Posted on 11/25/2005 2:49:03 PM PST by wagglebee
Following a recent interview for yet another documentary on pornography, I thought of so many things I should have said about pornography.
I had discussed its role as producing impotence, robbing men of their manhood. I had addressed its psychopharmacology as an "erototoxin." I had documented its presence in adultery, divorce, rape, child sex abuse and incest.
Civility, humanity, I said, has always hung by the thinnest of threads. We allow ourselves to be coarsened at the greatest risk. Life in the last five decades should have proven to us all – or at least to any hominoid with a modicum of sense – that the license of licentiousness is always followed by the most heart-rending violence to our bodies and our souls. We can daily see around us that the most vulnerable, the smallest and the weakest pay the price for our arrogance and our appallingly selfish ignorance.
I watched television on and off this evening. I switched from one station to another, revolted by one sudden graphic depiction of a crime show's serial rapist torturing his female victims. Another station dramatized a vicious tale of children being prostituted by dad.
I next saw a defaced young male corpse, at first thought to be a boy who had defended a brutally raped young girl. Cadavers, once restricted to horror flicks are now a TV staple. The dead are commonly uncovered (still neck up) and discussed by a coolly attractive and yet sympathetic female coroner – often a minority woman – filling the professional working-woman diversity quota, while thrilling the desensitized audience at the same time.
On another station, "Dr. Phil's" team is seeking missing American girls. Their distraught parents on camera, Dr. Phil explains that the girls are doubtless dead or enslaved in the foreign sex traffic.
During commercials, a lovely female newscaster says stay tuned for the "news" story of an 8-year-old being marketed for sex. Also "coming up," says another professional lady news "reporter," police just rescued a kidnapped teenager who had been locked in a dog kennel and rented out for sadistic sex. The "news" announcement of coming attractions shows police carrying out the dog kennel should anyone miss the latest in "how-to" commit copy-cat sex hate crimes.
ABC's "Prime Time" righteously reports on the increase in sex crimes, including murder on American university campuses, suggesting that silly kids just don't protect themselves and that the universities don't police sufficiently. True, as far as that goes.
Naturally "Prime Time" makes no connection between sex crimes and their own fare – such as "Desperate Housewives" – entertaining the public with adultery, drug use, prostitution and mom's sex with teenage boys. "CSI" on CBS, NBC's "Law & Order," and "Sex and the City" are now inseparable from the "news" of dog kennels and Dr. Phil's search for child pornographers as we are driven into the pornographic sewer of thematic coming-of-age adventures.
"But, are you sure it's not just more reporting?"
In all of these emotional molecules of dramas and news stories, the good guys are good; prosecuting minorities and lady lawyers are wonderfully empathetic; coroners notably dispassionate but caring. Women are getting equal time as rape and torture victims and as professional legal and crime-solving mavens.
Of course, the Big Five mass media corporations, those which Michelle Malkin calls the most effective corporate pimps of human history – Time Warner, Disney, Viacom-CBS, NewsCorp and AT&T – are raking in the money by exploiting visual sado-sexual brutality as far as they can.
For unless it's "child pornography," TV dramas and news programs never use the word "pornography." No news or drama programs ever describe the media itselfas causing copy-cat crime and sado-sexual violence.
The mass media breeds serial-rapist-murdering juveniles and adults who imbibe their stimuli alongside Internet sex games and legal pornography, while Big Pharma hawks every sex and depression medication it legally can inbetween these increasingly pornographic programs.
One neurologist writes, our "brains are not in charge;" our bodies are our "subconscious minds." If so, our bodies are being aroused and conditioned to children locked in dog kennels for sex, cadavers coolly uncovered and sado-sexual lust dramas alongside Madonna (also on television the last day or so) as a new, happy "mom."
This is the same Madonna who tongue-kissed Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera on the MTV Awards in 2003, while her 6-year-old daughter (dressed in first-communion white, wearing a "BOY TOY" belt) tossed flower petals on the dance floor.
James Joyce of "Ulysses" obscenity fame, said all pornographic spectacles rouse the flesh to reflex actions of the nervous system. Yes, our body is our subconscious mind.
Ah, for those clucking, elderly ladies who kept the young in check by their repressive gossip, as described by Evelyn Waugh in "Brideshead Revisited." Gone.
Instead, we have widespread mass-media pornography to breed a cultural collapse that is beginning to rival the sado-sexual brutality and insanity of the likes of Titus, Caligula and Nero.
And they never will as long as they are profiting from it.
Moral absolutes ping.
Judith Reisman is a very good, wise and brave person. I'll ping this out later. Have to back away from the computer for a while, for my sanity's sake.
:-)
What more can be said. She hit the nail right on the head.
LOL!
There were plenty of sex crimes (but likely much more of them unreported) and actually more open prostitution before TV ever existed.
Of course a lot of the nonsense in articles like this is based on a mythical sanitized past that we've since fallen from, that never really existed in the first place.
Pornography is like a drug. Very destructive to the user and all in contact with the user. Pornography does not always lead to criminal behavior, but increases the chances of it. YMMV.
Shhh....now repeat after me, extra-marital sex was invented by hippies...there never existed pornography until the 70s.
Excellent
Did you catch the bit about how pornography is also implicated in causing impotence yet also plays a part in rape and incest? Sounds a bit contradictory. It also begs the question as to why, if pornography makes us so prone to falling to all of these ills, it can't be used as a defense or mitigating circumstance. The answer, of course, is that pornography makes you no more prone to committing certain acts than does poverty or a bad childhood. It makes us feel better, though, to think that evil people don't simply do evil things....that it is a choice. Instead, there is comfort in the idea that if we just avoid certain things we'll be nice and safe.
Whatever. I never saw hard core porno until college, and even then it was only the one or two weird guys in the dorm who had it. Now it's on TV, on the internet, on the news.
Yes the culture is becoming more profane and sexually soaked. Do you really think this doesn't lead to a increase in sex crimes? I find that hard to believe.
Nice try. But it was around 1970 that extramarital sex and pornography became mainstream and `acceptable'.
Before then, these behaviors existed and were confined to the gutter, where they belonged.
Yeah, that was pretty puzzling too, but it was her making a reference to some previous article she wrote. I'm sure her explanation of it was amusing.
Well, you need to document a drastic increase in sex crimes but ALSO SOMEHOW ACCOUNT FOR INCREASED REPORTING of a lot of sex crimes.
In many cases it's only been the last couple of decades where you're seeing a lot of sex abuse cases being reported, particularly when the perp is a community leader or person of authority.
Additionally, with the growth of 24 hour cable news channels and expanded local news, what sex crimes you do have will be reported more often with more time devoted to them giving more ability for lurid details to be reported, thereby increasing the PERCEPTION of their prevalence.
Back in the 1880s or 1920s where a lot of houses had live-in servant girls do you think the master of the house raping the girl was reported a lot?
And I assure you that Catholic Priests didn't suddenly start molesting altar boys in 1970; we're just seeing an atmosphere where accusations are more likely to be believed and it's more acceptable to come forward. A lot of people on FR would like to kid themselves it suddenly started because leftist hippies started entering the Seminaries, though.
Regarding Prostitution I'd argue there's a good chance it's actually less open and perhaps less common than it was in 1800s, with a smaller percentage of the male population patronizing them; haven't seen any hard numbers and of course they'd be difficult to come by, but I'd say it's clear that it hasn't suddenly taken off or something that's recent.
Forget about the sex crimes. What about the fact that it makes people emotionally numb and, while able to achieve multiple orgasms, completely unable to achieve emotional intimacy?
Recently Paris Hilton complained that all her boyfriends told her she was sexy, but not sexual. IOW, there was no emotional there there with her.
For the kind of guys she sleeps with to make that observation, that's a stunning object lesson of how soaking oneself with the wrong kind of sex (visually or otherwise) makes one emotionally, if not physically, impotent.
Porno chic took it to the mainstream. Famous celebrities flaunted going to see "Deep Throat".
It was on exhibit at the "regular" theaters, not just the "art house".
X-rated records, comics, films, and photos existed in the 1930s and before. They were never on public display and kept out of the eyes and ears of kids. Those kids grew up into adults and even grandparents, yet aren't always aware of just what was out there. The sale of some such materials was criminal.
Now you can get extreme entertainment at Best Buy, Borders, and elsewhere. Do they ID? Or if a movie says "unrated", anything goes? Those ratings don't mean a thing to the American Library Association.
There is a culture war going on. Some think that some things are "age appropriate" while others don't like "rules".
i whole heartedly agree there is no such thing as the gool old days.
but i think there is a vast difference in the tolerance and definition of 'sin'/morals. i.e. what is acceptable (especially to media).
Ted Bundy said that reading cheap detective magazines gave him the ideas he had about capturing and killing young women. I don't know what percentage of the population can be influenced like Ted but I suspect that pornography especially the violent type affects many criminal minds like Ted Bundy's.
blah blah blah. More divorce; more children engaging in sex; more diseas. You people have to wake up and smell the coffee! V's wife.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.