PORNOGRAPHY: THE NEW REALITY part 1, (Introduction)

The most surprising change the Internet has brought about, unforeseen by its developers, has been the availability of pornography. It's been met with chagrin by most of society, yet it continues to be the profitable form of entertainment in the world. If Al Gore had foreseen the pornography flood, he probably would have never taken that initiative to create Internet. Smut that was once hidden in small stashes in basements, under beds or in garages is now ubiquitous, hardcore, high-definition, high-grade, and free. That situation is comparable to it being a public resource.

This represents a huge cultural shift. No doubt there have been a few consequences to this change. Revenge porn, for one. Child porn for another, mostly hidden (and pedophiles have been able to exploit the Dark Internet in other ways, but that is a subject to be treated in a future entry.) Even when the participants are adult and fully consent, A lot of questions simmer about children and teens so easily exposed to it. Of course some have concerns about its effects on adults. Gail Dines said in Pornland: How Pornography has Hijacked our Sexuality, that she could find the worst, most violent and demeaning porn with just four or five mouse clicks from Google. I tested that out, trying to follow the trail she gives, but couldn't find any porn that was terribly violent or misogynistic. She says that every page shows demeaning images. It's true that free sites offer a mind-boggling variety of porn, but most of it isn't what she describes. For the ones that are, she provides no details on how popular they are. Of course, she did her search in 2008, and many of the sites she found are probably closed. Pornhub's statistics of the most searched categories seem to contradict her: the top categories in 2015 were Lesbian, Teen (18-19), Stepmom, Cartoon and Milf. It seems mature women are out-competing the Teen category. It seems not every porn patron goes as young as he can. (I'll compare Pornhub's statistics to stats given by other sites in the next installment.) 

Even after reading Dines's book, I can't tell exactly what she and other antiporn activists really want to ban. Yes, seems a simple thing until you get down to the details. She says porn has become more hardcore, demeaning and violent toward women since the Internet came around. Of course, the Meese Commission, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine McKinnon all said the same things in the eighties. I would think that they would have surpassed necrophilic, bestial, genocidal orgies by now. Contrary to what Dines says, you go to Pornhub, Xhamster or any of the other porn sites, and they seem to mostly cater to vanilla tastes.   

Are two protesters, even feminist protesters, really on the same page about a porn ban? Do they mean that all references and depictions of sex should be purged? Or are they willing to destroy all of it if it means censoring the work in the categories they find objectionable? Or do they mean just a specific work or category?

I'll give a working definition of pornography IMHO: it's a work of literature or recorded media (audio or visual) that's created to motivate or enhance masturbation. This also means you can't have legally- sound definition of pornography without confirming the intent of the creator.  

Note I define it by intent of the creator and not the use. Due to the wide variety of kinks in human sexuality, and the wide variance of people's sex drive, almost anything can be used to motivate or enhance masturbation. Also, there might be movies and literature that have pornographic scenes where the rest of the work has a different purpose.  

Any avid reader or movie fan has at least one work that they have to consider borderline. Novels or movies with sex scenes but aren't made to be fapped to from beginning to end. I'm a reader of Stephen King, and imagine my surprise in the book It when you child sex scene. Not just any child sex scene, but one where the eleven-year old girl aggressively insists on  a gang-bang with the boys. This takes place in the pitch black, in a sewer they've been crawling in for hours. Though the book doesn't say this, you could imagine them being covered with shit. That's a scene by one of the greatest authors today. It's apparently not made to prompt or enhance masturbation, though I'm thinking it turns on some dark souls somewhere. I do wonder how antiporn crusaders feel about that scene. Wouldn't you know, most would-be censors are neither avid readers nor movie fans (though they might lead an anti-porn movement). They wouldn't be sacrificing anything they find of value.

Then there's a philosophical question: how honest and relevant can any genre or any style of work be if it totally avoids sex? It's only the principal drive in every species. If you cleanse sex out of media and art, won't it, as a practice, ring false and finally, uninteresting? For one thing, you can't have a good story about teenagers that doesn't deal with sex or at least attraction at some point, and teenagers would be the least interested in it.

By comparison, a totally salacious work does have a use.  

People have tried to ban porn before with some temporary success, but it had some unexpected effects. One problem they encountered was images that previously had no sexual interpretation suddenly became fap material. In the 1930s, during the Hays Code, what censors cut out the most were feet.

Here's the way it goes: if you cover up pussies, thighs become sexually stimulating. If you cover up the thighs, knees become exciting. If you cover the knees, the feet suddenly cause a full boner. It's not the body being uncovered that's driving the porn, it's the arousal of the person, and their money. Yet, there was always some guy you could find on the street corner who sold pictures of women displaying everything. Law enforcement never got rid of that guy, because it only takes a guy and a woman who want or need to make money, and a camera. Also, it's impossible to attack him without also attacking her. No legion of decency, production code, trade groups, vice squads or volunteer censors are going to stop that. 

The tension over how to depict sex, or whether to depict it at all, really goes back to the advent of writing, and possibly back to cave painting. People were having sex, but new media always presented the question of how a personal thing like sex should be depicted in persistent works that would be spread widely, and would probably outlive their author? 

I can't write about such a topic briefly, so this if going to be serialized. Next installment, I plan to present some graphs that show some unexpected things about pornography now.

Why you probably shouldn't laugh at Anthony Weiner yet.

It seems Anthony Weiner has ruined his life because he can't stop sexting. He even sexted with his young son in the room. The story is so bizarre. The really odd thing is, he didn't have any behavior like this in his history before 2011. I realize that Sexting was something new, but it isn't just sexting. Somebody this obsessed with sex would have been doing other things to get his rocks off, like joining Adult Friend Finder. 

It sounds to me like Antony Weiner might have a physical brain disorder. A malignant tumor would be doubtful because it would have killed him by now. Maybe a benign tumor. It could also be a rare side-effect of some medication. He was a workaholic and might have worked through a headache which was actually a stroke, that then went undetected. He definitely hasn't been like this his entire adult life, or there would have been a lot more stories about him that came out about him after the first sexting scandal.

No, he changed suddenly, so much so that people who knew him (like Jon Stewart) thought at first the original sexting scandal to be a hoax. It seemed to me that everyone was taken aback by his behavior. Also, he can't alter it, and it's becoming worse, despite his own expectations. Not even when his young child comes into the room does Weiner stop himself from sexting. The results were very disturbing. Not child porn, but close enough to make you fight down lunch.

NY Post: Just be happy you don't see a face

Brain cancer and brain trauma have been known to cause behavior changes like this. And even when a brain pathology makes a person do something, the person will still rationalize it as there choice and make arguments about it.

Maybe instead of laughing at Weiner and shaking our heads, we should urge him to get to neurologist. He might be seriously ill. If it is a physical pathology, he really can't help his behavior, but he might get it cured and be able to reclaim his life.

That would certainly be a story.