In summary, what Gertrude Himmelfarb pointed out in the USA is that the country has moved from a hegemonic culture in which everyone should be chaste to a hegemonic culture in which everyone should be profligate. According to her, who uses Smith, the uniformity of customs stems from a material condition, which is the absence of demarcated social classes. No demarcated social classes, no well-defined morality of the poor and the moral of the rich. However, looking in particular at the issue of sexual customs of each individual, I believe that it is not possible to have such a materialistic explanation. Let’s see: in a puritanical, Protestant society, there is no place either for a woman willing to have sex with several men, or for a woman who does not want to have any sexual activity throughout her life. The right thing is to marry and have children, uniformly, for all women. In the Catholic scene, however, there is a place to be a lot of things between prostitute and nun. Brazil does not criminalize prostitution because it is a country with a Catholic background; St. Augustine saw prostitution as a necessary evil.
Let’s say that uniformization is a Protestant cultural mark, before being an economic issue. Of course, one can point out the economic differences between Protestant and Catholic societies, but then one easily falls into the question of the egg versus the chicken . On this point, I stand with Weber: the Protestant ethic came before the material changes of capitalism. Culture came before matter. But, as we saw, this unifying counterculture would spread across Western Christendom, whether Catholic or Protestant. So, if there the order was for everyone to stop being uniformly bigots to be uniformly prostitutes, here the order is twofold: we have to go not only to be prostitutes, but to be all the same. This pressure for equality is even seen in the physiognomy of pop artists, who go through all sorts of “procedures” to get the same cheekbones, the same face shape, the same nose and the same lips. It is obvious that uniformity is taken to the extreme.
Uniform choices
Recently, I translated two texts indicated by the editor on pornography addiction. One of the texts, from a US vehicle, brought up the controversy of a Democrat politician who, in the face of studies that show that young men there are having less sex, decided that sex was a right and therefore prostitution should be decriminalized. The consequence of the right to sex is the obligation of others to spread their legs, which, in the final analysis, is capable of entailing the right to rape. (Let’s say a client acquires such a bad reputation that no prostitute wants to serve him. If there is a right to sex cured through prostitutes, one of two things: either the man is in the same situation as a SUS patient with a rare disease who needs a very expensive medicine, if a prostitute appears who agrees to submit to it for a very high price, or there will be the right to rape, if not even a prostitute like that appears.)
Do on the other hand, a conservative argued that the decriminalization of prostitution would lead to a rise in the demand for prostitutes, which, in turn, would lead to an increase in human trafficking and sexual slavery. In true American style, he didn’t say “prostitute”, but “prostituted person”. Political correctness and its passive language are ambidextrous there.
Well: in this country that has always lived with prostitution, it is very clear that there are prostitutes who are prostitutes because they want to – from the well-born to the poor –; that even if some had more choices than others, nearly all had choices; and if he didn’t, it’s because he was the victim of some criminal, probably when he was underage. Furthermore, all the arguments aimed at prohibiting prostitution based on exploitation (which is a crime in Brazil) arouses a lot of skepticism in me, as it could easily be used to prohibit the existence of sugarcane plantations. I bet it’s easier to find a hooker with financial comfort and options to change jobs than a cane cutter. The prostitute could pay for college (when a degree gave a job) and change her life; the cane cutter does not qualify for anything while cutting cane.
Thus, both sides of the issue assumed that no one was where they are by choice: that men were not having sex because of their own choices, and that a portion of women choose to prostitute themselves. What to do? Standardize: for one, all men have to be assisted by “sex workers”; for another, no woman can be a “prostituted person”.
All uniformly porn
But the report touched on an important issue : The number one reason young men stop having sex is pornography addiction. Pornography gives the addict a thrill he cannot achieve with sex. Sometimes the addict even finds a girlfriend, but leaves her in the lurch. Or – what is worse – he starts to try to reproduce the oddities seen on the screen.
The other article I translated is more interesting. A Spanish outlet reported that the French women had made a report on the evils of pornography and called for the criminalization of the “pornography industry” on the basis of it. The idea of banning pornography also arouses my skepticism, especially since – as the senators discovered – the problem is not the usual pornography, but the pornography of today. In the old days, porn movies had a little story that served as a pretext for explicit sex scenes. Today, thanks to the invention of Canadian sites like Pornhub and Redtube, people have free access to pornography, which in turn is produced at zero cost. Pornhub wins with the number of hits. So, a lot of people upload home videos, which don’t have a story, and soon, to differentiate themselves from other home videos, they start doing weird things. The brain gets used to this type of stimulus and man can no longer find normal things funny.
Another problem, even more serious, is that these sites are not effective in prohibiting access of children. As the mainstream progressive culture is obsessed with sex, it is no wonder that children – of both sexes – seek to see what sex is. France and England realized the problem and discovered another one: it is not possible to guarantee the anonymity of adults and veto the access of minors at the same time. Faced with this dilemma, England did not think twice and decided to sacrifice the mental development of children to preserve the anonymity of the perverts. France, on the other hand, is still in a legal battle with Pornhub and the like.
Much of the work of the French senators was only possible because, between the old porn producers and home videos, a kind of semi-professional producer, which makes image assignment contracts to sell the content to the websites. Women were at vulnerable stages of their lives and contracts, once they exist, can be analyzed and considered abusive. If it was just amateur video, they wouldn’t have any documents. And if they punish the producers without punishing the amateurs, everyone will become an amateur – and it was precisely the amateurism of pornography that fueled Pornhub.
Let’s say that, back in the years 70, the couples discovered that they could film themselves having sex and give the video for free to a producer, who would copy and distribute it to anyone who wanted to see it. Imagine explaining this to your grandma: “Grandma, everyone can see you having sex, just film it and replay it!” The thing looks more like a threat than an opportunity. Grandpa would like to see some tapes, but between liking and saying he likes there is an abyss, and there is yet another one between liking to see and liking to be seen. In our grandparents’ world, there was room for porn actors, because that was a specialized profession to be practiced by a few people. In ours, no: if everyone is a porn actor, nobody is a porn actor.
What France should do is make amateur porn difficult and regulate contracts. If there is one area that must be secured through the formation of a relatively unproductive monopoly, it is pornography. It’s good for the user when any driver can do the job of a taxi driver, but it’s decidedly bad for the user when anyone can do the job of a porn actor.
