Rick Santorum has promised a “war on porn if elected.
“Current federal ‘obscenity’ laws prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier,” Santorum wrote in the statement, adding that these laws should be “vigorously enforced.”
We’re going to have to define porn and obscenity for this to work. As a first step, I propose using use of the filthy word “Santorum” as an unambiguous indicator of pure smut.
“santorum” already has a similar definition: http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/santorum
That will go over well. Considering that many internet users watch pornography.
Now, all we have to do is get a judge to rule that sticking an ultrasound wand up an unwilling woman’s vagina qualifies as ‘porn’, and…
Oh well, Pharyngula was good while it lasted.
It’ll be among the first to go, due to the blatant Santorum appearing on it again and again.
Glen Davidson
“Rick Santorum” would be a good porn star name. Lousy president’s name though.
I’m pretty sure this will torpedo his chances, but I’m suddenly thinking of that one idiot who was so impressed by Gingrich’s moon base comment and wondering if we’ll see any repeats of that phenomenon.
Wow, Santorum really hates sex.
That piece of santorum dares talk about misogyny and violence against women as if he isn’t contributing to it?!
I was already half way to Hulk rage today, this is not helping.
Well I’m sure that this is some sort of dyslectic switch up, Santorum and his ilk do treat war as a type of porn.
The red sloth of war
I think we’ll need more clarification on what constitutes porn from Mr. Santorum. Perhaps if a few thousand people sent him their collections we could get some rulings from him, and thus know where the line is being drawn.
feralboy12
Uh, he does realize that the states most likely to vote Republican are the biggest consumers of porn, right?
…They do? Considering that if you go to any given porn site, you’ll easily find hardcore porn, I don’t think this law either exists or at the very least isn’t enforced in the least.
It’s Rick Santorum’s “Other” Google Problem…
I thought there was an adverse correlation between pornography and rape/sexual assault. But then maybe Mr. Santorum doesn’t consider rape mysoginy because these women are “asking for it”.
*reverse correlation
@DX: Do you have a reference for that? I’ve heard different things, never have looked up the original data.
He also needs to understand the meaning of “pandemic”. “America is suffering a pandemic of porn…” Must be widespread – multiple continents – and must be infectious. While you can catch stuff while making porn I always thought looking at it was pretty safe – at least from an infectious disease standpoint. Perhaps I got sprayed with my neighbor’s santorum.
The porn industry is going to love this. It’s like free advertising, and from a high-profile presidential candidate. Right now there are hordes of little fundamentalist kids sneaking off to their computers in their rooms to “do homework”. They may have to figure out how to get around the parental controls, but that’s just an educational challenge. I wonder if Rick gets a cut.
Rick should keep in mind that porn industry has made significant advancements to the Intertubes, particularly its commercial uses. Without them, progress could grind to a halt. A true Rethulican would understand that.
Either way the idea of causation is a failed hypothesis.
sorry DIRECT causation. You can argue indirect causation through business practices of production.
I’ve concluded that the USA must be paradise, with full employment, prosperity for everyone, no damaging social inequalities, a well-educated and scientifically literate populace, plus being universally loved in international relations.
It must be, given that Rick Santorum’s most pressing concern above all others is preventing people from watching staged intercourse.
Of course, in the Utopiac States of America, Rick Santorum would be an unknown character getting the psychiatric help he needs. Bah. Back to reality.
@dianne #5 – that should perhaps be “Prick” Santorum …
Of course not. The hypothesis that porn causes sexual violence and misogyny cannot fail, it can only be failed. >.>
“vigorously enforced.”
Did anyone else get an unfortunate and not at all work safe image at the idea of Santorum…vigorously enforcing…laws about porn.
Somehow everything the man says takes on a secondary connotation.
@Dianne
By necessity wouldn’t this require the creation of government positions to search the net for such pornography?
I can imagine a huge rush of applications to that agency.
Do you think sometime earlier Mrs. Santorum check the browser history, and this is his excuse/response.
“But honey, I was doing research to stop this pandemic!! And until yesterday I had no idea that the was hardcore midget-on-clown gay porn. I swear I didn’t.”
Oh good. Azkyroth has already got his trollface on, and has his truck loaded up with bales of straw.
YOUR COMMENT CZAR DEMANDS YOU STAY ON TOPIC *waves Flamingo Scepter*
@dianne,
The only law about internet porn is rule 34.
It always was. Just that the ‘P’ is usually silent.
Er…wouldn’t Santorum end up cutting off the internet of most of his voters if he does that?
Last time I checked the stats, the red states had the highest percentage of porn viewers…
@Unbound
Yes but they’re all in a race to be the one who’ll most support Rick on it. To do anything but zealous support is an admission of guilt.
I swear all of the GOP politics works like that, a race to prove you’re more pious so that your obvious open secret sins (like masturbation) aren’t confirmed.
PZ, close quote marks, please. Otherwise, perfect, as always.
You know, this setup sounds dreadfully familiar somehow. A cheap hack of a politician concerned only with being re-elected to a position within a stymied and struggling rightwing party? A speech waving the bogeymen of Pornography and Obscenity? Detestable morals and unspeakable plans for the future?
Why is this ringing bells?
Obviously I can’t prove that Santorum is collaborating to murder people to aid his campaign like in the book, but the whole thing about Teh Horribz Pr0n just sounded so terribly, tiredly familiar. It really is a cheap shot; if you’ve read the book, Parlabane’s comments on this sort of feigned moral outrage are spot on.
For bonus points, the anti-porn moralising family-values moraliser with rightwing morals in the book is secretly gay, like they usually are.
Yeah, I doubt that Reagan appointed each position on the Meese Commission as a punishment.
@dianne: Oh, yeah…you just know that behind that shit eating grin, he is truly a rick santorum.
Which leads one to wonder…has anyone been digging around in this guys past or current personal affairs? It has been noticed in quite a few cases in recent years that the louder the hate talk, the bigger the hypocrite scumbag lurking and seething just under the surface.
“The harder they come, the harder they fall…one and all”. At least, let us hope so.
dianne #16:
http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/1961to1999/1999-pornography-rape-sex-crimes-japan.html
http://anthonydamato.law.northwestern.edu/Adobefiles/porn.pdf
He’s just as wrong about the law as he is about the stats. See American Booksellers v. Hudnut, for instance.
Nixon appointed a commission on pornography, which concluded that there was no harm to society in it.
That conclusion was vigorously opposed by one commissioner, who felt that there was direct, measurable harm to society from porn. He later went on to fame in another context.
You all remember good Catholic Charles Keating, right?
A hand busy wanking is a hand away from prayer… or is it?
Were we done with the war on terrorism or what?
If we give them all our porn, maybe they’ll cancel each other out.
“Our trust is to prick holes in the stiff front erected by the smut dealers…we must keep mounting an offensive so we can lay to rest their dominant position…” Bless you, George Carlin.
Thrust, dammit, THRUST!
I bet Obama is hoping Santorum is his opponent. I’m a Republican but I would vote for Obama if Santorum wins the nomination.
In this video Santorum brags about his unsuccessful attempt to dumb down science education to accommodate his dead Jeebus.
And yet, at the same time, the GOP is requiring that doctors do medically unnecessary vaginal probes. For each probe, print out two pictures and sign them. Describe what they see. They require that the woman take all this material home and then bring the complete package back the next day (i.e., they can’t legally even throw it out) if they want an abortion.
If that’s not obscene, what is?
What you want a cookie for being only mostly stupid and sociopathic?
Wow. Now Mr. Frothy mixture is “defending” women? That’s a laugh. The man truly does hate sex.
Well since the war on drugs was so successful, I suspect he’s just looking for a new way to keep all those underutilized law-enforcement types busy. At least for a year or two. Until people lose interest in sex.
I foresee him emerging from a summit meeting with Ron Jeremy, triumphantly proclaiming “celibacy in our time”.
Seriously though, I think this is an indication that he is truly detached from reality. If he thinks this won’t cause the quiet dissolution of a whole lot of actual votes (as opposed to rhetoric support) in his base, he has been drinking his own bathwater for too long.
Capt.
I just started laughing hysterically at the first sentence of the OP. I mean, it’s not funny, but it’s funnier than the anti-choice shit and the homophobic shit of the last few days, and, what’s more, it ain’t gonna happen.
Feralboy, #10: I was just thinking that we should take a cue from the women sharing their ladybits TMI with that Virginia state rep and start sharing TMI about our smut habits with Frothymixture.
And nobody says they have to be your actual smut habits. I mean, I don’t find 2 Girls 1 Cup erotically enthralling, but, for the sake of my country, I can lie.
Dianne, #24: Yes. He will grasp the situation firmly, and he will pull and pull and pull until there is an outcome to his satisfaction.
Paulino, #40: What is the sound of one hand fapping?
So? Does the viewing of porn lead to the use of contraceptives? We all know how much harm that causes.
Ms.DC#49:
Isn’t it usually done with one hand?
Janine
Only the rhythmic method.
Man, we’ve got a lot of wars going on: War on Drugs, War on Illegal (i.e. brown) Immigration, War on Women, War on Sex, War on Pornography, the Culture Wars, and even the non-existent War on Religion…and I bet I’m leaving a few out. Perhaps we’re too possessed with war, too much TV, too many Conan the Barbarian movies, and just too much testosterone.
Can I move to somebody else’s country? Mine seems like it’s about to explode.
Of course he doesn’t. That’s why he says such things, and that’s why he can’t get elected.
…Ah, that explains a few things.
You will vote for Obama anyway, because Obama is the least evil.
Some prime Puerto Rican Santorum porn.
Safe for work but have some brain bleach ready.
Who knew that the sweater vests were for our benefit.
One thing that’s really odious here is that it’s yet another data point for the “ideas of the academic left are sometimes surprisingly useful to the religious right” hypothesis. See previous entries on poorly understood, excessive “post-modernist” cultural relativism and its use in the denial of science. Certain feminists schools describe porn as inherently misogynist (IIRC), this is illegitimately appropriated by the religious right as part of the their (oh so ironic) campaign for hypocrisy around sex, which is “coincidentally” hideously misogynistic.
Some porn is undoubtedly playing to misogynist tropes and also undoubtedly contributes to misogyny in wider society. I’m not a social scientist, but the few studies I’ve seen certainly seem to indicate that link can, and often but by no means always does, exist.
That’s not an “anti-porn” comment, it’s an “anti-misogyny” comment. I think the simple act of merrily viewing other people having sex for pleasure is not in and of itself a misogynist (or necessarily harmful) act. I don’t doubt that porn exists which is completely consenting, perfectly pleasant and an all round Good Thing for all concerned. If being watched/watching is what yanks your crank, then by all means go to it with the best of them sayeth I. Porn, in this limited sense, is like any other commodity, if it’s produced ethically (usual caveats apply) then I don’t have a problem. I don’t have a great problem watching professional sports people put their bodies at risk for my entertainment after all. Sex isn’t a special case in and of itself.
That said, as I’ve intimated above, I can certainly see HOW porn can be appropriated for negative ends. Encouraging existing male gaze, reinforcing objectification of women and misogynist tropes etc. Bugger I’m probably not explaining this very well…
…I can see how “ideal porn” as a Platonic entity is not necessarily misogynist and thus how carefully produced porn can be non-misogynist, but I am equally aware that the majority of consumer porn indulges in and supports misogynist tropes.
Erm is any of that clear?
Louis
The War on Christmas!!!!!
…and too few people heeding their moral.
At the end of the first one, Conan rides away, and in the background the temple burns.*
In the second one, there’s a god who wants something done. Conan knows that if that isn’t done, there’ll be a catastrophe. Nonetheless, Conan doesn’t do what the god wants, barehandedly fights the god, wins, and thus averts the catastrophe, effectively answering the question “but who will come and save you from your Lord”.
* Like, literally. Like, the walls burn. They’re obviously made of styrofoam or perhaps papier mâché. A sight to see!
Mr Frothy seriously expects us to believe that his new crusade against ‘teh pron’ is about protecting women, rather than just another expression of his pathological hatred of sex?
Right, because Santorum is totally opposed to misogyny… well, unless you are going to be unreasonable enough to count a little thing like viewing women as nothing more than subhuman brood-mares as misogynistic…
While it is undeniably true that the adult entertainment industry has serious problems with exploitation, when it comes to overall harm to women porn pales in comparison to Santorum’s forced-birth ideology.
Incidentally the above constitutes “vague thoughts open to correction by more evidence” not “hard line unwavering opinion designed to reinforce and existing dogma”.
In other words, please feel free to destroy it at will!
Louis
If Santorum REALLY wants to tackle porn, then he should look into tackling the areas where people wind up getting massively pissed off after watching a simple video only to later find their computer that they’re using being hit with some accompanying Trojan and Spyware viruses, since some bright spark asshole has somehow thought it to be a HILARIOUS idea to have those Trojans and Spyware be part and parcel of watching internet porn.
Speaking as someone that has shared enough flats and computers in my time, finding out that computers have become deceased due to viruses incurred by someone watching porn HAS been a legitimate annoyance. But it’s not someone choosing to have paid, broadcast sex that’s the problem there, it’s the pricks who decide that the viewing experience just wouldn’t be complete if people don’t also have to contend with viruses that’s the problem.
David Marjanović @ 57;
If Yahweh is anything like some of his followers (*cough*Ted Haggard*cough*), then the thought of a somewhat homoerotic, heavily muscled, oiled-up barbarian with a huge.. err… ‘sword’ coming after him is probably his
secret fantasyworst nightmare…“Excuse me … sir?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“That’s ‘Federal Agent.’ Federal Agent Galore.”
“Yes, Federal Agent?”
“I see you have some pornography there. I’m afraid I can’t let you have that, sir.”
“You can’t?”
“No, sir. Pornography is wrong. Very wrong. It’s dirty, filthy smut … and there is required punishment. President Santorum insists that the laws against pornography be ‘vigorously enforced.'”
“Oh? And how ‘vigorously’ would that be, Federal Agent?”
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to step over here, sir …”
I hope Frothy realizes that the Bible Belt states are the biggest consumers of porn in the US(and not just straight porn, gay porn too): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgs5A3tHMyc
***Calling Sastra @ 62, calling Sastra @ 62 – please collect your sniny new internets at your convenience***
I assume that the man in this hypothetical exchange has the obligatory ’70s era porn facial hair?
I love the Goldfinger reference.
I posted something similar to this on FB earlier, having seen a notice of same…
Santorum actually a tiny, twisted, ridiculously-misapplied iota of a point: the industry does more harm than good overall. Is it safer than streetwalking? Definitely. But there’s still a lot of exploitation and side-channel business going on there, and I’ve no doubt major criminals are tied into it. Anything that moves that much money has to be more evil than good somewhere down the line. And if you sex education came from porn, especially the mainstream stuff, you are going to have some really twisted ideas about human sexuality, especially female sexuality.
Now some women like erotica. I am one of them. But for the reasons above I stick to drawn things (please no cracks about my username, I’m as Caucasian as they come) and stories. I just don’t want anyone being hurt, even indirectly, to satisfy my desires.
Gregory Greenwood:
Yahweh would just discipline the barbarians, the way one of his spokesmen, Marcus Bachmann, said they should be disciplined.
“Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me…”
Sastra:
I see what you did there.
As many of you will remember (!) there was a famous obscenity trial in the UK in 1960 concerning the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover#British_obscenity_trial
At the time, one wag observed that the definition of obscenity before this trial was “anything that caused an elderly judge to have an erection.”
How things have changed!
In the war on porn, the first step is to know your enemy. Thoroughly.
Ever notice Santorum can’t explain what he’d do about the economy instead of pushing his misogynist, homophobic, fundamentalist Catholic social agenda.
I can tell you things about Peter Pan and the Wizard Of Oz, now there’s a dirty old man.
But ‘Tis, you are missing the moral economy. If LGBT people go back in the closet, porn is banned and no one uses contraceptives; the big sky daddy will favor us by improving the economy. We will just have to remember to cut taxes for the wealthy to that they have the money to hire the rabble.
Gregory Greenwood, #64, seconded. Very, very much seconded. I did LOL.
‘Tis, #69 (snirk), That’s because Economics be hard,* yo. The other stuff** just requires hate, which takes*** a bit of energy to maintain, but comes**** remarkably naturally.
Louis
* Titter
** Giggle
*** Guffaw
**** York
The only way they’ll take my porn is if they pry it from my cold, dead (right) hand
Scaryduck, #73,
So you’re a Southpaw?
Or is Ol’ Righty suffering from RSI?
Louis
‘Tis:
One might (might!) jump to the conclusion that Santorum* knows that the “free markets solve everything!” economic script he’s supposed to read from is complete and utter bullshit.
*Not unlike all of those state legislatures that would rather prevent access to birth control and rape pregnant women with a medical device (by proxy) rather than passing jobs bills that have already been written and are waiting approval.
I’m picturing the scenario something like this…The scene starts with a stereotypical porn set. The actors and director are discussing the planned scene. (First sex scene can be inserted here if desired.) Suddenly, in bursts (P)Rick Santorum Protector of the Innocent (TM) wearing a spandex superhero outfit that leaves little to the imagination. A stunt double will likely be required.
Santorum proclaims, “Pornography is illegal and I’m here to enforce the law. Vigorously.”
The actors and director say, “Ooh, Rick…show us your rod of vigorous enforcement. It’s so…large* and…unbending. Yes, let’s have some vigorous enforcement.”
The scene continues as you would expect it to.
*Hey, I said you’d need a stunt double, didn’t I?
Louis #74
I’m a leftie. And besides, doesn’t *everybody* click with their right?
he did exactly the same thing when he was doing populism, talking about social mobility and how low it is in the US, all the while contributing to it. That’s what right-wing populism is: misdirecting anger caused by real problems at scapegoats, while making the actual problems worse
Jadehawk, have you read What’s The Matter With Kansas??
I’m surprised no one pointed out the snuff porn in the bible by now.
One might even win an Internet.
If Bill Dauphin is around, I’d be interested to learn if, faced with a specific not-Romney, he would really prefer Mr. Stinkyfroth to win the Republican nomination rather than Robomormon?
no, not yet
If he can’t make it illegal, maybe he could discourage it with a pole tax. Bahdum-tish!
@holytape
#29
And rule 35.
Jadehawk, what you said in #78 is pretty much the theme of the book, why do people vote against their better interests.
Janine and Jadehawk,
He’s got a new book out now, too– Pity the Billionairee. I just started it yesterday and so far, so good.
humanape #44:
That’s funny — there’s a fuckton of other Republicans who won’t vote for Romney. I doubt they could bring themselves to vote for Obama, but they sure as fuck won’t vote for Romney. It’s interesting to see the divide — relatively intelligent Republicans couldn’t vote for Santorum, and the others can’t bring themselves to vote for Romney.
Interesting split indeed. It’s like the Republican party has set itself up for a knight’s fork.
It’d be really sweet if Santorum chose Romney as his running mate. That’d make sure not a single fucking Republican in the nation would vote.
Read it already. Pretty short book. But all should read it.
He wants to enforce federal laws?!
He wants to shut down the porn business?!
He wants to restrict our freedom?!
He wants to protect women?!
He wants to jump a shark?!
janine:
For some reason, I have the words “Invisible Handjob” running through my mind.
Moggie:
For some reason, I have beer sprayed all over my keyboard.
Nigel, it is the deep south and the far west that will not vote for Romney. The areas that were covered by dubya and Darth Chaney during the last Republican Presidency and what they tries to do with the far west McCain and the strangely deep south Alaskan Palin. While they are able to stay in the game because of their billionaire backers, both Gingrich and Santorum have true appeal for the deep south.
I am just waiting for the alliance between traditional conservatives and deep south values voters, one in place since 1968 to crack. Romney trying to dress in values drag is not working and neither Gingrich nor Santorum can beat even a weakened Obama.
“Invisible Handjob”
*snort*
The Invisible Handjob Of The Marketplace
Nigel,
blockquote>For some reason, I have beer sprayed all over my keyboard.
Beer?
My scepticism. You has it.
Louis
Wish I’d said it, but it’s John Avlon who just predicted what the GOP will experience if they nominate Santorum:
Moggie: You owe me a tea-free keyboard. Upon receipt of said keyboard, you will be awarded several sniny internets.
Has a Line been started yet for Sastra? Can one be in both Lines at the same time?
Alaska is ruled by deep south newcomers, who left Lousianna and Texas and followed the oil workers and their fat paychecks to Alaska, and infested with their preachers, who cluster their flock in compounds in the smaller communities ‘on the road’ where they’re more easy to control. Alaska has been declared a ‘refuge in the end times’, so the not quite Rapture Ready have flooded here along with their bizarre cult practices as well.
My daughter reports to me that there’s just no sensation in the world quite as creepy as working hard to get purchases checked out and in the bag and having the customer grab ahold of you, insisting they must ‘lay on hands’ and ‘give a blessing’.
Alaskans used to be more interested in your skills, endurance, courage and ability to tan a hide than your morals, but now the old timers are disappearing under a tide of Christianist newcomers, eager to receive a Permanent Fund check exceeding $1,000 for each and every one of their numerous kiddies.
There are several challenges to Frank’s Kansas. Some of them are mentioned in Prasad’s The Undeserving Rich: “Moral Values” and the White Working Class, which is itself in disagreement with all of the above.
You might tell the southerners that they have teamed up with their enemies from the Civil War. The traditional conservatives are descended from the war profiteers and carpetbaggers of the North, although they have forgotten the war, while the southerners are very much unreconstructed Rebels. They really don’t have much in common, except a hatred of everyone who isn’t them (and especially a race-based hatred).
That was interesting about Alaska. Thanks.
Wouldn’t that make them welfare queens, dependent upon a government agency? These christian slackers should provide for themselves!
Wait wait wait.
I know that ol’ Ricky-poo isn’t ever going to focus on the economy*, but getting rid of porn means getting rid of a multi-billion dollar industry.
Considering how shitty the unemployment rate is, maybe we should consider moral crusades that don’t actively destroy jobs, hmmmmm?
*Having an aneurism about sluts is way more fun!
Good to know that President Santorum will get right to work on pressing issues like unemployment, Iran, gas prices… Wait, no he’s going to go after porn. Well, yeah, that’s probably going to bring the country to it’s knees, too much porn.
That idiot never should have let the cat out of the bag. Now that porn knows of the coming war, it is likely to strike preemptively.
Another useless crusade to go on and waste vastt amounts of taxpayers money.
Why its just like the war on drugs!
This, from the same guy who thinks we don’t need to worry about CO2 in our atmosphere.
If you think it’s bad for us, “tell that to a plant, how bad carbon dioxide is.”
When you think he can’t get any dumber–he does.
Dick Santorum. Modern day moral christian crusader.
I hope he hasnt got any chance of being elected in the US as president.
The nice thing about this election cycle is that we won’t have to listen to or about Santorum for four more years.
Well, unless we read that he ran off with Marcus Bachmann.
Y’know, I’ve been trying to work out a Rick Santorum avatar that would be perfect for the game Tropico. So far I got this;
Rick “Frothy” Santorum:
Background: US Senator
Came to Power: Bought Elections
Traits: 1)Religious Zealot 2)Pompous 3) Great Schmoozala
Edicts (Automatic, cannot be cancelled): Inquisition, Book Burning, Contraception Ban, Prohibition.
Edicts (Cannot be enacted): Same Sex Marriages, Literacy Program, Sensitivity Training, Food Program, Free Housing, Social Security, Pollution Standards.
Colleges unavailable (must rely on foreign specialists), High Schools fixed to parochial (religious) education. Churches and Cathedrals build in half the time with double the upkeep. Cost of accusing citizens of heresy reduced by half. Landfills cannot be set to recycling.
I need to go back and get the numerical values, but I think that pretty much sums it up unless anyone else familiar with the game has anything they’d like to add. I don’t even think Tropico can survive a Santorum presidency to be honest.
Santorum has slightly more than half the delegates that Romney has, yet he’s being treated almost as the front-runner.
http://youtu.be/kA3WxjplKzo
Kids in the hall sketch “Stay Down”.
From Tom Lehrer’s album “That Was The Year That Was”,
Smut!
What I found amusing and ironic is that all his anti-porn arguments seem to have come from Marxist radical feminist Gail Dines and her book “Pornland”.
You’d think Santorum would be turning to various anti-porn Christians and using moral arguments backed up with Bible quotes. Instead all those points, including the stuff about “brain changes”, the statistic for “first exposure”, the idea that porn causes sex trafficking, “porn addiction” scaremongering, and attempts to link porn to violence against women, come straight from the world of women’s studies.
Maybe Rick Santorum is a closet Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon fan?
Actually, the really ironic thing is that various liberal/progressive sites, including the Huffington Post, took those exact same arguments seriously when it was a left wing feminist presenting them. Some of those sites supported feminist activists when they were the ones appealing to Congress to demand the banning of pornography.
But suddenly, when it’s Frothy saying the exact same things, it all becomes sexually repressed fundamentalist nutjob crazytalk…
Won’t entirely dispute this, but see here.
Doubt this. They said the same thing about video games and saturday morning cartoons, and I think this argument has all the same problems.
I don’t disagree with this sentiment, but as phrased it’s raising red flags given the issues that came up in Greta’s article I linked.
The thing is, as with video games, I’ve never encountered anyone who actually thought that porn accurately depicted reality, which seems to be what this argument assumes. Just a lot of people who are convinced the drooling morons around them all think that (basically a more specific case of this).
I’ve seen a lot of conflicting claims about the circumstances under which “mainstream” pornography is produced, and I’m skeptical of a lot of the more negative ones simply because it seems like it would be cheaper to do it sorta-ethically, and people generally start studios and other business ventures to make money, not to kick puppies (I will grant that spectacular exceptions may well be produced).
And the other half of the population gives up any thoughts of voting for him, too.
I know, some women love porn, too. But A. I don’t seem to know any of them and B. that doesn’t fit my simplistic joke.
@114. Wow. I wish I’d known about that article a few days about when I was arguing with blackskeptics. Greta basically argues what i was saying: Taking a hard-line that porn is degrading to women is itself degrading to women who are in porn, or like porn or enjoy the sorts activities depicted in porn.
Also, if guys see activities in porn, then try to talk their girlfriends into them, so what? If they aren’t coercive, this doesn’t hurt anything. If they are coercive, then that’s the problem, not porn. Women do the same thing. People have to get their kinks somewhere and I don’t see how porn is any less legit than anywhere else.
Not that a lot of porn doesn’t have problems, such perpetuating racist tropes about Asian women and especially black men, but narratives that essentially assert mind control of the audience are ridiculous and illiberal.
I wonder. Will Santorum be taking any “hostages” during this so-called War on Porn?
Unfortunately, it’s not really as simple as all that. First of all, I don’t know how one can rule out the possibility that some men may pick up the very idea that they are entitled to be coercive from porn. “Coercion is hot. Women secretly like all that stuff.” (The same sort of nonsense we see from nosepick artists talking about Alpha Males.) Or say they are coercive otherwise, even without porn – yes, the coercion is a problem. But if they’ve picked up something degrading or violent from porn, that can compound the effect of them being coercive.
I suppose by looking at the research on kids playing video games?
Assuming the effect we’re postulating exists, which has the issues referenced above…
…well, is there something special about porn in this regard?
That it involves sex, an area in which a lot of men are already problematically coercive and entitled?
Er. Do you mean this?
I don’t think many people think porn is real. I think they think it’s hot, I think it contributes to their sexual fantasies, and I think that men who are already coercive about sex aren’t going to be any less coercive about making their sexual fantasies reality.
ॐ: You will reveal your source of Comic Sans at once.
Oh, your using that script.
You go like this:<q cite= “creationist”> Stuff here! </q>
I’m surprised no one has pointed out the practical difficulty of making porn illegal by means of some objective-sounding definition that does not also include the bible.
Genesis 19:30-36. Lot has drunk sex with each of his daughters.
Gen. 38:15-16. A man named Judah has sex with his daughter-in-law, having mistaken her for a prostitute. Oops.
Genesis 25:1-6. Having a concubine is not adultery.
Numbers 31:1-18; 28-47. Ah, one of my favorites. This is the sex and violence part where Moses tells his tribe to kill all the Midianites except the virgins, which they can have for themselves.
1 Kings 1:1-4. Old King David’s servants procure him a young virgin “that my lord the king may get heat.” Doesn’t work. Oh, well.
Also take a look at The 6 raunchiest, most depraved sex acts from the bible (from Cracked.com but not made-up, the string of quotes from the Song of Solomon is worth a read in itself).
As odd as it sounds, this wasn’t likely actually sexual. See Shunamitism. Might be a trigger in there somewhere, but it’s unlikely.
Uh, are you only thinking of cheap porno movies? Because I think it’s much easier to understand how people could think of some porn as “accurately depicted reality” by looking at a nude photograph (which isn’t showing Anatomically Impossible Sex, bad photoshop jobs, or anything obvious like that). Obviously pictures can be airbrushed, the scenery can all be fake, etc., yet people can easily be fooled and they can fool themselves into not thinking about any of that. The model may not, in fact, get any sexual pleasure out of masturbating with Bibles, even though the picture seems to indicate otherwise. I guess the point is a bit more subtle when it’s something like Hollywood Sex, but this is a kind of distortion of reality which people do quite frequently accept.
Also: It’s not Porn. It’s Art. ;)
@Cassandra @119
Grown individuals should still be accountable for their own actions. Banning pornography that, despite having coercive elements as part of fantasy role play is still within legal limits, is not an acceptable solution to the problem of coercive behaviors in actual relationships no matter how its influence may compound it. I find it akin to “the devil made me do it,” as in “porn made me do it.” I also find myself siding with Larry Flynt on the subject of pornography as being a medium of expression even if it is sexual, and it is a right to those who believe in freedom of expression which may be regulated to protect those actually involved but never infringed.
Wasn’t suggesting that they shouldn’t and wasn’t suggesting that we should. But if its influence does compound it, that’s something we should be looking into and acknowledging, mitigating where possible. Our society shapes coercive men, and we have a responsibility to look very seriously at how we do that. Not everything is about the criminals here and whether their excuses are valid – we ought to be thinking how we can best limit the harm they do to their victims.
I am not of the assumption that you personally favor banning it, but many who cite this concern do. Absolutely I agree, how porn’s influence may negatively affect relationships should be looked into, and absolutely should be mitigated by education. I just wish to express that I preclude bans on pornography as in anyway fitting a model for how we should best limit the harm they (as in individuals who engage in violent/illegal behavior) do to their victims.
We need to settle on a distinct definition of the word “santorum,” lest we all become confused.
I vote we use it in place of the word “taint”
eg. when that guy teabagged me, I got a faceful of his santorum.
He means it contributes to violence and hatred against women *who aren’t in porn*. He doesn’t want women not-in-porn to be sexualized like the filthy harlots in pornography (I am sure he thinks they deserve it). Banning pornography on obscenity charges only drives the activity underground, proving he doesn’t care about the women who are in the porn who are harmed.
to the dude who said rick sanctorum must “really hate sex”: porn =/=sex. Seriously. There are heaps of folks who love sex but hate pornography because it is usually very misognynistic and well, industrial. It is like saying a ban on mcdonalds would indicate a hatred of food or eating.
I generally refrain from linking directly to my own blog posts here because it is impolite, but I wrote a post awhile back about the difference between feminist opposition to pornography and religious opposition to pornography. Some readers here might find it of interest in light of mr santorums wishes.
http://skeptifem.blogspot.com/2011/07/feminist-opposition-to-porn-v-religious.html
@55. janine :
Fromthe article there :
Hmmm … Co-incidence? I wonder.
I know “in my heart” ( ;-) ) that Rick Santorum will one day be caught with the proverbial “dead girl or live boy” – maybe both.
I … am pretty sure we already did that.
@StevoR
I’ve just got done reading up on all that about his gaffe in Rico. F*king hilarious in itself. “It takes real cojones to go down to Puerto Rico and tell them they need to stop using the word ‘cojones'” – Steven Colbet. Didn’t get to the ‘all-gay’ cruise though. That just tops it for me, cheers.
Don’t be a fucking idiot. I can’t stand this bullshit treating homophobes like they’re closeted homosexuals. And even assuming that he is gay, that wouldn’t make him a fucking pedophile.
Why do people say this kind of shit all the fucking time, sometimes without even realizing it?
Because self-loathing and displacement behavior provides a semi-coherent explanation of why they fucking care so much?
I’ve seen a lot of conflicting claims about the circumstances under which “mainstream” pornography is produced, and I’m skeptical of a lot of the more negative ones simply because it seems like it would be cheaper to do it sorta-ethically, and people generally start studios and other business ventures to make money, not to kick puppies (I will grant that spectacular exceptions may well be produced).
The mafia is also interested in making money, but they still kick puppies–and worse. Because sometimes sleaze makes you money just as well as not being sleazy. It’s certainly easier to make money the sleazy way for people who aren’t very bright–and most of the people in porn aren’t rocket scientists.
The business is always staring at respectability from the outside looking in. For a reason.
1) Linda Lovelace was drugged and threatened with murder if she didn’t perform in Deep Throat. It’s fine if a woman wants to be there–more power to her. But if she doesn’t, how many pornographers coerce performers, and how many of them look the other way when they are sure someone is being coerced? How many of them are pushing women who are otherwise willing into acts they don’t want to do?
2) Some cops in LA are so used to finding underage performers in “mainstream” porn (a lot of it is filmed in the San Fernando Valley) that they’ll gladly tell you the way they spot the age problem in films and magazines. And they spot those 16-trying-to-pass-for-19 performers enough that it would make you sick. Or at least enough that they can’t keep up with all the violations of that and other laws regarding adult entertainment that go on in the porn business.
3) I don’t know about now, but in the 80s and early 90s in LA, you could pick up most of the weeklies and find several porn actresses not only advertising their escort services in the personals, but also using their porn names to draw in more customers. The producers and directors knew, and did nothing about it.
So tell me how many businesses you think would encourage, or even condone, employees moonlighting at criminal activities? I’m not about to dispute the validity of prostitution law, and the law (and most reputable businesses) don’t care if it’s valid or not. They only care what the law itself says. And here were these porn actresses, advertising themselves as escorts, with the knowledge of their employers.
I don’t know about you, but condoning criminal behavior from your “stars” constitutes a sleazy business in my book.
@consciousness razor
I’ve wondered about that myself. I suspect it has something to with the premise of “she(he) doth protest too much,” and may be thought to be used as a (possibly corrective) slight towards one whose overt activities may be suggestive that they are of the self-loathing variety of homosexuals rather than homosexuals in general – which is probably why there are so many people who despite having nothing against homosexuals partake in that behavior. There is likely a subconscious feeling of “ah, that explains it.”
Personally, as far as these self loathing prudes (gay or straight) I sincerely wish someone would actually invent an orgasmo ray. I think it would be the greatest contribution to mankind since the internet.
It’s barely semi-coherent, though.
Why do white supremacists hate black people? Because they secretly are black? They secretly want to be black?
Why do misogynist men hate women? Because they secretly are women? They secretly want to be women?
@Life
When you’re grasping for explanations as to why someone is being a complete jackass, I wouldn’t expect you to be entirely coherent.
At best, craigore, you’re saying I shouldn’t place a lot of moral blame on the person who’s using my sexuality as a weapon to hurt others.
No, I don’t think I’ll be persuaded of that.
What I never see in these attacks is any signal that the speaker gives a shit about being my ally.
All I see is one hetero attacking another hetero, they way they’ve learned how since they were schoolchildren. And gay people are the bludgeon.
Nope. Not happy about it. Not willing to let it slide. It needs to stop.
Is it supposed to be an explanation, a joke, an insult? All of the above?
That’s deplorable and unfortunate. It’s also a single high-impact anecdote.
Based on what follows, I find the sincerity of this extremely questionable.
Good question.
Because we know cops’ instincts and generalizations about socially disapproved groups are always reliable.
I’m having a hard time seeing failing to consider themselves their employees’ lifetime chaperones as a strike against an industry.
Consciousness Razor, it’s not worth it.
Okay, as a clarification which may well be ignored, I don’t consider the issue of underage persons being illegally featured in porn to be irrelevant – I’m merely noting that, as the source is “certain cops,” there are at least three orders of fairly substantial confirmation bias to consider.
@Life
Well, good luck with that.
As far as the examples you’ve provided, I have to point out they present an altogether different animal. You’re talking about traits that are visibly obvious (ie. being black or being a woman) rather than behaviors, inclinations, or desires which are not obviously visible. Nevertheless, racists and sexists, are likely grappling with inferiority issues similar to those homophobes greatly based on what they have witnessed in the treatment of these groups and compounded by their own approach to these different people. But because of the absurdity of suggesting any of them are secretly women, black, etc, racists and sexists are commonly if not inevitably approached differently than those who are bigoted against behaviors and inclinations that can be better hidden than physical traits.
Nevertheless weapons used against all of these bigoted groups (highlighting their insecurities however that may be accomplished) may be assumed to be put to some corrective use and in the minds of many are potentially justified. I sympathize however that there is the prospect of collateral damage and should be absolutely minimized. I see nothing wrong with being gay, female, or black, etc, and so if anything the aim in assaults against prudes, bigots and secret self-loathers should always be towards acceptance and empowerment of those who happen to fall in such traditionally marginalized categories and that any embarrassment should befall exclusively on the bigoted. This is where I think we should dedicate our discussion on this issue.
@ Aquaria 141: IIRC, Linda Lovelace alleged her abusive husband forced her to do porn and that no one involved in the production of the movie itself was aware of it. Also, the 1972 mafia-run industry was not the same as the modern one.
I’m a bit dubious on your second claim, seeing as everyone I know in the porn industry (which is granted, the Midwest industry and not the San Fernando Valley) is scared shitless that some underage person will sneak in with a fake ID and they’ll go to jail. In fact, this happened to a couple guys I know who run a strip club. What do the police do? It’s not like there isn’t plenty of history of the police busting the porn industry at the slightest provocation. Why would they let this slide? For a modern example, see all the times Joe Francis has been arrested. Granted, that the Florida cops. Do the San Fernando Valley police just love the industry way more than the cops anywhere else?
The editors of High Times are all pretty open about smoking pot. Disregarding criminal behavior is pretty common in industries where opposition to the law is pretty universal.
Not that sleazy practices don’t go on. The main one I’m familiar with is bad-faith negotiation with the talent where you get them out to the shoot, then try to get them to agree to additional stuff when they supposedly already have the job, because if they just walk off, they wasted the day and the prep time. It’s nowhere near universal, but certainly happens. People are discouraged from talking about this publicly for fear of stoking the anti-porn forces.
Azkyroth, if to you it’s not worth discussing further, maybe you could up your standards and decide that it’s not worth defending in the first place. That would be helpful. I’m sure in your paranoia you imagine that I’m making all this up for you, but it’s actually all copypasta from TET, January 2011. It really is important to me.
+++++
Taunt bullies by calling them queer, and it’s likely that they’re going to
go home and kick the dog,take out their anger on an easy victim, someone who’s definitely queer or someone who performs gender differently.One of the most popular ways of demonstrating straightness is still to assault or torment someone else for not demonstrating straightness.
People have been using “doth protest too much” regarding homophobes since at least the WWII era. There is no evidence whatsoever that it helps. But there is evidence for other tactics. What we actually know does work, what’s empirically demonstrated to work, is coming out so that more people realize they have loved ones, friends and family who are queer.
This is very close to the schoolyard taunt of “takes one to know one”, and this ‘tactic’ implicitly reinforces the notion that being queer is bad.
Personally, I think all attacks on homophobes should be met with something along the lines of “it’s ok to be gay. just do yourself and everyone else a favor and accept it if you are. the bible/koran/torah is nothing but the same bullshit problems from your own bigoted antecedents and does you no favors.”
craigore,
you’re a straight man, aren’t you? And yet
Here you are telling me what I should have to put up with from you and your buddies, ostensibly for my benefit?
You don’t have the first clue about being an ally, then. It involves not trying to dictate the direction of the movement. Here I am pointing out how behavior like StevoR’s hurts me, and you’re brushing that aside because you’ve got your habits and you’re sticking to them.
Well then wake the fuck up, because here’s your chance to realize an obvious fact. Schoolyard taunts on the level of “takes one to know one” do not exclusively hurt the bigoted. They rely upon queerness being a negative thing.
@Life
I demonstrate my straightness by simply being comfortable with being straight. I wouldn’t have any problems with being gay, but I’m not and that’s just how I am.
@Life
We can focus on the schoolyard taunts, sure, they’re fuckin juvenile, ignorant, and just as bad as the bigoted assholes who initiated it by implying there was something wicked or shameful about being gay. I do not however see people dispensing with weapons of embarrasment altogether – after all, embarrassment is often key to motivating a correction in one’s behavior.
Even if this is completely true it’s really not relevant. You’re not the only person involved. A great many other straight men still engage in the toxic masculinity culture that relies heavily on tormenting gay men and treating women as subhuman, and you have to be aware of that context.
I don’t think people are objecting to “weapons of embarrassment.” I think that “life” is probably objecting to the notion of his sexuality being treated as such a weapon. I sure as hell do.
Yeah? Well thanks. You know, it’d be easier if I you were pulling alongside me, rather than laying there as dead weight.
Note: all you’re doing here is showing why people can speculate about it endlessly without receiving much pushback. You aren’t showing that it’s generally a reasonable speculation.
No. This is pseudoscientific armchair diagnosis. There is no basis for this sort of claim.
Just use Ockham’s razor, craigore. Your explanation is actually very complicated — exactly how do these inferiority issues arise? why would they arise in such a racist, sexist, homophobic culture, which teaches that racist, sexist, homophobic displays are normal and rewarded? or if it’s your claim that these displays aren’t rewarded these days, and the haters feel inferiority because times have changed, then what was the cause of these behaviors back when they were normal; do you see that inferiority can’t be an explanation of both X and not-X?
No, this line of argument doesn’t work out that way in practice.
As soon as that “do yourself and everyone else a favor and accept it if you are” thing comes out, it becomes a way of blaming closeted queers for being born into a homophobic society. Not everybody can turn away from the communities in their little towns, just like that, walk away from their only support networks.
Here’s a much better attack on homophobes! I’ll give you this one for free:
“Gay people are good, kind, caring people who love their families and just want to be allowed to show their commitments like everyone else is allowed to. And you want to stand in the way of love.”
See how that works? Nothing ambiguous; no implicit argument that being gay is something that everyone would like to avoid but the poor queers are stuck with it so they might as well be resigned to it.
I don’t know what could possibly make you think that this is a coherent response to anything I’ve said. It strongly suggests that you are failing to comprehend what I’m writing. If it’s very late where you are, go on and go to bed; I won’t be mad at you for taking leave and reading this thread again later.
I’m glad you appear to agree on this much. Now look again, because that’s what StevoR was doing, and that’s how this conversation started. You’ve been giving some appearance — perhaps unintentional — of defending his statement.
@Cassandra
I am naturally aware of that context. I believe we should confront it whole heartedly.
In the mean time let us also highlight the absurdity of sexuality in itself being a weapon. The mere fact that such revelations can cause embarrasement and be seen as a weapon is really the problem of the bigoted which unfortunately gets deflected onto people like life and gets to be so repetitive that, if I’m not terribly mistaken, simply suggesting that the fault in a homophobe lies in secret homosexual inclinations may lead to an assumption of fault in onself who happens to be gay for being gay (that it is homosexual and not that it is secret), and so the embarrassment (at least in cases intended for the bigot) gets displaced making it more than just the problem of the bigoted, yet sadly in such cases as Ted Haggard, the application of ‘outing’ maybe necessary in order to confront and correct the outrageous and self destructive behaviors of projection via self-loathing. I admit it is a very delicate subject to navigate, but I do wish to say that when I snicker at the prospect of Rick being outed, it has nothing to do with how Life or others happen to be, but how Rick happens to be being utterly uncomfortable with his own sexuality (whether he is gay or straight, he is most certainly uncomfortable and probably just needs to get laid however that is accomplished). If I’m reading too much into it though I apologize.
@Life
You might have nailed it, it’s 4am and I am feeling pretty exhausted. I admit StevoR was over the top but I wasn’t paying attention to that, just the block quote.
As far as my comment on being straight, I only bring it up because I think that’s the direction everyone should be moving towards. With that said, I’m going to go pass out. Cheers.
Now wait a minute, because you’ve conflated some shit here. Haggard was outed by someone who had personal information about him, and who was also personally hurt by Haggard’s public behavior. There’s a place for what Mike Jones did, and I’m not disputing that, but it’s quite different from you and your straight buddies snickering about who’s probably queer lol.
From my perspective, as a man who tried to stay in the closet into early adulthood, and can imagine what it might have been to continue onward with that, there’s also nothing funny about Haggard. It’s a completely fucking tragic story which ended well for no one. All I can think about is how much I wish he’d been surrounded by a more accepting community during his adolescence.
I really do not care what’s inside your head. I need this whole social pattern to change; it doesn’t make a difference in the effects if half the participants are just being “ironic” about their participation.
I would consider it a fine thing if you were a secret homophobe who was wholly supportive of queer people in all your actions. As far as I can tell, that would be an improvement.
Hey–Rick Perry is back in the news. He and the Republican scumbags in the Lege have just gotten Medicaid funds for poor women’s health yanked because he refused to let Texas Medicaid patients go to PP for pap smears, and birth control services.
Perry and the Texas GOP slime–the most moronic piece of shit douchbag fuckfaces, ever.
He can’t do this. Japan and Sweden would be put out of business!
@Aquaria (141)
1) I think it’s telling that the main example everyone uses of the evil things that can happen in porn is from 1972, back when it was illegal and controlled by organised crime. Things have changed a bit in the last 40 years.
2) The idea that underage performers are routinely used in mainstream porn is just nonsense.
Look up “18 U.S.C. 2257”. To be in compliance all porn companies are required to keep identification on record proving that the performers they hire are over 18. Simply failing to keep the required evidence is an offence in itself.
Ever since Traci Lords back in the 1980s, porn companies have been extremely paranoid about performers’ being legal. With the potential prison sentences they’d be facing if caught, they’d have to be utter morons to knowingly hire a 16 year old.
I remember someone spreading a false rumour about a particular performer being under 18 when she started. All the porn sites featuring her scrabbled to remove their content before even checking if it was true.
For an extraordinary claim like that I’d need to see more evidence than an anecdote about “some cops” saying stuff.
3) To me it would seem bizarre and hypocritical if people who pay people to have sex on camera were freaking out about people being paid to have sex off camera. It’d be like the owner of a head shop firing someone for smoking a little weed.
Aquaria,
There is no chance this has not been done on purpose, right?
I mean, they:
1. keep going against abortion
2. poor women lose medical help
3. have a reason to rail against Obama
4. triple win!
Aquaria:
I’ve been raging about that since yesterday. I mean, what the ever-lovin’ fuck are these people doing??
Further proof that Republicans can only get their rocks off when the uninsured are dying in a ditch. *spits!*
I find it very odd that in one breath people are willing to mock Santorum because Republicans (what with their incredibly healthy attitudes towards sex) make up such a large portion of the porn consumer market here in the U.S and in the next breath insist there are no issues with how porn is produced or how sex is depicted in it.
More evidence pro-life really means hate-filled sack of shit trying to hurt and kill as many poor women as possible.
@154. life is like a pitbull with lipstick ॐ says:
I didn’t intend to hurt you with my comment and feel you have misunderstood it. However, I am sorry that I’ve upset you. My apologies for that.
@139. consciousness razor wrote :
Okay, that’s NOT what I’m saying.
I was referring to a well known political proverb or saying that these things will end certain political careers using a bit of wry gallows humour.
I was NOT saying – and certainly don’t think – that closested homosexuals are pedophiles. “Boy” being colloquial for young male NOT necessarily under-age ones.
Nor was or would I claim that all homophobes are closest homosexuals although there is a number of cases and examples where that has been famously the case.
I was making an ironic mocking predicting of how I think Santorum’s career could very well end. Clearly some people think I went too far. Well guess that won’t be a first. Sigh. Shrug.
I don’t set out to be offensive or upset people and I’ll try to think more next time. I also hate having to walk on eggshells and know that whatever is said some people sometimes end up taking offence. I strongly believe in free speech and calling a spade a fucking spade. I also strongly believe in considering the feelings of others and not being a dick and it’s sometiems hard to get the balance right. So, yeah, I’m human, messed up and fallible like us all. I try to do the right thing, sometimes I don’t suceed and, please feel free to let me know when you think I’m not and I’ll certainly listen and try to change if I’m convinced there’s reason to do so.
Human nature, the social context & culture we’re all immersed in and because people often don’t think or say stuff they think is funny and amusing and true or a combination thereof. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes not. Commentry and opinions on where line sare and aren’t are pretty subjective and blurred with except of specific facts. Not everyone is tactful or good at expressing themselves. There ‘s probably a whole pyschology / anthropology / sociology thesis or two answering just that question out there somewhere.
And how many women were on it? I am going to make a generous guess that zero women were involved in that decision.
I am doing a lot of research into the birth industry in america right now. There are important harms associated with pornographic ideas about women and our bodies that I discovered in the course of reading about childbirth in the usa.
I read a post from an l&d nurse talking about how disgusting it is when a woman who hasn’t “at least trimmed” her bush is when she is giving birth on the unit. all the nurses sit around and gossip about these disgusting non porn-compliant pregnant women. This implies that the majority of women *do* groom their pubic hair, despite the added difficulty of a hugely pregnant belly, because they got the idea that their vaginas are impolite in a non-altered state. They are supposed to be mimicking the pubic hair of a prepubescent girl while giving birth, an activity that only post pubescent women are capable of. The practise of shaving women before labor ended decades ago because it has been shown to be associated with increased rates of infection, but it is back now by porn-induced patient initiative.
Every woman my age that I know shaves their pubic hair. I know that it did not used to be that way. It is bullshit that women feel that way about their bodies.
The effect of porn on plastic surgery is undeniable. Women in the sex industry often get plastic surgery to remain competitive, women outside of porn are doing the same (with labiaplasty, boob jobs, butt implants, etc) to feel sexually attractive. Women die from these surgeries, some are deformed forever, and at a minimum they are in needless pain to fit some fucked up cartoon ideal. Then there are tons of women who can’t afford surgery, but would have it in a heartbeat if they could, who spend their lives feeling like shit about themselves all the time. A friend of mine had her marriage end because her shitbag of a husband wouldn’t stop telling her to get tit implants. He would not stop looking at pornography of women with enormous boobs and found his wife totally inadequate after a couple of years of that conditioning. I’ve had my fair share of dudes pressuring me to do porn shit too as a young protofeminist, it isn’t fun. It seems pretty fucking common actually, and that angers me. You wanna say its harmless to “society” (a group of people that porn actresses don’t belong in apparently, because they get diseases all the fucking time)? Ask a shitload of women how their lives are impacted by pornography. You’ll find for every “cool” chick who says that porn is awesome there are 10 who have had profoundly awful life experiences because of the pornsick dudes in their lives acting out their fantasies on people who don’t enjoy it. Maybe the dudes happily wanking to this crap and inflicting misery upon women think its harmless, but who the fuck cares what they have to say about it? It is about as interesting as hearing another white person tell me that they don’t understand why there isn’t a white history month or a dude say that he thinks mens rights are awesome. Hearing the privileged justify it is a totally boring and predictable thing, in addition to being totally sickening.
I didn’t intend to hurt you with my comment and feel you have misunderstood it.
You’re pretty dim if you think I don’t understand you. I do. I’m just not interested in your self-image as a good person. Pretty much everybody thinks that of themselves.
Guess what? I hate hearing queerness used as a rhetorical weapon. I consider this concern to be somewhat more important.
This is an absurd exaggeration which functions to let you absolve yourself of any responsibility. It is an appeal to laziness.
When the government is taking away your actual free speech rights to mock politicians, then we can talk about this. Raising the issue here is a stinky red herring. The appeal of “but free speech!” is the first refuge of the braindead.
I can’t really take any of this seriously after the bullshit that preceded it. If you wanted your apology to seem sincere, you failed. For everybody’s sake, please don’t bother trying again. It’s unsalvageable.
I’m not anti-porn per se, but fucking hell, am I tired of hearing some men hand-wave any problems with the porn industry and conflate all feminist critique thereof with fundie opposition thereto. It’s as tiresome and as dishonest as the Polanski defenders who conflate sex with rape in order to accuse feminists of being anti-sex.
See, because it’s a well-known political proverb, it can’t possibly be homophobic!
Sayings are either common or homophobic. They can’t be both!
ॐ: Have you seen this study?
davenkdal
WTF? So the example of AIDS infections in pornography performers is from before 1972? ha. The rates of std infections are terribly high in pornography performers. The legal porn industry opts to use damage control instead of easily available prevention.
I guess no one underaged ever strips either then? ha.
But lets say you are right. You are excluding pornography made by people outside of the US or made without the legal red tape of having a legit business. I doubt all those videos of women fucking dogs are legal, but they are not difficult to find online. Where do you think they come from?
The thing about arguing about porn is that when I tell people that they are being unethical by giving money to the industry I often hear “who pays for porn anymore?” as a response, which means that the regulation doesn’t really have much effect on the porn that people are watching for free online. the story of swap.avi is illustrative- you can pay companies in different countries to make women do whatever sick fucked up thing you want, usually poverty stricken foreign women. Someone at the something awful forums paid impoverished brazillian women to eat their own shit this way, and the video was widely distributed on the internet afterwards.
By this logic child pornography doesn’t exist at all. Why do you think that pornography would be made of every age group except post pubescent minors? It is riduculous, if anything that kind of porn would be easier to distribute because it isn’t obviously child pornography. I think you underestimate the usefulness of pornography to abusive people; there are multiple websites where men post porn of their ex girlfriends or wives as “revenge”. What makes you think some sicko grooming a young girl for sexual servitude would refrain from making pornography of her? Do you think that the theme of teenage girls in porn would not affect the kind of porn made outside of the legal industry? Why would the demand go completely unrecognized when the demand for every other kind of pornography (including bestiality, rape, child, etc) is fulfilled?
It seems bizarre to me that you think that there isn’t any overlap between the groups. Plenty of women start out as prostitutes and get into porn because they are promised more money, or end up prostituting themselves to producers to get into porn and so on. They call the tricks “privates” when they are producers. Sometimes producers demand free tricks or they refuse to book someone. But porn is so ethical, its a reaaal great industry!
excuse me, the line that read “I doubt all those videos of women fucking dogs are legal, but they are not difficult to find online.” should have read “I doubt all those videos of women being fucked by dogs are legal, but they are not difficult to find.” I doubt much of it was consensual in any meaningful way…
Are people really getting most of the plastic surgery due to porn? Porn tends to be far more realistic about bodies than, for instance, fashion modeling. Breast implants are nowhere near universal and are widely disliked by pornhounds. For instance, out of the current top 10 performers as listed on AVN, four have implants and five out of the six naturals do not have especially large breasts. Four of them are over thirty and two are over forty. None are under twenty-three. Also, they aren’t all blonde or white and none are especially underweight. Mainstream porn isn’t all Jenna Jameson clones.
Last I checked, penetrating a woman against her will already qualifies as ‘rape’.
rick verb, 1. To remove with ones mouth.
santorum 1. noun, The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.
If you think the rape wand and shaming rules are bad, wait until they require the woman to name the fetus before getting an abortion, and then require the doctor to issue birth and death certificates.
It’s coming. Just watch.
A.R,
Of course, but it might not mean what you think it means. In a review article in Science, Daniel Wegner notes that it may be a “don’t think of an elephant” kind of effect; the more homophobic man is more motivated to not display any arousal, and thinking about not getting aroused causes him to get aroused. But then it’s not the gay porn per se which is causing his arousal.
rogerfirth:
I’ll have to go digging around to find it, but there is an excellent short story in which abortion is legal, but the woman is legally required to visit via an ATM-like machine an AI baby that grows up at a normal pace. The story is set at the last required visit, when the AI child turns 5 (I think).
I’m expecting something like that soon.
No one’s saying that women fucking dogs and child pornography don’t exist, just that they have nothing to do with the US porn industry. (Though bestiality is legal in several states.) This is a goalpost move of the original claim that such things were common in the San Fernando Valley porn industry.
What is your source for the high STD rate things? Wikipedia has a good, if cursory article about this. There was one incident in 2004 when Darren James became infected when shooting a movie in Brazil that didn’t follow US safety standards and spread it to Jessica Dee and Lara Roxx before it was caught. The industry, to its credit, did not release the scenes of transmission, which I’m sure would have had a large market of morbid curiosity and a smaller market of fetishists who actually found the idea arousing. They also shut down all production until it was clear the problem was contain and kept the affected people working in non-sex roles rather than dumping them.
Almost all the HIV infections in the porn industry were in late 1970s and early 1980s before much of anyone was doing anything about HIV. The above incident is the only confirmed case where anyone in the industry was infected due to porn production since the screening system was implemented in the 1980s. Derrick Burts may have been infected as well, but that is disputed. At any rate, the US adult industry has way lower infection rates than the population at large due to rigorous screening.
First all, that’s an incredibly low bar. Second, that doesn’t mean born is realistic about bodies. It isn’t. The vast majority of porn, especially porn parody movies and the like, tend to have may one or two body types throughout the whole movie. It’s all thick butts, slim waists and double d’s.
Personally I’m not to bothered by this as porn is about fantasy sex. My only problem comes in how eager some porn watchers seem to be on insisting that to be beautiful you just have those looks and the fact that this seems to be the only kinds of bodies producers want to see under mainstream titles. While BBW or older women (outside of milf and cougar shots) are popular it’s only as a specific side category for certain people. They’re bodies, not being ideal, are kept out of the big budget for varied audiences.
This may not even be wholly the fault of porn producers and just the general sexist views of society that demand women (and men to a certain degree) look a certain way. But it helps no one by pretending the issue isn’t there.
That depends on the porn you are watching and if it is made known. Also, and this is just me observing from the actresses I’ve seen, body types tend to go for a specific look and those that are lacking in one aspect try to get surgery to ‘improve’ it. Porn actress Sophie Dee who had her breasts done (going from a B-cup to DD, I think.)
Just so we’re clear, there’s nothing wrong with her choosing to get her tits done. It is her body. I’m only commenting on the trend I’ve perceived which seems to suggest the industry (the parts I’ve seen) are biased towards a certain body type.
ॐ: Hadn’t thought of that. But something tells me that it’s not that simple, considering some rather prominent examples (Haggard, Craig, etc.), and my own experience with homophobes. I wonder if there is any other work in that area…
@Skeptifem 175
I was responding to a comment about coercion in porn. STDs are a different issue.
As for HIV infections, the last outbreak was back in 2004, with 4 people infected on set. I’m not saying that that’s no big deal, but it’s not exactly an epidemic either.
Having said that, I do support any measures that make the job safer for performers.
Yes, I am excluding that. I was talking about porn produced by the US industry. I think that’s the porn that’s relevant to this discussion.
That’s what Santorum, his Christian buddies, and various US feminists are trying to criminalise. If porn produced elsewhere (without the same regulation) is much more abusive, then that’s a pretty good argument for not pushing US porn companies underground or overseas.
The extreme niche porn you’re talking about is a tiny market. Most people aren’t going online to watch scat and bestiality porn. You can find horror stories at the fringes of just about any industry if you look hard enough.
If it isn’t obviously child porn then it wouldn’t be appealing to people looking for child porn. If someone wants to make “teen” porn then there are plenty of young looking adult women for them to hire. That being the case, why would people risk a lengthy prison sentence by producing it illegally?
You’re ignoring the fact that porn companies are legally required to keep paperwork proving that performers are of legal age. This is something even the smallest companies do and is strictly enforced. When it’s even rumoured that a performer might be underage it’s widely reported and shocks the whole industry.
I don’t find it plausible that the police would ignore clear evidence of child pornography, not when the porn industry is under so much scrutiny.
Is there any evidence that girls under the age of 18 are commonly found in porn?
I think you’ll find that most of those sites are fake and use staged footage. Unless the “ex-girlfriends” just happen to be professional porn performers…
Of course there are some videos that really are the product of abuse, and of course that should be illegal. My point is that the crusade against the porn industry is attacking the wrong target. It’s like going after illegal sweatshops by attacking legitimate manufacturers.
I don’t think (and didn’t say) anything of the kind. Of course there’s a lot of crossover between porn and other elements of the sex industry. I don’t see that as a big deal myself, but then I live somewhere where prostitution is legal too.
Nobody ever said there wasn’t any such thing as a self-loathing, closeted same-sex-attracted homophobe. What’s at issue is their actual prevalence within the larger set of homophobes generally.
“Rather prominent examples” is the definition of selection bias.
And here’s where you’ll find negativity bias.
There is. As much as people like to cite that one Adams study, as of ten years later it had never been replicated. (And maybe still hasn’t, but I haven’t confirmed that.)
Here is Meier et al, DOI 10.1016/j.jrp.2005.01.007.
«Psychodynamic conceptions of homophobia suggest that it may be a byproduct of a defense mechanism spurred by an unconscious or denied attraction to gay individuals (e.g., reaction formation; Freud, 1936). In other words, this view suggests that homophobic individuals espouse an irrational fear or hatred of homosexuality because they are threatened or sickened by their own personal attraction to gay individuals. In an interesting study that helped propel this view empirically, Adams et al. (1996) found that highly homophobic men (versus non-homophobic men) became physiologically aroused (i.e., had increased penile tumescence) when presented with short video clips of gay men involved in sexual activity. Adams et al. (1996) suggested that their data were consistent with the psychodynamic view that homophobia is really a manifestation of a denied or unconscious attraction to gay sex. However, we do note that no one has published a direct or conceptual replication of this eVect with any type of task or instrument designed to measure unconscious forms of sexual attraction. This absence is particularly puzzling given the attention generated by the article. We Wnd it interesting that many diverse sources of information (e.g., journal articles, books, and countless websites) appear to accept this Wnding as support for a psychodynamic explanation of homophobia, even in the absence of follow-up empirical research.
Although the penile tumescence data of Adams et al. (1996) may be consistent with psychodynamic views of homophobia, it may be problematic to make such a strong claim on the basis of such data. In particular, it may be that the men responding with increased penile tumescence were highly anxious while viewing images of gay sexual activity. We suggest, in particular, that not all forms of anxiety reflect secret attraction processes. Anxiety can also occur when one is repulsed by a stimulus (Barlow, 1991). Indeed, Adams et al. (1996) admitted that their data could be interpreted in terms of non-psychodynamic forms of anxiety, which can cause penile tumescence (Barlow, Sakheim, & Beck, 1983). Prior data have shown that homophobic men exhibit physiological signs of fear and anxiety while viewing pictures of gay men (Shields & Harriman, 1984). Such physiological activity is quite similar to that exhibited by spider phobics when viewing spider stimuli (Shields & Harriman, 1984). […]
In the current study, we sought to determine whether defensive homophobics are secretly attracted to, or alternatively, repulsed by images of gay sex. We use implicit cognition measures because peripheral measures of arousal are diYcult to interpret in terms of central psychological states (Cacioppo, Klein, Bernston, & HatWeld, 1993; Davidson et al., 1994). In the present context, penile tumescence can sometimes be a result of sexual attraction and sometimes be a result of phobic anxiety (Barlow et al., 1983). […]
[I’ve skipped over the details of the experiments, to the discussion section now. –ॐ] The data were consistent in arguing for the defensive loathing hypothesis over the secret attraction hypothesis. First, defensive homophobics terminated images depicting gay (versus heterosexual) sex quite quickly. This result suggests that defensive homophobia shares important continuities with other phobic reactions, which also involve minimizing exposure to phobic objects (Cook & Turbin, 1997; Lang et al., 1997). Our participants did not know that we were centrally interested in viewing time and therefore this measure of reactivity was implicit. However, it could still be argued that viewing time is under some explicit control and that the motivated avoidance of gay images could in principle reflect conscious forms of self-regulation. Therefore, we turned to the sequential priming task, which was structured to minimize strategic processing strategies. Consistent with the defensive loathing hypothesis, self-deceptive homophobics displayed negative (rather than positive) implicit associations toward gay images. The convergence of these two sources of data suggests that gay sex has become a phobic object for some homophobic individuals, both at explicit and implicit levels of cognitive organization.
A core aspect of homophobia is anxiety. Some homophobic individuals report that exposure to gay sex, or even to thoughts of gay sex, cause subjective symptoms of anxiety and fear. As anxiety is often an indicator of defensive processes, it is natural to wonder what it is about gay sex that is so disturbing to some homophobics. A phobic aversion hypothesis proposes that for defensive homophobics, a simple distaste for gay sex has become connected with stronger avoidance motives, in turn triggering phobic-like anxiety upon exposure or even thoughts of exposure. The secret attraction hypothesis proposes that homophobics are seeking to avoid conscious awareness of repressed gay urges.
Our data supports a phobic-like aversion (Cook & Turbin, 1997). We believe it is inaccurate to argue that spider phobics secretly desire spiders or that claustrophobics secretly like to be crammed into dark and tight spaces. Quite the opposite is true even at the implicit level of cognitive processing (Teachman & Woody, 2003). By analogy to these other phobias, it appears that among a subset of homophobics, phobic-like aversion is characteristic of both explicit and implicit reactivity processes. There is no secret attraction among such individuals. How then can we account for the Adams et al. (1996) data showing that some homophobics exhibited increased penile tumescence while watching gay sexual activity? Quite simply, we would argue that these homophobics were experiencing high states of anxiety, which can, paradoxically, increase penile tumescence (Barlow et al., 1983).»
Ugh. That fucking PDF. On the screen, before copying and pasting the text, those words were perfectly clear:
eVect = effect
Wnd = find
Wnding = finding
diYcult = difficult
HatWeld = Hatfield
…
I am frequently amused when people say I support this or that.
What exactly do they mean?
What can this mean?
Do you consistently refuse to be a consumer of porn by any companies that don’t always use condoms?
I’ve seen that article as well, but I don’t think anyone was claiming that all homophobes were closeted self loathing homosexuals.
Not telling you anything you don’t know but, it’s way to signal you aren’t entirely unsympathetic for the other side and do share some of their concerns. Often times it’s meant to be conciliatory. Of course like most gestures of peace it is very abstract and when you have definite complains it doesn’t work to well.
The ‘anti-porn’ version of it would be ‘I support people’s right to have sex in exchange for money.’
Not to get too meta, but
Nobody was claiming that anyone was claiming this.
Adams et al suggested it was about 50%!
Meier et al show good reason to dispute this; the closeted same-sex-attracted homophobe was so rare they couldn’t find him.
They give plausible reason, from Barlow et al, to think that the penile tumescence effect would be due to mere anxiety, and they show that in their study the anti-gay reactions were typical of other phobias, so Adams’ findings can be understood as phobic anxiety.
ॐ: Yeah, I doubt that more than 5% of homophobes would qualify. The rest are just straight up homophobes.
Does this mean if I’m having trouble with my girlfriend, I should try not to get aroused?
@ consciousness razor, life is like a pitbull with lipstick ॐ and Cassandra Caligaria (Cipher), OM;
Having read you various posts on the issues revolving around the problematic nature of discussing the possible or actual closeted homosexulity of some homophobes, I realise that my post @ 61 was at best insensitive.
I would like to apologise without reservation for any offense given or harm caused. This is an example of my unconscious hetrosexual male privilege at work. I will be sure to correct my behaviour in future.
Again, A.R, please note this part:
You might be interpreting the study more definitively than even Adams and his research team did.
ॐ
I means they bought a fucking pinkyellowbluerainbow ribbon and if only they could remember what they did with it, they’d display it.
Regarding closet cases: there sure are a lot of them. Just check any gay hookup site and look for profiles that say “must be discreet” or “can’t host”. Some of those are gay men cheating on their lovers, but most are married men cheating on their wives.
Whether the gay-haters are closet cases or not, one thing is certain: they have dirty minds obsessed with other people’s sex lives. Normal, sane people aren’t particularly interested in who sticks which appendage in which orifice.
# 48 captstormfield says:
Santorum and the rest of the rethuglican gang don’t seem to realize that their “base” is very small, and the further to the nutbar right they move, the smaller the remaining base.
I’d love to round up a gang of haters-in-chief and have them given careful psychiatric evaluations. Betcha a jelly-filled donut a good many would be found to be certifiably insane or, if not that, strongly socio- or psychopathic. One can’t help but wonder if right wing craziness is on the rise since the dismantling of the mental health care system.
And finally, a word or two in favor of porn. Porn is a good. It helps those unable to connect with a sex partner to attain a surrogate sex life that’s better than none at all. The old, the ugly, the fat, the socially inept: thanks to the miracle of porn, they too can experience the delights of arousal and climax.
Yeah, I’ve felt very conflicted about porn for a while, after reading feminist critiques of the sex industry from the likes of Catherine Mackinnon and Melissa Farley. On the one hand, I think they’re right that much (though obviously not all) porn is exploitative and dangerous for the performers; and that, on a deeper level, most of the porn available in our society reinforces a patriarchal model of male sexual dominance in which women’s bodies become objects in the male gaze. This doesn’t necessarily mean all porn is bad, but I think it’s beyond doubt that there are serious problems with the commercial porn industry.
On the other hand, I also think history suggests that trying to ban porn, or the commercial sex industries in general,* is generally catastrophic. (Even on the approach favoured by Mackinnon, in which sex workers are not criminalized but clients are.) It doesn’t eliminate those industries, given the high demand for them; it simply drives them underground, into the hands of organized crime, and makes them more dangerous and exploitative for the people involved. For this reason I disagree with the prohibitionist stance. I think there are good reasons to avoid the commercial sex industry, but I don’t think trying to wipe it out through state enforcement has ever been a good strategy. Legalization and regulation is better.
(*Not that I’m suggesting porn and prostitution are the same: they’re very different phenomena, and they shouldn’t be conflated. But writers like Mackinnon, Farley and Dworkin are opposed to both, and similar prohibitionist arguments are made in both cases.)
RFW, I suspect you may be stupid as fuck.
No shit, but that’s not what we’re talking about.
Most of these guys also don’t hate gay people.
I’m not really sure who this comment is addressed to. I started composing it while I was talking with craigore, but it’s turned out to be a bit more acerbic than I’d like to be with craigore. I don’t know.
Maybe you, dear reader, will get something out of it.
+++++
Do you know how I tell the difference between a couple of homophobes making a doth protest too much joke and a couple of straight “allies” doing the same thing?
Sorry, it was a trick question. Frequently I cannot.
Homophobes also use the “stop repressing it” and “just be yourself” rhetoric. These are standbys of homophobic jokes.
Most homophobes these days have also learned what everyone else has learned, that it is impolitic to admit disliking queer people.
When I hear these jokes I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop. The only way I can really feel comfortable that you’re not going to do something else homophobic is if you don’t make these jokes in the first place.
And the self-loathing queer who lashes out with homophobia, though more rare than the frequency of these jokes would imply, will only detect that you’re mocking them for being gay. The “just accept it” stuff is word-for-word the exact same line they have overheard from overt homophobes who are tormenting someone for appearing gay or performing gender differently. So the closeted, self-loathing queer hears that this ostensibly well-meaning liberal considers queerness just as much a joke as the rest of their peers.
Everybody else’s “who you are” is an unambiguously positive thing. Straights are never mocked that way: “just accept that you’re straight! Get over it! It’s just who you are.” This incongruity shows queers where we really stand. Most of you would never want to trade places with us, but there are a significant number of queer people who would prefer to be straight, and make strenuous effort to fit the role. This social atmosphere is not primarily the fault of the closeted, and it certainly isn’t the fault of out queers. It is the straight majority who are to blame, and so it’s really twisted for any of you to give the closeted queer all the responsibility for their situation.
Gay communities can figure out for ourselves how to address those who are in the closet. What you can do is make straight communities unambiguously more accepting.
That’s done by affirming that it’s good to be LGBT, it’s good and that’s the whole of the matter. There’s no need for anything more psychologically complicated.
To be fair, a lot of m4m ads take the general form of “I’m looking for a guy to meet with discreetly at the rest stop so we can suck each other’s cocks, but I’m not gay and if any queers answer this ad, I’ll kick their ass.” This isn’t exactly a flood, but enough for aspiring comedians to notice a bit of a trend.
Link failed
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qdhE-vVW_swJ:www.urbandictionary.com/define.php%3Fterm%3Dgay&strip=1
ॐ: Actually, I was probably interpreting the results as those of a single study with poor variable control.
http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/doc/rnr/2894638935.html
A Craigslister complaining about homophobic responses
and obligatory TV Tropes link (read real life)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArmouredClosetGay
http://desmoines.craigslist.org/cas/2895919617.html (Warning penis picture) is vaguely along those lines, but nothing really blatant currently. I have seen some “no gays” ads in the past, though.
Yeah? You realize this is not at all what you said at #202?
It is not disputed that homophobes like to harass gay people.
Also not what you said. And please do look up selection bias.
Ace, this is the first time I’ve gotten to really evaluate your criticial thinking ability, and I gotta say, man, it’s not looking good.
No, it isn’t. Here’s what it says:
I really don’t think you understand what you are reading here. He’s in the closet, yes — do you understand some guys do need to remain in the closet? — and it looks like he’s looking for someone to fuck but not love, nevertheless there is zero threat of violence here.
That is of course also not what you said at #202.
:)
Above is one of the few upsides for people like me who come on to a thread late and read it backwards.
I never said that such listing dominated the m4m listings, just that there were enough to notice a trend. I also said I have seen such listings myself. How was the TV Tropes link different from my claim, other than me slightly hyperbolizing it? While I concede actual threats of violence are rare, plenty of ads go out of their way to make it clear gay guys aren’t welcome.
I’ve had similar experience being solicited by anonymous men when I was was listed m4w on dating sites because they didn’t want any “sissy fags.”
You said “a lot” and you haven’t shown a single one.
Did you? Because what you’ve said now is that you’ve seen “no gays”, not threats of violence.
Precisely what in the TV Tropes link did you think even could plausibly support your claim? Because I didn’t see anything.
(And again, it’s all selection bias. It’s near worthless to support any claims of any kind. But I would have expected that you had, ya know, one example.)
Jesus. Maybe you shouldn’t have said otherwise.
There is something like this, but it does not support your earlier claim at all. It is not somehow violence to be more attracted to “straight acting” guys.
There is some internalized homophobia in seeing “not trying to be a stereotype” as a good thing, but damn, I have plenty of internalized homophobia myself. And I’m sure as fuck not going to be discussing it wiht you, because at this point I do not trust you.
And once more, not what you said at #202.
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
Two things:
1. The primary industry is dying, and you can tell, if by no other means, than by just how desperate they are to feed their “professional” porn clips into sites that try to cater to, “self made videos”, in order to drum up more business. Even doing this, a *significant* amount of the stuff on the net now is self produced, or owned by people that are filming it in their own homes, as their own business, and not the, often literal, some morons running the main industry. (I say this based on watching some special they had on Showtime, about the owners of the original “Deep Throat” and some company that was trying to get rights to remake it. The people involved, and I mean ***all of them*** where so bloody stupid that I don’t think they could have told that they where exploiting, or had been exploited, even if they had barcodes on them, and where traded like stock between companies. I have seen brighter people, as the main characters, in movies like Dumb and Dumber…)
2. Strangely enough, when the courts get involved in cases of possible exploitation, the argument goes, “If you are even in the same room with the film crew, get tipsie and show some tits, you have *automatically* consented.” Uh, huh… Real porn you have to have your age verified, release forms signed, etc. But, apparently, if its in public, and you are drunk, its not exploitation, or dangerous? Because, I am seriously confused how they define the garbage the main industry makes as evil, then turn around and say, “But its entirely your own fault of someone films you without your permission, then publishes it!” Better yet, explain to me how not having a bloody choice it video and pictures are published, and having a court say so, is “less damaging” than ***choosing*** to work in the industry?
As for the whole host of problems that do exist in the industry.. Well, when you have porn legal, but everything related illegal (i.e., prostitution, etc.), you are bound to run into people who figure they can cater to both at the same time, and those people are ***not*** going to be honest, pro-women, businessmen. And, until the internet, they where the ones who have the “easiest” means to fund such projects. Now.. you need a webcam, a PC, and people willing to let the film be put on a site. Get enough of those, and you might even be able to buy a real camera. What you don’t need is drugs, drug money, side prostitution, and all the other crap, including people who couldn’t write a script for something with the intelligence of telitubbies, never mind a feature film, making your “story” for your “porno”.
That was intended as a hyperbolic description of a certain genre of ad with the subtext “I want to have gay sex without being reminded I’m gay, because the thought of being gay upsets me” exaggerated to make a point. It’s not like people using violence to express their internalized homophobia is unusual. They just wouldn’t actually put it in a Craigslist ad. That’s where the hyperbole comes in. It’s like all the baby-eating jokes. To the best of my knowledge, no one is literally accusing atheists of eating babies (unless you go back 25 years and interpret the Satanic Panic in a way that’s probably not justifiable). To give another common example around here, no one seriously asks for a cookie. People sometimes ask as a joke, but the point is it’s exaggerating the affirmation-seeking behavior of certain faux-allies to make a point. I use hyperbole in approximately 110% of my posts. It’s the only rhetorical strategy I use. If you didn’t take “general form” as a phrase that was supposed to signal that what followed was not meant to be taken literally, I apologize that I was unclear.
My anecdote about being solicited may not literally be the same thing as I claimed in 202, but I never claimed it was. I provided other support for the same essential claim. I could also tell you about about about the definitely-not-gay guys who wanted to take male strippers back to their hotel rooms for totally straight activities during my stripping days. Or the stripper who had to start telling everyone in the dressing room about how straight he was, then waving his penis in several guys faces to demonstrate that he wasn’t aroused by our presence (alcohol was involved). My point was that there are a lot of guys who not only won’t admit to be being gay, but will hit on guys based on their perceived straightness and make homophobic remarks about gay guys, who are beneath their sexual interest.
OMFG. This is a little bit late. You might have said that in your very next comment.
Not every guy who likes to have gay sex is gay. See also: bisexuals.
And the one you pointed out didn’t have that subtext. Trust me. My safety depends on being able to parse this stuff.
Well don’t. It definitely was not helpful in this case.
Hence my calling bullshit. So why the fuck didn’t you point out nigh-immediately that you were making shit up? Why did it fall upon me to squeeze it out of you?
Let me put this to you bluntly. I really do not need any hyperbolic reminders of anti-gay violence in my life. I do just fine — read: more or less constantly stressed the fuck out — with reality as it is.
The reading I took was that the general form involved threats of violence. Not necessarily the words “if any queers answer this ad, I’ll kick their ass” but yeah, some real danger.
Your essential claim turned out to be quite a bit different than you presented it. Had it been clear from the beginning, I would have just told you to fuck off and mind your own business.
Judging only by what you’ve said right here, that dude may very well have been straight. That’s pretty typical young straight guy behavior you’re describing.
Your point then was totally unremarkable, only tangentially topic, and uselessly anecdotal. A total waste of my time.
If you must, go lecture some other straight people with your insights. I didn’t need it.
Open bisexual tend not to be terribly intimidated by the fact that someone, particularly themselves, might think they are gay. They aren’t what I was talking about. I took you to be claiming that people trying to hide their homosexuality from themselves or other via an outward expression of homophobia is uncommon. Therefore, anecdotes of people doing exactly that would be relevant.
Granted, this isn’t as good a study, but one of those was provided upthread. You have questions about whether they adequately considered alternate hypotheses. This is valid, but I was trying to support the idea that their explanation was not unreasonable.
As to your alternative, are their any studies showing anxiety causes tumescence? I wouldn’t think performance anxiety would be an issue if that were the case. Or does anxiety make your penis do the opposite of whatever it is you want?
Bill Maher put it best: Santorum just hates sex!
QFT.
+ 1
+ 1
Yes, but only in opposite directions (or however you want to interpret opposite spin). That’s how quantum delocalization works. Pauli’s exclusion principle is not negotiable.
Well, Tropico isn’t that easy to play. Even if the country itself would survive, you might anger the Americans and/or the Soviets too much…
Heh.
Definitely not both, and I know of no evidence that would indicate he’s pedophilic.
There is evidence that Rick “Santorum” Santorum is a closeted homosexual. He has stated matter-of-factly, in public, that sex with his wife isn’t fun at all, and he shares Alan “Crazification Factor” Keyes’ opinion that if gay marriage were allowed*, all men would immediately stop fucking women and only fuck each other anymore, and we’d die out within a generation. The only explanation I can find is that he (like Keyes, who said gay sex is “like heroin”) is gay and hasn’t noticed, due to his sheltered life, that not everyone else is!
And then there are the people who say “we all have these urges, and Ted Haggard occasionally succumbs to them (because he’s important enough that Satan tempts him especially hard)”. I don’t know if Haggard himself has said that.
By no means am I (for one) disclaiming the existence of heterosexual homophobes. But as Rick “Santorum” Santorum is concerned, there’s evidence that he is gay.
Fred “Fred Phelps” Phelps has said similar clueless things, BTW. And when you ask him if he’s ever had sex with a man, he gets very angry but doesn’t answer the question.
* He may not know that it’s already allowed in several places. I don’t know precisely how stupid he is.
I had to add that link.
:-o What… the santorum.
Once you’re born, the Republicans stop caring about you.
You didn’t call it a fucking spade. You called it a kiddie-fucking spade.
I’m not disputing that he’s a piece of shit, but is there any evidence about which is the cause and which is the effect here? Did the porn make him like enormous boobs, or did he look at porn with enormous boobs because he happened to like enormous boobs?
See comment 197.
“I believe in” often means the same.
Huh. Looks like it’s common to have no idea.
I’m quite surprised at this claim, too, but the text quoted in claims 187 and 196 cites a study by Barlow et al. (1983). I suggest you go look for that in Google Scholar. (I’m too tired to do it myself, so I’ll just stop having an opinion on this subject.)
Well, he doesn’t like sex with women but feels he must do it anyway because apparently “go forth and multiply” still hasn’t been fulfilled, and he’s scared of sex with men as explained above…
@life is like a pitbull with lipstick ॐ
I don’t think I’ve consumed any video porn recently that wasn’t solo or women only. As a viewer I don’t really care whether condoms are used or not.
From a safety perspective there appear to be arguments both for and against condoms in porn. Arguments for their use seem obvious, but a number of porn performers (including Lorelei Lee and Kimberly Kane) have claimed that they’re unnecessary, or even (according to Nina Hartley) that they could increase health risks (due to the kind of sex required when filming hardcore porn).
I don’t claim to be an expert in the field. If condoms do make performers safer then I’d support their use, in the same way I support seat belts in cars, and hard hats on construction sites.
As much as I respect Nina Hartley, that is bullshit. Friction is minimized with lubrication, not by removing that layer of protective latex.
Your Small Government, Free Market Republican in action.
I’d say this is more of a “posing” than an “in action.”
Goddamn it! It’s 2012, why is anyone at all worried about porn? And who is supporting these utter nutjobs? Who can take this sort of crap seriously at all when there are clearly more pressing matters out there threatening to doom mankind? And who is this asshole to think he can legislate my morality or anyone else’s? What is wrong with the world when people can honestly and with a straight face claim that pornography is a genuine threat to anyone? It really seems like we should be past that.
I want to live on this planet less and less by the day. The people running our government are so detached from the rest of the world it’s sickening. This is not what anyone needs right now, but Santorum will get the puritan vote because a bunch of repressed fuckwits are embarrassed about their naughty bits, and by god the rest of us should be too.
Skipped all the comments, huh? Great.
@ 218. David Marjanović :
Oh for fuck’s sake! No, I’m not saying or meaning to imply that pedophilia is involved here. The terms ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ are being used colloquially here for male and female respectively which I thought was pretty flippin’ obvious from the context and given the saying. Yeah, in retrospect, maybe it was a dumb joke, a flippant one-liner thrown in to mock Santorum’s hypocrisy and general vileness when maybe I should’ve thought more first. I won’t be using that line again.
^ This exactly. Thanks for the new information there too which somehow doesn’t surprise me in the least. (I’d say Orson Scott Card is fairly obviously in that catgeory too FWIW.Many other examples exist.)
Look homophobia is a broad category with many different motivations for different homophobes. Some are religiously brain-washed, some are the “icky men /women kissing” variety some are just bullying idiots and, yes, some, a fair percentage even belong to closeted homosexual sub-set of the unpleasant irrational homophobia set.
Thus NOT every homophobe is a closeted gay but many are and denying this is, well, pointless and factually inaccurate. I don’t know why people would try to deny it.
No, I didn’t. Really. That you are drawing that false connotation from my actual words says more about you than it does me. Sigh.
There’s a difference between denying the possibility that some homophobic men might be closeted gay homophobic men and saying that people need to stop using that possibility as a verbal weapon against homophobes because it backfires on gay people.
well, it actually says something about your idiosyncratic understanding of the language you’re using, when you complain that the use of words for “juvenile human female” and “juvenile human male” shouldn’t be interpreted to mean you’re talking about not-adults
I forgot to say! This is from “A Birthday” by Esther M. Freisner. (I read it aloud on my birthday at a Story Hour at my house one year, because I’m extremely depressing.) I haven’t been able to find it in its entirety online, just in part in GoogleBooks, or I’d link to it.
and on that note: http://xkcd.com/1028/
@171. life is like a pitbull with lipstick ॐ says:
If you actually understood what I was saying and meaning there then why did you attack me for attacking Santorum as a hypocrite whose political career, I think, will likely be destroyed by some sort of sordid sex scandal? You wrongly mistook that as a homophobic comment when it wasn’t – so, no, quite evidently you did NOT understand it despite your claim otherwise.
I agree with the priority there. I disagree that that’s what I was doing although you clearly incorrectly believe that to be the case. Again, my attack on Santorum was NOT that over the probability that he is quite likely a closeted gay but rather over his hypocrisy and his homophobia – whatever motivates it.
No it isn’t. Its the sad reality of the world we live in and human nature. Usually here, we’re seeing religious people taking offence at what atheists say or homophobes taking offence at what non-heteronormatives say or MRA’s taking offence at what women say but other examples occur too.
Well I disagree completely with what you’ve said there but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
You haven’t seen some of the other threads here on censorship then I take it?
Freedom of speech and expression is something that I consider to be a key principle of our society and one of the things that makes us free and great. It really is immensely important and we devalue it – as you seemingly do – at our peril.
If you disagree with someone the best way to sort out that disagreement is with argument, rational discussion and maybe mockery and humour among other things. It isn’t to stop them having a say or preventing them from being heard – indeed drawing attention to the stupid things right-wing homophobes, misognists and creationist loons among others say is a big part of what this blog seems to be about to me.
Well it wasn’t bullshit and my apology to you was sincere and I’m saddened by your refusal to accept it. But that’s your perogative. I was trying to be nice to you but since you’ve responded only with disbelief and hostility in future maybe I should just refer you to the fainting couch and offer you some pearls to clutch instead?
@227. Jadehawk, cascadeuse féministe says:
Oh come on! Using ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ to colloquially apply to any men and women of almost any age is hardly idiosyncratically unique to me. Its pretty much what the words have evolved into and has been the case for a long time.
@226. Cassandra Caligaria (Cipher), OM says:
Okay but for pity’s sake we’re talking about one specific politician – the disgusting Rick Santorum – here NOT all closeted gays. Is that really so hard to grasp?
Still I’ve noted that point and won’t be using that line again because some people clearly have problems understanding what is meant by it.
1)they have not evolved out of their original meaning
2)their new meaning is specifically infantilizing, thus still based on their original meaning.
therefore, you’re still fucking wrong to complain that your use of these words resulted in the reaction it did. you fucked up at communicating, and that’s not other people’s fault.
your freedom of speech does not include the freedom to not be criticized, shamed or ostracized for speech that amounts to punching down the power-gradient.
What part of “we’re talking about a specific person” constitutes a response to “that rhetorical strategy backfires”?
Way to be a condescending asshole.
Well, capnxtreme, there’s me for one. Santorum’s position on porn is pure idiocy, but that doesn’t mean that porn is all good.
I’m “worried about porn” in much the same way as I’m worried about Hollywood, Disney princesses and the fashion industry and its magazine mates. It’s not neutral; it’s all about presenting unattainable ideals to make you unhappy and buy their shit as a fake panacea. Terrible for the self-esteem. It’s also a terrible, horrible substitute for sex education. (There’s an xkcd for everything – http://xkcd.com/744/ )
Ace of Sevens,
Stop right there, because you’re going on a new tangent off your old tangent. What responded to, the way you wrote it implied that any men who have sex with men are gay. It is helpful to not imply this.
What you’re talking about is irrelevant. I’m trying to be generous here, but doesn’t it give you a moment’s pause to realize that you’re trying to inform a gay man about matters he must surely be aware of? Doesn’t that make you wonder if maybe it’s you who’s confused?
Like this. Why doesn’t your impression here seem very, very odd to you, odd enough to make you question whether you really understand what’s being discussed?
Here’s a quote to help you: “Nobody ever said there wasn’t any such thing as a self-loathing, closeted same-sex-attracted homophobe. What’s at issue is their actual prevalence within the larger set of homophobes generally.”
And the Adams study, that’s what it was about, how many homophobic men might be same-sex attracted.
So here’s what I’ve been saying: very few homophobic men are same-sex attracted.
And here’s how you’ve been responding: a lot of same-sex attracted men are homophobic!
Both those statements are true; the set of homophobic men is many times larger than the set of same-sex attracted men.
So I just keep wondering why you’re going on about the latter statement, which was not anyone’s topic of discussion until you started. Besides the way that your one “example” indicates you’re overestimating homophobia among same-sex attracted men, your very premise is irrelevant to the rest of the discussion.
What started this discussion was the use of someone’s homophobia as an indicator of same-sex attraction. It’s a bad indicator because very few homophobic men are same-sex attracted. So if we consider a man, and we know that he’s homophobic, it’s still a matter of “horses, not zebras”; he’s probably straight. This should not have been construed as an opportunity to lecture a local zebra about other zebras.
No. I really don’t.
Adams et al wrote “Another explanation of these data [Adams et al’s own data] is found in Barlow, Sakheim, and Beck’s (1983) theory of the role of anxiety and attention in sexual responding. It is possible that viewing homosexual stimuli causes negative emotions such as anxiety in homophobic men but not in nonhomophobic men. Because anxiety has been shown to enhance arousal and erection, this theory would predict increases in erection in homophobic men. Furthermore, it would indicate that a response to homosexual stimuli is a function of the threat condition rather than sexual arousal per se. Whereas difficulties of objectively evaluating psychoanalytic hypotheses are well-documented, these approaches would predict that sexual arousal is an intrinsic response to homosexual stimuli, whereas Barlow’s (1986) theory would predict that sexual arousal to homosexual stimuli by homophobic individuals is a function of anxiety. These competing notions can and should be evaluated by future research. […] [T]he issue of whether homophobic individuals meet the definitional criteria for simple phobia should be investigated by determining whether these individuals experience anxiety or avoidance when confronted with homosexual cues.”
So the Adams team very clearly stated that Barlow’s theory would explain their findings. They didn’t think of ironic monitoring effects like Wegner mentions, but I don’t regard this as a serious failing of the Adams study. They did acknowledge that Barlow’s explanation was just as good as their own. And “whether these individuals experience anxiety or avoidance when confronted with homosexual cues” is exactly what Meier et al studied ten years later.
What I have a problem with are readers who take the Adams study to be more definitive than it is now or even was at the time, more definitive even than the Adams team did.
A waste of time, then, since no one here claimed that their explanation of their own data at the time was unreasonable.
For fuck’s sake, YES! Already cited four times in this thread, where it was noted that Adams had already acknowledged this explanation from the beginning.
“Indeed, Adams et al. (1996) admitted that their data could be interpreted in terms of non-psychodynamic forms of anxiety, which can cause penile tumescence (Barlow, Sakheim, & Beck, 1983). […] In the present context, penile tumescence can sometimes be a result of sexual attraction and sometimes be a result of phobic anxiety (Barlow et al., 1983). […] Quite simply, we would argue that these homophobics were experiencing high states of anxiety, which can, paradoxically, increase penile tumescence (Barlow et al., 1983).”
That’s ”Anxiety increases sexual arousal”; Barlow, Sakheim, and Beck; doi 10.1037/0021-843X.92.1.49
See also ”A Review of Anxiety and Sexual Arousal in Human Sexual Dysfunction”; Seto; doi 10.1177/107906329200500102
My patience, you have exhausted it.
“Performance anxiety” is probably an ironic monitoring effect.
No, it’s not that simple. See the Seto review for an overview of the usual data.
Second sentence should be:
What I responded to, the way you wrote it …
#234
I understand what you’re getting at, but Santorum’s position here clearly isn’t to “clean up” pornography, it’s to eliminate it altogether, to legislate your morality. What I’m saying is surely there are more pressing matters for presidential candidates to concern themselves with. Hunger, strife, failing economy, so on and so forth.
If you want to fight the good fight against pornography, and I’m not saying this is entirely without merit, then more power to you. But why is this even remotely considered a presidential duty? Why should any facet of the federal government be allowed to define what is obscene? This is a parental duty, nobody else’s. Don’t want your kids to be exposed to that shit? Do something about it yourself. Form an organization, make public service announcements, whatever! But for fuck’s sake don’t wait for the government to step in and do it!
I wasn’t informing you about how gay people behaved. I was informing you about the scope of my comments. That is something you apparently didn’t understand.
This last post clarified where you’re coming from. I think we understand each other now. Here’s my problem.
Is it? I understand that if penile tumescence data and self-ID are neither one good measures of same-sex attraction, you’re kind of stuck as to how to actually measure it, but I don’t think this in evidence. The size of the set of homophobes is a bit easier to determine, but still depends on where we draw the threshold. I don’t think SteveOr was claiming all homophobes are likely to be gay, just that the most extreme ones are.
I, however, never claimed this. If you aren’t disputing there are a lot of virulent homophobes who are sectly same-sex attracted, just that there are a lot more who aren’t, I don’t have any way of assessing whether you are correct unless someone figured out data collection problems and did a study I don’t know about.
bah.
The question of whether homophobes are more likely to be closet gays is independent of the question of whether it’s ok to mock to homophobes by implying that they are secretly gay.
Using homosexuality to degrade someone perpetuates the idea that homosexuality is degrading, regardless of whether that person is a closet homosexual or not. This is a necessary result of the fact that many people hear the insults; it is not just a message for the target, it is a message for everyone who reads the blog (and arguable the target does not). (Exercise for the reader: Explain the parallels with “intent is not magic”.)
At its essence it is the preservation of a special reserve in which the historical “U R GAY” meme is allowed to roam, looking for prey.
This is untrue, but it’s some small credit to you that you have retconned your memory as such.
This is bullshit, and you will be unable to provide a quote from me that suggests this regarding the scope of your comments. The only “misunderstanding” on my part was to believe that you actually meant violence when you said violence.
What you still give no acknowledgement of understanding is that when others were talking about how many homophobic men are same-sex attracted, it is not very informative to just start talking about how many same-sex attracted men are homophobic, even if you had any relatively unbiased data on the latter ratio, which you didn’t.
Yes, it’s pretty obvious if you stop to think about it.
Everyone is taught homophobia and learns it to some degree. By far, most men are straight. Thus absent some evidence that same-sex attracted men are vastly superior at learning homophobia, most homophobes will be straight.
Adams et al noted: “with the scale used in the present study, we found it difficult to find heterosexual men who scored in the high-grade nonhomophobic range (0-25).”
They don’t say exactly how many of their 29 ‘nonhomophobic’ men were high-grade, but they had to lump them in with the more numerous low-grade because there just weren’t enough of the high-grade to get reliable statistics from.
They go on: “Similarly, Hudson and Ricketts (1980) found that 56% of their sample scored in the homophobic range (i.e., > 51 ).”
Those are generous labels. To say that someone is not homophobic, just because they scored slightly less than half as homophobic as the scale measures, is damning with faint praise by Pharyngula standards.
Whatever though, you realize that nowhere near 56% of men are same-sex attracted.
Fron prominent, well-remembered examples, the definition of selection bias.
After I had to spoonfeed you the Barlow study, I’m not sure you really have any way of assessing anything.
I claimed that homophobic ads are not uncommon on m4m causal encounters on Craigslist. You disputed this. We went back and forth before realizing there was a gap between how I intended the statement and how you interpreted it. You claimed people making these posts weren’t necessarily gay. They could be bi. I said open bisexuals tend not to be homophobic, so this didn’t actually explain homophobia.
I think the issue is you are saying I implied that men who have sex with men are all gay. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that. My point was that people who are opposed to gay identities are homophobes. (Barring the vanishingly small number who think that anyone who isn’t pansexual is sexist.) Theoretically, homophobes also oppose gay sex. Therefore, when people seek gay sex while claiming to be straight and disparaging gay identities, something funny is going on.
Unless you are claiming that men who seek sex from straight men only are generally not motivated by homophobia, we don’t disagree here.
How does Barlow answer my question? It says tumescence can be caused by anxiety, not arousal per se. That tells us why trying to measure attraction by tumescence ala Adams doesn’t work. It doesn’t tell us how we can measure attraction without major confounders. As for the numbers, the Adams study wasn’t meant to have a representative sample of the population, only compare demographically-similar homophobic and non-homophobic groups. It’s also kind of old and trends like gay marriage support suggest homophobia prevalence is dropping, I don’t think it can be used to estimate overall levels of homophobia now.
Even so, let’s say everyone who doesn’t support gay marriage is a raging homophobe. That makes for about 48% homophobes last I checked. Is there any reason to think that 20% of men aren’t self-hating closet cases? That would make just under half of homophobic men secretly attracted to men. The general public seems to find these numbers plausible. A Gallup poll last year showed that Americans estimate about a quarter of the population is gay, which is about 20% over the self-IDed number. Granted, there are lots of possible explanations for this number, many of which don’t involve them being correct. My point is I don’t think it’s obvious that men attracted to men are a particularly small group and you haven’t provided any evidence for this, only supposition which I think is questionable.
What I’m saying is that you can’t conclude there are way more male homophobes than men attracted to men without at least rough bounds for each group. Homophobia is easy enough, but attraction is not. We can set a lower bound a hair over 4% based on people who are out, but absent some semi-reliable way to determine what straight IDed guys have an attraction they won’t admit to, I don’t see any way to set an upper bound.
Actually, thought about it a bit more and I think it is possible to control for the anxiety problem that likely caused false positives in Adams: Include material that everyone would know they aren’t supposed to find arousing. A duck humping roadkill duck or that chimp that killed that frog, then masturbated with it would be good examples. (I am assuming necrobestiality without human involvement is a rare fetish.) Use the positives from here to determine how many of the positives from the porn were false. Of course, this would require another study, but I think it is possible to measure actual levels of arousal in principle.
Dear PZ Myers,
Please don’t drag smut down to Santorums level.
Yours, The Internet.
oy. no, he disputed that violence was “not uncommon” in such situations, whether implicit or, as your comment, explicit (if you defend this as hyperbole, that would still leave the impression that implicit threats of violence are “not uncommon”, so that defense still won’t work)
again, no. he simply corrected a statement that you made which implied that men who like gay sex are always gay. his correction had fuck-all to do with the discussion of m4m ads, it was a tangent.
which may be true (i wouldn’t know), but isn’t actually what you said, even if it is what you meant to say. this version lacks the threat of violence that the original pretty blatantly displayed.
My assertion is that all blatant homophobia is an implicit threat of violence. Do you disagree? This is the subtext of some public service campaigns, like the one from a couple years trying to get kids to quit calling things “gay” and analogous to saying blatant misogyny supports rape culture.
@238. Ace of Sevens :
Actually i didn’t even go that far. I just said that *some* homophobes are secretly closeted homosexuals and noted a couple of prominent examples.
I think – as do others – see comment #218 David Marjanović – that it is very likely Rick santorum himself is one of those individuals.
I have no issue with those whoare still in the closet. That’s none of my or anybodies business but theirs and their partners and sometimes close families. Who am I or anyone esle to tell individuals how to live their sex lives & lives generally?
What I do however object to and think needs pointing out is Santorum’s hypocrisy – presuming as seems likely that he *is* one of those individauls.
PS. My username here is StevoR without the second ‘e’ and with a capital ‘R’ not ‘o’, ‘kthx?
PPS. Curious co-incidence that I’ve also just seen this comment :
http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2012/03/18/judge-roy-moore-rides-again/#comment-80516
today elsewhere in the FTB-verse explaining where that “proverb” I got in trouble for using thoughlessly earlier arose from. A governship election in Louisiana between known crook Edwin Edwards, vs KKK Grand Wizard David Duke apparently.
you’re not having an argument with me, your having one with strange gods; i’m just pointing out where you’re misrepresenting his comments to you.
and as far as i can tell, he doesn’t seem to think so, at least in the sense that it’s not going to result in a guy responding to this getting beat up. which is what your comment said.
I didn’t actually say that. If you took me as implying that, I apologize. I only meant that homophobia is common in the m4m ads and homophobia fuels a lot of violence. I was also thinking of cases like this. Read the comments, too. A lot of people certainly perceive a threat of violence.
To answer any objections, I am not claiming such attacks are common, just explaining why i hyperbolized the way I did. There’s a threat of violence from homophobes, a threat of violence from Craigslist hook-ups (see also John Katehis and Philip Markoff). I don’t think it’s a stretch to see a homophobe looking for anonymous gay sex on Craigslist and make a rhetorical connection.
“Rick Santorum has promised to initiate a war on porn if elected.”
He should thank his good and fluffy lord that he won’t be elected, then. That would be the fastest presidential assassination in history.