"You've got to take the bitter with the sour." - Samuel Goldwyn

***


Google cockup: "Your search... did not match any documents... In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 0 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."


Somehow I was amused by this Bak Kwa ad on a taxi.



Barracks restaurant in Dempsey Road must spend a lot on air-conditioning. No wonder the prices are so high for the portions you get. Well, at least there's the kumquat (complete with leaves).


Monolingual SBS MRT sign. I wonder if anyone's written in to complain about their lack of commitment to racial harmony.


I know this list in Wakafu was very funny, but this picture can't be read. Acidflask has a hi-res copy of the picture but I haven't gotten it from him yet.


NTUC: "F/TH CHK BLESS B-HAL"
The chicken is blessed indeed!


"Property of Changing Appetites. Do not remove from premises. Offenders will be handed over to police!" (or words to that effect)
I can't believe this happens often enough to need this warning (as with the Khong Guan biscuit tins and passing off)?!


"Tuition !!!!!!!!!...
Qualified and experience tutor teaching maths and science for primary and secondary school... Please contact... lousyman*@hotmail.com"
I sure wouldn't hire a tutor with that email address


Burger King (Singapore): "What your ingredients say about you. Turkey Bacon: You are willing to betray whatever residual culinary standards fast food had and put ersatz crap in your menu in order to earn more money."



The only interesting thing at the USC bazaar (at Science - they're ALWAYS at Science): T-shirts in braille


NUS - where we chain the furniture in the corridor so no one steals it


Science - where people need directions to the vending machine


Apparently you're supposed to take a leap of faith out of this door


Guess what's inside these things. Answer: pineapple (highlight for answer)
K Gourmet - the masters of making savory stuff that looks sweet (people think their buns filled with chicken feather sausage or otar are custard buns) and sweet stuff that looks savory (eg tao sar puff)


"NUSSU Tokok campaign: Q: Are girls in NUS overdressed? A: Ho-ho. Helloooo.... under-dressed is the correct word <:)"
Another interesting one was: "Q: There are too many 'Little Miss' in NUS. A: Give them growth hormones"
The person who designed these forms should be fired. The background at the place where you're supposed to write your comments makes it almost impossible to read what's written. I looked at a few, then gave up squinting - after 3 years you've heard almost everything that can be said, anyway.


Attempts at Valentine's Day emotional blackmail:


"You can give without loving, but you can never LOVE without GIVING. (Sociology Society)" (apparently they don't practise what they preach)


"Friendship stalk
Puppy Love (1 stalk)
Blooming Love (3 stalks)
True Love (6 stalks)
Passionate Love (9 stalks)
Eternal Love (12 stalks)"



"'Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.' - God
catholic awareness week 2007"

Besides arguably violating the 4th Commandment (YHWH and all that), there is something very wrong with this, as this line refers to the prophet Jeremiah (cue the calls about context, which are curiously absent whenever Christians talk about abortion).

Now, suppose we grant that this applies to everyone, and not just a prophet (or all prophets, even).

Since God knows us before forming us in the womb, he knows us before the moment of conception, when a sperm and an egg meet. Thus, to prevent the union of a sperm and an egg is murder. Contraception, naturally, is then out, being a murderous act. Yet preventing the events that would lead to the union of a sperm and an egg is similarly haram.

Even abstinence, then, could be murder.


Infusion (international) bazaar:


"Stand a chance to win a Free plane ticket to PHUCKET"


"Do you want to pay your respects to the late President Soeharto?"
Err, no, but there's something else I want to do...


Other nations had food samples, but Scotland was conspicuous by its lack of any. Yet, notice what seems to be a food warmer. They probably figured no one wanted to eat haggis anyway (cue Mike Myers on Scottish food).

There was a costume dressup booth with the most horrific essentialisation (when I use the word, you know something's up):


'Chinese Minority' was bad enough...


... but 'Afican' (sic) took the cake, condensing the entire continent of Africa into a single costume. I wanted to show up in a loincloth, and maybe with a blowpipe too - that's African as well.


'Arabian Belly Dancer' - sans veil?!

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography (9/10)

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus


The Public Debate: What Did Everyone Get Wrong About Men Who Use Pornography? (Continued)

"Porn Causes Men to be Violent

A more serious charge than the notion that pornography portrays violence is that it causes violence in the real world. Declares Dworkin, 'men believe . . . that they have the right to rape' and 'men really believe they have the right to hit and to hurt.' Not some men, not men who are addicted to pornography—just men, period. And in case you thought Dworkin was being careless, she writes elsewhere: “Pacifist males are only apparent exceptions; repelled by some forms of violence as nearly all men are, they remain impervious to sexual violence as nearly all men do.”...

The argument rests partly upon laboratory studies that suggest a connection between the consumption of pornography and increased callousness toward women, greater propensity to rape or to discount the seriousness of rape, and a taste for increasing violence. Second, opponents of porn list real-life examples in which pornography played an apparent role in a particular man’s violence against women—a serial killer, usually—as well as a few studies that suggest ordinary men have “gotten ideas” from pornographic material and forced their partners to participate.

The primary lab research to which critics of pornography refer has been conducted by Edward Donnerstein, Neil Malamuth, Dolf Zillon, Daniel Linz, and others. This is not the place to discuss the weaknesses of these studies at length, particularly when they have already been extensively critiqued by others. (See, for example, Bill Thompson’s Soft Core and Alison King’s essay, “Mystery and Imagination: the case of pornography effects studies,” in Assiter and Carol’s Bad Girls and Dirty Books.)

Suffice it to say that most studies have used college students, who were handy for researchers but might not accurately represent the pop ulation at large. Young adults in their late teens and early twenties tend to be sexually and romantically inexperienced. They probably have unclear ideas about what they might or might not do, and what is and is not acceptable behavior. Critics of pornography usually fail to note that female college students in these surveys sometimes show as much heightened aggression, arousal, and callousness as males...

To accept the antiporn case, one must presume that the “propaganda” of pornography was somehow more influential in these [male serial killers' lives than the violence and humiliation they suffered at the hands of real people. “Our research has shown that virtually all serial killers inc from dysfunctional backgrounds of sexual or physical abuse, drugs or alcoholism,” says the FBI’s John Douglas. “I’m not going to tell you that pornography fuels the desires of someone who wasn’t already thinking in that direction.”

Plus, as Alison King points out, “the fairly strong consensus among researchers is that sex offenders invariably had less exposure to pornography than the average male—a point accepted even by the Meese Commission.” This seems counter to common sense, but a study by Kant and Goldstein showed that sex offenders tended to grow up in households where there was almost no discussion of sexuality, and the values were traditional and conservative...

Furthermore, focusing on isolated killers ignores the hundreds of thousands—even millions—of men who look at pornography and never abuse their partners and acquaintances—men similar to most of the males in my survey. It is easy to say killers like Bundy and Bernardo were fans of pornography and leave it at that; few acknowledge that men like theologian Paul Tillich, jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, and symphony conductor Eugene Goossens were, too...

Ann Rule, who knew Bundy personally and wrote a biography of him, is convinced he was merely spinning another tale with his eleventh-hour confession” about pornography:

'I wish that I could believe his motives were altruistic. But all I can see in that Dobson tape is another Ted Bundy manipulation of our minds. The effect of the tape is to place, once again, the onus of his crimes—not on himself—but on us. I don’t think pornography caused Ted Bundy to kill thirty-six or one hundred or three hundred women. . . . The blunt fact is that Ted Bundy was a liar. He lied most of his life, and I think he lied at the end.'...

When MacKinnon writes that “sooner or later, all men want to do what they see in pornography,” if she means they want to try some of the sex acts with a consenting partner, and see ecstasy on a woman’s face, then the men in my survey would agree. But just before that sentence MacKinnon refers to “murdering a young woman. . . raping her, having vaginal and anal intercourse with her corpse, and chewing on several parts of her body”; and I cannot say a single man in my survey mentioned this as a cherished fantasy...

The 1992 University of Chicago Sex in America survey indicated that between 1942 and 1992 the number of men and women who reached the age of twenty and were still virgins had risen steadily, with the proportion of men outpacing that of women. Clearly pornography is not doing the job its opponents claim...

As Jen Durbin has observed:

'It’s too easy to get a skewed impression of porn if you only read about it. Students who read Andrea Dworkin become convinced that pornography equals pictures of dead Asian women hanging from trees, smiling buxom women meeting a gruesome fate in a meat grinder, ecstatic women fellating revolvers, etc. Students who read Nina Hartley become convinced that pornography is a form of self-actualization for uninhibited feminists.'...

To open an essay called “Pornography and Rape: A Causal Model,” for instance,
Russell quotes a man from Shere Rite’s survey on why he wants to rape women and what he fantasizes about when he thinks of doing it. But the man never said that he did rape anyone, he was just describing his thoughts...

Men’s “propensity to rape,” as Russell terms it, may be no more prevalent than women’s propensity to strike their children—that is, often considered, seldom performed.

Russell properly concludes that “having a desire to behave in a certain way is not the same as actually behaving in that way, . . . [but] it is helpful to have this kind of baseline information on the desires and predispositions of males, who are, after all, the chief consumers of pornography.” Unfortunately for her case, nowhere does Russell show that the 46 to 52 percent of the males in Hite’s survey who occasionally “thought of rape” were the males who looked at pornography the most, or that they had a record of mistreating women or a likelihood of actually raping anyone...

Ziliman and Bryant noted that differences in the way males and females responded to the materials were “trivial statistically.” This means that males and females were aroused in much the same way (something Russell and many other antiporn activists rarely bother to report) and that “massive prior exposure [to pornography] reduced aggressiveness sharply” in both sexes. Although the researchers were puzzled that after massive exposure to pornography, the research subjects were more likely to recommend shorter terms of imprisonment in a hypothetical rape trial—”rape is apparently considered a lesser offense” after exposure to porn—they added that in this too, “effects of massive exposure applied to males and females equally. The females’ dispositions toward rape and its punishment were apparently just as much influenced as those of males.”

Senn is one of the few enemies of porn who acknowledges that “studies of sexual arousal using both men and women have shown that sex differences in arousal to sexually explicit materials (no violent content) do not exist.” Several studies, she admits, suggest “women are as aroused as men to pictures and written depictions of sex whether the content is affectional and romantic or not.” In her own research, women’s levels of anger and confusion dropped considerably on successive viewings of a slide show of violent and nonviolent pornography.

Senn calls this “affective desensitization” and worries that “lessened anger might reduce the chance of social responses.” But why presume that the initial response is the more “true” one? A simpler explanation would be that the shock value dissipated, the women got used to the unfamiliar material, and they felt less personally threatened and could evaluate it more objectively. Their initial response could be likened to the fear and anxiety we feel toward the unknown—strangers from the other side of the globe, for instance—and what Senn calls “affective desensitization” could he more accurately termed “increased understanding and comfort” such as we experience once we have met and talked with strangers from China or the Congo. How many of us reacted with puzzlement and unease—even fear—the first time we heard about sex itself?

Rather than read too much into gender roles or pornography’s influence, I would suggest that the ready response of males and females to pornography in these studies is yet another confirmation that college students may be more suggestible—because they are less sexually experienced and mature—than older people.

Despite the holes in their logic, the opponents of pornography often admit that their minds are simply made up. Kathleen Barry writes: “I submit that the causal connections between pornography and sexual violence are perfectly evident. We do not need to follow individual men out of specific pornographic theaters and witness them raping the first woman they see to realize as women what impact pornography has on our lives. We need only appeal to our common sense.” Ray Wyre, who treats child sex abusers, says simply, “I don’t know how many men actually have fantasies and don’t put them into practice. But I don’t care about that [emphasis added]. What I do know is the more they masturbate to pornography, the more likely they will be to put their fantasy into practice.” With that reasoning, one should lobby to have all the fans of murder mysteries and true crime stories locked away before they are inspired to do some harm based on all the fantasy homicides and historic mayhem they read about. The most laughable analogies are fostered by MacKinnon: in at least two of her books, she suggests showing pornography to a man is like “saying ‘kill’ to a trained attack dog.

The theory that “porn causes people to be violent” is pretty suspect, Kathleen Barry’s notion of common sense notwithstanding. If it were true that the more pornography a man sees, the more likely he is to commit violence, then older men would be more violent: Like radiation poisoning, the cumulative effect of repeated exposures to pornography eventually would kick in as their lives continued. But according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, the largest concentration of men arrested for forcible rape is between the ages of 16 and 24. Sixty-one percent of the offenders are under the age of 25."

I was with My Toy, Acidflask and some others, and decided to enjoy a bukkake (my first, in fact). He has higher-res pictures, but I haven't gotten them yet:


Wakafu Bukkake (Udon): fish flakes, seaweed, egg, sweet beancurd, fishcake, tempura crumbs, crabstick (bah, they said crab), spring onion and coriander, with a bowl of dipping sauce at the side. Delicious.


From Democratic ImPossibilities Potluck after Christmas:


My focaccia. Not brown enough, and oddly shaped. And it wasn't herbal enough (too bad I'd made the next batch of flour by that time)


Jap seal meat curry


Fishing for seal meat


2nd batch of focaccia (several days later) - I baked for a bit longer at a higher temperature, and also brushed the tops with olive oil, so they look better (even those without cheese):





Curry Cream Chicken. This was for Hurr Hurr. Someone labelled it: "Gabriel's Ominous Meat" but it was the most popular item, if I do say so myself.

Original recipe; instead of microwaving I stir fried to brown the onions and apples, as well as the chicken, then baked the mixture. I left out the mushrooms though. The cream and cream of mushroom soup (this seems to be a common shortcut) were a bit less than required though.


After the addition of more curry and a bit more baking



'Okonomiyaki' which looks like cai tao kuay bad cai tao kuay (caked together), brought to you by the same people who gave us equally disgusting Chicken Ham Takoyaki. Today, about a week and a half later, they came back as part of NUSSU's food fiesta bazaar (where there was massive racial disparity in vendors, and 3/4 the stalls could be found at normal bazaars anyway). Uhh.


Ichiban Boshi (Esplanade): 'Our premium dishes are carved with sincerity & only the freshest ingredients are used'. Presumably their normal dishes are cooked without sincerity and don't use the freshest ingredients. They also, like a few other places, have 2 tiers of ice cream: Haagen Dazs and an unnamed, cheaper brand.

2girls1cup - California Girl and Lynnette

I'm so touched!

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography (8/10)

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus


The Public Debate: What Did Everyone Get Wrong About Men Who Use Pornography? (Continued)

"Pornography Shows What Men Want

'Pornographers... know what to make, and the distributors know what sell,' Susan Cole declares, as if the mere fact that something is on market is proof that the consumers want it and would not choose something else were it available. Are Pintos, Edsels, red dye #2, and thalidomide what consumers wanted? They were on the market and people bought them, so they must have been...

Many of the men in my survey did not often get what they wanted from pornography...

MacKinnon claims that pornography “eroticizes the despised, the demeaned, the accessible, the there-to-be-used, the servile, the child-like, the passive, and the animal.” That does not sound like many of the women I have seen in pornography, or the ones the men in my survey said they liked most. MacKinnon wants to pretend that “women feel compelled to preserve the appearance—which, acted upon, becomes
the reality—of male direction of sexual expression, as if male initiative itself were what we [women] want, as if it were what turns us on. Men enforce this. It is much of what men want in women.”

Everyone would like to be served at times, everyone wants to be desired—which requires assertiveness and initiative on the part of someone else. Women whose sexual relationships with men are fulfilling have their needs served by their male partner. If men wanted only power in sex, they wouldn’t experience performance anxiety, impotence, or premature ejaculation (or feel guilty when they do, because these are symptoms of not being able to satisfy one’s partner— or the fear of it. If domination and power were all that mattered to men, they would care only for their orgasm, and not their partner’s. The fact is, many men do care very much about women’s pleasure, both in life and in pornography, where it is the focus of so much attention...

Pornography Teaches Men About Sex
As Laura Kipnis dryly observes, 'The argument that pornography causes violent behavior in male consumers relies on a theory of the porn consumer as devoid of rationality, contemplation, or intelligence, prone instead to witless brainwashing, to monkey-see/monkey-do reenactments of the pornographic scene.”...

Pornography is Addictive
One can sense the same murky insinuations in Peter Baker’s worried declaration that the combined monthly sales of all Britain’s pornographic magazines—from Penthouse and Mayfair to Knave, Fiesta, and Club International—is 2.25 million. Apparently the reader is meant to assume each sale represents a different man, rather than the possibility that a smaller number of men buy multiple magazines. And what if there were 2.25 million buyers 0f pornography in Britain: Could they all be addicts and nascent sex killers? One does not get that impression from the Englishmen in my survey...

Porn Consumers Inevitably Turn to More Violent and Kinky Material
Porn critics positively savor the gruesome details they say are typical of the genre. Women are 'hung by their breasts from meat hooks,' Catherine Itzin assures us. They are 'fucked, tied up, spread-eagled, having ejaculate sprayed over their faces and bodies,' Diana Russell thunders, and 'No one knows what percentage of them are also being beaten up, tortured, rpaed or even killed.' MacKinnon says, 'Electrodes [are] being applied to the genitals of women being called 'cunt' in photography studios in Los Angeles and the results mass-marketed.' Cole assures us that 'men shove bamboo up women's vaginas,' one finds 'a meathook in a woman's vagina,' and women are 'branded with hot irons or gang-raped...' As always, Andrea Dworkin weighs in: 'A woman, nearly naked, in a cell, chained, flesh ripped up from the whip, breasts mutilated by a knife: she is entertainment, the boy-next-door's favorite fantasy, every man's precious right, every woman's potential fate.'

... When critics of pornography actually try to measure the violent content, the results are weak, to say the least. Catherine Itzin approvingly charts the findings of a study of the images on the covers of porn magazines on the east coast of the United States at the time of the Meese Commission. Although intriguing items such as fisting, leg irons, forcible rape, and corpses leap off her chart, their actual incidence in the pornography studied by researchers P.E. Dietz, Paul Elliott, and Alan Sears was negligible. The above items appeared in one percent or less of the material. In contrast, a subsequent study by Dietz of detective magazine covers found that 76 percent involved domination of some kind and 38 percent depicted bondage.

Opponents of pornography also casually assert that violence in pornography is on the rise. MacKinnon writes, “More and more pornography is more and more violent, and arousing,” but she provides no evidence. Russell and Karen Trocki are more sly: in 1993 they wrote, “Pornographic materials and mainstream depictions of women have become increasingly violent in the past two decades,”... Using such a skewed sample to characterize all pornography as violent is as accurate as saying statistics indicate that all Americans may be homosexual.

Palys’s examination of videos between 1979 and 1983 found that XXX videos with explicit sex were far less violent than R-rated ones with nudity and simulated sex. Examples of male domination and graphic aggression were higher in the R-rated videos, but they did not increase over time, and the number of violent scenes in XXX actually fell.

Thompson goes on to cite several studies that suggest MacKinnon, Russell, and anyone else who claims violence has risen in pornography are simply wrong. J.E. Scott and S.J. Cuvelier’s 1987 study of Playboy and Penthouse, covering the years 1954 to 1983, found a “violent” image on one page in 3,000, and four out of every 1,000 pictures, respectively. The rate dropped after 1977. A study by researchers at Reading Uniersity of European pornographic magazines (supposedly “harder” than American or British) up to 1990, found that “violent imagery” declined 42 percent from 1972 to 1979, and a little further by 1983. “Non-violent but demeaning” imagery climbed 23 percent from 1972 to 1979, then declined 19 percent through 1983.

What makes the debate about violence in pornography so tricky is that 'violence' is open to interpretation. What looks like violence to one person may be play to another. When MacKinnon infers a connection between “sadomasochistic pornography and lynching,” it is clear she knows nothing about consensual bondage and S/M, safe words, and the world of people who play at restraint and pain...

“Many women recoil at S/M because it seems to reflect what history teaches them men want most: to inflict sadistic pain on them,” writes James Ridgeway, a journalist and author of Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry. “But the surprise of the commercial S/M scene is that it most often finds men on their knees, abject slaves of their steely dominatrixes. Often cross-dressed in women’s clothing, they clank around in medieval chains, their cocks and balls ingeniously tied up, their bare asses lashed by whips, as they perform housewifely chores.”

In discussing a porn novel called Whip Chick, Dworkin wrote: “The portrayal of men as sexual victims is distinctly unreal, ludicrous in part because it scarcely has an analogue in the real world.” In other words, Dworkin argues that most porn is real to its viewers, but this porn is not...

The late John Preston, a popular author of gay pornographic stories, interviewed “Mistress Holly,” the owner/manager of an expensive brothel near Sunset and Vine in Hollywood, and reported:

'Holly speculated that only 15 percent of the male clients of the House of O were dominant in their sexual desires... They are men who are usually in charge all the time. They are the type who lord it over their wives, play the father role to the hilt with their children, and are probably giving the orders at work, too. They just can’t hold up to that pressure. So they come here and they hand over all their power and all their decision making to the domme.”'...

As a woman once wrote, when she was a child she “liked the sex-and-dominance games, which could be overtly sadomasochistic, because I liked the risk and the intensity. . . .“ Whether she suffered lasting harm because of such play is anybody’s guess: Her name is Andrea Dworkin.

The most extreme form of pornography, and therefore the handiest weapon in the “porn-is-violence” debate, is the “snuff” film, in which a woman is tortured and actually killed on camera for the sexual pleasure of the viewer...

When Snuff surfaced in 1976, feminist protests shut it down in some cities. The film helped to galvanize the antipornography movement into the 1980s. The only problem was that it was a hoax: an old-fashioned horror/slasher flick with some nudity thrown in. When Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau investigated, he discovered Snuff was really a 1971 Argentine movie called Slaughter, to which some extra scenes had been spliced. A story in the New York Times noted that the 'victim' was interviewed by a policewoman, and the authorities concluded, “The actress is alive and well.”...

Given that isolated psychopaths record their crimes in the privacy of their lair for their own pleasure, one cannot assert that such material is manufactured for the purpose of public sale to Dworkin’s “boy-next-door” —who wouldn’t want it in any case. Based on that slim but crucial misconception, however, one finds references to snuff in nearly every book and essay by opponents of pornography, often with no citation of an authoritative source at all...

If snuff films were really on the market, feminists would have hunted them down and held them up for gruesome display. Law enforcement agencies would be jumping for joy to possess the most perfect homicide evidence one could ever hope to put before a judge or jury. Why hasn’t this happened?

As a professor of law who must live or die by her citations, MacKinnon has worked the hardest to provide backup for such claims... Apart from quoting Senator Arlen Specter’s remarks in the Congressional Record as an authority, in several of her books MacKinnon cites a single Orange County, California municipal court case in which a man was convicted of murdering two young girls in the process of making a film. She invariably buries this information in an end note-perhaps because, as she admits, “the film was never found.” But somehow this enables her to insist of snuff films that “They exist,” and 'The intended consumer has a sexual experience watching [them]' (apparently “intended” consumers are as good as real ones)...

Less scrupulous commentators than MacKinnon assert that there are snuff films “priced to make [them] available to Everyman,” and increasingly popular as videos in the American home”[!]...

In 1997, journalist and former Israeli soldier and police detective Yaron Svoray published Gods of Death, the remarkable account of his search for a genuine snuff Film. The trail took him to Thailand, Germany, Miami, Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and the war zones of Bosnia... A career FBI agent told him, “As far as anyone in the bureau knows, there has never been a legitimate snuff movie ever found.” An officer in the New York Police Department’s child crimes unit said, “I’ve never seen one and I hope I never do.” A 29-year veteran of the Dutch police assured Svoray there was no such thing.

Yet Svoray managed to view a snuff film in a wealthy man’s Connecticut home, and in Bosnia he found brutal video footage of sex slayings by soldiers. I believe he saw what he says he saw. But he clearly shows that such movies are closely guarded by their (probably criminal) owners, not sold to the public, and that the Bosnian footage of rape- killings of women—like the movie made by MacKinnon’s Orange County killers—was incidental to the actual carnage... Yet I suspect that MacKinnon will cite Svoray in her sub sequent books as proof that snuff exists and men want it."

(Continued in next post)

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography (7/10)

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

***

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus


The 75% Problem: Child Sex Abuse and the Porn Industry

'Feminist critics of porography assert that as many as 75 percent of the women who are filmed or pictured in pornography have been victims of child sexual abuse or incest, and conclude that the purchase of porn supports and encourages an industry that thrives on the sexual abuse of women and children'...

A 25-year-old software engineer wrote:

'My first response is that when I was a women’s studies minor at college, I did a lot of checking up on feminist statistics when studying for class or working on reports. I found that an alarming percentage of them were totally wrong, and most of the rest were deceptive. So when I see “as many as 75%” were “victims of child sexual abuse or incest,” I read that “as few as 5% saw a copy of Playboy before they were 18” and ignore it. Feminist statistics have lost all credibility with me.'...

A 35-year-old bisexual, married two years and working on a masters, said it was “An impossible observation to comment on without sort of contexting, some sort of comparative curve. I’d be interested to know what the sample group is and how it might compare to, say, fast-food workers as a control.”...

“Conservative estimates currently state that three out of four women—across societal stratification—have been sexually abused at one or more periods in their life. Given this, the statistical correlate between women being survivors of sexual abuse and pornograhy is ludicrous.”...

“I see no causal relationship,” wrote an assistant professor of computer science:

'I’m not sure it even makes sense on some level. Does the recycling industry thrive on waste? Yes, but does the recycling industry cause the waste? No. The people employed by the porn industry should be informed con senting adults. It is not the business of the pornographers to examine the past life and childhood of their employees.'...

'The industry may attract abused women. Other industries probably do also. I would expect that the women who work in rape help lines, psychology, social work, and the police all have disproportionately high numbers of women who have been abused. Do these industries “thrive” on the abuse of women? I think not. Everyone has a cross they bear. For some it is child sexual abuse. Our crosses lead each of us in various directions in efforts to solve the issue involved. The differences are only in the details.'...

A chemistry teacher offered another analogy: 'By the logic of Dworkin and MacKinnon, people who watch Richard Pryor movies and listen to his tapes are encouraging the racism that gave rise to his anger, and, by extension, his comedy. By their logic, the cure for racism in America would be to no longer watch Richard Pryor.'...

The sex publishing employee also suggested that far from being only an isolated option for downtrodden women, sex work might be a way they find their way back to self-confidence and a feeling of self-worth and attractiveness (to say nothing of economic independence)...

Candida Royalle, a former porn actress who became a director and producer with Femme Productions, a woman-owned company that makes couples-oriented pornographic films, recalls an incident that supports this theory:

'Three Daughters, for example, became a very cathartic experience for the actress, Siobhan Hunter. She was one of the Mayflower Madam girls, who had worked as an escort to put herself through medical school. The scene we were shooting was supposed to be a very tender portrayal of her first time and we were shooting in a green room, and the actor had a moustache. All of a sudden, Siobhan started freaking out. She said, “This is reminding me of my actual first sexual experience. It was a green room, with a man with a moustache, and it was a horrendous experience, and I’m starting to freak.” So I sat her down and I talked to her, and I told her that my first experience was done with someone I loved, but that it was also a dreadful experience. I told her that I use the movies as a form of catharsis—as a way of redoing it, in a way, and making it better. I thought she could try to use this the same way. The man she was working with had so much genuine feeling for her, that is exactly what happened. They did the scene together and at the very end, while the cameras were still rolling, she sat up, they were hugging, and she started crying. If you see the scene, you’ll see tears on her face. It was such a release for her.'...

'Actors and actresses in pornography are adults who are fully able to give or refuse consent. They are responsible for themselves and their actions. It seems curious to me that feminists are claiming that the actresses in pornography are poor helpless weaklings who are unable to speak for themselves. This is exactly the kind of patriarchalism they pretend to detest.'...

As the man who made the marijuana harvesting and analogy put it:

'I think the best solution, for someone who truly wants to eliminate victim’ from any line of work, is to insure that any line of work in which women (and children and men) are employed is made completely legal, with thy responsibilities and rights thereunto, and held in the public’s mind being as honorable as any other.'...

“Many great artists were dysfunctional and they have created great beauty.” Whether
anything in pornography could be called “great beauty” is certainly open to dispute, but this man’s reference to Van Gogh implied that if we accept the feminist reasoning with regard to abused women in porn, we should forgo the purchase, enjoyment, and reproduction of the work of individual such as Van Gogh or Dostoevsky...

*Explanation of how Dworkin distorted a study by the Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco which found that 73% of SF street prostitutes had been raped, with nearly a quarter of rapists making reference to porn, where the conclusion was 'It is very difficult to establish conclusively the causal relationship between pornography and sexual abuse of women'*

Dworkin not only exaggerated the numbers in the study but asserted that they proved something its own authors would not claim. She seems to care less about truth than stirring her listeners to action, even if that means unleashing unproven claims supported by slipshod methodology It is not hard to see what prompted the more
vitriolic and contemptuous remarks that some men in my survey directed toward feminist arguments and their use of statistics."


The Public Debate: What Did Everyone Get Wrong About Men Who Use Pornography?

"Men Cannot Separate Fact from Fantasy
Several commentators have tried to argue that enjoyment of pornography is somehow different from pleasure with any other form of entertainment. Susan Cole writes, “there are real women in the pictures, and . . . an erection, any way you look at it, is not a fantasy.” Well, no, it is not. An erection is a physical response to a fantasy, like sweaty palms and a racing pulse during a horror movie. When we perspire and our heartbeat accelerates, an observer might say that physically we are on the verge of fight or flight, but this is not what we intend or actually do when we watch a movie like Psycho. MacKinnon argues that the physical response of an erection means that pornography an incitement to act, like racist literature or telling a trained attack dog to “kill”; but if she knew how many erections the average man has in his lifetime and never acts on (morning erections, hard-ons at the movies or when a woman smiles and pays one a compliment at work, or those embarrassing and unbidden erections in adolescence due to fluctuating testosterone), she would admit how ridiculous her attack dog analogy is.

Diana Russell is certain that “the argument that consumers of pornography realize that such portrayals [of rape myths] are false is totally unconvincing.” As proof, she cites three books or articles by women (including herself), as well as studies of college and high school students that suggested they were more inclined to believe rape myths after watching erotica. Of course, no one talked to men who customarily use pornography; no one consulted older, mature men for their perspective; and no one seems to have addressed the role of “experimenter bias” in these studies—the extent to which students might have guessed what the researchers expected to hear.

Taking sides appears to be more valuable to some theorists than obtaining hard, fair, and objective evidence. MacKinnon approvingly quotes researcher Edward Donnerstein’s reputed comment that “We just quantify the obvious”—a disturbing admission of bias—while Russell castigates him for “copping out” because he objected to the way work had been used by antiporn feminists.

In Susan Griffin’s formulation, “the pornographer. . . never admits to his hatred and fear of eros. . . . The traces of the chauvinist’s feelings come to us, therefore, oniy by inference and allegory.” In other words, it would do no good to ask men about pornography, because they can’t be honest. So Griffin accords greater weight to her own fantasies about what goes on in men’s minds than to whatever men might have to say for themselves. She smoothly concludes that “the pornographic mind is identical both in form and in ultimate content to the Nazi mind,” whatever that means...

This tension or interplay between realism and fantasy hardly sets pornography and its users apart from other forms of entertainment. Readers of romance novels want lovely plots and perfect bodies, but enough humanity and not too much perfection that the story becomes totally unbelievable. Action movies feature “real” heroes who have personal problems and make mistakes within the “perfection” of split-timed capers and escapes. “Realistic” stories by Dostoevsky or Hemingway still depend on rare events in people’s lives (like war or murder), helpful coincidences, heroes and heroines of uncommon virtue and vice, to hold our interest. Green, red, and yellow kryptonite hments of reality that kept the stories of otherwise invincible Superman interesting... Are we attracted by the realism or the fantasy? The answer, of course, is both...

To Men, Women in Pornography Represent All Women
Since some women are already on record to say they aren’t humiliated by such depictions, the situation obviously is more complicated than MacKinnon, Cole, and Griffin believe. The truth is, men know only too well that not all women are like the ones in pornography. That is one of the things that makes it appealing: that the women in porn do not behave like most of the women the viewer knows. As Nancy Friday explains... 'A fantasy woman does not reproach her man for letting other men peep at her, for wanting to ‘lie her with another guy, for dreaming of her having sex with a dildo or a dog. Fantasy gives men the love of women they want, with none of the inhibiting feminine rules they hate.'

What Friday also found was that male fantasies tended to be built on reality, not vice versa. They were not divorced from real life like the faceless males who ravished women in the fantasies they recounted to Friday. 'Most of the fantasies in this book are built upon memories of real women'... Friday recognizes what this suggests about men’s interest in pornography. Whereas women told her they fantasized about a demon lover who “is never seen with photographic clarity,” men reacted in the opposite way: “hence the great popularity of the nude in girlie magazines. The more a man can see, the closer the dream is to reality, the more specific, the more real the woman—the more exciting.”

In other words, the male viewer is not using pornography to create reality; it’s the other way around. He loves pornography for how closely it emulates reality at its best—although it obviously is not real... That is the great secret Nancy Friday discovered when she quizzed men about their sexual fantasies—the great secret that has thoroughly eluded all the antiporn commentators—and this is why she titled her book about male sexual fantasies Men in Love.

“In pornographic books, magazines, and films, women are represented as passive and slavishly dependent upon men,” declares Helen Longino, thereby demonstrating her ignorance of the common pornographic scenario where women take initiative and control. The threat from “mysterious female sexuality and capability” means that “pornography asserts that women have neither, that women are (often literally) castrated, helpless, incapable,” Susan Lurie assures us. She is clearly unaware that pornography celebrates women’s pleasure, and that the S/M sub-genre often depicts a female punishing a man, binding him, or whipping him for being “bad”—perhaps for not satisfying her, or for having lustful thoughts in the first place. (Lurie also does not explain what “literal” castration of a woman might be, or whether anyone’s seen it in pornography.)

You would think if there were nothing but humiliation, degradation, and violence in pornography, no self-respecting woman would have any thing to do with it. Yet critics of pornography paradoxically complain that self-respecting women routinely force themselves to resemble the models in porn.

“Ordinary women wear makeup,” Griffin observes. “Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal.” But Griffin compares these ordinary women to... mainstream cultural ideals, not specifically pornographic ones. Griffin also does not explain why the use of cosmetics predates the widespread availability of pornography by centuries. She does not explain how pornography could play a greater role in women’s lives than the magazines they buy for themselves—Vogue, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan... Cosmo “teaches women, step-by-step, how to become sex objects,” Lisa Steele observes, and 'Vogue and Bazaar... offer in-depth instruction in the narcissistic pastime of turning oneself into a living sculpture. . .'

... “No one has shamed my body like women have,” a woman told Naomi Wolf. Another
recalled her teen classmates saying “I was on the Itty-bitty Titty Committee” and teasing her with “You’re a sailor’s dream: a sunken chest.” She concluded, “Boys would never say that. Just girls.”

... Where women’s attitudes and self-image are concerned, research seems to implicate women’s fashion magazines more than pornography. Alison King reports a study by C.L. Krafka that suggested that female subjects who viewed pornography the researchers thought dehumanizing and degrading did not report greater sex-role stereotyping, lower self-esteem, or inferiority about their looks. A study led by T.F. Cash. however, found “women had lower self-esteem after viewing models in mainstream magazine advertisements.”

This should not be surprising, since the variety of women’s sizes, shapes, and ages in women’s fashion magazines may arguably be far more limited than in pornography. A commentator who has only seen a few copies of Playboy or Penthouse would not know this, but Laura Kipnis, who surveyed some of the less well-known publications, describes them in her book, Bound and Gagged. Dimensions is a magazine for “fat admirers,” and features “quite fat lingeried models... Full nudity is not a factor, but the magazine’s transgressive quality may be read from the fact that, according to Kipnis, it can be found oniy in hard-core porn stores. Over 50 offers “vistas of antediluvian flesh.” With the advent of amateur sex videos, a greater variety of ages and forms have naturally become available in action, as well.

As they so often do, women presume to speak for men in this area; “Readers feel short-changed when a woman does not look and act the part of the Playboy model. It is an insult to their masculine capacity to get what they want,” declares Judith Bat-Ada, although she doesn’t say how she knows this. She contends that this process leads to child molesting: “It makes him hate her. And it makes him turn to the younger female daughters in the family.” Perhaps it might in those rare cases where it happens, but can we impute this process to all users of pornography? What inspired men to molest their daughters before there was Playboy?...

(This chapter continued in a following post)

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography (6/10)

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus


Pornography and Violence

"Antipornography activists routinely link pornography with violence. Porn depicts violence against women, they assert, and it inevitably leads to violence against real women. How do men who like pornography respond to these assertions?

'What violent acts?' asked a 32-year-old. “The producers of porn magazines and videos are careful not to depict anything that a crime victim might say in a lawsuit might have inspired a violent crime. I have never seen violence against women depicted in an adult video, or in magazines. Even men-on-men violence is very rare.” He noted that to listen to antiporn activists, “you would think that most pornography was about violence, rape, and molesting children. Anyone familiar with porn knows this is completely false.” Stories written mostly by amateurs,
posted to the Internet, and therefore not purchased or sold for commercial gain, were a different matter: 'There are stories about rape and sexual torture to be found, and they arc very much a turnoff for me.'

A 41-year-old computer programmer noted that violence of any kind was rare in hard-core porn, somewhat more common in soft-core, but still light in comparison with the violence in mainstream films and literature:

'There is very little violence in visually oriented hard-core pornography. I have personally seen one bondage-S&M video which had very mild violence. I’d give it a PG for the violent content: It had nudity but no sex. The rest of the hard-core videos that I’ve seen had absolutely no violence, just sex and nudity. There is of course some violent hard-core pornographic literature—see some of the writings of the Marquis De Sade for examples These are not readily available; you usually have to special order them. None of the adult book shops that I’ve been to carry this kind of stuff. (My copy of De Sade’s Juliette was special ordered from Barnes & Noble—not an adult book outlet!) Once in a while I will get aroused while reading a violent passage in Juliette; there was a sadistic passage or two in Anne Rice vampire novels that gave me an erection, as well. Usually I prefer hardcore sex and nudity to this sort of tripe. While violence in hard-core pornography is rare, this is not the case in soft-core pornography. The Anne Rice vampire books that I’ve mentioned several times are an extreme. Even the much milder violence in Bret Ellis’s American Psycho is quite extreme for soft-core. More typical for soft-core pornography is a level of violence comparable to the movie The Maltese Falcon, i.e., a PG-13 level of violence. The emphasis is still on sex and nudity.'...

'There is a “lot” of pornography out there, and I suspect if it really did cause people to become more violent, we’d have considerably more violence than we do now.'...

'It's more likely that feminists themselves provoke men to acts of violence!' another man joked. “Seriously, car chases, gunplay, fisticuffs and so forth are way more prevalent [in regular movies], and there’s no movement to ban them.”...

A 20-year-old Canadian student interested in a career in sex counseling challenged the link on the same grounds: “Just because there is a correlation between two factors, like pornography use and violence, does not mean that one causes the other. Feminists want prove that pornography causes harm towards women and when you want to find a certain result, you’ll interpret the data to give that result.

One man said even if a link could be shown, it wouldn’t matter: “People having cars increases the chance of car accidents. Does this mean that when 99.9% of people can drive their car for a year without killing anyone, we should ban cars because of the .1% of people who are incompetent or unlucky? Of course not. It means we should deal with the .1%.”...

“Repression breeds violence. The more sexually liberated countries of Europe have far less rape.” A 33-year old software support specialist, married eight years to his only sex partner, agreed that “pornography can act as a cathartic experience and reduce one’s propensity for violence.” He then added: “One wonders why Andrea Dworkin doesn’t go around killing and raping, since she spends so much time reading/watching and then writing about that devil porn.”...

A 26-year-old writer and administrative employee said: “I’ve seen football players and other athletes bully people and beat them up. So why don’t feminists attack the multibillion-dollar sports industry? Surely there’s a more direct connection in people who beat people up professionally becoming violent than people having sex on film.”...

More than one man recalled reports that pornography drove men such as Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy to their crimes...

A divorced, 32-year-old computer consultant discounted Bundy as an example of any link between pornography and violence. “Curiously enough, while many use Ted Bundy as a case in which pornograph ‘forced’ him to do his vile deeds, it should be noted that Ted Bundy once claimed Satan himself compelled him to his atrocities. Moreover, when police searched Mr. Bundy’s car, they didn’t find pornography in it, they found cheerleader magazines.” His conclusion? “In my view, people who ‘blame’ pornography for their actions are only seeking to avoid personal responsibility for their actions.”...

Perhaps the firmest dismissal of the porn-causes-violence thesis came from an Englishman, a software engineer with five children:

'I reject the implication that there is some sort of “argument” about pornography put out by feminists. I do not grant them even that minimal level of intellectual honesty or respectability. The “arguments” I have read are a palpable tissue of lies, distortions, non sequiturs, special pleadings, and outright gender-biased hate speech. I don’t believe even those making them actually believe them. To me, they are simply another example of the “Big Lie” technique of the late unlamented Herr Goebbels—that if you yell it loudly enough, and phrase it extremely enough, somebody will believe it. On the other hand, I have read both the report of the (British) Royal Commission on Pornography, and a condensed version of the U.S. report (by Ed Meese, wasn’t it?). These were two serious, detailed, and meticulous studies, and they both concluded what in both cases the majority of the investigators did not want to conclude: that there is no evidence whatsoever that the consumption of pornography is harmful; that there is no good social grounds for regulating it; and that the harm that is sometimes caused by its production or distribution is a direct consequence of its marglnalisation by society. I will not accept, now or ever, the right of any other person, especially women, and especially feminist women, to define or control my sexuality. There is nothing to debate: my body; my self.'...

'I’ve had several partners, including my feminist wife, who enjoyed light bondage and simulated rape. Depictions of those definitely are a turn-on. My experience is that the strongest women are most stimulated by being dominated.'

A 36-year-old male pointed out that much of what appears violent in pornography is actually a very controlled form of fantasy play:

'I get turned on by pictures of classic role-playing such as “bondage,”“S&M,” including people being whipped, etc., and forced” although it Is really fake and they are playing; it is consensual in nature. It even feels good in real life to play around with this type of stuff a bit. This is not wh,it I’d call “violence.”'

Wrote a 23-year-old bisexual who preferred women:

'Violence can be erotic, but I think it’s important to distinguish between consensual and non-consensual. I know I like some violent things to be done to me that turn me on. So, as far as porn goes, there are violent scenes that turn me on because I have a fascination in the physical sensation of pain—I find the tension between pain and pleasure very erotic. But it all has to be in the context of consent. If I see a rape scene where the victim is saying “no, don’t do this,” I don’t like it and it doesn’t turn me on. But most of the “rape” scenes in porn have the victim excited and asking for more. If the acting job or picture is convincing, then it’s a turn-on because I really believe that the person does want that to happen to them.'...

Closely related to the idea of the consensual use of force was the appeal of being the object of such force focusing on the person who chooses to be the “victim,” rather than upon the person who “imposes” the violence. The key word here is “submission”; some men said the 'submissiveness' of one of the performers fired their libido, rather than the violence per se...

The question of consent has been a thorny one for feminists who oppose pornography. Because the activities that occur in pornographic films—let alone in such jobs as nude dancing and prostitution—seem unimaginable to many commentators, feminist criticism has taken some odd twists in order to “prove” that women cannot actually consent to such acts. For instance, it has been argued that limited professional and financial options drive women to this kind of work to such an extent that they do not have free choice. [Ed: Similarly, criminals are driven to commit crimes. Therefore they are not responsible.]...

'Let’s put this in perspective. You’re in a lot more danger of coming to actual harm playing football or other violent contact sports.'...

Some feminists have gone so far as to suggest that to stare at a woman in public is a violent act (or an aggressive and invasive one, at least)...

“In my experience, an erotic thriller means two mm utes of nudity and 60 minutes of violence. I have never been aroused by scenes of violence in pornography, and I doubt I ever will.”...

If there was stress or violence in their lives, a few men said, it could not be blamed on their use of pornography. A divorced public administrator, 48, declared, “There was no violence in my relationship(s). Arguments, tension, misunderstandings, god yes, but to blame this on pornography (which generally depicts pleasure/enjoyment?) is rather farfetched. ‘Sorry we had the wretched misunderstanding yesterday, darling. It’s the pornography,”“Work,” a 26-year-old administrative employee observed dryly, “is a much more direct cause of emotional and physical violence.”...

'The only semi-violent aspect in pornography which is somewhat arousing is when an attractive, strong guy is with a woman who is reluctant to have sex, kind of forces himself on her (not violently, but clearly coercively) and she is overwhelmed by attraction, arousal (of course she was always fight ing this), gives in, and enjoys it. Again, this is not so much violence as coercion. I do not do this myself, because I do believe it is not only un-PC, but not right. No means no means no. Now, occasionally I may have tried to seduce my partner when she has expressed lack of interest, but again, even tually no means no, and I have never been violent or physically coercive.'

If anything in this man’s description of an arousing situation seems improper or brutish, let alone “un-PC,” we might remind ourselves that it describes the sort of encounters that routinely take place in romance novels written for, purchased by, and read by women in the millions, and apparently regarded as “highly romantic.”"

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." - John Lennon

***

Periodic Table Printmaking Project - "Ninety-six printmakers of all experience levels, have joined together to produce 118 prints in any medium; woodcut, linocut, monotype, etching, lithograph, silkscreen, or any combination. The end result is a periodic table of elements intended to promote both science and the arts."

Singapore stops foreigners from singing complaints - "A choir that planned to sing a list of complaints about life in Singapore cancelled its performances after the city-state banned its foreign members from singing, organizers said on Saturday. The 60-member "complaints choir", a concept that originated from two Finnish artists, was scheduled to perform at a weekend festival but authorities granted a performance license on the condition that the foreigners would not participate."
WELL DONE. Youtube, Lyrics

Local Police Seize Human Rights Torch 'For Investigation' - "Shortly after the HRTR activities ended at Singapore's landmark hill and frequent tourist spot, Mount Faber, six police officers, tagged by a cameraman, seized two Human Rights Torches and two HRTR banners from CIPFG members. Categorizing the event as "illegal assembly", the investigation officer said the torches and banners were needed to facilitate their "investigation", and repeatedly demanded HRTR event participants to reveal their names and personal particulars, on the pretext of returning the props to the rightful owner after their investigation."

What I have against City Harvest Church - "I know it’s meant to be like us supporting her endeavours and stuff, but I found it incredibly inappropriate to expoit the church-goers (who will inevitably buy a few copies to show support) to boost album sales. A girl from my cell group at that time actually went to buy 20 and distributed it among us. It wasn’t as if all proceeds were going to some charity… sigh. (My info on this may be wrong, but even if there was a charity involved, no mention of the name of the charity nor it’s purpose was described at all.)"
More religious hate...

Prohibited Degrees of Relationship - Okay, so in Singapore a guy cannot marry his Wife's father's mother, Son's son's wife or Sister's daughter. Right.

Women want sex on the spot - "Sandy, 35, who also slept with a stripper on her hen night has no struggle with her conscience. "Do you think your husband-to-be wouldn't do something like that on his stag night?" she told Her World... According to male strippers Her World interviewed, these women go as far as to supply them oral sex and even full-on sexual intercourse. And in full view of the rest of the party too!"

Land of Milk and Honey - "Letter from Hong Kong... At the McDonald’s outlet that I turn to for a bite on the go, there’s a cheery young girl at the counter. Her distinctive name elevates her beyond the McJob nature of her work. She’s called, somewhat appropriately, Milk Fat, and she displays her name on her chest as if it’s a war-trophy!... my life has been enriched by an office secretary in a consulting firm called Nausea Yip and a travel agent named Honey Chan. Among other honourable mentions: Sincerely Hu, Busy Wong, Destiny Chu. But the winners by a long mile are sisters Chlorophyll Yip and Photosynthesis Yip."

One Chance in a Million: An Equilibrium Analysis of Stem Cell Donation - “A third source for stem cell transplants is umbilical cord blood, collected from newborn infants and stored at extremely low temperatures until it may be needed. This procedure has the advantage of being painless to the donor.”
GAH

Asia Sentinel - Singapore's Two-Faced Judiciary - "Corruption oftentimes takes many forms and disguises: paying obscenely high salaries and bonuses to judges is one, for they inevitably assume the gratifying form of monthly retainers by the government for loyal services rendered or to be rendered... In an attempt to win their case at all costs, they not only suppressed important evidence advantageous to Tang but concealed it from the presiding judge, Justice Chao Hick Tin. Nor did they take any steps to correct the judge’s misconception of the facts at the subsequent judgmental hearing, consequently ensuring that the damages awarded against Tang would be humongous: thus perpetrating a travesty of justice by their studied silence. A classic case of the legal maxim, suppressio veri suggestio falsi—suppression of the truth is suggestion of the false... The very fact that the judge felt obliged to descend into the obvious speaks volumes for the sorry state of a judiciary in bondage. It requires no special lexicon to interpret this well-known Shakespearean dictum: methinks the judge doth protest too much. With the best will in the world, is it really conceivable for any judge in Singapore to decide a case against Harry Lee Kuan Yew and his PAP cohorts?"
Given that this is in the NUS library's normal collection, and not the Confidential Books or even Banned Books collection, I assume it is not sufficiently seditious.

Msia scraps plan to export pesky monkeys - "MALAYSIA has dropped a plan to round up nuisance monkeys from its cities and sell them abroad as exotic meat or for medical research, after discovering that most of the animals are too ill to be exported... A recent study found 80 per cent of urban macaques carried diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis and Aids, he said. 'Only 20 per cent were healthy and, of this, only half the number were suitable for export,' he added."
Malaysia Boleh!

Take off and strip off - "Nudism (or "Free Body Culture" as the Germans like to refer to it) has deep roots in Germany. As early as the 1890s, the world-renowned "father of nudism" sociologist Heinrich Pudor was writing about stripping off and getting back to nature. Nudist colonies have existed in Germany for more than a century. Later, behind the Berlin Wall, in East Germany, nudism was an expression of freedom, a very personal protest against the confines of the communist state. Taking all your clothes off became so popular, there were even pop songs written about the subject."

Which of these men did the photographer think was a hero? - "This morning is the fortieth anniversary of one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War. It was taken on 1 February 1968, with the Tet offensive in its early stages. It pictures General Nguyan Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner... Here's what Eddie Adams had to say about General Loan: 'The guy was a hero... The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'"

"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better." - George Santayana

***

When I showcased Episode 1 of Luther/Lutc/Lut's popular game, Darkness, almost 4 (!) years ago, I noted that the programmer proclaimed that "his is the first game in the world to ever feature a girl in the RGS pinafore isn't it? There... meeting all your fetish needs *bleah*"


RGS Girl Girl in the RGS pinafore (and tie?!) looking at herself in the mirror


Watching a videotape of her watching the videotape


Endgame - creeping through the "Darkness" with a candle

In Episode 2 (my teaser hardly revealed anything), the girl's candle was blown out by a draft, and after she scented antiseptics, she found herself in:


A bloodied operating theatre! And worse, a CHIJ pinafore.


Walking through the corridor of the hospital


Running from the "Darkness"


Jarred by the spookiness of the surroundings

The latest episode (Episode 3) came out a while ago (after 3 1/2 years), with the announcement: "The third episode of the horrifying Darkness point-and-click adventure series is finally here! This time you find yourself in a subway train. Use your mouse and your wits to escape! Be sure to turn up the speakers and turn down the lights for maximum effect and enjoyment."

In it, she comes to in an MRT train, feeling like she's slept for 2 (gah) years. Yet she is still haunted by "Darkness".


Horror of horrors - she is now an SCGS girl!


Besides hot pink socks, she also has an overly-short skirt


Unfortuately she hasn't mastered the art of squatting properly.


Running - again!

The addition of some tasks with a time limit and the cranking up of the spookiness make this the most nerve-wracking instalment of the series (whether it is the most fun, I leave it up to you to decide!) Plus, the multiple endings (? - I didn't bother checking them out) give it some extra replay value!


There is something very wrong with the sprite, though, but I won't reveal it here.

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography (5/10)

"How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct." - Benjamin Disraeli

***

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus


Public Policy: Should Society Control the Use Of Pornography?

"I think it’s basically benign,” wrote a 29-year-old technical writer. “I don't think it warps people’s brains any more than commercial advertising, religion, or any other contact with society does. The people who say 'Pornography Made Me Do It' are the same people who would be manipulated by the most basic propaganda in our society.”...

'I don’t see porn as intrinsically harmful, even within a relationship (although I am dubious in the latter case). I don’t think the debate whether porn encourages sexual deviancy is worth arguing about. Some people with dangerous sexual interests use porn, and in some cases such use probably acts like a safety valve, in other cases it probably encourages the problem. However, the underlying problem is that people have not learned to resist their sexual urges, not that they can get their hands on porn. I believe that the demonization of porn does far more to encourage such dangerous behavior than porn itself. And I believe this extreme rejection of porn arises only because of a more general problem people have dealing with their own sexuality and sexual urges.'...

Several men who thought pornography was harmful also implicated the larger culture. “I think what has a much more degrading effect are magazine ads which are much more pervasive and much more dishonest, than actual porn where you are using it purely for a sexual purpose, argued a 31-year-old literature professor...

“I’ve heard women claim that is harmful,” said one [gay]. “But then I have heard some women claim gay porn is harmful to women too—because there are no women in it.”
A 33-year-old said: “I think it is really just a vocal group’s vision of what they see as sexually acceptable—and they’re trying to tell us all what types of sex and sources of arousal are appropriate. I think many women simply don’t understand men’s interest in porn, so it is written off as dirty, unacceptable—something watched by people who have sexual or personality deficiency.”...

'I think [porn is] harmful only to the extent that people allow themselves to be harmed.” Just as alcohol, chocolate, guns, and many other obsessions become harmful only when misused. Men who misread the messages of pornography, who take its conventions seriously, are most likely maladjusted in other ways, and pornography is not to be blamed for the misbehavior of such men. Any thoughtful guy can see how pornography is not like life; if he pays more attention to the lessons of the former, then he’s just stupid.'

In discussing the pornography industry and whether or not it exploits women, quite a few men suggested that performers were not being exploited if they received payment. “The women who work in pornography are paid for their work, just like any other job,” one said; “A woman who trades on her appearance or her sexual talent is not being ‘exploited’ any more than a woman who trades on her brains.”...

One man who said he had carefully studied the arguments about pornography’s harmful effects in the feminist press said, “I have consistently found these arguments to be lacking in analysis, lacking in evidence, and lacking in even basic reality testing. They seem to me to verge on dogma, and to be entirely disconnected from the reality of’ pornography and human sexuality.” For example, “opponents of pornography believe that the producers effectively decide that women wiii model, and then impose that decision by force.” On the contrary, he argued, “the pornography industry is mediated by money, not force. And that means that each model decides, for herself, on the day of the shoot, that she’s willing to model in exchange for the money that she’s being paid.”...

A 22- year-old single Canadian remarked. “I know that many porno actresses are really desperate, runaways, uneducated, who would rather be doing something else,” said another man, “Yet I’m glad that at least they can make some money off this huge industry taking advantage of our silly male weakness.”...

One suggested, performers may be vulnerable to abuse because they get caught in a crossfire between the legal marginality of industry, the firm social disapproval of it, and the market demand...

Several men believed the growth of amateur porn was proof against the claim that women would never perform sexually for a camera if they had sufficient economic alternatives and were not forced. “I know from the amateurs I know who produce their own porn that they get off on being exhibitionists, and weren’t pressured into it,” said a married 43- year-old accountant. The symphonic musician agreed:

'There are thousands of these amateur tapes! How is it possible for all those women—people like those who live next door, video-ing their own sexual behavior for anyone to see—to feel degraded? Many of them must feel turned on by acting out in front of the camera.'...

'Some people find it easier to take on a multi- billion dollar industry than to accept women as sexual beings.'...

If anyone is exploited, it’s men,” claimed a p.r. man, “but whether they are stuffing their wages into G-strings just to get a pretty girl to smile at them, or they are authorizing $4-per-minute charges to their phone in exchange for dirty talk, they are doing it willingly.” The Canadian professor who avoided porn felt the same: 'I think it’s more harmful to men than to many women. We’re the ones who waste our time and money on it. Who is harmed by heroin—the poppy growers or the junkies?'

About a fifth of the men in the survey took the trouble to suggest how the possible harms inherent in pornography might be alleviated. Their recommendations can be summed up as: better quality and improved social attitudes. “once people learn that it’s OK to consume porn, market demand for ‘good’ porn will help quell ‘bad’ porn,” wrote a chemical engineer. A 22-year-old who believed porn was often degrading to women also felt pornography could be employed to “remove sexist ideas from people’s heads, if more sexually explicit material picturing women as equals to men were released and made publicly available.”...

Several men called on the makers of porn to do more: “Making the industry more respectable would give the performers more rights,” said a married professor...

A 21-year-old gay student made an even stronger statement:

'American society as a whole is screwed up about lots of things and one of them is porn. We’re so bombarded with messages about what’s wrong and morally disgusting, and I think it’s a load of crap. We’re too uptight about little things that wouldn’t be problems if we didn’t make them problems. The only worry I have about the availability of porn is that someday the radicals are going to get it banned and it won’t be available.'...

'People who are already unstable or inclined to rape are going to consume porn in unhealthy amounts.

My take on these concerns is that rape comes out of some other sick need,
and has much more to do with violence than sex—so porn has little to do with it. One testimonial I recall hearing was from someone who got off on the thought of drowning someone. He loved seeing scenes of people on TV who were drowning (movies that depict it, etc.). This really got him off. We could eliminate all the porn in the world, and this guy would still have something to get off on.'...

Remarked a 42-year-old professor:

'I feel that the right to read/think/watch what you want is pretty much paramount and should come before the tenuous links between what someone reads and their behavior—or soon Marx will be banned (as would the Bible—some of the stuff people do in the Bible is nasty).'

A 41-year-old man in education administration defended the right to view porn despite his own addictive experiences: “I am a recovering alcoholic—if it were up to me I would ban alcohol and drugs. But that would only benefit me and deprive others for whom pleasure is derived from those substances. I can’t hold the liquor companies and drug deal ers responsible for my disease and the effect of alcohol and drugs on my life. The same would go for pornography.”...

A couple of men simply noted the distinction in the way erotica and pornography are treated by society... “Erotica, I notice, is something publishers call a book when they want to get it into a table bookstore.” Another man complained of a double standard in the U.S. with regard to graphic material: “National Geographic magazine can show naked children, some with small breasts, and get by with it, but let someone else do it and they are in the slammer.”

... A graduate student in mathematics cut to the chase: “The people who try to differentiate between erotica and pornogniphy are usually just censors.”

Quite a few men remarked on the class aspect. “Erotica is for intellectual, cultured, rich people,” a biochemistry graduate student remarked, “Sort of like the difference between being crazy and being eccentric. Depends on how much money you’ve got or which social circles you run in.”...

A 43-year-old married man offered an analogy:

'Erotica is coffee-table book porn. A pretty cover on the same thing. Maria Maples marries Donald Trump, an obvious jerk; a girl on E. Colfax sucks a cock for $15. Maria Maples is to erotica as the girl on Colfax is to pornography. A poor pervert is a pervert, a rich pervert is eccentric, and so on. Bottom line: same content, different marketing and packaging. If it makes your dick hard, it makes your dick hard.'

“Erotica’ is what you call pornography if you want to hang it in a gallery, isn’t it?” a law student asked rhetorically...

The best illustration of the semantic and subjective confusion over sexual imagery was offered by Steve, the 49-year-old British male who had little interest in pornography but saw no harm in it:

'No, I see no distinction, not even an aesthetic one. The only difference is in the speaker’s mind: “pornography” is a “boo word” and “erotica” is a “rah word.” To give a concrete example: During a debate on pornographic images, the proponent of censorship gave as an example of the utterly obscene, indefensible, and unacceptable, “pictures of women having sex with animals.” As it happens, I own a reproduction of such a picture. The original is in the Spiridon Collection in Rome, and is entitled “Leda and the Swan.” The pervert who painted it was Leonardo da Vinci.'...

A professor in France described the issues in Europe:

'Nobody should care about erotica as a problem. Advertising is erotica (at least in France). As far as pornography is concerned, there are laws; some are OK, some are hypocritical. In France you may not represent a membei of the church in porn movies. And this is a true problem, as for instance watching nuns making love is the Italians’ kick. It is lawful [apparently he meant available] in Italy, where pornography is curiously prohibited (but sold publicly), but unlawful in France, where pornography is permitted. Now on the other hand, European laws should nowadays be the same all over Europe. So what is the next step? French freedom of lovemaking, but with no priests involved, or Italian abstinence, with nuns banging themselves all over the place? Ask a lawyer!'...

Several men suggested that age restrictions on pornography could be eased if there were better and more widespread sex education. “I think that sexuality should be encouraged at an early age, but it should not come without some sort of contextualization, some sort of education as to its function and role(s),” remarked a married bisexual male. “Without context, many pornographic images are degrading, violent, at least confusing. I think that age has something to do with wisdom, but I also think that education should be encouraged at an earlier age—not just the birds and bees, but how sexual relations affect people, what such relations mean, etc.”...

A 56-year-old married professor said, “I have some concerns about kiddie porn, bestiality, and torture, but it is much better to view these things than to do them. If porn can act as a substitute for the real thing, then it should be allowed.”...

“Even age requirements seem silly to me. What exactly do we gain by prohibiting little Johnny from reading 'Busty Babes in Bondage'? A lot of prudery and superstition has given classier names and just sticks around in disguise.” A 21-year-old computer consultant, heterosexual but “bi-curious,” felt the tension and secrecy sparked an interest that just wouldn’t be there if were out in the open: “Even with children, do you think if pornographic magazines were not hidden off in the back shelves, a child would ever attempt to ‘get away’ with looking at them? How many children, if shown Debbie Does Dallas as well as The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, would choose to watch Debbie a second time?”"

"The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness." - Eric Hoffer

***

Quotes:

[California Girl:] I don't have an accent

[On an Arts module] The best students in all of my modules are from the Science and Engineering [faculties], which doesn't say much about the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Tell me what you think Philosophy is. [Student: A bunch of opinions] One 'opinion' is that philosophy is a bunch of 'opinions'... I'm just trying to have some fun here.

In this particular module - I know we're trying to save the environment, put the aircon on high - this is too warm, don't you think? (a high temperature)

[On admin] I belong to 4 or 5 different committees and they meet all the time.

There's been a bit of confusion about my name, which is why it's in capitals. I come from Australia and there you put the last name last, so when I came here, I said, I am [first name] [last name]. They said, 'Your name must be [first name]'... My email: XXX for [department name], [first name]... my [last] name is not there.

Tutorial attendance is very important. You get 5% just for turning up. You get it free. Practically unheard of in Singapore.

[On an essay with no word limit] The longer you write the longer the rope you're giving yourself with which I'll hang you.

[On my crushing a cockroach] You have just destroyed a piece of the environment. [Student: Minus 5%]

What do you hope to get out of this? You know, beside 4 module credit points. (besides)

Anyone else with wild expectations - to save the world or something like that?

[On Environmental Economics] They are the experts. I am not. Even though I have a degree in Economics.

A lot of people say we should be vegetarian. I'm a part-time vegetarian by the way. If I can eat vegetarian, I'll eat vegetarian. If not I'll eat meat, because I prefer eating meat to starving.

Some of them are factual. We say 'blond girls have more fun'. It may be true factually. It may be wrong factually.

Sociologists may - I don't know what they do, go out and conduct surveys: 'Are you blond? You have fun?' Yes. Tick.

[On things we cannot know] I can say things like 'Caesar spat in the river when he crossed the Rubicon.

There're statements that are neither true nor false. There're statements that are both true and false. Surprisingly. Let's have a little fun. I like having fun. 'The sentence on the board is false'

Most philosophers take this view. Moral philosophy is the same as ethics... for practical purposes.

You have food critics going around. 'This restaurant is great. 3 stars'... Or chopsticks. Or whatever.

air'th'air'tics (aesthetics)

[Ignoring Mac whores] No one wants to say 'Thou shalt buy an iPod'. Except iPod manufacturers.

There're a few more slides... but I have been commanded by the university to stop talking at a quarter to the hour and therefore I will obey.

Economics at the moment became too technical and didn't focus on reading and writing. (has become, doesn't)

I don't like this dichotomy between 'Pure' and 'Applied' Economics... Economics is a social science. Any theory which cannot be applied to the real world is useless... [Theories] do not come from the sky.

We may be very beautiful models out of developing countries, but it is often the case that beautiful models do not work in the real world. The real world is too dirty, too many variables. (build)

[On debates in development] Unfortunately for you and me, Rostow won [the] Nobel Prize, but Gerschenkron has not. If you want to win [the] Nobel Prize, you better not take this module.

Are you watching the movie today? [Me: I'm screening the movie today]

The Freshman look is the one that radiates 'This sem I can get 5.0'

Now, let's welcome My Ass (Myers?)

[On HIV in slums in Côte d'Ivoire {Ivory Coast}] There are people who are not infected yet.

[On slums in Côte d'Ivoire] You get to see things you don't see in Singapore, or even in the region... [Student 2: Has he not been to Cambodia?]

[On the Czech Republic] There're tram conductors who're very fierce and don't speak English, and I'm Asian, so I'm obviously there to steal something.

[On working in a Czech bank] I learnt Czech, then they mistook me for a Vietnamese who had migrated there really early and was selling cheap shoes on the side.

You get trams and buses filled with testosterone-filled men... They're really big, and they don't take showers... Bring a bar of soap... You get used to it. 'The guy in the desk next to me hasn't showered in a week.'

Everybody clears about that? (Everybody's clear)

If you think: we come into the world with nothing and we leave this world with nothing, your reference point should be 0... The crucial question here: because you say that [the] reference point matters - where is the reference point?... Suppose your friend told you, 'This lecture is very very bad', and you come in and discover, it's not so bad, it's good.

You ray car (Eureka)

Perhaps your in't'you'shern is wrong (intuition)

I'm terrible at gambling. So when I take a statistics course I suffer, because I don't know how many cards there are in a deck.

Prospect Theory in the feel (field)

Kino'koo'nya (Kinokuniya)

The only thing that is universal is rationality. Feelings are not universal. [Ed: Hurr hurr]

[On utilitarianism] When somebody stands up and says, 'I want to be unhappy', 'I want to be miserable'... What do you do? You send him to a psychiatrist.

[On Ehrlich's 0 population growth] Each family should have 2 children. Or to be exact, 2.1 children, if you can manage.

[On the Rule of 72] If nothing is done, in 10 years there will be 2 billion Indians.

[The] Recycling bin outside, turning up the aircon temperature - they are inconsequential. Believe me, they don't make a dent in global warming. It may give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside here.

being rationale (rational)

Have you heard XXX speak French? It sounds like Hokkien.

[Instructor: We see the concept of 'Economic Man'] Sounds so cool. Like 'Iron Man' or 'Ice Man'.

[On Descartes] To use politically incorrect language, the Father of Modern Philosophy.

[On Cartesian animals being machines] When I wash the car it doesn't mean I respect the car. It doesn't mean the car has a right to be washed.

Christianity is not going to do anything about population growth because we have been told to 'Go forth and multiply'. 10 billion? No trouble. 20 billion? Go for it.

Here're some great big gigantic words that may be useful to commit to memory because they are useful. Useful to show off... One word is 'axiological'... Another is 'espitemological'. Even longer.

You have ray'shear'n'air'lerty and instinct (rationality)

A cat doesn't say to itself in cat language: 'Ah! I'm hungry. Where can I go to find food?... We may be wrong, but that's animal behaviorists tell us they do.

[On a reading from Leakey's 'The Sixth Extinction'] Appropriately, it is on chapter 13 of the book... Appropriately also, it has 13 pages... I want somebody to do a presentation on that. By that, I obviously mean read the article.

China's pocket income (per capita)

[On debt before limited liability] If your company goes bankrupt, your creditor may come to you and take your life... Even today, we have many loansharks.

[Me: Did she sound excited?] Who? [Me: Zhenyi] She's always excited.

The ruler area (rural areas)

Today, we're going to talk about another seminar paper (seminal)

I've taken a lot of finance courses in the Business School when I was doing my PhD, but I still don't know how to invest my own money... Just hold a well-diversified portfolio... And hold it for a long time (I took)

How similar is the sah'mple to the population (sample)

I love talking about this sort of thing, because I love talking.

[Student: When is the best time to apply for jobs?] Tomorrow. Today. Yesterday.

Another way of saying 'pull strings' - I like to say 'network'. Sounds better.

They are not a charitable organisation. '12,000 students graduate a year. Let me hire a few to lower the unemployment rate'.

on'trer'pro'near (entrepreneur)

A lot of you want to do further studies... Why do further studies? 'Dunno'. Can't bear to leave NUS.

The chances are, I tell you, once you start working: got income, no examinations - so nice, don't want to do postgrad already. (It's so nice, I don't want to do post-graduate studies)

The employer looks at us: 'What's wrong with your students?' Then I look at the ceiling: 'What's wrong with my students?'... Like I'm the mother of 32,000 students.

Some companies may have a very relaxed dress code. If you dress better than the CEO, they may go, 'This guys is too ambitious'

[On sites for working abroad] There're many more ones, but these are the more reputable ones, not the ones that pop up: 'You're a lottery winner!'

[On MRT commuters] When they open their eyes, you see the word 'Death'

I'm a high school dropout. I don't have a high school degree. But as I assure my students, I do have a PhD.

African time is people come at their own times, then you welcome them, because you're so glad they bothered to come.

tar'luck ah'y'air street (Telok Ayer)

Mr Joo'zerph (Joseph)

The movies of the Shaw Blah'duhs is my research topic. My office is also [in] the Shaw Foundation Building.

In the club I do the web out (have a workout)

Of course, Descartes has been discredited in many ways.

[Me: What's that in metric?]... I think an acre is 1000 square metres... I'm too old to know about metric.

We: As thinking people, as University Scholars, have no choice but to think about what we do

[On a moist towelette] I have an object here which was, in a sense, free. I got it while having dinner the other day. I don't know why I'm carrying it around.

Written by a friend of mine. His name is, or when he wrote the article, his name was XXX YYY ZZZ. Now his name is XXX... I never found out why he changed his name. I didn't think it would be a good idea to ask.

Incidentally, if you ask me what philosophers do, I will give you a short answer: we make distinctions... The more distinctions the better... Without distinctions we see the world as a fuzzy blob.

[On the Mona Lisa] Suppose the French government is desperate. A rouge trader has bankrupted the whole country, so they need to sell it to raise money.

[On intrinsic and extrinsic value and Ryoei Saito] You may think this is a silly example, but a few years ago there was a Japanese billionaire who bought a famous Monet... Now it would be worth 200 million dollars... He wanted it to be buried with him... Suppose I bought the Mona Lisa and put it up there and threw darts at it... The eyes! It's mine. Is there any problem?... Fortunately for Monet, or this Monet painting, this Japanese businessman's empire collapsed. The painting was repossessed to pay his bills.

[On his wedding ring] The value to me is infinite. You come to me and say, 'I'll give you $10,000 for it.' I'll say, 'Go away'. You come to me and say, 'I'll give you a million for it.' I'll say, 'Go away'. You come to me and say, 'I'll give you a billion for it.' I'll say, 'Go away'... Given the price of gold, I'd be lucky if someone gave me $500 for it.

[In late January 2008] I forgot whether it's the 2005 or the 2009 version of the textbook.