Free speech is never free When I visited China in 2012, there were already chain grocery stores popping up everywhere. Curiously, next to the checkout lanes out front there were, among other things, vibrators and other adult novelties - of the small and discreet variety. This, in a grocery store - not an adult novelty store. In one of the hotels which I stayed a night, on the counter next to the packaged snacks and beverages placed in the room (which you pay for if consumed), there were packets of lube, complete with a Chinese/English bilingual labeling that included the word “sex”. And yet, pornography (and prostitution) is outlawed and treated the same way as illegal narcotics in China, on account of the government’s disapproval of such expressions of “lewdness”.In America on the other hand, pornography and sexual expression is more or less protected as a form of art and free speech, as long as no minors are involved. But that doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically better. Most porn available in America freely displays violence against the female gender, whether it be outright physically attacking them or, much more commonly, having them appear as unwilling and/or too willing, with little to no discussion or expression whatsoever of consent. Playing submissive or domineering roles is what people pay to see, even though it’s more than possible to create realistic depictions of two people falling in love and having sex. In other words, two people who actually care about each other, and display this very clearly.And this isn’t just in porn. Somehow we want to see people being humiliated, tortured, beaten up, blown up. We want to see power plays. We want to see people being made helpless, defenseless - because our own world has been made too bleak, too stagnant, and we’ve become so desensitized by loud, bright, flashing media and drugs that promise instant gratification. We want things to be instant, but we forget that emotions only exist through time - existence only exists through time. But we want things to be fast. We no longer care about taking the time to have a great orgasm; to be so intimate with someone and love them so much that it hurts - no, we just react to social media posts that have these words in them. It’s time to change. Intimacy, true intimacy, is what will separate us in the end.
