For all my ability to empathize with other people, there are a lot of things that I can’t understand. The attraction to bondage, S&M, or shoe fetishes, for instance.

Yeah, I’m watching the Betty Page movie. It’s CL’s fascination, not mine (I should note for the people that know her that she — at least to her admission — doesn’t get the bondage or shoe thing, either, those she does have a huge collection of twink magazines).

There’s a weird split level to eroticism. On the one hand, the basic elements that are on display — fetishistically speaking, at least — are still considered fringe at best, and mental disturbances at worst. On the other, you look at those old photos and films — the porn of our fathers and grandfathers — and it all seems ridiculously tame.

And you have to wonder, in a hundred years, will the men and women look back and call us puritanical, due to things that we considered dirty or hot?

And if they do, how far will their world of porn advanced?

That thought alone makes me need a bath. Or maybe a Brillo pad for my brain.

It seems that every twenty years or so, the government takes a turn for the ultraconservative, and launches (or threatens) investigations into high-profile pornographers, trying to scare the rest of the nation into complacency. And it’s always at times like these that you can gauge how far out there porn has gone; in the fifties, it was Bettie Page. In the seventies, Larry Flynt and Hustler. In the nineties, Rob Black and the gonzo videos.

You still look around and see a lot of things that are verboten — not just the illegal things, like bestiality and pedophilia, but scat, or the faux rape tapes, or bukkake. I want to side with the deviants, and generally do — I’m very anti-anyone telling me what i can or can’t do, and I have no interest in controlling others. Fine; I’m a Libertarian. But as long as it’s not hurting anyone — well, unless they want to be hurt — then by god, let it be seen and heard and acted out ’til the cows come home.

But I can see the opposite side of things, can make out the slippery slope that exists on the deviant’s side of the road (falling and falling and falling at the same exponentially steep degree as the one on the moralists’ side). Acceptance of any behavior outside of the middle lane is edging ever closer to the extreme, just the same as prohibiting it.

And so I’m left at some point thinking about Harrison Bergeron, and communism and dictatorships, and how certain segments of the population would be thrilled to no end to see a religious clampdown on immoral behaviors and whatnot.

They never seem to think about the fact that they could end up on the wrong side of the dictatorship.

Hypocrites.

I think they could all stand a good fuck. Maybe with a ball gag and four inch stilettoes.