Hate Mail - "Why Don't You Just Not Look At It"

How typical of the preening, narcissistic, materialist-atheist, pseudo-liberal to consider what I objected to in the promotion of internalized hatred and the bashing, humiliation and abuse of gay boys and men as if it were a mere matter of personal distaste for something, ignoring the fact that what is promoted actually does harm real people, whether or not you see it or know the people so abused.  No, merely not looking and ignoring that this is being promoted and, beyond any rational ability to deny it, modeling the behavior of people through appealing to both their narcissistic, egotistical feelings of supremacy and finding sexual arousal in hurting other people is too easy and entirely inadequate.

This is the American Firster way of dealing with the advocacy and the practice of fascistic violence somewhere out of sight, treat it as if the personal comfort of those bothered by it was the paramount consideration for you to have, pretending that it isn't there.  We're talking about the abuse of real people in real life, not going to a bad movie or listening to a bad dance band.  Though, considering the content of what's being objected to, the egotism of it, perhaps its not surprising that its champions would consider that to be a rational or adequate response to it.

If I were going to deal with only what's easy, what is not problematic, the common received consensus I wouldn't bother writing to post it, at all.   If I were going to do that there wouldn't be any point to it because that's already done in things that are published for profit, either to sell magazines or by those who put up ads and links to Amazon.   But, really, for someone who thinks the way to deal with things you don't like is to not read them, you spend a lot of time here looking at stuff you don't like and whining that it's been said.

I don't want my LGBT family members, including myself,  to act in the ways taught and encouraged by pornography, or the straight ones.   I don't want any of them abused and used in that way.  The difference between us might be I don't want anyone to either be destroyed in that way or to be the people who give into any encouragement to act that way strongly enough to look at that awful stuff to know what's being advocated.  Not people I merely know about, not people who I don't even know are alive and at risk for that.   It's not all about us.  It's not all about me.   It's certainly not all about you.

Update:  Let me guess, when Phil Ochs sang "A Small Circle of Friends" you thought the guy explaining his indifference really had a valid point.   That's essentially what you're arguing this is about, its OK because only the people it's going to hurt and their small circle of friends need to care about it.    And it's exactly the attitude to that the post-feminist "left" including so many "feminists" have gotten seduced into whenever sex is involved.  In fact Ochs got suckered into it by the parts of the media that wanted to peddle smut - with no concern for real people whose lives were destroyed by that industry - as you can hear from the lyrics.  It was such a groovy position to hold in the later 60s, before those second-wave feminists ruined the boys' fun.  Hey, he wasn't someone who was being pimped to whoever wanted to beat him up while they  corn holed him, infected him, wore away his soul or crushed it.  So much for the educational value of pop music.   Maybe the latter days of Ochs' life, before his suicide, were worn away by the hypocrisies and idiocies of materialism posing as an adequate substitute for real liberalism. 

I wonder why Phil Ochs' creative imagination didn't extend to wondering how the man who stabbed Kitty Genovese got the idea that it was OK to do that to women, how that was and is a predictable result of seeing women as objects that men can do with what they like, exactly the kind of thing that pornography teaches.  When Winston Moseley had been arrested for theft he had a stash of pornography in his car. 

But maybe partying with guys like William Kunstler diverted him from making that intellectual and personal connection.   I remember those times really well.  Boys didn't think much about the consequences for women unless something like reading about it in The Times forced them to and The Times didn't cover it much.  Straight boys were pretty much a small circle of friends interested in what interested them.  Even the ones who sang about that in their artistic life as a lefty protest singer-songwriter.