When's The Next Train Out Of Here?

The paper’s been full of child pornography rings getting busted and some new variety of porn where little kids wear thongs and things so it’s not really pornography.

It’s just weird. How can there be so many men who will pay to see pictures like that? It doesn’t make sense to the Pondering Pig. I am pondering it.

I think not messing with little kids is part and parcel of the moral law of the universe. Most guys know deep down that we’re supposed to take care of little kids. Make sure they’re all right. Wipe away their tears. That kind of thing.

Having sex with them or looking at sexy pictures of them – it’s right out. It’s, dare I say it, shameful!

I remember when I was a little kid my cat scratched me really bad, probably because I was teasing it unmercifully. I was so mad at that cat I shut the door so he couldn’t get away and then I hit him hard.

Did I feel better? I guess I showed him!

No, I felt ashamed and I didn’t want anybody to know what I had done. Because deep down in my little selfish kid mind I knew you’re not supposed to be mean to things that are littler than you are. It’s wrong – I wasn’t a little saint or something, believe me – I was just feeling the moral law of the universe.

Pig , little pig, you did a bad thing.

And I never did it again, because I remembered the scritchy way I felt. I’d rather not kick the stupid cat. Anything was better than that feeling. And now I had a secret I didn’t want. I’d beat up a little cat.

Besides, I liked my cat. He wasn’t stupid. I was stupid to do that.

Now, I have had it explained to me more than once that some men don’t feel the moral law. Beating up cats and kids and anyone weaker than themselves makes them feel strong and in control. It makes them feel good about themselves. They’re morally blank. Freudians used to call them psychopaths. I don’t know if they are evil or what. I just know you have to stop them because they won’t stop themselves. I used to think psychopaths were pretty rare.

Yet I’m not blind. Forget child porno for a minute and consider all the guys who go around whaling on their little kids. Doing horrible things to them just on general principles. Or giving their wives black eyes and putting them in fear of their lives.

And, if they go to church, justifying themselves because the Bible says to control those women or they’ll get uppity. (Not true of course – Bible says nothing of the kind) Or Muslims who think honor killing is the way to go. Your daughter does something to disgrace your family, like go out on a date. Kill her! That’s the best solution.

This is gruesome. Can you see why I became a pig? This human race has got serious problems.

How else can there be so many guys who spend their lives obsessing about six year olds?

Here’s another idea, horrible to contemplate. What if there is no moral law of the universe? What if I was the anomaly when I felt so bad about hurting my cat? And decided not to do that anymore?

What if beating and torturing and killing people who love you and depend on you and messing with little kids to get a little sex thrill and then having a little bedtime drinky winky like in the Mafia movies – what if that’s the male norm?

I’m getting dizzy. If it’s true, I don’t think I want to associate with you humans that much any more.

Sorry this post is so depressing. My rational mind says, “You dope, this is not new information. You’ve just described the whole reason Jesus came to save us, one by one by one. He’s the only train out of this burg.”

Mr. Conductor, can I have ticket on that train? I don’t like it in this town no more.

Some Pondering About Pornography Posts

Well now, what have I learned from the comments to the porn post, which are approaching and may have already exceeded 100 comments?

Well, for one thing, I learned that humans get angry very fast when they are defending their beliefs, and that even Christians start shouting or use cruel sarcasm to score a point, without noticing that in the heat of battle they’ve forgotten Jesus' advice, “íf someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also”.

It was an education for me. We barnyard talking pigs have a rule – we’re expected to treat each other with respect when we’re discussing something. Using that plan, we often come to agreement, or at least understand the other pig's point of view and gain some sympathy as to why they might think that way. When I forget that rule, I'm always sorry afterwards.

I also learned that, when humans discuss deeply held beliefs, they generally don't feel they need to bring in evidence to support their belief. Generally, when pigs talk, we’re expected to bring in examples from something that happened in our lives, or something we read in the newspaper or a book.

Like, for instance, two or three years ago I read a series of profiles in the Toronto paper of a sixteen year old runaway girl (Google didn't turn the story up, so I guess it's not online anymore.) When she arrived in town, she was met at the bus station by a great guy who wanted to take care of her and be her boy friend. He bought her meals and nice clothes and fell in love with her and wanted to marry her. But first she had to do one "one" thing to prove her love for him. She had to sleep with another guy, of course. He was a pimp who had found a nice new profit center for his collection. The girl was coerced, brainwashed I guess you could say, and came to believe that being a prostitute was the way to prove her love for him. And, when she was arrested - time and time again - and sent to a foster home, she would run away and return to her life on the streets. No policeman, no social worker, thought she was doing this from free rational choice, but because she was a dumb sixteen year old kid who was screwing up her life. The series made a big impression on me and influenced my opinion of how and why young girls might choose to become pornography models, as well as prostitutes. So I would probably have brought something like that up.

One reader, Paula did bring in a documentary she had seen about a porn actress. "It was difficult to watch", Paula wrote. "She was so pathetic, and had to work so hard to convince herself that this was what she wanted." I thought that was helpful, but then - she was agreeing with me.

Here's some stuff everyone agreed on: Child pornography, like child prostitution is, as Mr. Weiner described it, "wrong, amoral, evil and sick". I would extend that to include what the pimp did to that sixteen year old runaway. Probably most of us would.

Personally, if I was king I’d extend this circle of protection to naive eighteen or twenty-one year olds who are enticed by the same kind of pimp. I’d do it simply because I have known so many naive dumb twenty-one year olds of both sexes. And I wish them well.

I was intrigued by a couple of points that came up but not developed. Belladonna pointed out that the sexually exploited are in essence not different than "those poor souls who 'sell their body' to deep pit mines or mindless factories that seem dehumanizing (and often dangerous) for the profit of corporate stakeholders." That’s a thought worth developing. In fact somebody already did. I read a book by Gary Haugen, called Good News About Injustice, which very powerfully makes that case from a Christian perspective. The book had a big influence on my thinking and I recommend it.

And finally, one reader, who I am proud to say is also a talking pig, actually suggested a potential strategy for regulating abuses within the pornography industry.

Here's what she said: "If the courts decide that, due to First Amendment reasons, such violent (sexual) images have to be allowed to be produced (this IS currently a Pennsylvania court case), at a bare minimum the industry needs to be TIGHTLY regulated. Perhaps we could demand that substantial changes be instigated in the industry. For example, CGI (Computer Graphics Imaging) be required to create all intercourse/penetration images. In this day and age with our advanced CGI there is no reason for any human to be subjected to the very real threat of sexually transmitted diseases and possible internal and organ injury for a paycheck. Period. Make porn producers get OSHA work practices inspections and licenses, and seals of approval from watchdog groups for every movie made and magazine pic taken, and have it put in large letters on the magazine cover that “No human was in any way injured in the making of these images. These are staged images only. Computer graphics are responsible for all penetration images.” I can hear the porn producers screeching now."

To me, that proposal makes a lot of sense, and might be a useful place to take a civil, mutually respectful discussion with neither Bible-pounding nor cruel sarcasm, but just trying to understand each other and hopefully even eventually discover a strategy that normal people like us (pigs are people too, you know) could implement. Or decide we don’t need to.

We could also just go on to the next topic, of which I have one million.

We could discuss, for instance, how to best take Jesus’ warning to heart and try to remember it in our lives. The one where he says, “I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or a sister you will be liable to the council; and if you say, “You fool”, you will be liable to the hell of fire.”

Written along the Little Deschutes River, LaPine Oregon.

The Pig Sends Greetings and a Heads-Up.

Greetings from the Santa Cruz Mountains of California and thanks everybody for the amazing, powerful comment stream on the Pornography post. Don't stop, please! I'm going to take Kirstie's advice and read each of you slowly with a notebook in hand - as soon as I have a reliable internet connection again. You guys rock!

This is an important stream of thought, and I'll tell you why I think so. The path we're discussing (I particularly want to thank Mr. Wiener/Old Broken Fence/Steaming Crab/etc etc for holding up his end so well - I'm serious) leads, in my opinion, directly from "everyday" pornography into a whole lot of Evil.

I'm talking about the thousands of children and young teens kidnapped and sold into brothels each year to languish, get AIDS and die. This is no weird fantasy, folks - the State Department tracks it and issues a report on human trafficking every year. And, in my mind, the pornography we have been discussing is most visible piece of the same continuum - sex for profit, big time profit, billion dollar profits. Enough profit, for instance, to support the governments of nations like Thailand, Cambodia, and a big swath of countries all the way across Asia and Africa.

I guess I AM attacking the profit motive again, holy grail of mankind that it is. I want to get the relationship out into the open, and, frankly, I REALLY want those kids safe from harm. I have a vivid imagination, and thinking about their plight makes me really, really mad.

There HAS to be a way for ordinary North Americans and ordinary Europeans to have an effect on such evil. There HAS to be! My plan, until one of you comes up with a better one, is to get up on the roof and start shouting.

But first I need a roof!

Prostitution, Pornography,and the Pondering Pig.

I see where Belladonna has posted her thoughts on pornography. In her post, she confronts her own ambivalence about the subject - her personal distaste, her belief that pornography can be addictive for some, but also her deeply held belief in free speech as a key American value.

Her analysis makes sense to this pig, but she comes at it from a different perspective than I do. I'm not a bit ambivalent about pornography.

I feel there are some cosmic issues buried beneath its skin, so to speak. My intuition tells me that pornography breaks, batters and burns the humans posing in front of the camera, creating fountains of shame and feelings of worthlessness -- enough sorrow for a lifetime of repentance --and the pornography consumer is okay with that. It's the price those souls must pay for his pleasure. Their loss will be his gain.

I am not talking about Sin with a capital S here. That's God's department and he is a forgiver. I am talking about human hearts. I am talking about the hearts of eight year olds, eighteen year olds and twenty-eight year olds. I am talking about the guys too, although I have less compassion for them because I am one.

Some young guys may have a different perspective. When I was young I thought Playboy Magazine's Playmate of the Month was a definite advance in human society and when, along about 1971, the Playmates began to show pubic hair, I thought I was living through great times. Now that's freedom of expression! More to ogle on the wall while hanging out down at the print shop. I would just love to talk with those Playmates today and see how they feel about that episode in their lives. (How about that for a blog project?). Maybe I'm completely wrong. Maybe they look back on that time, when millions of guys used their photograph for secret purposes behind locked doors, as a high point of their cute little lives. I just doubt it.

Playmates were and are socially acceptible, normal, heterosexual cheesecake girls. Not scrungy models for pornography, which was that creepy stuff with closeup shots of human organs entangled. In those days I assumed pornography was made for socially inept freaks and was just an odd byway of society. It was an object of curiosity to me but not desire. I didn't know a single guy with a pornography collection. And, come to thing of it, I knew some really socially inept freaks.

San Francisco psychiatrist Melissa Farley has done a lot of counseling to prostitutes. She writes she has never yet ever met a woman who chose prostitution (or pornographic modeling) as a career because she thought it would be fun and rewarding. I believe she said without exception every prositute she worked with had been sexually molested within the family as a child.

So I believe (but I have no conclusive proof) that pornographic models are mostly kids and young adults who have already been battered into numbness in homeless homes, loveless laps, and hopeless couplings. Kids who are already seriously into soul-dulling drugs and who need access to a lot of money to get more of them. Kids who own nothing but sorrow and nothing left to lose.

Like most pigs, I have a heart and a mind as well as a penis. And my piggish mind tells me these two "coupled" industries - prostitution and pornography - are just two more examples of the powerful preying on the weak, the winners enslaving the losers, and the fat cats once again lighting their cigars on the bodies of the hopeless and helpless.

And it just freaks me out and I start getting mad, and I storm around the Pigsty until that frustrated feeling goes away. And then I sit down and try to forget it by reading some foolishness about how John Carter of Mars saves the beautiful Dejah Thoris from certain destruction by the Toad-Monsters of Illyria. Is there a relationship here?

And I keep hearing that little kid crying in the jungle. Or on the streets of Las Vegas. So I think, "I know. I'll give more money to the International Justice Mission or somebody like that. They'll save the kids with their lawyers and undercover investigators and white hats." (I like these guys, this is not satire) They do a great job, but it's no good. I don't get that warm feeling of satisfaction I'm craving (see Christian Hedonism and thanks Phil Plympton) from looking at my stupid Visa statement.

There has to be more. Something we can DO to make the world right again. And don't tell me I should go pray. Because I already did that. And you know what He said? Go read Psalm 10. So I did. I should just quote the whole thing here, but here's a link instead.

Somehow I don't think God's plan is for us to pray for Him to "break the arm of the wicked" and then go mow the lawn. I think that's the whole problem, in fact. Did the Christian Abolitionists pray to God to end slavery and then go to Bermuda on their Christian Luxury Prayer Cruise (thanks, Spoke for that unforgettable image) Did they go watch TV, secure and comfortable in their knowledge they had done all they could have done? No, they started the Underground Railroad!

What's wrong with us? What's gone wrong? I feel like something big has gone wrong, including in me and I'm just starting to see it again.

I hope I'm not making anyone uncomfortable here. If I am, I'll drop everything and make tea and little sandwiches. And then we can do a nice Bible Study and all feel better.

Screech! Little sweat drops fly off the Pondering Pig's forehead like in old-time comics.

I know there's a million holes in this argument. It's okay if you want to point them out. But, please, is there anybody out there who thinks I might be right?