{"id":2527,"date":"2002-06-11T10:09:53","date_gmt":"2002-06-11T10:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=72"},"modified":"2023-04-12T00:12:25","modified_gmt":"2023-04-12T00:12:25","slug":"p0rn-and-the-nba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2527","title":{"rendered":"P0RN AND THE NBA"},"content":{"rendered":"

I thought Spring was already here; but based on the comments in the blogoverse, the testosterone is rising now instead. Den Beste<\/a>, and then Den Beste again<\/a>, is answered by Olsen<\/a>, and then Raymond<\/a> offers a harder-core perspective.
\nOlsen seems to have come out the worse, based on what looks like his backing off. [Note<\/strong>: this has changed since I wrote this, and he is in his own words, ‘clarifying’<\/a>, not backing off.] Since things have cooled off, let me dump some ether on the embers and take his back.<\/p>\n

I’m a hippie liberal who thinks sex is great and p0rn isn’t. Not just for the reasons outlined by Raymond above – “that it’s anti-erotic and not well done” – but inherently<\/span>, because it externalizes and commodifies what ought to be a core human experience, and because it a part of a dangerous larger trend which risks making us all passive consumers of our lives, instead of participants in them.<\/p>\n

It’s not just p0rn, it’s the NBA and NFL and NASCAR; the replacement of sport – in which we can participate at the park, or rink, or even the local dirt-track – with spectacle, in which hundreds of participants entertain tens of millions of spectators.<\/p>\n

The idea that we would ‘professionalize’ sex in the same ways that we have professionalized sports and entertainment appalls me.<\/p>\n

I try and explain to my sons – who all have a healthy teenage interest in the female form – that it’s better to hold hands and smooch with a real girl than to jerk off to pictures of someone you’ll never meet, much less get to go to bed with.<\/p>\n

When Olson says:<\/p>\n

You can talk to them, you can even touch them, but you have to treat them as individuals, as actual people with identities of their very own, or they will know that they aren’t real to you, that they are just symbols, and no one wants to be just a symbol. They want to be loved, they want to be touched, they want you to do everything to them that you want to do to them; but they want to be treated as actual flesh and blood, not as bloodless abstractions. No one ever had a relationship with an abstraction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He’s speaking from the POV of the ‘object’ of attraction. What I’d add to that is that as the one who is attracted, you’ll have a better time when you acknowledge that your attraction is to a person, rather than an image.
\nSo instead of buying p0rn, go meet someone and ask them out. Instead of watching the NBA finals and tying your identity to a team of mercenaries, go down to the park and play some hoops. Don’t wear someone else’s jersey, wear your own.<\/p>\n

Or maybe, instead of sitting and consuming what passes for news and commentary these days, start your own blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I thought Spring was already here; but based on the comments in the blogoverse, the testosterone is rising now instead. Den Beste, and then Den Beste again, is answered by Olsen, and then Raymond offers a harder-core perspective. Olsen seems to have come out the worse, based on what looks like his backing off. [Note: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2527"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3041,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions\/3041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}