I heard the ad last week on NPR's Morning Edition, as so many others did, for the "50 Shades of Grey" teddy bear and, as so many others did, couldn't believe that something so repulsively sick was being brought to me by what was once quaintly called "educational radio". But, then, the romance book promoting torture as kewl sex had been promoted heavily in the media, on talk shows, on "news" shows, long enough so a knowledge of it even filtered down to those of us who don't watch TV and have pretty much given up radio, as well. The little of the actual book I've read in snatches included in written discussions of it were, as is universally acknowledged, badly written, the basis of almost all of the criticism I've read of it. Though I will admit that there has been some, all too mild, criticism of the idea of a rich man with a yen for sadistic sex preying on a poor girl who is convinced to play along, convinced she is in love with the creep. This week I've read some comparison with a book I did, actually, read quite a bit of before I tossed it away, "The Story of O", a book recommended to me by a woman who was otherwise intelligent except when it came to what she had imbibed a good, open-thinking, liberal was supposed to favor because, you know, "freedom of the press" "free speech".
The odd thing about this is that it's not an expression of freedom or freedom of thought for liberals to be gulled, duped or coerced out of condemning the promotion of oppression of women, men, children, animals just because sick men can achieve orgasm, or at least arousal, from the act of dominating them. Freedom to oppress other people is not a liberal virtue. Freedom to hurt other people is not a liberal virtue or anything to champion. The freedom to promote the domination, torture, harm and rape by stronger men over weaker people, including those who are otherwise already oppressed by them, is not a liberal virtue. Anyone who mistakes themselves as a liberal who champions those rights is deluding themselves that they are a liberal, they are a tool of the opposite of liberalism. It would be like the liberals of the mid-19th century supporting the rights of the slave industry to promote the idea of people of African ancestry as sub-humans and liberals of the end of that century championing those who spread the myth of black men as natural rapists of white women spread who could only be kept in check by regular lynchings. In fact, in the case of some of the crap championed by the "free press-free speech" industry, the distribution of exactly that kind of thing, resulting in murders, is championed.
The idiotic idea that words and books rightly have more rights than the victims of those who are oppressed by those who believe those words and books, is the quintessential means by which liberals were duped by corporate interests and the choice of such "liberals" in what was more important than the rights of the victims of the violence and oppression promoted by those commercial interests were the dead giveaway that they were, really, not especially dependable as liberals. And the issue over which they abandoned the core values of liberalism, the thing for which those were thrown over the side was nothing more elevated than the sexual arousal of the jaded and bored.
It's an odd notion, a truly perverse notion of liberal virtue, the idea that commercial publishers and sadistic sexual predators promoting the oppression of women in the most obvious of ways is an expression of the good which deserves our support. I think, oddly enough, that the problem with it came to me when I read another book of that genre, championed as a beacon of liberal virtue by the "free speech" industry, "Last Exit to Brooklyn". The infamous gang rape scene in it was such a clear expression of hatred, white male privilege and racism that everything I'd heard about the necessity of fighting for the rights of the book to be heard, the enormous fuss over is suppression, was clearly a crock of crap. The world would have been no worse off and perhaps better off if the auteur of it had, before sending it off, had some remorse and burned the manuscript. The same with The Story of O, everything by the Marquis de Sade and practically every other title that became Icons of the "free speech - free press" industry. Other than "Ulysses" I'm hard pressed to remember one of those pieces of "literature" which, when read, didn't turn out to be a sexist, often racist, expression of white male supremacy on rare occasion, gay.
It's one thing to champion the distribution of accurate information about sex, contraception, disease prevention which people need to live better lives and quite another one to distribute encouragement to ignore or not follow that advice. Pornography has had hundreds of times more of the encouragement to ignore and not follow that advice than it has promoted anything positive. If it all, miraculously, disappeared tomorrow, never to exist again, the world would be smarter, less oppressive and certainly better. The men in The Story of O should have all been in prison, the women in therapy. From what I have seen, the "hero" of 50 Shades should be locked up, away from potential victims, as should his type in real life. The publishers and authors who promote that kind of oppression certainly shouldn't be seen as having rights to do that which are more important than the rights of people who are victimized by people who learn to oppress through what they publish.
The infamous sexual slave-master and torturer, Ariel Castro, explained his actions through his addiction to pornography. He is the only possible expert on what motivated him to do what he did to the woman and girl he imprisoned, tortured, raped and otherwise treated like a character in a book which the "free press - free speech" industry would champion. Other sadistic sexual abusers and killers have also been inspired by what they read in such books, magazines and see in movies. Clarence Thomas, in his sexual harassment of Anita Hill parroted what he heard in the porn he is known to have watched. Sexual hate-talk is hate talk with the added attraction of sexual pleasure as a selling point.
The pseudo-liberal argument about how many men who gorge themselves on pornography don't go on to get convicted of rape is a smoke screen, literally like the arguments the tobacco industry used to make about how many smokers didn't die of tobacco related illness. It's the ones who are convicted of rape, sexual torture, sexual murder, ... who show the results of pornography in its most oppressive forms. Those exist on one end of a spectrum of using sex as a means of oppression, not all of which are illegal, though all of them are oppressive to some extent. As I'll show at the end of this piece, the analogy of the porn industry and the tobacco industry can illuminate the situation quite well.
And it is ultimately a matter of sexual arousal over domination of one person over another who is subjugated. And in almost all instances that will be a man held up as an example to other men in an instruction of how to enhance their own sexual satisfaction by using someone else as an object. It's no different from men who achieve a different form of satisfaction by the economic enslavement of people who liberals would have less trouble seeing as being worthy of their protection, despite whatever "consent" could be coerced from them. But when you throw sex into the mix, they all turn into University of Chicago neo-classical economists of the worst type.
That, alone, should illustrate the problem of liberals who are impotent in the face of sex used to oppress, harm and even kill people. They've been sold a bill of libertarian goods by the lawyers in the hire of the commercial publishing industry, the Floyd Abrams, that great champion of "free speech", who is, last time I heard, in the hire of the tobacco industry, championing their right to sell their product without the inconvenience of their customers being told of and reminded that the product they are buying can kill them in some pretty horrific ways. Suppressing vital health information, consumer protection, as "freedom of speech". If you need to see a good example of what the "free speech" industry is really all about, there you can see it in its most obvious. He's in it for the money, in service to corporate interest. The other stuff is just window dressing.
No comments:
Post a Comment