I’m only venting here; preaching to the choir, I know. I even wonder why I have made the effort to put this here.
I think, like the boy and the starfish, it is, at the moment, all that I can think to do, and it might be better than doing nothing. Anyway, thanks for your attention.
If you do slog through it all, you might find something to discuss. I especially hope you will find reason to materially support people like John Stagliano, whose ongoing persecution SHOULD be causing the level of outrage last seen in America when Bull Connor turned clubs, dogs and fire hoses loose on black men, women, and children for daring to suppose that “We the People…” meant them, too.
Here goes:
Aren’t you tired of porn being regarded as something shameful and perverse? I am.
I’ve been fond of sexually explicit media for over half a century. In that time, I have seen it evolve from what was actually a felony to produce, sell, or even own to a major industry.
Yet, in spite of a popularity that has made it a commercial success, it has remained, socially, and under capricious, vague, and inconsistent laws, what it always was, a crime.
I know that most of you are far from embarrassed, ashamed, or furtive about your love of porn. The ‘Raincoat Days’ of slinking into a filthy little porn shop in the worst section of town that smelled like a gas station men’s room and looked worse, are unknown to most of you and unpleasant—or, perhaps, cherished -- memories for the rest of us.
Today, most people – perhaps all adults – have looked at pornography. Most own some, and its sales suggest that most find it enjoyable at least occasionally. Another discussion in this forum cited a published study of which I don’t recall other details, in which a control group was to be people who had never viewed porn – none could be found.
So, without question, porn is a popular, pervasive, routinely enjoyed medium.
And yet, if you own any porn or watch it, there are certain professions – teaching, the ministry, and so forth—in which the general knowledge of that fact might well put an end to your career. There are companies that will find some excuse to terminate your employment if you are ‘outed’ as a fan of pornography.
A porn fan who is open about his enthusiasm risks being shunned in many social situations, thought of as immoral, repulsive, even dangerous – often by hypocrites who have shelves full of porn themselves, and do things in the bedroom that would nauseate a proctologist.
Producers of porn still risk prosecution and imprisonment for what they do, convicted by juries, that likely consume porn themselves, for making or selling the kind of porn that they may not – or perhaps do –like too! It’s as though a Chevy dealer were arrested, convicted, prosecuted, and imprisoned by a bunch of Ford owners.
For centuries, in this country in particular, pious frauds and moral tyrants with the conceit to suppose that no one but themselves knew right from wrong, had pontificated that sex of any kind – even as the necessity of procreation was harmful, shameful, and too disgusting even to mention. Genesis portrays it as a punishment for original sin and itself a sin carried from birth by the baby it produces!
Since our emergence from the Dark Ages (if we have emerged at all), and the birth of respect for human reasoning, the moral guardians have been compelled to produce evidence that their dark predictions about it of everything from hairy palms to insanity and blindness to the dissolution of civilization were facts. They have yet to do so.
When that didn’t work out, they narrowed their attack and went after porn. Sometimes I wonder if they legalized porn when they did, shortly after the introduction of the pill, just so they would have a subject for the righteous indignation that is their stock and trade: the source of their often prodigious incomes.
But the facts still won’t co-operate. In spite of many efforts to find it, there exists no real data to prove that the depiction of sex, however extreme, has any detrimental effect upon normal healthy adults.
Although ‘Playboy’, ‘Penthouse’, and even ‘Leg Show’ and ‘Sunbather’s Quarterly’ raised the level of most sock drawers (and other things) in the 50’s and 60’s, and most dads, like my own, had an 8mm projector hidden in the closet but didn’t own a movie camera, neither my father, nor anyone else’s brought civilization to its knees.
And today, we’ve been through ‘Deep Throat’ and Max Hardcore and Sex and Submission.com and, generally, things still go along pretty much as the always have – morally anyway: no better, maybe, but no worse.
Still, in spite of long experience that porn does no harm, we send pornographers to prison! We hear some moron on the tube or in the pulpit that porn corrupts our youth and destroys our families and he is neither laughed out of the building nor carried off to the asylum. Vile people counsel others to assault and murder homosexuals and they don’t jail them for inciting violence, no; they assault and murder homosexuals and venerate the ones who gave them the advice!
An acquaintance, searching for some enjoyed movie to lend us, reveals his copy of ‘Fuck Slaves’ and is embarrassed, while we make some lame excuse to leave and thereafter banish him from our presence, but probably not before we make sure that OUR copy of ‘Fuck Slaves’ is safely far away from our ‘acceptable’ DVD collection.
The eminent historian, Lewis Mumford in his classic, ‘The City in History’ credits a large part of the origin of cities, for civilization itself, to sex. We got together and constructed safe places, so that we could fuck whenever we liked in comfort. Desmond Morris, in ‘The Naked Ape’ concludes that 90% of the human nervous system and the configuration of the human body itself is for sexual arousal, that enjoying sex may be the source of most of what makes us human: language, the use of tools, and sentience itself. In nature, the flower exists only for sexual reasons, the bright plumage of birds, the gorgeous fur of animals, it all has a sexual purpose.
And what have we done? For most of our history, Americans have made sex dirty and enjoying sex perverse. Though many attitudes have changed, the final remnant of hypocrisy remains: we have made the depiction of sex shameful.
If we porn fans suppose the WE sit above all this hypocrisy and cant, then examine OUR view of porn.
How many of us here refer to porn actresses as ‘whores’, ‘bitches’, ‘skanks’ and the like? Some don’t; many do. How many of us would openly defend the porn professions as respectable and a valuable service to our community? Some would, but many would not, nor even do they think so.
Yet, especially from my own peculiar vantage as a deformed (slightly) and unattractive ( not so slightly) person, I know firsthand that porn fills a need that nothing else can in a pretty large and pretty forgotten group of people. To them, porn often is as important as food.
We praise and respect physicians and researchers therapists and caregivers as skilled professionals, altruists and Samaritans. But the people they labor to treat and comfort and cure are just as thankful for the porn makers, who, for a few minutes on occasion allow them to feel like beautiful people who arouse and are aroused by gorgeous women who enjoy giving them the gift of orgasm. It’s only pretend, of course, but they wouldn’t trade it, I’d wager, for a boatload of doctors, therapists, and caregivers.
The rest of you get that same gift from them or you wouldn’t be here. But how many of you – really – esteem John Stagliano or Velicity Von or their peers as equal in human worth to your physician or your financial advisor or your plumber? How many of you dismiss porn actors as ‘in it for the money’? Well, doctors and plumbers and financial advisors are in it for the money too. How many of you would brag that your daughter is a porn star? Not many I think.
Of all the outrageous stupidity of our species, of all our hypocrisy and self destruction of our happiness, of all the ignorances we cling to and illusions we nourish, none shames and degrades us more than that we still condemn our greatest and most natural pleasure, that we belittle even one part of what has saved us from living like worms.
It makes me glad to be old, for suffering this foolishness will not go on much longer for me. I’m sorry for young people; they have their whole lives to endure it. It’s not as bad as it once was, of course, and I guess things will improve.
But civilization seems to protect stupidity. In the wild, where surviving is a full time job, morons and hypocrites might die off like the Dodo bird. In our civilized world we preserve them and allow them even to reproduce. Often, we elect them to office. In such circumstances, foolishness of all kinds may or may not diminish, but it will never go away entirely.