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‘Pornography Is What the End of the World Looks Like’

2/27/2015

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A scene from “Fifty Shades of Grey.” (YouTube)

Posted on Feb 15, 2015


By Chris Hedges

BOSTON—“Fifty Shades of Grey,” the book and the movie, is a celebration of the sadism that dominates nearly every aspect of American culture and lies at the core of pornography and global capitalism. It glorifies our dehumanization of women. It champions a world devoid of compassion, empathy and love. It eroticizes hypermasculine power that carries out the abuse, degradation, humiliation and torture of women whose personalities have been removed, whose only desire is to debase themselves in the service of male lust. The film, like “American Sniper,” unquestioningly accepts a predatory world where the weak and the vulnerable are objects to exploit while the powerful are narcissistic and violent demigods. It blesses this capitalist hell as natural and good.

“Pornography,” Robert Jensen writes, “is what the end of the world looks like.”

We are blinded by self-destructive fantasy. An array of amusements and spectacles, including TV “reality” shows, huge sporting events, social media, porn (which earns at least twice what Hollywood movies generate), alluring luxury products, drugs, alcohol and magic Jesus, offers enticing exit doors from reality. We yearn to be rich, powerful and celebrities. And those we must trample to build our pathetic little empires are seen as deserving their fate. That nearly all of us will never attain these ambitions is emblematic of our collective self-delusion and the effectiveness of a culture awash in manipulation and lies.

Porn seeks to eroticize this sadism. In porn women are paid to repeat the mantra “I am a cunt. I am a bitch. I am a whore. I am a slut. Fuck me hard with your big cock.” They plead to be physically abused. Porn caters to degrading racist stereotypes. Black men are sexually potent beasts stalking white women. Black women have a raw, primitive lust. Latin women are sultry and hotblooded. Asian women are meek, sexually submissive geishas. In porn, human imperfections do not exist. The oversized silicone breasts, the pouting, gel-inflated lips, the bodies sculpted by plastic surgeons, the drug-induced erections that never subside and the shaved pubic regions—which cater to porn’s pedophilia—turn performers into pieces of plastic. Smell, sweat, breath, heartbeats and touch are erased along with tenderness. Women in porn are packaged commodities. They are pleasure dolls and sexual puppets. They are stripped of true emotions. Porn is not about sex, if one defines sex as a mutual act between two partners, but about masturbation, a solitary auto-arousal devoid of intimacy and love. The cult of the self—that is the essence of porn—lies at the core of corporate culture. Porn, like global capitalism, is where human beings are sent to die.

There are few people on the left who grasp the immense danger of allowing pornography to replace intimacy, sex and love. Much of the left believes that pornography is about free speech, as if it is unacceptable to financially exploit and physically abuse a woman in a sweatshop in China but acceptable to do so on the set of a porn film, as if torture is wrong in Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were sexually humiliated and abused as if they were on a porn set, but permissible on commercial porn sites.

A new wave of feminists, who have betrayed the iconic work of radicals such as Andrea Dworkin, defends porn as a form of sexual liberation and self-empowerment. These “feminists,” grounded in Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, are stunted products of neoliberalism and postmodernism. Feminism, for them, is no longer about the liberation of women who are oppressed; it is defined by a handful of women who are successful, powerful and wealthy—or, as in the case of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” able to snag a rich and powerful man. A woman wrote the “Fifty Shades” book, as well as the screenplay. A woman directed the film. A woman studio head bought the movie. This collusion by women is part of the internalization of oppression and sexual violence that have their roots in porn. Dworkin understood. She wrote that “the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.”

I met Gail Dines, one of the most important radicals in the country, in a small cafe in Boston on Tuesday. She is the author of “Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality” and a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College. Dines, along with a handful of others including Jensen, fearlessly decry a culture that is as depraved as Caligula’s Rome.

“The porn industry has hijacked the sexuality of an entire culture and is laying waste to a whole generation of boys,” she warned. “And when you lay waste to a generation of boys, you lay waste to a generation of girls.”

“When you fight porn you fight global capitalism,” she said. “The venture capitalists, the banks, the credit card companies are all in this feeding chain. This is why you never see anti-porn stories. The media is implicated. It is financially in bed with these companies. Porn is part of this. Porn tells us we have nothing left as human beings—boundaries, integrity, desire, creativity and authenticity. Women are reduced to three orifices and two hands. Porn is woven into the corporate destruction of intimacy and connectedness, and this includes connectedness to the earth. If we were a society where we were whole, connected human beings in real communities, then we would not be able to look at porn. We would not be able to watch another human being tortured.”

“If you are going to give a tiny percent of the world the vast majority of the goodies, you better make sure you have a good ideological system in place that legitimizes why everyone else is suffering economically,” she said. “This is what porn does. Porn tells you that material inequality between women and men is not the result of an economic system. It is biologically based. And women, being whores and bitches and only good for sex, don’t deserve full equality. Porn is the ideological mouthpiece that legitimizes our material system of inequality. Porn is to patriarchy what the media is to capitalism.”

To keep the legions of easily bored male viewers aroused, porn makers produce videos that are increasingly violent and debasing. Extreme Associates, which specializes in graphic rape scenes, along with JM Productions, promotes the very real pain endured by women on its sets. JM Productions pioneered “aggressive throat fucking” or “face fucking” videos such as the “Gag Factor” series, in which women gag and often vomit. It ushered in “swirlies,” in which the male performer dunks the woman’s head into a toilet after sex and then flushes. The company promises, “Every whore gets the swirlies treatment. Fuck her, then flush her.” Repeated and violent anal penetration triggers anal prolapse, a condition in which the inner walls of a woman’s rectum collapse and protrude from her anus. This is called “rosebudding.” Some women, penetrated repeatedly by numerous men on porn shoots, often after taking handfuls of painkillers, require anal and vaginal reconstructive surgery. Female performers may suffer from sexually transmitted diseases and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And with porn mainstreamed—some porn video participants are treated like film celebrities by talk show hosts such as Oprah and Howard Stern—the behavior promoted by porn, including stripping, promiscuity, S&M and exhibitionism, has become chic. Porn also sets the standard for female beauty and female comportment. And this has had terrifying consequences for girls.

“Women are told in our society they have two choices,” Dines said. “They are either fuckable or invisible. To be fuckable means to conform to the porn culture, to look hot, be submissive and do what the man wants. That’s the only way you get visibility. You cannot ask adolescent girls, who are dying for visibility, to choose invisibility.”

None of this, Dines pointed out, was by accident. Porn grew out of the commodity culture, the need by corporate capitalists to sell products.

“In post-Second-World-War America you have the emergence of a middle class with a disposable income,” she said. “The only trouble is that this group was born to parents who had been through a depression and a war. They did not know how to spend. They only knew how to save. What [the capitalists] needed to jump-start the economy was to get people to spend money on stuff they did not need. For women they brought in the television soaps. One of the reasons the ranch house was developed was because [families] only had one television. The television was in the living room and women spent a lot of time in the kitchen. You had to devise a house where she could watch television from the kitchen. She was being taught.”

“But who was teaching the men how to spend money?” she went on. “It was Playboy [Magazine]. This was the brilliance of Hugh Hefner. He understood that you don’t just commodify sexuality, you sexualize commodities. The promise that Playboy held out was not the girls or the women, it was that if you buy at this level, if you consume at the level Playboy tells you to, then you will get the prize, which is the women. The step that was crucial to getting the prize was the consumption of commodities. He wrapped porn, which sexualized and commoditized women’s bodies, in an upper-middle-class blanket. He gave it a veneer of respectability.”

The VCR, the DVD and, later, the Internet allowed porn to be pumped into individual homes. The glossy, still images of Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler became tame, even quaint. America, and much of the rest of the world, became pornified. The income of the global porn industry is estimated at $96 billion, with the United States market worth about $13 billion. There are, Dines writes, “420 million Internet porn pages, 4.2 million porn Web sites, and 68 million search engine requests for porn daily.” [To see excerpts from Dines’ book, click here.]

Along with the rise of pornography there has been an explosion in sex-related violence, including domestic abuse, rape and gang rape. A rape is reported every 6.2 minutes in the United States, but the estimated total, taking into account unreported assaults, is perhaps five times higher, as Rebecca Solnit points out in her book “Men Explain Things to Me.”

“So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year—meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror,” Solnit writes.

Porn, meanwhile, is ever more accessible.

“With a mobile phone you can deliver porn to men who live in highly concentrated neighborhoods in Brazil and India,” Dines said. “If you have one laptop in the family, the man can’t sit in the middle of the room and jerk off to it. With a phone, porn becomes portable. The average kid gets his porn through the mobile phone.”

The old porn industry, which found its profits in movies, is dead. The points of production no longer generate profits. The distributors of porn make the money. And one distributor, MindGeek, a global IT company, dominates porn distribution. Free porn is used on the Internet as bait by MindGeek to lure viewers to pay-per-view porn sites. Most users are adolescent boys. It is, Dines said, “like handing out cigarettes outside of a middle school. You get them addicted.”

“Around the ages of 12 to 15 you are developing your sexual template,” she said. “You get [the boys] when they are beginning to construct their sexual identity. You get them for life. If you begin by jerking off to cruel, hardcore, violent porn then you are not going to want intimacy and connection. Studies are showing that boys are losing interest in sex with real women. They can’t sustain erections with real women. In porn there is no making love. It is about making hate. He despises her. He is revolted and disgusted by her. If you bleed out the love you have to fill it with something to make it interesting. They fill it with violence, degradation, cruelty and hate. And that also gets boring. So you have to keep ratcheting it up. Men get off in porn from women being submissive. Who is more submissive than children? The inevitable route of all porn is child porn. And this is why organizations that fight child porn and do not fight adult porn are making a huge mistake.”

The abuse inherent in pornography goes unquestioned in large part by both men and women. Look at the movie ticket sales for “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which opened the day before Valentine’s Day and is expected to take in up to $90 million over the four-day weekend (which includes Presidents Day on Monday).

“Pornography has socialized a generation of men into watching sexual torture,” Dines said. “You are not born with that capacity. You have to be trained into it. Just like you train soldiers to kill. If you are going to carry out violence against a group you have to dehumanize them. It is an old method. Jews become kikes. Blacks become niggers. Women become cunts. And no one turns women into cunts better than porn.”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/pornography_is_what_the_end_of_the_world_looks_like_20150215/


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WEALTH: HAVING IT ALL AND WANTING MORE - OXFAM

2/15/2015

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On plants and modernity - By - Darren Fleet

2/1/2015

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On plants and modernity
By - Darren Fleet
I thrust my hand into the dark earth …

and curl my fingers into a loose fist around a clump of soil. The rays of sun above me filter through the coverage of a heritage magnolia tree, its canopy blocking half of the potato bed below. In the wet days of spring the magnolia’s clumpy red roses, the size of tennis balls, blanketed the backyard for weeks. I’ve spent hours, if not days in total, tolerating this one tree alone, religiously clearing the wilting red petals while tiptoeing around the young seedlings the tree attempted to smother at my feet. Now that it’s July, the buds are mostly gone and the green foliage is thick along the scraggly chocolate-brown limbs. The light is still diffused in the branches, but the potatoes don’t seem to mind — their water-saturated stalks, with fuzzy green leaves, are two feet tall now. Months ago, my neighbor attempted to convince me to cut the magnolia down to save all of this extra work. I told him I wasn’t about to cut down a fifty-year-old tree for the sheer inconvenience of sweeping flowers — and now that I know how long it takes to grow one simple seed into a real edible thing, how could I? If there is a Zen to gardening it is this simple fact: it’s not about the food, it’s not about the politics, it’s not about the greater good, the health or the DIY collectives; it’s about recovering a piece of irrationality, living beyond the efficiency at the core of our civilization’s malaise.

Gardening is kind of a lame word. It invites images of leisurely grandmothers, flower print gloves and poor weekend fashion sense. And urban farming, though more correctly descriptive, doesn’t seem to capture what I see happening in the yards and community garden plots around my neighborhood. Urban farming is a subversive activity, but only when it crosses the threshold from pastime to lifestyle. When that happens, something in you changes. Like the religious experiences of youth or the rapture of love, suddenly an entire realm of imagination opens up. You begin to pay more attention to the wind, the temperature and the sunshine. Everything becomes relational to the growing seeds, away from the ego, away from the self, away from the paradigm that puts you at the center of everything worthwhile. You start moving slower through the streets, eyeing scrap wood in the alleyways for potential plant beds. You examine rogue wild flowers for clippings. You tear apart scavenged pallets with an old claw hammer for boards to make a planter; you straighten out rusty bent nails to fasten it together even though one-and-a-half-inch spikes are a dollar a dozen at the Home Depot down the road. Rainy days become more bearable. The burning ball of fire in the sky has more meaning. You scorn the glass towers and give cheers to wild lawns and old houses deteriorating under the pressure of nature and time. You pay mournful homage to the sad irony that the best farmland in the world is now under concrete.

When I was a smoker, logic told me that that $8.00 for a pack of cigarettes was a good deal and $3.00 for a fistful of organic fair trade kale was a rip-off. This is the type of reasoning that happens when market mechanisms of value disable one’s ability to make sound physiological decisions — when the cost of a thing (exchange value) becomes the price tag on the thing, and not the thing itself (use value). The distorted process that leads to deadly price points between carcinogens and vegetables is alive in the mental environment as well. In the same way the market teaches us to value pesticides over blemishes, packaging over content and teeth-rotting sodas over water, modernity teaches us to value urban over rural, machines over minds, individuality over community and growth over contentment. This psychosis affects the fabric of our dreams, the careers we aspire to and the way we conceive of the land in our culture and our economy and its relation to ourselves. Accordingly, two of the saddest intuitive lessons we learn growing up in this part of the world are that food has no worth and that meals have no purpose other than sustenance. Today, food, even organic food, is expected to be cheap. Not surprisingly, North American food costs are the cheapest on the planet. Single serving dinners and fast-food restaurants dominate the eating culture. Agricultural workers are the lowest-paid workers throughout the vast continental food chain.

Even those who have nostalgic ideas about what it means to farm don’t really want to be farmers. When was the last time you met someone who actually wanted to grow corn, beets, beans or pumpkins? Have you ever met a college dropout in Toronto or New York or London who moved to the bald Canadian prairies to reap canola? And if you did, what did you honestly think of their aspirations? Were they lowbrow? Were they selling themselves short? Were they limiting their unique individual potential? Who among you wants to be up from dawn to dusk, at the mercy of earth’s natural systems, living on faith amongst secular technologies, covered in mud all the time, no time for art, music or self-expression? These questions might be rude, but they’re essential to ask in order to get to the heart of the contradictory relationship we have with farming in the modern age — it’s the most basic building block of our existence, but it isn’t valued.

Aspiring to be “only” a farmer, to work the land, has been the bane of modernity’s existence since development theorists first began spinning tales of how to get to the future. When exposed to the glitz of modernity, most people desperately try to escape the fields, leaving only Monsanto in the countryside. The mass-migrations to mega slum cities in sub-Saharan Africa, India and Latin America are a testament to the continuous pull of “opportunity.” As Daniel Quinn argues, even the earliest folks tales of Western civilization, like the Bible’s Cain and Abel, pit the entrepreneurial proto-urbanite against the satisfied herdsman, the latter murdered by his forward-looking bother — our first modern superstar. Modern humankind is urban. Nature is a place to visit. Reading early development texts like Daniel Lerner’s 1958 The Passing of Traditional Society, you learn that working the land, the primary occupation in “traditional society,” is to economic progress what religion once was to the enlightenment — backward, irrational, unimaginative, slow, old:

Traditional society is non-participant — it deploys people by kinship into communities isolated from each other and from a center; without an urban-rural division of labor, it develops few needs requiring economic interdependence; lacking the bonds of interdependence, people’s horizons are limited by locale and their decisions involve only other known people in known institutions.

Today in the industrialized world, with the exception of a fraction of the agricultural economy, there are no more farms, only factories. And communities are defined as groups of individuals, a hopeful oxymoron at best. The impact of this detachment from our agrarian roots is as ecological and social as it is psychological. Removed from our billions-of-years-old evolutionary environment in a matter of a few millennia (and in some cases centuries and even decades), the loss of natural interaction has turned into a banal impulse to destroy — that is, as ecologist Bill Rees says, to turn everything around us into ourselves. In religious terms, you could say we’ve gained the world but lost our souls. In secular terms, we’ve reached modernity, but lost our minds. Mental health is now the most debilitating medical condition in the United States, responsible for more lost work hours than any other affliction. Not far behind are the complications related to overeating — diabetes, heart failure, cancer, etc. Just a few months ago the FDA approved an “obesity pill,” a last-ditch attempt to tackle America’s 35% obesity rate. When we moved from the fields we stopped creating living things. This has affected us in ways we are only just beginning to understand. Our materiality is without a pulse. We spend most of our time killing and working with the dead. Our greatest minds cannot be satisfied with natural mysteries. In this paradigm, trees become paper, houses and fences. Fields become streets and parking lots. Minerals become steel and computers. Waterways become highways and trash bins. Animals and plants become food, fuel and commodities. The natural world has no intrinsic value other than efficiency, and the most efficient use invented so far is to mulch it into something else. And now we are waking up to the reality that our proudest human achievement, modernity, could be an evolutionary dead end. Without the ability or desire to go backward to some pre-modern utopia, how do we go forward without killing ourselves?

I did my first inner-city garden story in Vancouver in 2008 as part of a group assignment during journalism school. When someone suggested “Green Revolution” as a title, I wanted to gag. A quarter-acre of green space in a city of ever-increasing high-rises hardly qualifies as the coming environmental insurrection — and if it does we all really do have a lot to worry about. If there’s a revolution happening in this plot it certainly isn’t green, I said. Urban gardening, city farming, is not about food at all; it’s about recovering people. It’s about our psychological link to the land, where all issues from social inequality to food security to environmentalism converge. Every one of us has a psychological heritage choking under the veneer of modernity. The instinct that makes you nervous to fly 30,000 feet in the air in a metal tube is the same instinct that desperately searches for meaning without finding it in iPods, addictions, televisions, cars, financial careers, electronic stimulation, endless consumption and hyper-rationality. Like the altruistic goodness that is unleashed in the wake of tragedy, turning enemies into brothers and sisters, and nations into allies, a simple crack of the earth can turn a once-dead biomass into a thriving stalk of singularity. As we filmed the first dirt being shoveled for the assignment that day, something unexpected happened. Neighborhood addicts, sex workers, police officers, social workers and other curious bystanders flocked to the gates as if they were seeing something for the very first time. Who among them could recall the last time they had thrust their naked hands into the earth and didn’t rush to the tap to wash it off? Who could remember the last time they felt the intoxicating spell of splitting the ground?

I put the dirt in my hand down and mound it up against the side of a rainbow chard that’s been knocked over by the wind. This early in the season, some plants grow too fast and topple under their own weight. I stand it up and use a twist-tie from a loaf of bread to fasten it to a busted broomstick handle I found in the alley. Each morning after a windstorm some plant needs fixing. I know that what I grow in this plot isn’t going to last the coming winter. It might not even last past November. But that doesn’t matter. Urban gardening isn’t about the yield. It’s not about beating the factory-farm system or the rotten financial apparatus that is defining our generation. Instead, it’s about living beyond the systems that shape us. It’s about action. It’s about spark. It’s about creation. It’s about recovering the self. For many of us, planting a seed and caring for it until fruition will be the first time in our lives that we give life instead of taking it, that we create food instead of just consuming it. When you pull your hands out of your wallet and put them into the earth, for a minute, for an hour, for days at a time, when you hover over a seedling for weeks on end wondering if it’s ever going to grow its legs, you’re no longer complying with modernity.

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/103/plants-and-modernity.html

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