But with the money I just bought a book on porn, titled Pornified. It’s some ten years old, but it seems likely what we needed to know, we knew then. I know my book “Viewing Violence” was written some twenty years ago. The findings it reported have never been invalidated or, for that matter, systematically studied in the way you would think something threatening to radically alter our social order permanently would be by “experts”.
So: sex and violence. Are you old enough to remember when people worried about those? What was it, perhaps back in the 1980’s? When Alan Alda types fretted, at least with regard to violence, that it might lead to violence? We were told by the Alan Alda types, back then, that PBS was civilized, and much of the rest, not. I remember this.
Is it not astonishing that all this disappeared? It’s gone, by and large, is it not? If I want to watch porn–and I do on occasion, although certainly not daily–I don’t even have to put in my age. ALL the barriers to pretty much anyone, of any age, watching it any time, have vanished.
Who, anymore, has time for cultural criticism? Is this not the POINT of the Fed and its allied bankers vitiating the value of our labor by destroying the value of our money? And where the fuck is the Left on this issue? Absent. If it requires brains, judgement, and the capacity for historical contextualizing, they are “away on business”, like Churchill’s God and father in “The Darkest Hour”. (or Tom Wait’s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9mhsW5aWJM )
But where the fuck is most of the right? Yes, free markets, contract law, and property rights build prosperity, but is it really so damn hard to understand that a stable currency helps everyone? If we are at 50% of what is possible, why not chase 100%?
Well, I have no good answer there, but here is my thing: I’m going to remove violent movies from my life for a time. I’m going to read more, things like Pornified, but also things like Walt Whitman’s novel (which one of my kids got me for Christmas), poetry, and other stuff.
Who would we all be if we did not swim in this sea of depersonalizing sex, alienating violence, and solitude supporting media? It’s a Satanic soup.
And–and I forgot this point chasing squirrels–I think porn will turn out, in the end, to be very much like violence in media. It doesn’t make people addicts, inherently. It doesn’t turn them into sex fiends.
What I think it does, ALSO, is decrease levels of trust. Here is the thing: if you are thinking, as a man, with every women you meet and make love to, “somebody out there is better”, then you have inhibited the amount of intimacy possible with whoever you are with. If you know you might leave her, you have to pull back or, if you are sociopath, tell her what she wants to hear without conscience.
In the first case, she will feel it, if she is not committed to lying to herself, and in the second case you will fuck her up for a very long time. I once went on one date with a It’s Just Lunch date who had a man insinuate himself into her life, and that of her child. This man had a kid who became friends with her child. He asked her to marry him and she accepted. Then one day he and his kid just disappeared. Turned out he was already married to someone else, somewhere else. I have heard a lot of fucked up stories in my life. That is one of them. That’s actually not the worst.
In any event, the point before–SQUIRREL!!!!–was that subtle effects matter. If the light in your eyes dims even a little, that matters. If your joy in life diminishes even a little, that matters. In the social realm, if people start thinking “people suck” even a little more, that matters. If you start looking at other people as objects even a little bit, that matters.
I think most of us–certainly this applies to me in spades–find it difficult or impossible to remember or imagine a world before all of “this”. It is given, now. It is there, now. There are very few pay per view porn movies in hotels now, since it is all free on the internet. Everything is there, all the time, no matter the cost to our sense of integrity, capacity for trust, and even our capacity for authentically enjoyable sex and cuddling.