Re: Adult film director Max Hardcore sentenced to 4 years in prison on obscenity char
Wat? It was porn, not a life lesson
Anybody who tries to learn normal social conduct through porn is gonna be screwed up no matter what they're watching
Depends on what you mean here.
The women involved are real people; therefore, much of the supposedly "perverted" conduct depicted in Max's material is in non-fictional.
If people can engage in rough, wet and messy, and sadomasochistic sex in commercial porn then why not in "real life," provided that everyone involved is consenting? Is Max only screwed up if he actually gets off on what he's doing?
Many of Max's themes are at most just exaggerated versions of behaviors you can already find in mainstream porn. For a couple examples Belladonna and Sasha Grey are often no less nasty than Max (Sasha at least has said she was into rough sex/S&M before ever actually starting porn). Rocco Siffredi is just as rough and "degrading" as Max and sex researcher Alan McKee mentioned that he's a popular porn star with female audiences (yes, women watch porn too!).
Max's themes go well beyond some goofy old guy in a cowboy hat and a handful of trenchcoated greasy old guys jerking off. He's tapping into archetypes and desires that are very human. Consider the people who celebrate the rape of prison inmates or fantasize out loud about torturing "pedophiles" (which might include people sexually attracted to teenagers in their definition) to death. Such people are way more prevalent than people who have seen Max Hardcore vids and of course they're highly concentrated among right-wing authoritarians. Are such people any less sadistic than people who produce and get off on "extreme porn" or is it that they are less honest and creative about it?
It's interesting that the most politically domineering people - people who are the quickest to judge others, in fact the sort of people who would jump to the chance to guard a concentration camp that held those they consider to be "deviants" - are the same people who always lead the charge to ban sexual expression?
Speaking of which, to those who have said that feminists and social conservatives have much in common, there are many feminists who actually are very sex-positive and pro-pornography. Feminists are not a monolithic group, though arguably the ones in bed with social conservatives are feminists in name only since they go against the most basic feminist principle of women having sovereignty over their own bodies. It's telling how Pamela Paul's
Pornified, for example, was panned by many feminists but praised by Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary! Talk about being in bed with the patriarchy. If you actually look in the courts, in the legislatures, check out the voting records and the contributions, anti-sex "feminists" are neither a necessary nor sufficient factor in the drive to ban porn (or keep honest prostitution banned). Instead, those who support these measures are overwhelmingly right-wing authoritarian men - such as social conservatives and fascists. Remember the retarded Child Pornography Prevention Act (CPPA) that made cartoon porn illegal? Only three Republicans voted against it. It's a recurring pattern... it's the conservatives on the Supreme Court and for the most part on the circuit courts who bloc against porn as well. Ruth Ginsburg is the most consistently pro-First Amendment member of SCOTUS and she's also the most feminist. Before she was a member of SCOTUS she volunteered for the ACLU!
So it's interesting then how often MacDworkinite "feminists" get blamed for the anti-sex hysteria. If it wasn't for men willing to vote for their measures they'd get nowhere.
It's also interesting how the most feminist countries have the softest punishments for sex crimes and the most liberal policies on porn. Even scat porn is made and sold in feminist Sweden and Denmark, but not in more male-dominated Poland and in hyper-patriarchal Iran or Saudi Arabia it would get you hanged in a heartbeat. Female liberation and sexual liberation tend to go hand in hand - it's not just a coincidence. The anti-porner fems are just a neurotic subset of very
catty* women who have been co-opted by the SoCons to assist in pushing their reactionary agenda.
*No offense to felines; I love 'em.
