Yet more sterility!
Posted by LaudateAgno on 2024-May-5 15:31:19, SundayIn reply to Re: More sterility posted by diogenes on 2024-May-5 13:56:21, Sunday
In the 70s boy skin mags were perfectly legal in my country up to 1978. I don't see what is wrong with capturing the beauty of a boy, and I don't see what harm comes from wanking over such a picture.And how well-off in that country are boy lovers now? The countries that once legalized the stuff are among the more repressive (The Netherlands being an outstanding case). A culture of porn is headed in a bad direction, exacerbating all of the problems of the sexual revolution. Crazy preconceptions? Well, I suppose those will be quickly dispelled by a real sexual encounter.Exactly the problem: real encounters become occasions for disillusion. Dulls sexual arousal? According to who? That wasn't my experience of consuming porn when I was younger. Rather the contrary.When you were younger: of course, when everything dangerous is the most fun and you're always horny and porn is designed to turn you on. But I doubt you had the capacity to browse all day long on your smart phone. Long-term use of it is quite well-known to dull the senses. There are support groups for men trying to get off the stuff, for God's sake! There are loads of studies out there on the phenomenon, most of which look to be pretty solid (I have a decent nose for bullshit; I cannot provide a bibliography, but browse around, and perhaps Manstrupator can come to the rescue). Divorces sex from real human relations? Well, I don't accept that every orgasm must be with another person to be valuable, or that there is anything bad about solitary masturbation.Solitary masturbation can be very bad if it is primarily and consistently enabled by artificial images that substitute for real people. It gets to be too much. Encourages the subjects to treat their bodies as commodities? This is purely rhetorical. A 13 year old kid gets some pocket money in return for a few nude snaps. What is wrong with that? There are a lot worse things that people do for money. Most jobs, for example.A single example of harmlessness (and I agree your example is perfectly benign) does not change the fact that the relation one has with one's body is deeply influenced not just by its commodification, but by the culture of commodification that widespread porn endorses. Tell me OnlyFans is doing anything uplifting. Pederasty is not itself procreative. One could just as well say that man-boy love sterilises.No, one could not, because boy love does not diminish sexual potency in any way, and has been an active and productive element in the raising of red-blooded and healthy males, real boys, that is, not photos of them. Boys should be spending time with us, and we with them. Homosexuality as a whole, of course, has come under suspicion for being a non-procreative form of sex, but we know that pederasty simply need not be in competition with heterosexuality. But just as man-boy love can be part of a culture that is more fertile than our present one, so sex work, including erotica, can be integral to a fertile society.Can it? Has it been? Prostitution and the family have gone hand in hand.Of course they have, and prostitution, the oldest profession, will never go away. In fact Saint Thomas Aquinas, foremost Doctor of the Church, argued that it shouldn't be illegal. The declining fertility of our societies might be analysed in terms of urbanisation, neoliberalism, feminism or technology. But sex work? Porn? I don't find moralising pseudo-explanations convinving. It's about as plausible as saying that Rome fell because of its sexual decadence.I'm not up to any more sexual "moralizing" than you are. We are trying to evaluate the merits of the wide availability of pornography in the age of the internet, and you're not offering any. The declining fertility of our society is the result of many things, many related things strangely united under the umbrella of "sterility," and many of which can be traced to modernity's "sexual liberation" movement, which is turning out to have consequences people did not anticipate and don't like. A lot of feminists and gays aren't happy with the trans thang. A lot of boy lovers aren't happy with the age of consent thang. A lot of single men and ex-wives them are not happy with the porn thang. These are all tightly related issues. I know it is extremely difficult to accept the fact that widespread availability of porn is not a good thing, especially if the object of one's erotic gaze is an underaged male, and the availability of a single image is something some people risk their lives over -- the idea of porn being less available seems positively perverse. But its ubiquity is nonetheless a part of the problem. It does not have to be discouraged by draconian laws. But, like feminism, it needs to be put in its place. |
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