Reply #71: While he is a male

[Fovea]

Justice Potter Stewart says something both cogent and vexing when he says "I know it when I see it."

Vexing because it admits that a justice of the SCOTUS cannot define porn. This subjectivity is the root of this hydra.

Certainly, photos of lynching, child abuse, etc are not enjoyable to healthy individuals. But when compiling history, say of the lynchings in Omaha in 1919, that same photo might be very illuminating.


Also, I try not to be normative about human sexuality unless it is pathological. Sure, there is an awful lot of sick stuff out there. But that is because our society struggles to find a healthy way to express sexuality in a punitively normative church/media/state environment. Our cultural neurosis on sex allowed us to do essentially nothing for the initial half decade of the AIDs epidemic out of some misplaced shadenfreude regarding the sexual other. The tone and tenor of this discussion has shown that the ability to discuss sexuality without is being about the participant's aesthetics rather than discourse about a very complex subect in an objective way.

I am just saying a lot of people who are very worked up about porn/erotica (two spots on the continuum between undeniable depravity and petty flirtation) are just as worked up about almost any sexual expression. Here I refer to the 'all penetration is rape' rhetoric of folks who mimic Lysistrata, without the inflatable penii, or other visible signs of humor.

The first diagnostic sign of neurosis rather than rational concern is that when someone has to ignore a post that is not adopting this Dwarkinian view of sexual expression.


I don't waste time usually spreading my bona fides, but trust me, as a Wiccan priest of thirty plus years, who has done handfastings and pastoral counseling for couples of all stripes, I recognize that there is such a thing as abusive, pathological sex. But for every unambiguous example of unacceptable behavior there are several less egregious, harder to define as unambiguously unacceptable.