldn't really say that I honestly disagree with the above, I'm just honestly baffled by it.

Because I so totally don't see the slightest sign that we're products of a time or culture in which people can't help but see any inhibitory force as an unnatural shackle on their manufactured passions, I can't think of a single contemporary or recent example of anything that suggests that we are..

On the contrary, I see overwhelming evidence everywhere that we're products of a time in which people calmly accept any and every inhibitory force on their desires, tastes, wishes and preferences for commodified goods and pleasures -- or for that matter, any and every outrageous imposition on and/or denial of and/or looming threat to their basic needs for stuff like food and shelter -- as if the virtually undisguised indifference of those forces to whether they liked what they were being offered or got what they needed was simply too routine and natural an aspect of daily existence to make responding to any or every instance of it with more than a brief and superficial pro forma objection (at the absolute most) a game that was worth the candle.

Which is what I'd call a dispirited and dispassionate culture, not a culture in which people have devolved emotionally to the point that they can't handle anything more interpersonal than worshiping at the altar of their manufactured passions.

I mean, obviously, it's not really possible to say with any certainty whether they'd respond to an inhibitory force that tried to get between them and their putatively manufactured passion for pornography as passively as they do to everything else at the moment. As it necessarily never will be unless and until such a force appears on the scene in a form that has something in its bag of tricks that's a little more forcefully inhibitory than yet another tired iteration of the exact same rhetoric that'd already been an occasional minor feature of public discourse for years by the time it first succeeded in not having any practical or theoretical inhibitory impact whatsoever on the widely publicized ubiquity of online porn that it still doesn't have today.

And while (equally obviously) who can say what tomorrow will bring, given (a) that the widely publicized ubiquity of online porn occurred virtually simultaneously with the widely publicized dawn of the internet er' (b), how long ago that was; and (c) the complete lack of progress that would-be inhibitory forces have made both before and since then, I think it's pretty fair to say that whatever it brings, there's no particular reason to expect that it'll include the forceful inhibition of pornography, just at present.

Where do you see whatever evidence it is that I don't?

I'm sorry to say that I'm now so dead tired, I'm afraid I'm going to have to punt on the literary and historical dissenting opinion/perspective stuff until later.

Oh! Except that I do want say that the sexual repression that was one of the means used by organized religion for millennia to control its lay adherents isn't yesterday's fascism. And can't be. Because whatever clock they got running on those millennia hasn't ticked to a finish yet. It's not even starting to run a little slow, in fact. The overtly sanctioned institutional tactics whereby sexual repression is enforced and leveraged for power have been modified in form to suit the temperament of the day many, many times over the centuries, but neither the basic strategy nor its evergreen-reliable effectiveness has lost enough steam for the number of people sexually repressed by it or the extent of their repression to have declined significantly since the High Middle Ages.

They're definitely more openly and variously sexually active now than they were then. But that doesn't mean they're any less repressed than they used to be. Or even that they're much more sexually active than they used to be. Most people have always gone right on having as much repressed sex as their sex drives require whether a strong, codified and harshly enforced social prohibition happens to be in effect at the time or not, in reality. Because behavioral style has always changed and still does change dramatically and rapidly and easily practically all by itslef, for any number of reasons.

But people don't, broadly speaking. Or not on a large-group level and long-term basis when it comes to the urges they're born with, at least. Unless they're subject to very extreme and absolutely unavoidable restrictions. Such as (or comparable to) the kind of restrictions a man who's serving life-without-parole in a high-security penitentiary, for the sake of example.

And...since it can be dangerous both to understate the ongoing role of organized religion and to overstate the kind and amount of transformation human beings are capable of in my experience and observation. I wanted to pipe up sooner rather than later on that one.

Anyway. I hope that wasn't an epic fail, and to be continued.

[JackRiddler]

I am late in replying, but here is another thread within I posted about The Gaze: http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=28211&p=336737#p336737

Winston and Julia rebel by fucking.

That to me is the hottest thing yet uttered in this thread.

Yeep.

So which is it? How can two writers so brilliant, both towering influences on the world intelligentsia to this day, often mentioned as a pair, and each describing different but related aspects of an emergent techno-dystopia, come down on such seemingly opposite sides of the sex question?

It's been pointed out already that the two are not exclusive and I would go beyond and say it's both, and any, and all, possibly. We've seen these two pitted against each other before. It's a false dichotomy, both processes are at work, one open, one more hidden.

Okay, the replies so far show I failed as a writer in the above. I asked a largely rhetorical question that I thought, in the context of the rest of what I'd written, implied my view, which happens to be exactly what you have given as your answer: both, and any, and all, possibly. However, everyone thinks I meant the two were exclusive, proving my failure. I'd started from Huxley's view of 1947, which I thought pretty clearly was at the one extreme, i.e., he presented sexual liberation as a tool of political-economic oppression that went against the "natural decencies" and the necessary "laboriously acquired inhibitions." I contrasted that to Orwell's opposite rendering in fiction (extreme sexual repression as the tool of a dictatorship), though I think Orwell would have been looser in seeing both sides on this question. I did this not for the purpose of creating a false dichotomy, but again of showing Huxley's rigidity about it, which I attribute to his own unexamined social and class conditioning.

Which all goes to show, get it right first or your correction will be several times longer (and a lot less interesting) than your initial failure.

But getting back to rock and roll:

I think Orwell's extreme in 1984 is more right on the empiricism of what historical totalitarianisms and pre-modern repressive systems have actually practiced with regard to sex (such as stoning for "adultery," or most of the history of Christendom, or the narrowed Victorian ethic of Stalinism, or the dreadful sexist reaction of the Jacobins which I feel is far worse than the guillotining of the royals and aristocrats). Though it's clear there are exceptions (the Nazi ideal of a beautiful master race that fucked relatively freely to multiply, and attendant pornographic aspects of their show -- combined with the most extreme kitsch Kinder-Kueche patriarchy). And that nowadays in the West/global society (Taliban and fundamentalists notwithstanding) it's a different world, more of a Brave New one, in which sex is still dirty but everything is sexualized and sexualization is commercialized and porn is offered up as a drug, albeit one of several that cause ever greater submissive apathy, with television still the champion. Though this too is complicated. See, for example, the Hollywood movie trend, in which the ladies' pants may ride lower than ever, but actual lovemaking or even mere kissing between hero and heroine is more repressed with each decade, seeing as they are laconic warriors running from one MacGuffin to the next killing many foes without consequence in sexualized displays of wire-fu, mayhem, and very big explosions (the Bruckheimer-Bay model). Or see, to choose a metaphor and reality that can be conveyed in just two words,



ON EDIT: After writing the above I saw that someone had already more effectively said what I was getting at, in nuanced yet general, clear-thinking, empirically accurate terms, as opposed to my scattered examples. Said what I was getting at, and then some. So I shall quote said usual suspect, and try to restrain my usual jealousy at this person's talents.

Oh! Except that I do want say that the sexual repression that was one of the means used by organized religion for millennia to control its lay adherents isn't yesterday's fascism. And can't be. Because whatever clock they got running on those millennia hasn't ticked to a finish yet. It's not even starting to run a little slow, in fact. The overtly sanctioned institutional tactics whereby sexual repression is enforced and leveraged for power have been modified in form to suit the temperament of the day many, many times over the centuries, but neither the basic strategy nor its evergreen-reliable effectiveness has lost enough steam for the number of people sexually repressed by it or the extent of their repression to have declined significantly since the High Middle Ages.

They're definitely more openly and variously sexually active now than they were then. But that doesn't mean they're any less repressed than they used to be. Or even that they're much more sexually active than they used to be. Most people have always gone right on having as much repressed sex as their sex drives require whether a strong, codified and harshly enforced social prohibition happens to be in effect at the time or not, in reality. Because behavioral style has always changed and still does change dramatically and rapidly and easily practically all by itslef, for any number of reasons.

But people don't, broadly speaking. Or not on a large-group level and long-term basis when it comes to the urges they're born with, at least. Unless they're subject to very extreme and absolutely unavoidable restrictions. Such as (or comparable to) the kind of restrictions a man who's serving life-without-parole in a high-security penitentiary, for the sake of example.

And...since it can be dangerous both to understate the ongoing role of organized religion and to overstate the kind and amount of transformation human beings are capable of in my experience and observation. I wanted to pipe up sooner rather than later on that one.

Now to return to

.......out of the norm material follows (and the norm is poor enough)..........

Rather than speak from my pseudo-assimilated "normative" aspects, which Is usually what I default to in public, I'll speak from my whole experience. Recently I was reviewing an old journal entry when I got to my account of a particular scene, a lab scene from when I was very young. There was a perpetrator quote mentioned, a bit I overheard that stuck in my memory. It read "I've got it, I've isolated it." The scene recounted a phase in my conditioning where a certain alter was trained to respond with heightened arousal to a very specific command.

Some members of the elite exercise this degree of control over their slaves' sexuality. In fact it's one reason why I believe so many male subjects I know can't escape. The controllers literally have them by the balls, their sexual response isolated, and patterned to external manipulation. They can get off under control, but not in the normative world, not with anywhere near the same response level. Certainly their sexuality is divorced from any love or intimate attachment process.
...............

Is the future a giant boot stamping on your face or a hand that's got you by the balls? It depends on the fortuitousness of your birth I suppose, or some other factors.
____________________

You know, I seem to have missed things. Is there a page you could point me to where you introduce your story? Thanks. And godspeed.

I want to say something about the manifestation of most porn in this male dominated society, and please know I am not a consumer of it. I have occasionally watched out of pure curiosity until I was left feeling disgusted. I've searched for woman-centered porn but never found any, not a single example, except perhaps in novel form (erotica).

You know, I started looking for something I remember by a feminist collective that I remember as aspiring to do that and it was not the usual porn fakingly dressed up as "for women," but have you tried any Web searches with the relevant keywords lately? It's probably still there, somewhere on page 10,000 of the google results.

What I wanted to add was a bit of a potential re-frame. I love the example that was publicized of late, more biological of course, of the evolution of mallard duck reproductive organs. So it fascinates (and horrifies) me that male sexual fantasy involves either the perceptual occlusion or complete excision of female choice. Is it radical to assert that species survival is predicated on some form of reproductive choice? I don't think so.

Assuming I've understood the question, I agree. Meaning, (female) reproductive choice has played one of the key roles in (human) species survival and development all along, which has been a standard of evolutionary theory in some form or other since Darwin. If I may be very reductive, there are two extremes in the factors determining who among us passes their biology down to subsequent generations: female choice among male offers, and rape. Most traditional civilizations are somewhere in between, in which a patriarchy projects force in skewing reproductive "success" (as it's called in the literature) toward males from the dominant class, mainly by social means backed by strict traditions backed by violence, and women are treated more as trade goods with varying degrees of say than as a prize for the most successful axe-swinging barbarian. In a post-neolithic village environment, however, women often have equal or primary say about mate choice, though marriage by family arrangement may be more frequent, again all depending on the enormously variable norms of each society and tribe.

The majority of [heterosexual] porn depicts a fantasy world where men are completely dominant and the women perpetually turned-on and servile.

Yeah, but porn in which the men are completely submissive and the women never want to have sex doesn't quite live up to the reputation. At the very least, it's probably a niche market.

There's really, really, really a lot of porn in which women dominate men, even take them. Minority taste or not. If you think about it, it may have an appeal to men who in real life feel rejected to have the implied attractiveness, release from will and absence of guilt associated with being the blank target of desire.

I assert that if a female is "turned on" and assenting to sexual activity with a male, she has made a choice, and outside of a slave relationship, and even if circumscribed by culture, that is an active, not a passive or servile activity. No matter how hard the male tries to cover it with visually dominant or mounting displays, that process of choice, within the female, is a very real center of power.

Absolutely.

What males really fear is overt recognition of this, in some way that might be codified into culture, and so they fight any female progress. We battle as do the Mallards, but through our social relationships rather than physiology.

Hey hey hey, wait up there. Let's not assign numbers, but let's not generalize this tendency, please. I'm of the school that if anyone rules, it should be women. Except my mother.

[brekin]

compared2what wrote:

Hmm. Well, I certainly don't want to fail and am definitely not trying to displease or disappoint you.

But I'm not sure what failure would be from your point of view, so I fear that I might be about to fail epically, and apologize for it in advance if that turns out to be the case. I swear, I'll be doing the best I can by the standards I am familiar with, though. Okay?

Okay. Or at least so I hope. Because in all events, the one thing I am sure about it that I have an honest difference of opinion with you, wrt both substance and perspective. Nevertheless, I'm not disagreeing in order to be disagreeable or to score points, just in order to communicate.

Totally respect your point of view and see its value. I think you may have read too much into my spouse like "to be continued at a later point" comment. I wouldn't worry about failing at all. I think you probably articulate how a large group of people feel and since neither of us are drafting internet legislation I think why not for the both of us over reach a little on the exploration of this?

Okay. (Or so I again hope.) That' as good a staring point as any, albeit a little misrepresentative insofar as I couldn't really say that I honestly disagree with the above, I'm just honestly baffled by it.

Because I so totally don't see the slightest sign that we're products of a time or culture in which people can't help but see any inhibitory force as an unnatural shackle on their manufactured passions, I can't think of a single contemporary or recent example of anything that suggests that we are..

I think a perfect recent example is the Mohammad cartoons, even the "Draw Mohammad day" that happened. I totally believe in free speech, but to me it's less a question of "can I?" but "should I?". A culture believes that a graphic representation of their prophet is blasphemous. Should individuals kill over that if its transgressed? Of course not. But because we are acculturated to see anything cordoned off as sacred, taboo or restricted, as an affront to our freedoms we got to stir the shit up.

On the contrary, I see overwhelming evidence everywhere that we're products of a time in which people calmly accept any and every inhibitory force on their desires, tastes, wishes and preferences for commodified goods and pleasures -- or for that matter, any and every outrageous imposition on and/or denial of and/or looming threat to their basic needs for stuff like food and shelter -- as if the virtually undisguised indifference of those forces to whether they liked what they were being offered or got what they needed was simply too routine and natural an aspect of daily existence to make responding to any or every instance of it with more than a brief and superficial pro forma objection (at the absolute most) a game that was worth the candle.

I think people today are mostly apathetic (not suffering) because there are no limits on self entertainment even for people with little means. I think your right on about basic requirements but its really the bread & circus stuff they won't truck with being inhibited. If you took the playstation, internet and cheetos away even for a week, cities would be burning. People are impatient and frustrated for change, freedom, expression, stimulation but the only place that is really happening it seems is on the online reservation. You mess with that and that's when people get passionate, but end of the day it's a simulation and or substitute for real change, expression, stimulation,etc.

Which is what I'd call a dispirited and dispassionate culture, not a culture in which people have devolved emotionally to the point that they can't handle anything more interpersonal than worshiping at the altar of their manufactured passions.

I think people still can handle mostly the interpersonal stuff, I just think they are starting to prefer the altar with obvious repercussions for the real. Texting instead of talking, email instead of calling, Skype instead of visiting, Facebook instead of hanging out, Online classes instead of interpersonal education, Online porn instead of a relationship, Online gaming instead of real life adventure, etc..

I mean, obviously, it's not really possible to say with any certainty whether they'd respond to an inhibitory force that tried to get between them and their putatively manufactured passion for pornography as passively as they do to everything else at the moment. As it necessarily never will be unless and until such a force appears on the scene in a form that has something in its bag of tricks that's a little more forcefully inhibitory than yet another tired iteration of the exact same rhetoric that'd already been an occasional minor feature of public discourse for years by the time it first succeeded in not having any practical or theoretical inhibitory impact whatsoever on the widely publicized ubiquity of online porn that it still doesn't have today.

And while (equally obviously) who can say what tomorrow will bring, given (a) that the widely publicized ubiquity of online porn occurred virtually simultaneously with the widely publicized dawn of the internet er' (b), how long ago that was; and (c) the complete lack of progress that would-be inhibitory forces have made both before and since then, I think it's pretty fair to say that whatever it brings, there's no particular reason to expect that it'll include the forceful inhibition of pornography, just at present.

These days you are basically required to have a computer. It's like not having a car, or even a driver's license; you will be penalized. A computer with internet connection is basically a skinner box that conditions the user over time. I just don't think most people have the inhibitory training to handle what is out there. We just haven't had the history with it to know what is going to happen. It's like giving an Ak-47 to the Neanderthals in 2001 a space odyssey. Sure it will make hunting easier but who knows what else will happen. It's a pity because the internet is one of the few places where your curiosity can be a liability.

Where do you see whatever evidence it is that I don't?

I think all you have to do is look around. Attention is control. The internet is ubiquitous. Count the number of people you can have a conversation with who aren't looking at their phones or turning back to their computer after three seconds. Master is calling.

I'm sorry to say that I'm now so dead tired, I'm afraid I'm going to have to punt on the literary and historical dissenting opinion/perspective stuff until later.

Oh! Except that I do want say that the sexual repression that was one of the means used by organized religion for millennia to control its lay adherents isn't yesterday's fascism. And can't be. Because whatever clock they got running on those millennia hasn't ticked to a finish yet. It's not even starting to run a little slow, in fact. The overtly sanctioned institutional tactics whereby sexual repression is enforced and leveraged for power have been modified in form to suit the temperament of the day many, many times over the centuries, but neither the basic strategy nor its evergreen-reliable effectiveness has lost enough steam for the number of people sexually repressed by it or the extent of their repression to have declined significantly since the High Middle Ages.

They're definitely more openly and variously sexually active now than they were then. But that doesn't mean they're any less repressed than they used to be. Or even that they're much more sexually active than they used to be. Most people have always gone right on having as much repressed sex as their sex drives require whether a strong, codified and harshly enforced social prohibition happens to be in effect at the time or not, in reality. Because behavioral style has always changed and still does change dramatically and rapidly and easily practically all by itslef, for any number of reasons.

But people don't, broadly speaking. Or not on a large-group level and long-term basis when it comes to the urges they're born with, at least. Unless they're subject to very extreme and absolutely unavoidable restrictions. Such as (or comparable to) the kind of restrictions a man who's serving life-without-parole in a high-security penitentiary, for the sake of example.

And...since it can be dangerous both to understate the ongoing role of organized religion and to overstate the kind and amount of transformation human beings are capable of in my experience and observation. I wanted to pipe up sooner rather than later on that one.

Anyway. I hope that wasn't an epic fail, and to be continued.

All good stuff and I'm not able to meet everything point by point. I don't really think there is anything new under the sun. It's just volume and access to such things. Organized religion has in the past (and your right continues for many people) to regulate and structure their passions and their expression. Obviously that hasn't always worked out for the health of individuals or society but it has "worked" as in providing continuity. Of course the old ways need to be improved or even scrapped, but if our other only choice now is just to be locked in the Vatican's pornography wing indefinitely, I think we need to examine that.

[Project Willow]

Yeep.

Well, it's all highly personal on some level isn't it?

Okay, the replies so far show I failed as a writer in the above.

Not really, there were two intervening forces working on my comprehension, beer and the memory of another article that had compared the two writers' visions as exclusive. Apologies.

You know, I seem to have missed things. Is there a page you could point me to where you introduce your story? Thanks. And godspeed.

You must have regularly avoided certain threads on the board for over 5 years.
Here:
http://lynnschirmer.com/bio.html
It's been a long time:
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/03/art-of-lab-room-floor.html

Crow wrote:
The majority of [heterosexual] porn depicts a fantasy world where men are completely dominant and the women perpetually turned-on and servile.

Yeah, but porn in which the men are completely submissive and the women never want to have sex doesn't quite live up to the reputation. At the very least, it's probably a niche market.

There's really, really, really a lot of porn in which women dominate men, even take them. Minority taste or not. If you think about it, it may have an appeal to men who in real life feel rejected to have the implied attractiveness, release from will and absence of guilt associated with being the blank target of desire.

I assert that if a female is "turned on" and assenting to sexual activity with a male, she has made a choice, and outside of a slave relationship, and even if circumscribed by culture, that is an active, not a passive or servile activity. No matter how hard the male tries to cover it with visually dominant or mounting displays, that process of choice, within the female, is a very real center of power.

Absolutely.

What males really fear is overt recognition of this, in some way that might be codified into culture, and so they fight any female progress. We battle as do the Mallards, but through our social relationships rather than physiology.

Hey hey hey, wait up there. Let's not assign numbers, but let's not generalize this tendency, please. I'm of the school that if anyone rules, it should be women. Except my mother.

Hey! wa wa what? I did not write that.

[Simulist]

Project Willow, thank you for the links to your story. I'd read bits and pieces of it on the board here and there before, but I'd never seen the RI blog article or the links in it.

Whether I believe you or not is pretty irrelevant I suppose — but I do. And I have nothing but respect for what it must have taken for you to get to the place you are now, where you can share it.

[Project Willow]

Thank you Simulist.

[JackRiddler]

Hey! wa wa what? I did not write that.

No, you didn't. I messed up the quote tags. I hope it's fixed now. Sorry.

You must have regularly avoided certain threads on the board for over 5 years.

While I haven't been here that long quite, it's true I tend to skip over certain subjects by thread title. There's only so much I can handle.

Thank you for this. I'm looking at the drawings for a start.

[JackRiddler]

Willow, you are really talented. (I don't know what else to say. But that much is true.)


.

I think a perfect recent example is the Mohammad cartoons, even the "Draw Mohammad day" that happened. I totally believe in free speech, but to me it's less a question of "can I?" but "should I?". A culture believes that a graphic representation of their prophet is blasphemous. Should individuals kill over that if its transgressed? Of course not. But because we are acculturated to see anything cordoned off as sacred, taboo or restricted, as an affront to our freedoms we got to stir the shit up.

We can be friends but once again I don't know how you and I come up with such completely opposite perceptions. The Mohammad cartoons had nothing to do with proving that "anything goes." We can think of dozens of taboos that Danish newspapers would never have broken for that reason. That was an intentional provocation of Islam, surely in the hope of producing a widespread violent reaction. Riots were the predictable result based on prior incidents - like the earlier riots after it was revealed that American torturers had forced their victims to watch them flush pages of the Koran down the toilet. This was, in a way, a successor action aimed at humiliating and provoking radicalization. Fleming Rose, the commissioner of the action, has connections to the American neocon milieu. That was known at the time.

It was war propaganda, not unlike this:



From a time I presume you don't think was "anything goes" for inhibitions.

You know what I've noticed?

When empires rot due to criminal overreach and economic decay, one meme that usually appears - and ends up in subsequent histories - is that it's all going south because of "decadence," specifically too much unbridled pleasure, especially sexual. So it's the "whore" of Babylon, and the Roman orgies and vomitoria, and the sodomy in Sodom, and now the porn in the United States - or to the fundamentalists among Christians and Muslims alike, the skimpy fashions and gay sex - that is bringing ruin on the once disciplined power that had been so noble, martial and good.

This is what's called displacement. Not that these things are necessarily desirable, but some of them are, and in the main they're symptoms, and they're definitely not the cause of the decline.

[wintler2]

Fabulous discussion; thanks all for sharing.

The idea that the consumption of porn is a consequence of mens discomfit with womens selective power is intriguing, and fits perhaps with the view (not mine) that patriarchy in general is a reaction driven by mens fear of womens sexuality.

I'm suspicious of the justification/excuse baggage that could be loaded onto that theme, and not convinced that most women have as much selective choice as some men might think. Females appear to have that selective choice in many species, but not IIRC in most primates, where a dominant male takes his pick and other males and females make their choices on the sidelines when they can get away with it. 10,000 years as settled patriarchal societies has also had some impact on who chooses who. Is it just men who 'miss out'/aren't selected that consume porn? Obviously not. What about if add in those who are 'selected' but still insecure or resentful for whatever reason? maybe, but i'm unconvinced. There are men who are selectors not selected and still consume porn.


IMHO porn is bad data in a soma pill, and is currently flooding our culture because it sells, its cheap to make, and its nearly always inherent violence feeds the alienation required for powerless workers/soldiers/consumers. That it provides cover and income for the sexual slavery trade will benefit the perpetrators involved in that also.

[compared2what?]

Hmm. Well, I certainly don't want to fail and am definitely not trying to displease or disappoint you.

But I'm not sure what failure would be from your point of view, so I fear that I might be about to fail epically, and apologize for it in advance if that turns out to be the case. I swear, I'll be doing the best I can by the standards I am familiar with, though. Okay?

Okay. Or at least so I hope. Because in all events, the one thing I am sure about it that I have an honest difference of opinion with you, wrt both substance and perspective. Nevertheless, I'm not disagreeing in order to be disagreeable or to score points, just in order to communicate.

Totally respect your point of view and see its value. I think you may have read too much into my spouse like "to be continued at a later point" comment. I wouldn't worry about failing at all. I think you probably articulate how a large group of people feel and since neither of us are drafting internet legislation I think why not for the both of us over reach a little on the exploration of this?

Okay. (Or so I again hope.) That' as good a staring point as any, albeit a little misrepresentative insofar as I couldn't really say that I honestly disagree with the above, I'm just honestly baffled by it.

Because I so totally don't see the slightest sign that we're products of a time or culture in which people can't help but see any inhibitory force as an unnatural shackle on their manufactured passions, I can't think of a single contemporary or recent example of anything that suggests that we are..

I think a perfect recent example is the Mohammad cartoons, even the "Draw Mohammad day" that happened. I totally believe in free speech, but to me it's less a question of "can I?" but "should I?". A culture believes that a graphic representation of their prophet is blasphemous. Should individuals kill over that if its transgressed? Of course not. But because we are acculturated to see anything cordoned off as sacred, taboo or restricted, as an affront to our freedoms we got to stir the shit up.

But the people calling for more drawing of Mohammed weren't members of the culture that prohibits and/or inhibits doing so. They were members of a culture that's in every sense not only perfectly free to violate the sanctity of Islamic holy law and tradition with total impunity, but one that congratulates itself for being a people who proudly advocate the ostensibly admirable principles of individual freedom and even more ostensibly robust Yankee-backbone fortitude that rallying themselves to express their state-manufactured passionate opposition to a purely notional incursion on their liberty to do something they'd have no interest in or reason for doing if they hadn't been incited to it by proxies and spokespeople of the state.

So I don't think that's an example at all, let alone a perfect one.

In fact, the majority popular response to, let's say, flag-burning in the Vietnam era, or the exhibition of Andre Serrano's "Piss Christ" in the late '80s, or the exhibition of Chris Ofili's "The Holy Virgin Mary" in 1999 (to name the first three examples to spring to mind) suggests that we're as conservative as any other non-totalitarian culture that has enough civil liberty for the occasional perceived or real desecration of its own sacred symbols of identity and ideology to be within the realm of realistic possibility is.

Although I haven't really thought about it exhaustively, and reserve the right to revise that position if, um, you know, I'm confronted with a contradiction of it that hadn't occurred to me and makes me look like a fool.

Because obviously, that's only fair, and not cheating at all.

I think people today are mostly apathetic (not suffering) because there are no limits on self entertainment even for people with little means.

If you concede that the repo man, or living in projects and/or neighborhoods without cable or internet access, or the near-non-existence of entertainment that represents or acknowledges the real conditions to which the self in question is acculturated outside of niche market outlets that are fully self-inhibited wrt not transgressing parameters that are morally and politically acceptable to the majority population (ie -- struggling fledgling broadcast networks such as the WB, the CW, UPN or the early prime-time programmin on Fox) constitute a limit on self-entertainment -- and I think that you pretty much do have to make that concession -- I'd submit that it wouldn't be unreasonable for you to rigorously examine how much of that belief is independently derived from an impartial consideration of the evidence-based and how much on the self-enforced observation of received wisdoms arising from cultural conditioning.

If you took the playstation, internet and cheetos away even for a week, cities would be burning. People are impatient and frustrated for change, freedom, expression, stimulation but the only place that is really happening it seems is on the online reservation. You mess with that and that's when people get passionate, but end of the day it's a simulation and or substitute for real change, expression, stimulation,etc.

Again, I just don't see any evidence or precedent that justifies such a conclusion.

Historically and in the present both, when pleasures for which some or all of the American population feels a strong-to-strong-ish integral need and desire -- and this holds true whether they have inherently attached assorted health risks that commonly include addiction for some or not -- are forbidden, people either accept and ally themselves with the prevalent censorious ideology that led to the prohibition or they go underground when they want or need to avail themselves of that pleasure, or both.

Examples include but are not limited to:

* Prohibition in the '20s (and early '30s);

* the widespread, longstanding, ongoing and relatively statistically stable popular use of Schedule One controlled substances for recreational purposes that's remained a regular part of mainstream American life for decades, irrespective both of how strongly enforced the laws and social taboos and how severe the legal consequences were or weren't at the time; and

* the persistent failure of every harsh and virtually universally endorsed sanction against pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex, homosexuality and the use of pornography to make more than a minor dent in the rates at which they were practiced for more than a very, very brief time and/or on more than a very, very local level.

Obviously, Prohibition was ultimately repealed, some illicit substances (such as Cannabis) are not as demonized now as they were in 1970, and homosexuality, pre-marital sex, and pornography are no longer as uniformly condemned by everyone as they were between (roughly) the end of WWII and the beginning of the end of the war in Vietnam.

But in no case was that because cities rose up in open revolt against their prohibition. To the best of my knowledge, the only case in which populist uprising even played a key role at all was in connection with the partial and still very tenuous socially acceptable status that was eventually attained by homosexuality about twenty years or so after the Stonewall Riots called widespread attention to the issues around which the non-uprising-oriented movement that continues to advocate for the tolerance and legal parity its constituents still haven't gotten subsequently coalesced.

Not that it would mean all that much even if gay rights had been attained more fully and more immediately after they were demanded in the course of an angry popular uprising. Because obviously, homosexuality isn't a form of self-entertainment at all, let alone one that's on a par with playing video games.

I mean, neither is jerking off while looking at pornographically arousing images or engaging in pre- and/or extra-marital sex, imo and -- I'm pretty sure -- objectively speaking. But since they do at least involve witting choice and the discretionary exercise of will to some extent most of the time, there is at least some basis for the analogy.

I personally don't think it's a very strong one, but again, that's not material to my point. Which is that people do not rise up when sensual pleasures of any kind on which they'd become accustomed to relying are abridged.

Because it's not exactly like the ship of state was boarded and hijacked by angry populist pirates in response to the Comics Code Authority or the Motion Picture Production Code either, for that matter. And while that is arguably more than a little off-topic, granted, it's not by any more than texting and video-games are. Or so I'd argue, at least.

[BREAK FOR INTERMISSION, KINDA LIKE "GONE WITH THE WIND"]

[compared2what?]

I just think they are starting to prefer the altar with obvious repercussions for the real.

I was going to get around to saying that I didn't think "altar" was a loaded word that even came close to accurately or appropriately describing a computer screen with sexually graphic imagery on it to which a lot of men have easy access when they feel like jerking off anyway. So I might as well do it here:

Sexual desire is a naturally occurring fact of human biology that isn't equivalent in any way to religious faith or practice. Acting on sexual desire by stimulating it to the point of orgasm is therefore not a form of worship. That's a basic distinction that's not affected by whether doing so involves one person, two people, or forty people.

Or by whether it's imbued with intensely felt positive and/or negative and/or combo-platter emotions.

Or by whether it's an emotionally empty, casual and unmemorable response to a stray thought or randomly encountered stimulus.

Because non-violent and non-coercive sexual acts are not inherently ideologically value-laden. Their strictly ideological value is whatever the culture says it is. And while they are often inherently emotionally value-laden, experientially speaking and on an individual basis, (a) that's nobody's business apart from the individual's, assuming that all parties are free and consenting adults; and (b) for most people, sex involves a very wide range of not necessarily logically compatible emotions that aren't necessarily fixed and invariably the same in all circumstances, or even necessarily formally and consistently correlated with specific sexual acts.

In short, both sex and sexuality are dynamic not static in nature. Because they're both vital and not artificial in nature. You're just ascribing an externally imposed meaning on the act of masturbation to pornography on an absolutely random basis when you metaphorically classify it as a form of worship by describing a computer screen depicting pornographic aides to masturbation as an altar. That clearly and unambiguously dehumanizes sexual experience at least as much as pornography does. If not more. Which is the absolute opposite of what you intend and want to do, as I understand it.

So I very much hope that you'll reconsider the wisdom of continuing to do it.

These days you are basically required to have a computer. It's like not having a car, or even a driver's license; you will be penalized. A computer with internet connection is basically a skinner box that conditions the user over time. I just don't think most people have the inhibitory training to handle what is out there. We just haven't had the history with it to know what is going to happen. It's like giving an Ak-47 to the Neanderthals in 2001 a space odyssey. Sure it will make hunting easier but who knows what else will happen. It's a pity because the internet is one of the few places where your curiosity can be a liability.

Okay. But what, specifically, do you think is out there in terms of online pornography that poses a danger to the people who use it and/or to others that's substantially greater or different than it was in the pre-internet era that you don't think most people have the inhibitory training to handle?

And on the basis of what off-line evidence do you think they don't? What numbers have gone up or down? Where is the surplus in society's victims manifesting itself and how?

I mean, online porn has been ubiquitous for more than a decade. What signs of sociopathy associated with that can you point me to apart from the ubiquity of online porn itself?

Where do you see whatever evidence it is that I don't?

I think all you have to do is look around. Attention is control. The internet is ubiquitous. Count the number of people you can have a conversation with who aren't looking at their phones or turning back to their computer after three seconds. Master is calling.

Most people I talk to don't have their phones on or a computer anywhere near them, unless we're talking about something that requires both of us to be looking at the same thing on our computers for fairly mundane business purposes while we're talking via phone.

Also, the request wasn't just for evidence rather than rhetoric, it was for evidence of this being a culture in which people snarlingly reject attempts to inhibit their manufactured pleasures. Which isn't even the rhetorical implication of the above. Rather the reverse, given that if people are now helplessly enslaved and controlled by the Master of modern technology, whatever atypical urge they might feel to riot in the streets when they were thwarted would now be even easier to forestall before it got going than it was before. in the past***

And I don't even grant the premise that they are helplessly enslaved or controlled by the Master of modern technology to begin with, btw. They might be enervated, or distracted, or stressed out by various aspects of contemporary life to which the internet is central, for sure. Which might weaken some community bonds and/or decrease the amount of leisure time people had available for forming such bonds as well as for other purposes to some extent. And quite possibly to a large extent.

But that's neither enslavement nor control. It's potentially a handicap to the exercise of agency over one's own life. But if it were as glaringly and obviously recognizable as the single source of all oppression as you're saying it is, then freeing ourselves from oppression would take no work at all. Which would be both astonishing and utterly unprecedented in all the annals of human history.

Sadly, I myself believe it's a lot more complicated than you do. Because if I agreed with you, I'd have just tossed the laptop out the window and realized my autonomy years ago, being both perfectly free to make that choice and totally capable of acting on it, as I would be even for a lesser benefit than liberating myself from oppression, if there were one and I perceived it.

But there isn't and I don't. As far as I can tell, that whole line of argument is just an easy way of excusing oneself for not undertaking the more challenging and dangerous course of action that freedom from oppression would, in reality, require.

And there's nothing new about cultural reluctance -- or even outright cultural refusal -- to go that route at all. That's just how people are and always have been. Hence my views on the unlikelihood of their rising up in a Great Playstation Rebellion. Progress takes a lot more work and organization that that, most of which is tedious and difficult and takes a long, long time to yield significant results. Longer than a single lifetime by many decades. If not centuries.

It sure would be nice if there were a short-cut, though. I don't actually see that there's a single thing wrong with fantasizing about the possibility of one, in fact. As long as you know it's a fantasy, it's not that different from pornography, really. Imagination is an excellent place to go when you're living with frustrations and hardships beyond your power to address in reality, imo. In fact, I'd say that's exactly what it's there for.

Which is not the utopian ideal, obviously. But that doesn't make it a bad thing, necessarily. Or a good thing. It's just a thing. The good and bad is in what you make of it, not in it itself.

So say I, thus finally delivering this installment of my two ginormous and wordy cents.
_______________

*** On copy-edit for word repetition, shamefully.

[compared2what?]

It's always wonderful to hear and (sometimes) to learn from you guys. And I really like the tone and direction the discussion is taking, in that it's not just like dosey-doing around the dance down at the county fair where you swing your partner then go around the outside in a series of seemingly infinitely repeating, mildly irritatated bickering circles.

But I so totally knew that after I expended all that effort trying to illuminate a small part of what it feels like for a girl, that I could post it or, if I preferred, I could print it out, rip it into little pieces and use it for confetti at parades, because it would have about as much influence on the thread either way.

Funny how what we think we saw differs.

What I thought I saw happen after your post was this: Your writing "what it feels like for a girl" was heard loud and clear. It produced a "turn" in the thread. It prompted barracuda to write what it felt like for a boy of the same age, and how this may be related to the behavior of the later man toward the adolescent girl seen on the street. Then other boys responded to that with experiences of their own. In another context the lack of direct discussion on what you wrote might have signified indifference, but here it indicates the discomfort your story raised. Or so I expect.

I know it prompted me to feel my way into the situation you described, and this was unsettling (imagining how girls of that age feel) and brings with it some guilt. Since I'm one of Them. Though I don't act that way. I hope.

I am now complaining a little bit, I confess. Whining like a baby, in fact.

So I wish I could find the way to make you see that otherwise, but it is what it is.

Which was a much appreciated comfort and corrective. Thank you.

[brekin]

compared2what wrote:

Quote:
I just think they are starting to prefer the altar with obvious repercussions for the real.


I was going to get around to saying that I didn't think "altar" was a loaded word that even came close to accurately or appropriately describing a computer screen with sexually graphic imagery on it to which a lot of men have easy access when they feel like jerking off anyway. So I might as well do it here:

Sexual desire is a naturally occurring fact of human biology that isn't equivalent in any way to religious faith or practice. Acting on sexual desire by stimulating it to the point of orgasm is therefore not a form of worship. That's a basic distinction that's not affected by whether doing so involves one person, two people, or forty people.

Or by whether it's imbued with intensely felt positive and/or negative and/or combo-platter emotions.

Or by whether it's an emotionally empty, casual and unmemorable response to a stray thought or randomly encountered stimulus.

Because non-violent and non-coercive sexual acts are not inherently ideologically value-laden. Their strictly ideological value is whatever the culture says it is. And while they are often inherently emotionally value-laden, experientially speaking and on an individual basis, (a) that's nobody's business apart from the individual's, assuming that all parties are free and consenting adults; and (b) for most people, sex involves a very wide range of not necessarily logically compatible emotions that aren't necessarily fixed and invariably the same in all circumstances, or even necessarily formally and consistently correlated with specific sexual acts.

In short, both sex and sexuality are dynamic not static in nature. Because they're both vital and not artificial in nature. You're just ascribing an externally imposed meaning on the act of masturbation to pornography on an absolutely random basis when you metaphorically classify it as a form of worship by describing a computer screen depicting pornographic aides to masturbation as an altar. That clearly and unambiguously dehumanizes sexual experience at least as much as pornography does. If not more. Which is the absolute opposite of what you intend and want to do, as I understand it.

So I very much hope that you'll reconsider the wisdom of continuing to do it.

I think altar is the word I'm looking for. I disagree with when you say:

"Sexual desire is a naturally occurring fact of human biology that isn't equivalent in any way to religious faith or practice. Acting on sexual desire by stimulating it to the point of orgasm is therefore not a form of worship. That's a basic distinction that's not affected by whether doing so involves one person, two people, or forty people."

You could have just as easily have said "Spiritual desire is a naturally occurring fact of human biology that isn't equivalent in any way to religious faith or practice." Sexual desire is a basic drive that can be culturally modified and directed. Isn't there a natural element of worship, desire, mystery and ecstasy in lovemaking? Can't that direct experience be redirected (perverted) to the repetitive worship of false idols? Altars are basically totems to an authentic experience someone once had and the adherent engages in ritual to try in some degree to recreate the original authentic experience that person once had. Porn basically is feeding off the authentic act of sexual intercourse (rarely lovemaking) of another party. Is that worshiping act dehumanizing? I think most things one does repetitively that reduces feeling and spontaneity limits your humanity. With worship their is an element of great desire mixed with distance. The worshiper desires ecstasy without risk, thereby almost guaranteeing there will be no true ecstasy.

To put it another way. Most prophets/seekers have a open, spontaneous experience with nature at some point. They communicate it, write it down. Other seekers want that experience so they create rituals to comes close to the original experience of the prophet. In time they settle for a substitute water down ritualized version which minimizes their desire but doesn't fulfill it. Not too long they prefer the substitute, may even come to fear despise the real, because it is safer and more manageable then pursuing the real.

There desire, hunger is natural and real. But there substitute activity shouldn't be confused with the basic drive.

You have some other good stuff I'll try to reply to later. At work now and having a thread up with the tag line "Is Porn Bad for You?" for too long isn't the wisest thing for me to do.

[Simulist]

Most prophets/seekers have a open, spontaneous experience with nature at some point. They communicate it, write it down. Other seekers want that experience so they create rituals to comes close to the original experience of the prophet. In time they settle for a substitute water down ritualized version which minimizes their desire but doesn't fulfill it. Not too long they prefer the substitute, may even come to fear despise the real, because it is safer and more manageable then pursuing the real.

There desire, hunger is natural and real. But there substitute activity shouldn't be confused with the basic drive.

I'd never thought of this quite that way before, but you're right. And wise too, I think.

[Simulist]

I'm not sure exactly why this quote just came to mind, but somehow it seems strangely appropriate.

"But they found it's a trap, like a narcotic, because when dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating. You even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit, living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought record."

— Vina, from the original Star Trek pilot, "The Cage"