OK. I promised my commentary on why the blood has to go, but the guns get to stay. (As a civil libertarian, I must say that guns scare the fuck out of me, but I support your right to own them. And particularly since the righties are usually armed...)
We all know that the right wing's favorite right off the Bill is the second one, the right to bear arms. I mean, Ashcroft pissed all over the rest of those rights, but he sure as hell upheld the rights of nutjobs and not-so-nutty-jobs to own firearms.
But I'm talking on a more psychoanalytic level, here. I'm talking about how it's OK for the women on this site to wield a phallic symbol (gun) and wave it around, but the sight of a bit of blood on a sword, let alone a girl literally bathed in blood (Amina, I loved that set, and I'm going to have to buy the T-shirt now) is terrifying. There's a fabulous anti-war poster out there somewhere that reads "War is Menstrual Envy," and sometimes I think they're not far off the mark. Or you could refer to that lovely joke, "Don't trust anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn't die."
Of course, the phallic symbol is OK when it's just one girl and the fetishized weapon. However, in a few sets that were removed, there's a girl brandishing a phallic symbol at another girl, and that's definitely not OK. (Apnea and Benni's "Water" set, anyone?)
As far as bondage, I can't guess at why that's so obscene, unless it's pure paternalism--Must not think that women could possibly consent to being tied up, or even LIKE it, oh no....anyone who wants to overanalyze that at me is welcome to.
Puritanism is an interesting--I can't really call it an instinct, though it does seem sometimes to be a gut reaction. I pride myself on not being a prude, but I can cite interesting facts from my past that lead me to think that I too have fetishized "purity." The one ex-boyfriend that I could never quite get over (until recently, but that's another story) was the one that, for one reason or another, no matter how many times we'd get back together, I never got around to having sex with. One guy, a notorious New Orleans womanizer, chased me for months despite my lack of interest in his past conquests or pretty much anything else. He told me later that the one night he spent with me curled up in bed without sex meant more to him than most of the sex he'd had (I wanted to ask him why the fuck he spent so much time chasing it, then, but you know...) There's a weird tendency to the virgin-whore dichotomy from both sexes--I've overvalued the non-sexual part of relationships just as much as guys have with me.
I see it manifest on SG all the time. There's a need to denigrate "porn" and make it clear that SG is "art," or that they're here for the community! or to scorn a certain type of girl (You know, blonde, fake tits, blah blah blah) and talk about how "real" the SG girls are. It's all just another form of the virgin-whore complex, guys. Sorry.
Well, as the War on Porn will show us and as I'm sure others have noted: the only line that it's safe to draw is between consent and lack thereof.
If you start saying "OK, well this kind of porn is bad, but this kind is good," then someone else who doesn't like type B can say "no, that's bad too," and then you know where it goes from there.
If spankings and blood are obscene despite the consent of those involved, who's to say what else isn't? As the lovely DebraJean put it once, "Women are not babies." We don't need to be told what is acceptable for us to do or take pleasure in, as long as it's not hurting anyone else.
And by hurt, I mean seriously, not some trumped-up charges of "emotional distress" that Larry Flynt successfully fought to the Supreme Court. I've been in bars where someone put on a porn tape that I was disgusted by. So I left.
I've engaged in kink that would make most people squirm. At the same time, there are things that turn me right off, even gross me out. Some of these opinions have changed. But this is not a debate about taste. It's about what consenting adults have a right to do.
This administration's out to fight all types of non-reproductive sex. Gay and lesbian sex, sex by single women, and hell, even the right of married women to use birth control all have come under attack. The war on porn is only the most recent, and frankly, even though I've devoted plenty of journal space that I could be using to detail the cute things that J. said when he called to pontificating on the subject of our right to porn, I'm kind of irritated that only now, when the attacks hit closer to home, are we all getting rabid about it.
(I don't know what most of the people who read this journal have done about it, so I'm not trying to accuse.)
On a lighter note: I'll be out of town for the next two weeks getting some much-needed me time. I'll check in when I can.
We all know that the right wing's favorite right off the Bill is the second one, the right to bear arms. I mean, Ashcroft pissed all over the rest of those rights, but he sure as hell upheld the rights of nutjobs and not-so-nutty-jobs to own firearms.
But I'm talking on a more psychoanalytic level, here. I'm talking about how it's OK for the women on this site to wield a phallic symbol (gun) and wave it around, but the sight of a bit of blood on a sword, let alone a girl literally bathed in blood (Amina, I loved that set, and I'm going to have to buy the T-shirt now) is terrifying. There's a fabulous anti-war poster out there somewhere that reads "War is Menstrual Envy," and sometimes I think they're not far off the mark. Or you could refer to that lovely joke, "Don't trust anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn't die."
Of course, the phallic symbol is OK when it's just one girl and the fetishized weapon. However, in a few sets that were removed, there's a girl brandishing a phallic symbol at another girl, and that's definitely not OK. (Apnea and Benni's "Water" set, anyone?)
As far as bondage, I can't guess at why that's so obscene, unless it's pure paternalism--Must not think that women could possibly consent to being tied up, or even LIKE it, oh no....anyone who wants to overanalyze that at me is welcome to.
Puritanism is an interesting--I can't really call it an instinct, though it does seem sometimes to be a gut reaction. I pride myself on not being a prude, but I can cite interesting facts from my past that lead me to think that I too have fetishized "purity." The one ex-boyfriend that I could never quite get over (until recently, but that's another story) was the one that, for one reason or another, no matter how many times we'd get back together, I never got around to having sex with. One guy, a notorious New Orleans womanizer, chased me for months despite my lack of interest in his past conquests or pretty much anything else. He told me later that the one night he spent with me curled up in bed without sex meant more to him than most of the sex he'd had (I wanted to ask him why the fuck he spent so much time chasing it, then, but you know...) There's a weird tendency to the virgin-whore dichotomy from both sexes--I've overvalued the non-sexual part of relationships just as much as guys have with me.
I see it manifest on SG all the time. There's a need to denigrate "porn" and make it clear that SG is "art," or that they're here for the community! or to scorn a certain type of girl (You know, blonde, fake tits, blah blah blah) and talk about how "real" the SG girls are. It's all just another form of the virgin-whore complex, guys. Sorry.
Well, as the War on Porn will show us and as I'm sure others have noted: the only line that it's safe to draw is between consent and lack thereof.
If you start saying "OK, well this kind of porn is bad, but this kind is good," then someone else who doesn't like type B can say "no, that's bad too," and then you know where it goes from there.
If spankings and blood are obscene despite the consent of those involved, who's to say what else isn't? As the lovely DebraJean put it once, "Women are not babies." We don't need to be told what is acceptable for us to do or take pleasure in, as long as it's not hurting anyone else.
And by hurt, I mean seriously, not some trumped-up charges of "emotional distress" that Larry Flynt successfully fought to the Supreme Court. I've been in bars where someone put on a porn tape that I was disgusted by. So I left.
I've engaged in kink that would make most people squirm. At the same time, there are things that turn me right off, even gross me out. Some of these opinions have changed. But this is not a debate about taste. It's about what consenting adults have a right to do.
This administration's out to fight all types of non-reproductive sex. Gay and lesbian sex, sex by single women, and hell, even the right of married women to use birth control all have come under attack. The war on porn is only the most recent, and frankly, even though I've devoted plenty of journal space that I could be using to detail the cute things that J. said when he called to pontificating on the subject of our right to porn, I'm kind of irritated that only now, when the attacks hit closer to home, are we all getting rabid about it.
(I don't know what most of the people who read this journal have done about it, so I'm not trying to accuse.)
On a lighter note: I'll be out of town for the next two weeks getting some much-needed me time. I'll check in when I can.
VIEW 19 of 19 COMMENTS
I talk lots of shit, and even got my red-state national gaurd friend to quiet himself about Iraq (it's funny how the truth can work!), but I've not done a goddamn thing. So I should take what's come to me like a man and do what can be done to prevent some of my other rights from eroding.