November 02, 2007
Radicalizing Pornography
Dylan van Rijsbergen in signandsight.com, originally in Trouw (Netherlands):
A few weeks ago it was all over town. A billboard with a picture of a beautiful near-naked female body, wearing nothing but a bra. Eyes invisible. In front of her vagina a small designer bag. The poster bore the words: "lesson 84: lead him into temptation."
It was not so much the Photoshopped perfection of the female body that triggered me. Nor the absence of the woman's eyes, which made the body into an anonymous signifier of pure sexuality. I was not irritated because the picture forced on me the voyeuristic gaze of the heterosexual, macho-male observer, turning women into sex-objects. Most shocking for me was the fact that the little bag and the vagina were totally interchangeable. The billboard suggested that sexual temptation and the temptation to buy commodities were one and the same. The picture was not only about turning women into sexual objects. It was about transforming human sexual desire into a commodity. Interchangeable, standardized and ready to be sold to the highest bidder.
The debate about the pornofication of society was started by feminists and conservatives alike. Feminists like the American writer Ariel Levy and Dutch publicist Stine Jensen criticize the way women are portrayed in an inferior and humiliating fashion as no more than compliant slaves of male desire. Conservatives of either Islamic or Christian origin are also unhappy with this sexualization of the public space. In their view sexuality should not be displayed in the open. It should be restricted to the privacy of marriage. All these naked bodies on billboards, on television and on the Internet are only leading men and women into temptation. In their opinion, it is likely that these images will stimulate sinful behaviour.Conservatives usually blame the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies for sexual morals disappearing down the drain.
In a sense they are right.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 04:57 PM | Permalink
Comments
You are so close to getting it. Now substitute pregnancy (available 20% of the time), with HIV (available 100% of the time), and ask yourself: Are people in Uganda dying of Pregnancy? Or AIDS?
And then tell me: How effective are condoms at preventing HIV transmission?
I don't know, but you couldn't deduce the answer from their effectiveness in preventing pregnancy. After all, in a single encounter there's no reason to expect that the probability a condom will "fail" in the sense of causing one HIV-infected person to pass on the virus to their partner should be equal to the probability it will "fail" in the sense of causing a woman having sex during her fertile period to become pregnant (even with no protection whatsoever neither of these probabilities would be 100%). So, knowing how effective condoms would be at preventing pregnancy in a hypothetical world where women were fertile all year round does not tell you how effective they'd be at preventing the spread of HIV, that would be a subject that needs to be researched independently (and it seems that some of the studies discussed above do address this question).
In any case, I mainly just jumped into this thread to point out an error in your mathematical reasoning (as a nerd I can't let technical errors go, even if they have limited relevance to the overall argument!) Your claim seems to be that we can just take the probability a person will get pregnant in a year of condom use, 2%, and then just multiply that by 5 to find the probability they'd get pregnant if they were fertile all year round, since in reality they're only fertile for 1/5th of the year. But this is the wrong procedure--the correct one would be to take the probability a person won't get pregnant in a year, 0.98, and raise it to the fifth power (multiply it by itself 5 times), which gives 0.98*0.98*0.98*0.98*0.98 = 0.90392, or about 90.4% effectiveness in this hypothetical world of constant fertility. This happens to be pretty close to the number you got with your incorrect method, 90%, but it would be more wrong if we looked at some other method of birth control--suppose some method has a real-world effectiveness of 80%, then your argument would suggest a person would have a 100% chance of getting pregnant after a year of using this method in a world where they were fertile all year round, while the correct answer would be that they'd have a 67.2% chance.
Anyway, to move away from this technical point and address the larger issue, I'd say the strategy that would probably save most lives is to tell people the only certain way of avoiding AIDS is abstinence, but if they are unwilling to do so they should use a condom, with the caveat that they still have some significant chance of contracting AIDS if they regularly have sex with HIV-positive partners (on the other hand, if a person only has the occasional one-night stand or sexual encounter with a prostitute, the probability of avoiding AIDS on any single encounter with a condom is quite high). That way most of the people who would be persuaded by an abstinence-only message probably still will be, and those who wouldn't be persuaded by such a message may at least listen to the message about condoms and significantly reduce their risks that way.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Nov 10, 2007 11:40:51 PM
Like I said. The voice of reason. I would only add that they should also be told that when they get HIV, they WILL ultimately die of it. If there is a 10% annual likelihood of acquiring HIV, what is the likelihood after 10 years? I'm sure it's less than 100% but I am afraid if I try that one, y'all'l jis yell at me some more.
They might also be told that if they save their sex for marriage they will never get aids, they will live lives filled with as much sex as they want, and that their children will be much less likely to live impoverished lives.
Which again, is where I came in.
Posted by: Carlos | Nov 11, 2007 12:22:21 AM
This is where you came in:
"There is a direct causal link between single-motherhood and poverty. Perhaps you should consider first making abortion mandatory. Condoms are only 90% effective in preventing pregnancy and STDs under the best of circumstances. It's a wash if they are universally used and you only increase frequency 10 fold. Increasing it 100 fold like it is today and you guarantee the epidemics that we are now seeing."
(1) There's no reason to throw in STDs here, because your remarks about single-motherhood and abortion have absolutely nothing to do with STDs. The relevant statistic is that condoms are 98% effective in preventing pregnancy.
(2) As I've quoted, studies have shown that frequency of sexual encounters does not increase.
(3) As I've shown in the Thailand example, epidemics are instead prevented by condom use.
Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies. And yet more lies:
"If there is a 10% annual likelihood of acquiring HIV"
Except there's not. It's far less than 1%. Condom effectiveness does not equal chance of avoiding the STD. It means the relative risk compared to not using a condom. How thick can you be?
Posted by: anon | Nov 11, 2007 10:18:36 AM
Oh: "Like I said. The voice of reason." Again, you are not qualified to judge such things, because I said the same thing Jesse said:
Me: "I agree that abstinence is the best way of avoiding HIV. However, abstinence-only is not a realistic approach. People will have sex, regardless of how much you discourage them. But you can inform them of the risks, and provide technology (condoms) that reduces those risks."
Jesse: "I'd say the strategy that would probably save most lives is to tell people the only certain way of avoiding AIDS is abstinence, but if they are unwilling to do so they should use a condom, with the caveat that they still have some significant chance of contracting AIDS if they regularly have sex with HIV-positive partners ... That way most of the people who would be persuaded by an abstinence-only message probably still will be, and those who wouldn't be persuaded by such a message may at least listen to the message about condoms and significantly reduce their risks that way."
Posted by: anon | Nov 11, 2007 10:23:20 AM
One of the primary points in the original post was sex as commodity. Now here in the West, if the sexual images in advertsing were all gone, the amount would be hugely reduced. That would leave advertising for porn and prostitution as the only "honest" sexualized ads. Actual streetwalking qualifies, sort of, as an "ad." Most of the other stuff is there but semi-invisible to those who don't want it. (Exception: MySpace, where I got purely bombarded by obvious prostitution ads, so I quit the site. Not that I'm a prude, but I didn't go there for that!)
Carlos, the war on public sexual images is a war on modern advertisers. A war I support. The advertisers lie.
Posted by: Jumper | Nov 11, 2007 11:48:00 AM
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