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PORNFRIED
September 9, 2005
Rev: January 21, 2009
Trying to get a grip on the
core of "Pornified" without Published in 2005,
actually reading the damn by Pamela Paul.
thing...
(At least it's
not by Naomi Wolf)
A few points:
The use of the word "desensitized"
is misleading, if you're talking
about the way someone's taste For one thing, the word
changes upon experience of a wider "desensitize" suggests that
range of porn... your relationships with
actual human beings changes,
Let's take the question: what does and I wouldn't assume that a
wide exposure to a field of person's porn habits have
art (media?) do to your perception? anything to do with that.
But on the other hand,
Consider movie special effects: they might:
I just saw "Hellboy" on video the
other night, and thought it was NORMAL_PERVERSION
only barely watchable, despite the
fact that it's special effects
make movies I was impressed by as
a kid (e.g. "Jason and the
Argonauts") look really childish.
Have I been "desensitized" by
computer graphics?
Consider the fact that upon first exposure,
someone might think that Simon & Garfunkle
songs are the greatest poetry in the world,
but with wider experience you might think that
Allen Ginsberg is really edgy, and with still
wider experience you might see how Ginsberg's
style is totally Walt Whitman and that
philosophically Blake is so much heavier and
before long nothing but Wallace Stevens will
do it for you.
We do not normallly
call this process
"desensitization".
We tend to think of this as
becoming more "sophisticated".
It might result in becoming Reading a lot of
"jaded" ("less easily political history
impressed"?), but then, you may might produce a
also develop an appreciation for cynical attitude
subtlety, a greater depth of that blunts
understanding. patriotic fervor,
but this is not
necessarily a bad
thing.
Occasionally you hear the line
that that pornography "poisons"
relationships by encouraging
excessively tight standards of
beauty:
But what about movies,
television, fashion
magazines... It can also be argued
that porn is accepting
The idea that porn has of a *wider* range
a *bigger* influence than of body types than most
the straight media seems media: at the very least,
totally crazy. there's a niche market
for porn about any kind
of human (and non-human)
body you can imagine.
In contrast, you'll
notice that while
there's a Teen
An advantage Cosmo, there is no
of the Cosmo-Heavy.
transgressive
dynamic:
You tend to But one hopes, you avoid doing
get interested anything that actually violates
in anything a boundary of safety or ethics.
you're not
supposed to. So the actual dynamic
involves looking for
That limits things forbidden that
the tyranny are forbidden in error.
of the norm.
Or perhaps,
forbidden for
purely symbolic
reasons (to
provide fodder
for safe
transgression?)
CIRCULAR_MOTION
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