This poem is on a very disgusting subject, but I felt the need to write about it. Pornography is something that suffuses our culture, from fashion to music videos and the advertising industry. Chris Hedges graphically writes about it in Empire of Illusion, a book that everyone ought to read. There are 4.2 million porn websites, 12% of the web, servicing 72 million worldwide visitors monthly. 25%, or 68 million, of all daily search-engine requests are for porn. 40 million Americans are regular visitors to porn sites. The largest users of internet porn are between the ages of 12 and 17. Most female porn actresses are addicted to whole cocktails of drugs as a way to cope with the humiliation they endure.
It is more or less obvious how it degrades women, but it is less obvious how it degrades men. Pornography is not actually about sex, it is about exploitation, domination and cruelty. Women are turned into commodities and men become their degraded torturers, and the most extreme porn is exactly that: torture. There is nothing human about it; all emotion, all love and compassion, all empathy is eliminated, everything that is sacred about humanity is defaced. It is the worship of bestiality and ultimately the exaltation of a dying culture's obsession with its own annihilation. Where there is no humanity there is only death.
We watch it on the screen, a piece of meat
For masturbating men to fuck to death,
A moaning corpse that once was pure and sweet,
That once had lovely dreams; now only meth,
Now only liquor, pills to numb the pain,
The agony that kills a little more,
And kills still more with every shot, again
With every time they laugh and call it “whore.”
It dies for us, this strange commodity,
This spectacle for inward-dying men,
Who groan and lust for death’s cold ecstasy,
Alone and panting in their secret den.
And as we watch we die a little more
With every “bitch” and “cunt” and “fucking whore.”
Rob, I absolutely love this. It's very insightful, and appropriately disturbing.
ReplyDeleteMary (Lizzie's sister)