Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Clive Hamilton does the money shot, again
[READER ADVISORY WARNING: more double entendres that a 70s’ British sitcom]
Yay! My favourite object of derision (think of an inflatable sex-doll, only this one is abused for strictly cerebral purposes) is back in the news – and boy, do I have a load ready to blow on him.
The longer I’ve watched him, the more I’ve realised that Clive is actually not that complex a creature. Like a binary switch, he has but two modes – ranting against yoof and GenX, and ranting against pornography.
Quoth Clive yesterday:
No man who regularly uses pornography can have a healthy sexual relationship with a woman.
Quoth me:
(Waving my butchest wave) I’m over here, guys! Now that porn’s corrupted you, poofterdom is more than ready to offer you a healthy sexual relationship!
But I’m only dreaming, of course. Apart from Clive’s nasty – if by omission – homophobia, we know that he doesn’t really mean what he seems to be saying; in particular, the qualifier “regularly” is there to make sure that porn is okay for a (straight) man to use, providing that he feels suitably guilty on each and every occasion. Never mind pleasure in moderation, then.
While Jason Soon and Andrew Norton muse over Clive’s taxonometric place in the political pantheon, I’m happy to call him just a baby boomer fucktard (thanks to Ken Parish for passing on this choice noun). I assume that Clive’s got children of his own and that he’s concerned (as I would be) over their accessing pornography on the Internet. Clive’s solution (as Jason Soon unpacks it) is for zero parental responsibility, with (inept) filtering software to (attempt to) do the job instead.
A typical boomer solution, in other words. Instead of confronting the real issue – that it is (i) his own parenting and (ii) ongoing soixante huitard hegemony that are the joint problem – Clive looks anywhere but his own affluent doorstep. The very idea that Clive’s generation’s sexual (and later, economic) revolution might now be experiencing some blowback is anathema.
One simple illustration of Clive’s cretin-ness is in the actual accessibility of Internet porn to children (or at least minors without access to a credit card). Admittedly, there is a lot of free porn, which undermines credit card payment as a proxy gateway for ensuring that site viewers are adults. But who’s to blame for this market-irrational deluge (if one looks for it) of free porn? It’s hardly the porn industry that’s systemically destroying its own lifeblood; rather it’s a sign of yet another labour surplus – the video/pictorial equivalent of the thousands of uni graduate CVs that land on city desks each year, many pleading for the chance just to give their labour away.
The latter situation has plainly been created by economic fundamentalism – an issue on which Clive offers no answers, or even comfort. Much better to retreat into a research niche of solitary masturbation, eh Clive?
[READER ADVISORY WARNING: more double entendres that a 70s’ British sitcom]
Yay! My favourite object of derision (think of an inflatable sex-doll, only this one is abused for strictly cerebral purposes) is back in the news – and boy, do I have a load ready to blow on him.
The longer I’ve watched him, the more I’ve realised that Clive is actually not that complex a creature. Like a binary switch, he has but two modes – ranting against yoof and GenX, and ranting against pornography.
Quoth Clive yesterday:
No man who regularly uses pornography can have a healthy sexual relationship with a woman.
Quoth me:
(Waving my butchest wave) I’m over here, guys! Now that porn’s corrupted you, poofterdom is more than ready to offer you a healthy sexual relationship!
But I’m only dreaming, of course. Apart from Clive’s nasty – if by omission – homophobia, we know that he doesn’t really mean what he seems to be saying; in particular, the qualifier “regularly” is there to make sure that porn is okay for a (straight) man to use, providing that he feels suitably guilty on each and every occasion. Never mind pleasure in moderation, then.
While Jason Soon and Andrew Norton muse over Clive’s taxonometric place in the political pantheon, I’m happy to call him just a baby boomer fucktard (thanks to Ken Parish for passing on this choice noun). I assume that Clive’s got children of his own and that he’s concerned (as I would be) over their accessing pornography on the Internet. Clive’s solution (as Jason Soon unpacks it) is for zero parental responsibility, with (inept) filtering software to (attempt to) do the job instead.
A typical boomer solution, in other words. Instead of confronting the real issue – that it is (i) his own parenting and (ii) ongoing soixante huitard hegemony that are the joint problem – Clive looks anywhere but his own affluent doorstep. The very idea that Clive’s generation’s sexual (and later, economic) revolution might now be experiencing some blowback is anathema.
One simple illustration of Clive’s cretin-ness is in the actual accessibility of Internet porn to children (or at least minors without access to a credit card). Admittedly, there is a lot of free porn, which undermines credit card payment as a proxy gateway for ensuring that site viewers are adults. But who’s to blame for this market-irrational deluge (if one looks for it) of free porn? It’s hardly the porn industry that’s systemically destroying its own lifeblood; rather it’s a sign of yet another labour surplus – the video/pictorial equivalent of the thousands of uni graduate CVs that land on city desks each year, many pleading for the chance just to give their labour away.
The latter situation has plainly been created by economic fundamentalism – an issue on which Clive offers no answers, or even comfort. Much better to retreat into a research niche of solitary masturbation, eh Clive?
