Thoughts

dglenn's QotD was from this, and while I don't have much time to expatiate, I do have some thoughts:

1. This guy is being really what's-the-word. Disingenuous. Clearly the quote about Simon Walsh was intended and phrased to demonise in the best Daily Mail tradition, but in talking (if we must) about someone's sexual life it can hardly be "irrelevant" to mention that they're gay. Also, while we know the papers make it all up anyway and none of these people actually exist, if a word's in quotes we could at least consider the possibility that the speaker, and not the paper, might have chosen it.

2. I agree with the broad thrust of what he's saying, absolutely and enthusiastically, but he's ignoring a couple of factors. The whole direction of reality and fantasy as presented to us via news/documentary and drama in the media is to meet in the middle in a kind of limbo where nobody knows which is which. As factual programmes include more and more "dramatised" (i.e. made up) elements, fictional dramas become more and more realistic and devote themselves more and more to reality-based subjects, the line between reality and fantasy is becoming deliberately more blurred, till the dinosaurs you will shortly be gawping at on a spaceship in the forthcoming half-measure of nuWho (the title's right there in the Radio Times, so sorry, really not a spoiler) are bound to seem far more real than the actual David Cameron with lifelike Nick Clegg attachment smarming and sliming to the cameras from the steps of what's obviously the BBC's standard mockup of Number Ten. It's been happening all my life, and I can't see it stopping.

3. In this climate of deliberate blurring, the architects of this limbo (and if you don't know who, or at least what kind of people, I think they are, then we probably haven't met before, hi there I'm Zander*) are bound to pretend to be concerned about it happening in the area of sexual fantasy, to affect to believe that if sadomasochism as a fantasy is publicly tolerated then some lunatic will decide that it's okay to rape and brutalise a woman for real. Whether they're right or wrong I don't know; I can't speak for lunatics (though I think they would probably do it anyway). The media barons and politicians of whom I speak, of course, don't actually give a monkey's about anything except money, but they have an image to try to make acceptable to what they think of as their audience (reality and fantasy getting blurred again, see) and a large and vulnerable backside to cover.

And that explains the Prudocracy. Our masters want us not to know what's real and what's not, but they're terrified of what might happen to them if we ever discovered the true distinction between the fantasies they feed us and real life. Real life hurts (not all of it obviously, but the bad parts do). It's final, it has no safeword, and it never goes away. And the sooner we stop trying to make our fiction absolutely real and our reality into fiction, shove those two impostors back to their respective sides of the line, learn once again to use our imagination and our judgment rather than being spoon-fed...then the sooner our fantasy lives will become socially acceptable. Even the private ones.

And now I must get back to reality.

*No I'm not. That's a fantasy name. See what I did there?