CBS 60 Minutes Porn in the USA - Cable TV Porn in the 1990s sponsored non-porn programming as gateway drug, for adults to watch late-night porn once the kids were in bed. Porn was the most dymanic sector of the interent in the 2000s, leading the way in technological innovation. This was the context for the development of deliberate techincal fostering of addiction in the interfaces of Facebook and other top social media platforms. Therefore, the history of pornography as social control mechanism is applicable to the question: If high-tech addiction fostering has complete dominance now, who are the elite consumers of the other end of the addiction mannekin strings? Who is jerking your lead?
E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi, "The Dominance of Lust" [St, Augustine of Hippo], "A man has as many masters as he has vices". (When Israel invaded the Palestinian city of Ramallah in 2002, on the advice of the CIA, they started broadcasting pornography on 2 of 3 Palestian t.v. stations, to keep young people off the streets so they wouldn't resist the Israeli invasion.)
The world “liberty” coming from one of the regime’s mandarins is a dead giveaway that what we’re really talking about here is bondage. What I would like to propose here is a paradigm shift of simple but nonetheless revolutionary (or better still counter-revolutionary proportions) by saying what should be obvious … namely, that pornography is now and has always been a form of control, financial control. Pornography is a way of getting people to give you money which, because of the compulsive nature of the transaction, is not unlike trafficking in drugs. Unlike prostitution, which is also a transaction benefiting from compulsion, pornography is closely bound up with technology, specifically the reproduction and transmission of images. Just as the history of pornography is one of progress (technological, not moral progress, of course), so the exploitation of compulsion has been explored in more and more explicit form during the past two hundred years of this revolutionary age. What began as the bondage of sin eventually became financial control and what became accepted as a financial transaction has been forged into a form of political control. Sexual revolution is contemporaneous with political revolution of the sort that began in France in 1789. This means we are not talking about sexual vice when we use the term sexual revolution, as much as the rationalization of sexual vice, followed by the financial exploitation of sexual vice, followed by the political mobilization of the same thing as a form of control. Since sexual “liberation” has social chaos as one of its inevitable sequelae, sexual liberation begets almost from the moment of its inception the need for social control. That dynamic is the subject of this book.
It is no secret now that lust is also a form of addiction. My point here is that the current regime knows this and exploits this situation to its own advantage. In other words, sexual “freedom” is really a form of social control. What we are really talking about is a Gnostic system of two truths. The exoteric truth, the one propagated by the regime through advertising, sex education, Hollywood films, and the university system - the truth, in other words for general consumption - is that sexual liberation is freedom. The esoteric truth, the one that informs the operations manual of the regime - in other words the people who benefit from “liberty” - is the exact opposite, namely, that sexual liberation is a form of control, a way of maintaining the regime in power by exploiting the passions of the naive, who identify with their passions as if they were their own and identify with the regime which ostensibly enables them to gratify these passions. People who succumb to their disordered passions are then given rationalizations of the sort that clog web pages on the Internet and are thereby molded into a powerful political force by those who are most expert in manipulating the flow of imagery and rationalization.
Like laissez-faire economics, the first tentative ideas of how to exploit sex as a form of social control arose during the Enlightenment as well. If the universe was a machine whose prime force was gravity, society was a machine as well whose prime force was self-interest, and man, likewise, no longer sacred, was a machine whose engine ran on passion. From there it was not much of a stretch to understand that the man who controlled passion controlled man. John Heidenry’s history of the sexual revolution, What Wild Ecstasy, is one more example of whiggish history - this time, whiggish sexual history. In fact, all histories of sexual liberation are whiggish. The moral of each piece of this genre is either “People everywhere just wanna be free” or, to give the feminist variant, “Girls just wanna have fun.” That Linda Boreman Marchiano, AKA, Linda Lovelace found getting beaten and raped during the filming of Deep Throat not much fun is beside the point. The dogma that needs to be promoted here is that sexual license is liberating, and that the quest for liberation is its own justification, so even if a few people get hurt (or killed) in the process, it was generally worth it after all. Heidenry lays his metaphysical cards on the table at various points during the book. At the very beginning he tells us, for example, that “this ... is the way we were from about 1965 on, when the particles of revolt and enlightenment coalesced into a sexual Big Bang.” We have here, in other words, the classic Enlightenment explanation of everything. Just as the entire physical universe in all its grandeur, beauty and order is really nothing more than the random motion of discrete particles bumping into each other, so every social movement from economics to sexual liberation is essentially the same thing. The same explanation that George Will applies to the economic order, John Heidenry applies to the moral and sexual realm. Instead of atoms, we have atomistic individuals; instead of gravity, we have passion as the great motivating force, and instead of an orderly universe explainable by the laws of physics, we have society reconfigured by social movements like sexual liberation. This is how it is; in other words, the big picture. People everywhere just wanna be free and what gesture could encapsulate this freedom more than, say, masturbating to the dirty pictures in Hustlerl
As the last example makes clear, we are not talking about freedom here but a form of addiction or moral bondage - certainly for the individual but also for the culture as well. Which brings us back to the dishonesty of Heidenry’s book. The sexual revolution was not a grassroots uprising; it was not the coalescing of “particles of revolt and enlightenment”; it was rather a decision on the part of the ruling class in France, Russia, Germany and the United States at various points during the last 200 years to tolerate sexual bell avior outside of marriage as a form insurrection and then as a form of political control. Heidenry’s book is part of the general mystification on this subject and so not something that will explain things to the unwary: however, it is worthwhile as a classic expression of how sexual liberation has worked as a form of political control in this country over the past thirty-two years. Bernard Berelson, who worked for the Rockefellers, was a student of the Enlightenment and put those ideas to work in manipulating public opinion for them during the ’60s, most specifically in their battle with the Catholic Church over the decriminalization of contraception. Edward Bemays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of modern advertising. Both were part of the Illuminist tradition of controlling people through their passions, without the knowledge of person being controlled. And of all the passions - the illuminists make clear - the sexual passions are the most effective when it comes to controlling man.
What Heidenry’s book shows is how this control takes place not in theory but in practice. Given the wounded state of human nature after the Fall, flooding a country with pornography means getting a certain number of people hooked on it, just as flooding a country with drugs will result in a certain percentage of addiction. Once people are hooked, the culture’s mandarins can use the details of their addictions against anyone who goes against the regime. The subtext of Heidenry’s book is that everyone who opposes sexual liberation will be punished. “Several of pornography ’ s most outspoken enemies,” he actually says at one point in the book, “had come to an unhappy end.”2 What he fails to tell us is that the unhappy end he describes is just veiled way of talking about how sexual license is used as a form of political control. So to give the best known examples cited in Heidenry’s book, Preachers Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker were brought down by sexual scandals. Heidenry even admits that Bakker’s interlude with Jessica Hahn was a set up but refuses to understand the implications of the facts he brings forth. Nor does he mention the fact of Hahn’s seduction of Bakker was portrayed as Bakker’s seduction of Hahn in a way calculated to destroy his ministry and the ministries of other televangelists at the time. If Heidenry were a consistent proponent of sexual liberation, he would applaud both Jimmy Swaggart’s interlude with a prostitute, a visit clearly motivated by his exposure to pornography, and Bakker’s extramarital sex with Jessica Hahn. But that is precisely what he does not do, and the only explanation that makes any sense out of this double standard is that an act of “sexual liberation” is in reality a potential form of political control and only has meaning in light of the politics of the person who commits it. Just why is what Jimmy Swaggart did bad, when Larry Flynt does the same thing and is applauded as a hero when he does it? The answer to that conundrum is political. Jimmy Swaggart was on the wrong side of the political equation, and so could be marginalized by being exposed in Penthouse as a hypocrite.