| the blog of human failure
Let me introduce a hypothetical subject to you all, and you can let me know what you think about it. Let’s say you were a 15 year old male and you had a girlfriend. Now with full knowledge and willing consent of this girlfriend, you videotaped the two of you having sex at that age of 15. You then kept that video tape for 20 years until you were the age of 35 years old. You are no longer seeing this girl, but you still have the tape.
Does the fact that you are in the tape mitigate the child porn aspect of watching two 15 year olds have sex? Is it OK if you watch the tape for nostalgia but not OK watching it for sexual pleasure? I mean, it’s you in the tape, so this has the strong possibility of being a loophole. You were the one there having the consensual video-taped sex with another age-appropriate-at-the-time partner. How can it be immoral for you to watch a video tape of something 20 years later that if was perfectly moral for you to actually be doing and video tape yourself doing 20 years ago?
If you think it is immoral for you to watch the tape, that must mean that you think your identity significantly changes over time to the extent that who you were 20 years ago is not even the same person as who you are today. After all, you are not even entitled to watch a compromising tape of your other self.
Let’s take the idea a step further. What if you and your girlfriend, both at the age of 35, consensually video tape yourselves having sex? Now it is 45 years later and you are 80 years old. You no longer are dating the woman in the video and you no longer look much like the 35 year old you. Are you entitled to watch a video tape of the 35 year old you having sex at the age of 80? What about watching it for sexual pleasure as opposed to nostalgia? Is it too pathetic and creepy to watch a 35 year old version of yourself having sex?
If you think it would be pathetic or creepy to watch the tape, you must again think there is a significant difference in identity between the two versions of yourself, where you are again not entitled to watch a compromising tape of what was 45 years ago perfectly acceptable behavior.
Your current identity will over time make you a separate person from your past identity. Does this mean that the 35 year old is not entitled to the awards and accomplishments of the 15 year old version of himself? Does this mean the 80 year old is not really entitled to a lifetime of accomplishments simply because he is no longer the same person who performed them? Do I have to throw away this video or what?
In college I minored in Philosophy. The reason I did that was because at my university you could take any five random Philosophy courses and be granted a minor in it. We’ll get to that in a second. What you’ll learn in any run of the mill freshman Philosophy course, besides that god doesn’t exist and how to be a real asshole about it (”I mean, I can’t prove that there’s no invisible blue fire-breathing dinosaur in the room with us, but that doesn’t mean I have to be agnostic about invisible blue fire-breathing dinosaurs, am I right? So what are you ladies doing after class…”), is that there’s probably no free will in life whatsoever.
To break it down simply, we are physical systems and more specifically our brains are physical systems. Because of this they are subject to natural physical laws of cause and effect from and to other physical systems. Something stimulates my brain, a chemical process occurs, and my body reacts. There is no room for the idea of free will if humans are just devices of automatic reaction. “Well what about my soul?” you ask, voice quivering, bangs and tears in your eyes, trapper-keeper pulled tightly into your crossed arms against your chest. “Well where is your soul located?” your philosophy professor will undoubtedly ask. You’ll soon learn that your soul is riding atop an invisible blue fire-breathing dinosaur in the good place that is no place.
I bring this up because if we do indeed have no free will then me being a lazy piece of human garbage is either a genetic condition that I have no escape from or the result of environmental factors that I have no control over. I would otherwise feel horrible that friends and strangers alike seem to be working hard - living interesting, vital, and meaningful lives - but I know that the inability to work hard is just a condition of my natural being. I’m cursed by the fact that I’m a human and self-aware, because otherwise I would have no way of being cognizant of how worthless I am. Thank god that my laziness naturally tilted the table of life so I would roll gently towards a minor in Philosophy to find out I had no hand in making myself the useless person that sits in this chair today. It also helps knowing there’s nothing I can do about it.
The only bad part is that occasionally some scab shows up who asserts that he used to be a lazy person but then he “got his life on track,” and started working hard. I’m perfectly willing to accept that through the randomness of life some disparate factors coalesce and make people start working harder. I guess I just hate how they get to be self righteous afterwards and that they start rationalizing the change in themselves they had no volition in creating. It was no more your free will that got you into that car accident then it was your free will that made you go to physical therapy every day, so stop bragging about it.
As a side issue, if someone is acquitted of a murder for reasons of insanity, shouldn’t that verdict also apply to all of his previous parking and speeding tickets? If he couldn’t help killing someone he certainly couldn’t help not moving his car between 8am and 6pm. The defendant should get that money back to pay for his future counseling.
Here’s a topic I’m curious to get some varied opinions on. Can you masturbate to a pornographic video where the protagonist of your sex is a different race than you are? For instance if you’re a Black man, could you jerk off to a video where the male sex partner was White? What about Asian? What about a very dark skinned Latin person?
*As a quick aside, can anybody get off to two dimensional pictures anymore? I feel like even the most hardcore and specific pictures found in magazines and the internet are only little sticky notes spread around the world by the gods to remind you to masturbate to videos later, when you get home from work. Similar to the way walking by the hotdog cart reminds you that you haven’t eaten dinner.*
To keep things simple let’s deal with sex between one man and one woman. So that I don’t leave anybody out, I think you can replace the word “Man” in all of the following descriptions with “Boston Terrier” and my point still applies. When it comes to women in porno movies, most heterosexual guys can deal with almost any race under the sun. While they obviously have their preference about shape and size of different body parts, for a good portion of men the color of that vessel is not really terribly important. However, I have a pet theory that most men can’t masturbate unless the color of the penis on screen vaguely resembles the color of their own penis. What’s odd about this is that the rest of the person doesn’t resemble you; even the rest of the penis doesn’t resemble your penis. It’s usually a different size and shape and it has completely different tattoos. You would really have to freak out if you saw another penis in a porno with the same tattoos as your penis. I know I would be cutting it back to half an Ambien if I had a hunch my penis was out moonlighting without my permission. That is, unless the tattoo was something incredibly common, like barbed wire or “Mom.”
My best guess is that it would be pretty easy for a dark skinned Black person to jerk off if the male was a light skinned Black guy. I imagine most White men would be able to get there if the man was Asian. I bet almost every guy could deal with a Latin guy doing the fucking. It seems odd for a guy to put so much emphasis on the man in a heterosexual porno movie but that’s supposed to be your stand in. The fantasy is that this is you having sex with this beautiful woman and it’s impossible to get past the fact that you’re not a seven foot tall, 45 year old Filipino guy. You’re not even close.
Seeing how important the guy is in a straight porn film, I believe that there should be films with guys covered in Swastikas to appeal to neo-Nazis. They shouldn’t be able to get off watching a porno where the guy has ambiguous feelings about Blacks, Jews, and Catholics. I wonder how they would feel if the woman was obviously a Black, Jew, or Catholic. I suppose as long as he was sort of rough with her.
Oh, and for gay men, what if one of the dudes was your race, but the other was a disparately colored race. Seems simple enough, just associate yourself with the one that’s your race. But what if you are emphatically a bottom, and the person of your race is topping the whole movie? What if you’re Latin and it’s a Black guy and a White guy on screen; who do you root for then?
If you’re married, would your spouse be comfortable with you masturbating to a porno where the person of the opposite sex as you is a different race than your spouse? For instance say you’re a woman and you and your husband are both White. Would you be comfortable with your husband watching a porno with a White man and a Black woman? I imagine it would have to sting. What about a Black man and a White Woman? What about a Black man and a Black woman? What the fuck is he thinking about there?
How about this, you’re a Black man and you catch your White wife watching a porno with one Black woman and two Asian men. Do you wish one of the guys was Black? Both of them? How could it matter?
It’s difficult for me to put myself in the role of the woman when it comes to this idea of the self being reflected in porno watching. If she’s White does she have trouble relating to a Latin vagina? Perhaps for women it’s more of a white or black breast thing. It could be that they have some totally different priorities when watching a porno and they don’t care at all what race the woman is, only what race the guy is. If that were true it would seem that women don’t really need to be in porno movies at all, considering where everyone’s focus is.
Ok, just one more. What if you’re a White necrophiliac and the living one in the video is Black? What if you’re Asian, the perpetrator is Latin and the corpse is decomposed beyond racial recognition? What’s wrong? You can’t get off? Racist!
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