THE ESSENCE OF MORALITY

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

- Georges Bataille

DEVIL INSIDE

If the devil does not exist, and man has therefore created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.

–Fyodor Dostoyevsky

HIS FORK IN HER THIGH...

One of us paid, and the amount was then divided up, but I insisted on paying for Xenie, as though wanting to stake out a claim on her.

-Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon

THE SPACE EROTIC

Revolutionary feminism does not focus on the failures of men, but rather on the violence of patriarchy and the pain of sexist exploitation and oppression. It calls out sexual abuse to transform the space of the erotic so that sexual pleasure can be sustained and ongoing, so that female agency can exist as an inalienable right.

-bell hooks, Outlaw Culture

WHAT LIES AHEAD

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices.

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky

THE TRUTH ABOUT MEN

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

–Fyodor Dostoyevsky

FILTHY THINGS

“And how could such an atrocious thing come into my head? What filthy things my heart is capable of. Yes, filthy above all, disgusting, loathsome, loathsome!"

 

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

CAMUS CAMUS?

Freedom to publish and read does not necessarily assure a society of justice and peace, but without these freedoms it has no assurance at all.

(from McElroy's Banning Pornography Endangers Women)

PERVERSIVE SUBVERSIVE

Many leftists supported pornography because it subverted middle-class morality. Sexually explicit movies brought into the open the most private act that was supposed to occur only in the bedrooms of married couples. Porn equalizes human beings. "Sex strips away identities it takes a lifetime to build," writes John Hubner. "A naked aroused man is not a brain surgeon or a university president or a Methodist bishop. He is an animal with an erection."

 

(excerpt from Ford's A History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film) 

SEXPLOITATION

“…[T]he Roughies and Kinkies of the middle '60s generally represent the nadir of the sex-exploitation film, ugly in spirit and appealing to the worst instincts of humankind… Paradoxically, these grotesque films, featuring neither complete nudity nor loving sexual contact, were largely exempt from the wrath of the censors, possibly because the United States has traditionally been a country that censors sex but tolerates violence.”

(excerpt from Ford's A History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film)