nrh@inmet.UUCP (09/19/86)
>/* Written 5:01 pm Sep 12, 1986 by mat@mtx5a.UUCP in inmet:talk.pol.misc */ >/* ---------- "Re: Re: Re: Re: Commission on Porno" ---------- */ >> and I loathe any interference by the state with something as personal as the >> emotions, including sexual arousal, engendered by whatever art one >> freely decides to experience. And my intuition is that a society which >> regards sexual arousal as less desirable than horror or fear, and >> forbids works which evoke the former while protecting those which evoke >> the latter two, is *sick*. > >What about a society that holds these things as so personal and private >that the community has the right to say that people shall not gratuitously >manipulate the feelings and physical reactions of others? Since, by advocating the banning of pornography, one would be attempting to do EXACTLY that (otherwise, the various studies indicating shifts in attitudes towards stances you seem to find abhorrent are irrelevant) it follows that we should NOT regulate pornography because it would be "gratuitously manipulating the feelings and physical reactions of others". Pornographers don't work for free, and they can't tax you, their work is justified because people will buy it: their actions are therefore not "gratuitous" -- look it up. On the other hand, since the government will tax you anyhow, and since even the commissioners admit that violent crime is already illegal, the action of a government in preventing someone from seeing porn WOULD be gratiutous. As for the notion that this study has "documented", except in the loose sense of "supporting by writing", anything: remember the remark one of the commissioners made to the effect that "if we'd had to rely only on scientific evidence, we would not have reached our conclusions".