Media Bites – Guitar Hero & Porn

Rikk, if you looked at anything else we have posted or monitored, you will see that most of our media work has been about war coverage, election coverage, watchdogging the corporate world, exposing racism, and enviromental destruction. The last Media Bites we did was about bogus health care ads that were critical of the President. Having said that, I don’t think that questioning pornographers is a waste of time, especially since pornography causes harm both in the production of it and the consumption of it. I object to the exploitation of women as much as I do the racist policies that drive US foreign policy.

It is too bad that you jumped to such a conclusion about who we are and what we do because of one deconstructed commercial.

John, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I didn’t say that all production and consumption of porn causes harm, I said that harm is caused in production and consumption, both physical and psychological harm. If you wanted to explore that a bit more I would suggest you read Robert Jensen’s “Getting Off” or watch the documentary the Price of Pleasure.

Secondly, the work that GRIID does has not singled out the sex-trade industry, rather we see it as part of a larger aspect of exploitation or oppression, whether that be of workers, people of color, immigrants, children, women or non-human life. I think that hardly qualifies us as prudes. What we try to do with our media analysis is develop a culture of critical thinking, and we always try to apply a race, class and gender analysis to the work, thus we have tackled corporations, governmental & religious institutions, militarism, white supremacy and sexism.

GRIID has no religious affiliation and to imply that we do because we challenge the mainstreaming of a capitalist enterprise like pornography seems a bit off the mark. We certainly don’t care what you do in privacy and we are not advocating censorship, rather a critical look at the images and messages of media.

Lastly, in response to your suggestion to improve and expand porn culture is what the porn industry is always doing and since it is a capitalist enterprise some of the US-based porn producers are going to third world countries to use their cheap labor of women and children for production. This makes complete sense from a business point of view, minimize your overhead, cut costs, and have access to a large population of economically depressed people who will do most anything to feed their families. Therefore, I find it difficult to comprehend the benefit of expanding porn culture.