By Leif M. Wright
MUSKOGEE, Okla. — Nobody is into porn.
I just thought you might like to know that. The bazillion-billion-dollar porn industry in the United States is supported by invisible dollars from invisible customers who certainly never look at porn. Ever. Under any circumstance.
Just ask anyone, straight up: Do you look at porn?
It's very entertaining and good fun.
Statistically, either the wealthiest people on the planet are the only ones checking out porn or someone is lying.
Americans love porn. If you can dream up an idea, no matter how disgusting or abhorrent to most people, you can likely find a fetish site that caters to it.
A friend of mine (female), once said, "I want to find the most disgusting porn I can online; it'll be funny."
It wasn't.
Take my advice. Just don't. Seriously. You'll thank me.
Our obsession with porn can be laid directly at the feet of what the BBC called earlier this week America's "selective Puritanism." I think I'd rather call it "situational evangelicalism" because it sounds so much more fun and intelligent. They're both really just kind ways of saying "hypocrisy."
Judging by the outcry over Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction a few years ago, you'd think we had never seen a nipple in America. But judging by the $12 billion the porn industry earned in 2006, according to CNN, it would appear SOMEONE has seen a few.
The FCC recently moved to fine broadcasters huge amounts of money for letting expletives that rhyme with "ship" and "duck" slip on the air, and a federal court overturned that ruling. People freaked out. Why, if our children hear words that are older than the English language itself, they might end up becoming serial killers! The horror! They might tear their eyes out and run screaming through the streets with their hair on fire!
We can't stand that a few words might come out of our giant surround sound systems, but we don't really mind that someone is murdered twice every half hour, raped on-screen and lots of people just hop into bed with each other randomly in nearly every sitcom and drama on TV. But at least they're not talking about it using descriptive words.
Pharmaceutical industries can foist all sorts of mind-altering chemicals upon us and bombard us with advertisements for their chemicals day and night, but liquor stores can't sell alcohol on Sundays, and by God, if you're caught imbibing a natural plant like marijuana, we're gonna lock you up forever.
Apparently, the government doesn't mind you getting wasted, as long as someone with a powerful lobby is getting the cash from you doing so.
After years of urban legends about it, someone in Congress actually got the bright idea to consider taxing the Internet, which would largely open it up to hundreds, no, thousands of local, state and municipal tax laws, forcing Internet retailers to keep track of who has to pay what tax on everything they buy on the Internet -- not to mention that the federal government actually wants to tax your access to the network so that you pay extra for the same Internet service you're already getting. So it stands to reason that indirectly, the government would soon be profiting on porn. Yes, the same government that says you can't say a word on TV that once was the standard word for "defecate."
We can't teach sex education in school without complaints from people who fear that their kids might, gasp, actually have sex if they don't take abstinence pledges. Here's a newsflash for you: according to an eight-year study of "abstinence pledges," taking the pledges makes a teenage girl six times more likely to perform oral sex, and a boy four times more likely to get anal sex. And, of course, if they haven't had sex education about safety, that means they're exposing themselves to all kinds of diseases and infections. Good job there with the selective Puritanism.
My friend, Heather Corinna, is a sex educator and author who hosts one of the only sites on the Internet that seeks to give teenagers accurate and un-watered-down information about sexuality and safety, http://scarleteen.com
I asked Heather how our dualistic view on morality affects the teens she deals with on a daily basis.
"It's ultimately about our ideas of where is appropriate for sex, and in what context," she said. " Arbitrary ideas, of course."
And that's really the point, I think.
Our ideas of morality and what is acceptable in society and in our entertainment are really arbitrary.
Our culture changes with time, and it always has. Those changes, however, don't necessarily change the "it's always been that way" feeling that leaves most people clinging to old social norms even when they have no basis in any sort of verifiable standard.
Take the "s" word, for example. If you read the Bible in its original languages, it's full of the Hebrew equivalent of the "s" word.
Actually, it has more than its share of the "f" word, too, if you want to go there.
But I don't see anyone objecting to the Bible, because "s" has been changed to "dung" in our English Bibles and "f" has been changed to "know."
It's important to note that it isn't the Bible that made those changes -- it's those who thought the Bible's original content was too impolite for our society.
That's right, the Bible, in at least that way, has been censored by those who thought you couldn't handle the raw truth.
But if the Bible is too naughty for our social norms, shouldn't we be having discussions on why that sort of thing should be?
Many who demand "decency" in television and whatnot claim that this nation was founded on "biblical principles" or if they're feeling particularly ecumenical that day, on the "Judeo-Christian ethic."
What? You mean the same ethic that's too dirty to be read in its original form on our TVs without being bleeped?
Who are the arbiters of what is socially acceptable and what is not? Who gets to decide what content you see and what content is restricted from you in the name of protecting the children?
(Even though we see in the case of abstinence, "protecting" the children is more like "keeping them dumb so they don't protect themselves.")
In the long run, society itself decides what is acceptable, but those same deciders (insert GW Bush joke here) wait until they think no one is looking and they visit D.C. brothels or hit the porn sites just like everyone else also isn't doing.
It all adds up to a horribly repressed society that is afraid to even mention things that everyone should be talking about, learning about and demystifying so we can move on to more important subjects. But alas, we live in America.
Leif M. Wright writes for the Muskogee (Okla.) Phoenix.
