Philo

Insecure is the last word that I would use to describe strippers. They have egos like circus tents.

Believing in low self esteem is like believing in the zodiac. Once you decide to believe, you will always find evidence.

Many people have an abiding hatred of sex and sexuality, don't they?

Dear Helen Pringle,

Could you please define 'porn' for me, as you intended it in your article? The reason is that you may be using this term narrowly and selectively, so that you are referring to particular subject areas only. Or you may be using this term in a society-wide context. Or something else again.

Reading your article along with the numerous comments towards same, there seems to be a great deal of confusion as to exactly what it is that is being discussed. At the same time I find this topic of significant ambiguity in common usage. We all seem to claim to know the others' minds when we are each unclear about what it is that we each believe it to mean.

Given that Western civilisation and religion serve as a defence against nature in all its chthonian rawness. Feminist, Camille Paglia, writing on men's cultural achievements as a flight from nature and defence against the mystery and power of women, posits the following in "Sexual Personae"

"Happy are the period's when marriage and religion are strong. System and order shelter us against sex and nature. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the chaos of sex has broken into the open....Historiography's most glaring error has been its assertion that Judeo-Christianity defeated paganism. Paganism has survived in the thousand forms of sex, art, and now the modern media. Christianity has made adjustment after adjustment, ingeniously absorbing its opposition (as during the Italian Renaissance)and diluting its dogma to change with the changing times. But a critical point has been reached. With the rebirth of the gods in the massive idolatries of popular culture, with the eruption of sex and violence in every corner of the ubiquitous mass media.....Western civilisation has profited enormously from the sublimation Christianity forced on sex. Christianity works least when sex is constantly stimulated from other directions as it is now. No transcendental religion can compete with the spectacular pagan nearness and concreteness of the carnal-red media. Our eyes and ears are drowned in asexual torrent."

Deadly
“Could you please define 'porn' for me, as you intended it in your article?”

Aye there’s the rub. Of course those who condemn pornography as “degrading” and so on, presume to know what is the norm for human sexuality, and to identify deviations from it. But how could such a definition be anything other than arbitrary?

Women, in common with females of other species, adopt a sexually receptive posture without which sexual congress can’t take place. Those vilifying pornography are offended at the fact of sexuality itself; what they mean by “degrading” is “sexual”.

Poirot
Cthonian rawness, wow, that had me diving for the dictionary.

“with the eruption of sex and violence in every corner of the ubiquitous mass media…”

You hear that kind of thing a lot, and I can understand as to violence, but I don’t see it as to sex. There’s lots of violence. It seems like every night on TV there’s multiple programs about murder, often actually depicting it, not just shootings, but for example a while ago there was someone getting their ankles smashed with a sledge-hammer, and of course there’s the decayed bodies, the gruesome woundings, and all the rest of it. All the time.

But sex? I don’t think so. Pouting models, yes. Sex, no. Even the dancing is not all that sexy compared to sexy dancing from other cultures and times. In fact I think we live in one of the most sexually repressed societies in history. For example I read a history of 19th century London, and it was much more like Bangkok today than any western city.

Did you ever read ‘Sex in History” by Gordon Rattary Taylor? It was written in the 50s. Some examples: in pre-Christian Ireland, the ladies of the court used to great returning warriors by upping their skirts to show their privy parts. In mediaeval Italy, brothels were state-provided. In ancient Rome, public decoration included phalluses and vulvas, for example on public fountains. In short, many societies were far more open and positive about sex and sexuality than modern western society.

I remember also reading an interview with a Thai woman about the difference between American and Thai sexuality and she said "The difference is that in America you can talk about anything sexual, you just can't do it; in Thailand you can do anything sexual, you just can't talk about it."

The west is only drenched in public expressions of sexuality from the point of view of traditional Christianity. But that has always been *the* most sex-negative belief system in the history of the world, so that's hardly surprising.