Flutterby™! : I ♥ Pornography

Of all of the bumper stickers on my car, the "I ♥ Pornography" one was the one that raised the most negative comment. Eventually it got removed, partially because the stickers were looking ratty, but also because when Charlene occasionally borrowed my car the school administrators were asking her to park well away from the school.

When I pulled it off, I commented that without it and "Celebrate Perversity", the rest of the bumper stickers were really superfluous, but people have often wondered why. After all, I find most pornography dreadfully boring, the overly made-up "Paris Hilton" look-alikes of the mainstream leave me cold, I read the blog at Kink.com but find the films themselves giggly-silly, and so on. Yesterday evening Charlene and I had a bit of driving to do, and on the way she was reading from Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, which had this quote from George Bernanos:

I have often thought for a long time now that if, some day, the increasing efficiency for the technique of destruction finally causes our species to disappear from the earth, it will not be cruelty that will be responsible for our extinction and still less, of course, the indignation that cruelty awakens and the reprisals and vengeance that it brings upon itself ... but the docility, the lack of responsibility of the modern man, his base and subservient acceptance of every common decree. The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors that we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, insubordinate untamable men are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increas in the number of obedient, docile men.

That, right there, is why "I ♥ Pornography".

So it is with that in mind that I link to a few bits of commentary about the conviction of Karen Fletcher, aka "The Red Rose", on obscenity charges stemming from some stories she wrote and published on a web site. As all the commenters say, her stories were abhorrent, I want nothing of their content, but I find the notion that we're convicting people for sharing their thoughts to be yet another step in the march towards that evil of docility. Taken alone it's easy to dismiss her conviction, or the bullshit security theater that the TSA and U.S. Customs inflict on us, or the cop who hollers at the passenger in the car that was speeding because, as he explains to his partner, "this guy doesn't seem like he's getting it", but as a pattern it bodes very ill for the future of our culture.

• Elf Sternberg: Defining Deviancy Up: The Red Rose Conviction.
• Renegade Evolution comments on the Karen "Red Rose" Fletcher case.