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Plato and Porn

Posted by Pharmakon on 2020-July-30 02:36:06, Thursday
In reply to Thoughts on Jimmy Safechuck and porn. posted by Sick Rose on 2020-July-29 19:07:30, Wednesday

What does it feel like to be worshiped for one's beauty, for one's sexiness? To sense that you can wrap powerful and charismatic men/gods around your proverbial, uh, little finger? Should you revel in it, even though it is in the nature of existence that it will only last a moment and nothing you ever experience afterwards will ever be quite as intense? Or should everyone around you conspire to numb those sensations of power, of sexiness, of sheer exhilaration in your own beauty because they will not last, teach you to trash and doubt and fear what you are feeling?

Boys can be sexually attracted to men, but the worship of beauty you describe will mostly run from man to boy. What the boy will feel is what Plato describes as "that counter-love which is the image of love, though he supposes it to be friendship rather than love, and calls it by that name":

So he loves, yet knows not what he loves: he does not understand, he cannot tell what has come upon him; like one that has caught a disease of the eye from another, he cannot account for it, not realising that his lover is as it were a mirror in which he beholds himself.

--Phaedrus 255D-E (Hackforth tr)


Of course, especially under today's conditions, so unlike those of Plato's time, this can be understood by the boy as merely a power to manipulate. This is a corruption or degeneracy; you perhaps will argue it characterizes decadence. The boy who experiences only this is spoiled. When the power is lost, as it must be, bitterness follows. (I doubt this kind of loss of power is the main source of female rage, though I wouldn't deny it plays a role.)

Plato was so acutely aware of this risk that he urged the lovers to forswear sexual satisfaction (thus the misnomer "Platonic"), though on my reading that was a kind of monastic devotion to making philosophy out of the worship of beauty he thought more admirable than common or even necessary. But a lover who so spoils a boy that the boy becomes drunk on the power of his beauty has, in Plato's view and mine, ruined it for both of them. The better path, with or without sexuality, runs otherwise.

The notion of distinguishing art from porn lies at the center of the incoherence of obscenity law, the flaws in which are well, if somewhat turgidly, critiqued in the article linked below (I have shared it before). In essence, obscenity law says that if you can jack off to it, the state can prohibit it. So the problem of porn is really just the problem of masturbation. Can addiction to masturbation be unhealthy? Perhaps, but the notion that there is a role for the state in fighting this supposed evil was, as an explicit doctrine, abandoned in the last century. It survives, irrationally, in the stigmatization of porn.

hugzu ;-p


Pharmakon
  • (https site) Critique of 'obscenity'
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