At least it appears, from the story, that the major issue isn't the porn (although there was an indecency charge), but that he was watching a movie while driving. Which is as it should be.
I think this is indicative of the serious porn-addiction issue that is arising in the US. Who would actually feel compelled to watch movies of people paid to fuck each other, while they are in the car and driving? I don't think that's the impulse of a healthy psyche... I'm starting to think that porn is really poisonous, at least in the way it's produced and treated in the mass-market.
ahh, but when we learn the art of paying attention (which we have lost in our hyper-reality instant-gratification media age), then boredome isn't a problem, because nothing is really boring at all. However, your point makes sense. Long periods of driving would require stimulation to keep the driver awake, but porn would just be distracting it seems.
I'd have to disagree. It could have easily been any movie "Dude! I can watch the Matrix while I'm driving!"
As for porn being poisonous... It's a nasty industry in many ways. Not all unlike Hollywood, though, at least for the unimportant people in the business.
I'm thinking more along the lines of what the brain is being bombarded with, especially while driving (which is a semi-hypnotized state, the attention is fragmented). To intake images of de-eroticized, commoditized sex changes the way which we think of sex and deal with people sexually. For instance, how many women now endure their BFs giving them "facials", a degrading act popularized by porn. The degradation has been internalized without conscious choice taking place because of hot media like porn (hot in a McLuhan sense). Porn is poisonous to our human inter-relations, and it degrades the erotic essence that is the foundational alchemy of all things - by commoditizing it, sex just becomes another thing to have, but the depth and meaning has been stripped from the common understanding of it. So, the new culture, the new generation is growing up disconnected from one of the greatest connective forces in the universe. I have seen and experienced the degrading effects of culture's mass-subsumption of porn into its matrix, but I haven't the energy to go into that here...
ah yes, but why? I must admit, it's a sexual identity I can't get my head around. maybe it's just the leo in me, but it makes me cringe when I see someone humiliated or degraded...
I've asked myself this several times. I can't come up with a completely satisfactory answer.
I see it as an offshoot of the standard submissive personality.
Now that I'm older and can examine my own sexuality more critically, I kind of see it as being privy to a male orgasm as up close as possible. It provides a different sense of ejaculation that one does not get when engaging in fellatio, for example.
I also personally enjoy watching my partner engage in self-pleasure, so a facial is a combination of getting to watch that as well as being involved in an extremely intimate way.
For instance, how many women now endure their BFs giving them "facials", a degrading act popularized by porn.
Actually, I know a large number of women (and men) who LIKE receiving facials, including people who'd never seen it before in porn (or seen any porn at all).
Porn is poisonous to our human inter-relations, and it degrades the erotic essence that is the foundational alchemy of all things - by commoditizing it, sex just becomes another thing to have, but the depth and meaning has been stripped from the common understanding of it.
I have to disagree with this as a generalization. I know too many people who have used pornography as a positive force in their sexual lives, as well as a number of people who have used this same pornography as a platform for enhancing their erotic essense and as an integral element of their own foundational alchemy - actors like Annie Sprinkle and Nina Hartley, writers like Anias Nin. I am personally familiar with people who use pornography as a deliberate act of spirituality in action, such as the webmistress of http://www.ropelover.com
I understand the sort of 'commoditizing' that you are talking about, but I don't see pornography as the engine of that. That commoditization is an integral part of modern culture, from McDonalds to MTV to self-help infomercials. The twisted sexual images found in the mainstream media and advertising do much more to degrade the erotic essense of life by consistantly displaying sanitized eroticism with a conflicting undertone of guilt and accusation for responding to that.
This is not to say that the porn industry is not a nasty degrading place in many areas. However, I've personally observed too many powerful and meaningful events, organizations and individuals that are the result of that same industry to use to as the scape goat that most people insist it on being.
So, the new culture, the new generation is growing up disconnected from one of the greatest connective forces in the universe.
Alienation from the Divinity inherent in sexuality is not the exclusive domain of the 'new culture'. While pornography is more accessable in many ways today, it hs existed for millenia in various forms, from low-class courtesans in Ancient Greece to the writings of the Marquis De Sade in France to burlesque shows in the 1920s to the hot lesbian action section on Kazaa.
Pornographuy is not the problem. It's not even the symptom. But it is an easy target.
I'll admit I was on a bit of an anti-porn rant a while back, but I was really just confronting some of my own habits. you're right - the commoditization of sex is not really porn-related at all, but cultural, driven by ecomonic forces. I agree as well that porn can be used spiritually - I use it for my own sex magicks and solo tantric practices. The porn industry itself I haven't much problem with - there are some bad patches to be sure, and I suppose my lament is for the porn of better days, porn done with context, story, enjoyment of those participating. However, much porn on the web is filled with content which does (IMO) pose a threat to mental hygiene (I can't believe I just used that term): rape, child porn, snuff, etc. I fear this may be a match to the powderkeg that lies in the hearts of all those repressed angry men (of which there are many, I'm positive). I've seen relationships torn apart by porn addictions, and I worry about what having access to extremely hardcore porn will do to developing minds; adolescents and the like may have trouble contextualizing the content. But in the end, porn isn't the problem - as you say, it's just an easy scapegoat. The problem lies in our culture's attitude towards sex itself. I was projecting the problem onto the porn industry (which has taken some questionable turns lately, though I realize they are simply responding to a market demand - so again the problem lies in the culture that demands to see rape and violence towards women).
well, I wouldn't go around blaming restaurants, but I might have some things to say about fast-food culture and McDonald's :) anyway, you're right: some women do enjoy facials, but rarely are the women in porn enjoying them - it which case it does seem to present itself as an act of violence. Once again though, this would be an issue of bad porn, rather than porn itself. I did overgeneralize - there is much good porn out there (I've got a hard-drive full of it). My vitriol against porn was directed (in intention anyway) against the porn which seems to exploit - the women involved are humiliated and abused, and it doesn't seem that they are enjoying it; they do it because they need the money. Porn isn't really the problem, as vaxjedi reminded me - the problem lies in the culture that demands to see cruelty towards women. Of course, it's a different issue in BDSM or similar scenes... I don't believe porn itself is the problem, but it is the manifestation of a problem, and as such it screams out our cultural attitudes. I find what it says to be disturbing, hence my litany against porn. There should be a linguistic distinction between bad porn and good porn, because they exist in different sexual realms. Discourse on pornography becomes difficult when there is no clear language with which to discuss such things. but maybe that's just a cop-out, and maybe there's no problem at all. Perhaps the world is oving along exactly as it needs to, bad porn and all...
the problem lies in the culture that demands to see cruelty towards women.
Well, first of all, this isn't a gendered problem. Our cultures demand to see cruelty, period.
Secondly, I suspect that much of the reason for much porn being bad is not so much that people demand an absence of quality, but rather that badness is cheap and easy.
Thirdly, my view on the humiliation of women in the porn industry is that it is a byproduct, ironically enough, of sexual repression. Black markets always get and produce the dregs. Healthy, self-assured women seldom go into illegal professions unless the rewards are overwhelmingly worth it.
you make a good point - no one can produce good porn these days in such a competitive market, and for that same reason (as well as other reasons), the porn industry does get the dregs. I agree that our culture demands to see cruelty, and that in itself isn't gendered, but there is a gendered component to it. There is an aggressiveness, a hostility even, towards women and their sexuality (I see it in North America anyway). Back in the days of sexual freedom (short as they were, and perhaps illusory besides), good porn was produced because sex was celebrated as something joyous - even healthy, self-assured people produced porn, because the cultural attitude towards sex was more healthy as well (though perhaps that's a matter of opinion). Making porn in those circumstances was more an artistic endeavor than one of generating income.
What you are putting your finger on is the undeniable fact that the
<i>nature</i> of the cruelties usually directed at men and
women are different, and that women are more usually punished for their
sexual expression.
Back in the days of sexual freedom (short as they
were, and perhaps
illusory besides), good porn was produced because sex was celebrated as
something joyous - even healthy, self-assured people produced porn,
because the cultural attitude towards sex was more healthy as well
(though perhaps that's a matter of opinion).
I disagree.
I would argue that good people are going into porn just as frequently
now as before, but that the good porn that they produce is drowned in
oceans of dreck.
Despite the earlier relative prominence of good porn, "Pornstar"
has never been a mainstream-acceptable occupation.
When do you think the mainstream attitudes towards sex were more
healthy than they are now?
It seems to me that the people who do good porn aren't "pornstars" - it's not an occupation, but just an expression of sexuality. Some people like to be watched, some people like to film, others like to creatively express sexuality through well-made pornography (though I admit this is a rarity among pornographers). Yes, the cruelty is there against both men and women, but the cruelty towards women is more sexually-oriented, and hence more relevant to the discussion than the cruelty our culture exacts on the males (which I do not deny). As for mainstream attitudes towards sex, I think it's far more liberal than it has ever been (which is a big step forward), but it seems something is lost as well - perhaps it was never there, and I'm just suffering from a sort of delusiory nostalgia for an imagined past that serves to support my dreams of a well-adjusted society. Perhaps such a time never existed. I don't know if I'd call us healthy though... perhaps it's a healthier time than we have had for many an age, but the sexual cruelty and sex-commodification can't be discluded from the equation.
I agree that much of porn is problematic, but see that as a result of its being bad porn. I don't at all agree with your implication that porn is intrinsically harmful.
You seek to decontextualise the contextual. "Facials" are indeed greatly degrading to many, but only within the context of their disagreement, dislike, and overt or covert refusal of the act. I'm not a big fan of facials myself, but have had many women heatedly defend them to me. They were not all seeking degradation.
Nor can porn strip sex of meaning. The meaninlessness of sex to many is merely reflected in the pornography they produce. Shallow porn cannot exist without people with shallow views of sex.
I think that we will agree, though, that mainstream modern pornography reflects too thin a slice of human sexual expression to be allowed to constitute the principal basis of a young person's sexual understanding. But the same is true for cinematic expression in general.
Sex is no more or less commoditizable than anything else, really. After all, we can similarly argue that restaurants have worked to impoverish our societies by breaking down an appreciation for the sacramental human interplay that occurs when food is shared in another's house, when safety is extended to guests. But have they really?
I say that to blame porn, or restaurants, is to make scapegoats, and to dodge our collective responsibility for not valuing what we should.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-20 11:17 pm (UTC)But what was he nabbed for? Watching porn?
Oh wait, I have to read the article, heh...*is embarrassed*
(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-20 11:18 pm (UTC)I love how you post such interesting articles on your journal. I need to start doing that.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-21 02:39 am (UTC)At least it appears, from the story, that the major issue isn't the porn (although there was an indecency charge), but that he was watching a movie while driving. Which is as it should be.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-21 06:49 am (UTC)I don't think that's the impulse of a healthy psyche...
I'm starting to think that porn is really poisonous, at least in the way it's produced and treated in the mass-market.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-21 10:51 am (UTC)However, your point makes sense. Long periods of driving would require stimulation to keep the driver awake, but porn would just be distracting it seems.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-21 07:54 am (UTC)Most people that I have seen who drive for several hours a day have developed arguably dangerous habits in order to deal with the boredom.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-21 09:29 am (UTC)As for porn being poisonous... It's a nasty industry in many ways. Not all unlike Hollywood, though, at least for the unimportant people in the business.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-21 10:59 am (UTC)So, the new culture, the new generation is growing up disconnected from one of the greatest connective forces in the universe. I have seen and experienced the degrading effects of culture's mass-subsumption of porn into its matrix, but I haven't the energy to go into that here...
*whistles innocently*
Date: 2004-02-21 11:04 am (UTC)Re: *whistles innocently*
Date: 2004-02-22 07:01 am (UTC)I must admit, it's a sexual identity I can't get my head around.
maybe it's just the leo in me, but it makes me cringe when I see someone humiliated or degraded...
Re: *whistles innocently*
Date: 2004-02-22 07:16 am (UTC)I've asked myself this several times. I can't come up with a completely satisfactory answer.
I see it as an offshoot of the standard submissive personality.
Now that I'm older and can examine my own sexuality more critically, I kind of see it as being privy to a male orgasm as up close as possible. It provides a different sense of ejaculation that one does not get when engaging in fellatio, for example.
I also personally enjoy watching my partner engage in self-pleasure, so a facial is a combination of getting to watch that as well as being involved in an extremely intimate way.
I guess it's just a matter of perspective.
Re: *whistles innocently*
Date: 2004-02-22 07:57 am (UTC)thanks for sharing :)
I think I understand a bit better now.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-21 10:34 pm (UTC)Actually, I know a large number of women (and men) who LIKE receiving facials, including people who'd never seen it before in porn (or seen any porn at all).
Porn is poisonous to our human inter-relations, and it degrades the erotic essence that is the foundational alchemy of all things - by commoditizing it, sex just becomes another thing to have, but the depth and meaning has been stripped from the common understanding of it.
I have to disagree with this as a generalization. I know too many people who have used pornography as a positive force in their sexual lives, as well as a number of people who have used this same pornography as a platform for enhancing their erotic essense and as an integral element of their own foundational alchemy - actors like Annie Sprinkle and Nina Hartley, writers like Anias Nin. I am personally familiar with people who use pornography as a deliberate act of spirituality in action, such as the webmistress of http://www.ropelover.com
I understand the sort of 'commoditizing' that you are talking about, but I don't see pornography as the engine of that. That commoditization is an integral part of modern culture, from McDonalds to MTV to self-help infomercials. The twisted sexual images found in the mainstream media and advertising do much more to degrade the erotic essense of life by consistantly displaying sanitized eroticism with a conflicting undertone of guilt and accusation for responding to that.
This is not to say that the porn industry is not a nasty degrading place in many areas. However, I've personally observed too many powerful and meaningful events, organizations and individuals that are the result of that same industry to use to as the scape goat that most people insist it on being.
So, the new culture, the new generation is growing up disconnected from one of the greatest connective forces in the universe.
Alienation from the Divinity inherent in sexuality is not the exclusive domain of the 'new culture'. While pornography is more accessable in many ways today, it hs existed for millenia in various forms, from low-class courtesans in Ancient Greece to the writings of the Marquis De Sade in France to burlesque shows in the 1920s to the hot lesbian action section on Kazaa.
Pornographuy is not the problem. It's not even the symptom. But it is an easy target.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-22 07:19 am (UTC)you're right - the commoditization of sex is not really porn-related at all, but cultural, driven by ecomonic forces. I agree as well that porn can be used spiritually - I use it for my own sex magicks and solo tantric practices.
The porn industry itself I haven't much problem with - there are some bad patches to be sure, and I suppose my lament is for the porn of better days, porn done with context, story, enjoyment of those participating.
However, much porn on the web is filled with content which does (IMO) pose a threat to mental hygiene (I can't believe I just used that term): rape, child porn, snuff, etc. I fear this may be a match to the powderkeg that lies in the hearts of all those repressed angry men (of which there are many, I'm positive).
I've seen relationships torn apart by porn addictions, and I worry about what having access to extremely hardcore porn will do to developing minds; adolescents and the like may have trouble contextualizing the content.
But in the end, porn isn't the problem - as you say, it's just an easy scapegoat. The problem lies in our culture's attitude towards sex itself.
I was projecting the problem onto the porn industry (which has taken some questionable turns lately, though I realize they are simply responding to a market demand - so again the problem lies in the culture that demands to see rape and violence towards women).
Re:
Date: 2004-02-22 07:31 am (UTC)anyway, you're right: some women do enjoy facials, but rarely are the women in porn enjoying them - it which case it does seem to present itself as an act of violence. Once again though, this would be an issue of bad porn, rather than porn itself.
I did overgeneralize - there is much good porn out there (I've got a hard-drive full of it). My vitriol against porn was directed (in intention anyway) against the porn which seems to exploit - the women involved are humiliated and abused, and it doesn't seem that they are enjoying it; they do it because they need the money.
Porn isn't really the problem, as
I don't believe porn itself is the problem, but it is the manifestation of a problem, and as such it screams out our cultural attitudes. I find what it says to be disturbing, hence my litany against porn.
There should be a linguistic distinction between bad porn and good porn, because they exist in different sexual realms. Discourse on pornography becomes difficult when there is no clear language with which to discuss such things.
but maybe that's just a cop-out, and maybe there's no problem at all. Perhaps the world is oving along exactly as it needs to, bad porn and all...
Re:
Date: 2004-02-22 07:40 am (UTC)Well, first of all, this isn't a gendered problem. Our cultures demand to see cruelty, period.
Secondly, I suspect that much of the reason for much porn being bad is not so much that people demand an absence of quality, but rather that badness is cheap and easy.
Thirdly, my view on the humiliation of women in the porn industry is that it is a byproduct, ironically enough, of sexual repression. Black markets always get and produce the dregs. Healthy, self-assured women seldom go into illegal professions unless the rewards are overwhelmingly worth it.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-22 07:55 am (UTC)I agree that our culture demands to see cruelty, and that in itself isn't gendered, but there is a gendered component to it. There is an aggressiveness, a hostility even, towards women and their sexuality (I see it in North America anyway).
Back in the days of sexual freedom (short as they were, and perhaps illusory besides), good porn was produced because sex was celebrated as something joyous - even healthy, self-assured people produced porn, because the cultural attitude towards sex was more healthy as well (though perhaps that's a matter of opinion). Making porn in those circumstances was more an artistic endeavor than one of generating income.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-22 08:52 am (UTC)I disagree.
I would argue that good people are going into porn just as frequently now as before, but that the good porn that they produce is drowned in oceans of dreck.
Despite the earlier relative prominence of good porn, "Pornstar" has never been a mainstream-acceptable occupation.
When do you think the mainstream attitudes towards sex were more healthy than they are now?
Re:
Date: 2004-02-22 11:55 am (UTC)Yes, the cruelty is there against both men and women, but the cruelty towards women is more sexually-oriented, and hence more relevant to the discussion than the cruelty our culture exacts on the males (which I do not deny).
As for mainstream attitudes towards sex, I think it's far more liberal than it has ever been (which is a big step forward), but it seems something is lost as well - perhaps it was never there, and I'm just suffering from a sort of delusiory nostalgia for an imagined past that serves to support my dreams of a well-adjusted society. Perhaps such a time never existed.
I don't know if I'd call us healthy though...
perhaps it's a healthier time than we have had for many an age, but the sexual cruelty and sex-commodification can't be discluded from the equation.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-22 12:52 am (UTC)I agree that much of porn is problematic, but see that as a result of its being bad porn. I don't at all agree with your implication that porn is intrinsically harmful.
You seek to decontextualise the contextual. "Facials" are indeed greatly degrading to many, but only within the context of their disagreement, dislike, and overt or covert refusal of the act. I'm not a big fan of facials myself, but have had many women heatedly defend them to me. They were not all seeking degradation.
Nor can porn strip sex of meaning. The meaninlessness of sex to many is merely reflected in the pornography they produce. Shallow porn cannot exist without people with shallow views of sex.
I think that we will agree, though, that mainstream modern pornography reflects too thin a slice of human sexual expression to be allowed to constitute the principal basis of a young person's sexual understanding. But the same is true for cinematic expression in general.
Sex is no more or less commoditizable than anything else, really. After all, we can similarly argue that restaurants have worked to impoverish our societies by breaking down an appreciation for the sacramental human interplay that occurs when food is shared in another's house, when safety is extended to guests. But have they really?
I say that to blame porn, or restaurants, is to make scapegoats, and to dodge our collective responsibility for not valuing what we should.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-22 07:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-22 02:04 pm (UTC)*giggles*
Date: 2004-02-22 02:11 pm (UTC)