(extended post added below on Sunday morning)
Some random thoughts …
At one time, the Supreme Court’s notion was that porn was sort of local. The idea was that each community would decide for itself what was obscene because what would seem OK to people in Times Square in New York City would not be OK in Chickasha, OK. That idea is long ago antiquated by the internet. The porn we see on the ‘net is global.
Porn is less isolated now. Once upon a time, porn was pretty much a solitary experience. You read a magazine and looked at the pictures in embarrassed and alienated circumstances. No more. A very tiny sliver of the population engaged in Bondage play or sado-mashochism and while that community of people is still small, its ranks have grown and its practices have become more acceptable to society by sheer exposure. I dare say that in fact very few people would have any interest in being hung from the ceiling by fishhooks in their skin, but a large number of people have now seen such things on the ‘net.
I recently watched Kevin Smith’s “Clerks II” and I’m a big fan of the director of “Chasing Amy” and “Dogma”. In Clerks II, there’s an extended joke about an internet porn fetish, ATM (ass to mouth). In a mainstream movie?
Rather recently, I’ve written about an essay I read about Americans and their overall enjoyment of sex in the internet porn world. What goes on in cyberspace, it seems, affects the real world and those in the 20-30s dating scene find themselves faced with the prospect of attempting to have real world sex that competes with what goes on in porn videos.
Like it or not, porn is a multi-billion dollar industry — yes, billion with a “b”.
Larry Flynt, who publishes a gynecologically fixated porn mag called “Hustler”, is a hero to many who prize the 1st Amendment and to others of us who hate the hypocracy of the Republican Party for his sustained drive to “out” those who proclaim their goody-two-shoes philosophy in public and practice porn in private. Porn has put Larry Flynt in the “superrich” category.
Some parts of the internet porn “industry” flat flabbergast me. I’m left in amazed, bemused, conflicted confusion.
To start with, internet porn is boring. I mean really boring. Really really boring. And, I say this as a man who finds sex endlessly fascinating. To the extent I find something sexual “naughty” in my own personal pantheum of porn, there’s nothing like the internet to take the fun out of it.
I would like to think that internet porn is mostly confined to sleazy, lowlife dullards and those who are so physically challenged in some way that porn is their only sexual outlet. The facts won’t bear that out. The bottom quintile of the economic classes aren’t on the ‘net browsing porn because they don’t have DSL-empowered computers. The high speed, high quality porn that makes so much money is being sold to middle and upper-middle class men with powerful home computers on broadband connection.
It is not the permanent economic underclass that drives porn and it is not the intellectually challenged with IQs of 110 and less. Porn on the net is the province of the working class and middle class guy who works right next to you and eats at the next table at Chili’s or Olive Garden. It is college fraternity guys and older divorced guys who drive porn.
I’ll tell you who else drives porn. Women. They are the sina qua non of porn. Porn requires an endless supply of women who want to engage in sex for show and those women cannot be and are not women who are left out of the dating game due to some perceived physical deficiency. Porn women are large breasted and small waisted, in the main, and rarely over the age of 30.
I know that some of you who may be reading this have had an experience with dating sites like Match.com or Yahoo Personals. Have you looked at the “soft porn” dating sites? There are literally thousands of photographs of ordinary women exposing themselves, often grotesquely, in search of a “NSA” (No Strings Attached) hook-up. There are, of course, “swinger” sites and “nudist” sites and “escorts” for hire on the ‘net.
Porn, loosely defined, spills out into our mainstream entertainments of course. Have you been to a site called “Mr.Skin”? It’s a collection of those few seconds or minutes of mainstream films in which some actress is exposed and/or engaging in some kind of bad behavior. Think Charlize Theron in “The Devil’s Advocate” with Al Pacino or Halle Berry in “Monster’s Ball” with Billy Bob Thornton. Better yet, think of the thinly disquised porn of “9 1/2 Weeks”. Hollywood producers make cold calculations about the effect on ticket sales of such scenes and they are put into the movie to bring in the young males, then stripped out by the internet porn industry for resale to the same ticket buyers.
Porn, again loosely defined, also invades our television. HBO and Showtime every bit as much as the Playboy Channel sell us porn by cable every single week of the year and even broadcast television is all about shows with some sexual content. Rap music is filled with not just sex, but raw and brutal sex.
Strap on your seat belts and grab onto something, because here’s where I take one of those hard lefts onto another track.
I think porn is the canary bird in the coal mine of American civilization. I think this inexplicable spread of porn is a signal that the air is getting bad and our society has some hidden rot and decay that is really starting to stink. I think porn is the stench of gangrene in the blood. It is not the sickness itself, it is the stench of the sickness; the outward symptom of an inward rot.
Do you remember the pictures of people going to see a movie in the middle 60s at the Tower Theater? Girls in white gloves and boys in slacks and tie? Don’t see that any more, do we?
The Mom and Dad with two kids family is no longer the norm in our society. Single parent homes are by far the most numerous in today’s America.
Most jobs for most adults in America had health insurance, paid vacation and retirement plans as EXPECTED benefits. One adult’s salary supported an entire family. No longer. If you have those benefits today, the likelihood is that you work at a government job.
Fifty years ago, Dwight Eisenhower’s biggest problems as president were that the Russians had just launched Sputnik and there was a good chance the steel industry would go on strike, threatening a recession. No worries about a steel strike these days since there is no American steel industry, much less a steel union with power to shut it down. Is there anything about your SUV that is really any better than a 1957 Chevy with a flathead six or 283 V8? Who would you rather have as president today: Ike or Bush? Can you imagine Bush being elected in 1957?
Just to make things easier, btw, I am not saying porn is the cause of any of these things, only a symptom of other deteriorating subsystems of our society.
I think that as a nation, America has made the mistake of living a life unexamined. Things happen, technology rolls on and medicine creates more miracles, and we just don’t think about it. So, there’s internet porn, so what you gonna do about it? So what? So, people live longer, so what? So, SUVs are insane, so what? Let the selfish, self-centered assholes drive them, who cares? Yesterday’s parents didn’t like Elvis and today’s parents don’t like Fitty Cent, so what? It has always been so.
Quite right. So what?
Are we going to be able to eliminate porn? No. It’s been tried and has always failed.
Nevertheless, something tells me that we, all of us, the entire nation and maybe all of western civilization, need to take a step back and take stock. We are going to be faced very soon with looking at a large part of our lives as we daily experience them with respect to the environment. We will have no choice but to address the SUVs and how we use water and plow the ground and use air conditioners and heaters. When Social Security was first introduced in 1935, a bare one or two percent of the population could be expected to live significantly beyond the age of 65. Within the next seven years, about a quarter of the population will be older than 65 and have a reasonable expectation of living to 80 and beyond. This is the direct effect of advances in medicine. We’re certainly going to have to step back and take stock of that fact and most especially the fact that a very large porportion of those senior citizens do not have any other retirement plan. You can bitch about it or think about it or whatever, but very very soon the global economy is going to bite our ass hard: The devaluing of the dollar in the face of trillions of dollars of debt to finance W’s wars and the rise of the price of oil to the $100/bbl will affect how you live your daily life and it will impoverish you. Dick Cheney nonwithstanding, deficits do matter and we are on the verge of finding out just how much they matter.
Part of what scares me the most about all this is that those who we might need to count on to help take stock are entirely incapable of doing so in a rational and productive way. No one reads and no one knows crap about history or economics or politics or ethics. Not only have we lost our way, we’ve lost any way to find a better course. We’re too busy dialing up internet porn to be bothered with spending the same hour thinking about what we’ve lost, what we’ve gained and where we want to go from here.
I want to write more on this topic, but I have this overwhelming need to go pull the covers over my head and hide for awhile. Maybe it’ll just go away if I do that. If I come out from under the covers, I think I’d like to write something about how much I hate relativism as a social philosophy.
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