Worth a Read ...

Michael and I subscribe to The Walrus, a Canadian general interest magazine with an international outlook. It's a GREAT magazine ... and the most recent issue has an article that really hit home with me. (of course the fact that it reflects my views could be a factor :))

It's called It's a Porn World After All. It's a essay about 4 books: Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy; Pornified by Pamela Paul; Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood and Yellow Dog by Martin Amis. The first two are non-fiction the last two fiction. Each of these books deals with the proliferation of pornography in today's culture. And each of these books (and myself) sees this proliferation as perilous to society in general and youth in particular.

The article had two sentences that typify what my resistance (or should that be revulsion?) to pornography has been.

In writing about the impact of the internet ... "Flickering across a million monitors in a hundred countries at this very moment are not tales taken from "Debbie Does Dallas" or "Another White Trash Whore" [both porn movies from the time pre-internet] , but images of women and men most of whom are performing lewd sexual acts before a camera because they are poor, damaged, or have been coerced into doing so. It shouldn't be so easy to ignore this while pleasing ourselves."

Summing up ... "In its exploitation of personal tragedy and naïveté, its misrepresentation of human erotica, especially among newly sexualized youths, who may never recover from being consumers of its distortions, in its indifference to consequence, to the causality of action and effect, both on screen and in real life, extreme pornography may be stalking one emotion more than any other. That would be the shared feelings we have for fellow humans, along with the inclination to recognize kindred suffering and even lend aid. Porn may yet be the death of empathy."

Pow4rful stuff, huh? Hard to ignore. To read the full article click here

~ Shirley