Apparently he coined the phrase. Or at least TIME magazine thinks he did.
Posted by MF DU on 2008-10-28 16:07:41 +0000
Did anyone see the documentary from a few years back?
Posted by virtue on 2008-10-28 16:42:19 +0000
I've seen it--it's ok. I think it wanted to be be a more profound commentary on sex and culture than it was. Any of you read the Atlantic piece on porn and adultery? If I recall correctly, it had that same sort of "we're progressive and adult and talking about sex rationally, and not judging, even though we sort of are," feel, except with dirty pictures. Which led to the resulting vice magazine problem of simultaneous glorification and excoriation.
Posted by pamsterdam on 2008-10-28 17:45:09 +0000
I missed the documentary, but have read the article now (thanks to virtue's link).
So I'm a porn apologist now? I'm enlightened (as opposed to enlightened)?
I am extremely offended by the idea that it's acceptable to mention men watching porn in the same breath as rapists, just as offended as I am by hearing homosexuality mentioned in the same breath as child abuse.
Pardon my French, New Atlantic, but are you fucking kidding me?
Posted by TheFullCleveland on 2008-10-28 18:04:46 +0000
I'll have to read that. Back at U of Rochester, Nadine Strossen of the ACLU came to campus to talk about her book "Defending Pornography," which I didn't read, but I remember the talk being very good. I was briefly baffled by a female student who gave a rebuttal at the end of the talk, when she said that women "have to be protected from the male gaze," which I heard as "have to be protected from the male gays." Did any of you have porn shown on campus in college? Our Cinema Group showed one porn flick per year, as they wanted to represent all genres.
Posted by pamsterdam on 2008-10-28 18:14:10 +0000
LOL @ "women have to be protected from the male gays"!
The porn films on our campus (UNH) were, ah, privately shown.
Posted by virtue on 2008-10-28 18:37:17 +0000
I could understand being offended if the breath produced the sentence "watching porn is like raping someone", or some variation there of, but I don't see Douthat saying that. Rather, he is acknowledging that while anti-pornographers once used a similar argument [watching porn causes sexual violence/misogyny], their argument currently has less rhetorical force given recent social science statistics that suggest otherwise.
With reference to the quotation from which the italicized enlightened comes from, I think the real problem there is that it is a quotation of a quotation that has already been condensed, and duly rendered nearly nonsensical by its lack of context. Or by the ellipsis, I'm not sure which.
If there is anything to be peeved about, I should think it would be the far more problematic concept that there is some sort of platonic "problem of the male libido" that renders marriages almost inherently unsatisfying sexually. Which is another way of saying that the "problem" of the male libido is that women don't have one (or so I've been told).
Granted, I think nearly all discussion of marriage is problematic, given the catholic purposes attributed to it (it's religious! it's the individual and the state! it's symbiosis! it's romance! etc.).
I still found this far less irritating than virtually anything written by Caitlin Flanagan.
Posted by mr. mister on 2008-10-28 23:57:36 +0000
I saw the documentary. I was disappointed at the lack of boobies. It was a very interesting time for porn when the movie came out. It was almost artsy. Now obviously noone believes that beautiful story telling and hardcore porn can go hand in hand. (ba dum dum) Which the director of Deep Throat seemed to actually believe.