Tenebrae
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Below are the 7 most recent journal entries recorded in the "darkrhiannon" journal:
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04:06 pm
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I hate back-to-school shopping.
Am home now. Am tired and cranky. Ditto for the grrls. Blech. Have not even begun to do anything off-line for clothes for them. Just managed backpacks, notebooks, pencils, pens, etc. $300 later we seem to be ready for school in terms of supplies, if not clothes. Eldest daughter got a headache after the supply portion of shopping (which also included groceries) so we came home instead of doing clothes, which was just as well, since my patience had about run out anyway. Yukk. The only things I *like* shopping for are woodworking tools, books, and jewelry. I buy two pairs of jeans when my old ones get holes in them. I buy new shirts when the old ones fall apart. That's it. Since the younger two grrls seem destined to be clothes horses, I find myself at a considerable loss when shopping for them. They want everything in every color. They're not greedy, per se, just over-enthusiastic. Eek!
Current Mood:  tired
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09:06 am
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So, I've been reading Harry/Draco
and was digging through Restricted Section when I came across Moonlight and Shadow. This is a truly marvelous little snippet of post-war AU. Harry and Draco are both beautifully in-character, yet the plot is clever enough to allow them to interact in ways both hot, believable, and somewhat hopeful. A Lot Like Love on the other hand is dead on perfect in terms of angst within canon.
Give them a read and feed a truly gifted author.
Current Mood: Blessed
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01:43 pm
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Just created my first animated icon
Yeah me! Of course, it ain't much, but still. Squee.
Current Mood: Amped
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02:20 pm
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Switching flists
Thanks to the marvelous ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif) jaxinny who forwarded me beren's post on switching flists, copied here:
Switching flists. Thought it might be useful.
There is a reasonably quick way to find your friends on Journalfen, Greatestjournal, and Insanejournal.
journalfen console
greatestjournal console
insanejournal console
- Copy/paste your flist from your LJ user page into Word
- Do edit/replace of the commas with ^pfriend add so the list ends up looking like this:
friend add darkrhiannon
friend add jaxinny
friend add ...
- Copy/paste this list into the admin/console
- Then to find those who didn't turn up, save the resulting HTML file (use View / Source and save that) which will give you a list of all those you need to hunt for
-Check the people you've friended to make sure they're the same ones. Most people are using the same names, but sometimes names are taken. For example, the ncp on greatestjournal is not the same one as LJ.
Voila!
The journals (especially greatest when I did it) can't cope with really large flists--so do it in parts.
You're all added unless you have different names on GJ, IJ, and JF. Please friend me there or let me know your alteregos so I don't miss you!
Current Mood: Amped
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12:24 pm
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Slowly fixing my friends lists
Good grief, there has to be an easier way to do this.
I remember when I was kicked off of fanfiction.net back in the day. I was a paid user there too. I LOVED the comment notification and hits features that let me know how many people were reading my chapters. It was addictive and kept me writing back in my B/A/S days. Then the prOn censors reared their ugly heads. I'd already put my fics behind an adult tag, but that wasn't enough...no they wanted me to cut any actual sex or rewrite it to be less graphic. I said no. I got banned without even so much as an email. They clearly didn't need my business so I left and posted my fics on adultfanfiction.net, which was prone to losing my updates and generally drove me crazy.
Then I found lj. Life as I knew it changed yet again. I loved to be able to friend all those interesting friends of my friends. I loved surfing my friends journals, reading their comments, sharing their theories, pet peeves, and online lives. Those links are what matter to me, far more than my postings.
So now, I am trying to duplicate my friends list on each of the three journals I've created. This is a royal pain in the butt. I wish I could just paste my entire friends list into the new journals and be done with it.
However, I've discovered a silver lining to this particular cloud. New friends! Yes, I'm finding, as I search for my old friends list members, that there are other people on their friends list who look interesting. So once again, I'm friending new people and getting to read new and interesting things about them! This is awesome. I can thank el jay for this, too, because my existing friends list was just dandy and I'd gotten pretty complacent about reading what they had to say.
So, if any of my newly adopted friends are friending back the stranger who just showed up...Hi!
Current Mood: Blessed
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04:44 pm
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Bwah ha ha ha!
</form>
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10:43 pm
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Obscenity, pornography, and free speech
obscenity as defined by Brittanica Concise Enclyclopedia (bold face is mine)
Act, utterance, writing, or illustration that is deemed deeply offensive according to contemporary community standards of morality and decency. Though most societies have placed restrictions on the content of literary and graphic works, it was not until relatively modern times that sexuality became a major focus of societal concern. One of the first systematic efforts to suppress books deemed to be immoral or heretical was undertaken by the Roman Catholic church in the 16th century. Modern obscenity laws can be viewed as direct responses to the social and technological changes (e.g., the creation of the printing press and the development of the Internet) that have permitted the wide and easy distribution of sexually explicit materials. The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that materials are obscene if they appeal predominantly to a prurient interest in sexual conduct, depict or describe sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Material deemed obscene under this definition is not protected in the U.S. by the free-speech guarantee of the 1st Amendment.
Oxford University Press Philosophy Dictionary offers us this:
obscenity
An obscene representation or display, particularly of the human body or of a part of it, represents it in abstraction from human commitments and emotions, but not entirely objectively either (as in medical textbooks); rather the body or part of the body is more or less disgustingly reduced to a vehicle of a single appetite or function (usually sexual, but there may be obscene displays of violence, or eating, or other functioning). By this definition erotic art, in which human passion is central, is never obscene, but pornography may be.
pornography is defined by the OUPPD as follows:
pornography
The definition is controversial: roughly an obscene representation or display, especially of human sexuality, produced to provide an occasion for fantasy. The condition that the representation should be obscene distinguishes pornography in principle from erotic art. The legal problems arise because although some human fantasies may be innocent and pleasurable, others are pleasurable to some without being innocent, and ministering to them involves representing different sections of the community (especially women and children) in degrading and humiliating lights, as victims of violence, etc. When this is so there is an argument for censorship, from the right of such groups to equal concern and respect. This argument is distinct from a general moralistic distaste for the material in question, and distinct from the contested consequentialist argument that the existence of such material helps to promote violence. The extent to which other values are infringed by such censorship is controversial.
The above philosophical definition gives us insight into the thoughts of those who seek to ban erotic art and offers us some interesting correspondences with the Concise Encyclopedia's definition of pornography:
pornography
Pornography is notoriously hard to define. The word comes from the ancient Greek porne (whore) and graphien (write), so pornography is ‘writings by/or about whores’. Contemporary dictionaries give a very different definition: today pornography is considered ‘obscene material whose intention is to provoke sexual arousal’. Problems remain: how are we to define ‘obscene’? Are both James Joyce's Ulysses and Larry Flynt's Hustler ‘obscene’? The US government has thought so. At what point does explicit sex become ‘pornography’? One is tempted to agree with US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who concluded: ‘I know it when I see it.’
The category ‘pornography’ is relatively recent and postdates modern European obscenity by at least two hundred years. The first obscene book, The Raggionamenti, was composed by Renaissance Humanist, Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) between 1534 and 1536. The Raggionamenti is both a bawdy dialogue between two whores and a biting satire of Renaissance church and state. For the next three hundred years, obscene texts usually included anti-clericalism, religious skepticism, and political satire. During the eighteenth century, pornography played a particularly important role in intellectual life: dirty books were among the century's best-sellers and obscene pamphlets spread the spirit of criticism from the intelligentsia to a small, literate public. Late in the century, Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) perfected the themes of eighteenth-century pornography in a series of violent and explicit novels that advocated a thorough rejection of all norms, be they political, moral, or religious.
The content of pornography changed in the early nineteenth century: political obscenity vanished to be replaced by a fantasy world or what Steven Marcus calls, in The Other Victorians (1966), ‘pornotopia’. The audience for obscenity, however, remained the rich: a paper-wrapped, unillustrated book cost a Victorian reader twenty guineas. The leather-bound, illustrated, limited editions printed for rich bibliophiles were even more expensive. Because it was limited to the elite, pornography had a kind of back-door respectability. Obscene texts could be found on the shelves of the British Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale, but only in special, locked cases — the British Museum's Private Case and the Bibliothèque Nationale's Enfer — which were off-limits to working-class men, women, and children.
Rising literacy rates and the advent of national education made European elites anxious lest pornography made its way into the hands of the masses. To forestall such a possibility, governments in Europe and the US enacted the first anti-obscenity laws: the French laws of 1819, the US Customs Act of 1847, and the British Obscene Publications Act of 1857. All these acts were directed against materials cheap enough to reach ‘persons of all classes, young and old’. In the US and Europe, private crusaders like New York's Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) and France's anti-obscenity leagues railed against the evils of ‘smut’. Still, pornography proliferated: in France the number of obscene texts multiplied thirteen-fold in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, and new pornographic media — newspapers, brochures, and naughty postcards — brought obscene images to the masses.
1910 constituted a turning point. In 1913, British and US courts admitted defeat and created a new obscenity standard. Price no longer mattered; only the ‘harm’ done by pornography. Because they sought to improve society or elevate the human spirit, ‘science’ and ‘art’ escaped the charge of obscenity. Only ‘smut for smut's sake’ (to paraphrase US Judge Curtis Bok) constituted pornography. Legal tolerance (especially of written materials) continued to grow in Britain and the US. In 1967, American courts finally lifted the ban on John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Fanny Hill (1749). An American attorney observed that ‘there is no longer any obscenity law as far as writing is concerned.’
However, writing was no longer the principal form of obscenity. The image replaced the word, and obscene magazines, video strips, and films were sold in bookstores, specialized cinemas, and arcades. Even the local convenience store stocked explicit magazines, making pornography available to more consumers than ever before. In response, British, Canadian, and American governments formed special commissions in the 1970s and 80s to deal with the ‘pornography issue’. In 1968, US President Lyndon Johnson established the Commission on Pornography and Obscenity, which was followed shortly thereafter by the British Home Office Departmental Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (better known as the Williams Committee) and the Canadian Special Committee on Pornography and Prostitution. In 1985, distressed by the liberal recommendations of the Johnson Commission, President Richard Nixon established a second anti-pornography commission, the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, commonly known as the Meese Commission.
The Commissions introduced two new voices into the pornography debate: feminism and social science. In the US, author Andrea Dworkin and lawyer Catherine MacKinnon argued that pornography hurt women by condoning the objectification of women, and rape. In 1975, Women Against Pornography, or WAP, was formed and a few feminists served on the 1985 Meese Commission. Meanwhile, social scientists brought laboratory studies to bear on the question of ‘harm’. Psychologists concluded that extended exposure to violent pornography produces a ‘desensitization effect’, or an appetite for increasingly violent sexual media. The social scientists also concluded that only males already predisposed to antisocial behaviour were likely to commit rape after viewing pornographic films.
What is the future of pornography? Pornography continued to move from the margins to the mainstream of twentieth-century life. Home videos and the Internet have made seedy bookstore and sordid ‘porn’ theatres obsolete. Now consumers can experience ‘hardcore’ films in the safety and discretion of their own homes. Pornography can be acquired more easily and discreetly than ever before, which argues that pornography will stay with us in the twenty-first century.
— Kathryn Norberg
Bibliography
* Hunt, L. (1993). The invention of pornography: obscenity and the origins of modernity, 1500-1800. Zone, New York.
* Kendrick, W. M. (1987). The secret museum: the history of pornography in literature. Viking, New York
So, a few points that interested me in particular about these definitions and their implications for our attitudes, societies, rights, and creativity.
As it began, pornography was thus intertwined with social commentary and criticism. As such, it was actually more of a threat, not less. The ruling classes of both church, government, and society were concerned not so much for the supposed moral and spiritual taint of such literature as for its revolutionary ideals. We see this especially in the banning of "cheap" porn. Ah, "artbooks" are ok, but chapbooks, not so much.
This classist view develops into the mid-range definition of pornography as anything likely to roil the uneducated mind. We can see the arbiters of taste rearing their heads (a condition that remains to this day even after most of the classist language has become unconscious though, I believe, still present). Porn thus becomes "anything my friends and I don't consider attractive," while erotica is "anything I do like." This seems the very definition currently being espoused by Livejournal in determining what posts and illustrations to ban.
Attempting to judge pornography by its literary or artistic merit becomes a herculean, if not downright impossible task for the truly openminded. My kinks are not your kinks--yet fandom encompasses them all, though portions embrace some and not others. The time, talent, and deep characterizations shown by ponderosa121 in most, if not all of the artwork that I've seen of hers merit praise at the very least. The philosophical definition (sadly not legal) truly comes into play for me here: "...erotic art, in which human passion is central, is never obscene...." Yes, some of her pics were extremely uncomfortable for me to view because they hit too close to my nerves due to the extreme passion (whatever the predominant emotion) of her subject matter. Divorced from human emotions? Not for one second! Disturbing? Hell, yes. But so are the photos coming to us every day from Iraq.
Is livejournal going to ban coverage of the war? I would argue that true obscenity is not the illustration of non-existent fictional characters engaging in non-con sex. True obscenity is the arrogant waste of life, faith, love, and hell yes, taxpayer money in a war fought against a country that didn't attack us by a president we didn't elect, in an effort to be the police officers of a world that doesn't want us in that role. Oops, sorry, I seem to be backsliding into the medieval definition of pornography!
Yanking this into modern times, I find it absolutely ironic that the social science testing intended to prove the dangers of porn to the untutored minds of those imbibing actually proved nothing of the kind.
Think about this: our writers, readers, artists, and admirers in fandom are almost entirely female and the few males among us tend to be of the literate, feminist variety, not the crazed neanderthal type. We are the perfect audience for porn of any kind because we are the least likely to be affected by it! Study after study has proven that only "males already predisposed to antisocial behavior were likely to commit rape after viewing pornographic films." I believe the same to be true of stories and artwork, as well.
Thus any argument that banning porn is "protecting" us will fall on blind eyes, on my screen, anyway. Call it what it is and admit to it. You just don't like it and you want to censor it, livejournal? Fine. That's your prerogative. Mine is to stop being a paid member and to put my money where my fingers are. I'll be cross-posting this to my new insane, greatest, and other journals because you just lost my support.
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