I think this has been posted here several times already, but I think there's almost certainly too much easy access to hardcore porn now, especially that kids can find, and I don't think saying this this makes me a SWERF.― This is Dance Anthems, have some respect (Camaraderie at Arms Length)
Not inherently! I guess the question is how one puts that into practice. Because the ways it gets put into practice, like COPPA, _do_ disproportionately negatively affect SWs. And that's something that... I genuinely do believe it's well-intentioned. I don't think COPPA is "conservative" even! It's a liberal law promoted and passed by liberals. Supporting sex workers isn't really a liberal idea, I don't think. It's one of the places where the difference between liberalism and leftism becomes clearest. Liberals see people who make their living doing force fem ASMR and say "God, that's awful, we need to help that person get a decent productive job working for a national defense contractor."
For me, it's not a matter of _access_ to porn, it's a matter of porn _quality_. Frankly the financial incentives when it comes to pornography are perverse. I don't mean that as a pun. I'm literally just trying to talk about this from an economic perspective here. The problem here, to my mind, is that by and large when it comes to _what sorts_ of porn are out there, we've let the market decide. When you do that, you see the same thing that nearly always happens. The biases of the people who are _currently_ in power are perpetuated. The rich don't just grow richer - they shape the environment so as to self-select for people who _share_ their values.
I've seen the sorts of porn that get circulated on the Internet, and I do think that porn is a reflection of the values of the ruling elites. Now, I'm not saying that those values are bad in and of themselves. Lots of people _do_ find a lot of value in pornography that perpetuates "traditional" social values, such as porn featuring a dominant man and a submissive woman.
The challenge is for me is that pornography is often seen as being _qualitatively different_ from other forms of entertainment media by dint of the subject matter it portrays. I honestly don't see pornography that way at all. ContraPoints did this really fascinating video about the Twilight series that addresses really strongly the idea of Twilight as a sexual fantasy, the way in which it gave rise to 50 Shades of Gray. I haven't read 50 Shades of Gray. I've heard lots of people in the kink scene talk shit about it. All I know about it is that the author was really into Thomas Tallis's "Spem in Alium". To me, personally, this points to the positive social value of what I'm just going to generalize as "smut". Because I don't think there's value in making this hard and fast distinction. One can gain a great deal of _positive social value_ from work that appeals to the _prurient interest_.
So to me the question isn't one of "porn" itself, but _what sorts of material_ we are defining as "hardcore porn" that's accessible to children.
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I guess I'm just gonna really get into this here, talk about my early experiences here.
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When I was a kid - this was before the Internet - my best friend said hey, come on over to my place, I got this porn tape. So I did, out of idle curiosity more than anything else. His mom was off at work. Some conservatives would say that's the problem, that his mom should have been at home taking care of him instead of leaving him alone to watch hardcore porn. His parents got divorced because his dad was mentally ill and abusive. I am not sure that my best friend would have been better served by having been raised in a traditional two-parent abusive household. I can deep dive several more levels on this. One could draw all sorts of conclusions, make all sorts of speculations. I later learned that this friend sexually assaulted my youngest sibling, who was eight years younger than both of us. I don't personally think this had anything to do with his watching a porn video with me when we were 12 or so. From what I know, which isn't a lot but which is more than I'd like, sexual assault is a learned behavior. Minors who commit sexual assault often experienced sexual assault themselves, and from that experience got the idea that sexual assault was normal. I don't know whether or not my friend was sexually assaulted or not. I don't personally care if he was or not. I am angry at him and I hate him for what he did to my sibling. Whether it's because he was sexually assaulted or because of that porn movie we watched or any number of other reasons, that doesn't fucking matter to me. On a personal level, what matters is what he did.
And what matters is that I didn't know about this for 30 years, because when my youngest sibling tried to talk about this, nobody believed him. Oh, no, not _him_. He was a Good Boy. He wouldn't do Something Like That.
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My dad was a _huge_ porn hound. He just had tremendous amounts of it. Never was able to use a computer, because every time he got one he'd fill it with malware from clicking every porn link on the Internet. He did better with adult bookstores. He worked hard to be discreet about it, though. We knew he watched porn, but we never saw him watching it. Never saw _what_ he was watching. He'd take us out to buy comic books and he'd go next door while we were looking at "Crisis on Infinite Earths" crossover stories and he'd come back with a package in a plain brown wrapper. He didn't pretend he didn't have a tremendous appetite for porn, but he was discreet about it.
Our mom was less discreet about it. After they got divorced, she would take out the catalogs he got in the mail and show them to us and make fun of the "sick shit" my dad was into.
I don't remember what was actually in those catalogs. I know they were from a place called Spartacus. Until I moved here to PDX, I didn't realize that Spartacus was local to here. It surprised me to learn that. We grew up on the East Coast. As far as I know, my dad has never even _been_ to Porland. Spartacus is still around. I'm not really entirely sure what kind of stuff they do. I think it's kink, generally? She Bop, the local female friendly sex boutique, has a lot of their stuff. I've seen local kink folks kind of look down on their stuff in the same way they do _50 Shades of Grey_. Honestly kinksters can be kind of snobby sometimes.
Like I said, I don't remember what exactly is in the catalog. When I last talked to my oldest brother, he said that he thought our mom showing him that catalogue was sexual abuse, that it fucked him up. Me? Shit, I don't know. It's not that simple.
A lot of the kink stuff is force fem. My understanding is that Spartacus does some of the kind of stuff. I guess probably some of that kind of stuff was in the catalog. I can't remember. I can't remember at all what was in that catalog. Do I personally think seeing that catalog _made_ me trans, that it _made_ me someone who liked kink? No, I don't. All of this stuff about, like, queer propaganda, about promoting these unhealthy lifestyles... you'll hear other queer people talk about it sometimes. We're fucking _surrounded_ by straight propaganda. Everywhere. In all forms. Like Garfield says, I'm not _immune_ to propaganda, but the straight media narratives, the straight porn, the complete and total insistence from all sides that the _only acceptable form_ of desire was cishet desire... none of it managed to turn me straight.
Did the stuff I saw fuck me up, though? Did it fuck me up when I tried to figure out stuff about my gender and all I found was people talking about their sissy fetishes? Yes. Yes, it did. Tranny porn is fucked up. It's completely fucked up. It's made for the benefit of people who want to objectify and fetishize trans people ... in a way that _affirms their own identity as cisgender, heterosexual men_. That's the thing that's fucked up about it. It's not the objectification or the fetishization. It's the _distortion_, it's the way there's this unwillingness to deal with the reality of attraction, the reality of desire. That, to me, that's the crux of it. It's not that it's explicit. It's not about "corrupting the minds of the youth". It's about...
I don't know how to explain this exactly, but to me, the essence of porn, the essence of what I find _evil_ about porn, is Bernini's sculpture "The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa". I know it's not normally seen as "pornographic", and this, I think, is kind of central to what I find evil about it. Bernini sculpts a woman in the throes of lust, and then claims it in the name of something which hates women, which hates lust. That disgusts me. That is odious to me. This, to me, is The Lie, the one Peter Hammill sings about in "The Lie (Bernini's St. Theresa)". I hate the lie, whether it's tranny porn or Sunday Mass. I hate both manifestations equally.
I don't know if that's conservative or what.
― Kate (rushomancy), Sunday, 17 March 2024 01:46 (one month ago) link