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A couple of months ago we discussed the cultural legacy of the Playboy mag of all things under an effort post by @FiveHourMarathon. I was reminded of this by a recent lame-ass political scandal in Hungary in which a local/district volunteer coordinator of the main opposition party and apparently a single(?) mom was doxxed by some pro-government journos as a former porner / sex worker. Technically I’m supposed to call her a former porn actress, but the actual level of ‘acting’ that is involved in all of this makes me decide against doing so; supposedly she also appeared in a grand total of one casting video only (by Pierre Woodman) so calling her an actress would be a big stretch either way. Pretty much the only factor fueling this whole thing was that the party leader and MEP was pictured shaking hands with the ‘lady’ during some public events.
What does Playboy have anything to do with this, you might ask? Well, said party leader decided it’d be a swell idea to reverse the accusation of sleaziness and would also be some sort of clever gotcha to point out that a 51-year-old woman who’s a government commissioner and a former ‘Secretary of State for Sports’ (if you’re one of the few female politicians in Eastern Europe, it’s the sort of government position of lesser importance you can ever hope to fulfill, I guess) appeared in a photoshoot in the local edition of Playboy ages ago.
Anyway, I’m aware that culture wars are waged with maximal cynicism, dishonesty and opportunism, and this is a case of culture-warring alright; no need to remind me of that. Still, I found myself asking the rhetorical question: who the heck actually believes that posing for a photoshoot in a completely mainstreamed, slick, high-class magazine which eventually shifted to a women's fashion and lifestyle brand is the cultural/moral/social equivalent of anonymously getting your holes stuffed and swallowing cum/urine on camera for a handful of cash?
They’re equivalent because they’re both equally fine, and both equally unworthy of further attention.
Commodifying sex is anti-social.
So if they do it for free, is that ok then? Thereby de-commodifying it.
Granted, commodities can be given away freely too, I suppose. But if I were to say, write a poem and put it on my own public blog for free, I don’t think anyone would call the poem a commodity. I’m just creating something and choosing to give it freely. So it seems like I should be able to create and give away my own porn and have that be not-a-commodity too.
See that's the problem. Unlike your poem, sex is not a good, service or other such thing. It's a relationship you have with others. The implications of which do not cleanly stop and start at the will of contracts.
This fuzziness alongside its other peculiar characteristics (irrational draw, propensity to create children, etc) is why it is not treated the same as other things morally by most societies. And why attempts to use reductionism to map it onto benign activities are wrong headed.
Drugs have similar problems that also make them special in this way.
I think that there are plenty of people (myself among them) for whom porn is simply the most ethical way to deal with their sex drive.
I mean, sure, porn is to sex as instant noodles are to cooking and eating a nice meal with other people. Just as good sex is far superior to jerking off to porn, enjoying a nice meal with friends is much nicer than shoveling ramen into one's pie-hole. On the other hand, porn and instant meals are also much more limited in how bad they can go. No main dish which is completely burned, eating in icy silence because someone is pissed or suffocating because someone forgot your peanut allergy.
Happily, while living from ramen does not go too well in the long term, humans do not actually require high quality sex to survive. For people who find themselves in a situation where getting laid would require ethically questionable behavior or a lot of work, or who would prefer sex in the context of a romantic relationship but also have trouble finding such a relationship or worry about the potential drama, just masturbating to smut or porn seems like a totally fine solution.
I would argue that no society has reached a cultural equilibrium since effective contraceptives became widespread.
Consider: a nomad tribe which moves around, perhaps mostly sticking to certain lands but sometimes being driven a bit in one direction or driving a rival tribe from some good nearby land will have a fundamentally different relationship with the land -- at cultural equilibrium -- from an agrarian tribe which has plowed 'their' land for generations.
As humans who have recently found ourselves in a world where PIV sex no longer automatically results in pregnancies, we recognize that the cultural rules of old are no longer suitable, just as a neolithic tribe who had (magically, suddenly) discovered agriculture would. It is certainly not the case that throwing all rules which now seem vaguely adjacent to the old status quo seems good, "we will no longer eat animals because grain is our food" might seem obvious but will probably not become an equilibrium rule. Likewise, "now that unwanted pregnancies are out of the questions, having sex can become just as banal as shaking hands" might not be an equilibrium take. Of course, insisting that nothing has changed would be like saying "just leave the fields, we have to follow the herds".
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What similar problems do drugs have? If videogames cause similar brain signals, aren't those basically drugs? Maybe it's my wrong-headed reductionism speaking, but the reasons why societies treat drugs differently seem like boring practical reasons, not high-minded spiritual ones.
No. The difference is games produce natural-brain chemicals whereas drugs are alien to brain and produce much longer effect.
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Boring practical reasons are high minded spiritual ones. There is no difference except maintenance through time. It's a mistake to think that virtues are the concerns of some untouched far away realm and not the common lives of common men of the common time.
They make reasonable men do unreasonable things.
Other vectors of addiction can do the same, but nowhere near at the same rates. Few men have killed because of a video game. Legions have for sex and drugs.
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When and how did you arrive at the idea that sex is a relationship (this particular kind of distinguished relationship, as you conceive of it)? Did you only decide that porn was a bad thing afterwards, on the basis of this conception, or did you already believe that porn was a bad thing beforehand and this was just one more piece of supporting evidence?
This isn't a gotcha, I have no agenda here. I'm just genuinely and sincerely interested to learn more about how you think about these issues.
Uh, where did you arrive at the idea that it isn’t? It’s a paired activity, kinda inherently a relationship there.
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Arguably it started when I read Plato as a teenager, but that's not what convinced me of it. I think it's about when I had friends of mine get back together for the third time after swearing each other off. That's about when I knew my mother was right both to say that sex makes people retarded and that it connects people on a special level other things do not.
But time has done nothing but confirm this for me. I've hung out with many a people of little virtue (I've probably had more candid conversations with sex workers of more genders than anyone on this website), and their existential angst seemed to be proportional to the amount of casual sex they had.
A decent amount of them openly whined to me about feeling desensitized and frustrated at how unable to feel anything for anyone they were.
Now I refuse to conclude something too specific from my life experience, because it's not really generally applicable, but I will certainly stand by the ancient idea that sex is special and that carnal knowledge is not like other acts in its implications on the psyche of the participants. That alone seems undeniable to me.
I do not actually believe pornography to be evil. At least not inherently. I've stood by its artistic merits and associated freedoms here before on numerous occasions.
I used to have far more liberal views on this particular matter, but these days I think it probably needs some effective regulation or at least social framework, like we do for tobacco or alcohol.
The complete free for all of hyperreal stimuli seems a bit unwise, seeing as though I've had multiple friends make stupid life ruining decisions on account of it.
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Not the person you asked, but I was taught that sex was a relationship when I was taught about sex. I was also taught that porn "was a bad thing"; it was obviously lustful, but why specifically that was a problem was left quite vague. The vast majority of my conceptual model of why porn is bad I learned through direct experience.
What's your moral/ethical model for binging/purging as a method for enjoying food? It seems to me to be another example of the moral structure you're curious about here; "people see this as wrong, but why?"
Ah, FC, FC. I believe it's been a little while since we last spoke.
During our earliest one-on-one conversations, I had us pegged as being very similar types of minds. Although in every conversation since then I've gathered more and more evidence to the contrary. That's not a bad thing, not at all; it just is what it is. Either way, you continue to make a surprisingly excellent sounding board for different arguments and ideas, perhaps because of your enviable generalized easygoing nature. And so I'm going to babble incoherently at you for a bit about the topic at hand, in the hopes that at least one person reading this will find that the words contained herein bring clarity to some aspect of their own experience. @IGI-111 will possibly be interested in this as well.
To be perfectly frank, I find most of the typically stated "rational" reasons for the animus against pornography -- "it makes sex workers feel bad", "it's too addictive", "it distracts men from finding a real partner" -- to be, essentially, distractions. They don't really strike me as psychologically realistic, they don't smell vigorous, y'know? They give the impression that something is still being concealed. "Sex is special and pornography is somehow a violation of what makes it special" -- ok, getting closer, but say more, special how? There are lots of "special" things in the world, but they don't all draw this level of persistent sustained ire.
Roughly, my thinking is that there are two principle psychological causes of the general unease that many people feel with pornography:
Either the animus springs from the same unconscious mythopoetic wellspring as the prohibition against graven images of God, or:
There is a primal fear of its sheer destructive potential that cannot be reduced to any "rational" factor; although the line between this point and the former is blurry, and they may very well be the same thing. For what could be more frightful than the wrath of God, the wrath that God very nearly visited upon the Israelites for worshiping the golden calf.
Don't for a second think that there is no relationship between God and sexuality. An image of sex is very nearly an image of God, it is reasonable to confuse them, there is a very real risk that people might start worshiping the image as an idol. Lacan thoroughly explores the indissociable link between the two in Seminar 20 (humorously enough, the very same seminar that features the infamous dictum "the sexual relationship does not exist"):
So, essentially, pornography is evil because it gets too close to recording the truth. It risks making a graven image out of this "extra" jouissance ("jouissance" being the French word for "enjoyment", but the specific connotation here is that it's an enjoyment built out of pain, an enjoyment that you can never actually possess for it would simply be the immolation of the subject, it is the "enjoyment" of Exodus 33:20: "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live"). That's not the sort of thing you can just put in a picture and go passing around willy nilly! God jealously guards his (her?) secrets.
Whenever I ask people why they think Steam should be allowed to suddenly and arbitrarily delist pornographic games, thus endangering the income of many small artists and game developers ( @gattsuru feel free to consider this a reply to your top level post as well), I am always hoping, begging that they say "because God said so". Because then I at least know they're being honest! They're attuned with themselves. I let them go in peace, I have nothing more to say. It is the sort of thing that God might plausibly say, after all. Maybe he did say that. Who am I to doubt?
Maybe people are just increasingly embarrassed now to say that it's because God said so? Or it could just be a result of where I tend to hang out. I should just go down to my local lower middle class church, because y'know the more salt-of-the-earth people, the ones who haven't had their minds poisoned by so many books and foreign cartoons, their "defense mechanisms" often aren't as developed, if we're going to use psychoanalytic language. They'll give it to me straight. If I ask them what they think of porn they'll say "the fuck's the matter with you? Don't you know anything? Haven't you read the Bible?" And that's really just the answer I was hoping for all along.
Some days I really just feel like I'm done with the whole "argument and debate" thing. Arguments are yesterday's news. What I'm interested in are the mythopoetic symbols that govern your psychic economy. That's where the real shit is. But how to get people to share? They're so often embarrassed to share, or they don't even know themselves. I suppose I could offer a trade -- my symbols for yours. I'm always willing to lay myself bare as far as my powers of introspection will allow me. This could be the next big evolution of internet discourse, huh? It's like "let's talk about our feelings" but on steroids. This idea really has some legs. Just you wait and see.
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