The NSFW problem

Roger Ebert has a thoughtful post on the problem of not-safe-for-work images. It’s a real problem, and it’s a curious example of self-imposed censorship built on an artificial fear. I don’t care who you are, you’ve all seen pornography, you’ve all heard profanity, yet somehow, if even a tasteful nude or an obscenity neatly typed in a small font face appears in a web post, people freak out: I could have viewed that in my workplace! My eyes aren’t allowed to see a breast or a penis between the hours of 9 to 5!

There’s good reason for that, of course, and Ebert discusses some of it.

I haven’t worked in an office for awhile. Is there a danger of porn surfing in the workplace? Somehow I doubt it. There is a greater danger, perhaps, of singling out workers for punishment based on the zeal of the enforcers. And of course there is always this: Supervisors of employee web use, like all employees, must be seen performing their jobs in order to keep them.

There is also this: Perfectly reasonable people, well-adjusted in every respect, might justifiably object to an erotic photograph on the computer monitor of a coworker. A degree of aggression might be sensed. It violates the decorum of the workplace. (So does online gaming, but never mind.) You have the right to look at anything on your computer that can be legally looked at, but give me a break! I don’t want to know! I also understand that the threat of discipline or dismissal is real and frightening.

I’ve made it through two years on the blog with only this single NSFW incident. In the future I will avoid NSFW content in general, and label it when appropriate. What a long way around I’ve taken to say I apologize.

I think he misses a couple, though.

One is the one-sided nature of most erotic images that makes a workplace situation more difficult for those who are already struggling: women. Ebert himself does this, since his examples are all of lovely naked women. Why not naked men? Ebert is a male, he clearly enjoys the female form, but if he’d used examples of erotic male nudes, there’d be a little more distancing from the subject, a little more objectivity. I like looking at naked women, it tingles my hypothalamus in interesting ways; I don’t object to pictures of naked men, but I’m afraid there is no thrill here, not even a sense of forbidden, hidden fear. It’s easier for a male to dismiss images of women as simply beautiful and non-threatening, because he isn’t likely to be the target of objectification and lust, which actually are inappropriate in a working environment where women want to be treated as equals.

Avoiding even the appearance of discrimination is reason enough to avoid these loaded images, but there’s also a more universal reason that we have this problem, and it’s unfortunate. It’s the tyranny of the ideal, and it also is on display in Ebert’s post.

Whenever we talk about sexualized images and their virtues as simply representations of beauty, we always trot out examples from art of nubile young men and women in the prime of health, typically slender and unwrinkled and unburdened with any trace of experience. This is what we are supposed to look like, is the message, beauty is in this smoothness, these unmarred curves, this hidden youthful suppleness exposed. What we will regard as beauty in our bodies is such a narrow band of reality that it means that very few of us actually have a positive self-image, and not only every porn image, but every ad on billboards and television, reinforces that message that you aren’t worthy.

And of course it’s made worse for women, because the standard image of women is that ideal of young and fertile and lubricious. Are you pretty enough to be on a billboard? If not, there’s something wrong with you. Even as a man I can feel this, since no one is going to mistake me for a 20 year old Adonis, but at least I’m mostly spared the optic cacophony constantly reminding me that my body is homely and sub-standard.

But it’s not, not really. Everyone has bodies that serve them well, that carry them through life and give them pleasure and work hard, but somehow we’ve fallen into the trap of idealizing such a specific set of features that we spend most of our lives lacking the proper appreciation of them, in part due to the way the advertising and pornography industries work to promote a standard and punish anything outside that standard with neglect. This is another reason to avoid “NSFW” images — not because they’re unsafe for our eyes, an absurd concept already, but because we need to rebel against the homogenization of beauty.

Here’s a counter-example. When we talk about erotic images of bodies, we all know exactly what we’re talking about, and it isn’t my body or even the bodies of most of the readers of this article. If I posted an image of my kind of body (or, probably, your kind of body) it would be as an object of derision, something that people would mock because it’s not perfect enough, not pretty enough, or just plain ugly. I know; I posted one photo of my breast on facebook*, and got a flood of email that can be summarized as “ooh, yuck”.

Why can’t we treat bodies like we do hands? Look at this; this is not a youthful hand, it’s not an unlined hand, it’s not a smooth and perfect hand…but it’s beautiful.

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We can look at a baby’s hand, a young woman’s hand, or a gnarled old man’s hand and see loveliness and function everywhere, and respect the evidence of lives lived well. We’ve been acculturated by the tyranny of a narrow ideal to only be able to approve of bodies that fall into a tiny category that we can call ‘fuckable’. Outside of the art world, you simply don’t find images of bodies that are not airbrushed and photoshopped and selected for that kind of exclusively sexualized purpose.

It’s very easy to make a case for tolerance of images of beautiful people in a state of undress. I’ll believe we’re ready to be liberal about the use of what we call NSFW imagery when the case can be made for the beauty of a naked old man without a volley of derision and expressions of disgust and disappointment because they’re not a slim naked young woman.

*There was a good reason: it was to protest facebook’s policy of censoring photos of women breastfeeding their babies. While it’s embarrassing to be mocked for the fact that I don’t have a sculpted, youthful figure, it was worth it to point out the hypocrisy of a ridiculous policy. Consider it another act of sacrilege, and that I did a fabulous job of defiling most people’s ideal of what a breast should look like.

There will be blood on this day

Two salient facts:

  • We no longer have any cats. The kids all moved out, and to our shock and surprise, they took their pets with them. I guess we raised them responsibly after all.

  • Temperatures here in the soon-to-be great white north have dropped into the freezing range lately, and are likely to stay there. And lower.

Any of you who have lived in this part of the country knows what happens next: the wildlife all tries to move indoors, and without large roving carnivores about, the rodents have been having a carnival. They’ve been banging the pots all night and frolicking on the countertops, and that means I have to act.

It is Halloween, and there shall be a reaping. I’ve got a pile of traps to set up, the swift savage ones that smash skulls and necks (most emphatically not the cruel slow glue traps), and I’m anticipating a ghoulish evening of hearing snap-snap-snap all night long, and cleaning up bodies in between handing out candy at the door. Let’s all hope I don’t get my jobs of dispensing things into buckets mixed up.

NO RELATION!

Kevin Myers is some wackalooney Irish commentator who, as far as I know and as fervently as I hope, is no recent relation to this Myers — the only thing I can commend him on is that he manages to spell his last name correctly. Oh, we do have one other thing in common: we’re both atheists. He’s an idiot atheist, though, so I wash my hands of him. He recently made this admission while also acknowledging his flaming hypocrisy.

Now what follows is quite hypocritical. For, on the one hand, I simply don’t believe in God, because I am intellectually unable to; but on the other, I prefer a society which generally respects and reveres a god, and the organised system of pieties and rules that a god-based religion generates. The alternative seems to be a secular-dementia that makes godlike figures of such as Rooney [some football star I know nothing about –pzm]. I would have once said that there was little worse than the vulgar basilica at Knock, and the debased and semi-hysterical cult surrounding it — but surely, it doesn’t compare in sheer bloody awfulness with the frenzied adoration generated by soccer or television celebrity-worship.

How condescending. He’s too smart to be anything but an atheist; but all the little people out there, the dull dumb mob, why…they need religion so that they’ll obediently maintain his life in the style to which he is accustomed. There are plenty of idiot atheists like that, and they’re usually conservative/libertarian assholes. Personally, I would rather not live in a society of pious rules-followers; I want everyone’s intelligence respected and nurtured and encouraged to flower. My ideal society is one that is getting better and discovering new ideas and bringing everyone along, not just some smug elite that thinks they’re better than everyone else.

The credulousness that has caused people to turn to a god is so universal that it must be in our DNA. In other words, it is an evolved characteristic, which has proved beneficial to those who have possessed it. Groups of primitive man who didn’t believe in a god simply perished. Clearly, possessing this belief — presumably because it helped to create a moral order — conferred a decisive survival-advantage which non-believing groups fatally lacked.

So, mankind will always need its gods: that’s in our genes.

But wait, Kevin…are you not human? Did you fail to inherit this precious strand of DNA? Do you consider yourself unfit, doomed to die as a detriment to society?

There is no evidence that humans without god-belief died because of it. There is no evidence that atheism is genetically determined. There is no reason to believe that those of us who do not hold in faith are somehow biologically special — I certainly don’t regard myself as unusual, and consider my youthful departure from religion to be a consequence of early experience and education in science. I also don’t look at believers and figure they’re all crippled from birth.

It’s simply idiotic to declare that humanity will always believe in gods because of a genetic predisposition while noting that some of us don’t believe and also feel no stress or loss because of our disbelief — apparently it’s not in our genes.

Mr Myers (oh, how it pains me to use that name in this context!) has another peculiarity: he’s a self-loathing atheist who also thinks, along with the Pope and a host of other deluded souls, that secularism has been the great evil of the 20th century.

And no one ever suggested that gods were always good: look at the Aztecs, feeding their children to their ferocious deity: the Ashanti much the same. And in our post-religious culture, we have seen, in all their splendour, the celebrities whom people worship in the absence of a creator-god in their firmament: Madonna, or Lindsay Lohan, or Piers Morgan, or Simon Cowell — or even Wayne Rooney.

And they’re the good ones, before we come to the great secular gods of the 20th century: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot. They all triumphed in political cultures of obligatory godlessness. Remember — there have, in fact, been few societies which made godlessness mandatory: and without exception, they soon degenerated into orgies of murder. And maybe that’s what happened to the early hominids: those who didn’t have a god, in other words, those who didn’t fear consequence, rapidly disappeared in a welter of homicidal bloodshed.

Repeat after me: Hitler was not an atheist. He was a crazy Catholic. None of these people, horrible as they were, killed in the name of secularism or atheism, but in the name of specific ideologies…and they also tended to set up cults of personality. I know nothing about this Wayne Rooney with whom Mr Myers is obsessed, but I don’t think he’s a major figure in 21st century atheism, and for all I know he’s a devout Presbyterian; it doesn’t seem to matter to Kevin Myers. Madonna is a weird New Agey kabbalist and former Catholic…again, not an atheist. I don’t know what Lindsay Lohan’s religious beliefs are, but I doubt that all of her fans (does she have any any more?), or even a majority of her fans, are unchurched.

Maybe he should look a little deeper into his own assertions. He claims that societies that have made “godlessness mandatory” have collapsed. It could be that it isn’t the “godlessness” part that has been destructive, but the “mandatory” part, and that tyrannies that try to dictate the beliefs of citizens, no matter what those beliefs are, are going to fall apart in internal strife.

Not that I expect Kevin Myers to ever think that deeply about his own ideas. He seems to be content with his hypocrisy and self-contradiction.

Hey, if atheist views are so likely to disintegrate healthy social values, shouldn’t he be quarantining himself, and voluntarily hiding his unfit self so that he can continue to reap the benefits of a godly society?

Why do you think I call it a death cult?

Ray Comfort is great at demeaning the whole of Christianity by doing all the stuff you imagine that not even a Christian would stoop to doing. His latest: targeting the elderly with cards to remind them of their mortality and imminent need of salvation.

The card, published by livingwatersnewzealand.com, was addressed to her by name and asked her to fill in the date and time of her death.

“Please don’t forget to call me on the date you’re going to die, then we can discuss your eternity,” it says. However, the cards do not have a contact name or phone number printed on them.

“Hey, lady, you’re old and are going to die soon. Come to church now! Put us in your will!”

Living Waters is also the organization that sponsors these morbid booths at our county fair where kids are asked to take a test to determine whether they’re going to heaven or hell. The answer is always hell…so they’d better follow Living Waters orders!

Whenever I hear apologists tell me that religion brings solace to the sick and old and despairing, I always think of Living Waters and their mission of making sure everyone is dreading their demise.