Lenin's Tomb & Noam Chomsky on pornography

international | rights, freedoms and repression | other press Tuesday July 29, 2008 08:32 by anti-war activist

An interesting story just gone up on Lenin's Tomb. What do people think: are Chomsky and Lenin's Tomb right? Are we too worried about not being seen to be puritanical?

Are we too worried about not being seen to be puritanical? Or is Chomsky bending the stick to far on this one and in danger of ending up on the same side as the prudes, the authoritations and the religious right?

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/07/dont-ban-this-fi....html

"It is one thing to say that pornography should not be banned, that the state cannot intervene in such matters, not least because it would involve them in a necessarily authoritarian logic (in which they get to determine what might be a good, healthy representation of sex or nudity). And one should certainly contextualise pornography in terms of the sex industry as a whole, which entails looking at sex workers as active producers of their own conditions and not mere victims - that means supporting efforts at organising sex workers and resisting the very prurient/puritanical logic that justifies their repression and marginalisation. By all means let us also avoid prudishness, especially on this site. It is the farthest thing from my intention to make anyone feel uncomfortable about their sexuality, or to interrupt anyone's fantasies with stern moralising. But Chomsky's argument has drawn an odd chorus of defensive boos on the internet and in the comments to the post below - how dare he draw attention to the material conditions, the fact that wage labour is not free labour, that choice is not liberty, that the symbolic violence against women is part of a war on women that isn't less bestial because it is eroticised? Where does he get off? Evidently not in the pages of Hustler, the abnormal bastard."

To hear Noam Chomsky in his own words go to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNlRoaFTHuE&feature=related