My wild side features: wild things blog

10-12-08: PERMALINK

War is sex for Republicans

"Not only has [Miley] Cyrus been photographed wrapped in a sheet looking like she just had sex-she claims she was manipulated by the photographer..."

-- The Pornification Of A Generation A new book traces the migration of porn culture from adult theaters to the mainstream-and asks what that means for kids.

These conservative scare-mongering articles almost always make me wonder if I'm somehow abnormal, for NOT seeing sex in everything around me. Despite being a grown man, and liking women as much as any other fella, so far as I can tell. In this case, it simply never occured to me that Miley Cyrus looked "like she just had sex" in that photo-- until I read it in this article. I run across similar titillating bits by other conservative authors all the time, where they point out sexual innuendo or implications in various shows, films, stories, and photos, which I never noticed any such thing about-- until the conservatives themselves pointed it out to me.

All this talk about sex in media in general seems moot to me, as mainstream TV and film in America today seems more neutered or castrated than at any other point in my life-- and I've been watching TV and films for 50 years now. I feel truly sorry for any straight men who seek to find something alluring in US media today-- for it simply isn't there. Yeah, you might hear all sorts of talk about it, and see models or actresses prancing around in bikinis and lingerie on occasion. But that's it. Even mild sex scenes disappeared from most all TV fare maybe decades ago. If on American TV you see a film today which originally had a sex scene in it, the scene has either been completely cut from the work, or scrambled sufficiently to where it should have been cut instead.

For a while I thought you could buy or rent the original sexy films on DVD to get past the censors. I was wrong. In 2001 when I visited a male friend for the first time in many years, one thing we did was rent DVDs of films we each liked but the other hadn't seen, for one another's enjoyment. I learned he liked Annette Bening, and knew of a movie wherein she'd had quite a lot of sex and nude scenes early in her career, which I'd seen on HBO many years before. So I tracked it down and we played it. And I simply couldn't believe how heavily censored it was. Every one of the sex scenes had been completely removed, leaving one plain old frontal nudity scene. And that one remaining nude scene had Bening's entire body from top of her head to tip of her toes completely blacked out. It didn't even show her face! She was nothing but an utterly black silhouette, speaking. The exact opposite of her original appearance, which I remembered well.

So virtually all the American DVDs I've run across in years since are sufficiently heavily censored sex-wise to pass muster in theocratic Iran. Iran (and much of Europe) might well ban them for reasons of excessive violence-- but not for sex. Since there is none. Maybe those who pay extra for things like HBO or Cinemax or Showtime these days still see some sex in their fare-- I don't know, as I've not been subscribed to those for decades. But even back then, the channels didn't seem worthwhile watching beyond a month or two-- as they'd only have a couple dozen different films a month to show 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 30 days. And most of them you'd already seen on other, FREE channels. So you maybe had three or four interesting and never-seen-before new shows a month (if you were lucky), after which everything else was reruns. It seemed tough to justify so much money for so little extra entertainment. So we dropped the channels. We tried them again a few years later, but the only thing that had changed was, they'd gotten worse. For where originally these extra cost channels were almost commercial free, they'd since became as choked with commercials as any other channel on TV. So we gave up on them a second time, and never looked back again.

And our decision to drop them was based on their inadequate overall new-quality-content-versus-old for the price: if we'd only been considering the new sex-related content they offered, the choice would have been even more stark. For there was very little of that. So there's zero sex on 'free' network and cable TV these days; very little if any on 'premium' TV; and apparently little or none on DVDs, either.

Thank God for the internet!

With the tremendous success conservatives have had in wringing out sex from all other media venues, they're now turning their sights on the internet. Some folks might wonder just what are the conservatives' motives behind their crusade? The conservatives themselves give lots of different reasons-- but for maybe the true, number one aim.

You see, many conservative fortunes and politics these days are rooted in keeping America on a perpetual war footing; keeping defense spending throttles wide open, no matter what. This also necessitates starting new wars wherever possible too, as part of the on-going justification (and to regularly destroy the huge stockpile of built-up armaments, to trigger the 'necessary' manufacture of more). And constantly finding (or creating) new enemies who supposedly could knock us over with a feather if we don't spend $trillions on highly complex and expensive anti-feather gear.

So the puppeteers behind the conservative movement love war. But war requires lots of hate and fear and anger among the populace. If we have enough sex we won't be hateful, fearful, or angry enough for war. Hence, the war against sex as a major pillar of conservative doctrine.

This is also why they so despised the peace advocating 'free love' hippy movement of the 1960s. For that was the closest America ever came yet to realizing the truth about everything, and bringing down the conservative house of perpetual war for the sake of war.

My wild side features: wild things blog

10-12-08: PERMALINK