At the Ford Hall event tonight I learned about this amazing event that used to happen at Brandeis. It was called Dionysis Night and here is the deal: 100 students, twice a semester, naked on the Great Lawn, watching porn.
Brandeis was awesome! Why can’t we do this now?
Hi Scott,
While I agree with your overall sentiment that porn is best when it features empowered women, I just wanted you to be aware that you said a few things in your post that not only contradict this sentiment but that also greatly offend me.
To purport the stereotype that most porn actresses “were sexually abused in their childhood” is to deny the fact that women are sexual beings too. I’m not attempting to minimize the abuse that I’m sure many adult actresses did face, but I’m just saying that it’s short-sighted to think that no women went into porn because they are just as horny as you presume men to be. Which brings me to your next statement, that men in porn are “superhuman.” I’m assuming you are saying this because many porn actors have impressive stamina and whatnot. Sooo when a dude is hypersexual that makes him “superhuman” but when a woman is hypersexual, then she must be an abuse victim?
I am by no means dismissing our current standard of porn, which I do find inexcusably degrading. I just want you to think more about what your idea of female empowerment really is, beyond just a “boner killer”
Our generation is far too cautious, self-conscious, and fundamentally forged in a hyper-private lifestyle wholly unsuited to social life (including any communal event in which people are WEARING clothing) for anything as, um, “emancipatory,” as this to be conceivable. Maybe in the Sixties, sure, people didn’t giggle nervously at the thought of exposing themselves to a crowd of their peers and sitting through an hour (or more) of porn, maybe even engaging in public sex. But is that really what we want to aspire to – to revive a specific bygone ethos of the social “thrill” that has lost its luster and appeal for all but a few nostalgists? What is creative, active, or “radical” about measuring ourselves by standards that have withered and effectively disappeared in the space of a generation? Resuscitating such mindless rituals, taken out of their cultural context, would be both inappropriate and futile as a step taken in the advance “forward – to the fuckfest” (as it was so elegantly put).
Let’s not watch porn, and not be naked on the great lawn instead.
No i am in favor of watching porn on the great lawn, if we mean it, like Rivka says. We can’t just do it to be like oh look at me, I am watching porn on the great lawn. Firstly I would like to get into it.
Secondly I hope that the porn we make features no oppression, but instead is a a break from repression. I would like the women to be empowered otherwise it is a major boner killer.
If we can watch porn on the great lawn and it can feature women who are empowered and were not sexually abused in their childhood, and men who are are not superhuman then this sounds like great thing for MSA, Hillel, and BCF to host!
I think this is dumb. If there were 100 Brandeis students naked on the great lawn, id HOPE we’d be able to do something muuuuch more creative than sit around watching porn. That isn’t liberating, radical, creative, or exciting. It’s passive and boring and screams “look at me!” to cover up the fact that there’s absolutely no reason to look. To deserve the name “Dionysis” and– i HOPE– the enthusiasm of Brandies students, this event would have to involve wild antics and creative expression, which is totally missing from the soul-less, desperate cry for attention described in this post.
I have other issues with this event, too, like my belief that sexuality loses all of its eroticism, excitement, and, well… SEXINESS when we are all expected, by overwhelming majority pressure, to make it INCREDIBLY public and leave nothing private. For some reason, students today think that privacy is some scary cave of repression, and that liberation means everything becomes public. All to the contrary! Maintaining some sacred private place for certain aspects of individual sexuality is what makes it HOT; brining everything out into the public kills it.
Then there’s the issue of porn itself. I don’t favor censorship, but there are at least a few good reasons not to be so enthusiastic about pornography, and many of our activist friends would probably believe that supporting porn is somehow opposed to social justice.
But those last two points are secondary. The main thing is that this event is passive, immature, and UNCREATIVE! Come on, Brandeisians! We can TOTALLY do better….
lol
SSIS plz help this happen! Non-normative free pr0n for the collectivized non-normalized non-homogenized independent masses (as if they ever were otherwise)!
Until the Rev. let’s orgy all the time.
TO THE ORGIASTIC
FUTURE
FORWARD – TO THE FUCKFEST