Monday, July 29, 2013

The Smug, Self-Satisfied Denial of Reality Right In Front of The Noses of the Preening "Reality Community"

It's always hard to know when to stop making a point about something like the damage that pornography does to people.  Its harmlessness is such an entrenched lie in the educated class of the United States, Europe and elsewhere, held by people who fully believe that they constitute the rational, realist class of the human population, who reject mere belief and, in the more extreme form of that self-congratulating conceit, believe they "know" what they "know" based on evidence, especially "empirical evidence".   To get through that level of invincible ignorance held by those convinced of their enlightenment is going to take a long and massive fight.  The consequences of giving up, as the "sex pos" "feminists" have, are so bad for women and everyone that giving up is no real option.  It is capitulation to the worst of the past and the present.  It would be like black people willingly going back to Jim Crow, agricultural tenancy and, in the most explicitly obvious way and in every way, enslavement.

As I pointed out already the evidence is that the production of pornography that uses the bodies of people expose them to dangerous sex with other people who have extensive histories of dangerous, professional, sexual intercourse with other people with the same history.  All at the behest of the paying customers of pornography and, so its producers, directors and, um, "writers".  As internet porn has developed, that has included demands for ever rougher, ever more violent sex, without even the minimal protective equipment of condoms.  As mentioned the Los Angeles porn industry is trying to overturn the almost unique law requring condoms being used on the set.  So, for profit, the people you see onscreen, the raw material of pornography, are compelled to become one of the most fertile vectors of sexually transmitted disease.

But, with that massive evidence that porn damages the people it uses, uses up and discards like worn out machinery, if not industrial waste, the claim that no one is hurt by it is one of the major articles in the catechism of the educated class of the United States and elsewhere.

Another harmful effect of pornography that is documented with evidence and the sworn testimony of its victims is in the widespread use of it by pedophiles  in "grooming" children to be raped, prostituted and photographed or filmed while being raped by the very pedophiles that used pornography in the audio-visual indoctrination of their intended victims.   There have been court cases and sworn testimony from the victims, far more than even the sleaziest of "First Amendment lawyers, " those whose practice centers around in getting porn producers out of taking responsibility for what they make billions of dollars from, can brush aside.

But not the journalists, the primary pushers of the line that porn is everything from harmless to a positive social good.  Even as their newspapers and magazines carry reports of trials in which that testimony of the use of porn in pedophile "grooming," setting up even very young children to do what the adult, and increasingly teenage, child rapist wants.  While the hard reporting of court cases and, more rarely, investigative reporting of children used by pedophiles, pimps and porn producers document that use of pornography, those on the op-ed and other "opinion journalists" will recite what they'd have to know was a lie if they even read their own paper.

About twenty years ago someone told me about a couple who of an evening would watch videos of hardcore porn in the comfort of their living room with their children, under the age of ten, watching along with them.   Call me naive but it had not occurred to me, until that point, that parents would do things like that.  Of course I'd known of fathers, especially those who considered themselves sophisticated and progressive, would give their sons  straight porn and, reportedly, would even bring them to have their first sexual intercourse with prostitutes to celebrate a birthday.  Some psychologists recommended such stuff as prevention of "homosexuality."   Those stories are as old as the hills.  But with the widespread introduction of in home theaters that innovation in child neglect and abuse hadn't suggested itself, to me at least.

And increasingly it is reported that boys, especially, are exhibiting the beliefs about girls and women gained by watching porn at home and, now, online, that they want to do what they've seen, that they regard even quite young girls as objects available for their use - males are not the bottom in all but some of the rarer tastes in straight sex.   By a massive percentage, straight porn is a man's world, the women to be used and used up.  To the extent that boys are acculturated by porn, to that extent will the rights and welfare of women be disadvantaged.  To the extent girls are presented with those role models available to them, to that extent will they be taught that they should accept that. Teachers have been reporting seeing the far from harmless effects of the acculturation into pornographic thinking for quite some time, in even the most unsophisticated and rural of schools.  Pornography is generally far closer to the view of women that the Taliban has than it is to anything in line with feminism.  The role of women in all but some of the kinkier sado-masochistic porn in which it is the male who is dominated and abused  - reportedly not all that popular with most men - is that they are to be subjugated.

The themes of pornography are the greatest evidence of what its effects in the general society will be.  Objectification of people is the very act inherent to pornography,  the use of one person seen as passive by another person seen as dominant, the story line of almost all of it.  Then there is coercion by the dominant male (in all by a tiny percentage of porn) of either women or weaker men or children, into consenting to the sexual acts they want.  Ramping it up, there is rape, ramping that up there is rape with harm, degradation, humiliation, injury and everything up to murder, generally simulated but, in some rare reports, real, as sexual gratification.   The well beloved pornographer and complete slime, Larry Flynt's infamous picture of a woman in a meat grinder is the porn industry in one image as presented on the cover of his, flagship porn magazine.  Yet we're all supposed to not notice that and are not to come to a rational conclusion as to what it is selling, what, as pointed out yesterday, it is selling as possible behavior.

3 comments:

  1. Funny think happened on the way to this post: I was looking for the classic Tenniel drawing of Alice and Humpty Dumpty, and finding that, I also found some "nude Alice" drawings with, among other characters, Humpty-Dumpty.

    Didn't take long to realize such images (found a few more; I was curious) were basically porn. Not the stuff you see on Cinemax, even; no penetration, no sex at all. Just nubile young girls, completely naked (although still "R" rated; not crotch shots, thank you very much! So maybe not porn?).

    Nah, it was porn. Just kinder, gentler porn. Well, by today's standards.

    But clearly naked "Alices" were meant to be arousing. And what's the point of that, except to objectify women as objects for male arousal. I mean, it wasn't exactly the classical Greek business of admiring the human form. A few quite distinctly put me in mind of Cinemax porn (my exposure is limited, and its funny the porn on Cinemax hasn't changed in decades. Once every 30 years or so I have access to premium cable channels for a few months; or so it works out. Nothing on Cinemax ever changes....), where the female is obviously just waiting to be the recipient of the male's lustful recreation. It's not even sex, it's just...

    ...well, it's porn.

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  2. I didn't finish above, and so I have to add to my previous comment:

    you're comment about young boys and porn is what made the connection for me. Of course porn affects people, else why would it make any money? There are ancient forms of literature and even story-telling which don't affect people any more, so nobody bothers with them (the epic poem is a fine example). If the form is not effective (i.e., at least prompts your interest, which is an alteration of your behavior), why bother with it?

    So porn clearly affects behavior, else it would have gone the way of the sestina and the Spenserian sonnet. Perhaps the argument is supposed to be narrower, about how it affects behavior: but if it doesn't inspire at least masturbation fantasies, then what good is it? And it certainly teaches an attitude toward human sexuality that's about as useful as the action movies that teach us all that, with a gun in hand, we'll be the hero of the next mass shooting, taking down the bad guy with one shot between the eyes, from the hip, almost before the gun has cleared the holster, and certainly long before he can shoot me!

    Another digression: I was reading a gun magazine while waiting idly for something to be delivered to me. Among the rather dull industry-standard articles about the latest new guns and how wonderful they are (or cars, or computers, or whatever consumer product) was one about ankle holsters.

    Because, when you carry a concealed weapon under your jeans, you're much safer. In an action movie. Where people regularly pull guns, destroy property, shoot people, and otherwise behave with wild abandon.

    We don't live in such a world, but more and more Americans think we do, because it's all we see in movies and on TeeVee. Which don't affect how we behave at all, because,honestly, monkey see monkey do only applies to people we don't approve of, and behavior we don't like.

    Or something.

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  3. I think that the medium and the conditions of its production makes all the difference. Once real peoples identities, bodies, health and well being is introduced into it, then the consequences for them becomes the predominant issue. Also the consequences for other people.

    A purely imaginary text, especially without illustrations, harder to consume, etc. has fewer inherent moral issues attached to it. That the courts want to pretend that judges are unable to deal with those differences proves they are lying about that possibility.

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