A anonymous comment in my journal, which I suspect probably comes from Qaz:
A real bunch of right-wing wack jobs for ya, Sheer:
http://www.rochesternow.org/porn.html
And by response to it below:
Actually, yes, exactly.
While the tone of the article is entirely reasonable, there are several things taht they assert that I think are somewhat false-to-fact:
We feel that pornography is harmful to women and that as women we have the right to live in a society free of this harm.
This is the first one I want to attack – because I have a long list of beefs with it. The first one is that I feel that football inherently devalues human life by showing that violence – real, bloody violence – as a part of a game is acceptable. Can I demand that my views be used to censor this game that 90 million americans enjoy?
There’s this little thing called the first amendment. WHich is just as well, because if we removed every piece of content that anyone found objectionable, shortly we’d have no content left. I happen to think the bible does a rather good job of demeaning women, can we have it censored?
We dare not grow old or become overweight
Depends on what kind of porn you’re watching, now doesn’t it? I know of fetish porn where the whole *point* is being overweight. Different people are turned on by different things – and one of the beauties of the internet is that everyone can get exactly what they want. I don’t go for porn with perfect body types – perhaps the author of this article does.. 😉
More importantly, pornography frequently eroticizes violence.
Not any that *I* enjoy watching, but yes, you’re correct, it does. However, the people who enjoy this sort of play undoubtedly understand that it is just play. And if we’re going to complain about what people enjoy looking at, isn’t porn sort of a silly place to start? How about the television commercials that show that lying in the name of profit is okay? (Or the political canidates that show the same thing?). Or, how about the commercials that imply that you will only be popular if you are young and beautiful and buy product X? How about football, aforementioned, which shows that violence can be fun? Or children’s cartoons which show that violence is funny? Or COPS, which implies that violence performed against citizens is something to be proud of – we should definately beat up people caught selling plants!
However, we do feel that misogynistic sexual entertainment for men portrays the humiliation of women as “sexy” and presents women as two-dimensional beings.
Well, except that it’s just entertainment, just fiction, and almost everyone over the age of 12 understands this. Why not complain about mysoginistic TV shows like Married With Children? In porn there’s usually very little actual social interaction, so it’s blatently clear that it’s a fantasy world. (Actually, some porn has taken to having disclaimers at the front of the tape, something I ran into lately that amused me so much that I cut just the disclaimer with a video editor and threw the rest of the video clip away (it wasn’t very good, but the disclaimer was hilarious). But anyway, back to my original point – in television shows, there’s not nearly as much framing to indicate that the work is truly fictional.. why aren’t the authors complaining about this instead?
I never said that porn was fundamentally good – I said that it’s a very, very small evil compared with a whole lot of very large ones. And it does have it’s place and purpose.. to help single men deal with their sexual frustrations in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone.
It’s just a visual representation of what they would be imagining anyway. Or would the authors also outlaw imagination?
Eventually, viewing enough pornography can desensitize all of us so that we do not even question the devaluation of women in our society.
I don’t agree with this at all either. I don’t think that porn has in any way desensitized me to the putting down of women, or any other group for that matter.
We believe that the number of rapes and assaults on women would be drastically reduced — but not entirely eliminated — if pornography were to disappear
And on what data do you base that assumption? I think that it would probably remain approximately the same, or more likely increase slightly.
Have you done a study to see if rapists consume more porn per capita than the average male? Perhaps you’d like to tell me about how all those catholic preists have been buying ‘PlayPrePubecentBoy’ all these years? Can we please try and apply a little bit of reality to our assertions?
Many young males state that their first sexual experience was masturbating to pornography. Think of what this pornography then says to these men — that women like to be treated like objects, treated with contempt, and enjoy eroticized violence.
You have got to be kidding me. I didn’t get any such sense at all. You are in the twilight zone, my friend, and reality has apparently passed you by. Why don’t you go ask a few 14 year olds if they feel like women should be treated with contempt? And then ask them where they got that idea, if so? I bet you the answer is far more likely to be Eminem than Playboy.
Who benefits from pornography? Who finances pornography? Who is behind the camera? Who buys it?
Normal, healthy single men buy it, because they enjoy it and it helps them to avoid sexual frustration. They don’t, however, entertain any thoughts that it is in any way real. All one needs to do is try to approach a pretty girl in a bar to learn how fundamentally unreal it is. 😉
Or is it the majority of us who want to live in a society which does not allow the subordination, degradation or violation of women?
What you forget is that your entire article is devoted to the degredation of men – stating that we’re such simple and mentally incapable beings that we can’t enjoy a work of fiction without thinking that it’s a basic reality and that we can now go out and perform the acts we see depicted in the real world on anyone we want – or that we would think that there was anything real at all about the work of fiction portrayed – or that it was okay to think of real – i.e. not fictional – people in that way.
Personally, I think porn is *better* than the alternative.. which is to imagine the same sorts of things, only with people that you know because it’s far easier for our imaginations to handle the rendering of people we’re familiar with.
In short, and to sum up:
The first amendment protects speech for a good reason – because otherwise, there will always be some nut job wanting to impress their morals on you for what might sound like perfectly sane and reasonable reasons.
—————————————————————————–
ICE-T LYRICS
“Freedom of Speech”
[Intro]
A-yo Ice, man. I’m working on this term paper for college. What’s the
First Amendment?
[Verse 1]
Freedom of Speech, that’s some motherfuckin’ bullshit
You say the wrong thing, they’ll lock your ass up quick
The FCC says “Profanity – No Airplay”?
They can suck my dick while I take a shit all day
Think I give a fuck about some silly bitch named Gore?
Yo PMRC, here we go, raw
Yo Tip, what’s the matter? You ain’t gettin’ no dick?
You’re bitchin’ about rock’n’roll, that’s censorship, dumb bitch
The Constitution says we all got a right to speak
Say what we want Tip, your argument is weak
Censor records, TV, school books too
And who decides what’s right to hear? You?
Hey PMRC, you stupid fuckin’ assholes
The sticker on the record is what makes ’em sell gold
Can’t you see, you alcoholic idiots
The more you try to suppress us, the larger we get
[Verse 2]
[You have the right to remain silent]
Fuck that right! I want the right to talk
I want the right to speak, I want the right to walk
Where I wanna, yell and I’m gonna
Tell and rebel every time I’m on a
Microphone on the stage cold illin’
The knowledge I drop will be heard by millions
We ain’t the problems, we ain’t the villains
It’s the suckers deprivin’ the truth from our children
You can’t hide the fact, Jack
There’s violence in the streets every day, any fool can recognise that
But you try to lie and lie
And say America’s some motherfuckin’ apple pie
Yo, you gotta be high to believe that
You’re gonna change the world by a sticker on a record sleeve
Cos once you take away my right to speak
Everybody in the world’s up shit creek
[Verse 3]
Let me tell you about down south
Where a motherfucker might as well not even have a mouth
Columbus, Georgia, said they’d lock me up
If I got on the stage in my show and said “Fuck”
So I thought for a minute and said “No,
I wasn’t even gonna do a damned show”
Cos for me to change my words from my rhymes
Is never gonna happen cos there’s no sell outs on mine
But I vowed to get those motherfuckers one day
They even arrested Bobby Brown and Cool J
Yo, they got their’s comin’, cos I’m mad and I’m gunnin’
Homeboys, and there’s no runnin’
I’m gonna tell you how I feel about you
No bull, no lies, no slack, just straight fact
Columbus, Georgia, you can suck my dick
You ain’t nothin’ but a piece of fuckin’ shit on the damned map
[Verse 4]
Freedom of Speech, let ’em take it from me
Next they’ll take it from you, then what you gonna do?
Let ’em censor books, let ’em censor art
PMRC, this is where the witch hunt starts
You’ll censor what we see, we read, we hear, we learn
The books will burn
You better think it out
We should be able to say anything, our lungs were meant to shout
Say what we feel, yell out what’s real
Even though it may not bring mass appeal
Your opinion is yours, my opinion is mine
If you don’t like what I’m sayin’? Fine
But don’t close it, always keep an open mind
A man who fails to listen is blind
We only got one right left in the world today
Let me have it or throw The Constitution away
[Outro (Jello Biafra)]
What they’re trying to do with radio, with this, uh, McCarron-Walter
Act and a lot of other ways, is start by saying that they’re
protecting the public from wicked rock bands, or girlie magazines, or
whatever. But, if you follow the chain of dominoes that falls down,
what they’re really trying to do is shut off our access to information
itself.
If they can’t do it by law they know there’s other ways to do it.
