From: turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Pornography
Date: 27 Dec 1992 07:31:45 GMT
Organization: CS Dept, University of Texas at Austin
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
Summary: Sex is less serious today ... NOT!
Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

-*----
In article <1h8658INN4jg@agate.berkeley.edu> bickis@skmath3.usask.ca (M. Bickis) writes:
> [Sex] is treated far more casually than in most other times and 
> places. ...

Someone else writes:
>> I wouldn't even say that people have more sex now than in the 
>> past. I wouldn't say that people are having sex younger than in 
>> the past either. 

And back to Mik Bickis:
> I wasn't suggesting that.  I was talking about attitude.  In 
> the past, sex was taken seriously.  

To the extent that it makes sense to speak about such sweeping
generalities as how a culture treats sex as a whole, our own 
treats it very seriously indeed.  Consider, for example, the
number of people who have surgical procedures in the hope of
improving their sexual relations.  Or look in any bookstore and
consider the many *serious*, non-titillating volumes written on 
sexual relationships. 

So what can Mik Bickis be talking about?  Perhaps the passage
below provides a clue.

> ... There are some obvious explanations for this.  Easy
> birth control and antibiotics have minimized many of the physical
> consequences of uninhibited copulation.  Women's increased
> independence has freed them from having to depend on a
> (hopefully loyal) husband for material support.  ...

This list looks only at pragmatic issues.  Of larger importance
is the change that has taken place in religious views and moral
values.  To take one example, the notion that a woman's virginity
is a measure of her virtue and something that she should save for
her husband is still present, but no longer omnipresent nor as
powerful as it once was.  

Whenever such changes take place, those who put great stock in
the old values see the change as a loss: a loss of values, a loss
of seriousness, etc.  But this viewpoint is myopic.  Only the old
values are lost.  New values are gained.  And at least in the
case of America, sex remains as serious as ever, even though it
is approached very differently.  

To discuss such changes well, one needs to get past the point
where one *unconsciously* works from one's values.  (This causes
one to mistake what has happened, for example, mistaking a change
in values for a loss of seriousness.)  What are the values for
which one wants to argue?  Do they make sense?  Why should others
pay attention to them?

And then: where does pornography fit in?

Perhaps at some point Mik Bickis and I will find we agree on
some things.  There are quite a few *specific* criticisms of
common themes in pornography with which I concur.  But this is
quite different from condemning pornography as a genre.  And I
have yet to understand why I should do that.  

Russell


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