- Share This Post
- 1
- submit
- 4
-
Sparkle (0)
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.
That's a quote from George Orwell's 1984. I quote it because I want you to imagine a world where there exists no freedom to think for yourself or question what you are told. It's difficult to do given that we live in a country that allows us to think for ourselves and speak freely. But humor me.
Got it? Perfect. Now I'm going to tell you three little stories.
THE ATTACK ON THE DISCUSSION OF PORNOGRAPHY IN A SOCIAL CONTEXT
Violet Blue is sex writer, activist and educator who, in response to a recent anti-pornography conference, created the website Our Porn, Ourselves, a resource destination founded on the belief that all women should have the right to choose whether they consume pornography or not and no single group should control what consenting adults can or cannot see. This site and its tenets, more than espouse pornography, espouse freedom.
Nevertheless, last month, Facebook decided to pull the plug on the 3,000-members strong Facebook page created for Our Porn, Ourselves, and sent Blue an e-mail citing the group's violation of its terms of service, which forbid pages that are “hateful, threatening, or obscene” and those that “attack an individual or group.”
On a post detailing the event, Blue indicates how vigilantly she curated the content of the page to prevent violations of Facebook terms:
I was very careful to police the page nearly hourly to keep the content strictly within Facebook's terms, as I knew the page was under scrutiny from anti-porn zealots (and I had been witnessing their underhanded tactics on the page to harass users since its inception). I immediately blocked anyone who tried to post pornographic content. I believe the page was an example of exemplary conduct in order to have a safe place in which women (and men) could talk about pornography in a socio-cultural context. I purposely wanted a work-safe, non-offensive destination for these discussions and to build women's community.
Blue went on to send Facebook a letter asking for an explanation behind the company's decision to remove the page, which pointed out that while this page did not violate the terms of Facebook, other pages by anti-pornography groups do threaten and and incite attacks on the members of this group.
At around the same time that this was happening, anti-pornography pages on Facebook exploded with praise to the social network for removing the offending page.
I am not a porn consumer, though some of my accounts detailing my encounters may be viewed as such. Regardless, I believe that we each should have the freedom to decide whether we wish to consume pornographic content or not. What anti-pornography activists see as the triumph of decency, I see as a corrosion of this freedom. Pornography is just a hop, skip and a jump away from erotica, from books and stories that dare to tell of people's sexual experiences, and anyone who doesn't fit their vision of what “decency” entails.
THE ATTACK ON THE DISCUSSION OF RESEARCH PERTAINING TO THE EFFECTS OF PORNOGRAPHY
At around the time that anti-porn activists were gearing up for the above-mentioned conference, I told a good friend of mine, Jason Goldman, a scientist at USC about some of their arguments. Being a man of inquiry, he decided to check out the literature on pornography and see whether these had any backing.
His post, created as a means to inform the world about the research that had been done on pornography, exploded within days with so many comments and attacks from various anti-porn activists that Goldman was forced to close the comments and eventually, unpublish the post. He's been on the web for some time, but blogging about animal cognition or science among peers leads to a different brand of discussion. Flame wars the likes of which we sex bloggers see are not part of the everyday for him.
After much thought, he republished the piece, stripped to the bare bones of the science it initially offered. He chose to maintain the comments section closed.
Once again, anti-pornography groups had succeeded in taking away an individuals right to
