Reflections, Reflections

Large cable firm stops offering hard-core pay-to-view

"This stuff is illegal. Obscenity is not protected under the First Amendment," Knight said. "We'd give Adelphia a pat on the back, except that they should not have planned to break the law in the first place. Nobody who peddles porn cares a whit about women and children, or the men who get addicted and destroy their marriages and families."

AFA hailed the 130,000 e-mails that went to the Justice Department due to its efforts.

"We made the Justice Department fully aware of Adelphia's hard-core pornography," said Randy Sharp, director of special projects for AFA. "Did the DOJ become involved? We don't know for sure. What we do know is that distribution of obscenity is a crime and Adelphia evidently recognized that too."

Continued Sharp: "The boldness of mainstream cable companies to even consider offering this type of material is an indication that more vigorous law enforcement is needed from the top levels of government."

A victory, but what to do about the Internet? The Internet is the medium for pornography, because of its easy and immediate access and, to some extent, partially free (not-charged) content, which includes the most virulent, the most violent, and the most mentally diseased material.

"Nobody who peddles porn cares a whit about women and children"

Precisely.

"The boldness of mainstream cable companies to even consider offering this type of material is an indication that more vigorous law enforcement is needed from the top levels of government."

Very little will be achieved if there are no broad educational programs about why pornography hurts society. You don't combat cigarette smoking by simply trying to close the cigarette factories, it's foremost a question of public education. And where is the school curriculum on this, may I ask?

In the Triassic era.

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Update:

I had seen this post before, and had thought about blogging it, but it got lost along the way. Since the subject is related, here it is. Finally something worth reading at American Spectator, even though, ever so mild. The first quote is from a disgusting homo professor (over at Slate) talking about the new and old Deep Throat Movie:

[Inside Deep Throat] also steps awkwardly around Linda Lovelace's allegations in her 1980 memoir Ordeal that she made the film under emotional and physical threat, forced at gunpoint by her then boyfriend-manager to participate. (Disputed by all the film's other participants, needless to say.)

But Ordeal itself is fairly confused, concluding with this piece of wisdom about Lovelace's experience of being forcibly transformed into a porn star: "I never thought something like that could happen to me, but now I know better. It could happen to me, and it could happen to you." This is pure melodrama, of course. But then so are all discussions about the social evils of pornography: Innocence is corrupted, people's wills are overtaken, everyone is at risk.

Mild, but to the point, comes Douhat's comment on the above:

Pure melodrama, says Laura Kipnis, professor of media studies at Northwestern. And in a way, she's right: everyone isn't at risk, and what happened to Lovelace couldn't happen to her. She, after all, is well-educated, upper-middle-class white woman, with a job at a major university and a nice intellectual career -- a career in which she explains to other well-educated, upwardly-mobile types (like you and I, constant reader) why they shouldn't worry about the "social evils of pornography."

As for Lovelace, well, if the miserable reality of her actual life couldn't compete with the fantasy portrayed in her porn movies, isn't it reality that should be doing the apologizing?

related entry: Glorifying Rape - New Deep Throat Movie
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