Playboy is not porn. Playboy is not even smut. Playboy is – or rather, was – all about relatively mild, heavily Photoshopped, fairly old-fashioned pinups, barely a notch above PG-rated – nudes that, these days, amount to almost quaint depictions of the female erotic.
Why tell you this? Because I just received a very eager PR email from the alarmist, confused folks over at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), another scattershot anti-porn crusader group; they want everyone to know they’re delighted at the news that Playboy is removing nudes from its magazine – not, it must be said, because Playboy believes they’re exploitative, but because the sex-soaked Internet has made Playboy’s brand of gentle, hide-it-under-the-mattress boyhood sexual fantasy entirely obsolete. But never mind that now.
Strangely, NCOSE believes Playboy (like Cosmo, like 50 Shades of Gray, et al) is the enemy. Playboy is “porn” – or rather, as NCOSE puts it, a “cultural gateway” to porn – just more dangerous smut that destroys minds and marriages, leads to sexual abuse, prostitution, the kicking of puppies in their sleep. The fact that nearly all of this, particularly in the case of Playboy, is total, unproven nonsense, matters not.
I found that NCOSE’s email dovetails nicely with the bizarre, but somehow equally quaint smattering of “Porn Kills Love” billboards recently popping up like frightened flowers all over the Bay Area, apparently put there by a team of strange, anti-porn Mormon “fighters” hell-bent on – well, who cares, really. Does it matter?
This adorable group, too, believes smut is highly destructive. The devil’s work. Apparently, only sex that is not on film, that is clean, happy and approved by God, that is free of large silicon plugs, leather whips and fantasy sequences involving, say, callipygian bondage fairies and giant, well-endowed space octopi is safe for humans. And maybe Mormons.
Oh, you poor Mormons. I suppose the T-shirts DO act like a friendly courtesy notice: “Warning: Inhibitions galore. Terrible sexual skills. Do not date me”
Shall we declare the obvious? Here goes: Porn does not kill love. Bad porn, low-grade porn, violent, gross-out porn can do a few things: desensitize, distort, shove a person’s (male’s) already warped views of women, sex and human connection deeper into a hole of sadness. This can happen. But largely only if you’ve already been warped and misguided to begin with.
Then again, quality porn can, and does for many millions, bring tremendous delight. It’s another form of sex toy, really, a visual enhancement, adding spark and variety and perhaps some dirty, hey-let’s-try-that suggestions. Is there exploitation and abuse in the industry? Doubtless. Is it more prevalent in porn than, say, “normal” Hollywood or the fashion industry? Debatable. Particularly when you add the fact that there are more female porn directors and women-owned porn production companies than ever. Does Clay Olsen, the sweet, oddly well-funded founder of the “Fighters,” know this? Let’s just say: Doubtful.
So then, what does kill love? I mean genuine love – the vast, juicy, ever-evolving, self-defined, soul-illuminating, hard work-requiring, sexually charged, eternally maddening, ever-heartbreaking, poetry-inspiring kind?
That’s easy: Religion.
Of course it’s true. While porn may warp some perceptions and harm some relationships – and if it does, well, you’re doing it wrong – religious dogma has demeaned and destroyed the indefinable nature of love like no other invention in human history; nothing stabs at love’s feral heart like lopsided, constrictive, harshly male ideas about “God’s will”, nothing else forces love into all manner of cage, box and narrow ideology – from what constitutes “appropriate” gender roles to the “real” definition of marriage, from what’s allowable (or more accurately, what’s not) in the bedroom to how love is supposed look, act, hide and never, ever transgress.
Simply enough? Porn, even at its ugliest, is a fluffy rainbow gumdrop compared to the historic volumes of shame, guilt and emotionally destructive terror organized religion – Mormonism very much included – has brought to bear on the gorgeously inchoate manna we call love. Not even a question.
The harsh bondage of narrow-minded, sexist, patriarchal religious dogma, or… this kind? Choose wisely
But don’t take my word for it. Right now, as I write this, women from all over the world, from all beliefs and religious affiliations, are gathering in Salt Lake City for a historic meeting.
The Inaugural Women’s Assembly at the Parliament of the World’s Religion will try to address, among other issues, women’s (still) severely limited human rights, their mistreatment and sexual abuse, across nearly every culture on earth, largely at the hand of – you guessed it – patriarchy, organized religion, violent male moral weakness.
At the center of this landmark gathering will be the forbidden third rail of religion: the dignity and equal rights of women.
Faith leaders and followers from 50 religions across 80 countries are making this issue a primary focus at the first parliament to take place in the U.S. in more than 20 years. Alongside female leaders from the global stage, thanks to scholarship support, will also be women’s voices that are rarely heard: Dalit feminists, African environmentalists, Israeli and Palestinian peace activists, Indigenous Elders, Episcopal priests, Wiccan priestesses, green nuns and Maori-Mormon womanists from New Zealand. –Time
It’s a bit, you might say, unprecedented. So many powerful women from so many diverse nations, daring to openly acknowledge just how much the major religions of the world (every one of them invented, designed and enforced by men) has condoned and excused all manner of unspeakable abuse, constriction, even lethal violence against them, for centuries, from rape to stoning, genital mutilation to burning them at the stake, shooting young girls in the face on a bus, trolling and bullying them to suicide on the Internet.
To oversimplify: The real source of their pain? It’s not Playboy. It’s the brutally male vice-clamp of God.
Perhaps you hear about the pope? Francis recently modified, ever so slightly, the church’s rules on divorce, making annulments both faster, cheaper, just little less shameful.
Isn’t that nice? Coming from the institution that still vehemently refuses female clergy, rejects condoms, paid out upwards of $2.2 billion in recent years for the hundreds, nay thousands of rapes, molestations, pedophilic acts committed by its priests, all over the world, for decades and centuries?
Maybe you heard that Pope Francis met with a few of those victims, on his recent U.S. visit, and heard their stories. “God weeps,” he told them, with what I imagine was tremendous kindness and sincerity. I have no doubt.
But also, very strange. God weeps? God expresses human emotions? He reacts, tearfully, to events He did not foresee? Impossible. Christian God is omniscient and omnipresent; He cannot possibly become distraught at the unexpected “news” that so many of his priests sexually abused so many children.
But maybe that’s grammatical nitpicking. Francis probably meant it metaphorically – though it might be more appropriate, if you really wish to assign an emotional response to the Almighty over millennia of churchly abuses, to say not that “God weeps,” but that God howls in appalled fury. Just a thought.
Another angle: Recently did my girl and I thoroughly enjoy the SuicideGirls’ Blackheart Burlesque show, here in SF. Lousy production values, clumsy transitions, but also, I don’t mind telling you, quite surprisingly sexy and thoroughly hot, most notably because the performers – a fiery, fearless squad of young women of every body type, height, race, breast size – were clearly in total control.
There was zero dumb-guy jeering. I heard no loathsome frat-thugs screaming sexist nonsense from the (sold-out) audience – which, by the way, was a wild SF mix of genders and types; lots of couples, tattooed hipsters, straight and gay, male and female, artsy and irreverent, normcore and techie.
Which is to say: The show wasn’t merely refreshing and inspiring, it was a hotly diverse, sex-positive sign of the times (this, despite how SG has been around for nearly 15 years). My girl agreed; the show made us both feel simultaneously erotically charged, empowered and sexually badass, all at once. In other words, exactly what Playboy is hoping to become. Sorry, Mormons.
You are free to disagree. You are free to believe that any sexualized public display of the human form of any kind whatsoever, from high-fashion supermodels to ‘Magic Mike’, from Kink.com to ‘Anal Biker Babes IV,’ is always exploitation, objectification, demeaning. And verily, often it is.
But far from always. It’s all in the intention, attitude, drive toward authenticity. After all, sex, bodies, smut, erotic depictions have been a favorite form of human currency since half of forever – certainly long before the early Christian fathers crushed, and then stole outright, all the forms, icons and powerful yonic energies of the pagan goddess religions that long preceded them.
It’s a vast topic, I admit. Impossible to fully unpack here. Let’s be clear: I do not wish to defend modern porn beyond a reasonable point. It can be gross and caustic, it can be healthy and delightful, depending on the intelligence, sexual wellbeing and psycho-emotional stability of s/he who enjoys it. Obviously.
Simply to say: it’s going to be awhile before I receive a truly honest PR email, or that we all see a truly accurate billboard, one that states the truth outright: “Religion kills love.”
As for God? Well, in all his/her forms and as the radiant, pure manifestation of love throughout all of human consciousness forever, she’s already well aware.
Read more here:: Porn does not kill, and God does not weep
