trinity got paid a visit by some outfit called nopornorthampton (no, i'm not giving them a link, they spammed themselves all over the place as it was). we had a few um exchanges. you can go see for yourself if you've a taste for that sort of thing.
and then i am curious blue posted a link to some other outfit which popped up in response to these guys (a married couple, i take it, neither fundamentalist nor radical feminists, some sort of conservative Judeo-Christian ethos with nominally liberal views), mopornorthampton. a multi-volumed epic on "the horror that is nopornorthampton." well, god be with the days. so, i read for a bit, and learn...
...i guess the sheer level of smallness is amusing me. i mean, i'm used to pr0n wars, but in -this- case, what we would appear to have is one couple with a -lot- of time on their hands who are very VERY concerned about the adverse effects of pr0n on...the property value of their home. Or their neighborhood. as in, "there goes." as in, apparently -a pr0n store might be coming to their neighborhood-. Hence the blog title. Oh, yeah, and it's bad for wimminz and children and penguins and salad and the relations between the sexes (I Care, Deeply) and morality and other stuff, besides bluenosed NIMBYism. As we all know. But the POINT of the entire website there, basically, is: it's coming! A pr0n store! It's coming to town! HERE!!!11!!
So, at one point in the conversation, one of the two lovebirds is asking me to empathize with their plight thusly:
nopornnoho wrote:
May. 8th, 2007 04:16 pm (UTC)
Re: Kung Pao Pussies....
Porn may seem like a small deal until adult enterprises move into your area. As many towns have discovered, it can take years of hard work to recover from the crime and blight:
...which, you know, here in New York City, we all worry about this a -lot.-
Yeah. Funny place to visit. Wouldn't want to live there. I don't mean Northampton, I mean the -heads- of some people.
28 comments:
Interesting how NPN continued to ignore your and Trin's direct questions.
Funny to devote a website to concern about Northampton. It's a very quaint and beautiful town that hosts Smith College. It has the second highest lesbian population to San Fran, I seem to recall.
Your point about there being many other causes of crime and other problems more pressing about urban blight is well taken, although apparently not by NPN.
Yeah, it definitely can take years to recover from the crime and blight of porn theaters... it took a full -3 years for New York's homicide rate started to drop after Giuliani took office and started sterilizing Times Square.
Also, I thought the lesbians were in Berkeley, not San Francisco.
Well I've lost the particular link in that NoPornNoHo mess but
there's one that claims porn use leads inevitably to SM too.
I think they refuse to talk to me because they think I'm Too Far Gone (tm).
eh, my mom lives pretty damn close to there. next time i visit, i'll make a stop for some toys instead of dealing with them on the flight.
so their site, well it's pretty f'n creepy in many ways. i read just one testimony on "porn addiction" and even though my gut response was *cough,bullshit,cough*, i read an incredibly long one from a woman who was abused by 6 different men. i am never okay with blaming the victim, period, and in fact the opposite is true i'm always okay with blaming the perp. which using porn as the "excuse" well it's just to damn handy, dontcha think?
yep.
after reading through a fair amount of that mess, or rather the responses to the mess, my conclusion is that in fact besides being bluenoses who are callously using other peoples' suffering as justification for their own trifling issues, they are the sort of people who, if it wasn't this, it'd be some other crusade. people playing their music too loud, or something. some people live for that shit. just judging by the number and variety of people (many of whom don't seem to really give much of a shit about pr0n one way or the other) who now enthusiastically loathe them.
belledame, I can't quit you. ;-)
dude!
yeah, i think that was the creepiest part. i mean it's one thing to share a story to provide access to another human beings suffering, but another to make it almost a porny. i mean one that i was reading, if i didn't know better i would have thought it was penthouse letters. which isn't to say anything about penthouse, but more that these folks see publish that seem to think just because they didn't buy a magazine with brown wrapper, that it was okay to publish it with the warning "could be triggering". just ewwwww.
***side, love PL, just don't like reading the stuff that people did not consent to***
"i mean it's one thing to share a story to provide access to another human beings suffering, but another to make it almost a porny"
Yeah. And I notice that a lot of those long, harrowing testimonies are from the '80's (related to the Mackinnon-Dworkin ordinance maybe? I suspect it but don't recall.) I think that old "tell a disgusting enough story and you win" method is over... hope so, anyway, as it doesn't seem to me to accomplish much besides a guilty sort of titillation.
And one of the harrowing stories related an encounter with some MWD that... well, eh. It was a graphic account of a rape so I don't expect the woman to not be full of horror, but as a WWD myself reading the "and some of them were DEFORMED!!"
well...
it saddens me. even if I DO forgive her her shock, due to the circumstances, and believe that if she is gonna tell her story none of it should be... fixed to sound kind, or whatever.
ugh, do I detect some racism/classism in their argument? they seem to equate crime, blight, and pr0n with lower-income neighborhoods, and they care a lot about their property values...they don't want the neighborhood to "go downhill" in their eyes.
ugh.
oh, come on, you can't feel the -pathos- in that? can't we -all- relate to the horror that is Lowered Real Estate Market?
They reprinted one of my all-time favorite porn scare stories from "Men Confront Pornography". You just know you're in "Reefer Madness" territory when you come across passages like this:
"I was out partyin' and drinkin' and smokin' pot. I'd shot up some heroin and done some downers and I went to a porno bookstore, put a quarter in a slot, and saw this porn movie. It was just a guy coming up from behind a girl and attacking her and raping her. That's when I started having rape fantasies."
I'm not even sure how this guy made it out of the house to get to the porno bookstore with that combination in him.
:eyeroll: dropping the "g's:" a sure sign of a hardened criminal and junkie.
you've seen that before, you say?
this reminds me, I'd meant to try to write about that "Go Ask Alice" (nice girl's posthumous diary about her tragic descent into Teh Drugs) that was big in the 80's, you recall; the same people also "found" another book by another troubled teen, "Jay's Journal," written in not-at-all-suspiciously-familiar style; it was a Real! True! story of a young lad's involvement (tragic) in the Occult.
...yeah. you know, i know I've exchanged awfulnesses with some of the anti-porn feminists, and you know, much as i think their online behavior has bit the Big One and i think their seizing on Dworkin as some kind of Prophet is, well, kind of ishy, at least in a lot of cases i can understand where they're coming from: they have their own stories to write. you can quibble about whether you think they're going after the best targets, but: it's not funny, really, even if some of the conspiracy shit and so on is.
but people like THIS dude...
sorry, nothing but *point* *laugh* from here, it's sheer Warner Brothers time. oh noez!! WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE PROPERTY VALUES I MEAN THE CHILDRENZ?!?!
my sympathies for the NoHo folks who have to deal with his/their shenanigans, though: i know people like this, professional Energy Creatures. Not so fun, close up.
"I'm not even sure how this guy made it out of the house to get to the porno bookstore with that combination in him."
*nod*
Yeah. That and... well, if he got the message that raping was "okay" from the porn movies, why did "the voice" have to say "it's all right, it's all right, it's all right" over and over?
He knew it was wrong, and was looking for something to blame.
"at least in a lot of cases i can understand where they're coming from: they have their own stories to write. you can quibble about whether you think they're going after the best targets, but: it's not funny, really, even if some of the conspiracy shit and so on is"
Yes. The people who are horrified by porn because it HAS been used to hurt them... are understandable. I think their universalizing of their experiences is wrong, but it is at least understandable.
But this... the latest round is a response to me saying "Jensen is a tool" with "It amazes me how pornographers can convince self-professed feminists to defend extreme misogyny."
Who exactly have I been talking to? ;) The only folks in porn I talk to are Ren and some people who do a teensy bit of fetish modeling, all of which probably counts to these folks.
oh, come on, you can't feel the -pathos- in that? can't we -all- relate to the horror that is Lowered Real Estate Market?
Ha.
He knew it was wrong, and was looking for something to blame.
that, or in this case, "he" is a creation of someone's fondly fevered imagination of what a Boy Gone Wrong is like.
or, not. just, the writing style is...yeah. a bit fan-fic'y.
"that, or in this case, "he" is a creation of someone's fondly fevered imagination of what a Boy Gone Wrong is like."
Could definitely be.
Yeah, I've seen that story before – its from a 1991 anthology called "Men Confront Pornography". That particular passage was reposted before on a Usenet newsgroup I used to read – I guess some people think its a really convincing anecdote.
"Go Ask Alice" – I think that ended up being made into a TV Movie of the Week with William Shatner as Alice's father. Its been many years since I've seen it, so my memory of it is hazy.
that has got to be the most frustrating thing for me in the pornscapades. a big study just came out saying that children who have seen violent movies and played violent video games are not any more violent.
*shaking ones fist* men taking responsibility for their actions is still a pretty fucking novel concept, but c'mon everyone i think it just might work.
so yeah, how men treat women, rape women, beat women, abuse and assault women has sociological influences, absolutely.... but how about we start with the men first and work our way from there.
it's this same kind of thinking though that has men walking around thinking that women expect all men to have a small arm for a penis... um, short answer(ha!) is no, we do not.
"a big study just came out saying that children who have seen violent movies and played violent video games are not any more violent."
sassywho, can you give a citation for that? I'd love to see it.
well, we consult the ever trusty Wiki:
Go Ask Alice
website, see Go Ask Alice!.
Go Ask Alice is a controversial 1971 book about drug abuse that is considered a classic of American young adult literature. The book purports to be the actual diary of an anonymous teenage girl who died of a drug overdose in the late 1960s and is therefore presented as a testimony against drug use. Alice is not the protagonist's name; the diarist's name is never given in the book. A woman named Alice is mentioned briefly in one entry; she is a fellow addict whom the diarist meets on the street. Despite this, reviewers generally refer to the diarist as "Alice" for the sake of convenience.
Marketed to teen girls—it caused a sensation when published and remains in print 36 years later (as of 2007), popular with most teenagers of no certain gender. However, revelations about the book's origin have caused much doubt as to its authenticity and factual accounts, and the publishers have listed it as a work of fiction since at least the mid-late 1980s. Although it is still published under the byline "Anonymous," press interviews and copyright records suggest that it is largely or wholly the work of its purported editor, Beatrice Sparks.
...Go Ask Alice was originally promoted as nonfiction and was published under the byline "Anonymous." However, not long after its publication, Beatrice Sparks, a psychologist and Mormon youth counselor, began making media appearances promoting herself as the book's editor.
Searches at the U.S. Copyright Office[1] show that Sparks is the sole copyright holder for Go Ask Alice. Furthermore, she is listed on the copyright record as the book's author — not as the editor, compiler, or executor, which would be more usual for someone publishing the diary of a deceased person. (According to the book itself, the sole copyright is owned by Prentice-Hall)
In an October 1979 interview with Aileen Pace Nilsen for School Library Journal, Sparks claimed that Go Ask Alice had been based on the diary of one of her patients, but that she had added various fictional incidents based on her experiences working with other troubled teens. She said the real "Alice" had not died of a drug overdose, but in a way that could have been either an accident or suicide. She also stated that she could not produce the original diary, because she had destroyed part of it after transcribing it and the rest was locked away in the publisher's vault.
Sparks' second "diary" project, Jay's Journal, gave rise to a controversy that cast further doubt on Go Ask Alice's veracity. Jay's Journal was allegedly the diary of a boy who committed suicide after becoming involved with the occult. Again, Sparks claimed to have based it on the diary of a patient. However, the family of the boy in question, Alden Barrett, disowned the book. They claimed that Sparks had used only a handful of the actual diary entries, and had invented the great majority of the book, including the entire occult angle. [2] This led many to speculate that "Alice's" diary—if indeed it existed—had received similar treatment. No one claiming to have known the real "Alice" has ever come forward.
Sparks has gone on to produce many other alleged diaries dealing with various problems faced by teenagers. These include Treacherous Love: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager, Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets, Annie's Baby: The Diary of Anonymous, a Pregnant Teenager and It Happened to Nancy: By an Anonymous Teenager. Although billed as "real diaries," these do not appear to have been received by readers or reviewers as anything other than fiction...
...and yep, what i thought:
even before the revelations about Go Ask Alice's authorship, there was ample internal evidence that the book was not an actual diary. The lengthy, detailed passages about the harmful effects of illicit drugs are what many critics would expect of anti-drug propaganda and relatively small amount of space dedicated to relationships and social gossip seem uncharacteristic of a teenaged girl’s diary. Furthermore, the book uses many long words, such as gregarious and impregnable, which are uncommon in casual pieces of writing, especially those of teenagers.
and o irony irony
Because Go Ask Alice includes relatively explicit references to drugs and sex, conservative parents and activists have often sought to remove it from school libraries. ... The book was number 8 on the most challenged list in 2001 and up to number 6 in 2003. The dispute over the book's authorship does not seem to have played any role in these censorship battles.
The Jay's Journal thing is rather gross: apparently there -was- a real boy who committed suicide, but the editor took rather -dramatic- license with what little she'd had of the actual diary, causing the actual family a fair amount of grief.
The Jay's Journal thing is rather gross: apparently there -was- a real boy who committed suicide, but the editor took rather -dramatic- license with what little she'd had of the actual diary, causing the actual family a fair amount of grief.
The editor sounds like an asshole.
well, yeah.
here ya go trinity
Hmm, that's dated April 1... do Aussies have an April Fools' Day?
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