Government, it seems, wants to control our access to porn on DSTV. Thank goodness we have them to look out for us. We are clearly not capable of making these complex moral decisions all by ourselves. We are the rabble, the electorate and all we understand are those empty campaign promises. We love those flashy rallies and posters you print with all the money you get from those fishy tenders you issue to yourselves. Smiling, saying nothing in a roundabout way and baby-kissing is our daily bread. That’s our thing. We need the higher moral guidance of government. That’s right, we need our great unblemished leaders, the bastions of good and democracy, the masters of freedom and ethics who run this socially damaged country of ours to show us the way on this issue. We need them to do the thinking for us.
But there is a little glitch.
Our president is basically a porn star!
Talk about a conflict of interest here. He has had more partners than Dirk Diggler, markets his frisky image on the front pages of all major newspapers and on TV; the guy is a major celebrity. If there was camera equipment in his bedroom, vast fortunes could be made. He has shagged young barely-legal girls, daughters of friends, multiple wives, lovers and purportedly even secret agents sent by Mbeki to bring him down. And those are just the ones we know about. He gets laid more than James Bond and Hank Moody put together! How could such such a leader condone the clamping down on porn? He is porn!
Furthermore, our great and virile leader is currently bunking with the queen of England over in London which is tacit approval from her majesty for his lifestyle and actions. Had they been too offensive, she would have declined to have him and his machine gun under her roof. She didn’t seem too worried and actually seated him next to Camilla Parker-Bowles, a known late night sneaker-arounder with other women’s famous husbands. If I didn’t know better I may even suggest the naughty queen was trying to set them up. Devious old match-making goat! If I were the collective conscience of the five wives, I would be worried.
Those of you who think I am judging him for his sexual exploits are sorely mistaken. I think it is his right to have consensual sex with whomever he wishes; even Camilla, if that floats his Nkandla-meets-Isandlwana boat. I even think that massive media vilification and moral outrage are uncalled for here. There is a much greater force. It’s called voter outrage and democracy.
If there is no voter outrage, then our nation, on balance, suggests they approve of his recent philandering or at the very least approve of his governance more than they disapprove of his bed-hopping. His wives have the right to kick his randy butt out of the kraal if they so desire so it’s not like they have to stick around. South African voters will speak and if he has crossed an ethical line with them, he will be out on his leopard-skin bedecked ass.
I am guessing they will not and he will continue to rule us all.
In tandem with this accepting view of his nefarious activities, however, I don’t feel that gives him or his morally bankrupt bunch of ministers that pontificate over these issues any right to make pronouncements to us, his lowly citizens, on the subject of porn or sexual morality. If anything, I would expect them to dodge this issue for all they are worth. The hypocrisy would be too hard to spin, the damage endless. If you were not careful, the entire party could come off looking like a sex-crazed bunch of nymphomaniacs trying pretty hard to keep all the fun to themselves. Too risky, one would think.
Not so it seems.
Just as we were all becoming accustomed to the new sexual freedoms pervading our lives set by our role models at the top and the exciting announcement by DSTV that a TV porn channel is on its way when along comes Minister Noluthando Mayende-Sibiya. Armed with dubious statistics, no doubt supplied by the 13 000 amateur Christian statisticians that signed the petition against the channel, she decided to deliver the bewildering statement that bringing porn into the home will cause child molestation and all sorts of other horrors.
Really?
And here I was thinking that porn was already squarely in the home. Didn’t it happen years ago with the internet? I also just figured out on the back of an envelope that houses with internet are likely to be the same houses with DSTV so all that is happening is we are just being offered more porn, but this time on the big TV with surround sound and without the long download times.
But you see that’s why we need these guys! Thank goodness for that cutting insight from the minister. Instead of covering up for her boss, she is sticking her neck out to save us and she is not even bothering to support her claims with anything even resembling logic. Political bravery tempered by the kind of hard-headed conservative attitude that powered ox-wagons over the Drakensburg. So enlightening to see it thriving in the ANC as it did in the Nationalist Party that brought us the ultimate porn show of conservative deviance and sexual repression …. apartheid.
Not a few days before that, Minister of Arts and Culture, Lulu Xingwana, stormed out of the Constitutional Court gallery in protest of a few pictures of spooning lesbians. It is quite unclear whether it was the spooning, the exposure of a bit of skin or the fact that it was monochrome gay love on public display that made the minister’s bigotry gene start to twitch. What we can say for certain is that culture seems to be defended if it is your own and offends if it is not. The same minister did no storming when Zulu culture was brought in to the spotlight with ritual bull killings. Seems OK to beat an innocent animal to death with bare hands for no real reason other than to stroke your severly threatened male ego, but don’t you dare spoon a lesbian or stroke anything other than your ego, you degenerate!
Besides the obvious Orwellian alarms that this kind of censorship simply must trigger in the reasonable person, what on earth is wrong with watching porn anyway?
Porn is art, it is education and it is entertainment. Porn is creative, it can be beautiful, it can be silly, comical, sensual, erotic and on occasions it can even show the biomechanically incredible and that previously thought impossible by the world of Newtonian physics. It is honest and raw and those who make it are brave and crazy people. Yes, it can be depraved, sick and experimental too for it is us, the human being, naked and exposed for what we really are. The freedom of availability and popularity of porn on the internet proves it. We all want it, we are all curious, we all hide it well behind a civilised veneer but inside we are sexual animals driven to procreate and are genetically coded to enjoy doing so.
Only a truly sexually repressed, frightened little individual would try to ban pornography. You are basically trying to ban the best instruction manual available for generating life itself. Porn is to the human mating animal what the bible is to Christians … a user manual, a collection of totally unbelievable stories and a source of great joy.
If porn offends you, block the channel or don’t ever, ever go to www.youporn.com for free porn. You are free to keep your life porn-free while allowing others to enrich it with as much porn as they so desire. Live and let live. Turn the other cheek.
And let us finish off with that sticky topic of porn and the children who may watch it. I got my sex education in primary school, as a child, mostly from porn and classmates. The classmates got their education from porn and older siblings that had seen porn and bought the latest Scope magazine. None of us got anything of use from our parents. It was just too weird. The video that they made us watch in biology with a penis becoming erect in infrared was so cryptic that it confused me for a long time until I watched more porn to sort it out.
I am aware that you will have to take me at my word here when I state that I do not abuse or molest children. Well, I don’t and I am not alone. Many, many millions of wonderful porn-loving or even porn-liking warm decent people also do not molest children. Linking porn to violence and molestation is a scare tactic. It’s the kind of thing that mind-controlling religious freaks revel in. It’s the kind of thing that the Christian Right in America fund with millions to further their agenda of control over our minds and bodies for reasons apparent only to them. It’s bullshit!
In response, I propose a new study: I would like to study the prevalence of child molestation in the clergy. The clergy are presumably some of society’s only members untainted by porn, or so the brave 13 000 would have us believe. They are the perfect sample for my study. I bet the figures are compelling. Actually, I win either way. If the clergy are found to be deviant without porn, then we need not fear that it is the porn at work but something so central to our nature that even the clergy can’t escape it. If they are found to be deviant at all and we are forced to believe that the link between porn and abuse is causal then our only other logical conclusion is that the clergy MUST be secretly watching a lot of porn. Good for them. I suggest they need it more than most. With the same abuse of statistical method that the 13 000 anti-porn stars have thrust upon us, I bet we could go further and prove an actual correlation between a lack of porn and the sexually deviant, child-fiddling behaviour observed in the clergy.
I don’t personally know a single person who can claim to be porn-free, a virgin of porn so to speak. Porn is fun, it helped me learn what was possible and I am an emotionally richer, more deeply informed and happier human being as a result of my exposure to it. It made my childhood a more exciting experience and helped to alleviate the teenage confusion and depression surrounding the topic of sex.
I refute the notion that porn is bad for a society. I refute it more verbosely when those stats are being shoved in our faces by the religious conservatives or government ministers neither of whom can lay claim to or hold custody over morals and ethics in our society and are simply furthering their own warped agendas or personal issues. To use some saucy porn innuendo: screw you both!
Without porn and the internet, it is quite conceivable that the wonderful sexual revolution that has occurred may have been suppressed by these very people. The freedom to talk about sex and using condoms, the emancipation of women and the right to be gay or lesbian was won at a price. Let’s hang on to it for all we are worth and not give an inch.
So, esteemed ministers, religious conservatives and other prudes, please take your filthy hands off our porn.
Author
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