I’m not very good at remembering to post links on this blog to articles I write elsewhere, sorry. So here are the two I wrote this week.
First, in the aftermath of the terrible shooting incident in Las Vegas, I wrote the following for ThinkTheology pondering the price we’re willing to pay for freedom.
The Price of Freedom
The USA is once again reeling from a devastating mass shooting. The latest reports say that 59 people have died and 527 were injured during the Harvest Festival in Las Vegas on Sunday night. We weep for our brothers and sisters across the pond, and pray for all those physically, emotionally and mentally wounded by the incident.
Of course, the shooting has reignited the perennial row about gun control, with most of the world looking on in bewilderment and asking why the US can’t see that the way to reduce gun crime is to reduce gun ownership.
I had the privilege of living in the US for a few years in the early 2000s, and through conversations with lovely, sane, normal, God-fearing believers who also owned guns, I was able to get something of a handle on the question… Read more…
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Then I wrote a piece for LICC about how knowing the price of something isn’t necessarily the same as knowing its value:
Priceless
Samantha went to a tech fair in Austria last week, but ‘a barrage of male attention’ left her battered and dirty, with two broken fingers.
No, she wasn’t one of the exhibitors; she was a sex robot fitted with Artificial Intelligence. Asked why he thought so many men had ‘molested’ this incredibly life-like doll, her developer, Sergi Santos, said: ‘Because they did not understand the technology and did not have to pay for it.’
This seems to make sense. If the men had been obliged to buy or rent the £3,000 sex robot before trying her out, perhaps they would have attached more value to the experience? Read more…
on Oct 7th at 10:45 pm
A thought occurred to me while reading the “Priceless” post, as you pointed out the difference between how service workers of other industries are treated versus sex workers: Is it possible the very reason sex workers are prone to being treated so horribly by their customers is because, as you point out, sex is so fundamentally different and (because those who become abusive innately realize sex-in-commerce is fundamentally different) they’re more likely prone to lash out, taking out that destructive frustration they feel in themselves against someone else who’s also involved in the act? We always want to find someone else to blame other than ourselves.
I realize the point of your post wasn’t to get into the deep weeds of the issue, but figured I’d share. I’ve heard anger is one of the signs (in combination with other behaviors) that often accompanies someone’s addiction to pornography.
on Oct 7th at 11:15 pm
Ooh that’s fascinating. Yes, you could well be right.