Suddenly, I feel old....

..... and as if the world has passed me by. The BBC online magazine has this story of something I had never previously inagined:

Wife walks in and finds husband in an compromising position on the sofa with another woman. Wife feels betrayed. Wife files for divorce. Marriage ends.

It's a familiar scenario in soap operas, but for one married couple it was all too real. Sort of.

Amy Taylor and David Pollard met in an online chatroom in 2003, got married and shared their interest in Second Life, a virtual world in which users create avatars to interact with each other.

But the marriage ended after Ms Taylor's online character saw her husband's avatar having sex on a sofa with a female prostitute.

There is more here but my mind is just too boggled to continue now. I may come back to it later.

"She made me do it!"

It has been a lot longer than I intended since I last posted. Part of that has been due to having had a very busy and exhausting first weekend with the new intake on the Priest/ess training. Tiring it was indeed, but also very wonderful and rewarding. I am really looking forward to the year ahead.

I have also been feeling the effects of what seems to be a very low grade cold - just feeling a little under the weather and not very creative. Which is perhaps why I was especially shattered at the beginning of the week.

Anyway, I am still feeling a bit off - but will post nevertheless. Because, although I have not been feeling particularly creative, I have been doing a fair bit of reading and a lot of thinking. It will be no surprise to any that have read my earlier postings that much of this thinking has centred on sexuality and gender. One of the major things that has struck me over recent weeks is how difficult I find it to come to any sort of firm conclusion about any of it. For example, I cannot help but agree with the anti-porn activists about the deeply misogynist nature of much that is available. I will not go into details here except to say that much of the representation is of the degradation of women . I accept that this judgement is highly subjective and also that the acts are fantasy and that the women involved have given consent and have been paid for it. But I do worry about the fact that there is a market for this type of material.

I realise that my reactions are not evidence and I do not cite them as such. However distasteful I may find some of this material, moreover, I do not see it as having any causal effect - it is simply reflecting and serving a spectrum of desires and attitudes that are already present within the human species. There are numerous assertions made by campaigners that there are links between the "pornification" of society and the prevalence of violence against women. I do not necessarily accept them. For example, the same time period that they are talking about has also seen an increase, albeit not large enough yet, in women taking leading positions in all forms of human endeavour from science to politics. Porn is not a cause of this either. I could also point to the relatively more servile position of women in societies that have stricter control of porn, such as, say, Saudi Arabia, and assert that porn could have a positive effect on women's position. It would, however, have little validity.

Much of the anti-porn rhetoric implies that porn is responsible for creating a moral justification for negative attitudes about and violence directed at women. It is not. These attitudes and violence were rampant long before the internet was invented and the first blue movie shot- all that porn has done has been to make money from something that already existed. Rape has been seen as a normal part of life for millennia - in fact marital rape was only made a crime in Britain by the government of Margaret Thatcher. The rise of the awareness of domestic violence has, similarly, only come about during recent times - previously it had been accepted as something between the couple concerned and certainly no business of the police or the courts.

The problem is not porn. The problem is misogyny. Ren posted a story recently about an "honour" killing in Pakistan. This cannot be laid at the door of porn. Neither can the genital mutilation of young girls in many parts of the world nor the excesses of the churches who locked up "fallen" women and used then as slaves. It cannot be blamed for the rape of millions of women by soldiers from all armies. It cannot be blamed for the slave owners, including Thomas Jefferson, who raped - for what else can it be as property cannot refuse? - the women they owned.

A few years ago there was a call from politicians for a return to the "Victorian values" of family and morality and away from the permissiveness of the 60s generation which was leading, they asserted, to the decline of western civilisation. However, even a cursory glance at that history will reveal that the morality was nothing more than show. Estimates of the number of prostitutes in London would put it at around 3% of the entire population. These were by no means all women but many were young girls. To quote from F Rush The best kept secret- sexual abuse of children

"There were never enough 'voluntary prostitutes' to meet the voracious Victorian demand. Consequently, enterprising entrepreneurs established a system of obtaining 'involuntary prostitutes' Men who wanted sex with little girls were prepared to pay a good price, and a standard pricing system brought about twenty pounds for a healthy working-class girl between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, a hundred pounds for a middle-class girl of the same age; and as much as four hundred pounds for a child from the upper class under age twelve... " (Rush 1980, p.64).

All this before the internet. Long before Hugh Heffner or Larry Flint were even born. In fact, for most of the history of western civilisation the primary ethos has been the subjugation of women and the denial of their rights to assert their autonomy. Mythologically, it dates from a curse in a garden after Adam had made that original, classic, claim. "She made me do it!"

There are many men out there who hate and fear and want to harm women. They do not need porn to give them permission. Anything will do. The bible, for example, has been very effective in this regard for centuries. Which is one of the many reasons that I am uneasy and suspicious when feminists make common cause with the bible belt preachers as some have in the porn debate. For the enemy's enemy, far from being a friend, may prove equally or even more murderous. Think Hitler and Stalin.

The politics of pleasure

Some of you may have read about "The Price of Pleasure", an anti-porn film which is going the rounds in the US. I cannot comment on the content of the film, since I haven't seen it and as I do not think it will reach this part of the world, nor am I likely to. But the title itself in many ways tells me a lot
Firstly, it is catchy and to the point. It relates neatly to the subject of the movie - sexual pleasure bought and sold - and hints, alliteratively at the subject matter of porn.

I am more interested, however, in something that is implicit in the title - that sexual pleasure must have a price. Or, more precisely, a cost. And this is very much in line with on of the dominant themes within Christianity, in which sexual activity outside very strict limits is identified with damnation. I am not interested in the finer points of theology here, simply how those points have been transmitted into the cultural mainstream. A good example of such transmission can be found in the guidance given by their confessors to married couples in the medieval penitentials. A flow chart showing the decision making process that couples were exhorted to undertake can be seen on page 162 of James A Brundage's Law, Sex and Society in Medieval Europe in Google Books which is well worth a visit.

Such thinking is still with us - only the details change - and, according to it, some expressions of sexuality are licit and others beyond the bounds of decency. Although we hear that we are now living in a secular society, there is still a strong suspicion of sexual pleasure and a desire to regulate it. The language may have changed but the general message remains the same. The direct descendants of those medieval theologians are now ensconced in tenured positions in secular universities and may have no religious beliefs whatsoever but they do not seem a tmillion miles away in their tones of moral outrage and desire to rein in the dangerous beast of sexuality

Which is hardly surprising. I keep banging on about the all-pervasive nature of patriarchal thinking but it is true. Pleasure is, like everything else in patriarchal culture, put into a hierarchy and the pleasures of the flesh occupy the lowest level. And on this lowest level there are also degrees of virtue or vice. Consensual BDSM, for example, is considered by many to be less worthy than straight "vanilla" sex. Others will elevate lesbian - or gay - or bisexual - or celibate - or - or - the list goes on and in the end the label does not really matter. The way patriarchy conquered and retains its hold on our psyche is by the simple process of divide and rule. Mythologically this can be seen in the Babylonian story of Marduk's battle against the mother goddess, Tiamat. After killing her, he divides her body to create the material world. Similarly, the hebrew god creates the world through a series of divisions ans we still play along with his unwholesome (literally) game - earth and heaven, night and day etc - right down to man and woman - saint sinner. Sheep and goats. Wheat and chaff. Sex worker and anti-porn activist. Me and you. - the list goes on and on

On a link provided by Debi there is an account by Super Babymama of the way she enjoys sex. WARNING: NOT SAFE FOR WORK For her, sex is messy and passionate and is not interested in being acceptable or controlled. It is pornographic - or would be classed as that by many. Or, alternatively, it can simply be seen as the honest and guilt/shame-free enjoyment of all the pleasures of the senses. Others may enjoy bondage or submission - games by adults with full consent. Yet others may look to other ways. Why and how does it matter to anyone else? Sure, it is possible that some of these choices may be traced to patriarchal conditioning but, for Goddess's sake, who among us has not been so conditioned? It is in the air we breathe and therefore all our choices - even the anti-porn one - are inevitably conditioned. Surely the answer is to fully accept the conditioning and then move towards a new way of looking at sexuality - without the moral judgements that so plague us now.

Pleasure that is given and received with the true and informed consent of all affected parties is no business of anyone but the participants. And yet, The policing of pleasure is, and always has been, one of the principle activities of the patriarchs. And these patriarchs are not some shadowy group who meet in secret conclave to plot ways of control. No. They are in our own heads - they have colonised us so completely that we very often cannot even hear them as we grind the boots they have bequeathed us on the faces of other human beings. They exist in the judgements we make of our own desires- theirs are the voices we hear, telling us that pleasure must have a price.