Mark Morford, of course, my all-time favourite non-porn writer (though he does occasionally write for Nerve) – and have I mentioned how much I want to marry him? – has disgorged a wonderful rant on the GOP’s latest attempt to get everyone in the missionary position once a year whether they need it or not. Protection from Pornography Week (not to be confused with Marriage Protection Week, which he sounded off about a few weeks ago) is a wonderful steaming rant about the ridiculousness:
After all, porn ruins families. And communities. And children. And puppies. And the upholstery. This is the government line. This is what they would like you to believe. This is why they invented Protection from Pornography Week. Because you need to know They Care. They are on guard. Because you, as always, are under attack.
Here is the message: Despite how porn is a multibillion-dollar, record-breaking, insanely popular, widely accepted, gigglingly discussed, generally harmless, often exceedingly sexy and fun and unstoppable force of skin and fake orgasm and cheesy background music and money shots and thrust thrust thrust, it doesn’t really matter. It is pure evil, they say. And it’s coming for your children.
Unless, you know, it’s not. Unless porn remains merely that beloved slippery devil so reviled by every sanctimonious group in modern history, that final frontier of bogus moralism and excessive alarmism and puffed-chest indignation and oh my God who pray who will save the children.
I love this man. He gives me such hope that the world will not go to hell in a GOP-endorsed, deeply repressed and joyless handbasket.
High fives and praises for him! 😉
Here’s a related link: Protection from Crappy Pornography Week.
Dammit. No html allowed I guess.
Here’s the URL: http://www.hanneblank.com/main/protectionweek.htm
The more I think about erotica (pornography with the lights turned low), the less it seems to be dangerous. What can possibly harm us when we look at pictures of nude women or read about male fantasies? Such things are certainly not in the same league as the blood and horror on the shelves of the nation’s video stores. So I think about sex whenever I look at a woman – well, Honey, I did that anyway. I just wasn’t as clever at it when you finally tried me (it would be much more worth your while now!) Thinking about sex is what people do, men and women. It’s just that, like artists, people who are open to sexual ideas and really think about them, see life in brighter colours.
Oh – and we have a word in Australia for the Anti-fun Brigade. They’re called wowsers, which sounds about right.