sexuality-and-society

"First be free, then ask for freedom"

"It is about the impotence, the disillusionment that devours us without being able to express it, to shout it, to claim it properly, without being able to make a real break and assume it, a break as an individual, a citizen of the world, a human being, a break in solitude before registering it in the group"

"It describes feelings, emotions, doubt, self-destruction, frustration and depicts a youth who does not necessarily question themselves, who likes excess and cares for inconsistencies, who judges themselves to be both victims and guilty, while being lost, in search of meaning but also in search of themselves."

"We must make our own choices and not follow those that have been suggested to us, define ourselves in relation to our life and not the one that society imposes on us, free ourselves from ourselves, from our demons, our paradoxes and our famous schizophrenia, to better free ourselves from others and inhabit the world as it is."

"You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity."

"But implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance."

"Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate."

"When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. … there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak."

"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"

"The Amazon sites led me to other woman-killing outlets. None of the little movies has much plot. They're just five- or ten-minute scenes of attractive young women, usually undressed, dying violently. Overwhelmingly, the imagery displays young women as sexual objects for male entertainment — not as individuals with personalities. Obviously, there's a commercial market for this material, presumably among men who derive pleasure from watching females die (or pretend to die). One producer of these films has been the center of Canada's longest-running obscenity trial. Donald Smith, who calls himself "Dr. Don," created death movies of his wife. Then he advertised for models in Winnipeg newspapers. He made many quickie films and posted them for sale on a Web site which said its purpose was "to show beautiful women getting killed."Canadian police investigated in 2000. Smith and his wife were charged with obscenity. When the case came to trial in 2002, counts against the wife were dropped. The defense contended that the movies didn't fit the legal definition of obscenity because no sex occurred in them. The defense presented an expert witness, film professor Barry Grant of Brock University, who declared that Dr. Don's videos were little different from horror scenes in modern "slasher" movies shown in theaters and sold in video stores. Dr. Grant testified that grotesque killing has been part of cinema since silent days. Despite the professor's testimony, a jury convicted Smith. He was sentenced to probation, banned from the Internet, and fined $100,000. The sentencing judge, Helen Pierce of Ontario Superior Court of Justice, wrote that Dr. Don's videos had "the potential to change attitudes toward women, cause psychological harm to anyone who had previously been a victim of sexual violence, and could do serious psychological harm to adolescents." She said his films imply that an attacker "can silence women with his violence, leave them on sexual display, and walk away without consequence.""