[lit-ideas] Re: The Hays Hollywood Morality Code in lit-ideas Digest V8 #305
- From: Frances Kelly <frances.kelly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 06:41:44 -0500
Frances to Mike and others...
In your writing about a morality code for religious theists, you
unconditionally condemned pornography. This stance implies to me
that you hold all pornographic material to be bad and even evil.
Leaving aside temporarily the fact that sexually explicit
material can be in forms other than graphic and visual, my
curiosity is whether some such material might be intrinsically
good on its own regardless of its context or usage. My thought
here turns to lofty works of fine art that are considered to be
pornographic, or advertising underwear pictures of half naked
females in mail order catalogs that seem to be softly
pornographic, which may therefore make some such pornography
neither bad nor good. My basic assumption here is that all
pornographic material is an objective material construct that
exists outside the subjective psyche or nominal mind. If any
readers on this list have some interest in these many points
raised by me, your comments would be welcome and appreciated. My
broader goal is to attempt making a learned scholarly theory of
pornography that could have some global appeal. My probing thrust
is to appreciate that all pornography will initially arouse some
normal sexual interest in recipients or percipients to a degree,
but that only bad pornographic objects fail to satisfy persons in
any way other than through a sexual release, which likely makes
such objects obscene and disgusting and perverted. The only
absolute badness in pornography might be real kiddy porn and real
snuff art where live children are actually molested or live
victims are actually killed, all in the service of sexual
exploitation, whether the acts are only performed on stage in
public or also recorded on published media. If this stuff is say
private and silent for a sole individual person, then further
complications of justification would seemingly arise. The issue
of surrogate fetish objects not usually deemed to be sexual might
also be related to this issue of pornography in some key way.
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Sent: Tuesday, 15 November, 2011 1:13 AM
To: lit-ideas digest users
Subject: lit-ideas Digest V8 #305
lit-ideas Digest Mon, 14 Nov 2011 Volume: 08
Issue: 305
In This Issue:
[lit-ideas] Re: The Hays Hollywood Morality Code
[lit-ideas] Down Towns: 6 Unbelievable
Underground Spaces |
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Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:17:46 -0600
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The Hays Hollywood Morality Code
From: Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>
When I was young lad and as innocent as the lamb, the Cathoic
Church whetted my appetite for prurience by reading from the
pulpit every Sunday a list of all the films then showing in local
theaters that were on the Condemned List of the Catholic Legion
of Decency. It was a mortal sin to knowingly see a Condemned
movie and thereby putting oneself in the occasion of sin . God
frowns on doings. As I got older I wondered why God would frown
on his creation. Why, then, did he do it? Still haven't figured
that one out.
Anway, when I was still a young lad but not as innocent as
before, I was a paperboy and I would tear out movie-ad photos of
Jane Russell, Betty Hutton and MM (no, not Minnie Mouse) and
drool over them at my leisure. But one day I forgot and left a
photo of luscious legged Cyd Cherise in my jeans pocket and my
mother found me out. That only made it all the more exciting.
Ever since, I've been a fan of prurience. That's why I oppose
pornography. Sure porno is fun the first ten thousand fucks, but
Jesus, it do get boring watching after a while. But prurience --
ah, the tease -- that's another matter. Mammaries are not nearly
as exciting as decolletaged bosoms.
Cutting to the chase (the chase is the thing, after all -- the
problems start when one catches the other). Chasing is fun,
especially naked chasing, and the kinkier the better. Assuming
the onset of puberty at about 12 or 13 (at least in my case), I
have to admit that in the intervening 56 years I've not yet come
to understand femalehoodness -- like Freud, I'm left wondering
what the hell do "they" want?
Just to cuddle, it sometimes seems. At other times I think
"they" want to be worshipped, at other times it seems that all
"they" really want is a maintenance man around the house,
sometimes "they" want a hero -- all muscle-bound and ready to
face any danger, but still sensitive to "their"
needs. Women! Thank God I have a dick to tell me what I want.
Mike Geary
Musing in Memphis
On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 7:56 AM, Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> I recently wrote Maureen Sullivan instead of Maureen Dowd in
> referring to the NYT. Sorry about that. It was just dumb, but
it did
> remind me that I had long had this vague idea that Maureen
O'Sullivan
> was somehow connected to the advent of the Hollywood dress
code, in
> that this alleged dress code was put in at least in part to
address
> the scanty dress of films of the 30's, in which Maureen
O'Sullivan had
> played a scantily clad Jane alongside Johnny Weissmuller's
Tarzan of
> the 30's. Well, I read up a little bit, and it turns out that
you
> never know how deep a puddle is until you step into it. It
turns out
> that it was much more than a dress code.**
> ****
> ** **
> We all know that all new technology is co-opted by the baser
instincts.
> When the Gutenberg press first began printing, a major press
output in
> addition to bibles was pornography. Likewise it didn't take
long for
> movies to get violent and, to use a judgmental word, rather
depraved
> soon into their invention. So the Motion Picture Production
Code, or
> the Hays Code, was promoted in an effort to improve humanity,
or at
> least not to debase it further. However, good intentions, as
was seen
> with Prohibition, don't always work as intended. By mandating
that
> bad guys always get their due in the end, in 90 minutes even,
and
> all's well in the end, one has to wonder if it didn't lull
people into
> a sense of complacency. Around that time Edward Bernays showed
> corporations how to manipulate desire, and planned obsolescence
was on
> its way to being institutionalized as a mechanism to improve
the
> Depression-era economy, going on to become the disposable way
of life
> we know today. The threshold for titillation is a moving
target,
> traveling ever upward. People do bad things because they can,
so a
> lid does need to be put on things, but Prohibition proved that
laws
> often cause problems. A lot of art has always been didactic,
and has
> always failed. I wonder if in subtle but powerful ways the
blurring between reality and fiction doesn't influence a lot of
daily behavior.
> Below is a link from Wikipedia on movies before the code. It's
a look
> at America of the 30's through films.
> ****
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood)****
> ****
> ** Andy**
>
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Subject: [lit-ideas] Down Towns: 6 Unbelievable Underground
Spaces | WebUrbanis
From: Ursula Stange <ursula@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:29:32 -0500
I've been to the Toronto, Montreal and Cappadocia underground
cities. The others sound fascinating. Maybe time for a trip...
http://weburbanist.com/2010/06/17/down-towns-6-unbelievable-under
ground-spaces/
Sent from my kitchen...
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