You’re Gonna Have To Face It, You’re Addicted to Porn
Monday night at Golapagos I spoke about erototoxins, and other silly and sad ideas that some people *cough*Mike*Nichols*cough* have about what does or doesn’t happen when you make or look at a picture of a cock going into a pussy (or mouth or asshole, we’re not picky here). Well I guess we’ve caught the zeit geist(sp?) or it’s the phases of the moon or something.
Always eager to find a way to run “an important story about pornography” the AP and reporter David Crary have put their (dubious) crediblity behind the silly idea that porn is addictive. Nevermind that there is no scientific evidence for this, The AP knows porn=readership so lets run with it! Wheee!
But you know what’s even funnier than the addiction/erototoxin thing? Dig this:
“[40 year anti-porn activist] John Harmer is part of a cadre of anti-porn activists seeking new tactics to fight an unprecedented deluge of porn which they see as wrecking countless marriages and warping human sexuality. They are urging federal prosecutors to pursue more obscenity cases and raising funds for high-tech brain research that they hope will fuel lawsuits against porn magnates.”
Porn magnates? Are you fucking kidding me? There are no deep pockets in porn.
David Crary, if you can find me 50 people who make more than $1,000,000/year from porn I will blow you. (For comparison’s sake, each cast member of Friends got $1,000,000/episode for four seasons. Do the math.)
You can’t? What a surprise.
Consolation prize: Find me 50 people who work in porn with a networth of more than $10,000,000 and I’ll give you a handjob. Porn magnates. Give me a fucking break.
Of course that won’t stop Mr. Hammer from “raising funds”, or stop Crary from writing about it.
You know who’s addicted to porn?
The AP is addicted to porn. John Harmer is addicted to porn. David Crary is addicted to porn. They’re addicted to the money and attention and titilation they get by talking about porn, “researching” porn, “documenting” porn, and otherwise flitting around the edges and then wringing their hands over the growing porn crisis. They’re addicted the sloppy, slip-shot, or down right deceptive things that “tackling the important issue of porn” allows them. (Anyone notice this sounds an awful lot like what most pornographers like about working in porn?)
These people don’t want porn to go away. If it did, they’d have to report on real news. They’d have to find a new way to get themselves on the TeeVee. If it did they’d have to get a real job, or at least find a new scam to get people to send them their money.
April 7th, 2006 at 6:59 am
I love this kind of conservative ideology dressed up in the Land’s End khaki of social concern (”love” as in “am apalled by”).
A few times in my teaching career, I’ve given essay assignments that require students to explore various positions on ideas such as violent music causes violence. They go out, they do their happy research, they compile article on article that supports the relationship between, usually, hard-core rap and increased violence in children.
And then I bring in a copy of Eminem’s “97 Bonnie and Clyde” and we listen to it. We analyze the lyrics and we talk about how often it has come up in their research, which, it turns out, is quite often. Then I bring out the Billboard charts for the song’s CD and we talk about the numbers of people who bought the album and what we would expect, given the relationships that all these journalists have stated, to happen in terms of rates of American violence.
And…there’s a whole no connection. Which then leads into why journalists and others would seem so committed to saying that this kind of music–or video games or porn or whatever–is bad for society.
People are so easily threatened. And I wouldn’t care except for the fact that their fear makes them idiots.
April 7th, 2006 at 7:02 am
Sorry, the first sentence in the penultimate paragraph should read “And…there’s a whole lot of no connection.” See what happens when I don’t proofread?
I should be spanked. With a Strunk & White. Vigorously. And perhaps on film.
April 7th, 2006 at 7:46 am
—People are so easily threatened. And I wouldn’t care except for the fact that their fear makes them idiots.—
If it were fear, I’d have more sympathy. I get scared sometimes, and I’m when scared I’m not entirely rational. And I see plenty of things in porn that scare me.
But as usual it’s not fear, it’s that lovely two-some that seem to follow naked ladies around like hungry dogs: greed and laziness.
Harmer is a lawyer, who at 71 thinks he’s going to hit it big importing Chinese cars into the US (The cars still can’t meet emission standards). But thanks to his “anti-porn crusade” going out all accross the AP wire, he’s now a “Utah-based auto exective”. Makes it sound like he heads a GM division in the beehive state, doesn’t it?
But he’s not. He’s just a hustler looking to cash in on the cheap labor and lack of environmental protections in China.
Hammer is no different from pornographers who tack PhD on the end of their names, and Crary is no different from a dozen other journalists who “report” on this stuff without doing even a simple hour of Google research that would show that Harmer’s never made a nickle selling cars, and that those “doctorates” are available to anyone with a $5,000 line of credit on their Visa card.
Of course the stories lose their punch when you take out “auto executive” or “Ph.D” out of them, so there’s precious little inscentive for Crary to spend the 30 minutes it took me, someone with zero background in investigation, to find these things out. That’s how thing like “porn is a 12, 15, 52 billion dollar a year business” get in print and stay in print.
A little more googling and we see that Hammer and our old friend Ed Messe have cooked up a little 501(c)(3) chicanery at http://www.lightedcandlesociety.org/leadership.html
Call me cynical, but this doesn’t look like convictions, this looks like a chance to cozy up to an administration whose favorite whipping boy is porn, and whose favorite
totalitarian regimetrading partner is China.I doubt Ed needs the money, but I bet all this erototoxin nonsense has him thinking this is another chance for him to hear his name on the nightly news.
Make that three dogs: greedy, laziness, and self-aggrandizement.
April 7th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
I just had this sent to me via a stop censorship newslink - in response to the AP article - you may like it –http://www.stats.org/record.jsp?type=news&ID=560
January 4th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
[...] So why do the New York Times, and PBS, and the AP keep reporting this nonsense? For the same reason people make porn; because it’s fun to go slumming, because it’s titilating to take an “unbiased” look at the “adult industry” because putting something “trashy” in the business section spices it up a little. And mostly, because no one’s checking the facts. [...]
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:57 am
[...] Aparently that’s news enough for the New York Times to run yet another late to the party, disinformed and disinforming story about porn. Again I’m left wondering just what sort of porn the article’s author has been watching that this is news. Again I’m left with the suspicion that this in more of the mainstream media freebasing porn with precious little interest in the real story, or even the basic facts. [...]