Pornography is now everywhere in the Western world. We cannot escape its clutches. Whether in advertising, pop music, magazines, the Internet or prime-time television, pornography has gone mainstream.
What used to be regarded as the domain of sleazy men who frequented seedy parts of town to get their lust fix has now become fashionable, acceptable, and expected. The examples are everywhere.
In today’s paper there was a story of a woman who bought what she thought was a brand new mobile phone. To her horror, she discovered it was loaded with 135 files of hard-core pornography, some of it featuring bestiality.
Last week the Advertising Standards Bureau ruled that a Nando chicken ad featuring a near-naked pole dancing stripper going through the motions, then eating with her family, was not a problem, and even had the gall to argue that it was “not incompatible with family values”. Tell me about it: this is everyday life? Strippers doing their thing, then sitting down with the husband and kids over a nice chicken dinner? Spare me.
Of course the ASB is absolutely useless anyway, since it is just made up of the advertising industry. It is a self-regulating body, in other words, which is hardly likely to do any serious policing of itself. One might as well expect the tobacco industry to tell us cigarette smoking is harmful.
A number of authors have noted the pornification of our culture. And they have not all been conservatives, nor even religious. Ben Shapiro is, but his 2005 volume, Porn Generation, is an important indictment on our lust-driven society. Some decidedly non-conservatives who have also discussed this issue include Pamela Paul in her 2005 book, Pornified, and Ariel Levy in Female Chauvinist Pigs, also from 2005.
The really worrying thing is how our very young children are being prematurely sexualised and victimised by this tidal wave of sleaze. When you have mainstream retailers marketing g-strings to seven-year-olds, you know we are in big trouble.
Thus the move by the Prime Minister to stamp out porn- and alcohol-fuelled sexual abuse of children in the Aboriginal community needs to be seen as just part of a larger problem. All kids need protection from porn, as do women, and even men. Men too are victims of this trash, and problems of sexual addictions are growing at alarming rates.
Paul Gray, writing in today’s Herald Sun (June 27, 2007) is also concerned about our obsession with sex. He argues that we have moved from being a culture of sex repression to sex obsession. The sexual libertarians favour all sex, all the time. “The point of today’s Left-Liberal creed is that sex has got to be OK between everybody.”
But in today’s hyper-sexualised culture, it is men who tend to be the big winners. The love-em-and-leave-em philosophy especially applies today to blokes. “These are great days for men. Once, most males had to cajole, seduce and even marry a girl to get her to agree to something naughty. Now, the work’s all done for men by the magical powers of culture, fashion and social expectation. Yes, the high priests of the libertarian religion have done their work well.”
Consider the case of a recent Melbourne shooting victim: “James Douglas, father of William Street shooting victim Kara Douglas, spoke out against the media’s focus on the private life of his daughter. ‘Who cares if she worked as a lap-dancer?’ Mr Douglas said. ‘I’ve been told half the young ladies do it to put themselves through university.’ I sympathise with Mr Douglas. The point is, our world has changed so much that commercial exploitation of the female body’s erotic charms has come to seem unremarkable. Lap-dancing and pole-dancing, once part of a shadowy world of sleaze, are now a normal part of our sunny Australian landscape.”
The mainstreaming of pole-dancing is but one example of how pornophilia has taken over our lives. “Here’s the really good part, for men. Increasingly, this activity is not just in the nightclubs. It’s in the physical fitness routine of ordinary women out in the suburbs. Even teens are getting in on the act. Look at the ads. One Melbourne studio urges women to ‘unleash your inhibitions’ and ‘feel empowered’ through this male fantasy-oriented method of physical exercise. This particular studio offers pole-dancing and lap-dancing lessons and private tuition in ‘the art of striptease’. Another national company advertises dancing classes, as well as ‘install-them-yourselves’ poles, for doing it at home.”
Gray concludes, “Many of us still care about the women and young girls in our lives and even about the ones we see on the street, but don’t know. There’s no doubt in my mind that apart from being the victims of violent men, these women are the victims of misguided libertarian thinking. This is the thinking which has said, since the ’70s, that ‘sexual repressiveness’ is the only evil, when it comes to sexual morality. But there are worse evils than repressiveness. One is believing that the dream of every girl and woman is to be a porn star.”
But that unfortunately is the sad truth: for many girls and young women today, they have been so saturated by a porn-soaked culture, that they feel the only way they can really be a woman is to dress and act like a porn star. Indeed, one porn star even wrote a best-seller entitled, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.
When books such as that become best-sellers, then popular culture has pretty much hit rock bottom. And we are all paying a high price for such a sewage-ridden culture.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21974198-5000117,00.html
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