Pornography and the Power of Virtual Personae
I have written previously about the relationship between the Web and Human Sexuality. I have also explained how the mounting complexity of our societies has had a cumulatively suppressive effect on Human Sex. In spite of the seemingly greater “publicness” of sex, people find themselves somehow less able to manifest their true, individual, unique sexuality. Why is that? Simply because one of the basic requirements of mass socialization is the adoption of easy identifiers, of labels. There is less time to deliberate over subtlety than earlier in our history. What breeds a feeling of contentment in human beings is the same today as it ever was: to feel one’s self a part of a group, and for that, to feel less anxiety for the unknown.
Because modern societies are so large, bringing together people from widely varied backgrounds, value sets, beliefs and customs, they have given rise to universally subscribable cooperative systems for defining what things are. Labels, in other words. To participate in a society is to understand its labeling systems. And because large, modern societies have to accommodate such a broad spectrum of people, the labeling and identification systems such societies create necessarily demand that nearly everyone has to compromise some aspect of themselves in order to be accepted, and that some smaller number of people have to compromise significant aspects of themselves in order to be accepted. It is a bell curve…more
pornography | open source | blogging | rss | virtual reality
February 6th, 2006 at 3:37 am
[…] CONTEXT […]
February 7th, 2006 at 5:24 pm
[…] I’m going to construct a hypothesis for how I think this lapse in the functioning of Art as Alternative Experience Bridge has brought us to the current crisis. By crisis, I mean to describe the systematized, institutionalized suppression of individual sexuality, both outwardly, via everything from outright criminalization, to the more subtle development of taboos and norms which are enforced socially, to the tragic internal psychology of the sexual “misfit”. […]