Keep it Covered!

My Eyes! My Eyes!

By Alexander Cockburn

The control of sex and pornography is a major part of promulgating a prudish, puritanical political culture without ever imposing an overt political censorship regime.

Debates about so-called "political correctness", whether in the race, gender, or ethnicity conflicts can only be explained by the culture of prudery which prevails in American political discourse of all sorts. Like the 'sexual crimes' mania in the media.

It's useful and important this as part of maintaining this rigorously prudish, puritanical political culture the surface of which was barely scratched by the Sixties.

Sexual crimes stand for the violation of the established order based on supposed personal deviance and not on any actual material challenge.

They have the benefit of being immensely trivial and yet due to the absolutely poor to non-existent transmission of the ‘standards’ for acceptable sexual conduct, esp. occlusion from public instruction, remain ultimately "fantasy crimes".

People can imagine the most heinous punishments for this behavior because it is impossible for them to conceive of a sex crime in the same way as bribery of public officials or assassinations performed by agencies disguised as armies or cultural aid missions.

This impossibility goes back to the terror used by parents and teachers to threaten children for violations of their will by creating nonsensical consequences for trivial acts.

A perfect example of this is the story of the man in Fairfax County Virginia, who got up early on Monday morning, October 19, walked naked into his own kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee?

The next significant thing that happened to 29-year-old Eric Williamson is the local cops arriving to charge him with indecent exposure.

It turns out that while he was brewing the coffee, a mother was taking her 7-year-old son along a path beside Williamson’s house, espied the naked Williamson and called the local precinct, or more likely her husband, who turns out to be a cop.

“Yes, I wasn’t wearing any clothes,” Williamson said later, “but I was alone, in my own home and just got out of bed. It was dark and I had no idea anyone was outside looking in at me.”

The story ended up on TV, starting with Fox, and in the opening rounds the newscasters and network blogs had \ merciless sport with the Fairfax police for their absurd behavior.

Hasn’t a man the right to walk around his own home (or in this case rented accommodations) dressed according to his fancy? Answer, obvious to anyone familiar with relevant case law, absolutely not.

Peeved by public ridicule the Fairfax cops turned up the heat. The cop’s wife started to maintain that first she saw Williamson by a glass kitchen door, then through the kitchen window.

Mary Ann Jennings, a Fair-fax County Police spokesperson, stirred the pot of innuendo:” We’ve heard there may have been other people who had a similar incident.”

The cops are asking anyone who may have seen an unclothed Williamson through his windows to come forward, even if it was at a different time.

They’ve also been papering the neighborhood with fliers, asking for reports on any other questionable activities by anyone resembling Williamson—a white guy who’s a former diver, and who has a 5-year old daughter, not living with him.

I’d say that if the cops keep it up, and some prosecutor scents opportunity Williamson will be pretty lucky if they don’t throw some cobbled-up indictment at him.

Toss in a jailhouse snitch making his own plea deal, a faked police line-up, maybe an artist’s impression of the Fairfax Flasher, and Eric could end up losing his visitation rights and, worst comes to worst, getting ten years plus posted for life on some sex offender site.

You think we’re living in the twenty-first century, in the clinical fantasy world of CSI? Wrong. So far as forensic evidence is concerned, we remain planted in the seventeenth century with trial by ordeal such as when they killed women as witches if they floated when thrown into a pond.

Discontent in The Catholic World of Sex

A Cruel Conspiracy Between God & Nature

Spiritual literature tends to be naïve and in denial about the power of sexuality, as if it could be dismissed as some insignificant factor in the spiritual journey. As if it could be dismissed at all.  It will always make itself felt, consciously or unconsciously. Nature is almost cruel in this regard, particularly to the young.  It fills teenage bodies with powerful hormones that fuel the sexual drive. No matter that they don’t have the emotional and intellectual maturity to properly understand and creatively channel that energy. Read more...

Kind of mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, glad to see Catholics finally wising up to reality. But on the other hand I'm not sure in which context he means that sexuality is a cruel conspiracy between God and nature. I mean, if you maintain the traditional Catholic view, then you almost have to conclude that puberty is a conspiracy, perpetrated by God & nature to convict & condemn. What I'm not sure of, is IF he is still encouraging the traditional Catholic view.

Let Them Watch Garbage - 21st Century Media.

Next Up, Who's Gay?

By Chris Hedges

The chatter that passes for news, the gossip peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity.

Will Tiger Woods finally talk to the police? Who will replace Oprah? (Not that Oprah can ever be replaced, of course.)

And will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who crashed President Barack Obama’s first state dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of dollars they want for an exclusive television interview?

Can Levi Johnston, father of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s grandson, get his wish to be a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars”?

The chatter that passes for news, the gossip that is peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity.

We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd.

What really matters in our lives—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke—doesn’t fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains.

We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency.

There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism.

Celebrity worship has banished the real from public discourse. And the adulation of celebrity is pervasive.

The frenzy around political messiahs, or the devotion of millions of viewers to Oprah, is all part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship. We seek to be like them.

We seek to make them like us. If Jesus and “The Purpose Driven Life” won’t make us a celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or reality television will. We are waiting for our cue to walk onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and celebrated. Nothing else in life counts.

We yearn to stand before the camera, to be noticed and admired. We build pages on social networking sites devoted to presenting our image to the world. We seek to control how others think of us. We define our worth solely by our visibility.

We live in a world where not to be seen, in some sense, is to not exist. We pay lifestyle advisers to help us look and feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the movie of our own life.

Martha Stewart constructed her financial empire, when she wasn’t engaged in insider trading, telling women how to create a set design for the perfect home.

The realities within the home, the actual family relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make everything whole.

Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers and fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us happy, to make us celebrities.

And happiness comes, we are assured, with how we look, with the acquisition of wealth and power, or at least the appearance of it.

Glossy magazines like Town & Country cater to the absurd pretensions of the very rich to be celebrities. They are photographed in expensive designer clothing inside the lavishly decorated set pieces that are their homes.

The route to happiness is bound up in how skillfully we present ourselves to the world. We not only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism and happiness.

Hedonism and wealth are openly worshiped on Wall Street as well as on shows such as “The Hills,” “Gossip Girl,” “Sex and the City,” “My Super Sweet 16” and “The Real Housewives of (whatever bourgeois burg happens to be in vogue).”

The American oligarchy—1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined—are the characters we most envy and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion-dollar mansions.

They marry models or professional athletes. They are chauffeured in stretch limos. They rush from fashion shows to movie premieres to fabulous resorts.

They have surgically enhanced, perfect bodies and are draped in designer clothes that cost more than some people make in a year. This glittering life is held before us like a beacon.

This life, we are told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying. And this is the life we want. Greed is good, we believe, because one day through our acquisitions we will become the elite. So let the rest of the bastards suffer.

The working class, comprising tens of millions of struggling Americans, are locked out of television’s gated community.

They are mocked, even as they are tantalized, by the lives of excess they watch on the screen in their living rooms. Almost none of us will ever attain these lives of wealth and power.

Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have everything.

We are left, when we cannot adopt these impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. We have failed where others have succeeded.

We consume these countless lies daily. We believe the false promises that if we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected, envied, powerful, loved and protected.

The flamboyant lives of celebrities and the outrageous characters on television, movies, professional wrestling and sensational talk shows are peddled to us, promising to fill up the emptiness in our own lives. Celebrity culture encourages everyone to think of themselves as potential celebrities, as possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts.

Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity.

The New Age mysticism and pop psychology of television personalities and evangelical pastors, along with the array of self-help best-sellers penned by motivational speakers, psychiatrists and business tycoons, peddle this fantasy.

Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems... as defeatist, as negativity or as inhibiting our inner essence and power.

Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality, along with those who grasp the hollowness and danger of celebrity culture, are condemned for their pessimism or intellectualism.

The illusionists who shape our culture, and who profit from our incredulity, hold up the gilded cult of Us.

Popular expressions of religious belief, personal empowerment, corporatism, political participation and self-definition argue that all of us are special, entitled and unique.

All of us, by tapping into our inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, by visualizing what we want, can achieve, and deserve to achieve, happiness, fame and success.

This relentless message cuts across ideological lines. This mantra has seeped into every aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to everything

. And because of this self-absorption, and deep self-delusion, we have become a country of child-like adults who speak and think in the inane gibberish of popular culture.

Celebrities who come from humble backgrounds are held up as proof that anyone can be adored by the world. These celebrities, like saints, are examples that the impossible is always possible.

Our fantasies of belonging, of fame, of success and of fulfillment are projected onto celebrities. These fantasies are stoked by the legions of those who amplify the culture of illusion, who persuade us that the shadows are real.

The juxtaposition of the impossible illusions inspired by celebrity culture and our “insignificant” individual achievements, however, is leading to an explosive frustration, anger, insecurity and invalidation.

It is fostering a self-perpetuating cycle that drives the frustrated, alienated individual with even greater desperation and hunger away from reality, back toward the empty promises of those who seduce us, who tell us what we want to hear.

The worse things get, the more we beg for fantasy. We ingest these lies until our faith and our money run out. And when we fall into despair we medicate ourselves, as if the happiness we have failed to find in the hollow game is our deficiency. And, of course, we are told it is.

Time is running out. The poor can dine out only so long on illusions.

Once they grasp that they have been betrayed, once they match the bleak reality of their future with the fantasies they are fed, once their homes are foreclosed and they realize that the jobs they lost are never coming back, they will react with a fury and vengeance that will snuff out the remains of our anemic democracy and usher in a new dark age.

Porn Ruins Teenager's Concept of Sex

Forget intimacy, how about a facial instead!

By Eric Spitznagel

There's no stash of Hustler to be hidden these days. You can "clear history," delete all trace, in one click. At each adolescent fingertip is an inexhaustible stream of high-def images and Flash porn videos - some 400 million porno pages in all.

                                                  ....

...Travis and Cody, typical 21-year-old college students in Florida [] tell me there's one criterion at the top of their list when it comes to picking a fuck buddy.

"Pubic hair is disgusting," Travis says. "Girls should keep their vaginas porn-star trim."

Like most guys of my generation—I'm on the downslide to 40—I have fond memories of my first experience with pornography. I was 14 years old and my best friend had just discovered his father's secret stash.

We gathered in his basement and delicately turned the pages as if they might disintegrate. I asked him if I could borrow a few mags "just for the night," which in hindsight was a pretty bold request. I was, after all, essentially announcing my intention to masturbate.

Slipping past my parents with the stack of old Hustlers stuffed inside my jacket, I somehow made it to my bedroom and, not believing my good fortune, stayed up all night relishing the spoils.

To the modern 14-year-old, the scenario would be laughably quaint: There's no stash to be hidden these days. You can "clear history," along with any residual shame, in one click.

At each adolescent fingertip is an inexhaustible stream of high-def images and Flash video—some 400 million pornographic Web pages in all. The sheer breadth is staggering:

If you watched porn 24 hours a day, for example, it would take you several years just to get caught up on the 13,588 professional titles released in the United States in 2005 alone.

Plenty more is out there in bulk on the digital shelf, no credit card required: bestiality, piss-drinking, throat-fucking, bukake gang bangs, triple anal penetrations—all exhaustively cross-referenced. Any day now, some poor kid may actually go blind masturbating.

The awkward truth, according to one study, is that 90 percent of 8-to-16-year-olds have viewed pornography online.

Considering the standard climax to even the most vanilla hard-core scene today, that means there is an entire generation of young people who think sex ends with a money shot to the face.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly where the age divide falls, but it's safe to say that the first purebred guinea pig to have grown up never knowing a world without fisting on demand is probably around 22 years old.

By the time they're in high school, America's porn-fed youth have already amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of smut.

Seth Rogen, cowriter of Superbad—which features a now-classic scene of teenage boys graphically discussing hard-core sites—recently told me that one of his favorite pastimes is trolling porn message boards. "It's hilarious how much these kids know," Rogen says.

"There'll be arguments like 'This is classified as gonzo, but I would say it's more of a feature-BDSM. Also, they say this clip is taken from Handjobs #8, but this scene was actually first featured in Killer Grips #7.'"

Rogen might as well have been talking about brothers Travis and Cody, typical 21-year-old college students in Florida who tell me there's one criterion at the top of their list when it comes to picking a fuck buddy.

"Pubic hair is disgusting," Travis says. "Girls should keep their vaginas porn-star trim." Cody describes his first real-life ejaculate-to-the-face finale like this:

"It was the happiest moment of my young life. There is just something about blowing a load in a chick's face that makes you feel like a man."

For most men over 30, facials aren't something you actually do. They're like car chases or hurling someone through a plate-glass window—the difference between cinema and life.

But the ubiquity of porn has blurred the line. According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control, the number of heterosexuals having anal sex nationwide has almost doubled since 1992.

But boys have always been perverts. Since a facial requires a female to receive it, the real story might be the apparent surge in the number of willing participants.

In Immersion: Porn, a documentary by New York photographer Robbie Cooper, 22-year-old Lindsay sees the act as empowering to women. "Even if she has eight dicks on her face, she's still the queen of those eight dicks," she says. "I definitely like come on the face."

Former State Department staffer Mary Eberstadt, writing in Policy Review, compares the prevailing attitudes about porn to the general consensus on tobacco in the 1960s.

"[Porn] is widely seen as cool, especially among younger people, and this coveted social status further reduces the already low incentive for making a public issue of it."

Of course, porn doesn't cause cancer, though it may cause homemade sex tapes and hot cam-on-cam IM action (playing in a locked suburban bedroom near you).

And it almost certainly causes cell-phone-picture taking: According to a 2008 survey, one in five teenagers have sent an explicit photo of themselves to someone else or posted one online.

The sea change is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the burgeoning crop of young actresses flocking to the industry.

Joanna Angel of BurningAngel.com, a veteran porn actress at 28, describes doing a three-way recently with a 19-year-old girl new to the business.

"It was her first scene ever, so I was like, 'Don't worry—just follow my lead,'" she recalls.

"But then the scene started, and the way she was giving a blow job and the things she was saying and the way she was moaning—I was like, 'What the fuck?'

"When I was 19, I was not giving blow jobs that were nearly that exciting. The girls these days just seem to come to the set porn-ready."

In fact, "porn-readiness" is now a source of pride. While on tour promoting her memoir, Jenna Jameson was reportedly stunned that 13-year-old girls kept telling her she was their role model.

In a survey of 1,000 British girls between the ages of 15 and 19, roughly 25 percent said they aspired to become professional lap dancers.

"Dirty Angel," 22, who writes a blog called Tastes Like Kisses and started surfing porn in her early teens, says, "It was watching [adult star] Heather Brooke that gave me the mind-blowing skills I have now when it comes to giving a blow job."

To those of us who came of age in the eighties and nineties—the dinosaurs once naïvely content with even the most terrible, chafing teen hand job—it feels a bit like looking down from an attic window onto the Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love.

Let the young have their Twitter and their Jonas Brothers—we have no interest. But this kind of hurts.

Of course, we're not all missing out on the fun. The Brett Ratners, the Silvio Berlusconis, the thirtysomething divorcés of the world—they will carry the mantle for us and hopefully report back. At least those in good cardiovascular health.