Rule 34 is an internet law which states "If it exists, there is porn of it." As the parent of an innocent, impressionable, soon to be teen-ager, I will not encourage you to verify this law for yourself.
Besides, it turns out, Rule 34 is wrong! And wrong in ways that strike very close to home. Recently - for strictly scientific purposes - I googled the phrase: "Fortean porn." Guess what? NOTHING. Well, nothing that was both pornographic and Fortean, anyway.
It gets weirder: googling "naked Gnostic girls" does not find pictures of any such thing! At least not on the first page of search results. (I don't always google, but when I do, I pretty much demand instant gratification.)
You ask what results I expected from the phrase "Fortean porn." I'm not sure: that's why I googled. Perhaps a nice crop circle orgy. Oops - just googled that, and guess what? NO pictures of people having orgies in crop circles! You'd think there'd be tons of them.
Something is very wrong with this picture. Or rather, lack of pictures. I had an English professor who liked to say "What's missing is more important than what's present." Many Gnostic schools are ascetic - if the material world is the product of a flawed creator, it should be shunned. This is mirrored in mainstream western thought through Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, et al.
Other Gnostics have embraced libertineage as a method of spiritual liberation: Aleister Crowley is the most famous modern exponent of this tradition. Given his popularity among the young and hip, with their rock 'n' roll music and their "reefers," you'd expect to find millions of pictures of "naked gnostic girls."
But you don't. This is a topic we intend to follow-up on. Stay tuned.
It all depends on your definition of "porn", my fortean friend. Libertineage was no more present than in the young and hip British band The Libertines, who crashed and burned after one album in 2009 due to the libertineous self-destruction of one Pete Doherty, the guitarist/singer/junkie extraordinaire who was arrested an impressive 42 times and given an even-more impressive 42 "second chances" by various magistrates who clearly do not place the public good above a juicy headline.
ReplyDeleteDoherty, star of such infamous YouTube video smash hits as "Winemouse", in which the gangly, tweaked out Brits smoke crack and fondle baby mice.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=winehouse+doherty+mice&aq=f
After viewing this little gem, you may want to redefine "Gnostic porn" to include this particular scenario, which is both godless and god-awful all at the same time. Thus disproving your disproof of Rule 34.
And all that is really left to say is.... BOOM!
"Winemouse?" These are fully-clothed people handling baby mice. Fortean? Maybe. Decadent? No doubt. Porn? As Justice Black said, "I know it when I see it." This ain't it.
ReplyDeleteAside from chuckling at the Bible wouldn't Gnostics just use Pornhub like everybody else?
ReplyDeleteYou raise a good point, so I repeated the searches on Pornhub.
DeleteNothing. Zip. Nada. You get results, but they have nothing to do with the entered criteria.