Reviews by Hubie Goode: Sex, Lies and Indifference

Sex, Lies and Indifference


part 2

It is not just a matter of love that is marketed in the form of moneymaking properties. Lust is also marketed. It begins with our kids. They are marketed sex all the time now. There is little one can do besides going away to live on a mountain if you want to have any modicum of control over the way sex is perceived and ultimately experienced by the young. TV Stations can schedule more adult fair at a later time all they want to, but now even commercials have sexual innuendo and flat out sexual suggestion that would have made the innocent blush only 40 years ago. 

I can’t imagine the pressures young 12 year old kids go through today as they begin to experience the changes that come with puberty, only to be told that they are not part of the “in crowd “ if they don’t have some sort of sexual activity going on in their lives. Boys feel this pressure as well as girls, and they have only a rudimentary knowledge of the biology involved. Unfortunately for kids, the schools are only allowed to be concerned about mechanics and not character, and parents must provide the moral support, or the kids get none of that. What happens is that they are given a  loaded gun, told how to use it, then the parents must lay down the whys and why nots of usage. Some parents do, some don’t, and they usually disagree. This is why we have such confusion in our schools over these kinds of subjects, there is no standard. “Everyone does what is right in their own eyes.”

Sooner or later, the mind trip of lust that pornography brings to the table rears it’s ugly head in a young person’s life. It has been sold to them from a young age, in movies, TV shows, comedies and also on cable TV as something that sex only marginally resembles in real life. But, the porn industry has to make money, so it does much of the same things big tobacco is accused of; it was forced to take away Joe Cool, the smoking camel. TV is ripe with the lothario character, mostly male, but now and then a few female in its representation. In the 50’s you looked cool with a cigarette in your mouth, as James Dean and Bogart made famous. Now, the guy who beds many women consistently is the cool, untouchable character in much media these days. And it’s all a lie.

Those funny friends you see every week on TV shows are selling a type of invulnerability that is a complete deception. In real life, all these people would be sick and diseased, and their friends  would NOT be closely holding to them. In fact, most of these characters are also boorish louts, and yet their buddy club continues. Another lie. Obnoxious behavior results in isolation, not the caring, patient resiliency seen in the secondary characters to the lothario, or lout characterization.

But, that’s selling for you. Porn itself has in the recent times gotten to a point of desperation in that it often reflects its own short comings, namely: the law of diminishing return. And it certainly must be diminishing, for pornography has gotten weirder and stranger and has warped  the nations men in ways we could have little suspected in former years.

Once there was a time when porn was the sole bastion of back rooms behind the magazine stand, where patrons stood with other heavily cloaked men who all wore hats and glasses, some as a disguise, and you leaned into a book or magazine as a way to protect the secret addiction you served.  Magazines like Playboy moved some of this out into the mainstream with romanticized, soft focus  photography of young women in relative stages of undress. Outrageous as this was at one time, this is now considered soft core and a sort of “tea toataler’s” pornography. Of course, Playboy adopts the existentialist’s practice of debating  definitions as to what porn is and what it is not, but it’s funny how most people DO know what porn is when they see it.

Porn today increasingly resembles something out of Dante’s Inferno. Boys have been sold on it since they were young, and the need for the bigger and better sexual high that it brings has transformed porn into something violent and barbarian. Porn is now about punishing women. It is also about all sorts of other nasty anti-social ideas that are supposed to be erotic in design. As an example, there is a lot of “rape” porn now, more so than used to be marketable. Yet I sincerely doubt that any woman who has actually been raped will tell you that it was a hot time in the old town tonight. They didn’t secretly want it, and it didn’t awaken the true woman within. What it did was bring deep grief and emotional destruction to her life, and if you have seen a real victim of rape, there is very little that is sexy and erotic about their state. But the sale of the fantasy is still out there.

We’ve been told to love our neighbor as ourself, as a way to live life. Porn today is about making hate. It is about selling you on using sexual energy to create fear, disgust, anger, loathing and contempt. It is ultimately about a show of power. The man’s power over a woman in much the same way one would imagine happens in the most ruthless political regimes around the world. In those places a woman can be easily used in much the same way as toilet paper, and this concept is being sold to our young people as erotic.

The global industry of porn has been built on a house of lies to be worth approximately $96 million world wide. No thanks to the internet, there are now over 4.2 million porn websites, all accessible right in your home for the right price. No need to go hide out on the corner, or even buy a Playboy, porn can be gotten, in all it’s myriad forms, of which it really is only about one thing, right on the home computer. 

Have you ever thought about who gets supported by the money spent on porn? Movies and TV make it seem harmless and fun to an up an coming generation, in fact, it’s like an old funny friend, right Charlie Sheen? The porn industry can lobby politicians, buy expensive lawyers, and use public relations  to influence public debate and social opinion. Do you think that the folks involved in pornography are socially responsible people who never gamble, pay off the law or get special treatment in the courts?  Do you think they live in white picket fence surrounded housing in middle America with mom’s apple pie cooling in the window? Pornographers would like you to believe so.

Porn is a lot like big tobacco, in that it can employ an incredible marketing machine on the fringes that leads the unsuspecting into the woods and over the cliff, like the Pied Piper of Hamlin.  We now have a generation that has grown up with internet porn, this has been a major part of their sexual education. Studies show that the first viewing age of porn is now around 11 years old.  If you were to even suggest that men two generations ago were in their mid thirties before they developed any kind of fixation that even resembles what porn sells to the young audience of today, you would be laughed at. 

The brainwashing has worked. Many men generally believe that porn sex is what a woman wants. And it can be upsetting to find that the woman you are with has no desire to respond like a porn star.  This is not seen as a right of choice, but as a flat out rejection. Without the slapping and spanking and nasty name calling, real sex with women can come across as boring. But that’s what selling does. 

Young guys don’t know it, but the actors they have seen are not only altered, but they are also disfigured. I spoke with someone not long ago who works in the industry (remember, I live in the San Fernando Valley) and he told me that a common operation is not so much penis enlargement, but the snipping of major tendons that hold the penis in place by being attached to the pelvic bone. Without this tendon, the penis swings forward and free out of the body cavity. Quite the price to pay for that kind of pay check. It also is quite the litmus for a young, unknowing male to live up to. It can be disorienting and anger producing to find that the actual act, unaffected by viagra, or “fluffers” or multiple camera takes can be over with in 8 minutes instead of the 2 hours porn movie running time. More lies. 

Having to imagine porn scenes instead of a healthy response to a loving woman can be torturous to a male, and this works the same for both sexes of course. When you are not really there, the sex is usually what the porn industry wants it to be for you, a drug for the next high. Where is the love, people? Why do we believe the lie? You know a nude statue in the park is not porn. You know what porn is when you see it. Existentialist equivocation on the issue is a poor alternative.

Here are some claims about pornography to consider:

1) Women are coerced into pornography.

Usually, the women involved in the filming of porn are there for the money and they are usually sex addicted, though they probably won’t admit that. They are definitely not socially responsible, that is for sure, for they put no value on the effects that their actions may have on their audience. If a person is driven to sex acts by porn and then catches a STD that ultimately kills them, well it’s no responsibility of theirs. But that is not loving your neighbor. 

Any woman forced into porn or porn acts is a victim of a crime. This could be anything from kidnapping to assault and rape. It is a crime, nothing less. It gets even worse when you consider the reality of young women being coerced into human trafficking.

2) Woman can’t give real consent.

Again, the notion that there is a secret female life that a woman just doesn’t realize is the basis of this statement. Another lie. Whether we are "psychologically damaged" or not, (an this requires special analysis) as long a person can make their own independent decisions, they are responsible for their own actions. If there is a movie producer who is filming women who obviously are so damaged as to not be aware of their  place in a planned film, then litigation of a major type needs to be levied.

3) Capitalism forces women into porn.

Force is one thing, but sales is quite another. The allure and seeming lack of consequences of porn is no doubt responsible for much of the work done in porn today as it is for the customers who buy it. True, poverty makes criminals and prostitutes, but there are many poor people who never go that way, and that choice is to their credit, not just an alternative. Don’t be deceived, porn actresses and actors are prostitutes. Plain and simple. You pay for porn, you pay for a prostitute, you support the lifestyle and the industry. Yes, a value judgement on my part, but you’ll get nothing else here. I am not in the business of cow-towing to those who would paint a pretty frame on the picture of immorality.

4) Pornography leads to violence against women.

At one time it might have been less of an argument, as society had certain norms that held this sort of thing in check at one time. Those norms have been slowly eroded away, and porn is part of the process itself.

Let’s talk for a moment about another aspect that has crept into the mainstream of porn. Interracial sex. There’s a scene in a Seinfeld episode where Jerry and Elaine are debating the attractiveness of an Asian woman. Jerry says he likes Asian women, Elaine tells him that it’s racist to say so. Jerry denies that and stands on the idea of “liking” them as reason for non-rascism. But he’s wrong. Any decision about a person based on race is racism. As many of you out there know, interracial attraction disappears quickly when personality gets in the way. But porn doesn’t care about this, although it tries to put on a face of indifference. Just review some of the names for this genre of porn and you’ll see what I mean.  Another lie. 

It’s been proven by DNA science that there is no such thing as race in humans, only variations on a theme. If there wasn’t a racial taboo involved, then why name many of the films that are made in the way that they do? They do it because they know where the “buzz” comes from. And it’s racist.

Recently I saw a rather disgusting cartoon, which I won’t show you, but I’ll give  a brief description. It’s about an auction of young women, as if they were cattle. All the girls are Caucasian and the bidders are all African in descent. The girls are chained up and bound and the men all are rich and having a party. Interestingly, the girls are all identified as being from countries of Northern Europe and the countries just north of that location. There is an interesting point about this choice, which may or may not have something to do with anti-Semitism, but I haven’t decided at this point in time. But, briefly: there are those who have studied the 10 lost tribes of Israel and say that they migrated to the countries of Britain, France, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Scotland and also Australia and South Africa. This implies, of course, that if you are descended from those countries, that it is totally possible that YOU are a descendant also and therefore, Israeli too. Interesting, in that “black porn” seems most concerned with the appearance of white women from those countries despite there being many other countries with just as attractive a lineage. Interesting indeed. 

Regardless of this, the porn cartoon is offensive to everyone involved, and darkly wrong headed. Feeding on this kind of tripe will only cause problems down the road. It’s definitely not about loving your fellow man. It’s about hating everyone involved, perhaps humanity itself. When you give money to these producers in any way, you vote for this kind of sick, hellish trash. It will eventually find its way to your kids. And that, my friend, is NO lie.

more ranting next time