Anti-Porn Boilerplate

“So he joins the seamy company of countless pornographers and pedophiles, led by Larry “Hustler” Flynt, the paraplegic promoter of “pink” slime, and 80-year-old Hugh “Playboy” Hefner, the poster boy for chemical prosthetics and geriatric depravity. These latter-day pimps – men who market women’s bodies for men’s sexual pleasure – all try to present themselves as defenders of free speech, not the abusers and defamers of freedom that they really are.”

– Pat Boone @ Wingnut Daily

Again we come to realize that, for social conservatives, the opposition to pornography is motivated by similar misogynistic tendencies to those they find in the industry’s promoters. And it’s not just because of the infortuitous slip on the part of Boone in the first sentence, where he reveals just how thoroughly repulsed he is by slimy and icky vaginas. It takes only a moments reflection to see that his real problem is not that women’s bodies are being “marketed” per se, but that they are being marketed to too broad of an audience. Instead of being the private property of a singular man, properly enslaved into the dual role of a reproductive factory and a homemaker, the women in pornography become a commons for the enjoyment of many men. On one level of another, sex is always icky and “immoral” when it lacks the authoritarian direction of upstanding, white, Christian and (preferably) rich males like Boone.

(EDIT: Reading this afterwards has given me the feeling that many people could get the wrong impression from the above, namely that I’m endorsing what I describe pornography as doing. In fact, I’m more neutral on the matter. I don’t see pornography as being any more exploitative or degrading than any other occupation in our authoritarian corporatist social structure, but then again, it’s hardly the blameless enterprise that many of its defenders would argue it is. That is all.)

And it’s funny, because Boone later-on misses the tremendous irony in quoting one individual to support an anti-sex, anti-pornography position:

“Only a moral and virtuous people are capable of freedom; the more corrupt and vicious a society becomes, the more it has need of masters.

Benjamin Franklin

One can understand the affinity Boone feels with a lot of aristocratic males from the 18th. century, who designed a republic specifically to edify an oligarchic structure which would overwhelmingly favor people like them, but someone should probably take him aside and make a serious attempt at communicating the following: Ben Franklin was among the biggest philandering jackasses of the era. Quoting him as an authority here is probably not very advisable.