How would you feel if you supported a particular political party and went to their website only to find that hackers had redirected it to a kinky porn site? Democrats, Republicans, and Greens would probably be angry that their website had been hijacked. Libertarians might be delighted and defend the hacker's free speech rights. I don't support any political parties, so I wouldn't visit their websites any more than I would visit porn sites, since I consider their campaign lies to be just as phony and commercial as most porn, so if I happened to visit a political party's website and found porn instead, I'd probably think that was what was usually there and not even suspect that the site had been hijacked.
Since I don't care to be desensitized to violence or subjected to commercialism and disinformation, I don't watch TV, listen to FCC-licensed radio, or read newspapers and magazines, and I get my news primarily online from alternative media websites. But that doesn't mean that I'm safe from stepping in excrement. At various times right here on opednews I've run into sexist jokes, links to pictures of naked women in sexual poses, and most recently an avatar of a woman in bondage accompanying comments describing and promoting a sadistic porn website, all of which was allowed and defended as being appropriate. Now while some may think that makes me a prude, I feel that freedom of speech should allow me to choose what sort of things I wish to be exposed to and what sort of things I don't. I don't like racism, so I don't visit racist websites. To encounter overt racism on a website that called itself progressive, would, to my mind, be stepping in excrement, and I would be unhappy about the time I'd have to spend scraping it off my shoe. As a feminist, I feel the exact same way about sexism, and I feel that pornography is an extreme form of sexism.
Fortunately for me, the San Diego Board of Education recently brought frequent opednews contributor Robert Jensen to give a talk here and I had the opportunity to purchase three of his books, Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege, and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. The last-named book, Getting Off, is an excellent tool for removing sexist excrement from one's shoes.
The U.S. is a very strange place. With less than five percent of the world's population, we consume about one fourth of the world's energy resources. So we shouldn't be surprised to learn that with less than five percent of the world's population we also consume about one fourth of the world's pornography. Is it possible that those two statistics are related? Getting Off makes a good case that pornography teaches, reinforces, and perpetuates patriarchy, and that patriarchy is not a sustainable lifestyle. Here's what Jensen has to say:
It may be that in the long run, patriarchy is not a successful adaptation in evolutionary terms and will lead to the extinction of the species. As we look around the world at the threats to sustainable life rooted in patriarchal societies, that's not only plausible but increasingly hard to deny. That suggests a rejection of patriarchy, which makes possible long-term human survival, may well be a successful adaptation in evolutionary terms.
Consider the following reports and what they tell us about the relationship between pornography and behavior:
From a street prostitute, who reported that when one john exploded at her he said:
I know all about you b_____s, you're no different; you're like all of them. I seen it in all the movies. You love being beaten [He then began punching the victim violently.] I just seen it again in that flick. He beat the sh*t out of her while he raped her and she told him she loved it; you know you love it; tell me you love it.
So I'll gingerly attempt reading and posting to opednews again, but with a lot more caution in the future. Despite the occasional crap trap, it does have some authentically progressive writers. The problem was that the story that I read was by one of them. So I wasn't expecting the response. Had someone posted a story about a case of extreme anti-Semitism in the news, I doubt if Rob would have allowed a Holocaust denier to post a response. But patriarchy is intentionally divisive, and the justifications for the porn industry are considered valid, even though Jensen has thoroughly debunked each and every one of them in Getting Off.
Jensen rocks! He is definitely on the right track in saying that we need to reclaim our humanity. The problem is that many so-called progressives have great difficult recognizing that people unlike themselves in any way, might still be human. One of the chapters in Getting Off is called, "we are what we masturbate to." I wonder what the defenders of porn would make of that? Or of Jensen's statement:
So, I cannot escape a simple conclusion: If men are going to be full human beings, we first have to stop being men.
He's right, of course, just as in order to be full human beings, women have to stop being women. Despite biological, national, religious, political, or any other differences, I've been saying for years that there are not different kinds of people, there is only one kind of person, the human kind, or humankind, and that if we cannot be kind, we do not deserve to be human. We have to stop thinking of ourselves as men and women, Christians, Jews, and Moslems, Americans, Russians, Chinese, etc., and start thinking of ourselves as human beings if we are to have any hope of surviving. Divisiveness can lead only to nuclear holocaust and nukes are equal opportunity destroyers. We will either learn equality, or it will be imposed on us as we are burned into the earth we destroyed in our hierarchical separateness.
We've had decades in which to figure this out, and it's a pity that we've failed.
