Should authors avoid writing about a subject because a minority might emulate it?

[xssve]

The corset represents control and conformity to a masculine ideal of feminine beauty in the Master Narrative - but it also represent the Armour of Diana - it virginalizes the wearer without disempowering her - it gives her power in her own right, including power over men - the Domina in a corset is not Aphrodite bound, she is Hera unleashed.

 

[Epmd607]

The corset represents control and conformity to a masculine ideal of feminine beauty in the Master Narrative - but it also represent the Armour of Diana - it virginalizes the wearer without disempowering her - it gives her power in her own right, including power over men - the Domina in a corset is not Aphrodite bound, she is Hera unleashed.

It only gives her the illusion of power though, a plastic power. The Dionysian power of a woman lies outside of performance, fetish, leather, erotica, and sex games.

 

[xssve]

True, in the Dionysian sense, the girdle symbolizes and fetishizes that power.

From Wikipedia: Girdle, Girdle in Literature:

In literature, girdles are often portrayed as magical, giving power and strength if worn by men, and protection if worn by women. Many scriptures in the Bible point to the use of a girdle as a means of protection. Ishtar, a Babylonian Goddess, wore a fertility girdle, which, when it was removed, rendered the Universe barren. Hercules wrestled with the Amazon queen for her girdle in his Greek myth. Aphrodite and Venus also wore girdles associated with lechery in later poetry.[1]

For men a girdle was often used to hold weapons. It also gave them freedom to move in a fight, unlike other types of clothing. both of these are thought to carry the connection of power to the man's girdle in literature. For example, Odysseus wears a girdle which allows him to swim for three days straight, and a girdle worn by Thor doubles his strength.[1]

Later on, for women, the girdle became a sign of virginity, and was often considered to have magical properties. Monsters and all types of evil are recorded as being subdued by girdles in literature, a famous one being the dragon slain by Saint George. Marriage ceremonies continued this tradition of girdles symbolizing virginity by having the husband take the wife's girdle, and prostitutes were forbidden to wear them by law in historic France. Often in literature, women are portrayed as safe from sexual or other attack when wearing a girdle, but suddenly vulnerable if it is missing or stolen.[1]

 

[xssve]

One more - check out the shirtdress in this article - very Derelicté to my eye, although it's touted as Eco-Friendly, which is a current fashion trend, recycling.

They don't all look quite so Dickensian.

 

[Epmd607]

True, in the Dionysian sense, the girdle symbolizes and fetishizes that power.

From Wikipedia: Girdle, Girdle in Literature:

"The Golden Girdle of Gaea is a fictional object depicted in the DC Comics book Wonder Woman. It is based on the mythological girdle stolen by Heracles as part of his Twelve Labors."

Wonder Woman doesn't know that she has more power naked, even if it's just lesbo power.

 

[Stella_Omega]

It only gives her the illusion of power though, a plastic power. The Dionysian power of a woman lies outside of performance, fetish, leather, erotica, and sex games.

I'm getting a kick out of you two men arguing about Women's power

 

[xssve]

Who would know more about it?

 

[Epmd607]

I'm getting a kick out of you two men arguing about Women's power

I was talking about Wonder Woman the whole time. She has a golden lasso that was worn by Antiope. The invisible jet has no such godly lineage I'm afraid.

 

[Verdad]

This thread is kind of confused, but what the hell, I couldn't resist and I made a list of some common nonsense and mythology, most of which, if not all, can be found on this thread. Hope no one gets too incensed. It was kinda fun to write, anyhow.


"Woe is us, for our repressed society persecutes porn." Huh? Porn is neither illegal nor, lord knows, hard to obtain.

"If not persecuted, porn is condemned." False. Excepting Bible thumpers and similar fringe characters, public criticism of porn is rare and swiftly rejected as puritanical. The zeitgeist is, if anything, biased in favor of porn.

"If everything's so peachy, how come I can't talk about porn to just anyone?" Sex, and by extension porn, aren't on par with weather as conversational gambits. You're just going to have to save them for consenting company.

"Our pseudonymity here goes to show we're ashamed of our porn forays." Unless we just like to decide with whom we want to share a certain level of intimacy and with whom not.

"Well, at least by indulging in porn, we're breaking the rules and indulging in a liberating non-conformism." Together with everyone else on the planet. What do you think is the lowest common denominator for all internet users? Kabuki theater? Medieval warfare?

"Porn is a progressive force in our society." Especially the run-of-the-mill images of women as smiling fuck-holes.

"But some people snigger when I say I write porn—that's how repressed they are." On the other hand, there might be something inherently snigger-worthy about porn.

"Are you making fun of erotic literature? Are you saying sex has no place in serious writing?" Nope. I'm making fun of porn, smut, stroke. The clichéd stuff we read and write solely to get off. Is anything wrong with that? Not at all. But if you think it's a matter of puritanism that no one's handing out Pulitzer's for it, you're due a reality check.

"Hey, you've got a point there! Why is porn so clichéd? It's because all you fuckers have no balls and no imagination, isn't it?" Then again, it might be because it is porn. The stuff that's created with the sole imperative of getting you off, remember? You want boundary pushing? Try lit-er-at-ure.

"In my porn, I'm going to have nastier gangbangs and younger participants. That's going to push the boundaries and make it interesting!" The classical porn fallacy, exemplified in de Sade. If you're not snoring by day 3 of Sodom, you're not human.

"Say what you want, but some of my friends do disapprove of porn." And that is how they feel about it. What do you want, a guarantee that no one will ever disagree with you?

"But people who complain about porn are just being backward!" Possibly. And possibly you're just trying to invalidate any criticism because it's in your interest to do so. If no one said anything negative about porn, its power to enforce compliance would be that much more unfettered.

"Oh, come off it! Porn doesn't make men go out and rape!" True. If even it did, it would be practically impossible to prove. Only the clueless stick to that argument.

"Well, there you go: Porn doesn't make men go out and rape, ergo, porn has no influence at all." Your logic is wanting.

"You said yourself how clichéd porn is. It influences nothing. It's fantasy." Yep, and so is all of art and a good deal of reporting. We don't need to go around the bush with causality and whether porn shapes your fantasies or your fantasies shape porn. Your fantasies today are on the screen tomorrow—male fantasies by and large, I might add—and the day after, they've become the norm. Where do you think norms come from anyhow? Carried down by Moses from Mt. Sinai?

"I know everything about norms. I know everything about propaganda. I know how reality is presented in a certain way so it looks like the only possible way. It just doesn't apply to porn." Oh? What puts porn in the separate category from everything else one is exposed to in one's life? Heck, suppose porn actually doesn't lead to anything. Is there still something to say about it in its own right? Does it say something about our culture, as a mirror, as a mass phenomenon, as a gouge?

"Oh come on now. Porn is just wanking. Insignificant." And work is just working, writing poetry is just writing poetry, and so on. It's all you, every minute of it. If you do x many hours of something a week, you're a guy who does x many hours of something a week. So what, you say? So nothing. It's none of my business how much of what you do. I'm just making a point.

"What is it to you anyhow? Things are the way things are." True. Doesn't mean they're perfect and beyond criticism. Porn is a Foucauldian source of power par excellence, and I'm not shutting up about it just because it's not fashionable to say so. I'm not raving against porn, least of all the written kind, and I'm not taking women's side only, either. It just does well to everyone to think about what's handed down to them, through porn as through anything else.

 

[Epmd607]

"You said yourself how clichéd porn is. It influences nothing. It's fantasy." Yep, and so is all of art and a good deal of reporting. We don't need to go around the bush with causality and whether porn shapes your fantasies or your fantasies shape porn. Your fantasies today are on the screen tomorrow—male fantasies by and large, I might add—and the day after, they've become the norm. Where do you think norms come from anyhow? Carried down by Moses from Mt. Sinai?

"I know everything about norms. I know everything about propaganda. I know how reality is presented in a certain way so it looks like the only possible way. It just doesn't apply to porn." Oh? What puts porn in the separate category from everything else one is exposed to in one's life? Heck, suppose porn actually doesn't lead to anything. Is there still something to say about it in its own right? Does it say something about our culture, as a mirror, as a mass phenomenon, as a gouge?
.....


By not referring to the quoted material, by creating your own paraphrased quotes and responding to those -- you're basically just being super duper lazy, and there's no reason why anyone should respond to your points.

 

[FallingToFly]

My .02:

I am a writer, not a therapist. I have no guilt or shame or second thoughts about what I write or how it affects the reader. I love hatemail as much as I love fanmail.

Then again, my full-time job is basically in porn, and twisted, kinky, fetish-porn at that. Do I worry that someone is going to watch my video work, see me bound, gagged, tortured and sexually used and go out and try it with his next girlfriend or her next boyfriend? Nope, because if they were watching it in the first place, they were already thinking about it, and it was already hardwired into their personality.

Basically, people act on their natures, not on on their influences. I grew up in the white-trash, Bible-thumping, God made Adama and Eve not Adam and Steve part of Florida- and I came out as a articulate, educated, bisexual, kinky, polyamorous fetish model and performer who writes porn on the side. Had nothing to do with my environment- there was nothing LIKE that in my environment- I went seeking for the things that made me tick- and I found them. The same is true of anyone else- those who want it badly enough will find it.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

It's not easy forming and following a thread of reasoning on a message board, but I still have a few things I'm curious about in terms of your view of art and erotic stories.

The reason I said passive vs. active was to make a distinction between value vs. no-value experiences. No-value(jacking off) I just mean the brief pleasure you get from hearing a song, reading a story on literotica. The active and valuable would be me trying to learn the style of guitar, the no-value would be me just sitting and listening to the music. We are a culture of sitting and watching, listening. People make arguments for reading being active and television being passive, but I think they're both stupendously passive for most people.

I think this is the source of most of our disagreement: our difference in what we mean when we say that something "affects" or "influences" someone. You take a more narrow and specific view of what that means than I do. I suppose you might even be Behaviorist here, and say that something doesn't "affect" a person unless it has an observable effect on their behavior. That's a perfectly valid definition, but it's not definition I use, or the way I think of things.

To me there are no valueless activities. Everything we do and experience affects us and influences us to some extent. I think of the mind as like an ice berg, with 9/10's of it underwater, comprising snippets of mood and impressions and associations, and all sorts of subconscious bric-a-brac. That's where the information on beating off or watching baseball or whatever ends up, in that big wad of undifferentiated emotion and understanding and assumptions that form the foundation of the platform from which we do most of our thinking and judging.

Certainly some things are more important than others in shaping us, but everything has an effect. That's not to say that reading prn makes one want to emulate it, not by any means, but it has some sort of effect. You're a slightly different person for having spent an hour reading incest stories than you would have been had you spent that time watching a baseball game.

Does it create a change in behavior? Most probably not, and that's probably the critical parameter in this discussion, but it still has an effect.

I guess my question would be: since you believe you have an artistic role in shaping culture(however small it may be) what is that role and what are your personal responsibilities?

Well, that's what this whole discussion is about.

Personally, I don't think artists have any responsibility to the culture, because the artist's job is to interpret life and discover the hidden meaning of things (amongst other things), not the conscious espousal of values. That's the moralist's job. Art that espouses values is propaganda, not art.

At the same time, it's just about impossible to write an erotic story and not promote certain values, at least incidentally. We all do it, but the values we promote are so familiar to us that we rarely notice them. For me, I'm guilty of assuming that sex is an especially rich and meaningful experience that can change a person's life, which is certainly my own value judgment and very probably not true at all for most people.

I'm also guilty of promoting the idea of social equality between people of different genders, sexual orientations and ethnic backgrounds. I take this for granted, although it's actually a value judgment. Anyhow, a number of people have objected to the way I portray women, as often more passive and sexually confused than my men, so there's a little value conflict there.

I don't find incest erotic and so I don't write incest, which I guess is a value judgment of a sort. i also have people sexing it up without much emotional or physical consequences, which is both a value judgment and a bit of sexual propaganda.

Probably the best example is that I generally stay away from abject sex: heavy degradation and humiliation, waste-play, genital torture. Here's a subject where I think that, if enough people were writing about it (and writing well), you might observe some actual changes in mass behavior.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

This thread is kind of confused, but what the hell, I couldn't resist and I made a list of some common nonsense and mythology, most of which, if not all, can be found on this thread. Hope no one gets too incensed. It was kinda fun to write, anyhow.


"Woe is us, for our repressed society persecutes porn." Huh? Porn is neither illegal nor, lord knows, hard to obtain.

"If not persecuted, porn is condemned." False. Excepting Bible thumpers and similar fringe characters, public criticism of porn is rare and swiftly rejected as puritanical. The zeitgeist is, if anything, biased in favor of porn.

"If everything's so peachy, how come I can't talk about porn to just anyone?" Sex, and by extension porn, aren't on par with weather as conversational gambits. You're just going to have to save them for consenting company.

"Our pseudonymity here goes to show we're ashamed of our porn forays." Unless we just like to decide with whom we want to share a certain level of intimacy and with whom not.

"Well, at least by indulging in porn, we're breaking the rules and indulging in a liberating non-conformism." Together with everyone else on the planet. What do you think is the lowest common denominator for all internet users? Kabuki theater? Medieval warfare?

"Porn is a progressive force in our society." Especially the run-of-the-mill images of women as smiling fuck-holes.

"But some people snigger when I say I write porn—that's how repressed they are." On the other hand, there might be something inherently snigger-worthy about porn.

"Are you making fun of erotic literature? Are you saying sex has no place in serious writing?" Nope. I'm making fun of porn, smut, stroke. The clichéd stuff we read and write solely to get off. Is anything wrong with that? Not at all. But if you think it's a matter of puritanism that no one's handing out Pulitzer's for it, you're due a reality check.

"Hey, you've got a point there! Why is porn so clichéd? It's because all you fuckers have no balls and no imagination, isn't it?" Then again, it might be because it is porn. The stuff that's created with the sole imperative of getting you off, remember? You want boundary pushing? Try lit-er-at-ure.

"In my porn, I'm going to have nastier gangbangs and younger participants. That's going to push the boundaries and make it interesting!" The classical porn fallacy, exemplified in de Sade. If you're not snoring by day 3 of Sodom, you're not human.

"Say what you want, but some of my friends do disapprove of porn." And that is how they feel about it. What do you want, a guarantee that no one will ever disagree with you?

"But people who complain about porn are just being backward!" Possibly. And possibly you're just trying to invalidate any criticism because it's in your interest to do so. If no one said anything negative about porn, its power to enforce compliance would be that much more unfettered.

"Oh, come off it! Porn doesn't make men go out and rape!" True. If even it did, it would be practically impossible to prove. Only the clueless stick to that argument.

"Well, there you go: Porn doesn't make men go out and rape, ergo, porn has no influence at all." Your logic is wanting.

"You said yourself how clichéd porn is. It influences nothing. It's fantasy." Yep, and so is all of art and a good deal of reporting. We don't need to go around the bush with causality and whether porn shapes your fantasies or your fantasies shape porn. Your fantasies today are on the screen tomorrow—male fantasies by and large, I might add—and the day after, they've become the norm. Where do you think norms come from anyhow? Carried down by Moses from Mt. Sinai?

"I know everything about norms. I know everything about propaganda. I know how reality is presented in a certain way so it looks like the only possible way. It just doesn't apply to porn." Oh? What puts porn in the separate category from everything else one is exposed to in one's life? Heck, suppose porn actually doesn't lead to anything. Is there still something to say about it in its own right? Does it say something about our culture, as a mirror, as a mass phenomenon, as a gouge?

"Oh come on now. Porn is just wanking. Insignificant." And work is just working, writing poetry is just writing poetry, and so on. It's all you, every minute of it. If you do x many hours of something a week, you're a guy who does x many hours of something a week. So what, you say? So nothing. It's none of my business how much of what you do. I'm just making a point.

"What is it to you anyhow? Things are the way things are." True. Doesn't mean they're perfect and beyond criticism. Porn is a Foucauldian source of power par excellence, and I'm not shutting up about it just because it's not fashionable to say so. I'm not raving against porn, least of all the written kind, and I'm not taking women's side only, either. It just does well to everyone to think about what's handed down to them, through porn as through anything else.

Per usual, VERDAD confuses autumn colors with its leaves, confuses shadow with motion, and thinks pain is in the knife.

 

[Epmd607]

I think this is the source of most of our disagreement: our difference in what we mean when we say that something "affects" or "influences" someone. You take a more narrow and specific view of what that means than I do. I suppose you might even be Behaviorist here, and say that something doesn't "affect" a person unless it has an observable effect on their behavior. That's a perfectly valid definition, but it's not definition I use, or the way I think of things.

To me there are no valueless activities. Everything we do and experience affects us and influences us to some extent. I think of the mind as like an ice berg, with 9/10's of it underwater, comprising snippets of mood and impressions and associations, and all sorts of subconscious bric-a-brac. That's where the information on beating off or watching baseball or whatever ends up, in that big wad of undifferentiated emotion and understanding and assumptions that form the foundation of the platform from which we do most of our thinking and judging.

Certainly some things are more important than others in shaping us, but everything has an effect. That's not to say that reading prn makes one want to emulate it, not by any means, but it has some sort of effect. You're a slightly different person for having spent an hour reading incest stories than you would have been had you spent that time watching a baseball game.

Does it create a change in behavior? Most probably not, and that's probably the critical parameter in this discussion, but it still has an effect.





Well, that's what this whole discussion is about.

Personally, I don't think artists have any responsibility to the culture, because the artist's job is to interpret life and discover the hidden meaning of things (amongst other things), not the conscious espousal of values. That's the moralist's job. Art that espouses values is propaganda, not art.

At the same time, it's just about impossible to write an erotic story and not promote certain values, at least incidentally. We all do it, but the values we promote are so familiar to us that we rarely notice them. For me, I'm guilty of assuming that sex is an especially rich and meaningful experience that can change a person's life, which is certainly my own value judgment and very probably not true at all for most people.

I'm also guilty of promoting the idea of social equality between people of different genders, sexual orientations and ethnic backgrounds. I take this for granted, although it's actually a value judgment. Anyhow, a number of people have objected to the way I portray women, as often more passive and sexually confused than my men, so there's a little value conflict there.

I don't find incest erotic and so I don't write incest, which I guess is a value judgment of a sort. i also have people sexing it up without much emotional or physical consequences, which is both a value judgment and a bit of sexual propaganda.

Probably the best example is that I generally stay away from abject sex: heavy degradation and humiliation, waste-play, genital torture. Here's a subject where I think that, if enough people were writing about it (and writing well), you might observe some actual changes in mass behavior.

I'm pretty sure most writers don't avoid writing about something because they're afraid someone might emulate what's going on in the story. However, self-censorship for personal reasons has existed forever. Do you avoid writing about something you're interested in just because you don't want to be perceived as someone who writes this or that kind of story? I guess we'd have to find a popular porn writer who writes about something that's more about sexual humiliation than erotica to get at the emulation question better. I think the question is easily answered, I think it was answered well in the last thread that LoveIsAllYouNeed started. Humiliation/degradation fiction/pornography doesn't lead people to perform such acts. Just like Blowin in the Wind doesn't lead people to protest a war.

 

[Epmd607]

Per usual, VERDAD confuses autumn colors with its leaves, confuses shadow with motion, and thinks pain is in the knife.

His post made me chuckle, I imagined him sitting at his computer and hitting 'Submit Reply' with the mentality that he'd just solved all the problems of philosophy. Like Verdad is finishing the first draft of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in a trench during the First World War, sure he's solved all the important problems since Descartes. Except it would be more like Alfred Baeumler misquoting and mischaracterizing Nietzsche for Nazi purposes. Thank god Heidegger the Nazi saved Nietzsche. Shout out to Heidegger for having the slightest shred of decency. Not calling you a Nazi, Verdad.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

His post made me chuckle, I imagined him sitting at his computer and hitting 'Submit Reply' with the mentality that he'd just solved all the problems of philosophy. Like Verdad is finishing the first draft of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in a trench during the First World War, sure he's solved all the important problems since Descartes. Except it would be more like Alfred Baeumler misquoting and mischaracterizing Nietzsche for Nazi purposes. Thank god Heidegger the Nazi saved Nietzsche. Shout out to Heidegger for having the slightest shred of decency. Not calling you a Nazi, Verdad.

I'n excavating wonders undreampt of in VERDAD's philosophy-carnival-Rocky Horror Picture Show..

 

[xssve]

Blackstone comes from a world that decries porn, Verdad, and fetishizes the Bible. Porn is still Taboo in India, the culture that practically invented it - the Tantric sculptures have been nothing but a tourist attraction for centuries, and this is where they still throw widows on the pyre.

A homegrown porn industry is just beginning to emerge in India, if you wanted to conduct a study on it's effects, that would be a good place.

Here's a few links.

FROM SACRED SERVANT TO PROFANE PROSTITUTE (A History of the Changing Legal Status of the Devadasis in India, 1857-1947)

PREPARING FOR CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: INDIAN SEX WORKERS AND THE LAW

PROSTITUTION RESOURCES

A BBC article from the last page, dated 1998 claims a doubling of child prostitution - I'm curious about to what extent that is the result of the strong Dollar at that time - as you know strong currencies make for favorable exchange rates when traveling abroad, meaning tourism tends to increase in countries with strong currencies, particularly to countries with weaker ones.

Pornography, a word that is synonymous with sin in our society. To understand its present relevance, we need to delve into certain aspects of its form. We begin with its meaning. It stems from a Greek word meaning ‘writing about prostitutes’. It originated in Europe in the early 17th century when science was taking the tumultuous precedence on religion, ideas of contraception and conception were capturing minds and subversive literature was surfacing. In Pagan culture, the beauty of sex was depicted via carvings and paintings. Erotic literature had a place in the mainstream. But, erotica is quite different from pornography. Erotica has an aesthetic purity, while pornography is purely mechanical and commercial.

http://www.merinews.com/article/impact-of-the-porn-industry-on-present-day-india/125692.shtml

And finally, Indian Govt. Bans SavitaBhabhi, the Porn Cartoon Site?

China still does not allow it, although apparently, they are making most of the money from it.

 

[xssve]

I understand and mostly agree with your criticisms Verdad, but in this instance, I think the free market will eventually prevail.

There's always going to be a demographic of teenage wannabe nihilists and Devil Worshipers, that's what teenagers do, and they're going to eat up the extreme stuff - everybody else likes happy endings.

Even the modern novel, with it's themes of alienation and ennui, are mostly written for critics: the bestseller list is full of books with happy endings, hand a Hollywood exec a script with a depressing ending, they'll hand it back to you and tell you to write a happy one - because.... people like happy endings!

 

[xssve]

Hmmm... I take back what I said about China - the Chinese are fucking weird.

Then again, it might a lack of porn that leads to such lapses in taste.

 

[xssve]

Here's one: India: The rape kingdom!

India is well on its way to being the rape capital of the world. With most offenders taking solace in the idea that they can get away with it, there seems no solution in sight to the problem at the moment.

The author blames patriarchial expectations, amicus would blame liberals and feminists - sump'm goin' on.

 

[xssve]

And, some good news - I'd call it good, interesting anyway: New Delhi's 'eunuchs' forge lives in conservative nation

Say "hijras," and residents and shop owners at New Delhi's Beri Wala Bagh will give quick directions to houses where India's so-called third gender -- intersex people and eunuchs -- live together in well-kept homes intermingled with businesses and temples.

Intersexual refers to a variety of conditions where there is a discrepancy between a person's external and internal genitals.

On Friday, the groups won a longtime campaign to be listed as "others" instead of male or female, on voting forms. This was seen by many as a way to acknowledge a separate, unique identity.

Fascinating.

 

[oggbashan]

True, in the Dionysian sense, the girdle symbolizes and fetishizes that power.

From Wikipedia: Girdle, Girdle in Literature:

The older meaning of girdle was a belt, usually long and thin.(Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream "I'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes") It was nothing like a corset.

Did men wear gun girdles in the Wild West?

Og

 

[Verdad]

I'll admit to a perverse little impulse as I wrote that post. I never do that, usually—post just to see if someone gets annoyed—but hey, you only live once.

Here's the thing, though: I'm not as hot about porn as it sounds, and especially not after the first five hundred discussions. It's the amount of rationalizations surrounding the subject that still gets me squirming, though, and so I get a need to poke at them.

On the one hand, there's a sing-halleluiah-for porn mentality, and I naturally fall into considering porn's not so liberating effects. That's not to say I see only the negatives, but when it becomes near forbidden to say anything but "It's great!" I can't resist. It usually befalls Xssve to counter with the positives, and he does it well.

But on the other hand, and that's even more interesting to me, there's this oft-repeated idea that porn exists in some kind of a bubble that separates it from all other cultural experience, and it just baffles me. Sometimes it goes so far as to reject all fiction as a factor in forming our ideas about the world, and sometimes porn is given this special status.

Perhaps we should do this the other way round, though, so instead of the deniers frothing when any influence is proposed, they should come up with their own suggestions about the influence of porn on reality, unless they're really serious about there being none.

 

[Epmd607]

The older meaning of girdle was a belt, usually long and thin.(Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream "I'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes") It was nothing like a corset.

Did men wear gun girdles in the Wild West?

Og

Wonder Woman had a Golden Lasso that was worn as a girdle/belt by a goddess. In America I think the distinction has always been belt vs. girdle, never belt = girdle. I think men wore girdles underclothes and belts overclothes to sign the Constitution. I think 20th century gangsters called things girdles that they wore(they were girdles that held guns and knives and manly stuff) but they also wore belts for their trousers.

Haha, wait, I think I remember a part of combat uniform once in a while referred to as a 'girdle'... wow, forgot about that. 10th Mountain, put on yer girdles, pick up your rucks and follow me, corset-wearing infantry.

 

[Epmd607]

Perhaps we should do this the other way round, though, so instead of the deniers frothing when any influence is pointed out, they should demonstrate how there's none.

I don't think you get to decide how the argument is run. Especially since you think someone's said that no fiction/erotica/pornography/art has any influence on culture or individuals. If you followed any of the argument you'd get that. The influence of pornography on our culture has yet to be pointed out. The distinction was made in the very beginning. We're talking about possible negative impact of art/pornography on individual behaviour. We had to separate pornography from art to really get at the crux of the matter. This is the original assertion "Should authors avoid writing about a subject because a minority might emulate it?" The impetus is on proving or disproving that a narrative describing or showing anti-social behaviour can lead a reader or group of readers to display anti-social behaviour -- popularizing anti-social behaviour, if only in a select crowd. Visual pornography is at the heart of giving the best narratives of anti-social behaviour, but we're not really talking about that, we're talking about non-con and beasti type stories to answer for writers' impact.