Sunday, September 20, 2009

Intellectual Contortionist

I am no fan of pornography, by any means. It cheapens sex, reduces it not so much to something dirty and horrible, but makes of something profound and complex something far more mechanical and uninteresting. Not to mention the broken lives of the "performers" flickering on the screen, it robs sex of its mystery, its beauty.

Having said that (and I could say much more), I wonder about this guy:
He said, “all pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards. Now think about that. And if you, if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to go out and get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants.” You know, that’s a, that’s a good comment. It’s a good point and it’s a good thing to teach young people.

Hazarding a guess, I think he is referring to the fact that, especially for adolescent boys, viewing pornography might lead them (horror of horrors) to touch themselves. If an adolescent boy feels free to touch his own penis in a sexual manner, who's to say he might not be willing to touch another boy's penis the same way? In other words, it's a straight line from wanking in the bathroom to the copy of Penthouse sneaked out of Dad's sock drawer to listening to show tunes.

Since masturbation among males is about as common as breathing, even though most adolescent boys seem to think there is something odd or dirty about it, I think the notion that masturbation leads to gay sex just doesn't pass the smart test. After all, we'd all be gay. We're not.

Part of the problem is that far too many anti-gay folks think it's all about the sex. They just cannot conceive of the possibility that a man can be not just sexually aroused by and attracted to another man, but have an emotional attachment to another man the way the vast majority of us feel about women. I have to laugh whenever I hear about "the gay lifestyle" because what I think of is two men or women sitting around the kitchen, talking about their day, paying bills, cleaning the house, arguing over who took the trash out last, and wondering why their socks keep getting mixed up when they sort laundry. For some reason - well, I think I understand the whole attraction-repulsion thing - anti-gay folks obsess over the physical aspect of same-sex relationships to the exclusion of everything else. Gay couples are just couples, and for the most part sex is an important yet hardly the most important part of their bond.

As far as porn=masturbation=gay, all I can wonder about is the speaker's experience. Does he harbor these kinds of thoughts? I really have to wonder.

Virtual Tin Cup

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