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: this has changed since I wrote this, and he is in his own words, ‘clarifying’, not backing off.] Since things have cooled off, let me dump some ether on the embers and take his back.
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, 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.
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.
The idea that we would ‘professionalize’ sex in the same ways that we have professionalized sports and entertainment appalls me.
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.
When Olson says:
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.
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.
So 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.
Or maybe, instead of sitting and consuming what passes for news and commentary these days, start your own blog.
Porn is okay as long as no one gets hurt and it’s your right to think that it’s horrible and ant-participatory. But what about couples that the old flame has just gone out sexually and porn or seeing others in action gets them thinking again as sexual beings. Also for men it’s better if a man looks at porn, and does his thing, instead of having an affair and possibly bringing an STD home to his wife. When you help yourself out the chances of getting an STD is 0%. Women as well should be free to look at or do whatever it takes for them to feel good or find pleasure, men do it and women should have the same right too. Don’t be the liberal who aspires to protest porn because you don’t agree, but be the liberal who believes that people should do whatever they want to do that makes people feel good, as long as that means no one gets hurt. Now if the wife or the spouse conveys that they don’t feel comfortable if their mate engages in activity like that or watches things like that, then their feelings must be taken under consideration. A democracy and market economy allows people to chose what professions people want and the reality is there is a demand for this kind of service. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry and it employs who knows how many people. Think about people who’s lively hood (no matter what you might think) is making sex toys, adult films, or a girl who has no other talent and has enough money to retire at 35 because she became a successful adult film star. She probably would be living in a trailer park or something if wasn’t for the business. I mean people have to first remove the plank from their own eye before they remove the plank from their neighbors. Natural rights of man is what we as liberals strive for and what all of us liberals believe in which is life, liberty, and property with limited religious or governmental intrusions of these rights.
Porn sucks.
On the other hand….
I think its fine to use the excuse that people can find pleasure in porn to rekindle a relationship Left Minded, but don’t throw us the old line about making a killing in porn.
For every one porn star who’s making a killing, there are perhaps several hundred or more who are being screwed, literally, by the business, just like girls who go to hollywood to be ‘real’ actresses, and never make it big.
The money makers are the power brokers, all or nearly all of them men. A few women have used their popularity to take control of their own business interests, usually through websites and merchandizing.
Armed Liberal makes a good point that a real flesh and blood relationship with someone is a very important human experience. I am impressed that he wants his sons to understand that women are people, not symbols, who appreciate the finer things in life, like being smooched.
Women are less appreciative of meeting men who paper their rooms with clippings from certain magazines, or have stacks of such magazines under their bed. Complain all you want about the fact I’m not being gender sensitive here, but I know very few men who are intimidated by Waterhouse paintings and posters from Top Gun.