Re: Adult film director Max Hardcore sentenced to 4 years in prison on obscenity char
Why are depictions of rape, torture and murder "evil" only if someone admits that they can be sexually arousing?
Because if they are sexually arousing, they are being depicted as fun and pleasurable activities, and with enough viewings, as
normal activities. I should never have had to explain once, much less over and over again
ad nauseam, how being conditioned to associate sexual pleasure with other peoples' suffering is a bad thing. It should be self-evident to any sensible person whose head has not been stuffed with nonsense about how we are all isolated individuals whose private lives do not affect one another's.
Adolf Hitler would have burned her books and the woman herself, too. He was a staunch opponent of pornography and any "degenerate" expression, after all.
Go ahead, compare me to Hitler. Get it out of your system. Everyone else does.
Then, without relying on the fact that he was wrong about invading Poland, starting a two-front war, killing seven million Jews, and swing music, explain to me why he was wrong about pornography. Better yet, offer up a good argument for why
I am wrong about pornography-- because the last time Hitler used his brain for anything was more than sixty years ago and that was as a backstop.
Today, his fans would also have us believe the Holocaust never happened. If they could make all the footage of the Holocaust disappear, they would in a heartbeat. If they ever are able to use state power to make that happen, they will. Who but a dangerous deviant would want people to be able to possess such disgustingly obscene material?
Why settle for the real thing when you can get a couple of anorexic models and a smooth jazz CD and give all the white trash a chance to masturbate to it? After all, that's what
you are defending here.
Historical footage is not pornography. For one, as you might guess, it has historical value. It's not fiction. It isn't designed to titillate, to subvert anyone's natural sexual impulses into something more commercially exploitable. And it doesn't glamorize
anything unless it is propaganda, in which case it is glamorizing what the society, through the State, considers desirable. If the State itself is glamorizing something unwholesome, your society has much bigger problems than either my objection to pornography or your objection to censorship.
I think there is a very clear and distinct line between censoring fiction and censoring non-fiction. The fact that you must resort to examples of censoring non-fiction to demonstrate harm suggests that you cannot demonstrate that harm is caused by censoring fiction.
Why do the same social conservatives who would ban photographs of Abu Ghraib as "obscene" tend to be the most outspoken supporters of the very militarism which led to Abu Ghraib in the first place?
Don't ask me, ask them. I never supported enhanced interrogation, and I've crossed swords with numerous "conservatives" over the issue. On the other hand, when you look at the methods chosen by those soldiers when told to "be creative" and left to their own devices, it sure looks an awful lot like they took their inspiration from the kind of pornography you're defending.
Matter of fact, within days of the Abu Ghraib photos leaking, porn sites were making their own-- encouraging the kind of immoral and antisocial behavior you're now complaining about. How can you abhor people for committing acts without abhorring the people who applaud them for committing them? The people who tell them that it's fun, sexy, and
normal to degrade people?
To sweep "evil" under the rug will never make it go away. The less freedom of inquiry and expression we enjoy, the less we will understand the darker aspects of human nature. In this respect, knowledge is power, and a lack of knowledge is truly dangerous.
So humiliation porn is really just a stepping stone in the noble quest for truth? There's a difference between denying evil exists and refusing to participate in or tolerate it.
The horrible and scandalous "child pornography" which had a photographer facing
8,000 years in prison turns out to be pictures of teenage glamour models no more explicit than your average issue of Cosmo or Vogue (which also use teenage models). This man rotted in jail for nearly a year before the ludicrous charges were finally dropped.
Teenage glamour models are adults and the law should recognize that, so the point should be moot. That's also a different issue than the one we're discussing, because something that is not more explicit than an issue of Cosmo or Vogue is not pornography.
Meanwhile, video game propaganda to recruit young people into the meat grinder of militarism is not only legal, but actually funded by the state.
As it should be, because our nation's military is necessary and serving in it is an honorable career.
Obviously, sexual pleasure is an emotion, but you are artificially attaching a good deal of other baggage which does not necessarily play a role in sexual activity, either watching or doing.
Like what? What is the purpose of the bonding hormones released during sexual stimulation and orgasm if not to establish and deepen bonds? Operant conditioning somehow just
doesn't apply to pleasure when it's sexual pleasure? I'm not attaching that "baggage" to human sexuality, that "baggage" is the
function of human sexuality and it's human biology that put it there.
Although this does not necessarily hold in your case, there is often sexism involved in the assumption that women cannot enjoy watching or doing sexual activity without inhibiting strings attached.
Who said anything about
women? For that matter, who said anything about people not enjoying porn? If porn hurt, noone would watch it and I wouldn't give a damn about it. The problem is that it feels good so people don't realize what it's doing to them-- they don't realize that what they find attractive is changing and that they're slowly being desensitized to real sex with real sexual partners. They don't realize that they are losing the ability to connect with other people sexually.
Just because it feels good, doesn't mean it's good for you.
Many people, after all, have no trouble believing that men can enjoy pornography, casual sex, or prostitutes without being "scarred" yet refuse to believe that women have the same capability.
If anything, men are usually the ones more damaged. After all, they're the ones being encouraged by our culture to seek out these things-- and they're not allowed to admit that it stops being fun after awhile.
You don't see many people complaining about the twinks in gay porn being "exploited," after all, because relatively few have trouble believing that men can enjoy being sexually promiscuous.
Honestly, gay porn is just better. Both sexes. Maybe it's because they're the same sex... but all the gay and lesbian porn I've seen hasn't been one-tenth as abusive or as degrading as most straight porn.
Yet a pornstar like Sasha Grey who insists (outside of porn) that she truly enjoys being at the center of a gangbang is widely assumed to be lying.
Hell, I'm sure she does. It's not my thing at all, but it's easy to imagine how someone can enjoy being the center of that much attention-- and getting that many people off at once. Bet you that's a big part of what drives the porn stars that really enjoy their work, knowing that they're touching that many lives.
I'm curious as to what psychological research you have in mind when you make assertions like these.
This is basic Skinner. Operant conditioning, and what people are conditioned to respond sexually to. Will you deny that human beings are supposed to be sexually attracted to other human beings, whom they can have sex with? And that they are generally supposed to be emotionally attached to those human beings and enjoy pleasuring them as much as they are being pleasured?