Trouble in Milton Keynes
Local reactions to the resurrected JS:TO tour have begun, with Milton Keynes councillors being the first to stick their heads above the parapet with public displays of aggrieved piety. According to MK Today, liberal democrat councillor Isabella Fraser says,
As a committed Christian I would not be in favour of it. I think we have laws to protect religions from being slandered and they should apply to all religions.
Not very well informed then…
Conservative councillor Andrew Geary agrees:
I always found the whole think reproachable and thoroughly offensive and I am disappointed it is coming to Milton Keynes Theatre. I would love to see it banned, but we live in a secular society and there’s very little I can do about it.
Stewart Lee comments:
Jerry Springer the Opera was developed on public money in public spaces and belongs to the nation, whether the nation wants it or not.
But it’s OK to show all the gory horror bits to kids. Right Christopher!?
Hi Shaun-
Maybe we shouldnt focus my mind on things that are good, pure, lovely etc..
Focussing it on things that are cynical, jaded and tawdry would be a better idea?
(In other words: Surely a lot of the things the Bible says were common sense long before the Bible was written. Therefore I don’t use it as an authority – not without argument, anyway- tho’ it’s a jolly good source of apt quotations.)
(The picture of me holding ‘Passion of the Christ’ video shows for children is a bit seedy!! All I did was play it in the background in the shop at the time when it was the best-selling Christian movie video, just as I would with any other best-selling movie video. It’s true that a lot of the most appreciative viewers were children!)
That’s not what he said now, is it Christopher? You wouldn’t want to bear false witness would you?
This is all much too complicated. Any reasonable person, when hearing that they should focus on what is good, pure and lovely, would simply say ‘Yes, yes, yes.’. It strikes me as jolly devious to skirt round the issue, even if one is not playing devil’s advocate.
What I said was, that you shouldn’t read the bible then. The advice contained within, which you cite, tells you that.
I strongly suggest you read comment #50 again Christopher, before you continue to make a prat of yourself.
If you’re selective when you read the Bible (which is a highly diverzse collection of 66 different books, which makes me wonder how you can generalise about it) then of course you’ll see nothing but gloom and doom.Or sweetness and light (delete as appropriate).
People are only selective when they know what they want to read /what they want to be true / what they want to find in the Bible.
Christopher re #47:
Being aroused is not the same as having a soul-link with someone. A couple, married or otherwise, viewing pr0n together are not diminishing the exclusivity of their relationship by doing so. If they both freely enjoy it, then no harm is done to anyone.*
This doesn’t inherently destabilise any relationship, and can even strengthen relatioships by improving the sex-life within the relationship. Look at Jonathan Woss. He and his wife love a bit of pr0n and they’re not shy in admitting it. They also appear to have a vewy hewthy mawwiage and seem to love each other dearly. They’ve also never, either of them, had extramarital affairs. We know this ‘cos the tabloids would’ve been all over them if they had.
This single case study is not the basis of my argument, but merely illustrative of it.
Porn in a relationship is only bad if it’s only one side who wants it and the other feels it is forced on them, but that is simply symptomatic of an unhealthy power dynamic and porn is no worse than any other symbol of the powerlessness of one of the partners.
*with the obvious caveats that the pr0n is not exploitative, forced, involving kids or animals etc. In fact, can it be taken as read that whenever pr0n is mentioned, I’m (and I’ll bet everyone else who posts here – please say if this doesn’t apply to you folks) referring to pictures of adults in sexual poses or acts, doing so of their own free will and usually being paid rather well for the privilege, and that the viewers are not sneaking around behind their partner’s back viewing the images as a form of papery adultery.
Regarding the juxtaposing of the holy and the scandalous, it is perfectly justified because the holy puts itself on a plateau higher than the unholy on the sole basis that they’re following god’s work so it must be right and have a puropse betttter and more special than that which isn’t holy.
Any belief system which tries to claim itself as the fount of all morality and of all true wisdom deserves nothing but mockery. I take it that you are not against pricking the bubble of pomposity surrounding political leaders (you’ve said elsewhere that you don’t object to satire, just to an overly cynical worldview), but why should that pricking not also occur for religious leaders, those who would set themselves up to rule us with neither a democratic mandate nor even a sensible logical reason for their assumed authority.
Until it can be proven that there is a god, and that someone does have special powers to channel messages through the aforementioned god, then there is no reason why we should take their word for it. Especially when you consider the corruption and abuse that the churches have covered up that occurred when their superiority was assumed. Essentially, you guys had your chance and blew by (amongst other things) protecting the kiddy-fiddlers in your midst.
Now the church’s authority will never be assumed again
And, as Ross is a film reviewer, it’s a safe bet that he’s been exposed to dozens (if not hundreds) of violent movies. And I don’t recall ever seeing a newspaper report of a violent killing spree carried out by a BBC chat show host.
Andrew – you must have missed Terry Wogan’s stabathon around Television Centre after reading The Devil of White City.
Of course, he wasn’t a film reviewer at the time, but it’s still proof that TV makes you deranged. Either that or wigs, I’m just not sure which.
Hi Tom-
An awful lot of issues that you don’t address:
(1) Of course it diminishes the exclusivity. As between sharing intimacy with or without mating couples on screen, which of the two is more exclusive? And which less? You already know the answer.
(2) You don’t consider the actors and actresses. Why is it, I wonder, that there is practically no correlation at all between married couples and this kind of acting. Because it is intrinsically promiscuous – and therefore intrinsically opposed to marital and societal stability, which in turn is correlated to increased crime etc.. The actors will never know exclusivity – how easy will it be for them to have any stable relationship at all?
(3) When you speak of ‘wanting’ to view such films, we need to distinguish between two kind of ‘wanting’. You’re not suggesting that the brain wanting something and the loins wanting something are the same thing? Or that the brain and the loins are one and the same? Come now – what happened to your biological background?
Ben Dover (not his real name), the UKs leading male porn actor has been happily married for years, with kids, as had Cathy Barry, the UKs leading female porn star.
Indeed, the most succesful porn stars around the world do tend to be those that are married or in long term relationships.
as had Cathy, should read as has Cathy…. damn typos.
1) You’re not “sharing the intimacy with … mating couples on screen”, you’re viewing the images and getting the horn. They aren’t actually there with you in the box actually rutting away. It’s just electrons hitting a reactive surface (assuming a cathode ray tube tv).
2) “practically no correlation at all between married couples and this kind of acting”. There’s far more married people than there are pr0n actors. Many pr0n actors are indeed married, either to fellow actors or to directors. You need to spend more time watching mastumentaries on channels 4 or 5 or on tawdry cable like ftn before you postulate on the off-screen lives of pr0n stars.
Given that a pr0n star clearly isn’t overly worried about the exclusivity of the sexual act in a monogamous relationship, marriage to another pr0n star is usually very stable because neither of them is overly jealous of the other.
Oh, and before you start on the health risks, they all have to have a medical check each month and get a clean bill of health before they can act in any films. If anything, they probably have greater sexual health than the population at large and are more likely to have and long-term genital illnesses (eg cervical cancer) picked up earlier than anyone else.
3) Why do we need to distinguish between brains and loins for wanting to view the pr0n? If anything, I’d say that there’s no cerebral reason for wanting to view pr0n, what with the bad acting and all, and that the purely lusty reason for wanting to watch pr0n is, if anything, superior.
And as for the biochemistry of it…
If you’ve got the horn and a consequent desire to get your rocks off, that’s because the sexually stimulating hormones such as testosterone have bound to the receptors in your brain triggering release of further neurotransmitters going down the ‘sexy pathway’ (my phrase) to get you all horny and stimulated. The loins and the brain work together here
Of course, it allcomes down to the brain in the end. But one’s better judgment (or willpower), as we all know, can sometimes be at odds with one’s flesh.
When I associated the trade with promiscuity, I meant that it is part of the nexus that sees unmarried as cool and married as uncool. For example, whoever was married in real life would be unlikely (correct me if Im wrong) also to be married in the film. Or,even if they were, they would also sleep with people to whom they were not married.
Well, yes, I don’t think that anyone would ever be so foolish as to dispute that workers in the pr0n industry are, by definition, incredibly promiscuous.
However, to postulate that they all inherently see marriage as ‘uncool’ is foolish, especially as it comes from (I assume, although I concede that you could well be a former pr0n star) no experience.
I’ve no idea about whether the actors married in real life would be married on film, it’s unlikely since marriage isn’t necessarily an integral part of the tiny number of pr0n films that i’ve seen. Perhaps Shaun can shed some light on the subject.
Of course, that’s not the issue.
If all parties (the actors and their spouse) are consenting to them starring in the films, or just having sex outside the marriage off camera for fun, then no harm is done as long as all people are honest with each other and all parties readily agree it.
The nettle is not being grasped: Plenty of things are fun short-term and regretted long-term. The first time (or first few times) people do things, they cannot by definition be aware of long-term effects, unless of course someone has toild them – and even then they probably wouldnt have listened. The way you talk, one would think that everything that is fun short-term is also fun long-term.
???
You can well be aware of the long-term effects of doing something which is fun the first few times you do it. For example, I’m well aware of the long-term effects of booze, and have been since before I first drunk booze, but that doesn’t stop me drinking.
If something that is fun in the short term stops being fun in the long term then stop doing it. It’s as simple as that.
You seem to be implying that people are compelled to do everything htat you disapprove of and have no free will
People have free will. What all of us lack in greater or lesser measure is willpower. And there’s the rub.