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Originally Posted by punkworld
This is one of the oddest little threads I have ever seen.
The reason that there is a connection in the words is because there actually IS a connection between normal pornography and child pornography. Materials depicting sexually explicit acts made for the purpose of sexual gratification are pornography, period.
Attempts to change language in ways like this are both futile and absurd. Just look at the word fucking: whether you fuck a consenting adult woman, a prostitute, a dog, a fresh apple pie, a 2 year old, a corpse, a tied up lesbian or the Lord Jesus Christ himself, it's still fucking. It can be normal, obscene, abusive, delightful, harmful, bizarre, forced, consensual, disgusting, deranged, illegal or just plain boring. Still, it's fucking and nothing else.
Someone said in this thread that child pornography is a subgenre of pornography, and indeed it is. It is important to point out, however, that what we do is also a subgenre of pornography: pornography which only contains consenting adults.
Should butchers object because the meat a cannibal serial killer strips from his victims and eats is also called meat?
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You're in Europe, right?
I ask because your post reflects the luxury of a detachment from consequence we simply don't enjoy here in the US. This is NOT a theoretical, semantical, "intellectually stimulating" discussion we're having here - this is for keeps. I don't care to partake in an argument about technicalities of language. "Shampoo" is a Hindi word -- who gives a fuck, I still go to Walgreen's for mine. It's MY use and the connotations and associations THIS culture heap on the word that determine its MEANING FOR ME. The simple truth is the use of the same word ("pornography") in both circumstances is HURTING US. It contributes to our continuing legal marginalization. It operates on the collective cultural psyche. This isn't happening in college lecture halls, where the confused get a chance to raise their hand and ask the sorts of questions that might resolve clarity from complexity. Please don't argue with us on this point, unless you are prepared to convey your technical argument in layman's language to as many Americans everyday as are reading, hearing, and THINKING the association is real, simply because the terms have been so long conjoined.
Let's all of us please begin to distinguish mental masturbation thread-fodder from things that REALLY matter.
2HP