Five men were recently absolved of accusations of rape. The charges were brought against them by a girl who recanted her claim. Though there’s a lot of noise about “innocent until proven guilty” in this country, these boys were thrown in lock-up, held on exorbitant bail their low-income families could never hope to pay and some of them were suspended from their schools. All the result of mere allegations … which have turned out to be false.

Rape is obviously very serious, but so too should be protecting the innocent from false accusations and unlawful repudiation. Like it or not — under the tenets of our justice system — even if someone did perpetrate an act that violates the law, there should be no recourse for punishment BEFORE a guilty verdict is delivered in our courts. However, preemptive punishment, regardless of guilt, is not new in this country … this purported land of freedom and democracy … more like of hyperbole and outright lies.

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It’s been a little more than a week since I attended my niece’s baptism. It was the first such ceremony for me in at least four years and my first ever non-Catholic baptism.

The ceremony was held in this quaint little Episcopal church, upon a bucolic little plot in the southeastern hinterlands of Long Island. Now, my sister was raised Catholic, which I fault as the inspiration to baptize her child, but I don’t quite get the Episcopal thing. I don’t know to which brand of religion subscribes her husband, but I didn’t think it to be King Henry’s American variety.

Which sect of Christianity, though, is rather moot. In my experience, the degrees of Protestantism do not absolve the faith of its nascent ties to the Roman Catholic Church, which I fault for many of the unconquerable ignorances of the theologically persuaded.

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Maybe people were crazier back in the day, or at least a lot more gullible, but if someone today came around talking about a burning bush and having spoken to God, how credible would be that person? Would anyone believe them? Anyone who isn’t already drunk on the “word” and thumping their own bible or religious text, reading it on the train and at every spare moment? I doubt it.

I’ve been watching ‘Deadwood’ lately. It is marvelous. Very gritty and unapologetically vile … true to how I imagine frontier life to have been: filthy, objectionable, brutal, hard, miserable, coarse and unpleasant.

In the show, there is a preacher. The speculation is that he suffers from a tumor that is causing him to do wonky things. His sense of smell is so fucked up he thinks his own flesh is rotting. He has seizures. His eyeballs are askew. His short-term memory is unreliable. Finally, he is talking utter nonsense with regard to scripture … that is to say, even more nonsense than when the scripture is read verbatim.

When last I saw the preacher, he was talking to a bull about circumcision. He would stand upright and say something, then double over to view the bull’s johnson. The guy is touched in the head, surely.

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Humanity is ugly. At least, looking through a negative lens, it could be seen that way; there are so many unattractive people … they are asymmetrical, overweight, have distorted features, poor hygiene — bad teeth, body odor, bad breath, are extremely flatulent, etc. — and there is so much crime and vice in the world.

There is avarice, exploitation of others, crimes and general ignorance of other people’s obviously not inherent “human” rights. The list of wrongs is far longer than the list of rights.

One way to combat that ugliness is with beauty. We could treat everyone well despite how abhorrent they may appear or may smell, no matter what ugly actions they perpetrate. Sure, we would still have to punish criminals and sequester them, but they could be treated with dignity and respect and their arrest and eventual incarceration could fill us with sadness and regret that a human life has gone so wrong.

But, many of us choose instead to say “Fuck that.” It is much easier to be callous than it is to be caring.

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It is possible to be simultaneously repulsed and enticed. I speak from experience.

Do to the dearth of things worth watching on my TV (which will be canceled in less than a week) and a lack of motivation to do anything else, I tuned into Attack of the Show. On it was porn “actress” Sasha Grey, a 21-year-old girl. Or maybe she’s a woman; I really am not certain of the criteria. I suppose being able to take a huge dick in the ass would turn a girl into a woman.

See, and that’s where the ambivalence comes in. It’s easy enough to watch porn and derive some specific entertainment from it, but part of that ease comes from the absolutely anonymous nature of its participants. It’s voyeurism at its most distant, where the people fucking have a distinct lack of humanity that, in my opinion, is essential to maintaining the illusion.

The instant I wonder something personal about a woman getting drilled in both holes below the waist while getting her throat fucked, what is alluring in the very base and animal — unconscious — way is trumped by consciousness and thought and reason and intellect.

“Does she want to be doing this? Does she enjoy it? What was her childhood like? Was she ever raped? Has she always been mistreated by men and this is a manifestation of that? Did her father abuse her?”

I know, right? Who the hell thinks of this shit? Let’s pile on the hyperbole: Just watch that whore get drilled like a piece of meat and fuck the stupid fucking cunt because she’s not worth anything except a means to a masturbatory end.

It requires an adult making a conscious decision to put their self in these seamy situations by which other people derive vicarious pleasure, so who gives a shit if a bad state of mind is culpable for motivating that decision? Who cares if this woman could have been thwarted from fucking on camera, from sucking on a dick that just came out of her ass. Because, hey, it’s not debasing if she wants to do it. I’m sure I’ve heard the “no one’s holding a gun to her head” argument in this context.

But then, if these women were aided in a constructive way to work through whatever emotional issues I am perhaps erroneously assuming they must have … what would we watch while our wives are sleeping or our girlfriends are out of town? Or, for the sad sack that can’t get laid, what are they going to do to try and fill the void of real human contact in their lives?

There will always be demand for sex and so there will always be supply. Whether that supply is the willing, monogamous interaction many of us have been conditioned to believe is the “right way” to do things, or whether it’s girls abducted off the street and pressed into prostitution, or it’s chicks like Sasha Grey willingly proffering their assholes to get reamed on camera … a supply of some sort will be provided. It is simple economics.

What is less simple are the formulas that create the demand and the supply.

I’ve been to museums and seen exhibits on porn. Porn that dates back as far as one could assume. At the Brooklyn Museum there is a particular sculpture from ancient Egypt depicting a woman engaged in sex with, my recollection is foggy but, at least four men (and — GASP — get this, some of the men’s genitalia is only touching the other men’s, so the Eygptians were gay, y’all! But that little digression aside…)

So we have some significantly old proof that there has long been a demand for erotica, and to all the gay haters out there, we’ve got plenty of proof that gays have been around for a long time, too, and that the behavior was mainstream at certain points in time. Suck on that.

American society, though, is one of deep, sexual repression and shame and guilt. The Puritan fundamentalism on which this country was founded still very much pervades the fabric of our communities, some far more so than others, but the reach of Christian “values” is inescapable in the United States. As a result, any free and cavalier sexual expression is anathema and so, by that Puritanical standard, porn is by far the most egregious of all shameful sexual activities.

The culture of repression and the demonization of sex is particularly unkind to women because they are the ones very readily branded as whores for even the slightest whiff of impropriety — whether real or imagined — so little American girls are taught early what it is like to be shamed and scorned, branded as whores and how it feels to have one’s worth measured by a far higher standard than that of a boy’s, and to be given very little leeway to deviate from the society’s unrealistic expectation of what a girl or a woman should be.

In a way, I can almost admire Sasha Grey and any other female porn star who is in that business seemingly for the express purpose of saying “fuck you” to Puritan America. I appreciate when people fight back against injustice and unfairness. Truly, when it all comes down to it, what the hell does it matter what is done by someone who has no connection to you and does not factor into your life in any way, unless you choose that they do?

Whether Sasha Grey takes one or a thousand dicks in her ass and then proceeds to deep-throat them, it isn’t going to pay my rent, cook my food or make my train come in the morning. I have the choice to either watch it or not and, if it offends me, the smart choice would be to ignore it. There’s no reason to be indignant.

Yet any admiration I might feel for her or any of her contemporaries, and I assure you I don’t, is totally obliterated by the influence of my own upbringing in this Puritanical stunting ground called America. I would never admire or respect a woman who has been that used up by countless men, especially because she has done it in ready view of anyone who cares to look, documented and likely to be preserved for some time.

Maybe her porn will be on display in the museums of 2,000 years from now, if humanity has by then managed to put Jesus away somewhere and move onto a new fad, perhaps one of logic and reason, where intelligence and thought will prevail over closed-mindedness and superstition. I truly hope that the next generation of kids will be a little more open and a little less repressed so that, someday, humanity might be able to stop being hung up about in which orifice someone was screwed, and how often.