The one thing that needs more regulation is not guns, but pornography.
The medical literature on the negative effects of porn is underwhelming. I know Time magazine was recently all about sounding the porn alarm, but honestly the literature isn’t clear. Obviously attitudes about sex and sexuality are multifactorial and watching porn may actually be a symptom and not a cause. But you know what is clearly about harm? The literature on guns, which shows that a gun in the house increases the risk of suicide and homicide. I was really surprised by this, not that guns kill all kinds of people accidentally and on purpose, but that the literature on porn being harmful isn’t robust. Although one thing that might have the GOP concerned is that porn may have some role in religious and spiritual struggles. Fewer in the hard core religious right means, well, less of the voting block the GOP has so carefully cultivated.
So, how many people have been killed by porn?
Although I’m interested in that comment about porn causing doubt in religious folk. I’ve been promoting atheism all wrong–instead of science, I should be writing more about sex?
I’ll have to release a sex tape. That’s guaranteed to make people question the existence of gods.
“I’ll have to release a sex tape. That’s guaranteed to make people question the existence of gods.”
No that would pretty much confirm the existence of the Old Ones…
You’ll release whose sex tape? I’m sure there are some atheists out there other than you with a sex tape.
And the legitimacy of tentacle porn.
Their sex tape wouldn’t be as horrifying as my sex tape.
They can legislate all they want; they still have no ability to enforce the existing regulations. Everything is just an encoded packet away now, or so I am told.
What is the point of regulations if the users are just going to ignore them anyway?
It is just like suicide, no one can stop it. Just take even a top gun into the street at night.
that should say toy
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t the more religious regions of the US have higher porn consumption?
I remember hearing a few years ago about a church that put up a billboard near a porn shop with a message about how only the love of Jesus could set you free from the evil of pornography.
The porn shop promptly put up a sign near the church that said “Missing some excitement in your love life? Check out our couple’s section.”
Fred Tully — apart from pandering to their demographic, the other purpose of “unenforceable” laws is discretionary prosecution — someone causing you political troubles? Get a warrant (or not in recent times), search their browser history and there’s a good chance you can destroy their lives or at the very least give them a huge problem to deal with that saps most of their energy for a few years.
As for Republicans and their “straight” priorities:
Frequent Megyn Kelly Guest And Hate Group Leader Adds Anti-LGBT Conversion Therapy To The GOP Platform
Actually, the science has shown that as porn has continued to proliferate in society, rapes and sexual assaults have gone down. There was an article in Psychology Today last January that said as much.
Hi PZ — I just wanted to say this because you’ve said this kind of thing before, and it always makes me a little uncomfortable. You certainly don’t have to stop on my account! But I just wanted to say:
A sex tape of you would not cause me to doubt the existence of gods (well, except that I am an atheist, so everything does, but you get my point). I don’t watch things like sex tapes because it would make me wildly uncomfortable for my own reasons, but if I did watch sex tapes, a sex tape of you wouldn’t be any more illegitimate or uncool or whatever than a sex tape of anyone else. Even if it wasn’t sexy to most people, that wouldn’t make it gross.
I can talk about this politically, if you like. For one thing, your comments about your theoretical ugliness (you’re not) always make me go “wow, if you were a woman, it would be much harder to say that.” The other day, an MRA activist misread a tweet of mine, and within minutes, I had a whole stream of people telling me I was too ugly to exist, with a number of implications that I was certainly too ugly to be married or have romantic interests. (This is the sort of thing that is immune to argument; the fact that I am, in fact, married, just causes them to insult my husband.) It probably wouldn’t just be seen as amusing self-deprecation, but a real hook into insults and harassment. Maybe I’m wrong about that; I’m still relatively youngish, and maybe a woman closer to your age would have more latitude.
Still, that’s not necessarily an argument against doing it. Just because assholes gonna asshole doesn’t mean you have to stop using a strain of humor that amuses you. Just because it’s not a privilege I can exercise doesn’t mean you should stop exercising it; most privileges are things we want to extend to everyone, not take away.
Let me talk about it in terms of a different fallout, though. The idea that people who are not conventionally attractive are therefore *gross* when having sex is really psychologically damaging. It’s psychologically damaging to men; I know some men who think their bodies mean they can’t or shouldn’t be romantic or have sex. Women are likely to be even more systemically affected, I think; we are constantly bombarded with the idea that our bodies must either be perfect or disgusting, and what you’re saying plays into that. If your appearance bounds your behavior; if the idea of you having sex is supposed to be enough to gross people out—how must anyone else who already has these images of themselves feel when reading them legitimized? I doubt it’s a conscious effect, but it’s one more straw on top of a heap, one more reassurance that this cultural idea is a reasonable one.
Going back to men, just for a moment – I’m pretty sure one of the underlying pins of the self-deprecating jokes (perhaps not explicit, but at least in terms of cultural echoes) is that men are inherently less attractive than women. This is obviously a culturally accepted idea. It does have weird effects on men, though, who are also capable of feeling alienated from their bodies and sex. (Also, tangentially, on straight women—I have at least one female friend who feels deep, constant pressure to see women’s bodies as sexy, with relatively little support for her feelings that men are beautiful.)
There’s also the factual – I know a lot of poly people, and a lot of people who have public sex (another thing that makes me wildly uncomfortable, but which is my problem, not theirs). They’re not all conventionally attractive, and many are less so than you. This doesn’t stop them from having dozens of partners. It doesn’t stop the people who are at those public sex events from wanting to watch them, either. I admit I was super surprised to learn that. All the messages I’d received my whole life were about sex strongly correlating to conventional attractiveness, and it was jarring to realize I was wrong.
On a personal level, I always want to protest a little, because I don’t want you to believe these things about yourself. But I don’t think my protective impulse there is particularly legitimate; I could be wrong, but you don’t seem to be speaking from pain so much as drawing from a culturally accepted well of humor.
I’ve never seen a sex tape, and have no particular inclination to do so. But if I had to guess, if you and your wife did choose to release a sex tape, it wouldn’t be gross. It would be warm and loving.
All that said, I do understand the self-deprecating humor is… you know, self-deprecating, and it’s often amusing. I don’t think you believe these things about other people–I’m sure you would reject most of the ideas–and I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. I just think this is the kind of joke that could stand to be squinted at, and considered.
Despite the clickbait headline, the article seems legit and interesting: http://fusion.net/story/324449/racial-resentment-guns-research
TL;DR: “Racially resentful white people love guns”.
Or: gun control cannot be disentangled from racial issues.
Rachel @ #12,
I’m the same age as PZ, and I agree with you that he’s kind of cute. I prefer my clean-shaven husband, but some men with beards are handsome, PZ being one of them.
F.O.@#13:
gun control cannot be disentangled from racial issues
The elephant in the room is that historically going about armed was a privlege of the upper classes. The American political ideology teaches that we’re a classless society (yuh, huh!) and that individual liberty can be represented by going about armed. Remember that, while this was going on, you had European societies* in which aristocracy denoted itself by carrying weapons – the American sap who carried a gun was making a statement about class consciousness. One thing to consider is that gun ownership remains a class issue and the white lower/working class clings to their guns because that’s what separates them from those other people. Gun ownership being one privilege (since it doesn’t cost the rich and truly powerful anything at all!) that was left to them.
Suggestions for how to deal with American gun-love have to address the underlying class issue as well. One way of doing that is to point out that one is demoting oneself, socially, to be part of the gun-toting class. Another is to remove guns from social use in a manner that is class-neutral.
I made such a proposal over at stderr, here: “From my cold dead hands”
(* Japan, too, but not related)
“I’m the same age as PZ, and I agree with you that he’s kind of cute. I prefer my clean-shaven husband, but some men with beards are handsome, PZ being one of them.”
That really wasn’t what I meant… It was more a social statement than a personal one. He’s not ugly, but even if he were, would that matter?
Adding to Marcus Ranum: Guns used to be frightfully expensive. Each was roughly a month’s work by a skilled craftsperson. To a rich person, that was nothing, and specialty guns became even higher status symbols. But to a working stiff, especially to a cashless person like a farmer, a gun was unreachably expensive.
When Eli Whitney tried mass production, he tried it on guns first. Bringing the cost down could open new markets. (He faked the first presentation of matching parts on military muskets, by the way – the tools of the time simply couldn’t make parts that accurately.)
At the time the Constitution was written, guns were expensive, upper class, single shot, slow and inaccurate. If the writers had meant the Second Amendment to allow private gun ownership, it would have been about an entirely different situation than now exists. (Eli Whitney’s attempts at mass production were still decades away.)
The Second Amendment had to do only with the militia, the people’s army, the nation’s guard. A paid army was forbidden, and the body of the Constitution provides for the states to arm the militias. The militia acts describe that a militia member may commission a mil-spec musket from the local craftsman, and allow six months for the making of the musket, and the cost of the musket counts as paying tax.
The Second Amendment was from a very different time, and the Republicans misunderstand it dreadfully. We have no right to own guns, but they will defend that freedom at the cost of many other people’s lives.
They seem to think we have no right to look at porn, and they’d be happy to deprive us of that freedom, no matter the cost to our happiness or our economy. (Excuse me, the internet is in my other tab …)
PZ, I was going to say that you releasing a sex tape would make invoke god in the negative imperitive. However, Rachel has made me reconsider that. Release your sex tape, or not. Be rest assured that if you do release your tape you can be proud in the fact it will be just as awkward, embarrassing and fumbly as all the other amateurs out there!
Porn doesn’t get people off. Masturbation gets people off!
(Did I get that right? Maybe sex-averse aces shouldn’t try to make sex-related jokes.)
#12: That’s a thoughtful comment.
There is an unfortunate effect of being out and loud on the internet, and that is that I get a lot of the same messages many women do (but to a lesser extent): I get messages every day that I’m ugly and undesirable, that I’m a “beta” and fat and just plain horrible, and I can’t help but absorb that. I’ve been at this for 12 or 13 years now, and what’s happened is that I’ve reconciled myself to my unattractiveness…which is the only way I can cope. I’m at the point where I can’t even look in a mirror anymore without cringing.
So I don’t say these things to be funny. It’s my defense mechanism. I don’t get to be an ordinary guy with ordinary looks — there are a lot of people who aren’t at all shy about telling me what a monstrous creature I am, and the easiest way to deal with is just to agree and go along with it and recognize that I’m never going to be able to coast along on my dazzling smile and magnificent physique and craggy good looks.
Nobody should worry. There will be no sex tape, either, and I haven’t even seen any of them, so I wouldn’t know what to do to make one anyway.
PZ, that is a brave and thoughtful reply. I feel bad for my earlier flippancy. Our societies give excessive value to fleeting youth and beauty, while other qualities are ignored or even denigrated. I have no public profile (visually at least), but getting older has still exposed me to comments about age, fitness and weight. You’re right, the best one can do is acknowledge the facts of the matter, but it still stings and you do end up avoiding mirrors and grimacing when photos catch you at a bad angle or when especially tired.
Here’s hoping your children’s children live in a kinder and more accepting world.
Menyambal @ #
I’m not sure that “people’s army” is quite right. As I’ve read many times, the Second was indeed to protect state militias and win Southern support for the Constitution. In the South, state militias were used as “slave patrols” to prevent slave revolts which deeply worried slave owners such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Slave patrols policed slave quarters to make sure slaves didn’t have weapons and they captured runaway slaves.
Fred Tully wrote:
They stand a very good chance of getting laws passed. Plenty of Democrats like to be seen as “family values” types, too.
Besides, plenty of these laws are still on the books and have been upheld recently. Alabama still has a law prohibiting the sale of dildos and sex toys, which means you have sex toy stores selling “personal massagers”, “novelty items”, “educational devices”, “costumes” and butt plugs (because the law doesn’t name these as prohibited devices). The US supreme court declined to hear a case challenging it in 2005, and the Alabama Supreme Court explicitly upheld it in 2009.
Thank you for such an honest comment, PZ. For my part, I’ve never really understood why calling someone ugly should be heard as a anything other than a statement that reveals the true nature of the person speaking it. Physical attractiveness is an incredibly subjective thing, and going out of your way to insult someone because they don’t fit what you think is asthetically pleasing is, to put it bluntly, fucking childish.
And, I’m perfectly happy with my girlfriend, but I’ve always thought the most attractive qualities in a woman (or man for that matter, yay bisexuality) were compassion, a sense of humor, and a big… brain. Saying true beauty is on the inside sounds like one of those Disney cliches, but the older I get, the truer I find it to be.
Well, I think Rachel covered most of what I was going to say, but I will add, PZ. as a fellow old white male (55 next month, thank you medical/pharmaceutical science) I . . . what was the post about again? Oh, yeah, as a Real American who owns a few guns (can’t help it; they’re so damn, well, shooty) I can say from experience that porn is best enjoyed unarmed. That, and the GOP is people who scare me, and there’s got to be a Trump sex tape somewhere. That said, I would pay gladly to keep yours off the market. Perhaps a gofundme account should be established. I got six bucks.
I’m sorry, PZ. I was clearly reading it as more casual than it actually is, and I’m really sorry to hear that. I hope I didn’t seem dismissive of the damage this kind of abuse can have on men; my best friend has been through a psychological wringer over it. I think I mapped attitudes onto you from Scalzi, though.
I’m glad you have defense mechanisms. To whatever extent it helps, they’re full of absolute shit. Fuckers. My personal note at the end was true; I really don’t want you to think they’re right.
—
Porn. Good lord, my feelings on it are mixed. And I do want to see it regulated more, actually. But for radically different reasons, I expect. I’m not a second waver, but I am sympathetic to some of their critiques of pornography, and then you’re like, ack, who are these strange bed fellows and do I need to get up? Also, since I have different reasons for wanting reform, I would want different reforms.
But it sure is interesting what they think warrants regulation, and why, and how.
when I was in catholic high school we had some dude come and give a great pornography is evil lecture two years in a row until one of the brothers who ran the place started a conservation with him and got him to come out all anti-Semitic and paranoid conspiracy theory and he never came back after that..
here is what I thought of
uncle frogy
that is the first time that happened sorry
uncle frogy
Rachel #2. Very nice comment. I think it would be better if people here and elsewhere would refrain from the kind of self-deprecating comments that PZ made for the reasons you state. Those of us who are unhappy With our appearance will have that reinforced. I used to be unhappy with my appearance And am not so anymore(because I’m not skinny anymore) so I can relate to the feelings. I must say though that I wouldn’t have thought of this in regard to PZ’s comment if you hadn’t commented. Thanks very much.
PZ, not that my opinion matters, but you’re cute as a button and sexy as a cephlopod and have no “objective” reason to be insecure about your looks.
Release said tape on 8-track. It’ll confuse the hell out of anyone less than 40, and maybe the contents would too…?
Well, yeah, but when over and over again various people immediately leap to mocking your appearance it becomes pointless to resist — everything from Conservapædia to the Journal of Cosmology to assorted peons on the internet have put up pictures and photoshops announcing how funny-looking I am. I can accept that. I’m not insecure at all about it anymore. I pretty much have a permanent attitude of “fuck you, I’m ugly, but you’re an asshole” now.
As for porn, periodically the sewers of the internet go through phases where someone thinks it is hilarious to photoshop my face onto gay porn — or apparently, there’s even a genre that features skeevy old men having sex with attractive women, and they paste my face onto that — and they send it to me to teach me a lesson. I see it rather clinically, appreciating the fact that that young lady sure is pretty, or that man has been working out most impressively. And I have no problem with people making money with their appearance or bodies, but I’m about as interested in it as I am in body-building contests or Miss Universe pageants. As long as the participants are willing, it’s not something I worry about at all.
Wasn’t someone killed when their attic – stuffed with hundreds, if not thousands of pounds of Playboy, Hustler, etc. – collapsed on them? Seems like I heard something like this in the 60s or 70s. Or, maybe it was National Geographic and Readers Digest.
Then there is the sneaky way to do it. Ebay an item a picture of taken while in the buff and a mirror or reflective object showing all.
@rachelswirsky
Thanks for the posts.
As someone who used and abused porn, I do think it has skewed my relationship with physical appearance, mine and others’.
Then again, our society’s obsession with specific canons of physical appearance goes well beyond porn, and it damages people in more than one way.
@PZ
I met you in person PZ, and your looks were just normal.
Plus you were clean, obviously took decent care of yourself.
Still, as a big admirer of yours, I felt somehow relieved to read that the barrage of childish insults took a toll on you.
I still admire how you are unafraid of exposing yourself to all kinds of inanity, how you seem to shrug off all kind of abuses, but it’s good to know that you are still human.
Makes me feel like there is a chance for me as well, fearful as I am.
And you believe them? Since when has Conservapedia been right about anything, anything at all? You wouldn’t believe them if they said “gay marriage is ruining the country” so why would you believe them when they say “PZ is funny looking”?
As far as I’m concerned PZ looks just as I would expect a biology professor in his fifties to look.
Though you don’t have to be in your fifties or bombarded with explicit insults about your appearance to develop a strong feeling that you’re ugly and unattractive and unworthy of love or sex. I’m in my early 30s and I’ve felt old and ugly and off-putting since I was in my early 20s. Nobody has ever called me ugly, but I think the last time I looked in a mirror was when I was in my late teens. When I started growing facial hair I was appalled at the change that had overcome me, and it hasn’t got much better since. I’ve learned to cope, more or less, but that’s about all.
In my case, I expect, some of it is to do with being gay and having to experience a gay male culture that fetishises youth and beauty far more than mainstream culture tends to (for men anyway). Virtually every online profile I come across on gay hookup and dating sites tends to have a variant on the “nobody over 30 please” line, and gay porn tends to be about impossibly good looking young people. The problem is that I can’t decry it, because it fits with my preferences too. I’ve never found anyone much older than 25 sexually attractive. People have said I would when I got older, but it never happened. Even when I was in my 20s I hardly got any interest from these sites – which were my only avenue for sex and relationships – I’d spend hours at a time sending off messages by the hundreds, and maybe get one response for every thousand I sent. This had quite an effect on me, especially as the responses got markedly more numerous when I did not show a photograph.
Not once has anyone come out and told me that I’m ugly. But, then again, nor have they ever told me I’m attractive either. I’ve had many words of reassurance of the “come on, you don’t look at all bad” type from my (straight) friends, but they sound hollow coming from people who would not be attracted to me anyway. When those who would are universally silent, it just sounds like my friends are lying to make me feel better.
It’s a bugger. Ideally it would not be this way. But there are worse buggers out there. At least in my case the feelings of inadequacy aren’t intimately tied up with real power imbalances that affect my life adversely.
@24 Southe
Exactly! I mean, “sapiosexual” is much more interesting trait when compared solely to conventional attractiveness. I had a friend, back in the day, who was surprised that I was dating a “conventionally attractive, athletically fit woman” because, as he said, “you have always dated women who were more on the plus size”. I looked at him really strange at the point because I never realized the shallowness of his personality up until that point. Needless to say, we are no longer friends.
@dancaban
Ha! An release the erotic novel based upon said sex tape on punch cards.
Heh, yeah, facial hair is a big help. I keep waiting for bags-over-the-head to become fashionable for men.
The age thing is also a difference: I’m actively averse to finding young people sexually attractive — they’re all such children — so all those relative babies in porn are actually a turn-off for me. I know there is older woman porn, but I’m not interested enough to go delving into sub-categories myself.
Since we’re discussing the ‘political’ or social baggage implied by PZ’s self-deprecating self-mockery of his appearance on the sex tape issue, I’ll mention that men who do this always seem to me to be truncating their audience. Even if we grant for the sake of the “joke” that all straight men and young, attractive women are going to be “grossed out” — what happened to the rest of us? Older, ordinary-looking women are (again) invisible. Ditto I suppose for mature gay men. A less important point than those brought out above, but still.
The laughing, knee-jerk “no, please, we couldn’t take seeing you naked!” responses are locker room humor. Male locker room. I bet your women readers in comments never join in, even in fun.
Oh sure, it’s always about people.
Won’t someone care about the gerbils?
OK, I’ll stifle it in the future.
PZ, if you really want to intimidate the wankers that read conservapedia, you should have photos of yourself taken while wearing one of those giant Russian codpieces Edmund Blackadder wore when he was confirmed as Archbishop.
PZ Myers #42 wrote:
Or, alternatively, put out a sex tape.
It always amazes me how the ammosexuals proclaim the 2nd Amendment and other militia references in the Constitution exist to support the purported right of overthrowing the government – and how gun control proponents debate as if that made sense.
Pls note the very first three uses of the word “militia” in the Constitution:
Got that, folks? Constitutional militias are fully government-controlled, for the use of enforcing national/state laws and stopping rebellions.
In addition to the questionable claims about porn, the Republican platform includes more objectionable planks:
– the platform committee endorsed constructing a wall along the U.S./Mexico border, just like Trump wants
– the committee changed “illegal immigrants” to “illegal aliens” in the text
– the committee refused an amendment that would have pushed for a restriction of magazine capacity in firearms
– they approved an amendment that would make it legal for parents to force their LGBT children to go through conversion therapy
– Children raised in “traditional” homes are “healthier.” “Children raised in a traditional two-parent household tend to be physically and emotionally healthier, less likely to use drugs and alcohol, engage in crime, or become pregnant outside of marriage,” the platform reads.
– Education includes “a good understanding of the Bible.”
– Coal is a “clean” form of energy
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2016/07/12/3797322/gop-platform-draft/
#45
From a historical perspective, that’s exactly the way the term “militia” would have been used in late 18th century political discourse – the citizen army of a state, as opposed to a professional mercenary army a state might employ for its wars of defence or conquest. This usage stems from Italian political discourse of the sixteenth century, and enters English towards the end of that century – Machiavelli famously decries mercenary forces as unreliable and insisted that his Florence defended itself solely with a militia, unlike many Italian city-states of the time.
The Founding Fathers of the US had all read Machiavelli, and both they and Machiavelli were steeped in the culture of Classical political philosophy which made similar claims for the virtue and reliability of citizen-soldiers over paid mercenaries. Athens and Rome both used citizen soldiers, and this became the political orthodoxy. The Federalist Papers go into some depth in their discussions of Cicero and other classical writers on the subject. To them, a militia was an army made up of citizens, volunteer or otherwise, and paid for their upkeep, rather than non-citizen mercenaries who were paid for the work of war that they did.
The idea that a “militia” is a part-time alternative to a standing army is a much more modern one.
PZ — I don’t think you need to stifle the humor if it helps. Do what is useful for you. (I can say, though, that this particular defense mechanism has been damaging for me in the past; it’s correlated strongly with my worst bouts of eating disorders.)
I’ve been not sure how to make this comment, because it does two things I’m concerned about. I don’t want to reify the way that trolls talk about “ugliness.” Very few people are actually ugly–maybe no one. And even ugly people deserve full rights and human dignity. So while I can say you’re not ugly — you aren’t — I don’t want people who are (or, more likely, *think* they are) to feel like their responses are illegitimate. Ugliness is a stupid concept and a mobile target anyway. What does it mean? By and large, “I want to hurt you.”
Also, compliments to you personally have a certain degree of “beside the point.” I don’t want to get “notes from my bonery” especially because I don’t mean to express attraction.
On the other hand, I know, personally, a bit of reality checking can help when I get myself into a “I’m too ugly to go downstairs and be on this panel” mode. So:
You remind me of my father. He’s a good-looking man, kind, and one of the absolute best people I know.
Though, just to try to cut the serious nature of this a bit — I really would prefer my dad not release a sex tape.
No need to reply or anything. Just, I brought it up, and I feel I owe whatever sincerity I can give.
“– Children raised in “traditional” homes are “healthier.” “Children raised in a traditional two-parent household tend to be physically and emotionally healthier, less likely to use drugs and alcohol, engage in crime, or become pregnant outside of marriage,” the platform reads.”
Which, for sane policy makers, would mean that other kinds of homes would get extra support to make up for it. Not so much for Republicans, who want to make the lives of already disadvantaged people even worse.
rachelswirsky: nah, it’s good to know. If my spiky armor is hurting others, I want to hear about it. I can just put on something otherwise smooth & impenetrable.