proud blog

““

Let’s take a peek over at the Tobacco industry, shall we…

In 1998, after years of defending itself — successfully, but expensively
– in the courts against a staggering number of individual and class action
lawsuits, Tobacco finally settled — the industry agreed to pay out about $200 billion over 25 years, with the money slated to fund a number of anti-smoking programs and a $100 million/year marketing
budget.

Boy, they sure did come up with some killer anti-smoking campaigns
— — Remember the one where the guy is dressed up like a giant rat outside the Philip Morris headquarters — he falls to the ground, hacking, coughing, dying — it seems — while dozens of puzzled New Yorker pedestrians walk past… Classic.

And very memorable.

But, "effective"?

I guess that depends on who you ask…

The tension has got to be released, somehow.

[GEAR CHANGE: PORN] I thought about it some more and decided I should, in fact, separate the porn by sexual preferences and orientations on my sites.

Making this gay blog reflects that decision —

It was my original idea to try to “gently force collisions” between, gays, straights and whatevers by putting them all in the same “room” together, by mixing up the porn — and I mean REALLY MIXING up the porn — with like Sean Cody and Tawnee Stone in adjacent gallery wells. But then I thought better of it.

It might make for a good art experiment. But, I think maybe, just maybe [my mind is definitely net yet made up, so chill] but maybe the reason so many people will tell ya they have a problem with porn to your face, when their fingers are still funky from having just used some, is because of Sexual Imagery Saturation.

I’m going to re-visit the question: "How much sex (in which they
were not a direct participant) did people actually see before there was
porn, in the course of a day , a week?

Let’s assume, or better yet, let’s feel the truth of it by instinct — that folks are pairing off as they seem to always have and going into the woods alone together for a reason.

It’s unfortunately gotten linked to a conservative, suppressive sentiment, but privacy may be just what we need more of.

The desire to have privacy for sex may be much older than religion, and operate at a much deeper level.

Maybe things have gotten so messed up for us with sex because it’s harder to "get away into the woods" with a stranger. Maybe we need that. Living in big cities as we do makes it hard to get away for sex without either killing the spontaneity with premeditation or exposing ourselves to the stigma of promiscuity, if we are discovered — you just can’t win. Fuck. This creates pressures inside people, which they should relieve but can’t, and so they become distorted somehow.

Shit, for all we know, the angry anti-porn Bible-thumper might not be so much condemning porn as trying to defend a space of personal privacy for himself with no luck and no clue. Frustrated for the poor quality of the sex he has in his own life, unable to comfortably reach for and explore some line of personal taboo, oppressed by the closeness of other people all around him, forced to divide himself into sexual truth and public impression… Poor sod.

If my little speculation were true, it wouldn’t be hard to guess the effect of super-ubiquitous pornography. On the one hand, it’s like turning up the thermostat in your house — the water in the tub has got to get hotter and hotter to chase after the "orginal feeling of difference" we once felt when we got in for a soak. We have less time to make a longer trip. But then, on the other hand — we do have the PORN itself to help. We can pull down the shades or lock the door, and get just what the doctor ordered — a nice, unadulterated dose of ourselves.

No matter how you slice it, homogeneity in human culture is a lie or a false ideal. We remain interested in the idea of homogenity because, we’re told, we won’t have to worry about fitting in anymore.

Dreamy. Many bite.

But then the rewards of that, for those who have purchased acceptance with conformity, are too thin to live on.

I think perhaps what we need to do is to bring things back a
bit — in the bodyward direction — maybe forget about all this Mars
and Venus bullshit — maybe feel some tension again.

By definition, to think about something is to be uncertain about it. Once upon a time, we were 100% instinct, black and white, our brains a vast array of two-position switches, on/off, run/fuck, kill/die, etc. Purpose-Efficient. Now look at us…

We don’t know shit.

Maybe some amount of separateness based on difference is necessary. Maybe we need cliques, and families and factions and clubs and gangs and countries and Us and Them to preserve a level of tension in the cultural environment, without which something vital would be missing

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it sounds great — a great big bag of M&Ms,with every color in evidence — but every color alone.

Big Achiever Recluses, like Ted Koczsinki, notwithstanding, human beings seem to do their best when in the embrace of a group – and the bigger the group, the bigger the boost to the individual. But, as we all know, belonging to a group is hard work. And it’s all headwork to boot. When the joke you tell during a Monday morning marketing meeting can change the course of your life, I think it’s fair to say we spend a lot of time thinking very intensely about nothing – yes, I’m going to make the argument that a "value" loses all its value when the garish colors of arbitrary subjectivity and whimsy splash messily against the muted sepia tones of the law-abiding mind — lol. Nature made no terrors for us like that.

You might cherish, as I used to, the fact that human beings torment themselves so needlessly. Does pain really make us beautiful? Sure, if the choices are pain or numbness — tie me to the stake and let me feel something for a few minutes!

But, if what the people who are so busy these days condemning pornography are really wanting for is greater personal sexual privacy, it’s easy to see how the pervasive presence of porn might make that difficult in public, but just the thing when they’re all alone. It would explain the mass hypocrisy. Reminds me a bit of the sad plight of HAL9000.

If I am wrong, it would be a rare example of "more and more"
not adding up to less.

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