you know, every time i see this book cited as the worst example of what the book banners want to ban, i check it out. Skimming to the "pornographic parts", i'm reminded just how repressed we are to find this repulsive. You should be uncomfortable when learning new things. Sexuality is not pornography. It's certainly more extreme than anything I was ever exposed to in my youth, but i'm sure this could have been massively helpful to a few kids in my high school, and probably de-stigmatizing for a few others. Certainly worth pissing off a few parents.
The conflation of sexuality and pornography is one of the most harmful Puritan ideologies to persist into modern American culture. Speaking as a recovering Catholic who grew up in an extremely sexually repressive household.
As far as gender and sexuality specifically, nearly every aspect of what I did and said was analyzed and judged as "gay" or "not gay" by my guardians, gay also serving as a proxy for non-masculinity... and thus I could not for example have long hair (as apparently only gay men have long hair, and routinely pointing out that Jesus himself had long hair frequently led to punishment or physical abuse). From music taste to choice in friends to choice in language or books, to how I dressed.
In fact, I was told that men are never supposed to cry or show weakness, and my grandfather would quite literally beat the living shit out of me on a very frequent basis from the age of five, savagely beating me with metal objects and whips and belts, anything he could get his hands on, proclaiming that I would continue to get beaten until I stopped crying and took it "like a man". This was a routine part of my cult training as a child, getting beaten until my insides were dried out from crying and I physically could not cry anymore; until my diaphragm was convulsing from the pain. If I'd been found with a book like Kobabe's Gender Queer, I probably would have been put in the hospital.
I wouldn't wish my experience on the most evil of men. I absolutely understand why many who experienced gender violence in their youth simply decide to leave the entire concept of gender behind. Personally however, my path has been to unapologetically be myself and help other young men understand that they can embrace and define masculinity in whichever way they choose. To take back the reigns of masculinity from violent, sexually represeed psychopaths. The number of pissed off parents racked up along the way is just a measure of my success in this endeavor.
Visual depictions of hardcore sex acts where penetration is clearly visible = "sexuality". One wonders if anything at all can be pornography with your definitions.
Again, not all sexuality is pornography, and an inability to recognize that does not serve as evidence toward the contrary.
According to Oxford,
sex is "sexual activity, including specifically sexual intercourse.",
and pornography is "printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings".
If you are erotically stimulated by even the sight of sexual organs or sexual activity, that is a problem you need to deal with, but please do not project your perspective onto others. Many other people are able to look at such things and understand the message being conveyed. Nuance between words is not something we can just hand-wave away when it doesn't suit our argument. Sex and pornography are categorically different things.
It's shameful and sexually repressive to teach people that any form of sexual activity is pornographic. Or that children should wait until they are out of the house, away from parental supervision, to learn even the most basic things about sexuality. It's incredible to me sometimes to think about how much things have shifted back and forth in the last 100 years. In the 80's, you'd often find PG-rated movies containing nudity or sexual references. What happened, why have we slid back?
You would've had a hard time in my high school Sex Ed class, which I personally thought was still too censored and Puritan-influenced.
>and pornography is "printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity
The example I originally provided, that you and everyone else responded to contains the explicit display of both sexual organs and fellatio. It is indisputable, I gave detailed explanation how to see it for yourself in the book in question.
The depiction of fellatio, a type of sexual activity, is not inherently pornographic.
I would direct you toward my previous two comments and reiterate that your inability to understand the difference does not mean there is not a difference.
>I'm sure this could have been massively helpful to a few kids in my high school, and probably de-stigmatizing for a few others. Certainly worth pissing off a few parents.
That's great, then they can go to the public library and read it. Hopefully a teacher or guidance counsler can recommend it. It doesn't mean the federal government needs to pay for it to be in a K-5 school.
>Hopefully a teacher or guidance counsler can recommend it.
Not according to this bill.
>...prohibiting use of funds under the act “to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials...
This is perhaps a more common opinion than you think. Making it easy to catch bad guys is enough reason. I don't know how to effectively convince someone that the ease of law enforcement comes at the expense of liberty, which so many of the aforementioned opinion-holders also claim to be concerned about. I feel like it should be self-evident, that law enforcement and liberty are mutually exclusive, and that we have things like warrants to allow that infringement on liberty in very narrow circumstances. Dragnet surveillance is warrant-less evidence gathering.
>Because they're convinced that because they have nothing to hide, the law will never turn against them.
Yeah, this is a tough one to counter for me. Trying to identify a specific thing they do that may become of interest to a specific abuse of law enforcement.
I mean, one thing you can look at is news stories about the police grabbing the wrong person, trying to find someone who's as much like them as possible - but any example can be rationalized away.
The easy counter-argument to this, which Mr. Stanks alludes to, is that there's a difference between giving everyone data, and giving law enforcement data.
It's interesting. No one is a 100% law-abiding citizen. You can see this in traffic, for example, when a driver gets upset about pedestrians ignoring red lights, while they themselves are driving a few miles per hour over the speed limit and have the number right in front of them. The transgressions of others should always be severely punished. One's own transgressions are minor trifles that are not worth mentioning, or small privileges that one naturally claims. And when one is penalized a little for one's own misconduct, e.g., with a fine, one acts as if one were a victim of fascist repression.
It is self-evident, and they are doublethinking. You can test this by telling them that police should be required to wear always-on body cams. See how they react to that.
Good fiction writers seem to have a very deep understanding of human behavior, both as individuals and groups/systems. It's probably a combination of art imitating life, imitating art, and part prediction based on this understanding how human behavior and human systems evolve and interact.
And google forum search, which is pretty great overall, is often full of facebook comments. I don't mind the reddit results, since they still usually (somehow) contain the best answers to my queries. It would be great if it could be further filtered for actual forums.
Conceptually it’s difficult to explain to most people why this would not benefit them.
Like, I don’t maintain the delusion that I can’t be precisely identified by the apps I use. I just am vehemently opposed to it being tied to my government issued identity, which could be arbitrarily revoked and controlled by people who dont have pure profit as their motive. A lot of people probably find that overly paranoid.
I've wanted to try this on my old Pixel 5, but it has the dreaded screen/motherboard failure. It appears there is no solution for that short of replacing the screen/mobo, which i've already done once after cracking it.
I'm glad there is a name for these. I remember once driving past one[0], but the combination of terrain, road curvature, sunlight and foreground/background around them made a pair of these antenna look like a pair of giant hawks perched in a fire tower. For a split second it was a bit creepy.
Wasn't this the original basis for their justification of being a monopoly? And that the concession to the public was their mandate to operate bell labs and give fruits of their research to industry who did not participate in the monopoly?
Getting call records from the phone company, a private business that collects it's users' data, used to require a warrant. Why is it different now? Only because it's so trivial to hand over access to the database? I think in the past, the only thing that provided protection from illegal searches and seizures was the physical impracticality and friction involved in doing so. The warrant just allowed LEOs to dedicate their limited resources to a particular search. That is no longer a constraint.
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