Porn has gone officially mainstream in Umno-owned Utusan Malaysia

First, Anwar has been consistent in saying that results of certain constituencies are questionable, not all.

Second, the first-past-the-post system used to be workable until the rule was amended following the May 13, 1969 incident, whereby the previously stipulated condition of the largest and the smallest constituencies cannot be greater than 15%.

As an example, if the smallest constituency has 100,000 voters, then the largest permissible constituency is 115,000. Clearly, the gerrymandering and the disappearance of the constituency-size stipulation from the constitution have enabled Umno-led BN to win in the recent general election.

Third, no rule is cast in stone. If there is a will, there is a way. It is entirely up to the people to effect institutional change as they deemed fit. The people are the boss, the government is their servants.

This is the dumbest explanation I have ever heard, but no doubt it is meant for the ears of the ignorant rural folk.

Following Perkasa vice-president Zulkifli Noordin’s example, I would go further – BN had nine badminton players on their side of the court, playing against one Anwar Ibrahim.

That would complete his analogy. Now, what does the umpire have to say about how the game was played?

 When you cheat in exams or collude with another and help them cheat, both parties, if caught, will be automatically disqualified from passing and will be prevented from sitting the exams again or if in school or university, will be almost certainly, be expelled.

When professionals are caught cheating or committing fraud, whether in collusion or not, they are disbarred, disrobed or struck off registers, as well as facing criminal prosecution, fines and jail sentences.

You cheat at games, you get red cards, suspensions and bans and may also face criminal sanctions.

So why when you cheat blatantly at the general election and yet expect to get away with it, and even be rewarded with the spoils gained illegally, unlawfully and unconstitutionally?

Some weeks back, we read news reports in various newspapers about an IRS officer who shot an obscene video of his wife and threatened to blackmail her for more dowry. Actually, we read a little more than just that — newspapers pointed out that the act that was filmed was one of ‘unnatural sex’ according to some and sodomy according to more detail-oriented accounts. As far as news goes, perhaps there is nothing wrong about the reports — the facts had been stated, not sensationalised, and certainly the story, tragic as it is, was newsworthy.

The question is whether it was necessary to point out what the precise nature of the infraction was. How necessary was it to highlight the fact that the husband sodomised his wife and filmed her? Was the fact that a husband would stoop to filming any act of sex with his wife and threaten to circulate a video not disturbing enough? The specific nature of the offence might increase reader interest given its apparent unnaturalness, but is there not a line that mainstream newspapers should respect and stay within?

There are other instances of how seemingly factual news takes on a thin film of salaciousness in the manner in which it gets reported. The tragic saga of Fiza is another case in point. It is intriguing how throughout the whole saga, the woman concerned was called by the name that she took on in order to get married by changing her religion. Anuradha Bali just does not carry a whiffed of doomed romance as does Fiza, all Urdu yearning wrapped up in Hindi film song pain. The surname, Mohammed too was dropped deemed to be too clunky and too real sounding for the story. The man involved continued to be called by his original name Chander Mohan; no one referred to him as Chand Mohammed, his adopted name. The story was dramatic enough in any case; we had a minister chuck up his position for the sake of love, getting married in full public glare, quickly changing his mind and dumping the other woman who eventually passed away in mysterious circumstances a year later. The urge to laminate reality with superimposed drama serves to exoticise what happened. Also it locates the victim in a larger narrative that serves as an invisible background score that pushes us towards certain judgmental conclusions. In this case, the woman is made into a wisp of romance, reduced to a stereotyped notion of the temptress, by removing her from a social context, and exhausting her of any other identity but that of the tragic siren.

At a certain level, all news does get packaged. The reason why news items are referred to as stories is perhaps because they need to resonate with human beings at some emotional level. these are facts polished subtly to become narrative accounts of life that connect with some anxiety, hope or need that the reader experiences. This is particularly true in the case of crime reporting where other people’s misery is usually dramatic, random and dreadful all at the same time, and this induces a thrill of anxiety in the reader. Attempts to bring the victim closer, to instil the feeling that ‘this could happen to any of you just as easily’ is one of the underlying drivers of how stories get presented. This is why victims and criminals are both usually identified in a manner that invites some form of empathy and vicarious excitement. Descriptors like ‘son of IAS officer’ or model (even if only an aspiring one, like a million applicants for a reality show), MBA student, MNC executive are routinely used to place the event in a context that elevates the story value of the event.

But this takes on a more insidious character when crimes against women are involved. Devices employed include making the victim more attractive, and in many cases actively adding a sexualised layer of description. The photographs most used are invariably the ones where the person looks her youngest and most attractive, even if the picture might have been dated. In the case of Bhanwari Devi, the woman who was allegedly killed by her paramour, a Rajasthan, for becoming inconvenient, the photograph most in circulation showed her in the prime of her youth. This tends to be true of female victims in general- the coverage tends to be squint-eyed in that it simultaneously expresses horror and outrage while exploiting the victim sexually in the manner in which she is presented.

Much like the Hindi film rape, which uses the horrific to excite the base, the coverage of crimes against women takes on an exploitative hue, even without apparent overt intention. In some ways, the actions of the moral police are a more extreme version of this schizophrenic instinct, where morality becomes an excuse to do precisely what one is seemingly condemning. The recent instance in Mangalore of a bunch of right wing activists crashing a party and attacking the boys and pawing the girls, while apparently overcome with moral concerns illustrates this dichotomous behaviour. The pornography of morality is more frightening than the real thing for it comes cloaked in righteous legitimacy. The appropriation of women and their behaviour as a societal responsibility of which one becomes the self-appointed guardian results in being able to justify hooliganism and sexual exploitation in the name of moral reform.

For media in particular, the need to draw sharper boundaries is more critical. The complicity of media in the Guwahati pub incident is an extreme manifestation of the extent to which media participates in acts of exploitation in the name of garnering viewership. But it is in the more subtle and everyday occurrence of dressing up news, packaging it for more ready consumption, the squeezing out of more voyeuristic elements from the story, that the real transgression lies. All under the cloak of outrage and shame.

No one whispers about it anymore. There’s no need for dark theaters where furtive men skulk with guilt and damp handkerchiefs. Women need not giggle about Victorian novels with “dirty parts.” Kids don’t have to wait for Sex Ed, mom and dad, or that kid down the street who’ll show them a penis. No, the Internet has democratized the visual narrative of anatomical sex and every kid with a computer and a door on their room is online and gettin’ it on, women have made the remarkably unremarkable book Fifty Shades of Gray a bestseller, and men likely know more about the minutia of labial folds than they ever imagined they would.

Welcome to Porn 2.0. Or are we already at 3?

Given its ubiquity and availability, there’s no surprise in conversations I’ve had with younger adults who admit that porn comprises the bulk of their sexual mentoring and messaging, where they pick up their standards and practices, and how they learn to view the opposite (or same) sex in terms of visual composition and body parts (and really, that’s pretty much the focus of porn, isn’t it?). I’ve talked to and observed young women anxious that their breasts aren’t big enough, butts small enough, or fashion sense “hot” enough. I’ve talked to young men who say they imbibe porn on a regular basis and have grown to expect partners free of pubic hair “because that’s just what we’re used to” based on what they’re watching (and teen and 20-something girls appear to be complying, as corroborated by a gynecologist friend of mine). When both infantilizing a woman’s body and demanding a Pamela Anderson rack are the expected ideals for women today, I get bone-weary for my younger sisters.

Now before you get all snitty about how I’m this or that, I’m well aware of how protective, defensive, and proprietary many feel about their porn. As a news and opinion writer for a number of years, I’ve become well-versed on the heat that gets incited when discussing things like the Second Amendment, religion in politics, or Chick-fil-A, but I learned by surprise, after writing a piece called It’s Not HBO, It’s Porn, just how passionate people get about their pornography. I was so pummeled for making critical statements about the gratuitous use of porn-level sex in mainstream TV, I approach this discussion with the same caution I might approach gun control or gay marriage.

None at all.

Because it’s been mainstreamed; it’s come out from behind the curtain into the bright light of public analysis, much like the penises and waxed vaginas we now see everywhere, and that makes it fair game. We’ve got The Daily Beast running a sympathy piece by porn star Aurora Snow about how damn hard porn is on a girl’s body (Blood, Sweat and Sex: My Hard Life in Porn); we’ve got the Mr.Skin website, described as “the world’s foremost authority on celebrity nudity… the web’s #1 go-to destination for the complete skinny on Hollywood starlets at their hottest”; we’ve got TV shows casting porn stars like Sasha Greyfor the sheer PR buzz of casting a porn star (see, amongst other things, the late, greatEntourage). We’ve got a culture that not only aggrandizes, utilizes and idealizes porn in every nook and cranny of life, but one that, oddly, can turn it around to bully and berate anyone who might find the hypersaturation a tad hyperbolic.

Sigh.

I was on a panel recently on the topic of whether or not men’s body parts are being as amply represented as women’s in TV and film (they’re not), and as we discussed these matters of earth-shattering importance, Mr. Skin himself (aka Jim McBride) asked me what I had against porn. As I told Jim: nothing. Have at it, as people have for the last many centuries. Use it, enjoy it, be inspired by it, get off to it, but do we really need penises and vaginas on the kitchen table, literally and figuratively? Isn’t there some room for discretion and selectiveness about sex, or has the notion of connecting those body parts to something real and personal become as outdated as pubic hair?

I suspect it’s like the old adage about Catholic girls who morph into insatiable party animals once out of bondage (to borrow a porn image). While that hardly applies to everyCatholic girl, it does seem to apply to porn. Now that it’s been mainstreamed, taken out of the back room, pulled out from those seedy theaters, it’s on every menu on every table. One TV show after another has entered the race to feature the most naked women putting body parts to work in service of… well, if not the plot (rarely required), at least the viewing pleasure of porn-savvy audiences. A few penises show up in the bolder shows and movies. We’ve got premiere cable sharing “Real Sex” with us, every kind of online viewing option available at the click of a key, and little (none?) of it supplies emotional context or purpose outside of physical gratification… because we’re in the “Age of Porn” and anything goes: discretion, selectively, aesthetics, plot narrative, or oversaturation be damned.

But beyond the gladiator-like viewing of pumping participants, what is all this doing to the young people coming up in the world and just learning about sex; just grasping what to do with those oft-photographed and widely used body parts? It used to be parents, schools, and mentors translated the mysteries, magic, and confusions of sex to up-and-comers; now, even if parents and schools do get to them first, it’s porn that does the heavy lifting. And I question whether Aurora Snow, Sasha Grey or the bevy of bouncing babes and boys who saturate every screen, story, reality show and website help our developing young adults translate the many mixed and sometimes soul-killing messages much of porn conveys. They may be amazingly gymnastic and libido tickling, but they leave out the antiquated notions of tenderness, connection, fidelity and, dare I say, love.

When teens and young women feel generalized pressure to “look like porn stars“; when boys don’t seem to grasp that photographing and “fingering” a drunk, unconscious teen constitutes rape, and when anyone reticent about dragging sex from its private quarters to the well-lit mainstream is considered pathetic and prudish, there are some serious things to consider.

Enjoy your porn responsibly, call me names if you’d like, but I want to assure young girlsthat they don’t have to crawl across the floor if they don’t want to; don’t have get boob jobs to please porn-prompted boyfriends, and don’t have to regress their vaginas to pre-puberty status in order to enjoy oral sex. They can rise above peer and cultural pressure, love their bodies as they are, and assert their sexuality without being obligated to kiss a girl for a boy or drop to their knees for love. I also hope we can imbue our young men with a more expansive view of women, sex, and the visual expectations the world they live in seems to encourage.

Because we are all more than our body parts, gynecological or otherwise. Tell that to porn.

morepictures click http://clubdesexymind.blogspot.com/2013/05/women-are-suffering-from-epidemic-of.html