Hedges, whom is described as a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, recently penned a book titled Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, which attempted a pithy criticism of modern American consumer culture for allegedly selling the illusion of unlimited desires and masking the reality of social, economic, political, and cultural disaster. Two paragraphs from his AlterNet article should suffice to understand his drift:
Of course, what Jerry Springer groupies, pro wrestling fans, and gonzo porn have to do with the economic inequality and political cataclysm is a mystery to all but Hedges...especially since he tends to color his words with the usual amount of older generation hubris and moral scolding about how wonderful things were in the past, when books reigned supreme rather than the Internet.The cultural embrace of illusion, and the celebrity culture that has risen up around it, have accompanied the awful hollowing out of the state. We have shifted from a culture of production to a culture of consumption. We have been sold a system of casino capitalism, with its complicated and unregulated deals of turning debt into magical assets, to create fictional wealth for us and vast wealth for our elite. We have internalized the awful ethic of corporatism -- one built around the cult of the self and consumption as an inner compulsion -- to believe that living is about our own advancement and our own happiness at the expense of others. Corporations, behind the smoke screen, have ruthlessly dismantled and destroyed our manufacturing base and impoverished our working class. The free market became our god and government was taken hostage by corporations, the same corporations that entice us daily with illusions though the mass media, the entertainment industry and popular culture.
The more we sever ourselves from a literate, print-based world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of ideas, for one informed by comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans and a celebration of violence the more we implode. We ask, like the wrestling fans or those who confuse love with pornography, to be fed lies. We demand lies. The skillfully manufactured images and slogans that flood the airwaves and infect our political discourse mask reality. And we do not protest. The lonely Cassandras who speak the truth about our misguided imperial wars, the global economic meltdown and the imminent danger of multiple pollutions that are destroying the eco-system that sustains the human species, are drowned out by arenas full of fans chanting "Slut! Slut! Slut!" or television audiences chanting "Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!" The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip and trivia.
And of course, porn is seen by Hedges as a particularly corrosive and toxic influence on American culture...the selling of "lies" over "love".
Right off the bat, Hedges plays the classic antiporn liberal cards of "pedophilia" and "child corruption" and "corporate profiteering", using stats he must have borrowed from Chyng Sun or Maggie Hays.
The largest users of internet porn, which is slowly draining away profits from magazines and DVD sales because so much of it is free, are between the ages of 12 and 17. And porn producers know their market is increasingly underage. "The age demographic has moved downwards, especially in the UK and Europe," explained Steve Honest, the European director of production for Bluebird Films. "Porn is the new rock and roll. Young people and women are embracing porn and making purchases. Porn targets the mid-teens to the mid-twenties and up." There are some 13,000 porn films made in the United States a year. According to the Internet Filter Review, worldwide porn revenues, including in-room movies at hotels, sex clubs and the ever-expanding E-sex world, topped $97 billion in 2006. That's more than the revenues of the leading technology companies combined: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink. Annual sales in the United States are estimated at $ 10 billion or higher. There is no agency that does precise monitoring of the porn industry. And porn is very lucrative to some of the nation's largest corporations. General Motors, for example, owns DirectTV, which distributes over forty million streams of porn into American homes every month. AT&T Broadband and Comcast Cable are the currently biggest American companies accommodating porn users with The Hot Network, Adult Pay-Per-View and similarly themed services. AT&T and GM rake in approximately 80 percent of all porn dollars spent by consumers.Now, conflating the main audience of porn consumers with the media companies who make money on them (as if Yahoo!, EarthLink, Google, and Microsoft ONLY get their profits from adult consumers of porn, or that the major media conglomerates are so dependent on explicit sexual media that they absolutely would be bankrupted without them) is bad enough....but reducing the entire demographic of porn consumers to teenagers??? Really, Mr. Hedges??? Are there really that many teens stealing their parents credit cards to get into those adult websites?? And what about the most recent surveys that have shown that the largest base of users of porn tend to come out of the most right-wing religious sectors...the very folk who are the loudest against porn's corrosive effects on society?? I guess that proves his theory that porn is the capitalist's way of desensitizing people??
Now, you would think that this would be followed up by a in-depth analysis of what "gonzo porn" really is, and an analysis of why it is supposedly so corrupting. You would be wrong, in this case....what we get from Mr. Hedges is an elongated profile of...a gonzo porn starlet. In this case, we have Ariana Jollee talking up a gang bang shoot.
Of course, it doesn't take very long for Hedges's real agenda to expose itself.Ariana Jollee, 21, is sitting in a motel room, beside a particleboard desk and a bare white wall giving a pre-film interview for the DVD 65 Guy Cream Pie, a gangbang film produced in 2004 by Devil's Film. In the film she has sex with 65 men who stand in two lines, their pants unzipped, on either side of her. She is smiling at the camera. Jollee has sleek dark hair with bangs, a tribal armband tattoo around one bicep, and wears jeans and a loose black tank top. She has rounded arms, full cheeks and a slightly heavy chin. Jollee started doing porn in 2003 when she was 20 in a film called Nasty Girls 30. She has done hundreds of films and is one of the industry's premier "gonzo" girls, purportedly enjoying extreme abuse. Jollee tells her audience that she performed in a 21-man gangbang on her 21st birthday. She says she is looking forward to doing the same now with 50 men, although this number climbs to 65 on the set. "Cream pie" refers in the world of porn to men ejaculating on a woman's anus or vagina, rather than ejaculating into her mouth or on her body.
"I'll be banging fifty guys - fifty, fifty, fifty! Maybe more even. That'd be cool. So I'm like really excited."
[Emphasis added by me.]"If you're watching this before the scene, you're in for a fucking treat. Each one of those motherfuckers is gonna, you know, it's gonna be the ride of their lives." She nods thoughtfully. "But, who knows," she throws her hands in the air, "maybe they'll fuck me up. Maybe they'll really, like, teach me a lesson." She throws a small smile at the camera. She scratches her knee absently. "We'll just have to wait and see. Maybe I'm not as insatiable as I think I am. We'll see. I'm excited."
She concedes that when it is over she will "look like shit" but will be "well fucked." The interviewer asks what condition her vagina and anus will be after having sex with that many men. She speaks of her body parts in the third person: "They can take it. They want it. They like it. They go back to size after. Pussy's tight. She always goes back to size." The degradation she endures has turned her body into something she no longer consciously recognizes as herself.
Yup...because we all know that having sex with fifty people in a gangbang porn shoot and refering to your naughty bits in the third person is certainly degrading and defiling, since sex should only be used for the highest pursuits of love and intimacy and growth. Just as our media should only offer "good", "life-affirming" "progressive" politics that empower and enlighten the public into acting like "informed human beings" (and would do so were it not for the evil consolidation of capitalists selling cultural poisions like porn and pro wrestling and Jerry Springer reruns and "Judge Mathis"/"Judge Judy" pseudo-reality shows). Therefore, if we only would cast off "gonzo porn" (or porn of any kind) and reteach our youth the glorious powers of revolution through intellect rather than through their crotches, then we would have single payer health care, an end to war as we know it, and probably even a return to the glory days of the Liberal American Century.
Of course, Hedges has no intention of actually listening to and understanding what Ariana is actually saying and feeling, because he is so much in his own fantasy world of demonizing her profession and her personal sex life as inherently "degrading".....just like the antiporn feminist and the Christian fundamentalist he supposedly maligns for all kinds of social evil.
Anyone can tell me how this is any different from the core attitudes of the Right?? And why we shouldn't simply call out Chris Hedges as a modified liberal version of Shelley Lubben??
No...liberal elitism isn't always an oxymoron. Especially when it comes to sex....or imposing one's morality on others.
Update: Our Roman God Emperor Hostess now spaketh on Hedges: Two thumbs down, one loaded boot up. And I don't mean a computer booting up, either.
Ah, thanks for taking this one down, Anthony – saves me some typing. The one angle that you didn't cover, though, is Hedges recent history of "progressive" atheist-bashing. This puts him, in my mind, close to Robert Jensen as part of a newly-emerging "religious left".
ReplyDeleteBasically, these are people who have bought into the idea that modern politics pretty much comes down to "Jihad vs McWorld", and see "jihad" (and its xtian and neo-traditionalist variants) as the lesser evil. Hence, censorship and authoritarianism in the service of a more "real" and "authentic" way of living.
She speaks of her body parts in the third person: "They can take it. They want it. They like it. They go back to size after. Pussy's tight. She always goes back to size." The degradation she endures has turned her body into something she no longer consciously recognizes as herself.
ReplyDeleteOf course, this guy doesn't participate in the male custom of referring to his genitalia with all sorts of names, which also reflect third person. And I'm sure that when he dude friends refer to their cocks as things like "the rocket" and "the twig and berries" and "the hammer" etc, etc...he reminds them that they are degrading themselves so much they are merely a shade. **eye roll**
Bob Jensen devotes an entire chapter to Arianna Jollee in his porn book.
ReplyDeleteJensen told a class at Notre Dame that gonzo porn is what the end of the world looks like.
Hedges refers to gonzo porn as part of the "Apocalypse".
Plagiarism, much?
Hedges and my father have a history.
ReplyDeleteWhen Hedges was a NY Times correspondent, he made his bones reporting on the Balkan conflict. My father was upset with what he viewed as Hedges' one-sided reporting against the Serbs (consistent with Catharine MacKinnon's anti-porn diatribe against the Serbs in Ms. magazine), and wrote him a letter pointing out omissions in Hedges' reporting, including much of the history of Croatian and Bosnian Moslem oppression of Serbs going back to the Holocaust.
Hedges responded to the letter laregely because my father is a Holocaust survivor who had worked with some of the more progressive Serbian-American groups in joint memorials about Serbian and Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Hedges admitted that he got some facts wrong, and promised to get it right the next time he wrote about the subject.
15 years later, it seems that Hedges has been feeling a bit lonely and craves the embrace of "Kitty" Mackinnon.
And, BTW, Bob Herbert has piped up again in today's Times, blaming porn for George Sordini's machine-gunning of those women in the gym.
Thanks, Sheldon, for connecting some important dots. Hedges has a history of the kinds of unsavory alliances that make even fellow liberals who have somehow managed to hang onto a principle or two uneasy.
ReplyDeleteNot a bit surprised to find language lifted directly from Jensen's work in Hedges', as the two seem to be on the same page in more ways than one.
And Herbert, let us not forget, helped Melissa Farley provide cover for Elliot Spitzer when the great anti-sex-work crusader was unmasked as a particularly unpleasant john.
I don't know how many more examples of this kind I'm going to need to get the attention of people out here when it comes to the rising menace of anti-porn liberalism, but so far, I'm making zero headway on this issue among our own, which is very discouraging.
Way back in 1993, when this industry had its first serious AIDS scare, I tried to sound the alarm much as I'm trying to now. The result, as regular readers here know, was five years as a black-listed director, until the Marc Wallice episode in 1977, after which I was suddenly rousted from my cell, thrown on the train back from Siberia and put to work with Sharon Mitchell creating AIM.
One of the most exasperating things about working in porn is that no problem is ever addressed until it becomes impossible to ignore.
Clearly, none of the correct lessons from our past experiences have been learned, and the consequences are as predictable as they are ugly.
Sometimes, in our 20-second soundbite-driven society of ours, it takes a catchy phrase to get people off their asses.
ReplyDelete"Anti-porn liberalism" is an excellent phrase. I wish I thought of it myself. There was a time that I believed (and wrote) that the real anti-porners were right-wingers of one sort or another.
And I guess that was true, until the advent of Jensen/Dines. Then the floodgates seemed to open, with Kristof, Herbert, Goff, Hazen, Chomsky and now Hedges (I'm probably leaving out some names).
Before her campaign for Senator for Louisiana fell apart due to her domestic issues, Savanna Samson would have been well advised to point these things out so as to separate herself from the Democrats as a way to bolster her independent status.
If "Blue Dog" Democrats are those Dems who are conservative financially and oppose serious health-care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act, for example, then I suggest the phrase "Blue Nose Democrats" to describe sexually conservative folks who are otherwise mainstream liberals.
ReplyDeleteSheldon:"There was a time that I believed (and wrote) that the real anti-porners were right-wingers of one sort or another."
ReplyDeleteSame here. I don't know which is worse, though: the right-wingers who are anti-porn based in Judeo-Christian religious hysteria and "OMGWHATABOUTHECHILDREN!?" or the left-winger who want to Nanny us into a porn-free world and of the "ITSFORYOUROWNGOOD!" variety.
Personally, I see both as variants of basic American-style Calvinism and have equally little use for either.
ReplyDeleteI'll take what's behind Door Number Three.
Sheldon and Aspasia:
ReplyDeleteWell, there has always been a pretty noisy and loud segment of the Left that has adapted the conservative and restrictive viewpoint on sexuality and sexual expression....mostly, they have adapted variations of the traditional and radical feminist theories about how free sexual expression is the refuge of racism/sexism/defense of capitalism/rampant materialism/and so forth.
The only reason they aren't so visible as the Religious Reich...errrrr, Religious Right, is that they are usually dwarfed by the overwhelming power and institutional weight of their Christian fellow/sister travelers.
It's just that with the election of a centrist (sorry, but Obama ain't that liberal to begin with, and he's turning Right with every passing day) Democrat to the Presidency and a Democratic-controlled Congress, and with the demographics favoring the Democrats, the "Blue Nose" liberals and neo-Puritan Leftists are given more weight for their numbers. In a way, it's like the Blue Dogs; they get more power in a Dem Congress because they can swing the votes if the remaining Repubs stay united even in the minority.
All the more reason why pro-sex and pro-porn Leftists need to get active, outspoken, and loud. Silence = Complicity = Loss of Rights We Took For Granted.
Anthony
To underscore Ernest's point about the industry needing to deal with a problem before it's too late, there was this astonishing revelation about Eric Holder, our Attorney General, in today's Alternet by Jill Hussein C:
ReplyDelete"Is This Why Eric Holder Isn't Going After Bush Officials?"
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/is_this_why_eric_holder_isn%27t_going_after_bush_officials/#141997
Basically, it's an expose of Holder's conflict of interest, because the law firm he was working at prior to his appointment by the Presidenty has as its top client the Republican National Committee, and Holder has been going way too easy on Bushies involved in torture.
This would also explain why David Ogden's perspective on issues is being ignored.
It looks like Chris Hedges was positively quoted by none other than Judith Reisman:
ReplyDeleteHuman Events: Profs for Prostitution?
"Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter and Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute recently wrote about “Gonzo Porn” and internet free pornography with users “between the ages of 12 and 17,” young women and “mid-teens to the mid-twenties and up." We know the thinking, rational brain does not even mature until roughly age 21. These professors would thus encourage seduction of immature children seeking “moderate-to-high job satisfaction” into brothels where they provide “a valuable service.""
The kind of company liberal porn-bashers seem to find themselves in speaks volumes.
Anyone care to send Mr. Hedges a link to this blog?
ReplyDeleteIt might serve him to know how his screed has been received among a group of people who agree with him on many other things and consider him to be entirely wrong-headed on this one.
Whereas those who he would otherwise avoid like the plague they are to anyone with otherwise-liberal principles have enfolded him in their warm embrace.
And would anyone care to tell me where the bullshit about children having their first exposures to internet porn at age 11 originated?
What kind of horrific social science experiment was performed in order to secure this data? Was a representative sampling of 11-year-old assembled and shown examples of pornography by supposedly responsible adults and than asked if they'd ever seen anything similar before?
If so, those responsible adults should have been charged with the criminal offense of deliberately disseminating pornography to minors.
If not, I am very curious indeed how this statistic, which seems to have been swallowed whole by many legitmately skeptical individuals like Hedges who really should know better, was generated.
Quoting Sheldon:
ReplyDeleteBob Jensen devotes an entire chapter to Arianna Jollee in his porn book.
Jensen told a class at Notre Dame that gonzo porn is what the end of the world looks like.
Hedges refers to gonzo porn as part of the "Apocalypse".
Plagiarism, much?
Hmmmm....I actually do remember seeing that particular passage about Arianna Jollee in Bob Jensen's Getting Off....interesting that Hedges would pilfer it without attribution for use in his AlterNet article.
Also kind of interesting that we haven't heard much of Bob the Guilt Tripper lately...mostly, he's been posting more esoteric essays on the dearth of hope in present politics, or something such.
I guess that with Bob Herbert and Chris Hedges running shotgun and promoting his basic philosophy, I guess that Jensen feels that he can move on to other things.
And speaking of Herbert: Yeah, right....so a man goes into a women's gym and guns down a group of women foe no apparent reason other than rage....but porn is to blame. But nothing from him about the mouths of Limbaugh and Beck enabling gun-toteing Teabaggers and Militia wannabes. Yeah, he's quite a liberal, he is.
Anthony
Ernest re: the "children first exposed to porn at age 11" meme:
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that they probably got that stat from the same place Melissa Farley gets her "95% of all 'prostituted women' say that they want out" stat...crafted out of their asses, or out of thin air.
Or...they may have confused the idea of young people first being exposed to sexual explicit material (either through discovering an old Playboy or Penthouse or an adult vid, or probably discovering Mom's or Sis' sex toy in the dresser drawer) with young folk being active *consumers* of porn, as in the lie that "the average age range of a porn consumer is between 12 and 19".
Of course, they ignore the basic fact that with 3-G technology and modern camphones, young folk don't even need to become paid "consumers" to access all the porn they want....last time I heard, "sexting" could be done easily and for free; while you still need a credit card and proof of age to access paid websites or get into adult video stores.
But, then again, that might be the entire point of all this: porn is merely the transmitter for the real threat to Comstock liberals like Hedges and Puritan "leftists" like Jensen: young people are learning about sex earlier and are not so likely to be intimidated by moralist concerns. That must scare them as much as it does the Religious Right, but they have to maintain their "leftist" reputation for fear of being accused of copying the Far Right...hence all the smack about "pornification" of capitalism.
Underneath that patina, though, lies the same old tired antisex bullshit.
I might just honor that request, Ernest...as soon as I can locate Hedges email addy, I will probably go ahead and give him a piece of my mind...or five. Staying classy, of course.
Anthony