No, I’m not talking about naked people getting it on in various configurations, positions and places the rest of us probably couldn’t manage if we tried. That’s old school. It’s pretty easy to avoid traditional porn these days. I plugged the word sex into Google Images and came up with wholesome images of chastely clad people. Pornography didn’t yield anything of interest, either. I had to change my Google preferences to allow explicit images. Even then sex didn’t get me anything a ten year old couldn’t safely look at for the first few pages.
So I plugged in my first name – Veronica. Aha! Apparently girls named Veronica love being naked in front of a camera. I wouldn’t stick 98.5% of the photos there on my blog, but I had to allow explicit images to be shown in order to find one this ‘racy.’ Yes, her name is Veronica. No, I don’t look like that and never have.
The point is, I had to make a choice to look at sexual pornography on the Internet. I’d have to select and pay for a porn magazine; or a pornography channel on cable or Sky; ditto for movie theatres.
The porn I would like to say No! to is the stuff that gets shoved in my face by the media in the guise of news or entertainment.
Network news annoys far more than the rest. I turn on the news to find out what’s going on in the world and in my community. Just a few years ago sensationalist reporting was relegated to syndicated ‘news’ programmes, digging as far into the dirt of sensational stories as they could go. Now the networks are full of crime-porn, disaster-porn, human interest-porn, education-porn, government exposé-porn.
Last week’s bush fires in Victoria, Australia were a tragedy of horrendous proportions. With 181 dead and thousands left homeless – there was plenty of genuine, heart-breaking news – recovering bodies, housing the dispossessed, getting the fires out only to have arsonists reignite them.
Both New Zealand networks sent their news presenters over to stand in the rubble and moan about the humanity of it all. How did this become a ‘star opportunity’ for them? You could see the disappointment in their faces that the burnt out station wagon didn’t contain the charred remains of a fleeing family. ‘Interviews,’ i.e. cameras shoved in the faces of grief-stricken survivors who’d lost family turned my stomach as their private pain was reduced to ‘human interest’ to pump up ratings. The last straw was 5 minutes of air-time given to a videotape made by parents who thought they were going to die, saying good-bye to their children.
I wish this was an exception, but it has become the norm. Every natural disaster comes with titillating tales. (Remember the dozens of ‘child-rapes’ that were supposedly taking place in the convention centre during Hurricane Katrina – absolutely NONE of which was verified later?) Sensational crimes – it’s a given we will come to know the minute details of the crime and the criminal’s personal life – but the victim, dead or alive is also fair game in the ratings war.
60 Minutes was once THE journalist powerhouse, taking on government, industry and social issues with hard-hitting investigations. Now there’s two-headed babies, interviews with pseudo celebrities and tawdry reports on crimes of passion.
And let us not forget celebrity-porn! Britanny and Paris got so much news coverage last year you would think they had contributed something to humanity.
Then there’s alleged entertainment. I used to love cop shows. Hill Street Blues and Homicide: Life on the Street were two favourites – both realistic in many ways, gritty looks at crime. Child’s play compared to the current crop of CSI and similar shows. I know it’s special effects, but I’d really rather not see a maggot eaten corpse. And the story-lines – life could never imitate this art. Apparently teen sex-clubs are all the rage, young men should be on the lookout for poisoned condoms and half the judges in the US are involved in sad-masochistic sex rings.
Sigh… I’m too young to be too old for contemporary culture. I’ll keep choosing carefully, trying to avoid that lowest common denominator, which keeps sinking to new depths. Of course, I’m not exactly saintly – I hooked you with sex, but I got you to the end playing fair. 😉
Titirangi Storyteller 
The media does saturate it’s audience with violence, death, and sex… I guess you could argue that if people didn’t enjoy watching it, there’d be poor ratings and it wouldn’t be on the air… Of course, maybe there’s a reason they call tv shows “programs”… because they are programming people.
Funny how you can make an entire series are sex crimes, and people will sit in front of their glowing boxes considering it entertainment… When did sex crimes become entertaining? Clearly these shows are not informative, so they must be intended to be entertaining… I think it says something about the culture, but also about the motives of the networks…
You can get in a chicken and egg routine here, but I find it more likely that the media is shaping the culture than the culture is deciding the media… Afterall, “culture” is something you grow in a petri dish… There’s a level of control that goes beyond benign influence at play with the media.
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I’m with you 100%. The old fashioned pornographer is far more honest in their work than our media are. Time for a grassroots movement to ‘fight back!’ Where do we begin???
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Oops… some typos in my last.
Well, we begin by turning off the televisions, and God willing we end there, too. 😉
Honestly, tv is an inherently corrupt medium. I think it is beyond redemption. As for the rest of the bombardments, I suppose dark sunglasses and avoiding looking at billboards might work. Full contamination suit is best, as a man named LaVey said.
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But heaven help ANYONE who tries to take away our internet!!!!!!
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Wow. See, I find it to be pretty easy to stumble on porn, so much so that I figure we must not be a nation with good boundaries. I surfed the net with the kid filter on recently, with a kid by my side—looking for kid sites. A hit on a site for horses turned up a bulletin board chat on horses, yet one poster had a wallpaper background set some how on their bar/post: torture porn, complete with a woman shackled to a wall, ropes on her, blood splattered.
Further, a stroll through the video store turns up lots of covers of DVDs that are pretty much mainstream R films–and appear to be teen torture-porn.
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You make an excellent point – I’m writing from the pov of someone whose children are grown. When they were young, I did observe more sexual porn because it was in their faces. Still, your child (and you) are far more likely to be hit with disturbing images of torture, abuse and titillation on the nightly news, reality TV and network programming. (Cable you choose to pay for or not.)
It’s been a while since I have been in a video shop – one of the things I do to pay the bills is review DVDs and they arrive in the mail – often with no covers at all. But these days there are so many easy mail-order rental companies, you might want to explore that as an alternative. Looking through a select part of a catalogue with a child gives you more control. On the other hand, while content needn’t be censored – I do think covers should be g-rated. Thanks for the comment. Veronica
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