rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Fred Mertz) (02/01/85)
> My views are not based on the fact that sex is good or evil or anything. > My view on censorship is based on the fact that as far as I can ascertain, > the vast majority of extremely sexually explicit films do not promote a > healthy attitude towards sexuality. [TOM WEST] I happen to agree. But my question in response is: "So?" Do we seek to eliminate everything in the printed/audiovisual media that does not promote a "healthy attitude" towards a given thing? In the current discussion I've had with Nancy Parsons, she points out that she feels that, to her, pornography is degrading. Degradation is always going to be in the eye of the beholder, and only the person who feels the sense of degradation is going to experience it in that particular way, while others may not experience it at all. The point is: just because something is deemed "degrading", or "presenting unhealthy attitudes", does that justify it being banned/controlled/outlawed? Are there any other things that any group of us net-readers finds degrading? What about representations of "computer people" as drippy little anti-social nerds, for example? "I find that degrading!", he/she said. Should such representations be outlawed? Furthermore, who decides what the "healthy attitudes" are? Will artists be required to submit drafts of their work to a Governmental Healthy Attitudes Board (GHAB)? These are very real consequences of the notion that, if a group of people find something degrading, some authority has the right and/or obligation to ban that thing. And this notion is EXACTLY equivalent to Falwellite Moral-Majority-esque repression. You might say, "But we're not seeking repression, we're doing it for good reasons, for the betterment of society!" Unfortunately, that's exactly what the Falwellites say. > To repeat, my views on sex are irrelevant to this > discussion. I am concerned that the vast majority of sexually > explicit films promote an attitude that is definitely unhealthy. Since > this is unlikely to change in the near or far future (the situation, not > my attitude :-)), I support an attempt to supress the worst aspects of this. > If we could censor the "unhealthy" sex in movies alone, that would be fine, > but since we are unlikely to be able to do that, I support censorship > based on the "traditional" standards. (such as hard-core scenes get cut, > and so on.) Again, are you volunteering to be the determiner of what is and isn't healthy? If so, why you? If not you, who? More importantly, why do it at all? Any attempt to eliminate things on the basis of their "degradation" or "unhealthiness" is of necessity biased in the extreme, and WILL result in control over EVERY output of every medium. You can't just make a special case of sex (and the degradation of women through "unhealthy" depictions of it, according to some). What about violence? What about degrading television commercials and situation comedies? What about those nasty foreign films I can't understand that *I* find degrading? > P.S. I can't be repressed, I haven't yet been pressed. :-) Perhaps you're permanent-pressed? (or permanent-REpressed?) :-) -- "So, it was all a dream!" --Mr. Pither "No, dear, this is the dream; you're still in the cell." --his mother Rich Rosen pyuxd!rlr -- "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? I dunno." Rich Rosen {ihnp4 | harpo}!pyuxd!rlr