Over on A Voice for Men, Paul Elam is knocking the clichés out of the park! In a post about … oh, something about feminists being about to get their big comeuppance, who the fuck cares, all his posts are pretty much the same at this point, he explains how the mean feminists’
gravy train is about to derail, and that right quickly. One set of wheels is already off the track. … the choo choo is hittin’ poo poo.
That’s right, the metaphorical feminist gravy train is metaphorically derailing into a metaphorical mountain of metaphorical poop.
After a few more paragraphs of this poopery, Elam offers up a bit of inspiration for his troops:
[T]he times they are a changing. The worm is turning and lies are burning. Their whole house of cards is about to go up in a puff. What you are seeing is just the desperation that comes with them waking up to it.
Believe me, it does my heart good. Just to see their frantic scrambling to point the finger at me and my brothers, while they comically pretend our sisters aren’t standing right next to us, every time one more their lies bites the dust, is an absolute highlight in my day.
Must be time to crank up the action around here.
And then he really kicks it into high gear:
Keep your eye on the ball, boys. Put the pedal to the metal. Wake up and smell the coffee, feminists, because the shoe is on the other foot now! We’re burning the candle at both ends — because when the going gets tough the tough get going. What goes around comes around. Feminists and manginas, you made your bed, now you’re going to have to lie in it. The tide’s beginning to turn, all you gender ideologues and your lackeys at the SPLC, and it looks like there’s a new sheriff in town! Remember, nice guys finish last. And it ain’t over till the fat lady sings!
Ok, that’s not really Elam any more. That’s just a bunch of random clichés borrowed from Steve’s Cliché List, with some references to feminists and manginas and the Southern Poverty Law Center shoved in here and there.
Huh. I think I just figured out how Elam writes his posts.
EDITED TO ADD: For whatever reason, this post is no longer up at AVFM; here’s the Google cache version. Read the comments there too; quite a little shitstorm going on there.
I’m not saying that the guy who got convicted wasn’t a creep, or that his comic books weren’t drawn by creeps… Perhaps they were. I just see a problem with having a LAW which says it’s illegal to draw sex between people who “look underage”. Laws shouldn’t be THAT fuzzy and open to interpretation.
People should not be prohibited from drawing whatever they want in the privacy of their own homes, and if they want to invite a friend over to look at it and participate, fine. But when it’s being bought and sold and distributed to the point where it pervades everything from art sites to, well, anything, there’s a problem.
But why is it a problem? I’ve never seen anything that suggests people who look at socially unacceptable porn will end up doing those acts. To me this sounds like the whole thing of “video games will cause kids to be violent”. The problem seems to rely on the fact that people have moral issues with it rather than it will actually cause personal harm.
Okay Alex. I still don’t want a law that prohibits the distribution of drawings of people who “look underage”, since it’s way too fuzzy. One person could think a drawn boy or girl looks fourteen and another person could go “no, I think he/she looks more like eighteen”…. and the distribution of that picture would be either legal or illegal depending on who’s deemed to be right.
Jumbofish: There is actually a psychological study (it’s referred in one of the class books we had when I studied psychology at university, I could look it up) that shows men became more aggressive towards women after watching rape-porn (where men forced themselves upon initially objecting women who eventually came to like the whole thing). There were two control groups, one who looked at non-sexual movies and one who looked at consent-porn. So there is some basis for thinking porn can affect your behaviour.
I don’t think drawn child porn should be legal because it’s definetily harmless, I think it’s because deciding what’s child porn and what’s adult porn becomes pretty arbitrary when it’s not about real human beings with real ages. Sure, if you draw a baby getting fucked that’s definetily child porn, but there will always be cases where you arbitrarily have to decide that “that picture of a girl has too small breasts to count as an adult” or something equally stupid, and then send people to jail based on that arbitrary judgement.
I find illustrated child porn disgusting. But there are lots of things that I find disgusting.
I find bestiality disgusting. I think that actual acts of bestiality are abusive. But I don’t think that we should ban people from trying to buy and sell illustrations depicting bestiality.
I find racism disgusting. I think racist rhetoric ultimately does harm. But I don’t think we should stop racists from buying and selling material with racist themes.
So while I might find illustrated child porn disgusting, I think that it would be wrong to ban them.
Even if illustrated child porn does ultimately contribute to the normalization of such acts (which I’m not entirely sure it does — I’d need to see some sort of data before I felt comfortable drawing a conclusion either way here), I’m not sure out right banning it is the best solution. After all, it could be argued that the way race and gender are depicted in some art contributes to a culture of racism and sexism. It could be argued that the way violence is depicted in some works of art contributes to a culture where violence is more acceptable. But we don’t ban things based on that.
I know people who use porn that includes line drawings of children who don’t actually get off on actual children. I am deeply uncomfortable with saying they can’t use the porn they like and that doesn’t harm anyone else, particularly since I often get off on written rape porn, am repulsed by the idea of actual rape, and would really prefer that it not be made illegal for normalizing rape.
I will, however, be convinced if someone has a study showing that access to child porn with no children involved in the creation thereof tends to be correlated with increased rates of child molestation (or, for that matter, that access to consensually-made rape porn correlates with increased rates of rape).
“it” in the last paragraph of my previous comment refers to “rape porn,” not “rape”… just to be clear! Rape, obviously, should be illegal.
http://www.endlessvideo.com/watch?v=gFmGNqji4u0&start=0m10s&end=0m12s
Re: Drawn child porn
Absent evidence that it’s harmful, probably keep it legal. Potential issues of freedom of expression aside, if there’s no benefit to people, why waste money enforcing such a ban?
Well, until any definitive studies show yay or nay, we’ll have agree to disagree on this. Sometimes my mind goes to a weird place where things I would normally find disturbing and disgusting, and which I would never do/want done to me in real life, turn me on. But I write it out for myself, and only for myself. Nobody sees it, and nobody in my life knows about it, and I honestly don’t feel the need or want to share it. Maybe some people do. I don’t why they would, but whatever. My concern is, as I said, the potential for normalization and the fetishization of actual groups of people, in this case children, even if actual individuals aren’t used.
Alex, I just want to add that I do see your point, even if I disagree, for above given reasons.
And I do see yours, too. 🙂 Believe me, I’ve had arguments in the past with people over this where it has not gone so pleasantly, for various reasons (up to, and including my oponent’s eventually arguing that real children are only hurt by sexual abuse because society tells them it’s wrong -_-).
I live in the US, it’s a totally settled legal question here. Drawn and cg porn or porn with actors over 18, does not count as child porn even if the scenario in the film suggests it. There’s Supreme Court rulings to that effect. It’s not a pressing legal concern.
Jumbo,
Not addressing your post directly, but on why the atmosphere of the sexualisation of children and adolescents is a minefield.
I have to say, inappropriate sexualisation of children looks very creepy, and it is rather ubiquitous in the MSM; you don’t need to go searching very hard to find examples. By which I mean things like, soft core presentation of sexualised mages, since there are inevitable “Yes, buts” that will hedge these around like, “Yes, but the picture was of a boy/girl at a swimming carnival, so naturally he’s only wearing Speedos/she’s in a one-piece bather; it’s totally innocent”; or of a picture showing more obviously sexual content, you’ll hear an excuse like “Yes, but adolescent girls often develop in their early teens, so the girl in this raunchy pose could be over 18, you can’t be at all certain…”
These ambiguities extend to comic/manga depictions. For instance, some of the ridiculous hyper-sexualised poses that Ami ridicules on EscherGirls often touch the soft-core child porn button: I immediately remembered one well-known (and parodied) cartoon with a teacher looking up the skirt of a high school girl as she bends over a filing cabinet in a boobs’n’butt pose that reveals her panties — what’s the implied subtext there? (And the “Yes, but” objection is on shaky ground, as high schoolers are usually below the legal age close to 100%.)
Porn can and should be treated to age-appropriate content ratings (X 18+, I would think as a minimum). But inevitably, stuff gets past the censor. There are good reasons why children and adolescents should not be overly sexualised, even if that’s tough on pedophiles or ephebophiles who are vilified for a disposition that is not of their volition. Even though they deserve to have adequate treatment for a paraphilia, it is triggering for this stuff to be an easily purchaseable commodity out there in the free market.
I think it is healthy for children and young adults to be taught about sex-positivity at an appropriate age and not to be ashamed of their bodies, nor to be shamed if they engage in sexual play with others of their own age group, but that does not extend to allow some predatory adults to exploit that for their own purposes.
On age-appropriate acts: children and adolescents may become physically and emotionally able to engage in sex at a certain age (and that maturity may arrive at different ages for each category), but we have legal protections up to the age of 18 or thereabouts (in most Western countries) for very good reasons, mainly because of potential harm from adults especially if they are in a relative position of power and authority. If such acts are regulated, there is also argument that fantasy and porn content related to it is perhaps fit for the eye of the censor (government: content restriction) or the critic (people responding with speech that this is undesirable, if perhaps not provably harmful).
@Xanthe,
Not that it solves the issue or ends the debate, etc., but I agree with everything you just said.
“.. particularly since I often get off on written rape porn ..”
“.. Sometimes my mind goes to a weird place where things I would normally find disturbing and disgusting, and which I would never do/want done to me in real life, turn me on ..”
You are lucky that you are feminists. When an MRA says something like this, he/she gets ridiculed in a “man boobz” post.
In any case, it is encouraging that only one bigot on this board admits to wanting virtual child porn made illegal.
authortense, thanks for this:
“Any erotica that’s drawn, computer generated, written, or otherwise created — as opposed to filmed, photographed, or otherwise recorded — is inherently victimless.”
I like the way you describe this. I will use it in my own future writing.
“I live in the US, it’s a totally settled legal question here. Drawn and cg porn or porn with actors over 18, does not count as child porn even if the scenario in the film suggests it. There’s Supreme Court rulings to that effect. It’s not a pressing legal concern.”
Wrong. People are going to prison for very long senteces for posessing drawn images of “children” (in fact, the images were not of children, they were of fictional creatures such as fairies and tree sprites — and who is to say what an adult mythical creature looks like?)
http://animealmanac.com/2010/02/11/the-daily-almanac-a-man-goes-to-jail-for-manga/
Anyone called a “bigot” by an MRA must be doing something right.
@Catherine
I know you said you were just going on a tangent of what I was saying but I think I should say I am in no way ok with the sexualization real children. I’d prefer that next time you didn’t put my name when talking about something I never said I was ok with. I don’t want someone reading your comment and thinking “oh jumbo is cool with child sexual exploitation!”.
I don’t quite understand that logic it seems really silly to me. Lots of violent things on shows/games/movie aren’t banned because they show acts illegal in real life.
@antz
What are you even talking about? Unless you mean mras who express the desire to rape and kill real women which is not the same at all as wanting to view or create draw/written fantasy scenarios.
Dude you can’t just steal someone’s writing and use it without their permission.
@AntZ:
Could you provide the post where an MRA was ridiculed for zir sexual preferences? Bear in mind that a post that ridicules an MRA for saying that zir sexual preferences should be enforced upon others in some way doesn’t count.
Jumbo, [meta]
apologies. I thought my disclaimer at the very front of the post was sufficient to avoid that inference, in that I wanted to reply to what you had said, but as you said, tangentially, and not in implied 180º opposition. (I’ll reply to the content issue under separate cover.)
By the way, if you bring up Elam’s “The idea of fucking up your shit gives me an erection,” I will just pity you.
Thats…. immensely creepy.
Kids simply don’t have the mental capacity to be able to have non abusive sexual relationships with adults. It’s not that hard to understand seriously.
I know you didn’t mean any harm I just feel uncomfortable having my name next to that especially since we have certain trolls who do not read or take things way out of context!
haahaahahaha I bet that is what he meant XD
“Dude you can’t just steal someone’s writing and use it without their permission.”
Watch me.