login
mon posted: Mon 2019-05-27 14:04:21 tags: n/a
Not only does the county library system not lend DVDs, they don't even participate in Kanopy. Emailed my county commissioner to inquire "what would it take" to change these policies.

A few months back, from a BusinessInsider article, I learned that Amazon selectively bans erotica offerings. So, for example, Ken Follett has some modest literary cred, so his "Kingsbridge" series flies despite its recurring theme and graphic scening of sexual assault. For that matter, de Sade's "Justine" or "120 Days of Sodom" get Kindle editions; and smut doesn't get much smuttier than de Sade. Every taboo - incest, rape, bestiality - is explored. Likewise, Xaviera Hollander's advocacy for bestiality in "The Happy Hooker" is hardly central, but it's notoriously there, and for whatever reason, it is immune to Amazon's ban-stick. And a thousand and one mediocre "bodice rippers" where "her body betrays her" ...all good. But contemporary titles like "Taken by the Werewolf", from enthusiastic, if amateurish, authors... not so much.

Amazon originally held out against censorship for quite a while, and when they started compromising, it was to wash their hands of a particularly heinous pedophile predation manual. Exclusion of politically hateful material like holocaust denial, race-supremacist apologetics, and quack medicine woo soon followed.

* * *

I've been turning the proposition over in my mind periodically for months now, maybe a year - "feelings are always real and valid". This may be an innocuous stance if you assume everyone who hears it is essentially healthy and emotionally intelligent, but it's not the kind of blanket affirmation I want circulating in the world as it is.

So what is the significance of feelings being fundamentally "real and valid" if the intensity and flavor of that experience we call "a feeling" is distorted by trauma, and the resulting action manifestly irrational? To someone recovering from an environment where feelings were chronically invalidated, "all feelings are real and valid" may be profound. But what's much more generally useful is the ability to say "not only can I can name my feelings - I can identify whether my feelings are pertinent, appropriate, and proportional to the here-and-now; and I can moderate my actions in response to my feelings here and now to improve long-term consequences."

All of which is not to say emotional invalidation is uncommon or that I've never been guilty of it. It is not a profound thing to acknowledge that feelings are intractably real and valid; but it is a profound skill to accompany others through the process of sorting out emotional knots.

Good Men Project: Emotional (in)validation