Even though I oppose it in principle, I will not deny that from time to time I look at pornography, perhaps ten minutes once a month, and a few hours once a year when I am drinking. Although even this amount is in my view too much, I think as a single man who spends a lot of time on the computer this is likely quite low.
In any event, last night I watched a free thirty second teaser video of sorority girls being hazed. It amounted to low grade S&M, which is seemingly what most pornography consists in, whether this fact is obvious or admitted or not. Most everything you see effectively eradicates and ignores the feelings of the women in question, reducing them to sexual objects. This is why I oppose pornography.
I was tired and irritable, and I found it arousing. This of course was the intent, and it worked.
Yet, my self therapy over the past year or so has consisted in regularly trying to remember and feel emotions. I have spent most of my life in de facto emotional numbness, and as with all wounds, under the numbness is unremembered and unexpressed pain. I was lying there last night, doing this process, and I got to the other side of that pain: I felt pain, and all the attraction of watching these poor girls in the process of losing their sense of dignity and self vanished. Gone.
I have at times referred to cruelty as the outsourcing of pain. I really believe this is the function. All sadism, all destruction in this world, happens due to the inability of people to feel and process all the things that hurt them.
The cruelty we see in modern America–exhibits would include Horror movies, and as a random example the cover of the latest Nicki Minaj album cover–logically arise as a result of our shared inability to process tragedy, to feel deeply our own pain, and to become deeper human beings as a result. We spend too much time consuming media, conforming to values chosen by media, and too little time wrestling with the genuine problems of life, those of purpose. Our values are being nice, and pretending that voting to help people actually helps people.
Socialism, in the end, is sadism. It is emotionally weak. It is cannibalism. This is the cultural reality.