Porn, Oh?

After watching the Frontline documentary, “American Porn,” I was reminded of Storey’s assertion that “ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people.” There were a few examples throughout the documentary that I feel expressed the ideology of the porn industry aptly. When discussing her motives for keeping the large storefront glass windows in her Hustler Hollywood business, the owner stated, “We want people to see in, and we want people to break the stereotype that sex is dirty.” The more porn or sex products are publicly accepted, the less self-conscious people will feel about being seen and associated with these products. This makes perfect sense from a marketing standpoint, as another interviewee confirms with his statement, “There must be demand for this. This must be normal. I shouldn’t feel odd because I watch it.” He is referring to the promotion, availability, and popularity of pornography, which gives potential viewers the security and comfort of knowing that there is nothing strange about indulging. The porn industry must promote the ideology that sexual activity, and access to this activity, is normal, healthy, and exciting, and this ideology offers a freedom that many opposing ideologies about sex do not. Porn enables the viewer the opportunity to experience a fantasy of their choice, regardless of age, class, gender, race, or sexual identity. While the pornography itself exposes everything, the viewer is afforded privacy. The viewer does not have to explain his or her tastes in material to anyone, and can be comforted that the availability of this material means that there are other individuals out there who enjoy the same things. In this sense, an ideology based on open sexual expression and indulgence without guilt can actually form a community of individuals who visit the same websites, watch the same material, and buy the same products. The porn industry has to subvert the mentality that one’s sexual preferences and activities are something abnormal, embarrassing, or not to be talked about with others.

The third part of the Miller test asks if the material in question “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” when evaluating whether pornography fall within the acceptable realm of community-accepted normality. I have posted the following interview with porn star Sasha Grey because I found her perspective on the porn industry very interesting. The way she discusses her desire to “make adult films more creative” because she “wants people to keep watching movies even after they have an orgasm” suggests that for many individuals in the porn industry, pornography can be a product of artistic and creative expression. While many people may believe that porn is just filth that objectifies women and promotes unhealthy ideas about sex, I believe that porn is just a slightly more touchy version (pun intended) of every other product out there on the market. People are putting work into creating it by pooling their ideas, executing the production, and finishing with a product that is popular.

All Things Serve the Beam

A value for books is the most priceless gift my mother gave me. Growing up, the television stayed in the living room, and I was rarely allowed to watch it. If I had to choose one reason why I love books and reading so much, I’d have to say that they provide an escape from one’s own reality and the opportunity to relinquish control to the author. The author who has impacted my life the most is Stephen, and I strongly feel that anyone who really and truly reads and understands his work cannot go unchanged by it.

When I look at my book shelf, filled with his numerous works, I can pull out any book and draw upon the memory of a time or place when I lost myself within its pages. Sometimes these times and places were not the stuff of good memories, which is why I believe wider culture will never stop reading books.

There are times in life when our economy, jobs, living situations, and relationships are overwhelming for us, as a culture. The constant push of commercialism, combined with the pulls of our personal lives and the distractions of technology, are cultural pressures which many people struggle with. I absolutely loved McSweeney’s statement that “literacy is not a privilege, but a tool, and billions of people reach out to use it.” There is a comfort in books which I believe many people in wider culture must experience, knowing that your words and actions cannot affect the course of events, yet still feeling many of the mistakes or triumphs as though they were your own, and learning from them.

If I open a novel by King, Simmons, Butler, Little, Mieville, or Palahniuk, I do so expecting that the everyday stress of life will pale in comparison to being chased by a crazed man with a roque mallet through a hotel or giving birth to a child that metamorphoses into a spider. It may sound silly, but I told my grandma once that I read books of the darker genre because they make our lives look normal by comparison. I don’t want to read about my life, I want to read about someone else’s…and I want it to be terrifying. Because life, whether real or fiction, is often terrifying.

I do not think that print books are going anywhere. Part of being an avid reader is tied up in the experience of hunting for the book you want to read next or physically poking a book into someone’s face until they give in and read it. As Ken stated, on The New Yorker, he found books before the internet by “just wandering around, browsing in a bookstore, or friends would tell [him] about something they read.” There are social and tactile experiences of print reading that just cannot be replicated by e-books. I also agree with Leo’s statement that “the subway has become almost better concentrating time…given that you don’t have the internet…” One of the reasons I find it difficult to read on my iPad is that I am so easily distracted by other things like apps or incoming emails. There is no familiar search for the missing bookmark, or smashing of a paperback into my purse in case I have a free moment to read. I can’t live without the smell of books. And there will NEVER be an e-book equivalent to the signed Stephen King novel that is my most prized possession.

♥?

I’ll be honest, when I watched the video “Digital Nation,” I was simultaneously attempting to complete my math homework. It was one of those moments where, in the throes of concentration, a series of statements reaches out from the social media source and flicks you in the head. When the professor from the video stated, “It’s not that the students are dumb [or] not that they’re not trying, [but that] they’re trying in a way that’s not as effective as it could be because they are distracted by everything else,” I realized that I have been attempting this behavior since the beginning of the semester. While I agree with the perspectives of the students and teachers in the film, I find that my personal experience occupies a middle ground between the two extremes. I would love to do nothing in class but pay attention to the lecture, and read every word of the text when I get home, as is valued by the professors. But, from a student’s perspective, pressured by expenses, family, the university, and the ever-shifting employment market, is this even possible? I find that I am so consumed by the need to perform well in school that, if I receive a text from a family member in class and don’t respond, I feel overwhelming guilt. Sure, I may be spending the time I’m not paying attention in class emailing various other groups from other classes about assignments, but am I learning?

While I can say that I don’t have a Facebook account, cable television, or a Twitter account, I do have an internet connection. This seems to have become the minimal requirement to be a connected, involved member of a modern, social-media dependent society.  I am reminded of the journalist’s quote from “Digital Nation,” when she stated that her family members “were all in different worlds, and it just snuck up on [them].” I believe that this strongly applies to our favored means of communication in that we frequently become so connected to reading  and watching the feelings and emotions of those we know that we actually become reduced in our ability to effectively communicate in the real world.

I agree with Malcom Gladwell’s statement that, “the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns.” It is true that the expanded horizons of social media, accessible by anyone with cable or an internet connection, afford a certain sense of communal empowerment and opportunity to form a network for change between individuals who might never meet otherwise.

That being said, after perusing comments, reviews, and blogs over many years, I have noticed a definite decline in the standard of communication. How many of us have sent a text, left a comment, or emailed someone and received a reply that assumed from our written, impersonal communication, that we were expressing an emotion that was not actually intended?

The freedom, and the danger, of online social media is that anyone can be anybody. I mean this in the sense of literal identity, as well as the emotions we project to represent ourselves. This is relevant in every category from politics to online dating websites. I love hunting, hate snakes, was born in California, and my favorite animal is the dolphin.

Finally, I leave you with an excellent quote from Eleanor Roosevelt:

There Was A Time When YouTube Wasn’t Even A Thing. There, I Said It.

John Storey’s article “What is Popular Culture?” delves into the definitions and construction of ideology and popular culture. According to Storey, “ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people…[however], some cultural texts and practices present distorted images of reality…[producing] what Is called ‘false consciousness’ and working] in the interests of the powerful against the interests of the powerless.” This definition can be better understood by taking a brief look into the gender ideology propagated by popular children’s and young adult media in recent years. Disney constructed an empire on the shoulders of the damsel in distress, with animated tales like “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Snow White.” Whether you, the viewer, are male or female, does this image radiate strength or independence? Disney’s earliest films placed beautiful, innocent, and often “soft” women in roles where their pampered, stay-at-home-princess lifestyles were disrupted by some form of change that they ultimately were incapable of overcoming without the help of a prince. This idea of gender is a product of a time in which women were only beginning to gain independence and were still struggling to gain respect in the workplace and equality in culture. By looking at more recent films like “Brave,” we can see a shift in cultural ideology that reflects changing views of what women should be and what they should want. “Brave” features a princess who does not want to be married off or rescued, and the movie is unique in its lack of romance and its focus on breaching the generation gap between a mother (who is very much like the Disney princesses of old) and her daughter. 

Applying Storey’s second definition of popular culture as “the culture which is left over after we have decided what is high culture” to the Youtube video “OK Go- Needing/Getting,” I see a brilliant example of art that diverges from a norm to distinguish itself within popular culture. While high culture may shudder at the collaboration of “instruments” and cringe at the concept of driving a car (literally) through a song, OK Go is not “left over” from high culture in a negative sense. Rather, the video is afforded more artistic freedom because popular culture is more loosely defined than high culture. In many cases, accessibility to artists and videos like this by people of any race, gender, or background may be what makes popular culture so “popular.” Not everyone is able to gain exposure to high culture, but who’s to say that the general public would even enjoy high culture as much as popular culture if forced to compare the two?

The video “She takes a photo every day: 5.5 years” exemplifies Storey’s fourth definition of “culture which originates from ‘the people’ [rather than] something imposed on the people from above.” This video is fascinating because it shows changes in an individual that are compiled artistically without any attempt to sell something. The woman’s shifting face, hair, and backgrounds becomes a popular video through the simple ingenuity of what she is accomplishing and the dedication it takes to adhere to a basic activity for a long period of time, all with the purpose of showing change. The only imposition on the creation of this video was time, and it has a very natural, un-boxed feel.

The third video “Dog saves cat from fox,” was problematic for me. It reminded me of Storey’s assertion that the “fear of Americanization is closely related to a distrust…of emerging forms of popular culture…” I feel this distrust when I watch this video because I am unable to understand why this video—of so many on Youtube—gained so much popularity. I saw a man recording a wild animal in a suburban neighborhood. As the cat fled, presumably from the fox, the fox takes chase at a very close proximity to the man filming. From off camera, we hear a dog barking, and the fox retreats. This video does not show me an endearing case of animals defending each other, it shows me a blatant failure of one animal (man) to step in and prevent a potentially gruesome situation of animal violence. And why? Because popular culture values videos that show unexpected or “wild” things happening, and this guy preferred to get the shot, rather than interfere. This type of behavior (laughing on camera while an obviously frightened fox is driven off by a dog’s barking and an even more frightened cat has narrowly escaped) represents a dangerous mentality of indifference to nature and spectator-ship. Sure, this man isn’t a matador, goring a bull for a cheering crowd, but it’s a little too close for comfort.

In conclusion, I leave you with a Youtube video that reminds us all of “most popular” videos of Youtube past. I particularly enjoy this one because it shows a product of popular culture analyzing other products of popular culture. When comparing these past internet sensations to the top sensations of 2012, what similarities and differences do you see in the material or message? Is there a message at all? I look forward to your comments.