#porn

Remembrances 2: Pornography

~ Roger JG Albert

I’ve just finished reading a book by Julia Shaw (Dr. Julia Shaw) who studied psychology at UBC. Her book is called EVIL: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side. (Doubleday in Canada, 2019). Her basic premise in that book is that evil is entirely subjective and we all have evil tendencies within us and the potential to act on them. For Shaw, murderers and torturers, even Hitler, are human. They may have committed atrocities at times, but not 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. For Shaw, no one is objectively evil, not Ted Bundy, not Jeffrey Dahmer, not Paul Bernardo. Not even Hitler. She asks, provocatively, would you have killed baby Adolf if you had been given the chance? Her answer is, probably not because there would have been no way to predict how Hitler would end up on the basis of what he was as a one year old boy. For Shaw, evil is situational a great deal of the time and one person’s evil is another person’s glory. Ernest Becker declares in his book Escape From Evil that the twin pillars of evil are death and disease. He doesn’t objectify people as inherently evil. In essence, he argues, we have a deep-seated cultural aversion to death and disease and we have created a plethora of institutions dedicated to the denial of death and disease (including hospitals, I might add). Those institutions may be at loggerheads with one another as part of the ideologies of competing groups as they go about vilifying each other. But I digress somewhat.

Shaw deals with many instances of evil in the world, including pornography. Like all other themes in her book, Shaw doesn’t condemn people for watching porn, (and she doesn’t even consider it evil). She insists that people who watch porn are not evil, and are in fact, normal. This is true particularly considering that she argues from a 2007 study by Pamela Paul elaborated in her book Pornified (New York: Times Books) that “66 percent of men and 41 percent of women consume porn on at least a monthly basis.”1 When I taught a course in 2010 and 2011 at North Island College called Love and Sex and I did research on porn for the course, I learned that at that time 37% of the income derived online was from pornography. Of course there’s no way of pinning down a reliable statistic on the valuation of pornography, but it’s big business, there’s no doubt about that. Still, as Shaw argues, there is a gloss of shame and moral terpitude that accompanies pornography. Shaw is entirely correct here. In fact, I challenge you to admit yourself to viewing porn, or to have someone else you know admit to viewing porn. I wrote above that I researched porn for a course I taught at NIC in 2010-11. In doing that research, I viewed a lot of porn.

As people got to know that I was doing research on porn I got a lot of: “See any good porn lately, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.” That kind of comment was absolutely uncalled for with veiled suggestions that what I was doing was somehow immoral, but sex is such a powerful subject in our less-than-open society that even doing research on a taboo subject in any way associated with sex was liable to unleash opprobrium and displeasure. As part of my responsibility around this research, I notified the college that I was doing this kind of research and that they should be aware of that because it may show up on my computer. Shaw notes in her book that:

“When attempts at empathy and understanding are made, there is often a particularly vicious utterance that is used to shut them down; the implication that some people should be empathized with, lest we imply that we too are evil. Want to discuss paedophilia? That must mean you are a paedophile.” (p.8)

What I was especially interested in as I investigated porn was the way that women are portrayed by the purveyors of porn. I’m assuming that porn hasn’t changed much in the last ten or twelve years since I conducted my research, but I do know that there is a movement among some women to transform porn.2 In my research I noted that it was very common for women to be referred to as dirty, sluts, etcetera. Actually, I take it back. Porn has changed a lot in the last ten years. Just a quick scan of one porn site and it’s obvious that there’s a lot more DIY porn out there. It’s now common for young women to set up chats or performances of various sorts for money, and incidentally for the pleasure of men,I suppose. And, somehow, tokens have become part of the porn scene. I wasn’t going to get into how that works. Much on the DIY porn is ‘porn-lite’ but there’s still a lot of violent and nasty stuff out there with much denigration of women. It’s hard for me to relate to misogyny given that I had a mother, I have a spouse, many sisters, two daughters, and granddaughters. However, I know about the origins of misogyny in the Biblical story of creation and in many other cultural institutions and myths, and I see misogyny glorified in politics, education, movies, and popular programs like Game of Thrones, among many others.

Actually, porn is no different than many mainstream views on sex as dirty. Why the association of sex with dirt? Well, dirt, death. I’ll not go into this here to any extent. See this post I wrote from March, 2018 for a discussion: https://rogerjgalbert.com/2018/03/27/why-do-some-people-refer-to-sex-as-dirty/ Interesting that I seem to come back over and over again to these themes.

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1page 145 in Shaw’s book.

2see especially After Pornified: How Women Are Transforming Pornography & Why It Really Matters by Anne G. Sabo, a book I just ordered. (After I read Sabo’s book I’ll get back to you about how women are transforming porn.)

Emoporn: Oh yeah.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Okay, so last night I’m lying in bed just before falling asleep and I can’t shut my brain off. I’m trying to figure out what I want to write about. There’s so much. Then I got to thinking: what if I come up with a catchy new word? I could then craft a post around that and it might be more relevant to people. 

Well, laying there nodding off the idea came into my head about how we appeal much more to feeling than to thinking when we have to come to a decision in life about anything, like buying a car, choosing what to wear on a cold late fall day, or what kind of person you might want to live with. 

Certainly feelings are much more accessible than thought, especially rational thought based on evidence. Of course feelings and thoughts live side by side in our brains all the time. Even dyed-in-the-wool scientists can get excited, elated or angry at some experiment or other they’re working on. Feeling and thinking are partners in our brains. Problem is when we lead with feeling all the time and leave thinking to linger in solitary confinement in the recesses of our frontal cortex. 

So, I come up with this word, emoporn, to describe the phenomenon of people leading with their feelings or emotions when making decisions even when it’s plain that reason and logic should prevail. This morning, smug in the thought that I’ve come up with a neologism, a new word that I can foist on to the world I power up my computer and open my browser, open Google and type in emoporn, my new word. Well, what was I thinking? Emoporn is all over the place. I have not come up with a new word.

Emoporn or emo porn is just another way of describing porn, regular ol’ porn. Damn. I thought I had myself a neologism. It’s true that the way porn goofs use the term is not the way I would use it, but I suppose I have to stand aside and let them have their damn word for themselves. I think my proposed use of the word is much more elegant and useful than describing how “Emo Porn Girls Love Naked Pussy Sex.”  

I’ll tell you, the Christians are up in arms about emoporn or emo porn. A new headline on the Christian Post reads: Women Seduced by Emo-Pornography: The New 800-Pound Gorilla in Marriages. Well, there ya go. Ya gotta watch those 800 pound gorillas between the sheets. On the same website (Christianpost.com) I find this: “Wives today are now being seduced by “emo-porn,” which is a new virtual infidelity type of pornography that is more emotionally satisfying than creating physical pleasures, according to Focus on the Family.” So, it seems that emoporn is mostly a bored housewife diversion. They see all the hunks on daytime TV. Their husbands just don’t measure up. Better just masturbate while watching readily accessible emo porn. There’s lots of choice for bored, frustrated Christian housewives. Just Google emoporn, you’ll see. 

Of course, I’m a little disappointed but I’ll get over it. I can always pretend I’m a bored, Christian housewife and check out my new emo porn discovery on the internet. At 71, that stuff doesn’t have much effect, but maybe if I get enough of it, I’ll be rejuvenated and reinvigorated…at least digitally and I can phantasize about being a bored housewife alone in my suburban home mastubating the hell out of myself and not even thinking of my husband coming home. Yeah, that’s the ticket. 

What’s So Scary About Women? Introduction

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

In my last few blog posts I promised I would tackle a most difficult topic and that’s the misogyny embedded in many of our institutions. Well, that’s what I will do over the next few blog posts.

I’ve always liked to try to figure out how things work. When I was a kid I used to dissect and disassemble things all the time. I was forever curious about how things were made, especially mechanical things. Taking them apart was not usually too much of a problem, but to my father’s dismay, putting them back together was sometimes not so easy. My favourite targets were toys and motors but clocks really topped the list. As I got older and went away to a Catholic boarding school in Edmonton for high school, I still had a live curiosity but the priests were not too keen on seeing things taken apart and strewn here and there on campus. They were especially protective of the lab equipment. Looking back on it, I remember also having a keen interest in why people did things the way they did them. I had a hard time making sense of what I came to know as institutions (crystallized habits of thought and life). And, of course, figuring out why I had a penis and my sisters didn’t was top of mind. That said, I would never have dared, after turning 4, to bring up such a subject at dinner time. The disapproval would have been swift and sometimes mildly violent. I felt very early on that certain subjects were absolutely taboo. Still, lots of sniggering went on because we children weren’t yet completely indoctrinated. Of course, we learned a few anatomical things by playing doctor but it wasn’t easy to figure out the moral issues involved. The questions definitely outnumbered the answers in my first two decades of life on earth.

In my early twenties, after a serious sawmill accident, I had back surgery and wondered what to do next. Well, I went a little crazy for a while, smashed up a few cars, got drunk and stoned frequently but I had a couple of mentors that made a huge difference in my life. They prompted me to go to university. I applied to Simon Fraser University (SFU), but was rejected because my grades in high school were lousy so I attended Douglas College in New Westminster for two years, got an A average, had some great teachers and decided at that time to study sociology. On I went to SFU. That time of my life was super exciting and difficult too because of money, to be certain, but also because of sex. I couldn’t seem to get enough of it and too much of my energy went into pursuing it or worrying about not getting any. The sex drive for me was very powerful. It’s hard to concentrate under these conditions. I was clumsy and ridiculous like most of my friends and acquaintances around the subject of sex, but this was the early seventies for god’s sake. We would have been into some promiscuity and there was definitely some loosening of mores but we were mostly unsatisfied. But when all else failed, we always had some beer and weed to make us feel better. Still, I couldn’t help thinking about sex and women. I should now say sorry to all the women I was a dickhead to in those days. It wasn’t me, it was my gonads. Now that I’m 71 that drive, thankfully, is largely attenuated. Frankly, I don’t know how most of us get through our teen years. Our bodies are yelling at us YES and our damned superegos are blocking our genital paths to glory. Oh well, such is life. Eventually, I met Carolyn and that was that. We fit together nicely.

It took me a while to get settled into the academic life. For a long time I called myself a Marxist but I stopped doing that for the same reason that Marx pointed to French syndicalists in the late 1870s saying that if these people are Marxists then I’m not. I still find Marx’s analysis of history very compelling, but I I strayed from looking only at economic matters to studying schizophrenia (R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, etc), mental illness, depression (with which I’ve been on intimate terms with), crime, deviance, social solidarity, morality, Norbert Elias and other things. In my last couple of years teaching I taught a sociology course on love and sex. Given what I wrote above, this fit right to my curiosity bag. I got interested in pornography. What is it about porn that makes it such a lucrative business? It’s one of the top internet money makers( yes, people sniggered.) And, of course, I had a long standing interest in Ernest Becker’s work. You just have to check the archives on this blog to ascertain that. Becker’s book Escape From Evil has a lot to say about sex and about misogyny. In fact, Becker’s work is the foundation of my views on this topic.

So, in the next few blog posts I will address Becker’s work to start with, especially his emphasis on evil, animality and our institutional denial of death. Then I want to look more specifically at woman as temptress, as devil. I will follow that up with a look at language and women before turning to marriage and some of the other cultural institutions of sexual relations. Things may evolve as I go along. The order I present issues may change. Your comments might modify my approach too.

I must say, in concluding this introduction, that I, by no means, intend to glorify women and vilify men. We are all ‘guided’ in our actions by our social relations, our language, our sex, our gender, our economic interests, our egos, and a myriad of other factors. Morality plays a huge role although we barely ever mention it. We swim in a moral world but we seldom recognize it. Like fish who don’t know they swim in water, we are the last to recognize that we swim in a moral world. In this series of posts I’ll try to open up that moral world a bit so that we can see more deeply into want makes us tick as humans.