It’s always amusing to watch men define women’s self-respect. Ugh ugh and double ugh. Shut up ya patronizing assholes.

but I figured it might since you posted it right after my exchange with a different brad. Anyway, on the chance that I’m one of the assholes you refer to, just a couple of things: First, my comment had nothing to do with gender — I was specifically questioning ADB’s apparent assumption that people who go to top-tier schools have self-respect and don’t have pornographic photos taken. Second, you’re assuming I’m a man, which is kind of interesting.

Yeah, gotta love the use of “get” there.

BTW, Pompeii has some sweet graffiti porn— but I guess Pat Robertson would say that’s why it got buried under ash.

O Therese, the callousness of the Rich legitimates the bad conduct of the Poor; let them open their purse to our needs, let humaneness reign in their hearts and virtues will take root in ours; but as long as our misfortune, our patient endurance of it, our good faith, our abjection only serves to double the weight of our chains, our crimes will be their doing, and we will be fools indeed to abstain from them when they can lessen the yoke wherewith their cruelty bears us down.

This advice, IIRC, being offered to a young girl, cast out by cruel fate and – as is usual in a de Sade novel – debauched by a series of corrupt priests, thus being encouraged to use her sexual charms to rip off as many men as she possibly can.

plus ça change, non?

(Just FYI, that link leads you to an online copy of Justine, and is therfore probably not really work-safe).

Of course, as someone who came within about two days of becoming a stripper to pay for college, and yet still managed to graduate from a top university with over a 3.9 GPA, I can’t imagine why comments like that might rub me the wrong way.

But that’s really all neither here nor there. The really important thing to realize is that Ace has never seen a Venus of Willendorf. Because, you know, back in the old days, women didn’t do that kind of thing. And by “old days”, I mean about twenty five thousand years ago.

By the same token, he’d probably be shocked to encounter the Cerne Abbas Giant.

The only reason ancient people didn’t take pictures of themselves doing the nasty is that the technology to do so wouldn’t come along for another few thousand years.

“But Why Blame MTV and Sex & the City? What About the Internet? I don’t think the ubiquity of porn has much of an impact, because in order to sell this behavior, you have to sell it as cool, chic, hip, an attractive “lifestyle choice.”

Nah, you need to accompany it with fabulous digs like on The Real World or a fabulous job like Carrie Bradshaw has.”

*coughPLAYBOY!coughcough*.

Okay, seriously, Playboy has been doing this “Porn as signifier of a chic lifestyle” thing for more then half a century.

I hereby decree that nobody shall be allowed to write about the history of porn unless they are aware of three basic facts:

1. Playboy exists.
2. Playboy has been around for more then 40 years.
3. The existence of the cliche, “I only read it for the articles” and the basic meaning of said cliche.

Seriously, writing about the history of porn without knowing these things is like writing about astronomy without knowing the earth revolves around the sun.