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To Revive Sex, Ban Porn (paywalled, but it's very short, and I'll quote the relevant bits):
It goes without saying that this bill, and any equivalent legislation, will not pass, even at the state level (at least not without some more shifting of the Overton window). But given the coordinated attack that is currently being launched on pornography (via payment processors and age verification laws) throughout the Western world, there are clearly a number of individuals who wish they could simply ban porn entirely.
Revive what, exactly? And suppress what?
To take one of the most basic consequences of a blanket ban on all content designed "to sexually arouse or gratify": pornographic art depicts a number of scenarios and ideas which are impossible to physically realize. These include but are not limited to: mind control, body swapping, magical gender transformations, transformation into animals, transformation into inanimate objects, inflation and shrinking, petrification, nullification (of the entire excretory and digestive system), exotic anatomy (authentic male pregnancy and birth, people with far more limbs than would ever be practical, etc), aliens, angels and demons, and undoubtedly many more that I'm forgetting.
Plainly, all of these concepts (insofar as they are presented in such a way that their sexual dimension is made manifest) would be straightforwardly suppressed by any blanket ban on pornography. We would end up with the curious consequence that they could find no expression in material reality whatsoever: neither through the act itself, nor through fiction. Which raises the obvious question as to why people would be so afraid of something that's impossible to begin with.
Man.
I gotta teach these kids about subtlety. They know nothing.
"Subtlety" is when you're sitting in front of the fireplace with your girl on a brisk Autumn afternoon, her head resting gently on your shoulder, everything going perfectly right with the world, the demonic forces that are constantly threatening to tear you apart have finally abated for once. But you realize -- and "realize" isn't even the right word for it honestly, because "realize" implies a definite instant where something leaps forward into consciousness and makes itself manifest for the first time, whereas the phenomenon we're dealing with here is a lot more indeterminate, it's something that's "always-already" (I hate that word but it is useful sometimes) hovering on the border between consciousness and unconsciousness, caught between two modalities, but we'll still use "realize" because it's the best word we've got -- you realize that as much as you love this girl, she will never be a 100 ft tall dragon who will take you into her dragon womb, connect an umbilical cord to you, and genetically rewrite your body so that you too become a dragon. And you have to live with that. It's something that you'll just have to deal with going forward. One day at a time. This is, we can hypothesize, if not a "subtle" feeling itself, then at least something that could aspire to be a gateway to subtle feelings.
If someone is experiencing physical sexual dysfunction, then they should of course address that.
But if you're feeling moral guilt over not being fully present, then my good ol' fashioned practical advice would be: stop. I give you permission to stop beating yourself up over it. "Full presence" is a mythological construct, a yearning for an unmediated pre-linguistic experience that can never be realized. So just don't worry about it anymore. (Perhaps dissolving some of these worries will dissolve some of the animus against pornography as well.)
Sure. But that's wokeism's fault, not the fault of pornography as such.
We might go so far as to suggest that the complexity of desire as such is best brought to the foreground in art, and not in "reality".
Yes, the gray areas of human nature, like bizarre and objectionable pornographic content, so why are you trying to ban it?
It's interesting to see how porn has become somewhat of an obsession not only at opposite sides of the political/cultural spectrum, but all across it. Depending on the group, it's an issue of free speech even if it is kind of icky, it's sexual expression, it's destroying the family and the children, it's an unavoidable by product of digital technology, it may be consenting adults - but also inextricably linked to human trafficking, and on and on and on.
My idea for why porn keeps occupying this position is because it forces a question that individualism doesn't resolve well. "Two consenting adults with a camera" paired with "a private person in their own home" should be a pretty cut and dry issue of personal privacy within the liberal tradition (as in philosophical-political liberal tradition - not the generally center left of left political movement of the post WW2 USA).
But it isn't. It has been, and always will be, more weighty than that. This is because sex is something significant. We've all heard some version of the joke about when the little kid accidentally walks in on his Mom and Dad and the quick thinking father pulls the covers up and informs the wayward youth that he and Mommy were just "wrestling." This is because wrestling is something that can easily occur in public. And people of wildly different ages and genders can wrestle with one another without causing alarm, until that "wrestling" goes too far or seems to be less than innocent (side note: avoid and Sandusky references in the comments, it's too obvious of a joke). There's some sort of hard-to-define "line" about physical touch that isn't necessarily sexual but could be. This is where we get to use the famous line of "I can't necessarily define pornography, but I know it when I see it".
Individualism can't demarcate that line effectively because we all have an innate sense that sex is something more than wrestling, more than shaking hands, more than a hug, more than laughing together. But how much more and to who / whom and in what context will be defined an infinite number of ways by billions of different subjects. To use an complementary example; define "horny." We all feel it (okay, I guess Scott doesn't. Whatever, nerd) but we don't feel it like we do heat, cold, wind, or wet (settle down). There's no danger in feeling horny for an extended period of time (no four hour dick jokes, please) and it pretty much self resolves one way or another (seriously, no dick jokes here!). But define "horny" for me. Don't cop out and say "The imminent feeling of sexual desire and arousal." I mean quantify and specific define it in general for all people. You can't. And you can't define porn either.
Even worse, the inability to define porn doesn't mean we can agree to disagree. One man's hot fetish is another man's "eww who the fuck looks at this shit?!" It can, and does, trigger a disgust reaction. All of a sudden, a subjective taste is catapulted, potentially, into an object sense of not only moral outrage but hostility to a private and vulnerable act (sex).
And so people try to bridge this gap with all of those secondary arguments; free speech / expression etc. Where non-individualists have at least much more cohesive and simple argumentative advantage is in plainly stating "Sex is special. No one person or even a group of people get's to say it isn't special. We should make special rules to protect the special things." It doesn't matter who finds what inherently "sexual" in nature. All that matters is that, should such a circumstance occur, we all agree that it is handled with a strict sense of decorum, discretion, respect, and sensitivity -- we keep "it" sacred.
So the problem with porn isn't what constitutes porn or the subject evaluation of pornographic content, it's that such content exists in ways that betray and lower its conceptual weight in society. Having a nudey mag stashed under your mattress in 1979 was to be in possession of a talisman of great power. That conceptual weight is no longer the case when every person with a cell phone has, in a Schoredinger's cat sort of way, unlimited insane-o porn in their pocket at all times.
I don't have a solution - in a legal sense - to the porn-free speech tension. I could see a kind of "Canadian Prostitution" paradoxical structure where having porn and acting in porn is legal but producing or facilitating the production of porn is not. Then, with a lot of prosecutorial discretion, amateurs who want to get weird all of the internet aren't targeted, but scammy/scummy bro-dude production studios are.
In a conceptual or philosophical sense, the solution to porn is realizing that is is significant inherently because of it's inherent sexual nature and then making the personal and active choice to avoid it in order to better preserve the better nature of sex in and of itself.
Sorry for taking so long to respond to this. These are the kinds of replies that still make TheMotte worthwhile, so I appreciate it, I truly do.
No arguments there.
Perhaps. But, what kinds of rules?
The Bible is special too. But Christians don't think we should ban the Bible in order to protect it. They think we should disseminate it as widely as possible precisely because it's sacred and it brings people into contact with the sacred. (In fact they arrange regular mass public gatherings where they come together to worship that which is considered sacred. Apply the same logic to sexuality and...)
How do we demarcate the sacred things that need to be disseminated from the sacred things that need to be protected? Do we have a schema outlining the different modalities in which something may be sacred?
Maybe Protestant Christians, perhaps, but I know plenty of Catholics, at least, who think the Bible should have been kept in Latin and read in whole only by priests.
Fair enough! Catholics have always been very tolerant of iconography of Jesus though.
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