Pollution Of The Imagination To Permit Abuse And Discrimination

The important thing to remember is that it's about power, and the idea that you have to dominate in order to be sexual.

Gloria Steinem last night speaking about the fall out of the Harvey Weinstein scandal on Chris Hayes' "All In"

An all too pervasive American template for thinking about sex, and it's hardly exclusive to the United States, is in terms of male dominance and submission by whoever he wants to penetrate.  Essentially sex as presented in the media is frequently, perhaps mostly not unrelated to the act of rape.  That is certainly the dominant messaging of pronography, it is largely a promotion of rape in all of it forms, a man dominating and penetrating a woman or another man or a child or an animal.  Porn is an ad campaign for inequality and rape, one which is championed by pseudo-liberalism and which is just another venue of media fascists like Rupert Murdoch to make money in.

That is also the predominant dynamic of the sex industry in its other forms, pornography being merely prostitution for filming sale to voyeurs. 

I have come to believe that that issue is really what is behind the association of sex with sin in the Bible, that it is so frequently attached to abuse and the equivalent of rape.  You get the feeling that what you read in the several passages trotted out by gay bashers is written by straight men who are entirely ignorant of the full range of possible same-sex relations but who have seen the worst kind and figure that's all there is to it.   They couldn't imagine faithful, devoted same sex relationships which weren't based in sexual practices of dominance that was an expression of injustice.  One of the more interesting complexes of such statements is in Paul's First Letter to Timothy

8. We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. 9 We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, 10 for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine 11 that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.  1 Timothy 1:8-11

Set into a series of crimes against other people, murder, unspecified sexual immorality, slave trading, lying and those who bear false witness is the one they use as a money shot in their case against LGBT rights and equality.   Susannah Heschel, in another of her talks carried online and in her brilliantly different take on Paul pretty much wonders if the reason he was unmarried was because he was such a difficult person, but we can be pretty well assured that he was almost certainly a virgin. So there is no way for Paul to have had first-hand, personal knowledge about moral marital relationships based on mutual love and respect and not on the practice of someone being raped by a man in an act of domination.   He seems to be able to imagine such a thing in a heterosexual marriage, he seems unable to imagine it between two men.  Paul we know something about, the other passages so used, we know little to nothing about the people who wrote those.  In other places the mention of sex between men is imagined in terms of temple prostitution, the near ubiquitous practice among pagans of making slave children of both genders available to men to rape associated with pagan religion, the use of one man by another, reducing him to the status of a raped child - a practice which was, itself, forbidden by the Jewish religion. 

Today it's an obvious truth to anyone who has seen the wide range of expressions of LBGT equality that there is a part of male gay expression which is based on such inequality and, as I've mentioned over and over again, that is most seen in gay porn, especially that on the Tumblr platform though also in the direct marketing of online porn.  I would have to say that most of what I've seen promoted in porn is either dangerously unhygenic, bareback - unprotected anal sex, oral-anal contact, other exchanges of bodily fluid the dominance of a bigger, stronger, older or otherwise imagined empowered man over one presented as disempowered, the exploitation of younger men and boys by older men, the rape, torture, abuse, enslavement and destruction of those presented as weaker, the proliferation of "alpha male" - "fag" abuse and torture themes, simulated if not actual incest in which "fathers, older brothers, uncles" rape "sons" or, heaven help us, "grandsons" the rise of white supremacist and overt Nazi gay porn sites on Tumblr and elsewhere are the predominant media presence of gay men in the United States and, I'm sure, many other places.  And yet people wonder about what fuels the backlash against LGBT rights, what provides so many straight people with their imagined concepts of gay men - especially, which for many straight people is going to be the only place they get an imagined concept of gay men. 

I don't remember who said it,  maybe Ann Landers, who said that the brain was the primary sex organ, but it's certainly true that other than your own life experience that everything you think about other people and their lives is a product of your imagination, the images you see and create of what their lives are.  Obviously Harvey Weinstein has some particularly sick images of women and heterosexual sex as part of his background, Donald Trump as well and all of it mixed in with the sexualiation of male supremacy over women, a subset of, no doubt, their thinking about how to succeed in business as well as life  And they aren't alone.  A large part of those in control of the American media obviously share their ideas and even those who don't market stuff to those they have good reason to believe do like that kind of thing - straight porn is saturated with much of the same kind of thing, so much so that there are gay porn sites that are dedicated to carrying straight porn of men abusing women. 

It is the easiest thing in the world for someone to associate sex with injustice, with cruelty, to exploitation, coercion rape and willful destruction of someone because you can do that and get away with it because that is so pervasive in the media presentation of sex.  And that's as true of straight sex as it is for gay sex.  Only it's more acceptable among straight people when it's a male doing it to a female.  The largest part, the large majority of the sexual immorality that happens in the world is done in the context of straight sex.  If LGBT people want to disassociate ourselves with immoral sex, we're going to have to reject that because it might take what it did to out Weinstein to do it for rich, white, straight men, we're not going to be able to avoid it unless we reject it.