Threats you didn’t know existed: Black riots and “emo-porn”

First up, courtesy of Roy Edroso, we have a number of right-wing bloggers proclaiming that American cities are descending into a cesspool of black rioting and crime, which the PC Police are refusing to acknowledge. Not to mention that Obama may be planning to exploit the riots——or even start them——as part of his evil jihadi plan to retake the White House in 2012 (see here, here and here, plus the Washington Times denouncing Martin Luther King here).
There’s nothing new in this——as Edroso notes, back in 2008, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg theorized that white support for Obama was based primarily on fear of black race riots if he lost. But it’s still repulsive.
Then we have this oddity from the religious right, Focus on the Family denouncing the “emo porn” of “emotionally dexterous hunks of daytime [soap operas], chat rooms, celebrity rags, and romance novels”——i.e., men who sit and listen to their lady love’s wishes, share their feelings and forge an emotional bond.
The article explains that women are more vulnerable to porn in general because reading/watching it makes them feel they’re punishing their husbands for some believed misdeed. But the authors find “emoporn” particularly pernicious because it sets up an impossible standard for real men to meet: How can a regular husband, burdened with all the labor of supporting and leading his family, be expected to listen to his wife yammering about her feelings (“Most men just aren’t and cannot be that attentive, especially in marriage where responsibilities to provide weigh heavy upon them.”)?
Equating romance novels and TV soap operas to porn may be just a tactic to sell this bilge; the religious right holds up porn as the gateway to Satan (and now a cause of terrorism!) so linking it with All My Children or Nora Roberts may be a way to paint a Scarlet A on them.
Or maybe the writers genuinely do see them the same. One of the reasons porn is considered evil is that it leads you think about someone other than your spouse, which is morally no different from adultery (the same reason fantasizing while masturbating is bad, bad, bad for your soul); presumably the same objection could be made to someone mooning over a Bettina Krahn hero or a TV hunk.
Either way, it sounds like there’s a lot of sexism bound up with this. The suggestion women are more prone to porn (no stats presented). The assertion that husbands just can’t be expected to consider their wives’ feelings or share their own when they have Manly Stuff to do (departing from gender roles pushes a lot of buttons for some members of the religious right). And, of course, the assumption emo-porn’s appeal is entirely the emotional aspect. As Digby points out, soap guys and romance-novel heroes aren’t just sensitive, they’re hot. Hot to look at, and guaranteed to deliver raw passionate sex between the sheets. And despite the cliché that women aren’t really interested in sex, only love, astonishingly enough a lot of women actually enjoy fantasizing about it.
As threats go, emo-porn ranks very low on the matrix.