Hard News: Launching into raunch
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"If porn does any moral harm, it's more through (primarily male) consumers getting used to the idea that the (primarily female) subjects are a tradable commodity, than to those who get a decent wage performing in the industry."
I'd say the (primarily male) consumers are already well accustomed to that idea. As are many (primarily female) non-consumers. Even in places where there is no porn. It's an old idea. Porn may be *an* expression of it, but there are plenty of others.
I'm not saying it's a good idea. Neither is the end of the world, or the holocaust, but I'll watch both in a movie.
(actually I lie, I have never completely watched a holocaust movie. Too much of a bumout. But an end of the world movie, man, eat it up)
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Fake nails? I'm more bitter on gross looking tats. Now *that's* exploitation.
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I'm pretty sure the guys in porn are exploited more than the girls, the vast majority are only paid a small fraction of the standard female rates, get no nym recognition, have to do a lot of nasty shit on camera (including portraying themselves as a rapist), and often have to take potentially dangerous prescription medication and expose themselves to STDs to fulfill their job requirements.
I mean, sure, maybe they're happy with it all, but maybe the girls are too. It's still largely the guys getting the shaft.
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I cannot see how you can watch porn and not feel at guilt at enjoying the sometimes very clear expolitation of a fellow human being.
I feel bad for people who work at McDonalds but I love a Quarter Pounder now and then.
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I'm not saying it's a good idea. Neither is the end of the world, or the holocaust, but I'll watch both in a movie.
Neither of those examples are ever offered up so explicitly for a viewer's pleasure. You don't get the wokkita-wokkita soundtrack or the everyone's-having-a-good-or-at-least-interesting-time subtext in any Holocaust film I've ever seen. Sympathetic frisson, perhaps, but not pleasure.
Sure, it's a symptom rather than a cause of sexist culture. It's one of those symptoms like a hacking cough, though, that spreads the germs around as it makes its hosts miserable.
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does anyone really give the proverbial rat's rectum where - or in who - Matthew Ridge is putting any part of his body?
Julie Christie might...
Who can save us from this unsavoury prospect?
Actually, I'm gobsmacked* neither of them is on Dancing with the Stars this year.
* as in "astonished", by no means "disappointed."
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"" I'm not saying it's a good idea. Neither is the end of the world, or the holocaust, but I'll watch both in a movie."
Neither of those examples are ever offered up so explicitly for a viewer's pleasure. You don't get the wokkita-wokkita soundtrack or the everyone's-having-a-good-or-at-least-interesting-time subtext in any Holocaust film I've ever seen. Sympathetic frisson, perhaps, but not pleasure."
Clearly they are not exactly the same thing. I'm just saying that something that's a bad idea can make good viewing. To say a film like Schindler's List is not explicit is being obtuse. I found it full of full-on disgusting ideas portrayed in full technicolor glory. Far more disturbing than any porno I've ever seen.
And as for end of world films, many of them are upbeat. But no one cries foul that this might be an unrealistic portrayal. It's fantasy - not expected to be real.
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I found it full of full-on disgusting ideas portrayed in full technicolor glory. Far more disturbing than any porno I've ever seen.
Yep, as I was watching Bones last night, with its incinerated corpse in a chandelier at the beginning, I had to wonder why I, or anybody else for that reason, was watching this, instead of Eva Longoria in her undies on the other channel.
My wife didn't really get my point.
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portrayed in full technicolor glory
Spielberg filmed Schindlers List in good old fashioned black & white :)
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some would assert that schindler's list is holocaust porn.
other than one film in the 80s you don't see many directors making personalised and agonised protrayals of cambodia.
i'd also like to see a 5-page discussion of business-as-usual violence on tv and in film. i've had sex. i've never laid a finger on anyone in anger.
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i'd also like to see a 5-page discussion of business-as-usual violence on tv and in film. i've had sex. i've never laid a finger on anyone in anger.
Because that finger's strictly for lovin'?
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merc,
The love that knows no name.
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Because that finger's strictly for lovin'?
i've never spoken to anyone who doesn't like to scratch an itch, or have an itch scratched.
if they say they don't, they're lying.
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"Spielberg filmed Schindlers List in good old fashioned black & white :)"
Gawd, the fact I didn't even realize is kinda scary - I just thought it had a bumout mood through clever coloring...but I never did finish watching it. But the fact that I didn't like to see that, doesn't mean I don't think anyone else should. It may very well give neonazis sick ideas, but that's not a good enough reason to condemn it.
"some would assert that schindler's list is holocaust porn."
All art is porn if you want to look at it like that. Unless you adopt a definition of porn that excludes it from being art, then it pretty much just is another form of art.
Business-as-usual violence is just the same. I don't condemn it because I don't think it promotes violence. It just hooks into the violent streak latent in many of us, and titivates it. Violence is interesting, as is sex, and people want to see it, realistic or unrealistic. Actually, most people prefer to see the unrealistic - one of the things almost everyone I've ever talked to about Once Were Warriors has said is that they found the violence disturbing because it was realistic.
Just because some people are not titivated by violence or sex doesn't mean that what they like is superior in some way. They might really like NZ Idol. Personally I can't stand it, but I'm not going to say it shouldn't be allowed.
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Business-as-usual violence is just the same. I don't condemn it because I don't think it promotes violence. It just hooks into the violent streak latent in many of us, and titivates it.
I've actually come to the surprising conclusion that my boys cope with violence in games and videos (they don't get R18 of anything, but the older one can now legitimately go to R16 movies if he wants) quite well - they know it's not real, and they're less creeped out by horror movies than their parents are.
OTOH, I'm still inclined to shelter them from more significant sexual content. The younger one in particular is uncomfortable with it and it's harder for them to abstract into mere spectacle.
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"Sexual offending against women is far lower."
Russell, I'd be interested to know your source for this.
FYI, in 2005 MOJ stats show there were 1823 convictions for sex offences (up on 1636 for 2004).
Over the past 14 years these figures have waxed & waned but not massively. Of 27,837 sex crime convictions, 45% of all victims were 11 yrs & yngr (12,417); 78% were 16 yrs & yngr (21,670).
These stats mask the true extent of sex crimes against women and children in NZ, given that most go unreported.
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Hi Denise,
Russell, I'd be interested to know your source for this.
I hadn't looked at the most recent numbers, but I referred to a post last year, which said:
Before we depart this topic, it's worth noting that New Zealand's record in reducing sexual offending by more conventional means is actually very good. Our rate of sexual offending is lower than most comparable jurisdictions (the rate of forcible rape is half that in the US) and, at the same time as the likelihood of reporting has considerably increased, reported offences have fallen steadily. No Right Turn pointed out that five years ago, sexual offending was 25% higher than it is now.
http://publicaddress.net/default,1246.sm
I think this is the study I was referring to at the time:
Over recent years, the number of sexual offences recorded by the Police has decreased. Between 1996 and 2005, the total number of sexual offences decreased by 13 percent, from 3,780 to 3,271. Over the 10-year period, the overall sexual offence rate varied between a high of 10.1 per 10,000 population in 1996 and a low of 7.6 per 10,000 population in 2004.
I think that the fact that the raw number of offences decreased over that time while the population increased, and while the rate of reporting almost certainly increased, is evidence of an improving trend. The numbers you have provided on the age of victims are, naturally, appalling.
NB: The figures quoted above are police ones. It's probably worth noting that the MOJ and the police count offences slightly differently. The MOJ counts sexual offences "with a high degree of intimidation" as violent offences, while the police put all sexual offences in a separate category, which may account for any discrepancy.
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"OTOH, I'm still inclined to shelter them from more significant sexual content."
Children are the exception to every social rule. I think making an effort to shield kids from porn is sensible, but you needn't take it too far. If the kids are trying to see porn, then they probably will. When I was a ten year old, it was an interest of every boy I knew, and most of us had seen some porn, and I don't think any of us were 'damaged' by it.
The stories in Playboy were as explicit, or often more so, than the bulk of porn movies. Also just as unrealistic. We knew they were fantasies then. We were also aware that girls didn't like it anywhere near as much, with rare exceptions. OTOH they loved Mills and Boon which struck me as equally fantastic.
You don't have to be a child prodigy to see that most guys don't have 10 inch dicks, most girls haven't got gigantic tits, that random hot strangers don't offer you sex (unless you are hot yourself), that coming on someone's face is more likely to piss them off than excite them, that threesomes are probably a bit more complicated to set up than just sitting down on a couch with a sleazy smile or a bullshit line. That doesn't mean that all of those ideas aren't appealing.
Of course every parent has a duty to shield their kids from harm. With respect to sex, I would think the main way to achieve that would be to give them the facts. The fantasies that kids get from stories that their mates tell them (and this happens from a really young age, I think I heard my first bawdy joke at about 5), from dirty magazine stories, from porno movies, and from many mainstream films too, are obviously mostly bullshit. If you don't know the facts then you could think pretty much anything. At least if you watch a porn you'll have a vague idea of some of the real mechanics. But the parent's duty surely has to be to explain about the entire sexual process in a factual way so that kids know about the risks as well as the rewards.
This should be done in much the same way that violence is explained. Children are patently aware that violence does happen, since fighting innate in humans and most kids have had a fight before they've learned to speak. They have felt the pain, the humiliation, the elation, and the consequences of it. Most children have been manhandled (if not actually struck) by an adult and they can clearly see the power and control it brings, along with the anger and hurt they feel. It's patronizing bullshit to suggest that children learn violence from TV. They learn it in the playground, and they recognize it on TV. Of course it is a subject of great interest - to be beaten up is one of the most unpleasant things a person can experience. They can also see that it's fantasy, that it's escapist. In reality, the good guy usually doesn't win, it's the cheap shot bully who throws the first punch, backed up by his mates. That's why kids like violent films, because they are a fantasy that shows what the child would like to see, the small guy beating the big, the good beating the bad, the outnumbered beating the gang. I think it helps them cope with the reality that they are already accustomed to.
Again, I think there are some kinds of violent depictions kids should be shielded from. Paradoxically, the more realistic kinds are probably the most likely to upset them.
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Sexual offending against women is far lower.
There's this as well:
The U.S. Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey (considered our best measure of crime because its anonymous surveys capture offenses not reported to police) reports that rape has been falling dramatically for decades...The crime surveys further indicate that the decline in sexual violence is greater among younger females than older women.
I don't know if similar data is available here, particularly over the long run.
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Think it's interesting, this one, but maybe strays from the point - does the emperor (fashion icon, guru, insert your favourite suck-up phrase here) have NEW clothes, or NO clothes?
Has the World disappeared up its own self-important fundament, or are we all out of touch? Dunno.
I do think we are too ready to be awed by the insight and sheer global relevance of our alleged creatives in situations like this.
Perhaps Francis (c'mon, "Francis"??? How about getting into the real world, be "Frank"!) would like to admit his true muse with these kiddie pawn t shirts - the one his humorous and irreverent Mum made him wear that said "Likely to be a pretentious goolie manipulator all my life".
Oh, and the debate about semi-naked nymphy things? I thought that died with Pavement. -
some would assert that schindler's list is holocaust porn.
They've clearly never seen Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS
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