Thursday 6 March 2008

Rogue's gallery no.5: pornography

Another multi billion dollar industry that has become a great scourge against the dignity of the human person, and a major player in the culture of death, is pornography. So much so that it consists of about 15% of the Internet. Like the sex industry, it is semi-criminal and also a major means of spreading virus and malware across the web. So widespread has it become that there is scarcely a single newsagent or corner shop in England where it is not on sale.

Yet paradoxically this is one sector where the demand is not as nearly as great as the supply. Despite its easy availability it is surprisingly rare that one sees anyone buying it over the counter. Only about 20% of films that are produced are for deliberately violent and pornographic purposes, and they are hardly ever released in cinemas. Most of them are released straight into DVD or for Internet download. Nevertheless, unlike mainstream film production the profit margins are extremely great, and this is a guaranteed source of easy money. It is very easy to create now with computer graphics, and far from being a surreptitious business it works openly with no attempt to cover itself.

It is often claimed that it is impossible to control pornography's spread and stop it. That is completely false. The technology and means to block it are very sophisticated, effective and easily available. It is also very easy to track the makers of this filth and the sources of it on the Internet. But this would fly in the face of the massive lobby that totally opposes any control. For corporations such as Google, Microsoft and many of the media moguls, it is a significant part of their business! It is not difficult to see the reason for their support for the 'pro-choice' lobby.

Consequently censorship now has become more of an enabling exercise rather than a restriction of viewing. The British Board of Film Censors is a quango that is not accountable to parliament and effectively acts completely in the interests of the film industry. Its' self avowed policy is to allow almost anything and everything to pass through, only stopping at child pornography for form's sake. Recently they caused much controversy by de-restricting video nasties that banned twenty years ago.

So yet again, it all boils down to money, and the consequent power that financial clout gives. But the same can't be said of the universities, another bastion of the culture of death. They have a very different reason for their support of it.

2 comments:

Craig Chamberlin said...

I just recently wrote on article on this very same subject entitled Pornography and the Destructive Pleasure-Demeaning Cycle. There can be only one outcome of pornography and it is destruction. The destruction of self, which consists of the inability to establish non-erotic relationships and the inability to enjoy eroticism outside of a pornographic context and the destruction of beauty, in which beauty itself becomes desensitized to the point of the modern day male no longer appreciating the natural beauty of women.

The woman, in turn, is forced to live up to a standard of fantasy non-existent in the real world. I really enjoyed your article, as it points out one my fundamental arguments. When man is driven by feelings alone it can only lead to adhering to a philosophy of materialism (greed) or pleasure (lust) - pornography encapsulates these two philosophies perfectly. You can read my article at: http://mywisegeneration.blogspot.com - I'd love to hear what you think.

LizzieD said...

These are very good posts. However, not only is pornography available in every corner shop and newsagent, it is in every supermarket. As a mother of a young boy, I have become thoroughly fed-up with dancing around in front of the cube stands selling the "Daily Star" displayed at child's eye level in supermarkets, in order to prevent him from seeing the pornographic pose of the girl on the front page. I have written to Tesco's and their lame answer was "we're not responsible for what the papers put on their front pages" oh, right, so you're exhonerated then eh? Now he's old enough I try to shop when he's not around, or get him to read a book in the car whilst I shop - but it is hard when one is home-schooling.
One of the most distressing sights I saw recently was in a motorway service station, where I observed two boys about the age of 9 taking down one of the most explicitly pornographic magazines from the stand. I looked around to see who they were with, before I knew it, more and more children came up to them to view the contents of the magazine. One boy rushed up and grabbed the magazine, and began to perform a sexualised thrusting motion towards it. I realised it was a whole class of schoolchildren, and although I stared at them stonily, they ignored me. I eventually found their teacher, blithely gassing away at the entrance to the shop, and once I informed her of what was happening she pulled them out of there in an embarrassed manner. I thanked God that I'd kept my son from school and school trips, where this sort of thing could happen. But the wholesale destruction of these children's innocence still haunts me.