Osama's Porn Collection

No matter what religion a fanatical fundamentalist belongs to, he is still going to turn out to be a damn hypocrite. I'm sure that after all their sex scandals, Evangelicals are happy to know that they are not alone amongst the most fanatical representatives of world religions. It might even turn out that Osama's porn collection overlaps with the ones enjoyed by the most rabid preachers of Christian virtue. Here is an article about the porn that was discovered in Osama's compound:

The pornography recovered in bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive, according to the officials, who discussed the discovery with Reuters on condition of anonymity.

If bin Laden hadn't gotten himself killed, he could have easily run for office as a Republican candidate. The guy was obviously hypocritical enough for that. 

Anti-Porn Feminists: An Oxymoron

Turns out that among all the weird phenomena in the world there is one called Anti-Porn Feminists. Of course, everybody knows that there are often bad, abusive things going on in the porn industry. These abuses should be discussed and fought against.

But feminists who are anti-all-and-any-kind-of-porn? How insane is that? Why not just be honest about it and call themselves "anti-sex feminists"? The idea that all porn is bad and everybody who watches porn wants to abuse women is preposterous. Pornography is a way for people to explore their sexuality, their erotic fantasies. Any attempt to take that away is censorship of the worst order. The very idea that you can control your sexual fantasies betrays a profound misunderstanding of the very concept of human sexuality.

What disturbs me in this weird feminist anti-porn movement is that more and more often one encounters so-called feminists who promote the exact same agenda as the fanatical Focus on the Family or some other even more repressive religious organizations. Porn bad, erotic fantasy bad, sex bad, housewife good, homeschooling good, burqa fantastic. That this kind of claptrap is being sold to us as feminism is very annoying. For centuries, patriarchy repressed female sexuality. For women, sexuality was only acceptable as a vehicle of child-bearing and nothing else. Women were seen as an object of sex, and never as a free subject. The idea that all pornography is offensive to women comes right out of that mind-set.

There are many women in the world who live their sexuality freely. And they enjoy pornography on a regular basis. There are female film-makers who make porn tailored exclusively to the needs of women. It is very puzzling to me that some people would claim that all pornography presents women as objectified and abused. That is simply not true.

In the case of the anti-porn feminists I linked to at the beginning of the post, their vocabulary betrays a profound fear of sexuality. Of course, they are smart enough to couch their fear of sex in quasi-feminist and quasi-political terminlogy. The reality, however, is that they are as uncomfortable with the very idea of sex as any fanatical preacher who promises fire and brimstone to everybody who dares to want sexual enjoyment.

Sex is scary (at least to some journalists)

I wonder when it will be possible for feminist journalists to write about sex without assuming the prissy Victorian attitude of beleaguered virtue in need of rescue. As I have discussed before, the words porny, pornified, porned, pornification, and any variation thereof are endlessly repeated by writers who claim to be feminists.

The most recent example of this "sex-is-bad-mean-and-scary" attitude is Tracy Clark-Flory's article "Generation XXX: Having sex like porn stars". Like many other people who write about sex today, Clark-Flory conceals her terror of human sexuality beneath the guise of worrying about teenager's unhealthy sex lives. It would be much more useful, of course, if she left the poor teenagers (whose crazy sexual excesses are wildly exaggerated anyways) alone and just talked about the reasons why the idea of sex makes her so uneasy.

Teenagers watch to much porn, suggests Clark-Flory, and as a result, pick up unhealthy, exploitative attitudes to sex: "What's most interesting to me, though, is the idea that young women of my own porned generation are embracing a sex act most often intended to humiliate the fantasy whore on-screen. Someone will surely pen a book someday soon that details how women's pornification of their sex lives amounts to shameful self-exploitation. There's another way to look at it, though: Enthusiastically engaging in that defining act, the grand finale of most X-rated fare is one way to dramatically announce oneself as a member of our dominant sexual culture -- which is the world of porn." The overused variations of porned, pornification and similar weird terminology signal the author's enjoyment of talking about pornography. Simply put, a need to play so much with the word betrays a desire - and simultaneously a fear - to play with the reality of porn.

The feminists' uneasy attitude towards sex is part of the reason why breastfeeding children more or less until they are ready to retire has become a huge part of the feminist agenda. Reacognizing that female breasts are sexual organs is too painful, so huge efforts are being made to concentrate on the purely utilitarian, asexual uses of breasts.

As feminists, we have to recognize that this fear of porn, of our own breasts, of sex in general is the legacy of the patriarchal culture. We will never be truly liberated until we reclaim sex as our own.

Ukraine Outlaws Porn

Every time I want to start feeling marginally optimistic about my country of origin, it goes and does something stupid. Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko signed a law today making the possession of porn a criminal offense. It's still ok under this law to keep pornography for "medicinal purposes." I guess this means that if you bribe your doctor to give you a note saying you will die a painful death unless you watch a certain amount of porn every day, it will be acceptable.

Ukraine faces very grave problems at this moment. The hopeful momentum created by the Orange Revolution was betrayed by lack of real change that Yushchenko 's government was supposed to bring to the country. Instead of working on laws that the country so desperately needs, Yushchenko wastes his time and energy on these senseless, unenforceable and utterly ridiculous statements.

The only reason for introducing such a law in Ukraine that I can think of is the need to mobilize massive amounts of popular discontent for more street protests. You keep the people's sexuality repressed long enough and they will sublimate it into other areas of their lives. The only real consequence of this law, however, will be an ever greater level of corruption. Now there will be a black market that will manufacture proof that people need porn for medicinal purposes.