If I may use what you wrote as a springboard.Consul wrote: ↑Mon Jun 26, 2023 7:54 amYes, what started as a political demonstration for the civil rights of gay people has become a queer carnival with a degree of kinkiness that is unlikely to increase the social acceptance of homosexuals & transsexuals.vegetariantaxidermy wrote: ↑Sun Jun 25, 2023 8:36 am A lot of gay people are fed up with the excesses of 'pride parades' too and are distancing themselves from them since the acronym became a mile long and the parades became a display of fetishes and sex acts.
On a theoretical level, and thinking in mytho-poetic terms, there are positive and beautiful visualizations -- for example the picture of a happy, healthy, unified family with children enjoying themselves in nature, or that of the Madonna & Child I included below -- and there are darker, and ugly visualizations such as the following:
The combination -- again symbolically or pictorially as well as in reality -- of the smell of semen and feces together is not, I submit, a *pretty picture*. The notion, the idea if you will, the visualization of man's procreative equipment and life-seed directed into the rectal cavity will not ever become the subject of higher visualization.Flash wrote: "As he zipped up his trousers, he admired his own handiwork: a slimy line of splooj that started at the boy's ass-crack and zigzagged up to his shoulder blades."
Again, thinking of some of our most beautiful art which generally speaking is a visual applied philosophy-excursion with the purpose of elevating the mind to higher regions, there is nothing (in any case that I have noticed) in any Gay Pride display (parade, manifestation) that ever raises the level of visualization to an elevated level.
What I want to point to is to the philosophical and cultural problem of minds that become located in the *infernal regions' of grossly visualized phantasy. On one level it is non-different if these grotesque visualizations are presented through the perversions of a heterosexual couple or when homosexual couplings are portrayed. The result of both is a *downward plunge* into a physiological ugliness and brutality -- such is all pornography.
There is such a thing as *stewardship of the mind and the imagination*. There then must be certainly the prospect of a *pure imagination* and an *impure imagination*. I recognize that I referring to things that are all defined through one's value-system, and that our value-systems are bound up with assessments and value-judgments. I am therefore well aware that, for some people, the downward plunge into ugly visualizations as well as, for example, the actual mechanics of anal intercourse are matters of no consequence.
When I have stated that I believe that homosexuality and other *perversions* (yes, my value-judgments are expressed in that word) should be suppressed and repressed by all parties, including homosexuals (if that is their predilection), it is essentially because that once the downward visualization is set in motion, once the addiction to (for example) the pornographic imagery and stimulation, the visualizing mind is brought down into what we once understood to be *infernal regions*. I mean this more in a Platonic sense than specifically a Christian sense.
As we all know the visualization pictured in The Republic has to do with an ideal construct, and an ideal construct of a civilization and an education system through which our children are brought up. Doesn't it really come down to the issue of to what imagery, to what imaginal possibilities, we will expose to our own children? Paedeia?
Homosexuality, homosexual practices, kinky sexuality, sexual perversion, but fundamentally the diversion away from the primary and *sane visualization*, as well as the reality of a *healthy, productive family* -- this is what, at the very core, is what should be repressed. Not by legal force but by voluntary agreement.
My point is practical, but I must admit that I am unsure if it is absolutely true: once the downward plunge is taken (in phantasy, in visualization, in imagination and in real praxis) it only ever increases. Is it safe to say that it is far easier to go *down* than it is to go *up*? The upward visualization, lofty idealism, the striving after the pure and the beautiful, require sacrifices. To quote a religious aphorism:" You cannot simultaneously pray to God and masturbate". I do certainly recognize the value-system in assigning something high and elevated to the upward visualization and hierarchizing it as against the lower element -- these are my value criteria. But I think the point is valid.



