Her work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Elle, Self, New York Observer, VanityFair.com, Esquire.com, and McSweeney’s among other publications.

Trouble is, the article only talks about how the experience is positive, without mentioning any of the possible negatives.

That’s when it occurred to me that not everyone is doing his or her part for the common good. Many of us watch porn online—perhaps all of us, at one time or another—but only a noble few make contributions commensurate with our viewing habits. Suddenly, sharing a homemade porn with the cyber world seemed as important a societal contribution as recycling.

It’s pretty amazing that an article in the mainstream media could make online porn seem perfectly normal. It’s fine to think it can be part of a healthy sex life, but to offer no commentary about how things can go wrong is only half the story. It’s sort of like saying, “Hey, heroin is great!” Yeah, some people can create “The White Album,” but some people die.  Something so powerful as sex can’t possibly be this simplistic.

More of my thoughts on porn here.

This definition needs to expand even for Loughner.  People keep arguing if Loughner was insane.  What part of shooting and killing 6 people strikes anyone as sane?  I understand that the insanity defense has very specific criteria, but in an odd way, claiming that Loughner isn’t insane has an impact on how people view insanity in general: that you’re either insane or you’re not, when there are many other levels of mental illness.  Violence isn’t the only criteria for determining if someone suffers from mental illness.

I realize that having Rush Limbaugh committed doesn’t make any sense – but what he’s spouting every day doesn’t make any sense either. Limbaugh’s influence is an example of cultural insanity as much as individual responsibility – and cultural insanity isn’t really ever diagnosed, even if it has a more pervasive and daily impact.

This isn’t only a problem in politics, or on the right.  Take a look at the recent Oprah show with people crying and shrieking about receiving various products.

How is this not an example of mental illness?  It’s a delusion: belief in things that don’t exist – that HDTV’s are this important.  Like a sick merger of capitalism and fundamentalist religion.  I watched 30 seconds of the show “Bridalplasty” and got immediately depressed.  I didn’t come away with a feeling like “watching a car accident” but like watching sociopathy on display – both the contestants and the people who put this show on the air.  Worse than a show like “Hoarders” or “Intervention” (which I like) because those shows at least acknowledge the subjects’ illness; it doesn’t celebrate it.

I’m not sure how you actually treat people with certain other kinds of mental illnesses, but there are many out there who need to be deprogrammed like any cult member.  Unfortunately, “deprogrammed” sounds awfully close to sounding like saying people need to be put in “reeducation camps.”  But fuck it, this mental illness is growing and overtaking the mainstream.

Another example – the incoming governor of Alabama saying that people who haven’t accepted Christ are not his brother. Yeah, this is Alabama, and the governor likely said worse 50 years ago. But it’d be nice to think that humans have been progressing, not devolving, in that time.

“There may be some people here today who do not have living within them the Holy Spirit,” Bentley said. ”But if you have been adopted in God’s family like I have, and like you have if you’re a Christian and if you’re saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister.”

Bentley stopped just short of calling for non-Christians to accept Jesus Christ.

”Now I will have to say that, if we don’t have the same daddy, we’re not brothers and sisters,” he said. “So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.”

Just imagine, for instance, if this governor said something like: “I am filled with the alien spirit, and only those others who believe in the sky gods are my space brothers.  I want to be your space brother.”  This is no less insane – but that person would be laughed out of office. Collective belief in a fallacy doesn’t make it more true.  What the governor said isn’t just “controversial” but out of his mind.

And this is why people talk about the rhetoric on the right being so much worse than the rhetoric on the left.  Nevermind violent rhetoric, there’s inherent danger in someone being an intellectual zombie. This governor puts targets on non-Christians as “lesser people” – which won’t get the same attention, but is just as dangerous as a gun sight map.

But this issue isn’t just a problem on the right.  I’ve seen people I respect say things like “this is evidence of mind control” or “just you wait, they’re going to paint him as a truther.”  This is also damaging, as people are being so self-protective of their own ideology without any self-criticism.   Disinfo has a post – Loughner Being Cast as Occultist.  He’s not “being cast” – these are things he actually did.  Just admit it – there are likely a number of hugely deranged people who believe in 9-11 truth, UFOs, and other conspiracy topics.  The defensiveness strikes me as not much better than the defensiveness on the right so rampant right now.  Nor does Icke-like speculation.  It’s laying negativity on negativity.

In the meantime, listening to all these isolated tracks has gotten me seriously fired up about music.  So I bought myself a new computer – a 21 inch iMac i5 plus a copy of Ozone 4, to remaster and possibly rerecord the tracks I’ve already completed.  I’ve also just finished reading Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, which was incredibly inspiring.  Music is where my head’s at right now, not dystopia. Or, rather, I’d rather sing about dystopia than write about it.

Long story short, eight months ago I googled amateur porn at home during my lunch break to discover my 22 year old daughter as the star.

What’s amazing is this is exactly the scene in the novel:

Me and my wife brought it up to her and she yelled at us for judging her, and that she wanted to be an actress and she felt this was the only way she should be one. I was disgusted by her irrationality and gave her a choice. Everything she had, I paid for. Her college tuition, her car, everything. She wanted for nothing and I told her I would not continue to support her if she continued down that path. She opted to move out and continue her life. I’m heartbroken and don’t know what to do.

Book cover is chapter one of TABOTD, published in an individual volume in a slightly different form by Cloverfield Press.

James Lee Manifesto

But I see the emergence of porn as much larger than that – it very literally is evidence of our world coming to an end. I may be very liberal on many issues, but when it comes to sexuality, I can feel like a fundamentalist Christian. The spread of porn is somewhat akin to Global Warming – both evidence that we are mistreating the Earth, but also has the potential to totally transform our behavior for the better. Porn is evidence that we’re being totally careless with our sexuality, but taboo-breaking could be useful if we don’t devolve completely.  I’m not entirely optimistic about our chances.

The trouble with porn is that it is currently taboo. Even though people decry the mainstreaming of porn – Jenna Jameson on Oprah – the mainstreaming is as thoughtless as any other mainstream cultural artifact. Jenna Jameson shows you can make a lot of money in porn and there’s even some glamor in it, but the real porn story is how this trickles down to everyone else. Just as people debase themselves eating cockroaches on “Fear Factor” to get 15 minutes of fame, porn is bringing the same impulse to the bedroom.  No, sex isn’t the same as eating cockroaches, but there’s a similar senselessness in a lot of porn. “To each his own” is a little too easy.

In an interesting (though overly conservative) interview with Pornland author, Gail Dines, she says:

So what happens is that desensitization sets in that much quicker and that much earlier. In order to keep the consumer base going, the pornographers have to keep upping the ante. They make it more violent, body-punishing, or abusive as a way to keep men interested. When you think about it, if you’re exposed to it at age 11 or 12, you’re jaded by 20. You’re certainly jaded by 30. Pornography bleeds sex dry of intimacy, emotions, and connection. Once you do that, then there’s not much left. It becomes boring and mechanical. So you have to keep feeding newer and newer ideas just to keep [the audience] interested.

Actually, that’s not really the core of the porn revolution. It’s not that people are seeking out new and stranger types of porn, it’s that everyday, average people are filming themselves and feel nothing about broadcasting it. Jenna Jameson is irrelevant – it’s the porn self-publishers who are worth intensive sociological study.

What she fails to grasp is: promiscuity has been around for a very long time. Now people are just pointing a camera at it. I remember a friend telling me about being in a  band opening up for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the nineties. Afterward, there was a long line of girls into their dressing room dubbed the “Blow job line.” Each waiting for their turn. Who would do that? The answer: the people who are filming themselves today.

Still, there is a dividing line between doing something in private and wanting thousands of other people to witness it. And this speaks of a general boredom and emptiness, as well as dumb superficiality and narcissism – if you can’t get on reality TV, you can make your own. The reason it’s destructive is because porn is still taboo – people think by fucking and broadcasting it they’re actually accomplishing something. Giving the finger to authority, parents, society, whatever. Doing something naughty. Sure, people get off on exhibitionism, and some exhibitionism is healthy, but part of the titillation is that you’re doing something wrong. If sex was seen as just another bodily function, there wouldn’t be as much satisfaction in making your own porn movie.  The fact that it’s forbidden makes it more attractive in an American culture where nudity is off limits.

So maybe we’re in the middle of a crossroads. The pornification of the world through the web is helping us reach a point where nudity is as nice and normal as it should be. Trouble is: most people putting up home porn movies aren’t quite evolutionary sociologists, so they’re mostly just being stupid and careless. Which really does seem tied together with how the human race is thoughtless about everything: the environment, finance, why should sex be any different? For every Nina Hartley, who’s a genius, there are thousands more who have no idea what they’re conveying.  Porn isn’t evidence that we’re breaking taboos, it’s evidence of our collective meltdown.

Basically, porn is about a lack of imagination – body over brain.  It’s useful in some regard, but it’s also a new kind of fundamentalism: sex is more important than everything. Turns this may not just be the case for the actors, but for viewers as well.  See Scientific American:

I’m left wondering … in a world where sexual fantasy in the form of mental representation has become obsolete, where hallucinatory images of dancing genitalia, lusty lesbians and sadomasochistic strangers have been replaced by a veritable online smorgasbord of real people doing things our grandparents couldn’t have dreamt up even in their wettest of dreams, where randy teenagers no longer close their eyes and lose themselves to the oblivion and bliss but instead crack open their thousand-dollar laptops and conjure up a real live porn actress, what, in a general sense, are the consequences of liquidating our erotic mental representational skills for our species’ sexuality? Is the next generation going to be so intellectually lazy in their sexual fantasies that their creativity in other domains is also affected? Will their marriages be more likely to end because they lack the representational experience and masturbatory fantasy training to picture their husbands and wives during intercourse as the person or thing they really desire?

I’m not saying porn isn’t progress, but I do think that over the long run it could turn out to be a real evolutionary game-changer.

This comment at the Pornland interview gets to what I’m getting at, except I do think of this as possible “end of history” behavior:

All of universal behavior is commodified. Not just sex, but recreation, eating, aesthetics…they are all turbo-charged by multi-billion dollar industries compelling its participants to consume more. And all of these facets of life lead many people to extreme behavior built on the mediated experiences all around them (ever see enraged soccer parents light into a ref at their kid’s match?). The point, while valid, is academic. Unless the professor is stating we’re near an “end of history” with respect to pornography. I doubt that she is, or she would be in great company with those who declared Elvis Presley the end days or painting the visage of Christ a sign or Armageddon.

The real culprit isn’t porn, but a culture which sells sex repeatedly without ever representing it directly. A confusing message which says: sex is dirty and wrong, but it’s all you should think about. In a way, Lady Gaga is more “pornographic” than than porn because she’s selling sex while lying about what’s actually going on. In a fame-obsessed culture, of course people would think they’re being interesting and deviant by recording sex. They’re not – they’re just being a different kind of consumer of dumb culture.  If the overall attitude towards sex was healthier, porn as it is today wouldn’t exist. The result wouldn’t be porn being in a sitcom (which happens in my novel – “Stick it to Me”), the response would be, “Yeah, I fuck too, so what?” Porn would primarily consist of instructional videos.  Simply, you take the dirt out of porn and it loses much of its purpose. If civilization doesn’t collapse first, maybe that’s where we’re heading.

Rage Underground seems like something to watch.

Meanwhile, Palin says,

As far too many in the media, and in various governments, rush to condemn Israel, we must put the recent events off Israel’s coast into the right perspective. This “relief” convoy was not about humanitarian aid, as the liberal mainstream media keeps reporting. The whole operation was designed to provoke Israel, not to provide supplies to Palestinians held hostage by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Anyone who sees the video of Israeli commandos being attacked as they land on that ship knows the people aboard were vicious thugs, not “peace activists.” The media insults our intelligence with their outright mischaracterization of who these enemies are.

Ackerman:

A generation ago, Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, two Jewish writers whose work has helped shape the conservative agenda in America, argued that American Jews ought to get over their residual fears of what was then known as the “Christian right” and embrace them as fellow lovers of Israel, even if that love is predicated on a millenarism in which the Savior eventually rids the world of Jews who fail to see His light. Pew’s findings have made them prophetic. And there is new mortar for the bonds of this conservative American-Israeli coalition: mutual hatred for Barack Obama, the American president whose meagre efforts to midwife a two-state solution have been greeted with contempt by Netanyahu.

Netanyahu offers the evangelicals a key defeat for Obama’s foreign-policy agenda, helping pave the way for a conservative restoration. The evangelicals offer Netanyahu rear-guard counter-pressure against Obama’s peacemaking efforts. They are not likely to fret about dead or dying Palestinians or dead “aid workers” – or are they terrorists? – aboard a flotilla off of Gaza. They share Netanyahu’s instinctual contempt for humanitarian do-gooders, his opprobrium for international institutions, and his antipathy to an independent Palestine as an endgame for the conflict.

Israel isn’t an American ally, it’s an American right ally, also known as the American Taliban.