In the passage I posted yesterday, Joseph Weizenbaum said:
Just as our television screens may show us unbridled violence in "living color" but not scenes of authentic intimate love - the former by itself-obscene reversal of values is said to be "real," whereas the latter is called obscene - so we may discuss the very manufacture of life and its "objective" manipulation, but we may not mention God, grace, or morality.
The situation is, likely, somewhat different for people thirty or so years younger than I am in that their TVs showed them lots of sex. Increasingly, during the Reagan 80s, TV was deregulated and Rupert Murdoch was imported to both promote increasingly right-wing, Republican politics and to turn American TV into a tawdry sex show. That Reagan and his adoring political followers were, on the one hand, deregulating TV and, on the other hand, spouting the most conventional of Victorian sexual morality is only a sign of just what hypocrites and liars they were, and, to an extent still are. Since Weizenbaum wrote his book, the far-right has expropriated language of First Amendment advocacy that liberals believed was theirs, and turned it to right wing-Republican purposes, trading in the now less useful anti-obscenity smoke screen, no longer of use to their real purpose. I will give them this much, the right-wing, as can be seen in the Republicans on the Supreme Court, made the exchange subtly enough for liberals to mistake what was a defeat for a victory. That such First Amendment champions, the "liberal" Nat Hentoff eventually became conservatives, even joining up with the Cato Institute shouldn't have been surprising. Their focus was always libertarian, not that of classic American liberalism.
As a gay man who, until about a decade ago, would have supported large amounts of that "First Amendment" discourse, I find language can still seriously shock would be liberals. "How can you say that," is something I often hear when I talk like this these days. "How can a gay man say those things," is frequently the next thing said in angry, shocked tones used by an actor playing a purity campaigner in a movie in the late 1950s or early 60s. What would be more shocking to them would be that it is my experience as a gay man that has helped me to see beyond the accustomed way of thinking on these issues.
By sheer bulk of the putrid stuff, by the amount of damage it does to gay men - I'll only speak to the situation of gay men, Lesbians should speak for themselves - the anti-gay hate speech that is most damaging to us is said by gay men in the porn industry. All of the vicious hate speech of the Phelps tribe, in both terms of its mendacious viciousness and quantity, can't match what you could find on Tumblr's gay porn sites and others in a couple of hours of pretty unpleasant research. I know because I conducted that research, using some of the more typical terms of anti-gay hatred used by such anti-gay groups in searches. The use of those terms of hatred, so often used to oppress us, are featured as sexually arousing in gay porn, thus their indispensability in those web-searches and, I'd imagine, many who go looking for other than quasi-journalistic research.
The hatred of gay men as expressed by the most obscene and violent of queer bashers has been thoroughly introduced into the minds of gay men and sold as sexually exciting, the script of scenes of degredation, abuse, imprisonment, endangerment and everything up to sexual torture and, on some of the most depraved of porn sites, enslavement, maiming and murder. And all of that is supposed to be a proud emblem of liberty, enlightenment, freedom and sexual emancipation. As very frequently seen in this most so-called liberated sexual speech the theme is the total domination, use, degradation and destruction of a gay man by another, stronger, older, more experienced gay man. And that's not when the difference of age isn't a major aspect of it. Many of the photos and gifs on Tumblr look to me to violate laws against child pornography, many of those themed in terms of fathers raping their, alleged, sons. Many of the pictures look to me to involve the actual rape of underage boys. I looked and found that similar themes were frequent in male-female porn, though, again, women would be better at addressing that topic than I would. As an aside, if I had a young child and I couldn't block those kinds of sites, my kid wouldn't go online. As a gay man, as an extremely liberal person, I've got a big problem with this.
While the political opposition to gay rights has often gotten its most public image in the corporate media dressed in clerical garb, it's never been my experience that the people who presented a physical danger to gay men are likely to be church goers. Not in the United States or other predominantly Christian countries. Most of those I've encountered have been decidedly irreligious, breaking the second commandment is an almost uniform feature of their invective. Most of those I knew by name and reputation were quite unlikely to keep the commandments against heterosexual adultery or fornication. In a few cases they fit the classic stereotype of the gay man in deep denial who had sex with men on the sly, but almost all of them who I knew of were decidedly heterosexually promiscuous. I don't recall gay bashers to have been famous as church goers, either. I don't ever remember someone who fit the image of a pious believer who could be suspected of taking what Jesus said seriously among those who have threatened or publicly abused gay men in my presence. Clearly, the bishops, cardinals and reverends who are the public voice of gay oppression don't seem to account for queer bashers in most cases.
The same is true for the depiction of straight sex, only in a less extreme way on TV. There Weizenbaum's general observations about considering living beings as objects is more the given, men as the real people, women as objects. Intimate love, what he proposed as an alternative to the violence which was ubiquitious on TV, wasn't what replaced it, sexual violence and sexual use seems to be more palatable than the depiction of heterosexual love to TV producers. The depiction of intimate sexual love between a faithful loving married couple is a theme I don't really recall seeing on TV. Not even in the likes of Lifetime movies for all their emetic and cloying content. I would suspect that your average viewer would squirm uneasily at that kind of depiction, waiting for someone to turn into a mad killer or sexual psychopath or the next scene to reveal a secret lover on the side.
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In Maine, my native state, the campaign to pass gay marriage last year depended heavily on the participation of liberal religious groups, Christian, Jewish and others, even as the media here concentrated on the so called "Christian" groups who were in opposition. Clearly, by the demographics of the state and the vote totals that passed marriage equality, most of the supporters were religious people, most of those self-identified as Christians. But you wouldn't know that from the coverage of the issue. Atheists and agnostics, even if they voted overwhelmingly for marriage equality, wouldn't have made up the majority of the votes passing the equality law.
The achievement of gay rights depends on making a choice for real freedom and decency that is not to be found in a morals free libertarian model, it is found in the classic American liberalism that would not have seen anything positive in the pornograpic self-image that is the predominant media representation of gay men. That image has not changed or improved since those rare ancient Greek vases which depicted the rape of slave boys were made. The image of class and physical domination of unequally empowered males is the norm in today's pornography, it is the model of sexual stimulation being sold to gay men by what that form of libertarianism has produced. Even if every vestige of legal and straight oppression falls, that internalized oppression will still stand, still damage and still oppress us. Only it is using us to oppress each other. I strongly suspect that it is the same political and mental dynamic that accounts for why the real liberation of women, something which is in the interest of the largest part of the human population, so frequently stalls out. Women are taught to become their own oppressors and as a result, liberation stalls and is overturned.
Steve Biko provided one of the most basic, most potent insights into this situation when he said that the most potent tool of the oppressor was the mind of the oppressed. Men who find being abused, oppressed, physically and mentally assaulted sexually stimulating will never really be free. Neither will women. And unless that is rejected, equally, by those in a position to oppress, no one will be free of it and its effects. No one will be free to love. They'll be embarrassed to love, too afraid to love, the specter of that perverted sexual ideal will haunt them and shame them and it will make them suspicious of the person they love.
There can be no such thing as an OBJECT of love, you have to love another person. People cannot be loved as objects, and I don't see any way to see people as anything but objects if you don't believe they are more than that. And that, in the end, depends on a religious belief that people are more than that. Maybe in every one, I can't believe someone who really loves someone else can see them as mere objects, no matter what they might claim. Like the "Christian" queer basher, their actions betray that they really believe the opposite of what they profess.
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