Putin The Prude

So I don’t really know if this is true or not, but I heard the other day that Imagefap has been blocked in Russia.

What’s Imagefap, you ask? It’s a popular porn sharing site. Yes, I’ve been there. No, I’m not a regular guest. I’m not an enormous fan of pornography, but let’s face it, I enjoy looking at pretty pictures of naked women. I’m a heterosexual guy. That’s what heterosexual guys do. It’s the way we’re built.

But I find it interesting that Putin’s Russia has elected to block Imagefap. Argue that porn is bad...argue that it is good...argue that it is indifferent to human behavior...no matter. It is always going to be around. And my guess is that Russia’s current attempt at moralizing censorship will be pretty much ineffective. Russian men, and more women than you might think, will find their way around the Russian Cyberwall, or, more likely Russia’s own entrepreneurs will dash to fill the gap. (Please, no jokes here.)

It is particularly mystifying given that Putin’s own public persona is so based on his being a hyper-masculine male, always ready for a bout of martial arts or a midnight trip around Moscow with the Night Wolves motorcycle gang (on his three-wheeled motorcycle of course). One would think that a little porn would be just the thing for such a regime. What kind of guy doesn’t look at porn? I mean, really?

So why, then, would Russia block Imagefap? My guess is that two things are in play. First, part of Putin’s support comes from depressed rural areas, or from the un-privileged parts of cities--in effect, people who are somewhat like Trump’s deplorables. And these people, even if they themselves privately consume as much erotica as anyone, find the public acceptance of it disturbing and alien...i.e., foreign, i.e., Western, i.e. American.

Ergo, it is probably worth Putin’s while to play to that audience, and say, Look, I’m stamping out that degenerate filth...no more pornography...even while rumors about what actually happens behind the Kremlin’s doors are vivid and detailed.

But, there’s more. I think there’s a second reason for Putin’s sudden prissiness. Specifically, I think that Orwell had it right, and that dictatorships really do hate sex...except, of course, as an act of aggression. You see, there is a moment in sex...at least if it is consensual...when your mind is wholly occupied. When it is not thinking, in short, of Higher Ideals, or The Nation, or Victory Over The Enemy, or Obeying The Will Of God (whose will, curiously, is always revealed to us by other humans, and is so frequently identical to the wants of Our Leaders in this moral world).

And it is that moment of utter freedom, however fleeting, which they hate...

Maybe I’m being mystic here. But, whether I’m right or wrong on this, I’m willing to bet that in the long run, or even the short, it will not work. In the long run, there will be as much pornography in Putin’s Russia as there is everywhere else. It may be a little harder to get, but it will be there. Human biology is not so easily overcome.

Thus, in the end, Putin, and his censors, will enter history along with our own Anthony Comstock, who enjoyed in his time vast power, and publicly boasted of the number of people he’d driven to suicide and of the number of books he’d burned...

But when he died, he was just as dead as any of us ...

And as for his legacy...nothing.

Except the reputation of a villain and a fool, and, almost certainly, a latent “pervert,” utterly incapable of accepting who he really was...deep down...below the belt...

Even as he rode his version of a three-wheeled motorcycle, with his version of the Night Wolves...

In all their leathery glory.


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