The article nearly comes to the correct diagnosis, and then swings completely in the wrong direction:
NYT wrote:porn is also just a product — something made and distributed and sold, and therefore subject to regulation and restriction if we so desire.
The belief that it should not be restricted is a mistake; the belief that it cannot be censored is a superstition. Law and jurisprudence changed once and can change again, and while you can find anything somewhere on the internet, making hard-core porn something to be quested after in dark corners would dramatically reduce its pedagogical role, its cultural normalcy, its power over libidos everywhere.
The first sentence, that porn "is also just a product" is where everything lives and dies.
The fact is that all labour alienates the individual from themselves, each other, and the product that they produce.
This "product" is a symptom of capitalist exploitation.
In a similar vein, when the Bolsheviks took power in Russi Kollentai demanded that the prostitutes be considered part of the working class. Something that Lenin agreed to and that Luxemburg famously objected to in Germany.
Kollentai wrote:bourgeois science and its academics love to prove to the world, that prostitution is a pathological phenomenon, i.e. that it is the result of the abnormalities of certain women, just as some people are criminal by nature, some women, it is argued, are prostitutes by nature. Regardless of where or how such women might have lived, they would have turned to a life of sin. Marxists and the more conscientious scholars, doctors and statisticians have shown clearly that the idea of “inborn disposition” is false. Prostitution is above all a social phenomenon; it is closely connected to the needy position of woman and her economic dependence on man in marriage and the family. The roots of prostitution are m economics. Woman is on the one hand placed in an economically vulnerable position, and on the other hand has been conditioned by centuries of education to expect material favours from a man in return for sexual favours – whether these are given within or outside the marriage tie. This is the root of the problem. Here is the reason for prostitution.
The capitalists will have in both way in prostitution and not; in porn and not; in taking out the trash and not. They will dimly pretend that the world is equal for everyone and when this proves not to be the case, they'll blame drugs, abuse, or anything else for why their thesis is incorrect.
But it is only incorrect because Marxism
is correct.
Liberate humanity from its alienation by destroying captaialism and the problem will be resolved.
Find liberal talking points in which to chat with other liberals about liberalism and liberalism will be maintained.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!