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

[Epmd607]

Since Verdad's intellectually lazy this morning and wants to re-start the argument...

Say Verdad writes dirty underage porno stories, mostly about getting with sixteen year olds, nothing too ped. Then JBJ comes along and reads them all and really loves them. Say JBJ goes out and sleeps with a sixteen year old and the coppers find all of Verdad's stories on JBJ's computer. Does Verdad, the pornographer, bear any responsibility for JBJ's actions?

Say Vlad Nabokov writes an erotic novel where there is child abduction and rape. Then JBJ reads said novel and really enjoys it, thinks Vlad has made it all sound so very sexy. Say JBJ is found abducting and abusing his young step-daughter. The coppers find a copy of Lolita in JBJ's white van. Does the dead Vlad Nabakov bear any responsibility for JBJ's actions?

These are two very different questions. We're only dealing with the first, because if you don't understand the silliness of the second, you're probably a dum-dum.

Oh yeah, 'JBJ' is short for 'John Brown Jackson' a fictional character. Verdad is short for 'Verdad'.

 

[Verdad]

How about you relax and lay off the silly ad hominems, Epmd?

You've done little since you came here except tried to insult everyone, either collectively—"this is just a porn board and all you people talk about is stupid"—or personally, by attaching random absurd characterizations to individual posters. We've already got our petty provocateurs, so how about you try for some other role?

Like, you know, chilling off, saying what you think, considering whether there's something to what others think, and so on. I find it more fun that way, and besides, if you're as desperate to impress as you seem to, it's usually better done by making your points than by shouting how poorly you think of everyone else.

If discussion boards make you all giddy with a chance to be obnoxious, though, you do what works for you.

 

[xssve]

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

Right, except were; going back all the way to Sumer and Akkad here; the girdle helps keep your loincloth on, and your gut in, but it also protects your abdomen and soft underbelly from being penetrated by the other guy's knife, spear or arrow.

There is a distinction between a the girdle as an article of clothing/fashion accessory and the broad Girdle as protective Armour - if it's thin, we call it a belt.

And no, they wore gun garter belts.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

epmd607

Sleeping with teens was legal the while I was growing up, so I have a different attitude about it than some. I recall that performer Jerry Lee Lewis married a 13 year old cousin;people got a little excited about her being his cousin. Shakespeare depicted underage sex and Muhammed married a child. So the issue isnt new to the world, and is only recently demonized. Child brides remain legal in most states. You and 'Aunt' SR71PLT might have more fun with a younger victim than me. Age of consent is a legal convention...like alcohol consumption and the army draft. Didnt Margaret Mead write a book about underage sex in Samoa?

Lincoln blamed Harriet Beecher Stowe's book for igniting our Civil War 690,000 died in that struggle.

This morning I read an article about how Wall Street and China own pretty nearly all of the pols in Washington. They pay the pols for the bailouts and pay the pols to ignore unemployment and off-shoring of jobs. I expect people to be mutinous about both, but we're not. So you dont know what gets people excited.

 

[Epmd607]

How about you relax and lay off the silly ad hominems, Epmd?

You've done little since you came here except tried to insult everyone, either collectively—"this is just a porn board and all you people talk about is stupid"—or personally, by attaching random absurd characterizations to individual posters. We've already got our petty provocateurs, so how about you try for some other role?

Like, you know, chilling off, saying what you think, considering whether there's something to what others think, and so on. I find it more fun that way, and besides, if you're as desperate to impress as you seem to, it's usually better done by making your points than by shouting how poorly you think of everyone else.

If discussion boards make you all giddy with a chance to be obnoxious, though, you do what works for you.

Since Sept 2006 you haven't authored anything for the site. Why not disappear from the Author's Hangout if you're not going to add anything of value to the site? Again we have Verdad misquoting and mischaracterizing other posters to suit his interests. This is a porn board meant for erotic story authors on the site Literotica.

I've done little? I'm glad you've kept track of my time on the Literotica message board. I have about 500,000 views on my stories. I'm an author here and I've come to hang out, you're not an author here and you don't know how arguments work.

 

[Epmd607]

epmd607

Sleeping with teens was legal the while I was growing up, so I have a different attitude about it than some. I recall that performer Jerry Lee Lewis married a 13 year old cousin;people got a little excited about her being his cousin. Shakespeare depicted underage sex and Muhammed married a child. So the issue isnt new to the world, and is only recently demonized. Child brides remain legal in most states. You and 'Aunt' SR71PLT might have more fun with a younger victim than me. Age of consent is a legal convention...like alcohol consumption and the army draft. Didnt Margaret Mead write a book about underage sex in Samoa?

Lincoln blamed Harriet Beecher Stowe's book for igniting our Civil War 690,000 died in that struggle.

This morning I read an article about how Wall Street and China own pretty nearly all of the pols in Washington. They pay the pols for the bailouts and pay the pols to ignore unemployment and off-shoring of jobs. I expect people to be mutinous about both, but we're not. So you dont know what gets people excited.

Shout out to Margaret Mead vs. Patriarchal Derek Freeman. Yeah, Samoa is still the Cultural Anthro 101 centerpiece. Age of consent is a legal convention, like you said. We're more interested in protecting children nowadays. At some point in the past it was okay to sell your children into slavery too. It's still okay in Afghanistan.

 

[xssve]

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.

But it does pretty much exist in bubble separated from all other cultural influences - though not necessarily experiences - cultural experience is cultural experience, there's no way around that, and porn is part and parcel of the whole thing, but it does exist outside the cultural dialogue, for the most part - there is a dialogue, but up till now it's mostly been formal official disapproval (see al the studies furnished by the OP) countered by mostly informal repudiation, at least until recently.

That the existence of the internet has made it ubiquitous has a lot to do with the changing dialogue - previously, the critics were able and encouraged to register their dismay ins spite of most of them not even knowing what they were talking about, i.e., not actually having been exposed to it, and there's your bubble - it's not a shared cultural experience.

One does not typically spend significant amounts of time looking at porn unless one likes it - if thirty seconds of somebody else's mucous membranes and erectile tissue are more than enough for you, it's unlikely you'll subject yourself to for longer just to see if there's anything to it - generally, you either love it or hate it, and if you hate it, it's hard to understand why somebody else loves it, particularly when it directly concerns a thing that's pretty much at the heart of intimacy between two people.

Marriage, as one pundit observed, is a license for depravity: you have exclusive rights over each others sex organs, and for most people, there isn't a lot of room for additional sex organs in there anywhere.

Porn represents additional sex organs - they happen to be symbolic, but that doesn't seem to make a whole lot of difference psychologically.

Again, there's your bubble: it's not porn that exists in a bubble, it's porn enthusiasts who exist in a bubble, and who are really only understood and are sympathized with by other porn enthusiasts - it places you outside the box - the cliche of the weird guy wanking alone in his bedroom, a social outcast, devoid of significant social skill - and that image persists, even when everybody's doing it - the "HNG", always referred to in a disparaging tone.

In some respects, that's how it threatens "society", which is after all, corporeally, a network of hierarchical social relationships and rituals - somebody goes off script, and it causes confusion, it disrupts the aura of inevitability, the "rightness", it raises questions.

In some sense, we are all exploring where exactly porn fits into the script, making room for it, treating it for what it always has been, a cultural phenomena that's always been there, it's just been hiding under the rug, wrapped in plain Brown paper.

In that dialogue, like any other cultural experience/phenomena, there is plenty of room for criticism, it's just a question of how much of it is fashionable disdain, how much genuine positive artistic critique.

The real problem there is that coming out of the cold it's all still just "porn" - if you say, "I don't like porn", I have to ask "which porn? Donkey shows? Or just the old in/out?".

Are there any distinctions?

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 I've ever denied there is an influence, but the argument against more often takes the form of cause and effect - my argument is that porn is not really the prime mover here, but it can and does contribute in shaping and influencing the outcome, possibly even in some statistical discernible fashion - like any other cultural experience, i.e., watching Fox possibly influencing the way you vote.

Do conservatives vote republican because of Fox network, or do they watch Fox because they're conservative?

It's a little of both, I'm sure - I don't think you can reasonably construct a valid binary mytheme here.

Anything that offers that sort of complication is automatically subject to crude categorization, ergo, the binary mythme of porn as agent of either depravity or liberation - since in order to make informed value judgments, you have to know something about it, and understand both arguments.

Shit I've spent years trying to get a handle on it, and I'm still not always sure.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Shout out to Margaret Mead vs. Patriarchal Derek Freeman. Yeah, Samoa is still the Cultural Anthro 101 centerpiece. Age of consent is a legal convention, like you said. We're more interested in protecting children nowadays. At some point in the past it was okay to sell your children into slavery too. It's still okay in Afghanistan.

Conventions change. Adults under the age of 18 cant legally consume alcohol, but the legal age was 18 for many years. So I dont get excited when I see adults under 21 with beer or wine coolers. Ditto for driving. I got my drivers license at 14, cant do that anymore.

Mothers still sell their daughters into prostitution plenty of places. One tribe in Africa abandons its children at 3 years of age, some parents in the tribe use their
children as bait for predatory beasts.

 

[xssve]

Let's take the organ business as a jumping off point: that porn represents literally, additional set of reproductive organs, is largely the impression of the non-porn enthusiast - in reality, it's media, and media functions as a medium of fantasy, fantasy is itself a form of creative visualization.

I remember when Rocky first came out, standing outside the theater watching as at least some percentage of the male audience emerged jumping around, shadow boxing or play fighting with their friends, and it was a very sort of electric mood, in agood way - everybody was very pumped up and exited - nobody was worried that Rocky was going to emerge form the shadows and beat them senseless, they were Rocky, they had identified with the character.

Some of them may have gone on to become boxers, some that did might have ended up punchy, the horror that was Rocky before he got his shot - some maybe even died, I dunno, but that was a distinct choice on their part - most simply internalized the sense of personal struggle and triumph and went on doing whatever they did - i.e., even total identification doesn't mean you have to pattern your life after the images you have been presented with, it can be a very temporary thing that becomes a form of experience - ersatz, because you didn't actually have to do all those pushups and get your ass beat, but it does have a certain philosophical value.

Porn works similarly, and after you explain that to somebody who is otherwise skeptical, i.e., "but wouldn't you like to try that"?

They may say no fucking way Jay, but a line has been crossed there, it no longer represents other peoples sex organs but has become an alternative set of behaviors that you can choose to emulate or not.

What is it you're emulating? Is it a specific act, or a whole psychological approach that you've possibly been conditioned to avoid? i.e., maybe it's more than just a duty to god and country, etc.

 

[Epmd607]

Conventions change. Adults under the age of 18 cant legally consume alcohol, but the legal age was 18 for many years. So I dont get excited when I see adults under 21 with beer or wine coolers. Ditto for driving. I got my drivers license at 14, cant do that anymore.

Mothers still sell their daughters into prostitution plenty of places. One tribe in Africa abandons its children at 3 years of age, some parents in the tribe use their
children as bait for predatory beasts.

This is on topic of the thread. I'm not bothered if your fantasies and stories involve underage sex, maybe they're good stories. I don't think that you reading or writing stories is an indication that you engage in illegal activity. There are enough thought police roaming around already. I don't think SR71 wants you to stop fantasizing either. It's about the actual laws not stories or fantasies that I disagree with. I want to protect the laws against underage sex and I think you want them to change. That's a whole different discussion from reading and writing pornography. My wife was underage when I started dating her, we weren't together for that long in high school and I never slept with her, but I wanted to. I don't think I did anything wrong by fantasizing and I probably would've slept with her then if I had the chance.

 

[Epmd607]

...

What is it you're emulating? Is it a specific act, or a whole psychological approach that you've possibly been conditioned to avoid? i.e., maybe it's more than just a duty to god and country, etc.

Someone might watch a dude put his finger in a girl's A while he's going down on her in a porno and think, "I've never thought of that, I'm gonna try it on this girl." Then he goes and tries it out, the girl likes it or doesn't and we have emulation. But no one's afraid of that. People are afraid of the psychological conditioning, that if you watch enough hardcore porn you're going to take on the mindset of pornography, the rough, barbaric, use a woman as your object type thing. Regardless, the case against BF Skinner has been made well, and people aren't so easily conditioned to make choices against their moral standing.

I don't care if you watch porn every day and want to rough up a woman, porn doesn't make it acceptable to do so. Anything that resembles, creates, or verifies a fantasy narrative has no standing when the viewer makes his fantasy a real life scenario. You can't take someone else's narrative without making it uniquely your own.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

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.

I think I provided a pretty good example of one instance of porn's influence on society, and that was the explosion in interest and acceptance of anal sex that followed its widespread depiction in adult videos of the mid-80's.

That might have happened too long ago for a lot of people to remember, but I happened to be rather...er...involved with adult videos at the time and remember it quite clearly. Before, anal sex was pretty much considered a bizarre perversion practiced primarily by male heterosexuals and sicko's. Once video porn demonstrated that anal could be done and could be erotic, the practice was validated and began to be accepted. I really doubt this would have happened without the propaganda of adult vids.

I'm not at all saying that men started anal-raping women after viewing Back Door Girls #4, but it was an influence on behavior.

And wow: another example comes to mind now. Deep Throating. Virtually unknown before the Linda Lovelace/Harry Reed movie of the early 70's, it's now accepted as a desirable skill in lovemaking.

And yet another: The influence of BDSM on fashion. I'll never forget being in downtown Chicago in 2006 and seeing manikins in one of the chicest department stores wearing leather and chain and kneeling at each other's feet.

Does anyone doubt that the explosion in BDSM wasn't caused by the access to D/s material on the internet? And yes, there was an explosion. Originally a fringe kink, D/s has gone mainstream, its acceptance a result of its internet ubiquity.

Come to think of it, I never even knew I was into BDSM until I encountered the practice on the internet. I knew I liked erotic restraint, but I'd never considered that I might be into D/s. The BDSM I saw on the web gave me a context for my predilections and a vocabulary with which to describe them,

By making things familiar, demystifying and validating, porn can be a powerful influence on social mores and one's idea of what's acceptable.

I still don't worry about people emulating my stuff. If I wrote murder mysteries, I wouldn't worry about people emulating them, so why should I make an exception for sexual acts? If someone is moved to act out one of my stories, the problem is entirely in their understanding of reality, not in what I've written.

 

[xssve]

Someone might watch a dude put his finger in a girl's A while he's going down on her in a porno and think, "I've never thought of that, I'm gonna try it on this girl." Then he goes and tries it out, the girl likes it or doesn't and we have emulation. But no one's afraid of that. People are afraid of the psychological conditioning, that if you watch enough hardcore porn you're going to take on the mindset of pornography, the rough, barbaric, use a woman as your object type thing. Regardless, the case against BF Skinner has been made well, and people aren't so easily conditioned to make choices against their moral standing. I don't care if you watch porn everyday and want to rough up a woman, porn doesn't make it acceptable to do so.

It basically the limits of the medium and the intent of the thing - men watch it to get a Woody and rub one out, it's very simple.

Actors who are willing to have their every orifice penetrated and pried open, often can't act otherwise, and probably aren't in any condition to do so anyway, so it basically boils down to: how many things can you do to the human body, physically?

It would be nice if there were more room for intimacy, romance, emotions, and sometimes there is, but the sad truth is, most guys fast forward over those parts.

So yeah, there are those who lack the wit or judgment to realize that it's all contrived for vicarious thrills, and treat their girlfriends that way - still, I dont' see that as substantially different than any other cultural influence, and the mainstream influence might be that women aren't even supposed to enjoy it all, and are sluts if they do - but are in fact, literally, just receptacles for semen and incubators for babies - believe me, that isn't an idea original to porn, that one is Augustine's.

 

[Epmd607]

I think I provided a pretty good example of one instance of porn's influence on society, and that was the explosion in interest and acceptance of anal sex that followed its widespread depiction in adult videos of the mid-80's.

I did give your scenario some thought and did want to comment on it. I didn't before because it resembles a statistical statement and we don't have actual statistics on the explosion of people performing anal with their partners to coincide with the spread of pornography in the home.

Pornographers will tell you how difficult it was getting a woman to do anal in the 80s. Now it's something almost every female performer will do. Why more women are shaved now than in the 80s is a similar anecdote. The assumption is that with the spread of porn, the viewers of porn, men, began preferring the shaved coochies of their favorite female performers. Women caught on and started to shave their non-performer coochies. It's something that's meant for statistical sampling and the profession of the psychologist.

 

[Epmd607]

It basically the limits of the medium and the intent of the thing - men watch it to get a Woody and rub one out, it's very simple.

Actors who are willing to have their every orifice penetrated and pried open, often can't act otherwise, and probably aren't in any condition to do so anyway, so it basically boils down to: how many things can you do to the human body, physically?

It would be nice if there were more room for intimacy, romance, emotions, and sometimes there is, but the sad truth is, most guys fast forward over those parts.

So yeah, there are those who lack the wit or judgment to realize that it's all contrived for vicarious thrills, and treat their girlfriends that way - still, I dont' see that as substantially different than any other cultural influence, and the mainstream influence might be that women aren't even supposed to enjoy it all, and are sluts if they do - but are in fact, literally, just receptacles for semen and incubators for babies - believe me, that isn't an idea original to porn, that one is Augustine's.

To me there's been a reverse reaction in my favorite pornography. Amateur porn between real life couples is incredibly popular now. The amateur porn where the female and male are seemingly loving and caring toward each other is uber popular on the amateur sites. No one wants to see amateurs pretend to perform like porn stars, they want to view something closer to the real thing. To me mainstream pornography is meant for a young guy, college type dude who's into themselves more than another person ie family. Young unattached men are into violent combat sports, video games, hardcore pornography because it represents a simulated ideal of manliness. Eventually they grow up, care about people outside of themselves, but many don't, even after getting married and having children. I think this two-fold presentation of manliness has been around for a while. When you're young it's about individual combat, when you're older it's about protecting a family unit.

 

[xssve]

For instance have you ever seen a movie where the guy is trying to get all romantic and the woman get's disgusted and starts ordering him to do things?

That has happened to me in real life, the urge to just mindlessly rut is not confined to the male of the species - if you got an itch, you gotta scratch.

I hear a lot of women complain that their men aren't forceful enough.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

BTW: I happen to know that Verdad is a female, and a very astute and perspicacious one.

 

[Epmd607]

For instance have you ever seen a movie where the guy is trying to get all romantic and the woman get's disgusted and starts ordering him to do things?

That has happened to me in real life, the urge to just mindlessly rut is not confined to the male of the species - if you got an itch, you gotta scratch.

I hear a lot of women complain that their men aren't forceful enough.

The woman as dom is plentiful in porn and in real life. It's just more common that the traditional role is of a male who leads the action in the bedroom. Most females like to play dom characters once in a while, it's a nice change. Females have plenty of complaints, we've probably heard most of them.

 

[Epmd607]

BTW: I happen to know that Verdad is a female, and a very astute and perspicacious one.

I don't know anything about he/she, accept that they think they know all about me and my character. I get irritated when people appear and start arguing without having read any of the argument. Especially when it seems they don't write stories, come to the 'Author's Hangout' just to argue like this is discussion circle for philosophy undergrads.

 

[xssve]

The woman as dom is plentiful in porn and in real life. It's just more common that the traditional role is of a male who leads the action in the bedroom. Most females like to play dom characters once in a while, it's a nice change. Females have plenty of complaints, we've probably heard most of them.

Its' more a question of spontaneity to me - I think that's why amateur porn is so popular.

I think it would make an interesting movie to really just put two people in a room and see what happens without any direction.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

BTW: I happen to know that Verdad is a female, and a very astute and perspicacious one.

I had no idea she has a perspiration problem. Must be French.

 

[Epmd607]

Its' more a question of spontaneity to me - I think that's why amateur porn is so popular.

I think it would make an interesting movie to really just put two people in a room and see what happens without any direction.

But the eye of the camera is upon them and they'll know it, act unnaturally...we wouldn't want to get illegal and film two people without them knowing. The panoptic eye is already upon us, you don't masturbate by yourself anymore, you're being tracked by the websites you visit, by the television, by whatever you buy. Ooooo, spooky. Shout out to Jeremy Bentham and JS MILL.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

This is on topic of the thread. I'm not bothered if your fantasies and stories involve underage sex, maybe they're good stories. I don't think that you reading or writing stories is an indication that you engage in illegal activity. There are enough thought police roaming around already. I don't think SR71 wants you to stop fantasizing either. It's about the actual laws not stories or fantasies that I disagree with. I want to protect the laws against underage sex and I think you want them to change. That's a whole different discussion from reading and writing pornography. My wife was underage when I started dating her, we weren't together for that long in high school and I never slept with her, but I wanted to. I don't think I did anything wrong by fantasizing and I probably would've slept with her then if I had the chance.

Here's my problem with the whole issue: Our society sexualizes kiddies from day ONE, and momma's lead the parade; in school we give them rubbers, the courts let them decide to abort or not; most of them in middle school are boinking their brains out; by high school a piece of ass is required ettiquette.

I've been around since the Creation (I was the serpent in the Garden), and I recall when the underage hysteria got started. The problem back then was adult black males knocking-up underage sistas and abandoning them to welfare. The idea was to jerk a knot in some tails to stem the tide of welfare payments. Then the WASPs discovered that the law was good for getting rid of Sis's 18 year old boyfriend (if he was a jerk). We created battalions of adolescent sexual predators who merely fucked their high school sweethearts. The law is now a club the Aunt SR71PLTs use for entertainment.

When I was 18 and 19 I boinked plenty of 15-16 year old girls, and noone but their fathers had a problem with it. One daddy owned a motel!

We make a problem where none existed, and it has stopped none of the fucking.

 

[xssve]

Voyeur porn is a well established niche, you'll find vids like that on any tube site, often shot with a starlight lens.

I don't know if it's real or contrived, usually, it's just pretty much the same fucking, just bad angles and poor lighting.

In some sense, it's what makes it difficult to calculate the effect that porn has on expectations - there are any number of inputs in that area, and there are indirect effects.

I've heard plenty of conservatives parroting Limbaugh talking points that swear up and down they don't listen to Limbaugh, but the fact of the matter is that many of their friends and associates do, and that's where their opinions are coming from.

It strikes me that porn in general largely represents the eternal quest for the zipless fuck: seamless, and graceful - reality has zippers, and is often more like Something About Mary.

Hence, the setups tend to be pretty contrived, and the only honest thing about most porn is the fucking. It doesn't surprise me therefore that a lot of directors choose to simply dispense with the formalities.

At the same time, market saturation has reached a level where porn producers are struggling to stand out from the crowd, they are really at a disadvantage compared to amateurs who just need a camera and some friends.

But to come full circle, if you watch two amateurs whose expectations have been shaped by porn, you might as well be watching pros, at least the lighting and angles are better.

 

[xssve]

But the eye of the camera is upon them and they'll know it, act unnaturally...we wouldn't want to get illegal and film two people without them knowing. The panoptic eye is already upon us, you don't masturbate by yourself anymore, you're being tracked by the websites you visit, by the television, by whatever you buy. Ooooo, spooky. Shout out to Jeremy Bentham and JS MILL.

Inhibition is natural.