One of my favorite ladies in all of bloglandia has been getting far more than her fair share of shit these days. So here’s something to cheer her up: pretty boys and talk of porn! (below jump, because there are a lot of pictures)
(From the top: Georges St. Pierre, Georges St. Pierre, Roger Huerta, Roger Huerta, Anderson Silva, Patrick Cote and Nick Diaz. All MMA fighters, because I watched the UFC last night and it was awesome.)
So Caroline posted about a picture that gave her the ickies over at her blog. And it was a quite personal post, where she really dug into her feelings on the subject and laid ‘em out there for people to see. Because she admitted to disliking the picture, she’s been called all sorts of things from a radfem to a frigid bitch. None of which were necessary, and all of which were jumping right to a conclusion that she didn’t make.
I’m a card-carrying member of team Yay Sex! and of team Yay Free Speech! which makes me a part of team Yay Porn! almost by default, even though I must confess that I hardly ever watch it. I own Hustler panties and Larry Flynt and Traci Lords’ biographies, but no porn.
I blogged about this stuff fairly extensively back here, so if you want to know where I fall on this stuff, have at it. (Incidentally, there’s a link in there to Caroline’s writing on the UK ‘extreme’ porn ban, so read that too.)
But the question seems to have become (rather nastily) whether we can have honest debate over this type of thing or whether we have to basically shut up and have our own comments limited to the legality of the pictures in question.
And just as I come down pretty hard on the side of keeping it legal, I come down pretty damn hard on the side of having discussions about it. Having adult, non-shaming, thoughtful discussions where no one is ordered to “examine” their feelings or desires until they come up with the proper answers.
Because at some point the personal IS personal. Me, I like boys who look like the one at right, here–oh, GSP, you are delicious–and many other people don’t. Some don’t find men attractive at all, some do but like ‘em a little different.
Some of you may be disgusted by my love for a rather bloody sport like mixed martial arts, while we’re at it. But just like the porn we’re discussing, the athletes in mixed martial arts are adults, ones who train for countless hours and get paid for what they do (though arguably plenty of ‘em don’t get paid nearly enough, much like porn performers). They made their choice to do what they do, and I enjoy watching it. You don’t have to.
Somehow, when sex comes into it, everything becomes messier. People on one side believe that porn is dangerous, that it’s harmful, that it incites people to do rotten things, that people will see something on TV and feel compelled to act out what they see.
Since this side tends to have the ear of our legal system, despite the constant tendency of the anti-porn types to portray some sort of “porno-iarchy” (not my coinage, thanks) that is hooked in to the power structure, it’s understandable that those of us on the free expression side tend to circle the wagons around each other and get quite defensive when we see things being threatened. It’s understandable that since kink, nonmonogamy, and hell, even unbridled female lust are often punished in our society, we tend to get very defensive about things that it’s probably taken us a lot of–dare I say examining–to come to grips with.
But damn, it’s okay not to like things. It’s okay to say that a picture makes you feel icky inside. And to question a particular choice of a particular photo to represent something that you’re a part of..well, yeah. That shouldn’t be a problem, should it?
I mean, we just had a discussion about a picture recently, didn’t we?
Ultimately, of course, all of our opinions about a sexual photo don’t matter a bit–the only one that matters is the one of the person in the photo.
Still, I don’t think that silencing debate by throwing out words that are guaranteed to cut, whether they’re “Fucking English chav” or “radfemmish” have any place in this discussion.
Thank you hinny. xxx
Oh, and Patrick Cote is ridiculously hot!
I do loves them french canadian boys..Cote looks a lot like the man my friend just married.