Well met at Stanford
Robert Teeter
How Men Really Respond to Pornography, at the Stanford Bookstore today at
12. In the book, David does two things that needed to be done, but hadn't
been. He actually talked to men about pornography -- 150 of them. And
with that evidence, he demolishes the assumptions, the stereotypes, and
the vilifications that have come from the left- and right-wing antiporn
activists who have dominated the debate.
The talk was informal. David talked about how he wrote the book
and what he found. He read excerpts and he took questions. A few
questioners asked about violent porn and about porn making men violent.
David pointed out that very little porn is violent, and the men he talked
to weren't interested in it. Those few violent criminal who cited porn
as an influence had real-life influences that were much more significant.
Afterwards, David, his wife Carole, and I had lunch at the Stanford
Art Museum. It was a wide-ranging discussion of the book, religion, family,
kids today, current events. I had a fine time and hope to see David and
Carole again soon.
If you're in the area (and you see this in time), try to catch
David at the bookstore at 7 p.m. tonight. If you're out of the area, buy
the book.
--
Bob Teeter (rte...@sonic.net) | http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/
"The best thing for me about the Internet is that if you are a freaky
person with fringe interests you can find someone else to share those
interests with." -- Jessamyn West of Librarian.net
smw
Robert Teeter wrote:
> I went to see David Loftus' talk about his new book, Watching Sex:
> How Men Really Respond to Pornography, at the Stanford Bookstore today at
> 12. In the book, David does two things that needed to be done, but hadn't
> been. He actually talked to men about pornography -- 150 of them. And
> with that evidence, he demolishes the assumptions, the stereotypes, and
> the vilifications that have come from the left- and right-wing antiporn
> activists who have dominated the debate.
Thanks for the update! A question -- how does one tell left- from
right-wing anti-porn? Is right-wing anything religious and left-wing
anything feminist?
Francis A. Miniter
Francis A. Miniter
Don Tuite
Don
John S. Watson
> I thought it had to do with which hand you held the book in.
Or is it the opposite?
JW
Lewis Mammel
Robert Teeter wrote:
>
> I went to see David Loftus' talk about his new book, Watching Sex:
> How Men Really Respond to Pornography, at the Stanford Bookstore today at
> 12. In the book, David does two things that needed to be done, but hadn't
> been. He actually talked to men about pornography -- 150 of them. And
> with that evidence, he demolishes the assumptions, the stereotypes, and
> the vilifications that have come from the left- and right-wing antiporn
> activists who have dominated the debate.
>
> The talk was informal. David talked about how he wrote the book
> and what he found. He read excerpts and he took questions. A few
> questioners asked about violent porn and about porn making men violent.
> David pointed out that very little porn is violent, and the men he talked
> to weren't interested in it. Those few violent criminal who cited porn
> as an influence had real-life influences that were much more significant.
>
> Afterwards, David, his wife Carole, and I had lunch at the Stanford
> Art Museum. It was a wide-ranging discussion of the book, religion, family,
> kids today, current events. I had a fine time and hope to see David and
> Carole again soon.
Did you lick each others assholes? I'm just not getting this.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Richard Harter
Er, was this meant to be funny?
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net
http://home.tiac.net/~cri, http://www.varinoma.com
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Today is the last day of the mistakes you've already made.
francis muir
Miniter" <min...@attglobal.net> wrote:
> Probably right-wing porn allows only heterosexual sex to be shown.
No, no. Consenting mouseburgers
Douglas Clark
this is quite lovely news to hear that a rabster has produiced a good book.
--
Douglas Clark, Bath, Somerset, England ....
Lynx: Poetry from Bath ......
... http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com/lynx.html
"Robert Teeter" <rte...@sonic.net> wrote in message
news:gJmna.6153$JX2.4...@typhoon.sonic.net...
Michael Zeleny
>Lewis Mammel <l.ma...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>>Robert Teeter wrote:
>>> I went to see David Loftus' talk about his new book,
>>> Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond to Pornography, at the
>>> Stanford Bookstore today at 12. In the book, David does two
>>> things that needed to be done, but hadn't been. He actually
>>> talked to men about pornography -- 150 of them. And with that
>>> evidence, he demolishes the assumptions, the stereotypes, and
>>> the vilifications that have come from the left- and right-wing
>>> antiporn activists who have dominated the debate.
>>>
>>> The talk was informal. David talked about how he wrote
>>> the book and what he found. He read excerpts and he took
>>> questions. A few questioners asked about violent porn and about
>>> porn making men violent. David pointed out that very little porn
>>> is violent, and the men he talked to weren't interested in it.
>>> Those few violent criminal who cited porn as an influence had
>>> real-life influences that were much more significant.
>>>
>>> Afterwards, David, his wife Carole, and I had lunch at
>>> the Stanford Art Museum. It was a wide-ranging discussion of the
>>> book, religion, family, kids today, current events. I had a fine
>>> time and hope to see David and Carole again soon.
>>Did you lick each others assholes? I'm just not getting this.
>Er, was this meant to be funny?
Receiving a rim job can be a ticklish matter.
--
cordially, -- Mikhail Zel...@math.ucla.edu
7576 Willow Glen Rd, Hollywood, CA 90046 323-876-8234 323-363-1860
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better. -- Samuel Beckett
Robert Teeter
> Robert Teeter wrote:
That was the distinction I had in mind, though in actual
practice, there's not much difference.
Lewis Mammel
Richard Harter wrote:
>
> On Thu, 17 Apr 2003 05:48:04 GMT, Lewis Mammel
> <l.ma...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> >Robert Teeter wrote:
> >>
> >> I went to see David Loftus' talk about his new book, Watching Sex:
> >> How Men Really Respond to Pornography, at the Stanford Bookstore today at
> >> 12. In the book, David does two things that needed to be done, but hadn't
> >> been. He actually talked to men about pornography -- 150 of them. And
> >> with that evidence, he demolishes the assumptions, the stereotypes, and
> >> the vilifications that have come from the left- and right-wing antiporn
> >> activists who have dominated the debate.
> >>
> >> The talk was informal. David talked about how he wrote the book
> >> and what he found. He read excerpts and he took questions. A few
> >> questioners asked about violent porn and about porn making men violent.
> >> David pointed out that very little porn is violent, and the men he talked
> >> to weren't interested in it. Those few violent criminal who cited porn
> >> as an influence had real-life influences that were much more significant.
> >>
> >> Afterwards, David, his wife Carole, and I had lunch at the Stanford
> >> Art Museum. It was a wide-ranging discussion of the book, religion, family,
> >> kids today, current events. I had a fine time and hope to see David and
> >> Carole again soon.
> >
> >Did you lick each others assholes? I'm just not getting this.
>
> Er, was this meant to be funny?
It was rhetorical. I meant to comment on the dissonance between
the delicate refinement of the days activities and the approving
tone with which pornography has been discussed here and in other
comments on the thread.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Jeff Inman
So, you have your own notions, going in to the thing,
and any survey that doesn't back up your bias is
obviously biased?
Jeff
Lewis Mammel
I assume most men have had a boner once or twice in their lives.
Sometimes when I go through my cache of valuable and interesting
documents at work I find these 6, 7, 8 year old surveys that they
pass out with great encouragement to fill them out and hand them
in, still in their envelopes.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
"If you look at the earth, you'll see that half of it is light
and half of it is dark, and as it turns, this boundary, this
line between light and dark, turns slowly so that it sweeps
around the earth. And if you look at this line as it sweeps
along, you'll see people BRUSHING THEIR TEETH. Now we have
all these reasons why we brush our teeth, to prevent decay
and so on, and I'm not saying any of them are wrong, but if you
look at things from a different point of view, you'll see this
line moving around the earth with people BRUSHING THEIR TEETH -
and that's what physics is - looking at things from a different
point of view."
Richard Feynman ( Paraphrased from memory )
Lewis Mammel
Jeff Inman wrote:
>
> So, you have your own notions, going in to the thing,
> and any survey that doesn't back up your bias is
> obviously biased?
... and anyway, the results of some survey are not really
at issue. I was talking about the approving tone that I
perceived in the thread, based on 1) the implication that
it's mostly not violent, so oh, OK no problem, and 2) what
a bunch of assholes these people are that are against it -
we know so much better than they what's what. ... as I
read it , OK?
I saw a show maybe a year ago ( probably several years! )
about new millionaires, portraying them as what's happening
now. One of them was an internet porn king. The honcho news
babe doing the segment was on this weird porn set consisting
of an array of open booths, each with a woman who would make
audio links to selected internet participants and perform
interactively. She briefly interrupted the live proceedings,
then backed off - time is money.
The scene really reminded me of an old Star Trek episode
where the crew was held prisoner in a similar situation
for the amusement of some cosmic potentate.
So do we need a survey to explain what's happening here?
That guy whose calling in - do we need to know the nuances
of his motivations? I think we get the general idea!
Lew Mammel, Jr.
smw
Lewis Mammel wrote:
First time in a long time I agree with Lew. Porn strikes me as a nasty
business and bad for the soul all around. Which doesn't mean that its
consumers are necessarily bad guys or that it ought to be banned, but it
ought to be possible to argue against a ban without becoming the
business' apologist.
Not saying that that's what David's been doing -- haven't read the book.
Michael S. Morris
Saturday, the 19th of April, 2003
Jeff Inman wrote:
So, you have your own notions, going in to the thing,
and any survey that doesn't back up your bias is
obviously biased?
Lew:
... and anyway, the results of some survey are not really
at issue.
They may well not be at issue with you, but, well,
they are what is at issue in David's book. His book
is a nonscientific, journalistic survey tending to refute
antiporn claims about the motivations of men who consume
porn. Roughly put, it says we like it because we like
to fantasize when we jack off, and not because we are
all latent rapists.
Lew:
I was talking about the approving tone that I
perceived in the thread, based on 1) the implication that
it's mostly not violent, so oh, OK no problem,
But, violence *is* a big antiporn claim. Perhaps
*the* big antiporn claim. "Porn is the theory, rape is
the practice." Whoever said that (MacKinnon or somesuch.)
In any event, it is the primary thing David's survey tends
to refute. Instead of men wanting to objectify and control
women, it tends rather to show that men want to be
objectified and controlled.
Lew:
and 2) what
a bunch of assholes these people are that are against it -
we know so much better than they what's what.
Well, the targets of refutation in David's book are
a bunch of assholes. Though I don't think the book
addresses every possible objection to porn.
Lew:
... as I
read it , OK?
Sure, but as I read you, you came on way out of proportion
to what was said.
Lew:
I saw a show maybe a year ago ( probably several years! )
about new millionaires, portraying them as what's happening
now. One of them was an internet porn king. [...etc...]
Kind of like the "634-5789" sequence in the second
Blues Brothers movie. I'm not sure what your point
is. I object only to your take that anybody is
"being held prisoner". You have no evidence for that.
And, in fact, I'd say the weight of evidence is
entirely against you.
Lew:
The scene really reminded me [...]
The scene was meant to do exactly that---to titillate
at the same time as satisfy a need to feel self-righteous
about it. Personally, I'm not convinced that what the
guy calling in to "interact" with the girl in the
booth was experiencing was as soul-destroying as the
TV news program itself.
Lew:
So do we need a survey to explain what's happening here?
We do if one of the arguments made by antiporn censors is
that porn users crave violence against women. We need to
know whether that is true or not.
Lew:
That guy whose calling in - do we need to know the nuances
of his motivations? I think we get the general idea!
I get the general idea. But I don't believe that MacKinnon
and Dworkin do.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Saturday, the 19th of April, 2003
Silke:
First time in a long time I agree with Lew.
Porn strikes me as a nasty business and bad
for the soul all around.
Billionth time in a long time I have disagreed with
you. Seems to me one could write *exactly* the kind
of thing Lew just wrote, using shame as a device
in exactly the same way, and come out with something
that is blatantly homophobic. Substitute a bath-house owner
maybe for the porn king.
Who the fuck are you to pronounce on the goodness
to my soul of my sexuality? What exactly do you know
about it?
Which reminds me that a good fraction of David's
respondents were gay, and that it was pretty
interesting to me the sections of the book which
covered how integral the discovery of porn as
teenagers was in teaching many of these men
about their different sexuality---how they knew
they were different in the way they didn't respond
to the images of het porn in the way that was
obviously intended for them to respond, and how later,
when they explored gay porn, they learned what
to do.
Silke:
Which doesn't mean that its
consumers are necessarily bad guys or that
it ought to be banned, but it ought to be
possible to argue against a ban without
becoming the business' apologist.
These (consumers are bad guys, censorship)
were never at issue with you or with Lew.
They are, however, at issue with antiporn
advocates.
You know, you can flip around the net easily
and find a huge amount of *free* pornography.
Isn't there some level of this sort of consideration
that would give the big lie to the claim that
it is all just evil businessmen (corporations,
capitalists, Dick Cheneys, etc.) exploiting sex
industry workers?
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Marko Amnell
news:3EA145EC...@netdirect.net
> Silke:
> First time in a long time I agree with Lew.
> Porn strikes me as a nasty business and bad
> for the soul all around.
>
> Billionth time in a long time I have disagreed with
> you. Seems to me one could write *exactly* the kind
> of thing Lew just wrote, using shame as a device
> in exactly the same way, and come out with something
> that is blatantly homophobic. Substitute a bath-house owner
> maybe for the porn king.
>
> Who the fuck are you to pronounce on the goodness
> to my soul of my sexuality? What exactly do you know
> about it?
First time in a long time I agree with Mike Morris.
There is more than a smidgen of old-fashioned conservatism
in the soul of every self-righteous Critical Theorist.
This is as true of Theodor Adorno as of Silke-Maria Weineck.
It's all about telling the lower orders what they really
ought to believe and do.
ObBook. John Stuart Mill, _On Liberty_
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
francis muir
> Lew:
> I was talking about the approving tone that I
> perceived in the thread, based on 1) the implication that
> it's mostly not violent, so oh, OK no problem,
>
> But, violence *is* a big antiporn claim. Perhaps
> *the* big antiporn claim. "Porn is the theory, rape is
> the practice." Whoever said that (MacKinnon or somesuch.)
> In any event, it is the primary thing David's survey tends
> to refute. Instead of men wanting to objectify and control
> women, it tends rather to show that men want to be
> objectified and controlled.
"Tends to refute"? Why would anyone suppose that Loftus'
witnesses are reliable? As I understand it Lewis' ire was
directed more at Robert Teeter's cozy tone than at the
books contents. It was RT's unfortunate coupling of the
book and his "Hail fellow RAB, well met!" that provoked
L's unnecessarily harsh post. On the other hand, we are
RAB, right?
smw
Michael S. Morris wrote:
> Saturday, the 19th of April, 2003
>
> Jeff Inman wrote:
> So, you have your own notions, going in to the thing,
> and any survey that doesn't back up your bias is
> obviously biased?
> Lew:
> ... and anyway, the results of some survey are not really
> at issue.
>
> They may well not be at issue with you, but, well,
> they are what is at issue in David's book. His book
> is a nonscientific, journalistic survey tending to refute
> antiporn claims about the motivations of men who consume
> porn. Roughly put, it says we like it because we like
> to fantasize when we jack off, and not because we are
> all latent rapists.
In other words, it shows that men have no imagination?
smw
Michael S. Morris wrote:
>
> Saturday, the 19th of April, 2003
>
> Silke:
> First time in a long time I agree with Lew.
> Porn strikes me as a nasty business and bad
> for the soul all around.
>
> Billionth time in a long time I have disagreed with
> you. Seems to me one could write *exactly* the kind
> of thing Lew just wrote, using shame as a device
> in exactly the same way, and come out with something
> that is blatantly homophobic. Substitute a bath-house owner
> maybe for the porn king.
I'm sure you could. I'm not interested in the gender angle here, as
perhaps you assume.
> Who the fuck are you to pronounce on the goodness
> to my soul of my sexuality? What exactly do you know
> about it?
Make a case for porn that doesn't rest on negatives, and let's see.
> Which reminds me that a good fraction of David's
> respondents were gay, and that it was pretty
> interesting to me the sections of the book which
> covered how integral the discovery of porn as
> teenagers was in teaching many of these men
> about their different sexuality---how they knew
> they were different in the way they didn't respond
> to the images of het porn in the way that was
> obviously intended for them to respond, and how later,
> when they explored gay porn, they learned what
> to do.
Sounds entirely plausible; but that, too, rests on a negative.
> Silke:
> Which doesn't mean that its
> consumers are necessarily bad guys or that
> it ought to be banned, but it ought to be
> possible to argue against a ban without
> becoming the business' apologist.
>
> These (consumers are bad guys, censorship)
> were never at issue with you or with Lew.
> They are, however, at issue with antiporn
> advocates.
I know.
> You know, you can flip around the net easily
> and find a huge amount of *free* pornography.
> Isn't there some level of this sort of consideration
> that would give the big lie to the claim that
> it is all just evil businessmen (corporations,
> capitalists, Dick Cheneys, etc.) exploiting sex
> industry workers?
that's not the claim.
David E. Latane
On Sat, 19 Apr 2003, Michael S. Morris wrote:
> You know, you can flip around the net easily
> and find a huge amount of *free* pornography.
> Isn't there some level of this sort of consideration
> that would give the big lie to the claim that
> it is all just evil businessmen (corporations,
> capitalists, Dick Cheneys, etc.) exploiting sex
> industry workers?
So the presence of a commodity for free--like the sample of shampoo I got
in my mailbox--refutes the notion that shampoo manufactury is a business?
Eh?
Of course I agree that some pornography is nonpecuniary -- the Marquis
didn't get pleasure from making money, but from hurting women.
D. latane
smw
Marko Amnell wrote:
On the contrary, it's the inverse puritans who want to reserve a special
status for sexuality. Critiquing porn is no different from critiquing
any other cultural practice, be it anti-war protests, junk food binging,
or exorbitant CEO salaries.
smw
francis muir wrote:
> Michael S. Morris wrote:
>
>
>>Lew:
>>I was talking about the approving tone that I
>>perceived in the thread, based on 1) the implication that
>>it's mostly not violent, so oh, OK no problem,
>>
>>But, violence *is* a big antiporn claim. Perhaps
>>*the* big antiporn claim. "Porn is the theory, rape is
>>the practice." Whoever said that (MacKinnon or somesuch.)
>>In any event, it is the primary thing David's survey tends
>>to refute. Instead of men wanting to objectify and control
>>women, it tends rather to show that men want to be
>>objectified and controlled.
>>
>
> "Tends to refute"? Why would anyone suppose that Loftus'
> witnesses are reliable?
Especially since they seem to have been saying rather exactly what one
would expect them to say. After all, pornography consumers would want to
refute the same arguments David wants to refute. It's a bit like asking
Ari Fleischer about the motivations of awarding fat contracts to
Halliburton.
And the anti-porners at least on the left aren't talking about intent or
conscious motivation in any case. Which makes them a lot harder to
refute than Mike and David seem to assume. And since what is at question
in the left critique is the impact of porn on women, interviewing men
doesn't seem quite the convincing tack here.
Needless to say, none of that is an endorsement of McKinnon and friends.
Ron Hardin
> And the anti-porners at least on the left aren't talking about intent or
> conscious motivation in any case. Which makes them a lot harder to
> refute than Mike and David seem to assume. And since what is at question
> in the left critique is the impact of porn on women, interviewing men
> doesn't seem quite the convincing tack here.
Porn is a job opportunity. The trouble is that one woman takes up a lot of men.
--
Ron Hardin
rhha...@mindspring.com
On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.
Marko Amnell
news:3EA160CD...@ameritech.net
>
>
> Marko Amnell wrote:
>
> > "Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote in message
> > news:3EA145EC...@netdirect.net
> >
> >
> >>Silke:
> >> First time in a long time I agree with Lew.
> >> Porn strikes me as a nasty business and bad
> >> for the soul all around.
> >>
> >>Billionth time in a long time I have disagreed with
> >>you. Seems to me one could write *exactly* the kind
> >>of thing Lew just wrote, using shame as a device
> >>in exactly the same way, and come out with something
> >>that is blatantly homophobic. Substitute a bath-house owner
> >>maybe for the porn king.
> >>
> >>Who the fuck are you to pronounce on the goodness
> >>to my soul of my sexuality? What exactly do you know
> >>about it?
> >>
> >
> > First time in a long time I agree with Mike Morris.
> > There is more than a smidgen of old-fashioned conservatism
> > in the soul of every self-righteous Critical Theorist.
> > This is as true of Theodor Adorno as of Silke-Maria Weineck.
> > It's all about telling the lower orders what they really
> > ought to believe and do.
>
>
> On the contrary, it's the inverse puritans who want to reserve a special
> status for sexuality. Critiquing porn is no different from critiquing
> any other cultural practice, be it anti-war protests, junk food binging,
> or exorbitant CEO salaries.
So what do you tell your students? "Now boys and girls, remember
what Auntie Silke told you, that porn is bad for the soul all
around, so you just stay away from soul-corrupting filth like
Georges Bataille's _Blue of Noon_ and _The Story of the Eye_."
LOL! I would go as far as saying that anyone who hasn't read
pornographic literary masterpieces like BoN and TSoE has an
impaired imagination. Sexuality is one of the most basic
elements of human nature. Why shouldn't art and literature
deal with it in an explicit way? Do you realize what a prude
you sound like?
smw
Marko Amnell wrote:
You have the oddest assumptions concerning teaching, Marko. And, no, I
don't consider Bataille porn in the sense here discussed; Sade or
Masoch, neither.
> LOL! I would go as far as saying that anyone who hasn't read
> pornographic literary masterpieces like BoN and TSoE has an
> impaired imagination. Sexuality is one of the most basic
> elements of human nature. Why shouldn't art and literature
> deal with it in an explicit way? Do you realize what a prude
> you sound like?
It's like saying that love is one of the most basic elements of human
nature, hence we should all read tons of Harlequeen novels.
If you have something other than red herrings to offer, I'd be interested
to hear what you think.
Marko Amnell
>
>
> Marko Amnell wrote:
>
> > "smw" <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
> > news:3EA160CD...@ameritech.net
> >
> >
> >>
> >>Marko Amnell wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote in message
> >>>news:3EA145EC...@netdirect.net
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>>Silke:
> >>>> First time in a long time I agree with Lew.
> >>>> Porn strikes me as a nasty business and bad
> >>>> for the soul all around.
> >>>>
So why is Bataille different from internet porn? Because he's
print media? So how about the film Caligula? Real women actors
were being abused and exploited sexually to film that, right?
Or is that different because it's an "art" film, so you get
to put it in a different category from the run-of-the-mill
porn produced by and for the hoi polloi? (who really ought
to know better) If the porn industry were taken over by
high-quality artistic directors and all the porn films
produced from now on could be categorized as "art" films,
you wouldn't have any problem with it?
"The most expensive adult movie (25 million dollars in 1979)
ever made, 'Caligula' tells the tale of the mad Roman emperor's
rise and fall. Depicting his descent into madness and depravity
with graphic sex and violence with an all-star cast, 'Caligula'
is a true cult classic. Lavish sets, some truly over the top
acting courtesy of Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren and John Gielgud,
and blazing direction from Tinto Brass help to lift the film
from its roots in American porn empire Penthouse and create a
wonderful vision of the debauchery in ancient Rome."
http://www.prismdirect.co.uk/movies/product_detail.html?code=PENT2136
smw
Marko Amnell wrote:
> "smw" <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
...
>>
>>You have the oddest assumptions concerning teaching, Marko. And, no, I
>>don't consider Bataille porn in the sense here discussed; Sade or
>>Masoch, neither.
>>
>>
>>
>>>LOL! I would go as far as saying that anyone who hasn't read
>>>pornographic literary masterpieces like BoN and TSoE has an
>>>impaired imagination. Sexuality is one of the most basic
>>>elements of human nature. Why shouldn't art and literature
>>>deal with it in an explicit way? Do you realize what a prude
>>>you sound like?
>>>
>>
>>It's like saying that love is one of the most basic elements of human
>>nature, hence we should all read tons of Harlequeen novels.
>>
>> If you have something other than red herrings to offer, I'd be
>>interested to hear what you think.
>>
>
> So why is Bataille different from internet porn? Because he's
> print media?
No -- why do you feel you had to bring up Bataille instead of "Wet Blond
Teen Sluts" or whatever? Surely, the difference you're asking me to
defend is the very assumption of your post.
> So how about the film Caligula? Real women actors
> were being abused and exploited sexually to film that, right?
I have no idea.
> Or is that different because it's an "art" film, so you get
> to put it in a different category from the run-of-the-mill
> porn produced by and for the hoi polloi? (who really ought
> to know better) If the porn industry were taken over by
> high-quality artistic directors and all the porn films
> produced from now on could be categorized as "art" films,
> you wouldn't have any problem with it?
This is very boring. If porn weren't stereotypical, predictable, badly
written, badly acted, and badly lit, yes, I'd have a different
relationship to it. What of it?
Lewis Mammel
Marko Amnell wrote:
> So why is Bataille different from internet porn? Because he's
> print media? So how about the film Caligula? Real women actors
> were being abused and exploited sexually to film that, right?
As I recall, CALIGULA was pretty much a Hollywood film except
for one orgy scene done to porn standards, which seemed kind
of spliced in. It looked just like any old porn movie, except
for the get-ups, which made me wonder if that's the way it
really would have been.
Again as I recall, the mainstream stars had been given assurances
that everything would be in the best taste, and felt betrayed by
the insertion (ahem) of the porn segment - something like that.
So I think the abuse and exploitation was not anything new for
those involved in the scene, as they were porn stars, not
"real women actors".
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Marko Amnell
>
>
> Marko Amnell wrote:
>
> > "smw" <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
>
> ...
>
> >>
> >>You have the oddest assumptions concerning teaching, Marko. And, no, I
> >>don't consider Bataille porn in the sense here discussed; Sade or
> >>Masoch, neither.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>LOL! I would go as far as saying that anyone who hasn't read
> >>>pornographic literary masterpieces like BoN and TSoE has an
> >>>impaired imagination. Sexuality is one of the most basic
> >>>elements of human nature. Why shouldn't art and literature
> >>>deal with it in an explicit way? Do you realize what a prude
> >>>you sound like?
> >>>
> >>
> >>It's like saying that love is one of the most basic elements of human
> >>nature, hence we should all read tons of Harlequeen novels.
> >>
> >> If you have something other than red herrings to offer, I'd be
> >>interested to hear what you think.
> >>
> >
> > So why is Bataille different from internet porn? Because he's
> > print media?
>
>
> No -- why do you feel you had to bring up Bataille instead of
> "Wet Blond Teen Sluts" or whatever? Surely, the difference
> you're asking me to defend is the very assumption of your post.
I bring up Bataille and the film Caligula to expose the
inconsistency of your position. First you say you object
to pornography because it exploits women - it is "bad for
the soul" as you say. But when confronted with pornographic
high art, you turn around and claim that what really bothers
you about porn is that it is badly made - that it has low
aesthetic value, and poor production values.
> > So how about the film Caligula? Real women actors
> > were being abused and exploited sexually to film that, right?
>
>
> I have no idea.
>
>
> > Or is that different because it's an "art" film, so you get
> > to put it in a different category from the run-of-the-mill
> > porn produced by and for the hoi polloi? (who really ought
> > to know better) If the porn industry were taken over by
> > high-quality artistic directors and all the porn films
> > produced from now on could be categorized as "art" films,
> > you wouldn't have any problem with it?
>
>
> This is very boring. If porn weren't stereotypical,
> predictable, badly written, badly acted, and badly lit,
> yes, I'd have a different relationship to it. What of it?
So your *only* objection to the porn industry is its low aesthetic
standards? The fact that women perform various sexual acts in
front of the camera and men pay to watch the photographs and
films is not a problem? If that is the case, why isn't acting
in a bad B-movie "bad for the soul"? Or is porn bad for the
soul in exactly the same way that making or watching
"Attack of the 50-foot woman" or "The Attack of the Killer
Tomatoes" is bad for the soul? If so, why do you make a special
fuss about porn at all? Shouldn't your argument be against
poorly made movies in general?
But I don't really believe that is your position, because
you've spoken before about the fact that women who act in
porn films are financially exploited. What you don't like
is the fact that men pay women money to watch them perform
sexual acts. You think that act in itself is exploitative.
You don't believe women's sexuality should be a commodity.
Otherwise why would you object to porn at all? But when I
bring up the example of pornographic high art, you start to
backtrack because you don't want to look like a philistine
who wants to censor art. In other words, you're a hypocrite.
You only want to accept pornography if it can be presented
as "art". My intention is merely to point out this
inconsistency in your position. Your argument against
pornography is incoherent.
Ron Hardin
> This is very boring. If porn weren't stereotypical, predictable, badly
> written, badly acted, and badly lit, yes, I'd have a different
> relationship to it. What of it?
It's like sex.
Marko Amnell
news:3EA18A3F...@worldnet.att.net
Look, you're missing the point. The porn stars are women who
don't mind selling their sexuality as a commodity. They've
made that choice. If you believe in a free society, you
ought to let them make that choice and respect it. No one
is forcing any woman to act in porn films. Women are free
to choose another profession. To argue that selling their
sexuality is always "bad for their soul" is conservative
and reactionary. It means you think you know what is good
for other people better than they do themselves. You're free
to believe that, but I think you should be honest enough
to admit openly that what you hold is a conservative political
position. Silke is trying to have it both ways. She is
trying to argue that pornography is always bad for the
soul, and yet deny that she is defending a conservative
political position. Furthermore, she wants to make an
exception in the case of pornography that is "art". There
are no logical grounds for such an exception. If pornography
is always "bad for the soul" then producing and consuming
pornographic high art must also be always "bad for the soul".
Why would pornography stop being "bad for the soul" because
it also has a certain aesthetic value? That is just hypocrisy.
smw
Marko Amnell wrote:
> Silke is trying to have it both ways. She is
> trying to argue that pornography is always bad for the
> soul, and yet deny that she is defending a conservative
> political position.
That's not Silke trying to have it both ways, that's Marko displaying a
truly stunning lack of conceptual agility.
> Furthermore, she wants to make an
> exception in the case of pornography that is "art".
Exception from what? I already told you I don't consider Bataille or
Sade or Masoch pornography.
smw
Ron Hardin wrote:
> smw wrote:
>
>>This is very boring. If porn weren't stereotypical, predictable, badly
>>written, badly acted, and badly lit, yes, I'd have a different
>>relationship to it. What of it?
>>
>
> It's like sex.
No, it's like other people's sex.
smw
Marko Amnell wrote:
Not every position that doesn't fit into your either/or roster is
therefore inconsistent.
First you say you object
> to pornography because it exploits women - it is "bad for
> the soul" as you say.
I explicitly mentioned that there's no gender angle involved here.
What's with the reading comprehension problem?
> But when confronted with pornographic
> high art, you turn around and claim that what really bothers
> you about porn is that it is badly made - that it has low
> aesthetic value, and poor production values.
To repeat, I don't consider your examples porn. Deal with it.
...
>>
>>>Or is that different because it's an "art" film, so you get
>>>to put it in a different category from the run-of-the-mill
>>>porn produced by and for the hoi polloi? (who really ought
>>>to know better) If the porn industry were taken over by
>>>high-quality artistic directors and all the porn films
>>>produced from now on could be categorized as "art" films,
>>>you wouldn't have any problem with it?
>>>
>>
>>This is very boring. If porn weren't stereotypical,
>>predictable, badly written, badly acted, and badly lit,
>>yes, I'd have a different relationship to it. What of it?
>>
>
> So your *only* objection to the porn industry is its low aesthetic
> standards? The fact that women perform various sexual acts in
> front of the camera and men pay to watch the photographs and
> films is not a problem?
Right, that's not the problem. As I pointed out to you before, the
sexuality appears to be your problem. The usual epistemological
dependence on prudery the alleged anti-prude reliably exhibits. On, in
Freud's fine paraphrase, "the hysterical overvaluation of the sexual."
> If that is the case, why isn't acting
> in a bad B-movie "bad for the soul"?
It is. So is standing at a cash register all day. As I pointed out
before, I don't make a difference between porn and Harlequeen novels.
Or is porn bad for the
> soul in exactly the same way that making or watching
> "Attack of the 50-foot woman" or "The Attack of the Killer
> Tomatoes" is bad for the soul? If so, why do you make a special
> fuss about porn at all? Shouldn't your argument be against
> poorly made movies in general?
This is a discussion about porn.
> But I don't really believe that is your position, because
> you've spoken before about the fact that women who act in
> porn films are financially exploited. What you don't like
> is the fact that men pay women money to watch them perform
> sexual acts.
You're an idiot.
Marko Amnell
> > So your *only* objection to the porn industry is its low aesthetic
> > standards? The fact that women perform various sexual acts in
> > front of the camera and men pay to watch the photographs and
> > films is not a problem?
>
> Right, that's not the problem. As I pointed out to you before,
> the sexuality appears to be your problem. The usual epistemological
> dependence on prudery the alleged anti-prude reliably exhibits.
> On, in Freud's fine paraphrase, "the hysterical overvaluation
> of the sexual."
Ridiculous. My attitude to sexuality is completely relaxed.
Stop projecting your absurd Freudian theories on everyone
you argue with.
> > If that is the case, why isn't acting
> > in a bad B-movie "bad for the soul"?
>
> It is. So is standing at a cash register all day. As I
> pointed out before, I don't make a difference between porn
> and Harlequeen novels.
Well, that's certainly an original argument. Porn is bad
because it's just like working at the supermarket checkout.
But it has nothing to do with Lewis Mammel's position, which
you claimed to agree with. And by the way, it's Harlequin,
not Harlequeen.
smw
Marko Amnell wrote:
> "smw" <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
> news:3EA1A5AE...@ameritech.net
>
>
>>>So your *only* objection to the porn industry is its low aesthetic
>>>standards? The fact that women perform various sexual acts in
>>>front of the camera and men pay to watch the photographs and
>>>films is not a problem?
>>>
>>
>>Right, that's not the problem. As I pointed out to you before,
>>the sexuality appears to be your problem. The usual epistemological
>>dependence on prudery the alleged anti-prude reliably exhibits.
>>On, in Freud's fine paraphrase, "the hysterical overvaluation
>>of the sexual."
>>
>
> Ridiculous. My attitude to sexuality is completely relaxed.
> Stop projecting your absurd Freudian theories on everyone
> you argue with.
You mean, you didn't notice that I was ironizing you're "you don't like
pornography, you gotta be a prude" bullshit? Thanks for helping along
with the demonstration...
>>>If that is the case, why isn't acting
>>>in a bad B-movie "bad for the soul"?
>>>
>>
>>It is. So is standing at a cash register all day. As I
>>pointed out before, I don't make a difference between porn
>>and Harlequeen novels.
>>
>
> Well, that's certainly an original argument. Porn is bad
> because it's just like working at the supermarket checkout.
Yeah. Imagine people watching hundreds of movies of other people doing
nothing but working at the supermarket checkout and ask yourself whether
you'd respect their choice of entertainment.
> But it has nothing to do with Lewis Mammel's position, which
> you claimed to agree with.
Lew was objecting to an absurd rhetorical juxtaposition.
> And by the way, it's Harlequin,
> not Harlequeen.
Hey, I translated the things for a living, I can spell them any way I
please.
Don Tuite
rich), it's
_Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond to Pornography_, ISBN:
1560253606 (Thunder's Mouth Press). Amazon lists it for $12.57.
Powells lists the ToC:
1 Unveilings: men's first exposures to pornography; age, content, how
it happened, initial reactions
2 Growing Up: the social context; parents' attitudes, social messages
about porn
3 I Know What Boys Like: men's tastes, what they want to see more of
4 The Appeal of "Lesbian" Pornography: why are "lesbian" scenarios so
popular?
5 The Image of Men in Pornography: reactions to the men in porn;
comparisons, the issue of penis size
6 How Men Use Pornography: how often, correlation to mood and
masturbation, feelings after use, concerns about use
7 Sharing Porn With Others: use and discussion with other men;
attitudes of, use by, and discussion with significant others
8 Off the Beaten Track: men who like special kinds of pornography
9 The "Slippery Slope" and the Question of Addiction: periods of
lesser or greater use, the issue of porn addiction
10 Reality vs. Fantasy: whether porn fans confuse characters in porn
with real people, or import sex practices from porn
11 Pornography as Hell, Pornography as Therapy: stories of men who
found either a curse or a savior in porn
12 Public Policy: possible harms of pornography, the distinction
between porn and erotica, social and legal controls
13 Pornography & Violence: to what extent does porn depict, encourage,
or increase violence?
14 The 75% Problem: the possible link between child sex abuse and the
porn industry
15 The Public Debate: What Did Everyone Get Wrong About Men Who Use
Pornography?
16 The Public Debate: What Did Everyone Get Wrong About Pornography?
-- objectification, subordination, degradation, and hatred of women
17 Toward a New Theory of Men and Pornography
Marko Amnell
> >>As I pointed out to you before, the sexuality appears
> >>to be your problem. The usual epistemological dependence
> >>on prudery the alleged anti-prude reliably exhibits. On,
> >>in Freud's fine paraphrase, "the hysterical overvaluation
> >>of the sexual."
> >>
> > Ridiculous. My attitude to sexuality is completely relaxed.
> > Stop projecting your absurd Freudian theories on everyone
> > you argue with.
>
> You mean, you didn't notice that I was ironizing you're
> "you don't like pornography, you gotta be a prude" bullshit?
> Thanks for helping along with the demonstration...
You've misunderstood. I wish, I hope, I was still able to be
hysterically interested in sex like I was, say, ten years ago
(not in the Freudian way, but just a healthy sexual appetite)
It would be a sign of life. My sexuality nowadays is more
nostalgia than I'd like. Sex is pretty far down on the list
of my priorities right now (which was not the case when I
was younger and looking for exotic experiences of all kinds,
not just sexual).
> >>>If that is the case, why isn't acting
> >>>in a bad B-movie "bad for the soul"?
> >>>
> >>
> >>It is. So is standing at a cash register all day. As I
> >>pointed out before, I don't make a difference between porn
> >>and Harlequeen novels.
> >>
> >
> > Well, that's certainly an original argument. Porn is bad
> > because it's just like working at the supermarket checkout.
>
>
> Yeah. Imagine people watching hundreds of movies of other
> people doing nothing but working at the supermarket checkout
> and ask yourself whether you'd respect their choice of
> entertainment.
I just think it's a strange and inappropriate analogy. If watching
other people having sex doesn't turn you on at all, I'd say
there is something wrong with you. Having said that, I've
outgrown my own interest in porn years ago. It was only
interesting before I had some sexual experience myself.
I wonder though if you've ever met any people who work in the
porn industry. They're not all as dumb as you think. I have a
friend, a computer programmer, who is much more interested in
the porn industry than me, even to the extent of trying to meet
some people in the business (just a quirk of his personality,
he's weird in many other ways). Anyway, he introduced me to
someone who is fairly well known in the business, Sacha Gabor,
who is a dead ringer for Burt Reynolds. That's his gimmick
in the industry, and you can easily find a lot of his porn
movies if you search the net (a lot of them have names that
are spoofs of famous Burt Reynolds movies). I don't think I'd
otherwise ever speak with someone like that if it wasn't for
my friend. But I met him in a Chinese restaurant and spoke to
him for a couple of hours over lunch until my friend showed up.
Then some porn actresses also came to restaurant, and I spoke
with them too. Anyway, Sacha is quite intelligent and speaks
several languages fluently. He had travelled around the world
for years and has made quite a lot of money from the porn
industry. Yeah, of course he was kind of sleazy (and was dressed
in an absurd white Elvis-style outfit). But he also had some
interesting observations about life and people (plus some
incredible anecdotes to tell about the crazy antics of some
of most famous porn actors and actresses). He was born in
Hungary and is pretty well read and sophisticated, so he may
not be representative of the industry in general. But I'm just
trying to point out that not all the people in porn industry
are losers and deadbeats.
Marko Amnell
news:ed61ed6a62214a8ba45...@mygate.mailgate.org
> Anyway, he introduced me to
> someone who is fairly well known in the business, Sacha Gabor,
> who is a dead ringer for Burt Reynolds. That's his gimmick
> in the industry, and you can easily find a lot of his porn
> movies if you search the net (a lot of them have names that
> are spoofs of famous Burt Reynolds movies).
Here's one link, and you can easily find a lot more
(it seems they spell his name Sasha Gabor):
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/9268/trivia.htm
tejas
Little imagination would be better.
Ted
Jeff Inman
>
> Marko Amnell wrote:
> > But it has nothing to do with Lewis Mammel's position, which
> > you claimed to agree with.
>
> Lew was objecting to an absurd rhetorical juxtaposition.
Lew was hysterically critical of the Teeters for actually
enjoying spending time with David Loftus, who dared to
write a book about That Festering Porn Shit. It seems
that the Teeters made a horrible mistake in failing to be
outraged by the Loftuses; the Teeters could apparently have
better defended All That Is Good by giving the Loftuses
a nice social snub, or at least reporting their company
dreary.
I agree with you that there is much in porn that is not
good for the soul, but I guess I can't condemn it so
outrightly, and, even if I could, I still don't get how a
report that spending time with David and his wife was
pleasant should be such an absurd rhetorical juxtaposition.
Or did you mean something else?
Jeff
smw
tejas wrote:
I was thinking of women who tend to need no visual or verbal aids to
masturbate; most would, in fact, find them distracting...
>
smw
Marko Amnell wrote:
> "smw" <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
> news:3EA1B749...@ameritech.net
>
>
>>>>As I pointed out to you before, the sexuality appears
>>>>to be your problem. The usual epistemological dependence
>>>>on prudery the alleged anti-prude reliably exhibits. On,
>>>>in Freud's fine paraphrase, "the hysterical overvaluation
>>>>of the sexual."
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Ridiculous. My attitude to sexuality is completely relaxed.
>>>Stop projecting your absurd Freudian theories on everyone
>>>you argue with.
>>>
>>You mean, you didn't notice that I was ironizing you're
>>"you don't like pornography, you gotta be a prude" bullshit?
>>Thanks for helping along with the demonstration...
>>
>
> You've misunderstood. I wish, I hope, I was still able to be
> hysterically interested in sex like I was, say, ten years ago
> (not in the Freudian way, but just a healthy sexual appetite)
> It would be a sign of life. My sexuality nowadays is more
> nostalgia than I'd like.
sorry to hear that. odd as it sounds, falling in love helps. I think sex
becomes more personal the older you get.
>>>>If that is the case, why isn't acting
>>>>>in a bad B-movie "bad for the soul"?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>It is. So is standing at a cash register all day. As I
>>>>pointed out before, I don't make a difference between porn
>>>>and Harlequeen novels.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Well, that's certainly an original argument. Porn is bad
>>>because it's just like working at the supermarket checkout.
>>>
>>
>>Yeah. Imagine people watching hundreds of movies of other
>>people doing nothing but working at the supermarket checkout
>>and ask yourself whether you'd respect their choice of
>>entertainment.
>>
>
> I just think it's a strange and inappropriate analogy. If watching
> other people having sex doesn't turn you on at all, I'd say
> there is something wrong with you.
Really? How deeply odd. It's like saying that watching other people read
a book should fulfill me intellectually.
> Having said that, I've
> outgrown my own interest in porn years ago. It was only
> interesting before I had some sexual experience myself.
That sounds about right to me -- I think porn has its place in
adolescence, like Hermann Hesse.
> I wonder though if you've ever met any people who work in the
> porn industry. They're not all as dumb as you think.
What's with that bullshit again? Where did I say I think they're dumb? I
simply think that genre porn sucks on pretty much every level (and
surely, you're not dumb enough to pun on that one...).
smw
Jeff Inman wrote:
> smw wrote:
>
>>Marko Amnell wrote:
>>
>
>>>But it has nothing to do with Lewis Mammel's position, which
>>>you claimed to agree with.
>>>
>>Lew was objecting to an absurd rhetorical juxtaposition.
>>
>
> Lew was hysterically critical of the Teeters for actually
> enjoying spending time with David Loftus, who dared to
> write a book about That Festering Porn Shit.
Look, I think Lew's remark was totally out of line, too. But I agree
with him that there's something hysterically funny about the discourses
involved.
> It seems
> that the Teeters made a horrible mistake in failing to be
> outraged by the Loftuses; the Teeters could apparently have
> better defended All That Is Good by giving the Loftuses
> a nice social snub, or at least reporting their company
> dreary.
if that's how you read Lew -- perhaps. didn't sound like that to me.
perhaps he can clarify.
> I agree with you that there is much in porn that is not
> good for the soul, but I guess I can't condemn it so
> outrightly, and, even if I could, I still don't get how a
> report that spending time with David and his wife was
> pleasant should be such an absurd rhetorical juxtaposition.
> Or did you mean something else?
I'm sure I'd enjoy spending time with the Loftuses myself; I wish David
success, and I'm damn sure I wouldn't feel the need to berate him for
his research. I'm not even sure I condemn porn outrightly -- I've
watched some of the stuff, trying to be what I thought was a good
girlfriend, found to my mild relief that the guys found the stuff just
as hysterically funny and unsexy as myself, and that's that. There are
some pornographic pictures of myself floating around somewhere, in any
case. What strikes me as wrong is to assign any possible objections to
porn to right-wing or left-wing nutcases. Perhaps Lew is a right-wing
nutcase; he sometimes sounds like one. Most of the times, not.
So.
Ron Hardin
I can't find the very recent Lileks on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue
(does anybody have a link?). Maybe it came out whenever the issue came out,
I don't know. His archive has gaps. He said:
Men are more or less wired ready to go; women need to read a hundred pages or
so about getting to know the guy, incomprehensible to men, in bodice rippers.
Asking wife about buying the swimsuit issue: ``But why would you want to?'' A
woman's answer.
I don't remember all the connections he gave though, and in particular his way
of putting it. Lileks is very good but can only be read in very small amounts
at once.
My own thought is that women argue the woman's side, and men the men's,
and it's not a transcendental discussion but part of the war between the sexes.
Confusion starts when the man goes into the indicative and the woman stays
in the subjunctive.
Ron Hardin
> I can't find the very recent Lileks on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue
> (does anybody have a link?). Maybe it came out whenever the issue came out,
> I don't know. His archive has gaps. He said:
I found it. It was a Screed, not a Bleat. I just read it recently, though
for all I know it's very old. Read and discuss
http://www.lileks.com/writings/post/si.html
Lewis Mammel
tejas wrote:
>
> "smw" <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
> news:3EA15FD1...@ameritech.net...
> > In other words, it shows that men have no imagination?
>
> Little imagination would be better.
Like for example in those TV ads for GIRLS GONE WILD,
it takes very little imagination to see through the
video blur.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
smw
Ron Hardin wrote:
> Ron Hardin wrote:
>
>>I can't find the very recent Lileks on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue
>>(does anybody have a link?). Maybe it came out whenever the issue came out,
>>I don't know. His archive has gaps. He said:
>>
>
> I found it. It was a Screed, not a Bleat. I just read it recently, though
> for all I know it's very old. Read and discuss
>
> http://www.lileks.com/writings/post/si.html
"There's a stand for the issue in my local grocery store, and I watch
the expressions of women when they spy it. Their eyes roll up so
severely they nearly topple backwards, or they emit small tight spiky
clouds of furious disapproval. It makes for dangerous moments in the
check-out line.
Do men really imagine women care all that much? We're all on the
Victoria Secret's Catalogue mailing list, anyway.
Ron Hardin
He left himself an out with the last line.
He's wrong about objectification though; Paglia had a better analysis
in Sexual Personae that I couldn't find that last time I looked for it
so won't look again, that a man staring at porn is looking for an answer.
Objectification is exactly impossible.
smw
Ron Hardin wrote:
The piece didn't have anything to do with women in any case; it was all
about putting down men who don't like babes in bikinis. In general,
women enforce female norms and men male ones.
>
> Objectification is exactly impossible.
>
smw
Sodd Furley wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Apr 2003, smw <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote:
>
>>Marko Amnell wrote:
>>
>>
>>>"smw" <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
>>>news:3EA1A5AE...@ameritech.net
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>>So your *only* objection to the porn industry is its low aesthetic
>>>>>standards? The fact that women perform various sexual acts in
>>>>>front of the camera and men pay to watch the photographs and
>>>>>films is not a problem?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>Right, that's not the problem. As I pointed out to you before,
>>>>the sexuality appears to be your problem. The usual epistemological
>>>>dependence on prudery the alleged anti-prude reliably exhibits.
>>>>On, in Freud's fine paraphrase, "the hysterical overvaluation
>>>>of the sexual."
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Ridiculous. My attitude to sexuality is completely relaxed.
>>>Stop projecting your absurd Freudian theories on everyone
>>>you argue with.
>>>
>>
>>You mean, you didn't notice that I was ironizing
>>
>
> Yes, I thought you were getting a little hot under the (wrinkled)
> collar.
so much catachresis, so little point...
Susan Adams
Michael S. Morris
Saturday, the 19th of April, 2003
Jeff Inman wrote:
So, you have your own notions, going in to the thing,
and any survey that doesn't back up your bias is
obviously biased?
Lew:
... and anyway, the results of some survey are not really
at issue.
I said:
They may well not be at issue with you, but, well,
they are what is at issue in David's book. His book
is a nonscientific, journalistic survey tending to refute
antiporn claims about the motivations of men who consume
porn. Roughly put, it says we like it because we like
to fantasize when we jack off, and not because we are
all latent rapists.
Silke:
In other words, it shows that men have no imagination?
One of the interesting discoveries for me in reading
David's book was that a lot of the men responding seemed
to like porn like I do---namely, *written* porn. So,
of course, I'm sitting back here and chuckling at your
comments about soul-destruction and imagination, as
well aschuckling at imagining Lew's cubicles filled
with Anais Nins punching the McErotica timeclock---"They
did it for a dollar a page!"
But, OK, let me just say: I do have no imagination.
Or at least not enough. If I want to stay horny---and
I very much do want to *stay* horny---I *need* (a) some
masturbation time, and (b) some specific aids on occasion
(certainly not even a quarter of the time) to keep my
fantasy life spiced. I have always been a "girl next
door" sort of guy (there's a George Carlin routine about
this), so those porn-aided fantasies are invariably end
up being about my main squeeze. And the point is, they
generally carry over to the mutual benefit of both of
us. Why keep horny? Because it is good for my soul as
a man, and it is especially good for the soul of my
marriage. I really believe it's like the more I keep
it going, the more it wants to go, and the less I indulge
myself (and I have tried abstinence as an experiment
just to see what would happen), the less I want sex
at all. I think, by the way, there is a lovely little
book that says precisely this from a female perspective:
Betty Dobson's _Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving_.
Lew's cubicle thing is really pretty ridiculous---he's
imagining that porn is produced, and only produced,
by the exploitation of the women involved. That is
the subtext---the women involved wouldn't do that if
they didn't *have* to do it. I'll bet that is just
more often false than true.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Saturday, the 19th of April, 2003
Lew:
I was talking about the approving tone that I
perceived in the thread, based on 1) the implication that
it's mostly not violent, so oh, OK no problem,
I said:
But, violence *is* a big antiporn claim. Perhaps
*the* big antiporn claim. "Porn is the theory, rape is
the practice." Whoever said that (MacKinnon or somesuch.)
In any event, it is the primary thing David's survey tends
to refute. Instead of men wanting to objectify and control
women, it tends rather to show that men want to be
objectified and controlled.
Francis:
"Tends to refute"?
Yeah, tends to refute. Adds inconclusive evidence in
a direction that refutes the claim. Simple.
Francis:
Why would anyone suppose that Loftus'
witnesses are reliable?
Because it is even loopier to suppose they
are unreliable, and that there exists some
expertise somewhere (psychology do you think?
psychoanalysis? polygraphy? tarot cards?) which
can tell us what it is that they *truly* think.
Because they tend to say exactly what I would
tend to say.
The reason for my "tends to refute" is not that
I think they are lying. In fact, I'd bet money they
are telling the truth, if there were an objective
way to measure that truth. But, the unscientificalness
of David's book is in the self-selected nature of
his respondents. I don't think you'll find a
skid-row bum in there, but you'll find lots of
computer geeks and engineers and people who are
obviously net.people. It is quite possible that
David's sample is representative of only a small fraction
of those who consume porn, and that your average
male consumer *does* lust after violence against
women.
Francis:
As I understand it Lewis' ire was
directed more at Robert Teeter's cozy tone than at the
books contents.
But, Bob is simply a nice guy meeting another nice guy
and being nice about it. I just didn't get Lew's animus
about it, except as animus about porn or its defense
itself.
Francis:
It was RT's unfortunate coupling of the
book and his "Hail fellow RAB, well met!" that provoked
L's unnecessarily harsh post. On the other hand, we are
RAB, right?
I guess Lew's response read to me like the way one
might respond if David had written a Holocaust revisionist
book or something. I just don't get it. But, I guess
I've been convinced porn is a good thing for many
years now. I consume it myself, and I think its detractors,
both left and right, are a heckuva lot more soulless than
its defenders or consumers. So there.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
smw
Michael S. Morris wrote:
I wouldn't want to interfere with a good chuckle, but what's your point,
exactly? I wasn't referring to visual porn specifically. And Anais Nin
stinks big time.
> But, OK, let me just say: I do have no imagination.
> Or at least not enough. If I want to stay horny---and
> I very much do want to *stay* horny---I *need* (a) some
> masturbation time, and (b) some specific aids on occasion
> (certainly not even a quarter of the time) to keep my
> fantasy life spiced. I have always been a "girl next
> door" sort of guy (there's a George Carlin routine about
> this), so those porn-aided fantasies are invariably end
> up being about my main squeeze. And the point is, they
> generally carry over to the mutual benefit of both of
> us. Why keep horny? Because it is good for my soul as
> a man, and it is especially good for the soul of my
> marriage. I really believe it's like the more I keep
> it going, the more it wants to go, and the less I indulge
> myself (and I have tried abstinence as an experiment
> just to see what would happen), the less I want sex
> at all.
Sure, use it or lose it and all that. But I know plenty of men who stay
plenty horny beyond their 20s (or 30s or 50s) w/o your aids. From their
perspective, your soul's already outta whack because it seems you can't
stay horny without them.
> I think, by the way, there is a lovely little
> book that says precisely this from a female perspective:
> Betty Dobson's _Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving_.
>
> Lew's cubicle thing is really pretty ridiculous---he's
> imagining that porn is produced, and only produced,
> by the exploitation of the women involved.
Perhaps he's concerned about the porn that is.
That is
> the subtext---the women involved wouldn't do that if
> they didn't *have* to do it. I'll bet that is just
> more often false than true.
Mileage on "have to" varies, I suspect. But t's not terribly relevant to
this discussion, I think. Of course I think women being coerced into
porn or prostitution is wrong and nasty, and I'm sure you do, too. As to
the exploitation that's not coercive in the narrow sense, there's plenty
of non-sexual sorts that are equally objectable (or, in your case,
equally non-objectable)
smw
Michael S. Morris wrote:
>
> I guess Lew's response read to me like the way one
> might respond if David had written a Holocaust revisionist
> book or something. I just don't get it. But, I guess
> I've been convinced porn is a good thing for many
> years now. I consume it myself, and I think its detractors,
> both left and right, are a heckuva lot more soulless than
> its defenders or consumers. So there.
The problem isn't so much soullessness in your case (your soul being all
over the place, after all), but intellectlessness. To assume that
anybody who objects to porn has to do so for whacky reasons that somehow
fall neatly into "left" or "right" is just silly.
Lewis Mammel
"Michael S. Morris" wrote:
>
> Francis:
> Why would anyone suppose that Loftus'
> witnesses are reliable?
>
> Because it is even loopier to suppose they
> are unreliable, and that there exists some
> expertise somewhere (psychology do you think?
> psychoanalysis? polygraphy? tarot cards?) which
> can tell us what it is that they *truly* think.
Follow the money. There's a whole raft of new multimillionaires
created by internet porn, as per the show I saw. I've seen other
shows and articles, all laudatory, about such entrepeneurship.
There was a case in Florida where a houseful of babes were hired to
live their lives for the internet, including plenty of posing
and I-don't-know-what , all financed by some by now famous and
powerful internet porn lord. The township tried to say that this
was sex trade in a residential zoned area ( duh ) and he was fighting
it, since no customers visited the premises.
From what I understand, internet porn dwarfs all previous porn
trade in dollar amount. It represents quite a boom, at any rate.
I saw a clip ( several times ) advertising a talk show ( Kimmel
probably ) where some guy says, "I can't get over the idea that
I use the same machine to masturbate that I use to teach my kid
the alphabet." Of course, this is uproariously funny.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Ron Hardin
> The piece didn't have anything to do with women in any case; it was all
> about putting down men who don't like babes in bikinis. In general,
> women enforce female norms and men male ones.
It had to do with women's incomprehension of domesticated men. The topic in Lileks is
found by looking for the best line; the rest was written around it.
Thurber's Walter Mitty would be another story of this.
Both are men's stories of women.
smw
Lewis Mammel wrote:
>
> "Michael S. Morris" wrote:
>
>
>>Francis:
>> Why would anyone suppose that Loftus'
>> witnesses are reliable?
>>
>>Because it is even loopier to suppose they
>>are unreliable, and that there exists some
>>expertise somewhere (psychology do you think?
>>psychoanalysis? polygraphy? tarot cards?) which
>>can tell us what it is that they *truly* think.
>>
>
> Follow the money.
You can hardly follow the money to porn consumer's intentions,
motivations, desires.
Mike may come w/o layers. The men I've known reveal their thoughts very
slowly. Why the hell would I tell some David Loftus what I really want,
think, feel?
"unreliable" is simply the wrong word because it implies some intention
to conceal or deceive, when there are simply various registers of
communicative truth. There's the stuff you tell strangers, the stuff you
tell intimates (various things to various types of intimates, cf. what
you tell your mother to what you tell your lover to what you tell your
children), stuff you perhaps tell yourself.
Michael S. Morris
Saturday, the 19th of April, 2003
Jeff Inman wrote:
So, you have your own notions, going in to the thing,
and any survey that doesn't back up your bias is
obviously biased?
Lew:
... and anyway, the results of some survey are not really
at issue.
I said:
They may well not be at issue with you, but, well,
they are what is at issue in David's book. His book
is a nonscientific, journalistic survey tending to refute
antiporn claims about the motivations of men who consume
porn. Roughly put, it says we like it because we like
to fantasize when we jack off, and not because we are
all latent rapists.
Silke:
In other words, it shows that men have no imagination?
I said:
One of the interesting discoveries for me in reading
David's book was that a lot of the men responding seemed
to like porn like I do---namely, *written* porn. So,
of course, I'm sitting back here and chuckling at your
comments about soul-destruction and imagination, as
well aschuckling at imagining Lew's cubicles filled
with Anais Nins punching the McErotica timeclock---"They
did it for a dollar a page!"
Silke:
I wouldn't want to interfere with a good chuckle, but
what's your point, exactly?
Umm, _aesthesis_, maybe.
Silke:
I wasn't referring to visual porn specifically.
But that, or audio porn, are the two cases where one
might imagine Lew's cubicle-thing. Turns out a lot of
consumers of porn aren't particularly interested in that.
Silke:
And Anais Nin stinks big time.
So typical of you. And why do you imagine your
aesthetic judgment has any validity or authority
or knowledge of anything behind it at all? For
all of its irrelevancy to the present thread,
Anais Nin does not stink. On the other hand, I don't
think and I didn't say she is particularly fine or
good, either. She was mentioned for the sake of an
allusion and a joke.
And we come back to this aesthesis thing, where,
again, you wouldn't be caught out claiming
any rational system of aesthetic judgment at
all, and yet you casually toss off damnations about other
people being soulless for liking things you dislike
and cannot begin to comprehend.
Harlequin romances, snort! You are on record as
*liking* Derrida, dear, when every other one of
his supporters have to basically admit he can't
write as well as Barbara Cartland did, so pay no
attention to the contradictions on top of
contradictions in what he says, and simply imagine
dutifully what he might mean by it.
Peanut-butter sandwiches and McDonald's french
fries have their place, and it simply does not
mean I am incapable of appreciating lobster thermidor
(and possibly well in circles around your appreciation
and knowledge of the same) if I admit that I like them.
I said:
But, OK, let me just say: I do have no imagination.
Or at least not enough. If I want to stay horny---and
I very much do want to *stay* horny---I *need* (a) some
masturbation time, and (b) some specific aids on occasion
(certainly not even a quarter of the time) to keep my
fantasy life spiced. I have always been a "girl next
door" sort of guy (there's a George Carlin routine about
this), so those porn-aided fantasies are invariably end
up being about my main squeeze. And the point is, they
generally carry over to the mutual benefit of both of
us. Why keep horny? Because it is good for my soul as
a man, and it is especially good for the soul of my
marriage. I really believe it's like the more I keep
it going, the more it wants to go, and the less I indulge
myself (and I have tried abstinence as an experiment
just to see what would happen), the less I want sex
at all.
Silke:
Sure, use it or lose it and all that.
Nice and dismissive, that.
Silke:
But I know plenty of men who stay
plenty horny beyond their 20s (or 30s or 50s)
w/o your aids.
Yeah, and I believe in them just like I believe
in that Nietzschean man happy in evil. I.e.,
I haven't met them, and, though I grant they are
theoretically possible, I question if they have
been able to keep a marriage bed happy for 18
years. Speaking of which, we made my SUV happy,
too, the other night after dancing. I'd never done that
before---gone parking. I mean, I've made out in
cars in the relative safety of our driveway, but
we found a secluded and deserted pull-off on a country
road by a stream.
Silke:
From their perspective, your soul's already outta
whack because it seems you can't stay horny without them.
Well, maybe they don't have much perspective on it
at all. Maybe they are pretty soulless people.
Maybe they aren't married with children, and
haven't a clue about what it is to struggle against
the unsexiness inherent in that. Maybe they lie
when they say they don't use pornography.
You haven't addressed the whole gay thing I raised,
except to say that it is somehow "negative", although
it seems to me it is perfectly positive, and unlikely to
be replaced by anything different. But, I've gone through
similar self-discovery in experiencing porn. Specifically,
I would say AN Roquelaure's (aka Anne Rice) _The Claiming
of Sleeping Beauty_ trilogy was important for me. I mean,
there're scenes in it which, well, I'd never do in reality
and never want to do, but it was something in the way of
a surprise to me about me to discover that I could be aroused
by spanking scenes, and just as easily by male-male scenes
as female-male or female-female scenes. I guess from my
pornographic experience of those books I would date my belief
about my own sexuality, that it is *not* a hardwired, fixed thing,
that though I am pretty darn vanilla in practice, in
theory at least there is a huge range that I could
choose to respond to, or choose to put myself where I
would respond. From my inner experience of those books,
I date my skepticism about there even being anything natural
about categories such as homosexual or heterosexual. I'd
call that *positive* discovery of the sort these gay men
in David's book speak about.
Furthermore, from what David's respondents report, I'd
say a lot of men have apparently *discovered* new things about
their own sexuality through pornographic explorations.
I said:
I think, by the way, there is a lovely little
book that says precisely this from a female perspective:
Betty Dobson's _Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving_.
Lew's cubicle thing is really pretty ridiculous---he's
imagining that porn is produced, and only produced,
by the exploitation of the women involved.
Silke:
Perhaps he's concerned about the porn that is.
I'm sure he is. However, I don't join him in
imagining there's much of it at all.
I said:
That is the subtext---the women involved wouldn't
do that if they didn't *have* to do it. I'll bet
that is just more often false than true.
Silke:
Mileage on "have to" varies, I suspect. But it's
not terribly relevant to this discussion, I think.
Of course I think women being coerced into porn or
prostitution is wrong and nasty, and I'm sure you do,
too. As to the exploitation that's not coercive in the
narrow sense, there's plenty of non-sexual sorts that
are equally objectable (or, in your case, equally
non-objectable)
That's correct. Equally non-objectable.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Sunday, the 20th of April, 2003
Silke:
I was thinking of women who tend to need no
visual or verbal aids to masturbate; most would,
in fact, find them distracting...
And, guess what? There are people---men and women,
in fact---who are different.
Your commennt about watching a porn flick with
a boyfriend reminds me that I've seen I think
3 porn flicks in my lifetime. Two were an evening
out at a drive-in with some guys just after
high school. We saw "Deep Throat" and "Candy Does
Hollywood" I believe. I found that a very un-arousing
experience.
Then, with a female partner, we rented a video once
and watched it. We both critiqued it afterwards---
agreeing as to the vapidity of the plot, how it would be
better if there were more characterization, more romance
to it, more believability to it, less jumping from
clinical position to position. However, we also experienced
that it turned *her* on, and that proved to our mutual
enjoyment.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Sunday, the 20th of April, 2003
I said:
I guess Lew's response read to me like the way one
might respond if David had written a Holocaust revisionist
book or something. I just don't get it. But, I guess
I've been convinced porn is a good thing for many
years now. I consume it myself, and I think its detractors,
both left and right, are a heckuva lot more soulless than
its defenders or consumers. So there.
Silke:
The problem isn't so much soullessness in your case
(your soul being all over the place, after all),
but intellectlessness. To assume that anybody who
objects to porn has to do so for whacky reasons that
somehow fall neatly into "left" or "right" is just silly.
I'm not sure where you get that from what I have said.
I don't think I introduced the dichotomy, but what is
silly is to deny that there *is*, in fact, such a
dichotomy. The "right" antipornists are antiporn out of
prudishness or worship of tradition, sometimes including
religious tradition. The "left" are those who do so
out of some twisted feminism. Like any such categorization
or coarse-graining of our world, it isn't, and well, isn't
meant to be, accurate in detail. In fact, it would intellectless
to assume that it were so meant.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Sunday, the 20th of April, 2003
Francis:
Why would anyone suppose that Loftus'
witnesses are reliable?
I said:
Because it is even loopier to suppose they
are unreliable, and that there exists some
expertise somewhere (psychology do you think?
psychoanalysis? polygraphy? tarot cards?) which
can tell us what it is that they *truly* think.
Lew:
Follow the money. There's a whole raft of new multimillionaires
created by internet porn, as per the show I saw. I've seen other
shows and articles, all laudatory, about such entrepeneurship.
There was a case in Florida where a houseful of babes were hired to
live their lives for the internet, including plenty of posing
and I-don't-know-what , all financed by some by now famous and
powerful internet porn lord. The township tried to say that this
was sex trade in a residential zoned area ( duh ) and he
was fighting it, since no customers visited the premises.
From what I understand, internet porn dwarfs all previous porn
trade in dollar amount. It represents quite a boom, at any rate.
I saw a clip ( several times ) advertising a talk show ( Kimmel
probably ) where some guy says, "I can't get over the idea that
I use the same machine to masturbate that I use to teach my kid
the alphabet." Of course, this is uproariously funny.
I don't understand what I am supposed to do with "following
the money". I mean, does this tell me anything at all about
David's respondents being unreliable? I don't think so.
The porn I have paid for is mostly written [for example,
when I purchased the AN Roquelaure (Anne Rice) book _Claiming of
Sleeping Beauty]. On the internet, I'm certain I have never
paid for anything. Maybe I'm just undersexed or something,
but I don't get it---there just seems to me to be so much
free stuff out there for just about any and every taste, and
some tastes I didn't know even existed, that I can't imagine
wanting to pay for anything.
It's obvious that the internet has exploded porn
to the masses, and that's because you don't have to
skulk to the seamy side of town where you might be
seen by someone and embarassed or shamed in
order to get porn.
But, the whole sort of exploited porn workers/sleazy
porn king thing strikes me as a function of the ghettoization
of porn in the first place. It's a perception that feeds on
shame and embarassment, and feeds into the low quality of
so much of what is available. But, honestly, if one is told
about how hot the C3PO suit was for Anthony Daniels to
wear out in the Tunisian desert in making the first "Star
Wars" film, why don't we get the same sort of shame thing
going over people who happen to like that movie? I mean, it's
not like it's "The Seventh Seal" or anything.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
David J. Loftus
> this is quite lovely news to hear that a rabster has produiced a good book.
Well, "a" book, anyway. To assert that it's a "good" book may be
premature, at the very least.
Geez, guys, after years of trying to get interesting threads started
here and having no more success than anyone else (except for Mike,
perhaps), I find 60-plus posts went up in just the couple days I was
away on the road.
If I had known you folks are more apt to talk about subjects that
interest me -- let alone me myself -- when I'm gone, I would have left
town much sooner!
I'd love to get involved in at least half a dozen of the trails this
thread has taken, but I have to get showered up and dressed for Easter
dinner at my cousins' today. Will try to check back and comment on
some of the more erroneous and amusing remarks later.
David Loftus
Oh and yes, it was great to spend some quality time with Mr. Teeter on
Wednesday. Sure sorry I didn't see any other RABsters while I was
doing my dog-and-pony show in the Bay Area.
smw
Michael S. Morris wrote:
...
> I said:
> One of the interesting discoveries for me in reading
> David's book was that a lot of the men responding seemed
> to like porn like I do---namely, *written* porn. So,
> of course, I'm sitting back here and chuckling at your
> comments about soul-destruction and imagination, as
> well aschuckling at imagining Lew's cubicles filled
> with Anais Nins punching the McErotica timeclock---"They
> did it for a dollar a page!"
> Silke:
> I wouldn't want to interfere with a good chuckle, but
> what's your point, exactly?
>
> Umm, _aesthesis_, maybe.
no point, then?
>
> Silke:
> I wasn't referring to visual porn specifically.
>
> But that, or audio porn, are the two cases where one
> might imagine Lew's cubicle-thing. Turns out a lot of
> consumers of porn aren't particularly interested in that.
Which hardly invalidates whatever point he was making about that kind of
porn...
>
> Silke:
> And Anais Nin stinks big time.
>
> So typical of you. And why do you imagine your
> aesthetic judgment has any validity or authority
> or knowledge of anything behind it at all?
Why should I care whether it does? Why should you care?
...
> And we come back to this aesthesis thing, where,
> again, you wouldn't be caught out claiming
> any rational system of aesthetic judgment at
> all, and yet you casually toss off damnations about other
> people being soulless for liking things you dislike
> and cannot begin to comprehend.
You never did get the difference between "no" and "no ultimate," did
you? The fact that there's no ultimate basis for aesthetic judgment and
that there cannot be will not stop me from distinguishing between
_Animorphs_ and _Metamorphoses_. Live with it.
> Harlequin romances, snort! You are on record as
> *liking* Derrida, dear, when every other one of
> his supporters have to basically admit he can't
> write as well as Barbara Cartland did
huh? who?
> so pay no
> attention to the contradictions on top of
> contradictions in what he says, and simply imagine
> dutifully what he might mean by it.
You've never read Derrida, Morris, so just shut up about him.
> Peanut-butter sandwiches and McDonald's french
> fries have their place, and it simply does not
> mean I am incapable of appreciating lobster thermidor
> (and possibly well in circles around your appreciation
> and knowledge of the same) if I admit that I like them.
And what's stopping you from enjoying them? And what's stopping me from
not enjoying them? What are you ranting about? It's bad food in more
ways than one, and you know it. Myself, I have a once-a-year-craving for
mashed potatoes out of a box. Why would I have to misrepresent them for
that? They're still bad food and bad for the body, just as the vast
majority of porn is bad art and bad for the soul. Why are you getting so
excited?
> I said:
> But, OK, let me just say: I do have no imagination.
> Or at least not enough. If I want to stay horny---and
> I very much do want to *stay* horny---I *need* (a) some
> masturbation time, and (b) some specific aids on occasion
> (certainly not even a quarter of the time) to keep my
> fantasy life spiced. I have always been a "girl next
> door" sort of guy (there's a George Carlin routine about
> this), so those porn-aided fantasies are invariably end
> up being about my main squeeze. And the point is, they
> generally carry over to the mutual benefit of both of
> us. Why keep horny? Because it is good for my soul as
> a man, and it is especially good for the soul of my
> marriage. I really believe it's like the more I keep
> it going, the more it wants to go, and the less I indulge
> myself (and I have tried abstinence as an experiment
> just to see what would happen), the less I want sex
> at all.
> Silke:
> Sure, use it or lose it and all that.
>
> Nice and dismissive, that.
Nah, it's one of the nicest rules of the sexual universe. But it's not
exactly news.
> Silke:
> But I know plenty of men who stay
> plenty horny beyond their 20s (or 30s or 50s)
> w/o your aids.
>
> Yeah, and I believe in them just like I believe
> in that Nietzschean man happy in evil. I.e.,
> I haven't met them
Well, dear, I have. And I find it rather curious that you need to
disbelieve in them. Perhaps they're just luckier than you -- bad thought?
...
> Silke:
> From their perspective, your soul's already outta
> whack because it seems you can't stay horny without them.
>
> Well, maybe they don't have much perspective on it
> at all. Maybe they are pretty soulless people.
> Maybe they aren't married with children, and
> haven't a clue about what it is to struggle against
> the unsexiness inherent in that. Maybe they lie
> when they say they don't use pornography.
And maybe they get turned on by their lovers. And maybe, when they need
their kicks, they get them from talking dirty to the woman who's right
there, or ask her about _her_ fantasies rather than grabbing some porn
full of other people's fantasies and then rolling over on the woman next
to them, hoping some of the excitement will rub off.
> You haven't addressed the whole gay thing I raised,
> except to say that it is somehow "negative", although
> it seems to me it is perfectly positive,
Once again, you didn't understand the argument. In your argument gay
kids need porn for the wrong reasons. Just like you say you need porn
because you otherwise can't get it up. These are negative reasons, not
positive ones. They address a deficiency.
> a surprise to me about me to discover that I could be aroused
> by spanking scenes, and just as easily by male-male scenes
> as female-male or female-female scenes. I guess from my
> pornographic experience of those books I would date my belief
> about my own sexuality, that it is *not* a hardwired, fixed thing,
> that though I am pretty darn vanilla in practice, in
> theory at least there is a huge range that I could
> choose to respond to,
imagine talking to people instead!
> I said:
> That is the subtext---the women involved wouldn't
> do that if they didn't *have* to do it. I'll bet
> that is just more often false than true.
> Silke:
> Mileage on "have to" varies, I suspect. But it's
> not terribly relevant to this discussion, I think.
> Of course I think women being coerced into porn or
> prostitution is wrong and nasty, and I'm sure you do,
> too. As to the exploitation that's not coercive in the
> narrow sense, there's plenty of non-sexual sorts that
> are equally objectable (or, in your case, equally
> non-objectable)
>
> That's correct. Equally non-objectable.
As long as it ain't your daughter.
Michael S. Morris
Sunday, the 20th of April, 2003
I said:
One of the interesting discoveries for me in reading
David's book was that a lot of the men responding seemed
to like porn like I do---namely, *written* porn. So,
of course, I'm sitting back here and chuckling at your
comments about soul-destruction and imagination, as
well as chuckling at imagining Lew's cubicles filled
with Anais Nins punching the McErotica timeclock---"They
did it for a dollar a page!"
Silke:
I wouldn't want to interfere with a good chuckle, but
what's your point, exactly?
I said:
Umm, _aesthesis_, maybe.
Silke:
no point, then?
Plenty of point---the assumption that one, by using
pornography, is somehow acceding to the exploitation
of the hired hand. The hired hand in the case of written
porn probably is having a blast writing what he is writing.
Silke:
I wasn't referring to visual porn specifically.
I said:
But that, or audio porn, are the two cases where one
might imagine Lew's cubicle-thing. Turns out a lot of
consumers of porn aren't particularly interested in that.
Silke:
Which hardly invalidates whatever point he was making
about that kind of porn...
What invalidates it is probably how much of it there
is. I.e. there is so much that it seems to go way beyond
any possibility of the myth of a handful of trapped and
exploited people. I mean, jeez, look at the explosion
of "amateur porn" in particular.
Silke:
And Anais Nin stinks big time.
I said:
So typical of you. And why do you imagine your
aesthetic judgment has any validity or authority
or knowledge of anything behind it at all?
Silke:
Why should I care whether it does? Why should you care?
I get tired of it. It's just stupid. I didn't
say anything positive or negative about Anais Nin,
but you have to weigh in about it in such a way that
puts down me and anyone else if there were any chance that
we ever thought kindly of the lady or might say anything
positive about anything she has written. It's just relentlessly
stupid.
I said:
And we come back to this aesthesis thing, where,
again, you wouldn't be caught out claiming
any rational system of aesthetic judgment at
all, and yet you casually toss off damnations about other
people being soulless for liking things you dislike
and cannot begin to comprehend.
Silke:
You never did get the difference between "no"
and "no ultimate," did you?
Yes, I did get the difference, which has been my whole
point for years now. I have never claimed "ultimate",
and in fact I have always claimed sublunar, and that
is what you never have gotten.
Silke:
The fact that there's no ultimate basis for
aesthetic judgment and that there cannot be will
not stop me from distinguishing between
_Animorphs_ and _Metamorphoses_. Live with it.
I've been living there all along, no thanks to you.
I said:
Harlequin romances, snort! You are on record as
*liking* Derrida, dear, when every other one of
his supporters have to basically admit he can't
write as well as Barbara Cartland did
Silke:
huh? who?
Lots of people, every Derrida thread that shows up
around these parts.
I said:
so pay no
attention to the contradictions on top of
contradictions in what he says, and simply imagine
dutifully what he might mean by it.
Silke:
You've never read Derrida, Morris, so just
shut up about him.
Maybe you should clarify for me---I should shut up
until I have read a book of his, or does this "read"
have to be in the sense of agreeing with your
"reading" of him?
I said:
Peanut-butter sandwiches and McDonald's french
fries have their place, and it simply does not
mean I am incapable of appreciating lobster thermidor
(and possibly well in circles around your appreciation
and knowledge of the same) if I admit that I like them.
Silke:
And what's stopping you from enjoying them?
Absolutely nothing.
Silke:
And what's stopping me from
not enjoying them?
Absolutely nothing.
Silke:
What are you ranting about?
Your characterization of it as "soul-destroying", when
it is *not* soul-destroying, when it enriches my soul.
Silke:
It's bad food in more
ways than one, and you know it.
No, I'm afraid I don't think it is bad food.
There are other things I think are bad food.
Not culinary art is simply not the same thing
as bad food.
Silke:
Myself, I have a once-a-year-craving for
mashed potatoes out of a box. Why would I have
to misrepresent them for that?
I don't know why you have to misrepresent them as
bad. They aren't.
Silke:
They're still bad food and bad for the body,
Once-a-year eating box mashed potatoes is
going to do *anything* negative to your body?
You are out of your gourd.
Yeah, it'd be bad food and bad for your body
if that were all you ate 24/7, but that is not
what we are talking about here. Just as the fraction
of pornography I read is a very tiny fraction of
what I read.
Silke:
just as the vast majority of porn is bad
art and bad for the soul. Why are you getting so
excited?
Because it isn't art at all, and it isn't any more bad for
the soul than those instant mashed potatoes are. Anymore
than underwear from Victoria's Secret are bad because they
cover up or deny the body.
I said:
But, OK, let me just say: I do have no imagination.
Or at least not enough. If I want to stay horny---and
I very much do want to *stay* horny---I *need* (a) some
masturbation time, and (b) some specific aids on occasion
(certainly not even a quarter of the time) to keep my
fantasy life spiced. I have always been a "girl next
door" sort of guy (there's a George Carlin routine about
this), so those porn-aided fantasies are invariably end
up being about my main squeeze. And the point is, they
generally carry over to the mutual benefit of both of
us. Why keep horny? Because it is good for my soul as
a man, and it is especially good for the soul of my
marriage. I really believe it's like the more I keep
it going, the more it wants to go, and the less I indulge
myself (and I have tried abstinence as an experiment
just to see what would happen), the less I want sex
at all.
Silke:
Sure, use it or lose it and all that.
I said:
Nice and dismissive, that.
Silke:
Nah, it's one of the nicest rules of the sexual universe.
But it's not exactly news.
But it is true nonetheless, and significant, and
important in the present context.
Silke:
But I know plenty of men who stay
plenty horny beyond their 20s (or 30s or 50s)
w/o your aids.
I said:
Yeah, and I believe in them just like I believe
in that Nietzschean man happy in evil. I.e.,
I haven't met them
Silke:
Well, dear, I have. And I find it rather curious
that you need to disbelieve in them. Perhaps they're
just luckier than you -- bad thought?
Not really a bad thought, but it is a little hard to
buy all these guys unburdening themselves about
their non-use of pornography to you, and believing that
to be more reliable or representative of anything
than David's sample.
Silke:
From their perspective, your soul's already outta
whack because it seems you can't stay horny without them.
I said:
Well, maybe they don't have much perspective on it
at all. Maybe they are pretty soulless people.
Maybe they aren't married with children, and
haven't a clue about what it is to struggle against
the unsexiness inherent in that. Maybe they lie
when they say they don't use pornography.
Silke:
And maybe they get turned on by their lovers.
Ahh, thank you, I was hoping for that. I win. See,
it ain't pornography *at all* you are against. It's
masturbation. Of the guy on his own without the girl
as the object of the arousal.
Of course, I have never said anything about not getting
turned on by my lover. You imagine that I did, but I
did not. Try "inventive" for "horny", and maybe
that will do it.
Silke:
And maybe, when they need
their kicks, they get them from talking dirty
to the woman who's right there, or ask her about
_her_ fantasies rather than grabbing some porn
full of other people's fantasies and then rolling
over on the woman next to them, hoping some of the
excitement will rub off.
I can only suppose you figure this as tit for tat for something---
maybe my allusion to marriage, I don't know. But, it isn't,
and it's rather sad. Anyway, let's see if we can move beyond
the game here and look at a specific: In my life right now,
it would have to be Tuesday nights. On Tuesdays I have choir
rehearsal from 7-10 in the evening and a long drive to get me
home by about 11:15. OK, my partner will be in bed asleep by
that point in time. I will be very tired myself, planning to
awake at 7:00 in the morning (but, Wednesday, thankfully, is
not a workout morning). But, I will typically not fall
immediately to sleep, and my mind will need some time to
relax and wind down from the day. Let's say that an extended
sexual fantasy beckons, of course with masturbation. Do I do
that or not, Silke? Is there something ethically wrong, or unaesthetic,
or soul-destroying, in indulging myself in such
a way when I am in a monogamous sexual relationship? My partner
and I might have had a great time spinning out mutual
fantasies on Monday night, and may well again on Wednesday
night. Or at some point during the day. And we talk dirty and
listen to each other and tell each other our fantasies plenty,
thank you very much. But it's not Monday or Wednesday
now and the Roomful of Blues suggestion in their tune "Roll Me
Over" simply does not work with her. In fact, so much so
that I think it would be simply an unloving thing (and therefore
unethical) for me to try and wake her for sex. It is Tuesday
night and she's asleep and the horniness has crossed my mind.
Do I shut that down (maybe on the theory that this will
"save it up" for later) or do I indulge (on the idea that
it stokes fires for later)? My belief, and it is a belief
borne out by actually deliberately trying it both ways each
for extended periods of time, that my sex life with
my partner is in fact improved when I do not shut such an
occasion down or out, but indulge myself. And porn? That
is simply a sometime (my bet is about 1/4 of the time, maybe
less) adjunct/aid to that masturbation. I will
go and get on the net until I find some story I like.
I said:
You haven't addressed the whole gay thing I raised,
except to say that it is somehow "negative", although
it seems to me it is perfectly positive,
Silke:
Once again, you didn't understand the argument. In
your argument gay kids need porn for the wrong reasons.
That is what you said before, but I still don't get it.
What is wrong about their reasons? How exactly do you figure
they should be taught about fellatio and anal sex without
access to something which would be "pornographic"?
I mean, these are gay men, right, some of them growing up
in a rural community, where there is no gay community at all.
It seems to me that is the way it is, neither bad nor good,
neither right nor wrong---the majority, and in some cases,
all of the people around them will be different.
Silke:
Just like you say you need porn because you otherwise
can't get it up.
Not exactly what I said. But, you knew that.
Silke:
These are negative reasons, not
positive ones. They address a deficiency.
They aid imagination, in exactly the same positive way
lacy black panties do. I mean, complaining about somebody
learning something from porn as "unimaginative" strikes me
as the same as complaining about somebody liking Plutarch
or the Iliad because they aren't imaginitive enough to write
up some heroic stories of their own. What about learning
from wisdom of the human community? What about seeing what
other people like and do? Why is that not a positive thing
in and of itself. Maybe those non-consumers of porn you've
met would be better, more knowledgeable, more inventive
had they consumed.
I said:
a surprise to me about me to discover that I could be aroused
by spanking scenes, and just as easily by male-male scenes
as female-male or female-female scenes. I guess from my
pornographic experience of those books I would date my belief
about my own sexuality, that it is *not* a hardwired, fixed thing,
that though I am pretty darn vanilla in practice, in
theory at least there is a huge range that I could
choose to respond to,
Silke:
imagine talking to people instead!
As opposed to reading a book, and that from
a "literature" teacher. Great. Once again, I
haven't said that I have not talked to people.
But why "instead"? Do you figure I did not learn
the politically correct thing?
I said:
That is the subtext---the women involved wouldn't
do that if they didn't *have* to do it. I'll bet
that is just more often false than true.
Silke:
Mileage on "have to" varies, I suspect. But it's
not terribly relevant to this discussion, I think.
Of course I think women being coerced into porn or
prostitution is wrong and nasty, and I'm sure you do,
too. As to the exploitation that's not coercive in the
narrow sense, there's plenty of non-sexual sorts that
are equally objectable (or, in your case, equally
non-objectable)
I said:
That's correct. Equally non-objectable.
Silke:
As long as it ain't your daughter.
Nope. Not a prude, I.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
smw
Michael S. Morris wrote:
> Sunday, the 20th of April, 2003
>
> I said:
> One of the interesting discoveries for me in reading
> David's book was that a lot of the men responding seemed
> to like porn like I do---namely, *written* porn. So,
> of course, I'm sitting back here and chuckling at your
> comments about soul-destruction and imagination, as
> well as chuckling at imagining Lew's cubicles filled
> with Anais Nins punching the McErotica timeclock---"They
> did it for a dollar a page!"
> Silke:
> I wouldn't want to interfere with a good chuckle, but
> what's your point, exactly?
> I said:
> Umm, _aesthesis_, maybe.
> Silke:
> no point, then?
>
> Plenty of point---the assumption that one, by using
> pornography, is somehow acceding to the exploitation
> of the hired hand. The hired hand in the case of written
> porn probably is having a blast writing what he is writing.
Can't you get it through your skull that I'm not arguing what you think
I'm arguing? I didn't make any point about exploitation whatsoever. Why
do you keep hallucinating that I did? Bad conscience?
...
> Silke:
> And Anais Nin stinks big time.
> I said:
> So typical of you. And why do you imagine your
> aesthetic judgment has any validity or authority
> or knowledge of anything behind it at all?
> Silke:
> Why should I care whether it does? Why should you care?
>
> I get tired of it. It's just stupid.
I get tired of people claiming Anais Nin is a good writer. It's just
stupid.
> I said:
> And we come back to this aesthesis thing, where,
> again, you wouldn't be caught out claiming
> any rational system of aesthetic judgment at
> all, and yet you casually toss off damnations about other
> people being soulless for liking things you dislike
> and cannot begin to comprehend.
> Silke:
> You never did get the difference between "no"
> and "no ultimate," did you?
>
> Yes, I did get the difference, which has been my whole
> point for years now. I have never claimed "ultimate",
> and in fact I have always claimed sublunar, and that
> is what you never have gotten.
I've never claimed anything but ultimate, either. Obviously, standards
of some sort are always in operation. So what do you think you've been
arguing over for the last years?
> Silke:
> The fact that there's no ultimate basis for
> aesthetic judgment and that there cannot be will
> not stop me from distinguishing between
> _Animorphs_ and _Metamorphoses_. Live with it.
>
> I've been living there all along, no thanks to you.
So again, what do you imagine your point to be? And what allows you to
agree with me on _Animorphs_ but to disagree on Anais Nin?
> I said:
> Harlequin romances, snort! You are on record as
> *liking* Derrida, dear, when every other one of
> his supporters have to basically admit he can't
> write as well as Barbara Cartland did
> Silke:
> huh? who?
>
> Lots of people, every Derrida thread that shows up
> around these parts.
Who?
> I said:
> so pay no
> attention to the contradictions on top of
> contradictions in what he says, and simply imagine
> dutifully what he might mean by it.
> Silke:
> You've never read Derrida, Morris, so just
> shut up about him.
>
> Maybe you should clarify for me---I should shut up
> until I have read a book of his, or does this "read"
> have to be in the sense of agreeing with your
> "reading" of him?
A book would do. And if you want to comment on his writing, make it a
book of his in French.
> I said:
> Peanut-butter sandwiches and McDonald's french
> fries have their place, and it simply does not
> mean I am incapable of appreciating lobster thermidor
> (and possibly well in circles around your appreciation
> and knowledge of the same) if I admit that I like them.
> Silke:
> And what's stopping you from enjoying them?
>
> Absolutely nothing.
>
> Silke:
> And what's stopping me from
> not enjoying them?
>
> Absolutely nothing.
>
> Silke:
> What are you ranting about?
>
> Your characterization of it as "soul-destroying", when
> it is *not* soul-destroying, when it enriches my soul.
Sorry, there's no ultimate standard on the beauty of your soul, either.
I said "bad for the soul," in any case, not destroying.
>
> Silke:
> It's bad food in more
> ways than one, and you know it.
>
> No, I'm afraid I don't think it is bad food.
> There are other things I think are bad food.
> Not culinary art is simply not the same thing
> as bad food.
But deep-fried food industry waste byproducts (you mentioned fries) are
bad food.
> Silke:
> Myself, I have a once-a-year-craving for
> mashed potatoes out of a box. Why would I have
> to misrepresent them for that?
>
> I don't know why you have to misrepresent them as
> bad. They aren't.
They're terrible.
> Silke:
> They're still bad food and bad for the body,
>
> Once-a-year eating box mashed potatoes is
> going to do *anything* negative to your body?
Nope. But they're still bad food.
> You are out of your gourd.
Hallucinating again.
> Yeah, it'd be bad food and bad for your body
> if that were all you ate 24/7, but that is not
> what we are talking about here. Just as the fraction
> of pornography I read is a very tiny fraction of
> what I read.
congrats
> Silke:
> just as the vast majority of porn is bad
> art and bad for the soul. Why are you getting so
> excited?
>
> Because it isn't art at all, and it isn't any more bad for
> the soul than those instant mashed potatoes are.
I fully agree that my soul appears unaffected by an occasional
indulgence in mashed potatoes.
Only if porn were the only way to keep it going.
> Silke:
> But I know plenty of men who stay
> plenty horny beyond their 20s (or 30s or 50s)
> w/o your aids.
> I said:
> Yeah, and I believe in them just like I believe
> in that Nietzschean man happy in evil. I.e.,
> I haven't met them
> Silke:
> Well, dear, I have. And I find it rather curious
> that you need to disbelieve in them. Perhaps they're
> just luckier than you -- bad thought?
>
> Not really a bad thought, but it is a little hard to
> buy all these guys unburdening themselves about
> their non-use of pornography to you, and believing that
> to be more reliable or representative of anything
> than David's sample.
But since David's interlocutors are, by your argumentation, eminently
reliable, you're forced to either believe me or not believe Loftus'
interviewees...
All those guys? No. I'm only talking about a very few, and those who feel
close enough to me to talk about all kinds of embarrassing stuff or
stuff they think I'd disapprove of or that would upset me etc. etc. And
I'm talking about guys who rather ruefully talk about trying porn and
not getting anything out of it. It's not that I started interrogating them.
It's funny, because I used to believe that crap you and Ron peddle -- all
men get excited by SI swimsuit issues, they just don't admit to it blabla.
>
> Silke:
> From their perspective, your soul's already outta
> whack because it seems you can't stay horny without them.
> I said:
> Well, maybe they don't have much perspective on it
> at all. Maybe they are pretty soulless people.
> Maybe they aren't married with children, and
> haven't a clue about what it is to struggle against
> the unsexiness inherent in that. Maybe they lie
> when they say they don't use pornography.
> Silke:
> And maybe they get turned on by their lovers.
>
> Ahh, thank you, I was hoping for that. I win. See,
> it ain't pornography *at all* you are against. It's
> masturbation. Of the guy on his own without the girl
> as the object of the arousal.
God, how silly do you get. No, I don't object to masturbation at all
(it'd be like objecting to moonrises).
> Of course, I have never said anything about not getting
> turned on by my lover. You imagine that I did, but I
> did not. Try "inventive" for "horny", and maybe
> that will do it.
You're on record saying that 1/4 of the time, you can't get it up w/o
porn and that you transfer your porn fantasies to your lover.
> Silke:
> And maybe, when they need
> their kicks, they get them from talking dirty
> to the woman who's right there, or ask her about
> _her_ fantasies rather than grabbing some porn
> full of other people's fantasies and then rolling
> over on the woman next to them, hoping some of the
> excitement will rub off.
>
> I can only suppose you figure this as tit for tat for something---
> maybe my allusion to marriage, I don't know.
It's simply a paraphrase of how you describe your porn consumption.
> But, it isn't,
> and it's rather sad.
It sounded damn awful, yes.
> Anyway, let's see if we can move beyond
> the game here and look at a specific: In my life right now,
> it would have to be Tuesday nights. On Tuesdays I have choir
> rehearsal from 7-10 in the evening and a long drive to get me
> home by about 11:15. OK, my partner will be in bed asleep by
> that point in time. I will be very tired myself, planning to
> awake at 7:00 in the morning (but, Wednesday, thankfully, is
> not a workout morning). But, I will typically not fall
> immediately to sleep, and my mind will need some time to
> relax and wind down from the day. Let's say that an extended
> sexual fantasy beckons, of course with masturbation. Do I do
> that or not, Silke? Is there something ethically wrong, or unaesthetic,
> or soul-destroying, in indulging myself in such
> a way when I am in a monogamous sexual relationship?
You're so full of crap, Mike. It's totally beyond me why you feel the
need to justify your masturbation practices on Tuesday nights.
[more yaddayadda by day of the week]
> And porn?
You do remember the topic!
...
>
> I said:
> You haven't addressed the whole gay thing I raised,
> except to say that it is somehow "negative", although
> it seems to me it is perfectly positive,
> Silke:
> Once again, you didn't understand the argument. In
> your argument gay kids need porn for the wrong reasons.
>
> That is what you said before, but I still don't get it.
> What is wrong about their reasons? How exactly do you figure
> they should be taught about fellatio and anal sex without
> access to something which would be "pornographic"?
Talking, reading, doing. Why did you bring up gay kids specifically?
Because they have a harder time figuring it out. For bad reasons.
...
> Silke:
> Just like you say you need porn because you otherwise
> can't get it up.
>
> Not exactly what I said. But, you knew that.
Nope, I thin that's exactly what you said. You said that you consumed
porn because "I want to remain horny" or something like that. Implying
that w/o it, you wouldn't. You're free to change your story anytime.
> Silke:
> These are negative reasons, not
> positive ones. They address a deficiency.
>
> They aid imagination, in exactly the same positive way
> lacy black panties do. I mean, complaining about somebody
> learning something from porn as "unimaginative" strikes me
> as the same as complaining about somebody liking Plutarch
> or the Iliad because they aren't imaginitive enough to write
> up some heroic stories of their own. What about learning
> from wisdom of the human community? What about seeing what
> other people like and do? Why is that not a positive thing
> in and of itself. Maybe those non-consumers of porn you've
> met would be better, more knowledgeable, more inventive
> had they consumed.
Because most porn is so damn formulaic and so damn unrealistic that it
preicsely does NOT tell you what other people do. It gives you
pre-packaged fantasies of the mailman whose mere sight turns on the
housewife so much that she drops her bathrobe and spreads her legs.
"Wisdom of the human community" my ass. You're really out of it now.
> I said:
> a surprise to me about me to discover that I could be aroused
> by spanking scenes, and just as easily by male-male scenes
> as female-male or female-female scenes. I guess from my
> pornographic experience of those books I would date my belief
> about my own sexuality, that it is *not* a hardwired, fixed thing,
> that though I am pretty darn vanilla in practice, in
> theory at least there is a huge range that I could
> choose to respond to,
> Silke:
> imagine talking to people instead!
>
> As opposed to reading a book, and that from
> a "literature" teacher. Great.
"Literature"?
> Once again, I
> haven't said that I have not talked to people.
> But why "instead"? Do you figure I did not learn
> the politically correct thing?
No. On the contrary, I figure that you are getting exactly the
equivalent of the PC thing, sexual normativism.
> Silke:
> As long as it ain't your daughter.
>
> Nope. Not a prude, I.
you been taking Helen to the peep show to demonstrate her career option?
tejas
"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote in message
news:3EA2CEA7...@netdirect.net...
>
> But, honestly, if one is told
> about how hot the C3PO suit was for Anthony Daniels to
> wear out in the Tunisian desert in making the first "Star
> Wars" film, why don't we get the same sort of shame thing
> going over people who happen to like that movie? I mean, it's
> not like it's "The Seventh Seal" or anything.
Skiffy don't count, Mike.
ObFavePorn: The Mitchell Brothers SODOM & GOMORRAH. Funny stuff.
Ted
Michael S. Morris
Sunday, the 20th of April, 2003
Lew:
Follow the money.
Silke:
You can hardly follow the money to porn
consumer's intentions, motivations, desires.
Agreed. Especially since David's respondents make clear
that what porn is available is not necessarily what
they want, and moreover it is clear this is probably
because of the societal ghettoization of porn in the
first place.
Silke:
Mike may come w/o layers.
It is more that it is unknowable which layer is above or
below which, and that I'm afraid, is something I think
is true of most people.
Silke:
The men I've known reveal their thoughts very
slowly.
I don't know how you could presume to know this.
That is, that their thoughts are "revealed" as
opposed to hidden before.
Silke:
Why the hell would I tell some David Loftus
what I really want, think, feel?
Maybe because you want to sound off about an issue.
Nah, couldn't be.
Silke:
"unreliable" is simply the wrong word because it
implies some intention to conceal or deceive, when
there are simply various registers of communicative
truth.
Agreed so far.
Silke:
There's the stuff you tell strangers, the stuff you
tell intimates (various things to various types of
intimates, cf. what you tell your mother to what you
tell your lover to what you tell your children), stuff
you perhaps tell yourself.
The only possible disagreement is if you are *also* asserting
that the "stuff you perhaps tell yourself" is more true truth
than the stuff you tell strangers, that it is deeper in any
meaningful sense.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
David J. Loftus
> So do we need a survey to explain what's happening here?
> That guy whose calling in - do we need to know the nuances
> of his motivations? I think we get the general idea!
That's precisely the problem my book was meant to address: everyone
seems to THINK he or she knows what's going on with men and
pornography -- advocates and academics and experts have gone on at
great length about what goes on in men's minds -- but none of them
ever showed any evidence of having discussed the matter with any men.
In this day and age, if men were dictating to society what women thought
and felt, they would be roundly criticized. Somehow, it's been all right for
women to commit the same offense against men, however.
David Loftus
David J. Loftus
> First time in a long time I agree with Lew. Porn strikes me as a nasty
> business and bad for the soul all around.
I'd like to know on what basis you offer this judgment. Porn is "a nasty
business" in what sense? As opposed to news coverage of the war?
"Bad for the soul" in some sense different from, say, the latest megabillion
thriller, horror slasher (in which the expression of sexuality is often intimately
associated with sudden death), or "reality TV" show?
David Loftus
David J. Loftus
> Marko Amnell wrote:
> >
> > First time in a long time I agree with Mike Morris.
> > There is more than a smidgen of old-fashioned conservatism
> > in the soul of every self-righteous Critical Theorist.
> > This is as true of Theodor Adorno as of Silke-Maria Weineck.
> > It's all about telling the lower orders what they really
> > ought to believe and do.
>
> On the contrary, it's the inverse puritans who want to reserve a special
> status for sexuality. Critiquing porn is no different from critiquing
> any other cultural practice, be it anti-war protests, junk food binging,
> or exorbitant CEO salaries.
I don't recall you employing phraseology like "a nasty business" or
"bad for the soul" with reference to these other activities.
David Loftus
David J. Loftus
much of the
time here, though he may appear to be "defending me." Unfortunately,
Silke seems
to be mostly just enjoying baiting Marko rather than trying to clarify
her remarks or
explain herself. I'd be interested in hearing more about her positions
on the matter.
smw <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message news:<3EA18311...@ameritech.net>...
> This is very boring. If porn weren't stereotypical, predictable, badly
> written, badly acted, and badly lit, yes, I'd have a different
> relationship to it. What of it?
So when you say it's "a nasty business" and "bad for the soul," you
are not speaking
about sexuality per se, or even at all?
You must be aware that most people who read such remarks, without
amplification,
are going to assume that you are. Marko did.
David Loftus
David J. Loftus
> He's wrong about objectification though; Paglia had a better analysis
> in Sexual Personae that I couldn't find that last time I looked for it
> so won't look again, that a man staring at porn is looking for an answer.
>
> Objectification is exactly impossible.
I analyze objectification theory, at least as propounded by folks like
Dworkin and
MacKinnon, in the latter pages (pp. 285-290, to be exact) of my book
-- with a little
help from a few people like Canadian philosopher F.W. Christensen.
Objectification may be "exactly impossible," but it is also perfectly
common in a variety
of nonsexual contexts.
David Loftus
David J. Loftus
> Michael S. Morris wrote:
> > But, violence *is* a big antiporn claim. Perhaps
> > *the* big antiporn claim. "Porn is the theory, rape is
> > the practice." Whoever said that (MacKinnon or somesuch.)
> > In any event, it is the primary thing David's survey tends
> > to refute. Instead of men wanting to objectify and control
> > women, it tends rather to show that men want to be
> > objectified and controlled.
>
> witnesses are reliable?
No need to. Just read what they had to say and ask your gut whether it
sounds plausible and consistent.
The men I talked to understood the importance of what I was trying to do,
and many of them did not attempt to sugarcoat their behavior or interests.
Even more telling, some of them tended to repeat society's dogma about
men and pornography even when their own personal experiences were at
variance with it.
Doesn't it make more sense to at least weight what men have to say on
their own behalf against what a bunch of radical feminist activists (not a few
of them lesbians, incidentally) have said on behalf of such men?
If hetero males were claiming to be authorities about the motivations and
behavior of lesbian women, without offering any evidence of having spent some
time talking with same, they would be pillaged.
David Loftus
tomca...@yanospamhoo.com
> Make a case for porn that doesn't rest on negatives, and let's see.
Without Internet porn we would spend all our hours arguing in RAB? :)
The Greek idea is that Apollonian (mind) moderates the excesses of the
Dionysian (body). I would like an example of the Dionysian moderating the
Apollonian, but I can't think of one. :(
David J. Loftus
> francis muir wrote:
> >
> > "Tends to refute"? Why would anyone suppose that Loftus'
> > witnesses are reliable?
>
> would expect them to say. After all, pornography consumers would want to
> refute the same arguments David wants to refute. It's a bit like asking
> Ari Fleischer about the motivations of awarding fat contracts to
> Halliburton.
Some did, some did not. Please remember that I talked to gay and
bisexual
males, and offered the testimony of men who were indifferent to or
actively
opposed to pornography, as well. My job as a reporter was merely to
ask
open-ended questions (and to approach the hot-button issues from a
variety
of different directions), and relay what the men had to say in
response.
You may examine my questionnaire and decide for yourself how
open-ended
or "leading" it may have been:
http://www.david-loftus.com/watchsex-qq.html
You might also learn more if you asked me some questions about my
findings
instead of holding forth with your opinions on a book you haven't
read, a very
tiresome habit of which I am also unfortunately not immune.
> And the anti-porners at least on the left aren't talking about intent or
> conscious motivation in any case. Which makes them a lot harder to
> refute than Mike and David seem to assume.
Not talking about intent or conscious motivation? What have you read
by these
theorists?
Some sample quotations:
"The experience of the (overwhelmingly) male audiences who consume
pornography
is therefore not fantasy or simulation or catharsis but sexual
reality: the level of
reality on which sex itself largely operates." -- Catharine MacKinnon
" . . . the argument that consumers of pornography realize that such
portrayals [of
rape myths] are false is totally unconvincing." -- Diana E.H. Russell,
who cites
three books or articles by women, including herself, as well as
studies of college
and high school students as evidence
"Readers feel short-changed when a woman does not look and act the
part of the
_Playboy_ model. It is an insult to their masculine capacity to get
what they want."
-- Judith Bat-Ada, who goes on to say this leads to child molesting,
because the man
resents his partner for not living up to this "ideal": "It makes him
hate her. And it
makes him turn to the younger female daughters in the family."
". . . men believe . . . that they have the right to rape . . . . men
really believe that they
have the right to hit and to hurt. Pacifist males are only apparent
exceptions; repelled
by some forms of violence as nearly all men are, they remain
impervious to sexual
violence as nearly all men do." -- Andrea Dworkin
"Sooner or later, in one way or another, the consumers want to live
out the pornography
further in three dimensions. Sooner or later, in one way or another,
they do. _It_ makes
them want to; when they believe they can, when they feel they can get
away with it,
_they_ do." -- MacKinnon, her emphasis; what she is referring to in
this passage is
apparently "murdering a young woman . . . raping her, having vaginal
and anal
intercourse with her corpse, and chewing on several parts of her
body," which is
what immediately precedes the above passage
> And since what is at question
> in the left critique is the impact of porn on women, interviewing men
> doesn't seem quite the convincing tack here.
Except that much of the left critique depends very heavily on
assertions about
male motivations and behavior due to porn consumption which are
demonstrably
wrong. MacKinnon herself wrote in _Feminism Unbound_ that "Whatever
goes on
in the mind of pornography's consumer matters tremendously."
Unfortunately,
she repeatedly commits the error of propounding vast assertions on the
subject
without ever indicating she has discussed the matter with a single
porn consumer.
David Loftus
David J. Loftus
> The reason for my "tends to refute" is not that
> I think they are lying. In fact, I'd bet money they
> are telling the truth, if there were an objective
> way to measure that truth. But, the unscientificalness
> of David's book is in the self-selected nature of
> his respondents. I don't think you'll find a
> skid-row bum in there, but you'll find lots of
> computer geeks and engineers and people who are
> obviously net.people. It is quite possible that
> David's sample is representative of only a small fraction
> of those who consume porn, and that your average
> male consumer *does* lust after violence against
> women.
That is, of course, always possible. However, when porn critics
speak of "all the violence" in pornography (e.g., Susan Griffin writes:
"There is almost no pornographic work without the infliction of pain. . . .
Over and over, pornography depicts acts of terrible violence to women's
bodies" -- and on the religious right, you have Beverly LaHaye, who
blithely explains that "The depiction of rape, child sexual abuse, torture,
and bestiality are commonplace"), whereas the objective observer will
find it very difficult to find such material, you have to suspect that all
the assertions about men's taste for sexual violence may be equally
unwarranted.
> Francis:
> As I understand it Lewis' ire was
> directed more at Robert Teeter's cozy tone than at the
> books contents.
>
> But, Bob is simply a nice guy meeting another nice guy
> and being nice about it. I just didn't get Lew's animus
> about it, except as animus about porn or its defense
> itself.
There seems to be general agreement, even from Silke and Fido, that Lew's
crack was out of line at best and puzzlingly offensive at worst. So naturally
Mike and Marko would turn to an explanation dependent upon shame and
sexual value judgments.
> Francis:
> It was RT's unfortunate coupling of the
> book and his "Hail fellow RAB, well met!" that provoked
> L's unnecessarily harsh post. On the other hand, we are
> RAB, right?
>
> I guess Lew's response read to me like the way one
> might respond if David had written a Holocaust revisionist
> book or something. I just don't get it. But, I guess
> I've been convinced porn is a good thing for many
> years now. I consume it myself, and I think its detractors,
> both left and right, are a heckuva lot more soulless than
> its defenders or consumers. So there.
Thanks for your spirited input, Mike.
David Loftus
David J. Loftus
> Lewis Mammel wrote:
> >
> > "Michael S. Morris" wrote:
> >
> >>Francis:
> >> Why would anyone suppose that Loftus'
> >> witnesses are reliable?
> >>
> >>Because it is even loopier to suppose they
> >>are unreliable, and that there exists some
> >>expertise somewhere (psychology do you think?
> >>psychoanalysis? polygraphy? tarot cards?) which
> >>can tell us what it is that they *truly* think.
> >>
> > Follow the money.
>
>
> You can hardly follow the money to porn consumer's intentions,
> motivations, desires.
>
> Mike may come w/o layers. The men I've known reveal their thoughts very
> slowly.
As did some of the men I talked to. A few finished the survey in a
matter
of a week or two. Many more took months.
> Why the hell would I tell some David Loftus what I really want,
> think, feel?
Maybe because I'm tired of all the balderdash propounded about people
like
me in public, and the misdirected rage I've suffered from some sex
partners and
friends who have strong opinions on the matter and haven't had the
interest or
the patience to hear what I have to say on my own behalf.
I don't want you to think everyone beat down my door to defend his
private
interests and tastes. There were trust issues in both directions; some
men never
revealed their identity or whereabouts to me; some needed reassurance
that I
wasn't some Internet voyeur -- I sent them samples of my previously
published
writings.
But a lot understood right away what I was about, and had no problem
speaking
at length about matters no one had ever questioned them about before.
Haven't
you noticed in your 'net experiences that it's sometimes easier to
show parts of
yourself -- not just the more private sides, but the more prickly and
offensive sides
-- over an electronic medium that keeps you safe from the other
party(ies), who are
also unlikely to run across the other real people in your life?
> "unreliable" is simply the wrong word because it implies some intention
> to conceal or deceive, when there are simply various registers of
> communicative truth. There's the stuff you tell strangers, the stuff you
> tell intimates (various things to various types of intimates, cf. what
> you tell your mother to what you tell your lover to what you tell your
> children), stuff you perhaps tell yourself.
And there's stuff you tell people simply because they bothered to ask.
As I say, a number of times the men commented that they had never been
asked "that" before. Some found it refreshing. Others were just plain
flummoxed:
I don't know why I do this or like that, they admitted.
David Loftus
David J. Loftus
> Michael S. Morris wrote:
>
> > Saturday, the 19th of April, 2003
> >
> > Jeff Inman wrote:
> > So, you have your own notions, going in to the thing,
> > and any survey that doesn't back up your bias is
> > obviously biased?
> > Lew:
> > ... and anyway, the results of some survey are not really
> > at issue.
> >
> > they are what is at issue in David's book. His book
> > is a nonscientific, journalistic survey tending to refute
> > antiporn claims about the motivations of men who consume
> > porn. Roughly put, it says we like it because we like
> > to fantasize when we jack off, and not because we are
> > all latent rapists.
>
As opposed to women who buy repetitive romance novel plots by the millions,
year after year?
I have to say, Silke, despite your protestations to the contrary and Marko's
misreadings of your sinewy posts, I think Mike and Marko have indeed put
their finger on a pulse of sexist/elitist condescension toward men in your
remarks.
David Loftus
David J. Loftus
> >>In other words, it shows that men have no imagination?
> >>
> >
> > Little imagination would be better.
>
>
> I was thinking of women who tend to need no visual or verbal aids to
> masturbate; most would, in fact, find them distracting...
See, more condescension. Nobody "needs" chocolate to survive or science fiction
thrillers to be entertained, but people make use of such items because they're
available and certain consumers appreciate them. I would imagine most men who
use pornography ALSO masturbate to no visual or verbal aids, but you argue as
if you know for a fact that they don't.
Why is it so important to you to express your superiority to such folks?
David Loftus
David J. Loftus
> Why keep horny? Because it is good for my soul as
> a man, and it is especially good for the soul of my
> marriage. I really believe it's like the more I keep
> it going, the more it wants to go, and the less I indulge
> myself (and I have tried abstinence as an experiment
> just to see what would happen), the less I want sex
> at all. I think, by the way, there is a lovely little
> book that says precisely this from a female perspective:
> Betty Dobson's _Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving_.
For those who are interested, the author's name is Dodson.
But of course, nobody's brought up the fact that women are
manufacturing and marketing porn videos now (from Candida
Royalle's "couples" material to hard-core lesbian movies by real
lesbians), and that a lot of women are on record as enjoying
porn on occasion and being all in favor of more and better
product (see, for example, Wendy McElroy, _XXX: A Woman's
Right to Pornography_; Lisa Palac, _The Edge of the Bed:
How Dirty Pictures Changed My Life_; or the collection edited
by Cherie Matrix entitled _Tales from the Clit_).
> Lew's cubicle thing is really pretty ridiculous---he's
> imagining that porn is produced, and only produced,
> by the exploitation of the women involved. That is
> the subtext---the women involved wouldn't do that if
> they didn't *have* to do it. I'll bet that is just
> more often false than true.
But it's an assumption that imbues anti-porn feminist
critiques, wherein advocates not only erroneously project
their personal responses onto men, but other women as well.
David Loftus
David J. Loftus
>
> Sure, use it or lose it and all that. But I know plenty of men who stay
> plenty horny beyond their 20s (or 30s or 50s) w/o your aids. From their
> stay horny without them.
Once again, you're trying to employ good old fashioned shame in support
of your supposedly forward-thinking, even outre position, Silke. Mike isn't
saying he "couldn't" stay horny without such aids; just that they help.
So where's the harm?
> That is
> > the subtext---the women involved wouldn't do that if
> > they didn't *have* to do it. I'll bet that is just
> > more often false than true.
>
> Mileage on "have to" varies, I suspect. But t's not terribly relevant to
> this discussion, I think. Of course I think women being coerced into
> porn or prostitution is wrong and nasty, and I'm sure you do, too. As to
> the exploitation that's not coercive in the narrow sense, there's plenty
> of non-sexual sorts that are equally objectable (or, in your case,
> equally non-objectable)
Quite.
In this arena, I suspect many semi-valid arguments against the sex industry
get inextricably wound up with personal and historic fears and insecurities
that relate to nudity, the body, and sex.
Perhaps it's not so much "exploitation of women," or the commercialization of
sexuality, or gender roles per se that create unpleasant and even unsafe
working conditions for sex industry employees, and which guarantee that most
porn is cheap, unimaginative, and boring, but the general social stigmatization of
the industry and open sexual expression, which tends to discourage direct
communication between manufacturers and consumers, enables some sex
industry customers and manufacturers (as well as authorities) to take advantage
of the workers, etc.
Social disapprobation artificially heightens the interest in sex industry products
while at the same time guaranteeing that the work will be ill-rewarded, substandard,
and occasionally abusive to the labor force.
David Loftus
francis muir
there is is the:
Iris & B. Gerald Cantor
Center for Visual Arts
and housed in the same building the:
Cool Café
The first named for the founder of the Cantor-FitzGerald Bond Trading firm
which lost more persons in the Twin Towers on 9/11 than any other company
and also lost a bunch of Rodin works, those he had not donated to Stanford.
The Cool Café is owned and operated by Jessie "J.Z." Cool who also runs an
esxcellent Grabeteria on Santa Cruz Ave. in menlo Park just West of Peet's.
David J. Loftus
> Michael S. Morris wrote:
> > You haven't addressed the whole gay thing I raised,
> > except to say that it is somehow "negative", although
> > it seems to me it is perfectly positive,
>
>
> Once again, you didn't understand the argument. In your argument gay
> kids need porn for the wrong reasons. Just like you say you need porn
> because you otherwise can't get it up. These are negative reasons, not
> positive ones. They address a deficiency.
And your problem with that is what?
Although society does not make sufficient room for the sexual identity and
maturation of homosexual men, but pornography is an inadequate substitute,
we should deny them that pitiful option as well?
What gives you the right to take away this "negative" justification when several
gay and bisexual men told me they strongly appreciated it?
This reminds me of anti-porn feminist arguments which say, women who work in
the sex industry would never freely choose to do such a thing; they have either
been forcibly coerced or economically coerced by a narrow number of choices.
Their answer is not to improve the choices such women have, but to take away
one of them, rather like saying "manual labor degrades the American working
class, so let's export all those jobs to the Third World where they'll be more
appreciated and not sully Americans."
David Loftus
> > a surprise to me about me to discover that I could be aroused
> > by spanking scenes, and just as easily by male-male scenes
> > as female-male or female-female scenes. I guess from my
> > pornographic experience of those books I would date my belief
> > about my own sexuality, that it is *not* a hardwired, fixed thing,
> > that though I am pretty darn vanilla in practice, in
> > theory at least there is a huge range that I could
> > choose to respond to,
>
> imagine talking to people instead!
This from the woman who said "why would I want to talk to a stranger about
my private habits?" A lot of people might find it more difficult to discuss their
sexual interests and habits with others face to face, Silke.
David Loftus
francis muir
>>> Francis:
>>> Why would anyone suppose that Loftus'
>>> witnesses are reliable?
> "unreliable" is simply the wrong word because it implies some intention
> to conceal or deceive,
Codswallop.
Don Tuite
Housman, "Terence, This is Stupid Stuff," I, e., Malt does more than
Milton can, etc.
Don
Ron Hardin
> In this day and age, if men were dictating to society what women thought
> and felt, they would be roundly criticized.
A Tom Swifty!
--
Ron Hardin
rhha...@mindspring.com
On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.
Jac.m.a.m.Oppers
The Middle-Eastern belly dance ?
Jac.
smw
David J. Loftus wrote:
> smw <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message news:<3EA1656B...@ameritech.net>...
>
>>francis muir wrote:
>>
>>>"Tends to refute"? Why would anyone suppose that Loftus'
>>>witnesses are reliable?
>>>
>>Especially since they seem to have been saying rather exactly what one
>>would expect them to say. After all, pornography consumers would want to
>>refute the same arguments David wants to refute. It's a bit like asking
>>Ari Fleischer about the motivations of awarding fat contracts to
>>Halliburton.
>>
>
> Some did, some did not. Please remember that I talked to gay and
> bisexual
> males, and offered the testimony of men who were indifferent to or
> actively
> opposed to pornography, as well. My job as a reporter was merely to
> ask
> open-ended questions (and to approach the hot-button issues from a
> variety
> of different directions), and relay what the men had to say in
> response.
>
> You may examine my questionnaire and decide for yourself how
> open-ended
> or "leading" it may have been:
>
> http://www.david-loftus.com/watchsex-qq.html
With all due respect, David, it's chockful of leading questions:
"What do you remember thinking about the men who were
depicted or described in pornography? Was there anything
you didn't like about the way they looked or acted? As you
became sexually active, did you compare their appearance
and/or performance with your own? Did it ever bother you
that there might have been some differences? Did you want
to be more like the men in pornography? In what way?"
"Is
there anything in particular you like to see two women
doing? Do you imagine yourself as either of the two women?
Do you imagine joining them as yourself? "
" Does your use of pornography increase in relation to other
developments in your life, for example career breakthroughs
or setbacks, family difficulties, work difficulties, times of illness
or physical growth, or challenges at school? "
"Have you ever fastened your gaze and fantasies upon a
particular person in pornography and felt as if you knew him
or her, sought this person out in other items of pornography,
imagined yourself in a friendship or romantic relationship with
this person?"
"Some people argue that prolonged consumption of
pornography causes the user to require ever greater,
more dangerous, more unusual and perhaps more violent
content. Has this been your experience? Have you personally
observed it in anyone else?"
Did you run this by an IRB just for kicks, btw?
>
> You might also learn more if you asked me some questions about my
> findings
> instead of holding forth with your opinions on a book you haven't
> read, a very
> tiresome habit of which I am also unfortunately not immune.
"seem to" clearly refers to Mike's presentation of same. If they don't
apply, please clarify.
>
>
>
>> And the anti-porners at least on the left aren't talking about intent or
>>conscious motivation in any case. Which makes them a lot harder to
>>refute than Mike and David seem to assume.
>>
>
> Not talking about intent or conscious motivation? What have you read
> by these theorists?
Quite a bit, David.
>
> Some sample quotations:
>
> "The experience of the (overwhelmingly) male audiences who consume
> pornography
> is therefore not fantasy or simulation or catharsis but sexual
> reality: the level of
> reality on which sex itself largely operates." -- Catharine MacKinnon
Yes? So? I don't see anything about intent or motivation there.
> " . . . the argument that consumers of pornography realize that such
> portrayals [of
> rape myths] are false is totally unconvincing." -- Diana E.H. Russell,
> who cites
> three books or articles by women, including herself, as well as
> studies of college
> and high school students as evidence
But that makes my point, David. You don't assume that Ms. Russell would
assume that if asked, men would say "I think porn is a highly realistic
genre," do you?
Mind, I don't agree with them at all. I'm just saying that interviewing
men won't refute them. The accusation in that lit is structured in such
a way that no man will plead guilty.
Myself, I find the mainstream het porn plot more degrading of men than of
women. Mostly because I do in fact believe that men are perfectly aware
of the fact that the horny slut who comes at the sight of their dick is
a pathetic fantasy.
> "Readers feel short-changed when a woman does not look and act the
> part of the
> _Playboy_ model. It is an insult to their masculine capacity to get
> what they want."
> -- Judith Bat-Ada, who goes on to say this leads to child molesting,
> because the man
> resents his partner for not living up to this "ideal": "It makes him
> hate her. And it
> makes him turn to the younger female daughters in the family."
Whoa.
But I do know men whom porn made deeply insecure about their lovers'
reaction in bed. Would an experienced man be fooled? Nah. But the
adolescents who, in Mike's words, "learn how people really act" from
porn may indeed be rather befuddled by live women's range of reactions.
> ". . . men believe . . . that they have the right to rape . . . . men
> really believe that they
> have the right to hit and to hurt. Pacifist males are only apparent
> exceptions; repelled
> by some forms of violence as nearly all men are, they remain
> impervious to sexual
> violence as nearly all men do." -- Andrea Dworkin
Sorry, David, these are the usual gee-whizz look-at-those-nutcases
quotes trotted out on soc.men etc. They really don't address what I'm
saying about the structure of the feminist argument. I could refute your
points by taking recourse to the self-defensive ramblings of
wife-beaters, too. You don't imagine that there _aren't_ men who talk
exactly like Dworkin thinks they all think?
> "Sooner or later, in one way or another, the consumers want to live
> out the pornography
> further in three dimensions. Sooner or later, in one way or another,
> they do. _It_ makes
> them want to; when they believe they can, when they feel they can get
> away with it,
> _they_ do." -- MacKinnon, her emphasis; what she is referring to in
> this passage is
> apparently "murdering a young woman . . . raping her, having vaginal
> and anal
> intercourse with her corpse, and chewing on several parts of her
> body," which is
> what immediately precedes the above passage
and she'll always get out by "one way or another"
>>And since what is at question
>>in the left critique is the impact of porn on women, interviewing men
>>doesn't seem quite the convincing tack here.
>>
>
> Except that much of the left critique depends very heavily on
> assertions about male motivations and behavior due to porn consumption which are
> demonstrably wrong. MacKinnon herself wrote in _Feminism Unbound_ that "Whatever
> goes on in the mind of pornography's consumer matters tremendously."
Sure. But neither your self-presentation nor Mike's presentation nor
your questionnaire inspires any confidence in me that you can tell me
"what goes on in their mind." Not that MacC could, either.
And that doesn't mean I don't like your project -- as long as you call it
"what men really say about porn" and not "what men really think about
porn."
> Unfortunately,
> she repeatedly commits the error of propounding vast assertions on the
> subject
> without ever indicating she has discussed the matter with a single
> porn consumer.
I know.
smw
David J. Loftus wrote:
> smw <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message news:<3EA20D...@ameritech.net>...
>
>> Sure, use it or lose it and all that. But I know plenty of men who stay
>>plenty horny beyond their 20s (or 30s or 50s) w/o your aids. From their
>>perspective, your soul's already outta whack because it seems you can't
>>stay horny without them.
>>
>
> Once again, you're trying to employ good old fashioned shame in support
> of your supposedly forward-thinking, even outre position, Silke. Mike isn't
> saying he "couldn't" stay horny without such aids; just that they help.
> So where's the harm?
He said he uses porn because he wants to stay horny.
I did not lay any claim to "forward-thinking" -- where do you get this
stuff?
I really have no objections to Mike using porn. I have no objection to
Mike's wife using romance novels. I have no objections to Mike's kids
watching three hours of TV a day.
I have no interest in seeing porn banned, I think both the religious and
part of the feminist critique of porn is wrong-headed and rests on
spurious assumptions.
But I still think (mainstream formulaic) porn is crap and bad for the
soul. Your own book, if I understand it right, stresses how crappy most
porn is. I don't think it's a good idea to have crappy shit invade your
intimate sphere. That's all.
smw
David J. Loftus wrote:
> smw <sm...@ameritech.net> wrote in message news:<3EA2E23E...@ameritech.net>...
>
>>Michael S. Morris wrote:
>>
>
>>>You haven't addressed the whole gay thing I raised,
>>>except to say that it is somehow "negative", although
>>>it seems to me it is perfectly positive,
>>>
>>
>>Once again, you didn't understand the argument. In your argument gay
>>kids need porn for the wrong reasons. Just like you say you need porn
>>because you otherwise can't get it up. These are negative reasons, not
>>positive ones. They address a deficiency.
>>
>
> And your problem with that is what?
The context was that I had challenged Mike to provide a positive reason
for porn, David.
My problem in the case of gay kids is the structure that makes porn
necessary for them.
My gay friends tell me that a lot of younger sex partners try to act out
porn scenarios, leading to incredibly contorted positions designed for
the camera angle. Funny, I thought.
> Although society does not make sufficient room for the sexual identity and
> maturation of homosexual men, but pornography is an inadequate substitute,
> we should deny them that pitiful option as well?
Get off it; I've stressed several times that I have no interested in
"denying" anybody anything.
> What gives you the right to take away this "negative" justification when several
> gay and bisexual men told me they strongly appreciated it?
blablablabla
>
Michael S. Morris
Monday, the 21st of April, 2003
A try at rewording something:
Silke:
And maybe, when they need
their kicks, they get them from talking dirty
to the woman who's right there, or ask her about
_her_ fantasies rather than grabbing some porn
full of other people's fantasies and then rolling
over on the woman next to them, hoping some of the
excitement will rub off.
I said:
I can only suppose you figure this as tit for tat
for something---maybe my allusion to marriage, I don't
know. But, it isn't, and it's rather sad.[...]
I was getting angry here because I felt I was
opening myself to some easy shots for the sake of something
serious, and you were just indulging yourself in the
easy shots rather than thinking about any of it.
But, it occurred to me that maybe I have miswritten,
as in miscommunicated, by using the term "horny" in
the first place.
For "horny" I definitely did not mean physically aroused,
erect, which maybe if that's what you thought I meant,
could explain your tone. "Horny" to me means in desire, yes,
but at the edge or verge of aroused, and with something
like half a dozen designs or plans swimming around in
my head for the seduction and the fucking of my lover, including
perhaps some involving ropes and blindfold, or a silk scarf
tickled across skin. Horny is an erotic state, and, I think,
good for the soul---my soul and the soul of my marriage.
And I mean, in particular, it is good for me to be in that
state 24 and 7, whether or not actual physical sex is likely
to take place anytime soon.
In my experience of a monogamous sexual relationship, one
division of the sex we have is into that which I initiate and that
which she initiates. We've actually tried the experiment of
a month (by talking it over and by deliberate design)
in which the only sex is that which she initiates. I am,
as it were, easy. I have never had any difficulty responding
physically to her (as she puts it, " or probably to any
other beautiful woman in bed with you"). So, under such an
experiment, we still have sex and a sexual relationship. The
thing that goes missing, however, is *me being on edge*---the
sort of 24 and 7 "I want your buns" state that I meant by
"horny". That is a state which I maintain is good for my soul
as a man, and as well good for our soul as a marriage.
For her, it's more than just a penis that responds to
turning the knob like indoor plumbing. It's not a response,
but a constant urging upon her that, yes, she is desirable.
My point is that that state is not a given, is not
to be taken for granted. It is, in fact, a conscious choice
for one to make against a fairly unsexy unerotic daily routine,
with kids being driven to half a hundred activities, and
her mother living with us, and what horniness is, is a habit
that can be cultivated, or lost. ("Lose it", by the way, I
don't think is permanent---it's like playing the piano and
then not playing for a year: You can pick it up again and
certainly remake it into a habit). Cultivation,
I think, requires not only quality erotic time together with
my wife (i.e. not just falling into bed at 10:00 pm
exhausted and having to get up at 6:00 in the morning),
but some masturbation/fantasy time alone with myself
*and* some input from porn to keep the fantasies fresh
and new. This doesn't have anything to do with any negative,
either. I mean, it isn't in order to make up for her ideal sexual
frequency being less than mine, for example. If her ideal
frequency were three times a day, I think I would *still*
need masturbation time, solo fantasy time, and some input
from porn in order to keep the habit of desire exactly
where I think it ought to be.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
francis muir
> But I still think (mainstream formulaic) porn is crap
> idea to have crappy shit invade your intimate sphere.
Then why on earth have you spent post after post after
post discussing it? What is it about the thread that has
so engrossed you -- and others of course.
There are many poor books around and a few good ones.
smw
Michael S. Morris wrote:
>
> Monday, the 21st of April, 2003
>
> A try at rewording something:
>
> Silke:
> And maybe, when they need
> their kicks, they get them from talking dirty
> to the woman who's right there, or ask her about
> _her_ fantasies rather than grabbing some porn
> full of other people's fantasies and then rolling
> over on the woman next to them, hoping some of the
> excitement will rub off.
> I said:
> I can only suppose you figure this as tit for tat
> for something---maybe my allusion to marriage, I don't
> know. But, it isn't, and it's rather sad.[...]
>
> I was getting angry here because I felt I was
> opening myself to some easy shots for the sake of something
> serious, and you were just indulging yourself in the
> easy shots rather than thinking about any of it.
> But, it occurred to me that maybe I have miswritten,
> as in miscommunicated, by using the term "horny" in
> the first place.
Mike, in case there was any doubt about it -- I wish happiness to your
sheets, and most certainly all couples, short-term, long-term,
forever-term, need to figure out for themselves how to get there. What I
don't like in porn is precisely the way in which it norms sexuality,
invading one of the few places that can be free of mass-produced garbage.
If you've found enough imaginative non-formulaic porn that doesn't rest
on pre-packaged ideas of what's sexy, good for you. At one point, I made
a deliberate effort to find "the best there is," and what rose to the
surface was such unredeemed garbage that I was convinced that the genre
can't be saved. I mean, even the sex scenes in very fine
non-pornographic books and films are mostly awful (exceptions, yes, of
course -- I myself liked the sex scenes in _Live Flesh_ a lot).
To make your woman feel desireable is a fine and noble endeavor, and vice
versa. And I agree that such a sense of an ongoing current of desire
needs to be nurtured. If porn does it for you, fine. I think there are
other ways, and I think those are better ways, but if you ever got the
impression that I personally would prefer you personally to consume less
or no porn -- nah.
smw
francis muir wrote:
> smw> wrote:
>
>
>>But I still think (mainstream formulaic) porn is crap
>>and bad for the soul. . . I don't think it's a good
>>idea to have crappy shit invade your intimate sphere.
>>
>
> Then why on earth have you spent post after post after
> post discussing it? What is it about the thread that has
> so engrossed you -- and others of course.
I could point out that sex seems to be an engrossing topic, and any
opportunity for procrastination seems good right now... but it's a good
question, nonetheless. I'll heed its implications and return to my own
book manuscript now...
Ron Hardin
> > He's wrong about objectification though; Paglia had a better analysis
> > in Sexual Personae that I couldn't find that last time I looked for it
> > so won't look again, that a man staring at porn is looking for an answer.
> >
> > Objectification is exactly impossible.
>
> I analyze objectification theory, at least as propounded by folks like
> Dworkin and
> MacKinnon, in the latter pages (pp. 285-290, to be exact) of my book
> -- with a little
> help from a few people like Canadian philosopher F.W. Christensen.
>
> Objectification may be "exactly impossible," but it is also perfectly
> common in a variety
> of nonsexual contexts.
Check out Levinas ``The Phenomenology of Eros'' an appendix to _Totality and
Infinity_, which a woman tells me is not at all accurate but it seems good to me.