Undesired vs. Disliked

I've been thinking about some implications of a point from the Confessions post, that men don't feel desired even when we are. So that means we men can't see desire for what it is. Men must either miss it entirely or see it as something else; like being valued for our usefulness. And this makes me wonder if, perhaps, when we men are not desired we percieve that as being less valued, we feel that the woman feels that we are not useful, we feel disliked? Usually I have more weight of personal observation than this when I bring something up; I'm really guessing here. But I think there may be a meaningful overlap between "women who I thought disliked me on first sight" and "women who were not attracted to my type." Maybe some of the time I've confused simple lack of attraction for dislike.

I'm sure that overlap is not all misperception, though. People pick up signals from one's looks about one's views, attitudes, subcultural affiliations, and there's obviously another big overlap between not liking those things about a person and not being physically attracted. I've been told that to women in general, nobody is attractive if the woman dislikes the person, regardless of their looks. Lots of men separate the two to some extent; e.g. when a man was asked about his admiration for the beautiful, scheming, manipulative, amoral and comic-violent character Shampoo in the anime Ranma 1/2, he replied, "I don't want to DATE her." (There's a whole lot of correspondence in me between not liking something about someone and not finding them attractive, but I admit I made sure Google Safe Search was off when I went looking for a Shampoo picture.)

I also suspect there's some wrong-way feedback in there, in terms of automatic extra dislike when we (everybody, not just men) look at people who would be really attractive except for whatever. I think of a certain gorgeous young woman at my last workplace, who was not very competent at her work and also tended to give orders outside her sphere of responsibility. During the time I was there she became even more disliked than her behavior accounted for. A young male friend burst out at one point, "She doesn't get to do this just because she's got big boobs!" Frankly, I think if she had been totally unattractive, she wouldn't have gotten as strong a reaction. I've observed the same reaction in women discussing a conventionally attractive man who was the wrong type.

Fits and spurts

Like so many bloggers, I get inspiration in fits and spurts. I try to smooth it out by putting off the last inspirations in the queue, but then by the time I get to them I'm no longer inspired to write about them.

Also blogging related, my email address is now visible in my profile. I thought it was there all along.

Glass houses

Kinky people, I think, are pretty reluctant in general to criticise other people's kinks. That's probably a good thing most of the time. I personally think kinks are really only open to criticism when they leak or overlap into the rest of life; when they don't, I think it's generally a matter of taste. Often, however, it seems to me that people give something a pass just because it's flying a kink flag; e.g. sexual assault goes unrecognized because the genders are the same, and being upset would be homophobic. I've been pretty vocal here about my objections to some kinds of dommes.

Two kinks which I do not object to, but have little or no taste for, are sadism and forced feminization (little and no, respectively). I've just been reading Bitchy Jones's take on forced feminization. She's really fun to read. She correctly recognizes that we shouldn't give something a pass just because it's identified as kink, and makes a pretty ironclad case about why forced feminization is wrong, including this summary:

* Doing housework is humiliating for men
* Men doing housework is exceptional and surely only the domain of exotic sex play
* It's humiliating for a man to be made to do something most women do every damn day. To make it even more humiliating for this MAN he can dress as a WOMAN as well. Well, yes &mdash how humiliating. *For* *me*.
* Femdom is full of misogynistic, archaic, fifties gender role inspired shit.
* No consideration is being given to female sexuality &mdash instead we are supposed to enjoy femdom because it means we don?t have to do all the housework (like other women *do*, apparently) rather than because it TURNS US ON.

OK, this sums up pretty well why forced feminization is not one of my submissive kinks; these things don't resonate with me for exactly the listed reasons. (And also the result would be just plain comical in my case, something like what you'd get with Macho Man Randy Savage in a dress. With apologies to all crossdressers who aren't built for it.)

However, I'm going to defend the practice here. I think the problem with turning this kind of analysis on kink can be quickly summed up by comparing it with BJ's main kink, sadism:

* Doing housework is humiliating for men
- You're hurting people
* Men doing housework is exceptional and surely only the domain of exotic sex play
- You get off on hurting people
* It's humiliating for a man to be made to do something most women do every damn day. To make it even more humiliating for this MAN he can dress as a WOMAN as well. Well, yes &mdash how humiliating. *For* *me*.
- Hurting people is your whole kink
* Femdom is full of misogynistic, archaic, fifties gender role inspired shit.
- Pain hurts
* No consideration is being given to female sexuality &mdash instead we are supposed to enjoy femdom because it means we don't have to do all the housework (like other women *do*, apparently) rather than because it TURNS US ON.
- You are just directly, immediately, unequivocally, obviously, not subtly, not by-implication, not if-this-has-the-stereotype-reinforcing-effect-I-predict, hurting people

Most kink that I've heard of is based on stuff that is inherently unacceptable in ordinary life; and a whole lot of it has roots in some pretty fucked-up stereotypes. Kinks including housework and wearing dresses stand up a hell of a lot better to real-life analysis than, say, BJ's

I want to *decimate* his masculinity (Hey Latin freaks – leave it! I *know*. I’ve fucking masturbated about what decimate *really* means). But I want to be able to see his masculinity as I take it apart.

Neither of them should be subjected to that unless they become real life.

A Man Pole Dancing

Since virtually all my commenters are women, I thought I'd share this video I happened across. Dude's got grace.

Male Pole Dance at Pole Divas -- Training clip # 2

Sorry about the music.

Intimate pictures of Venus - the planet

OK, does anyone else think that the lower right picture looks like the planet's hoo-hah? Or have I just been alone too long?

Lost Dog Returned

My wife took me out to dinner tonight as a thank-you for running down to move the bedframe for her. I always feel a little down after seeing her, kind of a reminder of my failings and loss. On the way home I saw a tiny little dog wandering around a parking lot in the center of town, and pulled in. The dog was a pudgy, scared little Silky Terrier soaked with rain. She had a collar with a phone number, so I called the owner and returned the dog. Now I feel much better.

One-upmanship

Holly said,

Last night I masturbated to orgasm while receiving a backrub.
I have the best possible life.

I can resist mentioning this at Holly's, but I can't resist mentioning it: I bought my wife a wearable "hummingbird" vibrator for her use while I was giving her Swedish massage.

Note-I published a much longer post a few hours before this one; I'm driving my own "big" post off the top.

Confessions

Here's some ways I actually think, sometimes, deep down, that I'm ashamed of and might try to explain but certainly won't defend. They're hard to get over and I think quite a few men think this way, so for reference:

------

The other day my wife called me up to ask me for help moving something; she was receiving a new iron bedframe with headboard and footboard, made of recycled iron fence, (probably pretty cool looking though I didn't get a chance to see it), shipped in a wood box about 6 feet by 6 by 2, and she didn't find out until too late that she had no means of moving it from the lobby of the complex to her apartment. She knew I was out of work and might be available to get it shifted. I headed straight over to her place (about 1/2 hour drive), and got it into her apartment. We chatted for a short time and she seemed very grateful and happy; I excused myself quickly due to my cat allergies (when she got cats is when I really knew it was over), and headed home. Frankly I felt pretty good about myself that I'd cheerfully on a moment's notice do that for the woman that was divorcing me, expecting nothing in return.

That night I had a dream that we reconciled; it turned sexy. So was I really expecting nothing in return? Maybe I was; maybe seeing her and having her be so friendly just raised old feelings. Maybe I wasn't; maybe somewhere in my subconscious I was motivated by the "do nice things for the sexy woman" motive.

Whichever it was, the dream showed me that the old training of my imagination is still in force; she's still the sexiest woman in the world to me. Probably a good thing; there's still several months before the divorce will be final, and I don't want to be seriously looking around yet (hard as that is).

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I don't so much think, or fear, that women don't like sex, that they're the "no sex class"; I'm more likely to think that they don't like sex with men. I remember how Melissa Etheridge used to affect me; of course songs like "The Way I Do" were her singing professionally, but her marvellous presentation made me think that perhaps there was some real meaning to it. Then she came out as a lesbian, and that depressingly resolved the mystery in my mind; there was real feeling, but it was about other women. Deep in my heart I thought, Of course. Now it makes sense. When looking on the Web for women who talk about liking sex, I found lesbian or bi women first. Sometimes women seem to me to be the only sexually attractive entities in the universe, even to other women.

I KNOW this is wrong. I haven't had any particular shortage of experiences that demonstrate the appeal of men in general or me in particular. And there are plenty of women on the Web doing a good job explaining all about the appeal of men. It's flat-out ungrateful of me to continue to feel this way. But still, I know women like men in my head but not my heart. (That, BTW, is what faith means to me; faith is when you know in your heart as well as your head.)

After writing this part, I happened upon Hugo Schwyzer's "Of Never Feeling Hot" via Rogue Bambi's "Vital Bodies" section. There's a lot more said there. Interestingly, I get more compliments than any of the men in my friend group, and making the point much better, Hugo was apparently rated as "America's Hottest Professor". But we both have this deep, difficult to shake feeling that we cannot be truly sexually desireable to women because we are men. I have, like one of the commenters on Hugo's post, felt sexually desireable to a bi man; I have felt valuable to women (as in the frame-moving thing), but never so desireable as when that bi man hit on me.

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Ugh. This one is going to get me in trouble. It's EXTRA wrong. But I'll still explain it, because I think it's a valuable admission.

But thinking about what I said above, I realized that I'm actually sometimes somewhat jealous of women, of what in my imagination is women's privileged position in the world. I feel like I can never be as desired as a woman is. I will never be treated with the kindness and politeness that I offer women, and that doesn't mean just pretty ones. I will always be treated by strangers with the reserve and automatic suspicion designed for the potential rapist (which I totally support and think is the right way for women to behave, in a world full of acquaintance rape).

I've often thought how nice it would be if I could do my life over as a woman. (Virtually all men apparently would like to come back as man.) Now, I feel like a man down to my core. Saying I sometimes feel like a woman in a man's body isn't something that would be a problem here, but I don't feel that at all. There's a big difference, that I think gets lost occasionally, between "It would be great to be X" and "I feel that I am X". Though sometimes I think being a woman would be easier and better, I never think I am or should be one.

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Me saying that I know I'm wrong about some of these isn't meant to muzzle people. If you feel like telling me why I'm insane to be jealous of women's desirability, please go ahead. I expect I'll agree with you; it's a confession not a manifesto.

My kinks driving me toward marriage

Sorry I haven't had much to say recently; a couple of thoughts just came up though.

To me, Christianity is true. I see no reasonable alternative explanation for the available historical accounts other than the resurrection of Jesus. And this forces me to accept things I don't much like, like abstention from sex outside of marriage.

Recently, though, this one has been getting easier; I've been seeing a few reasons to prefer the idea of marriage, or at least a long relationship, before sex.

One is some dommes. The Web is full of nasty, predatory, morally ugly dommes. Looking for porn for my submissive side exposes me to buckets of these. They drip with contempt for their subs, and I am revolted by that. (Note, in their defense, this is apparently what sells best.) I don't want contempt, so I don't want to share my submissive side, other than in this pseudonymous intellectual sense, with anyone I can't trust deeply.

And the other is closely related. It's the stigma of being a male and enjoying submissive play. As far as I can tell, submissive women have it much worse because they are "reinforcing the patriarchy" and "betraying feminism". For a man, though, it's still an insult to imply that he wants submissive sex. And again, that makes me only want to share with the right person.

Other people have already talked about the contempt and stigma and said pretty much everything I'd have to say about it in itself; I only had this little to add about the effect.

Love is not sex

"Love is sex." From Turn Me On by Dirty Old Ann

A couple of minor incidents recently brought up something something that's been on my mind for years.

It's tragic when people faced with any kind of love &mdash affection (storge), charitable love (agape), friendship (phileo), any love except romantic love (eros) &mdash immediately think of sex. Sex is great. My biggest concern in looking for a wife will be whether she matches my sex drive and kinks; my biggest fear is that I will not be able to find that. Sex is the single most important factor in marriage to most men (including myself); and I have reason to believe my sex drive is stronger than most men my age. But there's so much more to love than that.

People seem to be bad at adjusting a point of view; instead they accept or reject points of view in a mutually exclusive way, even if the two are basically compatible. The sexual revolution has betrayed its hippie founders deeply. Free love was supposed to be about more love; by freeing sexual love of jealousy and possessiveness, it intended to allow expressions of love where they couldn't take place before. A noble goal. It has failed grotesquely; jealousy and possessiveness thrive, but often love is afraid to show itself for fear that it will be mistaken for sexual desire. There is freer sex but more restricted love; and any of the serious old-time hippies I've known would reject that trade utterly.

It is harder now for women to express love with female friends, and much harder for men to express love with male friends. When I gave a male friend a back massage, a couple of women present took pictures, with an intimation that they liked the men touching men thing in an erotic way. I think that was a bit off. It's fine that they find the idea of male-male eroticism hot, it's just off when it's one straight man working out knots in another straight man's back. It's creepy like a guy taking pictures of two straight girls hugging and imagining eroticism. People seem to have almost lost comprehension of nonsexual love. A friend once made a joke about me and my female dogs, which I thought was pretty disgusting. It's really pathetic if you can't imagine a loving relationship with a pet without bringing sex into it.

A fascinating unintended consequence of the sexual revolution has been a new exclusivity in dating. Sixty years ago, when sex wasn't expected on any early date, there was also no expectation of exclusivity; you dated lots of people simultaneously as a matter of course. (It's still that way in Mormon-dominated places.) There was social ritual attached to the transition from dating anyone at whim to "going steady". Moving sex earlier in the dating process has moved the expectation of monogamy earlier in the process, the opposite of what the free love types intended, and that makes it harder to choose the right mate; I bet that's a contributor to the high divorce rate.

This isn't to say that all the effects have been bad; for example, 60 years ago I would have had to suppress my kinks, never letting them see the light of day. As in my first marriage. Not a prospect I like thinking about. But I think overall the Sexual Revolution was a bad trade.

Evolution and Genesis

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
--Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, translated by John Hammond Taylor

St. Augustine made that comment in the early 400s AD, about 1450 years before Darwin's On The Origin Of Species, and went on at some length in that vein. The idea that the account in Genesis recounts the Earth's natural history in a simple way is an old one, but it was rarely taken seriously until recent centuries. This is why when Augustine wanted to explain how to take Genesis literally, he wrote a 400-page work on the topic, not a pamphlet that said it's all simple. (I have not read this work yet; I just found out about it and ordered it while researching for this post.)

I think the straightforward natural history reading of Genesis was largely invented recently as a reaction to the medieval Roman Catholic church. At one time, when the Church was a career, social, and political organization, they strongly discouraged Bible reading, including forbidding the translation of the Bible to "vulgar tongues", e.g. not Latin; and they held that all Bible interpretation was a matter of complex allegorical interpretation only to be undertaken by Church professionals. This helped keep people away from finding out inconvenient doctrines like the priesthood of all believers and our direct unmediated access to God through prayer. Martin Luther and the Protestant church reacted to this by encouraging the most literal interpretation possible, which in the case of Genesis gave us young-earth creationism.

In Biblical interpretation (exegesis), it's important to take an originalist view rather than a textualist one. The contains many styles of literature, not all of which are suitable for literal interpretation. When Jesus says "I am the true vine," he doesn't mean he has leaves, and when he says "I am the door," he doesn't mean he has hinges. If you are looking for the meaning, it is immediately apparent; if you strive for a literal meaning, it is absurd.

Or take this beautiful passage from Job:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said:
"Who is this that darkens my counsel
     with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man;
     I will question you,
     and you shall answer me.
"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
     Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
     Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
     or who laid its cornerstone-
while the morning stars sang together
     and all the angels shouted for joy? (Job 38:1-7, NIV)

The Bible only needs one true meaning. Even if you thought the Earth was flat, you would not imagine that instructing the reader about geology was point of this passage. You don't need to know that the Earth is round to see that this is about God's incomparable majesty, not the Earth's construction. And that's why early Christians were generally not confused by Genesis.

It is impossible to look at Genesis and believe that its main intent is natural history. It makes a spectacularly bad natural history. Light is created on the first day, and there is evening and morning each day, but the Sun, Moon, and stars aren't created until the fourth day. What was evening and morning with no sun? Where was the light coming from? A natural history would answer this; Genesis does not because that's not the point. Or, Genesis says,

And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth." And there was evening, and there was morning &mdash the fifth day.

And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:20-25)

So when were grasshoppers or cockroaches created? They move along the ground sometimes, and fly sometimes. Or bees, or bats? How about all the sessile sea animals? They aren't plants but they don't move. Natural history was never the intention.

I can't imagine anyone who's been a serious churchgoer and didn't hear a sermon on Genesis. There must be tens of thousands of volumes of commentary that have been written about it. But all of these words fail to convey more about human nature and God's nature than the compact little story as it is. It doesn't need to be natural history to be true.

I have some more words for young-earth creationists:

Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body. (Ephesians 4:25, NIV)

Young-earthers tend to display a horrifying indifference to the truth of what they say. Almost all the science is nonsense, only fit to deceive people who know nothing of the field; much of it is based on never having bothered to really understand Darwin in the first place. When you point out that one scientific claim is false, they just move on to another from the same bogus-science source. A bunch of little lies cannot shore up a big truth. When a Christian find out that one of the claims they've been repeating is a lie, that is "disgraceful and dangerous" as Augustine puts it, and they've been making Christians look vastly ignorant, they should step back from all the ideas they got from that source. Learn about each topic before you repeat it; learn the reasoning of the enormous majority of scientists who think that the young-earth claim is wrong. This page, http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/creation.html is a really good start but it's down as I write this.

Or if that's too hard, (and deeply understanding some things like radiometric dating is hard), don't say anything about it. Learn from Paul:

For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. (1 Corinthians 2:2)

Beauty vs. attractiveness

I'm currently taking a day class in programming for Android. I am surrounded by college-age women; e.g. half my age. While many of them, like young Nichoel the cosplayer in the previously linked video, are beautiful, they are not attractive to me. It's a big relief; when I was young I figured attraction to young women would be a pain in the ass when I got old. Nope. I acknowledge the beauty without desire. I never really expected to be able to able to appreciate the beauty of a nubile woman so much in the abstract; when I was young I really couldn't separate acknowledgement of beauty from feeling attracted to women. Not that I so much separate it as it is separated for me somewhere subconsciously.

(At least so far; I'm now in the point after my wife leaving where my subconscious is starting to really want to look around for someone new. Too soon for my conscious mind by far.)

Not hardly

In this post I said that I didn't really like large boobs on thin women. I just watched this video of a cosplayer doing a parapara routine to Caramelldansen and realized that I am full of shit.

Not that I'd hit on her if I met her. But she's sure fun to watch, for the cheerful smile even more than the other things.

Nothing is great or small, save by position

Still behind on projects, so writing here will be shorter for a bit.

I had what seems like one of the best evenings of my life last night. I was at a friend's birthday party. It was a chance for human physical contact; I gave three backrubs and got one very skillful and caring one, which was the first time I've been touched extensively (more than, say, a hug) by someone who wanted to make me feel good since February. Once most of the guests were gone, me and probably my four favorite people in the world (one of whom was the married woman who gave me a backrub after getting one from me) sat around an outdoor fire and talked until one in the morning. We got to have some adult talk; mostly someone's teenagers are around.

It illustrates something about happiness. After that long with little human touch, that backrub was unquestionably better than most of my physical experiences of any kind, including sexual ones; and it unquestionably made me happier than most of those experiences. Yet in times when I've had nearly as much touch, especially sexual touch, as I want, the same skillful nonsexual massage I got last night would have meant little for me.

It's a reminder of the incredibly difficult and challenging fact that I could potentially be happy with my situation now. Yes, it's been a tough past year; I lost one of my dogs (car accident), my job and my wife, in a few months; the loss of my wife also meant the loss of the usual savings buffer I kept for bad times, after the loss of the job, and furthermore, put me in debt; and I've been sick with some kind of low-energy thing that no one's been able to pin down, likely a mix of allergies, some mild autoimmune thing (I've got borderline ANA numbers), and depression. Those things would make anyone sad, but my wife left many months ago. I should be more recovered.

The devil of depression (probably not clinical) is that feeling guilty about still feeling depressed makes me feel worthless and depressed. Then I veg and don't do anything useful, and that makes me more depressed about myself. The most useful thing I've come up with is that the only way I can be morally defeated by this depression is by not trying. If what I try fails, but I honestly applied all my intelligence and effort, I still have a moral victory. This world is not my true home and success in it is up to God once I've done my best. All he asks of me is that I do do my best.

Busy weekend

I have a lot I want to write about, but I think I may not have any time to do it this weekend. Probably there will more late Monday night, or Tuesday.

Onanism, Masturbation, and the Bible

I think most Protestant Christians have actually dropped the idea that masturbation is forbidden in the Bible; the most recent source I heard calling masturbation a sin is C.S. Lewis, who died in 1963. (I have tremendous admiration for Lewis, but disagree with this, which was a throwaway comment illustrating some other point; I don't know that he ever really considered it.) There was, for a while, a fashion for calling masturbation "onanism" along with any other nonprocreative sex which caused a male orgasm; according to Wikipedia, the first use of "onanism" for masturbation specifically was 1716.

This instance of Not In The Bible is a relatively easy one; it just makes remarkably little sense. Setting the scene we have:

If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband's brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her. The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel. (Deuteronomy 25:5-6, NIV)

Then we have the actual story of Onan.

Judah got a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the LORD's sight; so the LORD put him to death.

Then Judah said to Onan, "Lie with your brother's wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to produce offspring for your brother." But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so whenever he lay with his brother's wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from producing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the LORD's sight; so he put him to death also. (Genesis 38:6-10)

So what we have here is a case of Onan defying one known commandment, and God punishing him; and people who read this tend to ignore the known commandment and instead make up a new one based on whatever in the story they think is gross, and assert that God was punishing Onan for that instead. It's as if people read the story of Cain the farmer murdering his brother Abel the hunter, and decided farming was a sin. It's a wild violation of common sense and Occam's Razor. In fairness, the law about the brother marrying the widow was one of the laws not carried into the Christian Church, and thus many people may not have been familiar with it just like most Christians couldn't tell you offhand whether stork is kosher.

As a note for understanding Onan's motives, I am under the impression that Tamar's son by Onan would have inherited Er's estate, which would otherwise go to Onan and his heirs.

Porn and the Bible

I think I'm going to write up a little series of things that I disagree with many or most of my fellow Christians about. Here's why I disagree with my fellow Christians on porn.

There are two passages generally quoted; one is the italicized one in here:

Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, "The two will become one flesh." But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit. Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.(1 Corinthians 6:15-20, NIV).

The argument is generally that porn is sexual immorality and forbidden here, but that argument is perfectly circular; the whole question is whether porn is sexual immorality, so a passage forbidding sexual immorality doesn't prove anything. Also the context implies it's the kind of thing you could do with a prostitute. My take is that it's more a prohibition of what is sometimes called 'saddlebacking' with someone you're not married to; e.g. it's not OK if your do oral with your intern but stop short of orgasm.

The other passage is the italicized

You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.(Matthew 5:27-30, NIV)

There are a couple of interpretations of this, which involve the interpretation of the whole chapter. One is that it is hyperbole, but still truth. Jesus is making a point about the fact that everyone is a sinner; we all all sinners because the true standard we must measure ourselves against is perfection, as explained in the concluding verse of the chapter: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (verse 48) Our eye or hand does not actually cause us to sin, we would sin just as much without them. But the standards and stakes are both so high that if they did cause sin, we'd be better off performing home amputations.

Another interpretation, in no way conflicting with the first, is that this is about training and mental preparation, rather like I talked about here. This is where I originally got that concept. If you are fantasizing about how you'd seduce the people around you, you are preparing yourself to do that; you are seducing them in your heart. I don't see porn as connected to that at all. Porn isn't exactly training the viewer to seduce the people around; for one thing I'd need to be a plumber or pizza delivery guy first. And of course her reactions would have to be totally implausible. It's just all too disconnected from reality. If my favorite porn star, Aria Giovanni, showed up on my doorstep and propositioned me, I don't think the time I've spent with her pictures would incline me to accept one bit; I'd just be looking for the hidden cameras and trying to figure out what's really going on.

I do think as a Christian that I shouldn't be paying people to commit sins, and since I think sex with people you're not married to is a sin, that rules out most everything besides softcore and hentai; I include in that thinking the fact that I'm implicitly paying porn sites with pageviews/ad views. I do have some hardcore porn I collected before coming to that conclusion, which I didn't feel it necessary to delete after the fact.