A long time ago (in blog years) I wrote a post titled 'The Conservative Party's war on Porn,' in which I rambled for a few paragraphs about the Conservative British government, headed by David Cameron and then by Theresa May, making numerous attempts to limit, restrict, and control the production, distribution and availability of internet pornography, and how it's a slippery slope of the government slowly taking away people's freedom to consume media. Well, it's over a year later, and me from back then would have hoped that Theresa May's government would be concerning itself with the largest political event this country has seen in decades. But instead Brexit is at a standstill, and Theresa May is proving herself again and again to be too weak to really get anywhere against the European Union. It's already clear that she also has no clue how to properly manage her priorities, wasting time with a pointless and disastrous (and hilarious) election, and attempting to implement the same intensely dubious policies that made me hate this party to begin with. This will be a much broader post than before though, I'll be talking about the Conservatives, but also about violent media, feminism, governmental control of the internet, the influences religion has on society, and porn of course, it'll be really long, so buckle up.
First up, some backstory, before the election results were in, I was expecting the Conservatives to win a bigger majority in parliament, since the closest thing to a viable alternative was Jeremy Corbin, everyone's favourite socialist, I didn't think it was going to be a contest. I still thought they'd win, despite the Conservative manifesto, a cancerous mess of proposals and policies that I'm sure Supreme Leader May thought she could get away with while simultaneously kicking the Labour party while it was down in a landslide victory. That didn't happen however, as the election turned out to be one huge, glorious own goal for May, who lost the party majority that the Conservatives already only barely had, leaving the British parliament in a tight stop, and crushing Supreme Leader May's dreams. As you may or may not have noticed, I'm not a big fan of Theresa May, the reasons for this are numerous, but chief among them is the simple fact that I do not trust her; I never have, it seemed iffy enough when a remainer became the head of Britain's Brexit government, but even before that, I've never seen her as truly having the needs of the nation as a major priority, she's sneaky, Machiavellian, and borderline authoritarian.
My outlook changed slightly with the election, as I no longer saw her as simply borderline authoritarian, but full on authoritarian. Sure, there was the myriad of plans that were miserly and stupid, like free school breakfasts and lifting the ban on fox hunting, which no doubt turned off a bunch of parents and animal lovers, and the unfortunately nicknamed dementia tax, which was an abject disaster, but none of that bothered me more than the internet policies, which were monstrous. This was supposedly a response to the rising threat of terrorism, but I highly, highly doubt that having regulatory control of the internet would make that threat just go away, I said this before about the Investigatory Powers Bill, terrorism is just an excuse. The plans included, but were not limited to, banning the development and distribution of secure software, which sounds real secure don't it, going after closed platforms like game consoles and mobile phones, and, my personal favourite for its sheer lunacy, confiscating foreign nationals' smartphones while they're in the country. You don't have to be a genius to see the holes in these plans; taking people's smartphones is absurd and banning secure software and closed networks is a perfect climate for surveillance, interception and cyber-attack, but it gets worse, as impossible as that may seem.
The regulatory power and intentional crippling of security would effectively grant the Conservative government complete power over the internet, which is more than a little unnerving. Like I've said before, many times, government should not have the power to control or regulate its citizens' consumption of media, though both the Conservatives and the Labour party have been doing that since the days of Tony Blaire and his hate laws. But with the power that the manifesto proposed, it would spread beyond what people can and can't say, extending to what people can see, which is where we finally get to the topic of pornography. Over the years, as I rather insufficiently recalled in my last post on this subject, the British Government seems to really take issue with pornography, and while it has since the dawn of online porn's massive availability, I focused exclusively on the current Conservative Government's puritanical pearl clutching and efforts to kill porn in the UK. I will now outline my stance on the matter of pornography for the sake of clarity, in my opinion, porn is neither a benefit nor a detriment to society, but simply another industry, like books, movies and games, it's a product, though one that, due to its inherently sexual nature and the awkwardness surrounding it, receives far less attention in the public consciousness.
Which is precisely why, as I said last time, it's bound to be mommy state's first target. The public at large doesn't really discuss porn, since it's a bit of a taboo, but what that means is if/when the government makes a move to destroy the porn menace, while smaller voices will speak up, there with be no major resistance from the wider public, after all, it's only porn, and the only people who watch porn are sad, lonely basement dwellers, right? The threat here is that when mommy state has the power to take one thing away, they will inevitably start going after other industries and mediums, it's a slippery slope argument for sure, and porn isn't banned just yet, it's just getting a notoriously censorious organisation put in charge of its regulation, but porn would just be the start. In this case, how long would it be before they target the corruptive force of violence in the media; shooters and action games would have to be censored and regulated because they encourage violence, but the rabbit hole would just keep going deeper from there; for instance, in driving and racing games you can drive irresponsibly, in RPG's you can make morally dubious decisions, and in a certain popular puzzle game there's cute little talking gun turrets, once you can justify censoring one corruptive force, you'll inevitably be able to justify censoring them all. This would be the inevitable end of government control of the internet, China style censorship and regulation that would result in a far smaller, far more restricted internet, where the Government has control over media distribution and consumption. YouTube would be heavily policed or gone because of the Alt Right, Twitter and Facebook would be gone because of all the hate speech, search engine results would be heavily filtered, and porn would simply not exist, because it's dirty and dangerous to the kids, as is Call of Duty and Marvel movies, because they're violent. And at that point, who knows where it would stop; smoking can cause cancer, alcohol can fuck up your organs, and high fat and sugar foods can cause obesity, these are areas that the government is already making moves in. It really becomes a matter of how much freedom the state thinks it can trust its citizens with, since their agency might lead to them making bad decisions, and that's charitably assuming that their intentions for such authoritarianism are good.
Yes I sound like a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy nut right now, but going back to my thoughts on Theresa May, I do not trust her, though I would absolutely trust her to find justifications for ridiculous and tyrannical policies, like, for example, using terrorism as a justification for taking over the internet, and my distrust of her would make me more than comfortable to believe that her scheming wouldn't stop with the conquest of the internet. This has been made painfully observable in just the last few days as of me writing this, with Canadian activist Lauren Southern being detained and denied access to Britain on suspicion of terrorism. As absurd as it sounds that a young, sexy libertarian from Canada can even be considered a terror suspect, the apparent reason is her previously distributing 'racist' flyers stating that Allah is a gay god, like that has anything at all to do with racism and isn't a blatant admission that some ideas are above mockery in this country. Not to mention how it looks that British border police are arresting right-wing activists, given how they treat right-wing activists like Tommy Robinson within the borders, I'm firmly dissuaded from believing that there's no political bias involved. The justification is a moral panic; Lauren Southern wants to spread racism against a religion, Theresa May has tried to exploit hysteria about terrorism to push dangerous online policies, David Cameron, throwing in a twist, attempted to justify his porn policies by trying to cause a moral panic *cough* "normalising sexual violence against women... poisonous to the young people" *cough*. And this isn't unique to Britain either, with both major parties in America trying to use the moral panic around guns to push their own agendas, be it trying to amend or repeal the second amendment, or using it to push for censorship in the media. But when it comes to guns and violent media, there's a correlation causation conundrum, school shooters may play violent video games, but that may simply be incidental, and omit contributing factors that take far greater precedence, such as a person's mental or emotional wellbeing, mental or personality disorders, and external factors like abuse and stress. It also fails to consider that violent video games are played all over the world, but shootings are significantly more frequent in the United States, which has more relaxed gun laws compared to nations like Britain, implying that it's much more of a gun issue than it is a video game issue.
Getting back on topic, I did a bit of info digging, as is only right when trying to be assertive on a topic, and what I found was genuinely surprising. In secular, developed parts of the world like America, Britain and Europe, Pornography has generally more relaxed laws around it in comparison to more theocratic and or less developed parts of the world, like Africa and the Middle East, where porn is illegal in most nations, again though, we face a correlation causation conundrum. Here's the conundrum, and I included a couple of world stat maps for visual reference, with the bottom one showing Suffrage by country and year. There would appear to be a correlation in these maps; more secular, developed nations like America, Britain and the European nations, who reached suffrage earlier and rank higher in gender equality than African and the Middle Eastern nations, also have the most relaxed pornography laws. The cause of this could be many things, one such possibility is that this reflects the development of liberal and egalitarian values across the globe with regards to women. Meanwhile in less enlightened parts of the world, like the highly conservative and theocratic Islamic states, women's liberties are severely restricted, and coincidentally, so is access to pornography. What this implies is that as a nation becomes less religious, like a lot of western nations are doing, traditions and beliefs of modesty become more relaxed, and beauty starts to be embraced more hedonistically, in other words, people like looking at naked people, and god can no longer tell them that they can't.
The modern world is slowly losing its faith, to a heathenous non-believer like myself, that's a good thing; old, unchallengeable ideas and structures being phased out and replaced by new ideas in a new, more scientific and technological world. The problem that losing religion comes with is the loss of absolute morality, among other things; while faiths like Christianity and Islam provide rigid, god-ordained codes on what is good and bad, the atheistic mindset of there being no god delegitimises said god-ordained codes. Unlike what hardcore believers say however, people not believing in god doesn't completely destroy society, since we can all generally agree that things like murder and theft are wrong, ideas born from religion that have since been passed down through culture and enshrined in law. But unfortunately, nature is violent, and humans are animals. To compare this to something contemporary, in The Walking Dead, society has been completely destroyed by a zombie apocalypse, inherited religious morals like murder and theft are pushed to their extremes as people fight to survive, and in season 8, there is a war going on, between a collection of survivor colonies that are trying to uphold pre-apocalypse morals and values, and the Saviors, a colony that has abandoned many pre-apocalypse values in favour of a cult of personality surrounding a violent and autocratic warlord. At the core of the war is a clash of ideologies; with Alexandria, Hilltop and the Kingdom all still holding onto a pre-apocalypse societal model, and the Saviors structuring their society into a rigid hierarchy, with Negan and his inner circle at the top, and other colonies that they have enslaved through violence and fear at the bottom. This is common in post-apocalypse stories; violent autocratic systems of governance rising to power, might making right, with the apocalypse restarting a survival of the fittest mentality. And among the survivors, there will always be loyalists; not just people who group around the strongest and fittest to ensure their own survival, but in the case of systems like the Saviors, perhaps to also find a sense of order in the chaos of nature, a guiding hand, or rather a barbed baseball bat, to help them make sense of the world.
There was a point to that little digression, I swear. While humanity is made equally in the eyes of the law, or at least they should be, they are not and will never be made equally in the eyes of nature, there will always be strong and weak, there will always be leaders and followers. This is where religion, and eventually modern ideological movements like Feminism come into play. A desire to make sense of chaos is one of the reasons Religions have so much appeal; they provide answers, as well as providing absolute morality. In this sense, ideologies like Feminism are modern religions; as they provide answers that make sense of the world, although in the case of feminism, those answers almost never make sense, because like religion before it, it has a habit of getting cause and effect mixed up. Feminists, for example, see the discrepancy in average earnings between men and women and assume that this is by design; the pay gap, they go on the assumption that it's by design for the same reason that a creationist assumes that the human body was designed, they believe there is a higher power. The key difference here however is that in the case of creationists, that power is a benevolent god, while in the case of feminists, that power is a malevolent, oppressive system; the Patriarchy, but both groups are doing the same thing, looking at something that doesn't appear to have a natural reason for being, and therefore inferring that the reason is not natural. Ignorance plays a big part in this, for obvious reasons; with both groups using confirmation bias to support their conclusions. But there is another sense in which Feminism is a religion, and that is, of course, morality, which is where Feminism goes from stupid to sinister.
Feminism, like Christianity, has encoded in its core beliefs a system of morality. Feminism, like Christianity, has an enemy. The Patriarchy, by the feminist definition, is a gender-based hierarchy that values men over women, and in which men have most, if not all the power. Feminism has, however, become a joke on the internet over the last few years, as their version of Satan has been repeatedly and mercilessly refuted; there is no such thing as the Patriarchy, as a system that values men more than women would never allow for such a huge discrepancy in workplace fatalities, homelessness and violent crime victimisation, let alone grant women the right to vote and run for office. And since it's very creation, Feminism has held, if not been completely built upon anti-male sentiment, taking the social justice approach that states that the oppressed can hate their oppressors, and that men are the oppressors, thus it's okay to hate men, like this lovely pair of cunts protesting Father's Day. In this oppressor-oppressed system, women are naturally the oppressed, and face all sorts of injustices at the hands of society, which is where feminist morality is rooted, things such as the dreaded male gaze, the immoral act of men liking sexy women, which is where Anita Sarkeesian's push for feminism in gaming is rooted. Men like sexy women, but this is objectification, dehumanising women for the pleasure of men. And hence, in Sarkeesian's mind, sexy women in video games is wrong, as is depicting men in powerful or dominant roles, as they enforce "harmful" and "problematic" gender norms in the "presumed straight male player". This positively poisonous mentality naturally spills over to other medias, films, books, and even music, and if it's morally wrong to portray women as sexy and to portray men as powerful and dominant, because sexy women is objectification, and maleness is toxic, that effectively makes Pornography, an industry built entirely on sexual desire on appeal, the literal manifestation of evil.
There is another thing Feminism has in common with religion, and that's its ability to influence politics. The ideology preys of the good intentions of people around it by trying to secure a monopoly on ideas such as gender equality, after all, you want women to be equal, right? But that's only what the dictionary says Feminism is about, as I said before, for decades now, Feminism has been a distinctly anti-male ideology; proclaiming that all men are sexist and that they need to sit with their legs together on public transport because their anatomy is sexist, lest we forget the absolutely abhorrent Feminist beliefs that all men are potential rapists and abusers, and that men are never victims of anything ever, never mind all the homelessness, domestic abuse perpetrated by women, and that in countries like mine, it's legally impossible to convict women of rape, because equality. So when feminism uses the goodwill of the normies to get itself into high places like politics and industry, that toxic mentality can start doing some serious damage; like not funding abuse shelters for men, enforcing gender equity policies that throw meritocracy out of the window and breed mediocrity, and spew out propaganda about "toxic masculinity," about manspreading and mansplaining and using questionable or outright false statistics to make the genders afraid of each other. Their Feminist puritanism naturally therefore starts to spread to media policy; which usually ends in censorship, yay. You can no longer show women who are weak, feminine, sexually appealing or subordinate, as that would be sexist and immoral, meanwhile you also get strongly discouraged from showing men as strong, masculine and in a leadership role, because that promotes harmful, patriarchal, misogynistic and bla bla bla. And again, if portraying women as sexually appealing and feminine is immoral, then you're bound to think that porn is the worst thing in existence, and if you're a feminist activist or politician who can influence policy, there's no limit to how far you can spread the cancer.
In the past, it was religion that tried to strangle porn, because it was against the will of god to indulge in the pleasure of human beauty and sexual desire. But the rise of the internet has led to an explosion in availability of all kinds of products and medias, a product of more enlightened and technological world. But with the decline of religion came a loss of divine morality, and a spiritual vacuum that was always going to end up being filled, be it by another religion, or by a new belief system built upon a similar framework to religion. In the secular western world, that vacuum came to be filled by progressive ideologies, one such being Feminism, an ideology every bit as hostile to pornography for remarkably similar reasons; because they too believe that indulging in sexual desire is immoral, though because of Patriarchy rather than the word of god. Feminism is also very good at infiltration and has managed to infest numerous industries and implement policies that sate their beliefs, while feeding on the goodwill of everyday people. This scheming isn't unique to Feminism however, as authoritarian politicians are everywhere, ones who have their own agendas and beliefs, and will use any justification to push their agendas at every turn; censoring media, banning journalists from entering the country on politically motivated grounds, increasing their own power, and targeting industries that they deem immoral and corruptive. One such politician is our current PM, Theresa May, whose grossly authoritarian and miserly policies cost her party their majority in parliament, a much-deserved self-inflicted wound. Her priorities are backwards in the age of Brexit, as like the last few PMs before her, she's out to control the citizenry's consumption of media, and sees Porn as an easy target thanks to the public apprehension surrounding it, and an obvious target in a new age of feminist and progressive puritanism, of which I highly doubt she isn't a firm believer. The AgeID system may not be a ban, but it's a policy that, once in place, will be there forever, and will inevitably be expanded upon in the future, it's just another step towards that ban, a ban that would be a victory for censorship, and the start of very long, very dark road.
Now, assuming you've made it this far, you may think this incredibly long screed to be a stroke of genius, or the ramblings of a maniac; one deeply delusional and paranoid, and who thinks that the Government wants to delete his digital spankbank. If you think that of me, I'm fine with that, but my intention is to be honest, right or wrong, about what I think of the war on pornography. Really, it's not a war on porn at all, but a war against the open consumption of digital media, which I why it should worry you as it does me, because the tendrils of censorship are always looking for new things to strangle, and it's reaching would never end with the destruction of porn. As usual though, feel free to disagree, and thanks for reading.
Rampage's opening is not what I was expecting, but it opens up an idea that I think the film could have done more with. The opening is basically the last 20 minutes or so of last year's Life, you know, that film that scared me and my friends utterly witless. For this and another scene in the first act, it almost looked as though they were going for a horror vibe with the film, first with a space station being destroyed by a mutated lab rat, then with a squad of soldiers being wiped out in a forest by Ralph (the wolf.) These two scenes aren't remarkable when viewed as horror, they rely a bit too much on the good old trick of loud audio cues every time something happens, but this isn't a horror, so that's me projecting onto the film, rather than looking at what it does have. Right out of the gate, the film presents a pair of likable characters in Davis and George; Dwayne Johnson is basically playing Dwayne Johnson, and that's neither surprising, nor a bad thing from the right point of view, but the friendship he has with George is surprisingly well done, or better done than the relationship with Chris Pratt and his raptors at least. George is no Caesar, but the scenes in the film where he isn't out of his mind on the rampage virus present a very funny, very vulgar guy with a believable and kind of sweet friendship with Davis. The obligatory backstory scene that provides George's origins is expectedly ham-fisted, but it does at least explain how a Primatologist knows how to kill things, which obviously becomes useful in the film's finale. Naomi Harris' character is easily the least memorable lead in the film, as her job seems purely to be delivering exposition, which always makes for a compelling character. And then there's Negan, and I don't mean that as a Joke, Jeffrey Dean Morgan's character in this film is Negan, or rather what would happen if Negan was a cowboy, which also isn't a joke. He was probably my favourite character in the film, but I can imagine that if you hated him in The Walking Dead, you'll be less fond of Jeffrey Dean Morgan in this film than I. So far then, that's a serviceable line up, two likable actors falling comfortably into their respective typecasts, and Naomi Harris just kind of being there, but for me film really took a turn for the worse with its villain; Wyden, but that's a point that needs further expansion. 
Easily the biggest two issues that bog this movie down are a plot that makes no sense, and an inconsistent and wonky tone. This is a monster movie, in the same vein as films like King Kong or Godzilla, incidentally two films from which the Rampage video games take influence. The issue however is that this film's plot is really dumb, complete with a sinister organisation doing illegal experiments, a hyper corporate, morally empty CEO villain, and an action hero turned zoologist becoming man's last hope against giant monsters. That villain really does hurt the film in the long run, as even by this film's own standards, she's absurd. She so blatantly villainous, in fact stupidly so, being the CEO of a major company, and also thinking that putting millions of lives at risk by field testing your new bioweapon is a good idea. She even comes complete with a dim-witted minion, and it derails the film every time it cuts to her. The film establishes a timeline of us inventing genetic editing, which can, from the right point of view, explain away a few of this film's absurdities, like how these monsters grew so big, so fast, and how Ralph and Lizzie (the crocodile) look and act nothing like their uninfected, real world counterparts. But then there's things like the zoologist who knows how to operate an Attack Helicopter's weapons and literally can't die, not even being slowed down with a bullet in him, or the super villain whose plan is so stupid that the only thing missing is a volcano hideout. The problem this presents is tone; the film is very much like Pacific Rim: Uprising in the sense that it foregoes a compelling story for mindless action, but like that film, it doesn't commit to style or substance, the story is executed sloppily and nonsensically, and it's not as cool as it wants to be in the action. I said before that this film is in the same vein as Godzilla and King Kong, but absent is the substance of Godzilla, this film has no grand metaphors for contemporary societal fears or ominous, Lovecraftian undertones like the 1954 and 2014 films, nor does it have the adventurousness of Kong, and if was going for style, again, Pacific Rim could run rings around it. This film lacks the flash of a film like Pacific Rim, and without a compelling story, the film's biggest blessings become its typecast mains, and while they're fine, the film ultimately comes across as forgettable. 
