Secondhand Porn, Live from San Francisco
Posted By jss on February 18, 2009
A friend of mine reports from California, The Land Where Trends Begin, on the latest in San Francisco:
Porn Exhibitionism!
He calls it a topic but I’m elevating it to a full-fledged trend and calling it:
Secondhand Porn!!
… which is catchier and sounds more dangerous and awful, just to see if the news networks will jump all over it. Note the extra exclamation mark. It takes two, I’m told, to get Wolf Blitzer’s attention.
Here’s a topic for you: porn exhibitionism. Everybody has these new flat screens (there are a lot of retirees and googleaires here who still have money) and they’re making like Amsterdammers, leaving the curtains open so that we can see their magnificent 57″ (or whatever) display. Our house is on a hill and when I wash the dishes I look down over the street and the house across the way.
One night, not thinking of anything, I looked up from the dishes and was momentarily confused by the image of a giant cock sliding into a cute young ass … on the giant TV screen of the neighbor across the street. Another time, in another neighborhood, I glanced up to see the image of a big hairy ass being fistfucked. “Disgusting” does not begin to describe it. Obviously these people know that anybody can see what they’re watching; it’s a sort of passive-aggressive exhibitionism-by-proxy. And you don’t even need Internet connectivity!
My friend, I should add, is easily disgusted by many things, but I had not previously imagined that gratuitous pornography was one of them … so this must have been quite the visual assault. There is almost zero chance of this trend making it to Haydenville, Mass., where I am, so I will have to take his word for it. This is New England. People close their shades if they’re going to do anything even so deeply personal as to trim their toenails.
In one of the more famous quotes ever by a Supreme Court Justice, Louis D. Brandeis once wrote:
The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men — the right to be let alone.”
Generally, we take this to mean that government ought to leave people alone; it is a statement that defines the view that there is, embedded in the U.S. Constitution, a right to privacy.
This is the kind of right that means you can watch porn, and have sex with whomever you want and however you want, consensually, in private.
But we can also turn it around … huge images of big hairy asses being fistfucked really do not need to be shared with the unsuspecting, do they?
Let me know if second-hand porn has come to your neighborhood. Or just call CNN or Fox News, and I’ll pick it up from there.
"Into Temptation" is a usually-but-not-always safe-for-work forum about evolving social-sexual networks and how they have changed and are changing lives. It will also loosely chronicle the research, writing and publication, I hope in 2011, of a book by the same name.
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