Posted on 01/24/2006 2:50:39 PM PST by SmoothTalker
Actors having real sex in art-house movies. Erstwhile child star Lindsay Lohan appearing barely clad on the cover of her new album. Teenage girls strolling down Main Street USA attired in ''Porn Star" T-shirts. A bikini-wearing Jessica Simpson bumping and grinding in the music video for ''These Boots Are Made for Walkin.' " College-age women flashing for the ''Girls Gone Wild" video series with nonchalant exhibitionism.
Not too long ago, pornography was a furtive profession, its products created and consumed in the shadows. But it has steadily elbowed its way into the limelight, with an impact that can be measured not just by the Internet-fed ubiquity of pornography itself but by the way aspects of the porn sensibility now inform movies, music videos, fashion, magazines, and celebrity culture.
Braving the inevitable accusations of prudery -- which they reject -- critics such as Paul are sounding the alarm. They say the current hypersexualized climate distorts the attitudes of young people toward sex and relationships. In particular, they contend it has a damaging effect on the self-image of young women and girls, who are confronted with a culture that objectifies them while disguising it as female empowerment.
''Our culture once glamorized cigarette smoking to a large extent. It was promoted by the medical establishment, the film industry, TV," she says. ''But once the evidence of harm began to be disseminated by the government, and by schools and the private sector, the number of people who started smoking went down. My hope is that once people realize the negative effect that pornography has on individuals, their children, their wives, and society as a whole, there will be a mind-set shift."
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
***the Internet-fed ubiquity of pornography ***
Go to the porn sites. Oggle! Press those buttons! Hit the links! And your computer will pick up so much internet VD that it will take a special cleaning to fix. Viruses. Hijackers, mousetraps, diverters. And all sorts of nasty stuff (and I'm not talking about the pictures).
I love this country!
Not to mention they lived their lives in a media fishbowl. Not very healthy way to run a marriage. Hell, they all need food. Send Emeril, Ina Garten, and Paula Deen!
I don't know if Jessica truly lacks brains, or has cultivated a type of brainless image to appeal to her brainless fans. How sad....
"What use to be common pornography is now pop culture. "
I don't understand the obsession with porn.
But I also don't understand why they have more skin on commercial TV in Europe than we do in the US by far (like topless models in commercials and porn movies on after prime time) and their cultures don't seem as obsessed with porn as people in the US.
Now that's my idea of 'Broke Back' Mountin'
NOTHING that emaciated can be considered "sexy".
But it is an issue that is discussed from time to time on this board and I occasionally comment when I read an article.
Our commercials many not show the same ammount of skin as European commercials, but their is plenty of skin in American movies and many magazines. The jokes on some American sitcoms, definitely invoke pornographic images and have gotten increasingly raunchier.
Just curious if you happened to read the many examples provided by the article atop this thread.
FYI... Porn threads are always good for riling people up.
DISCUSSION ABOUT: "The Pornification of America"
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It's pretty funny when people try to say that pornography has no affect on anyone. Or on them, at least. If what people saw, read, and heard had no affect on their minds, the advertising industry would be wasting billions of dollars.
What people read, see and hear definitely shapes the consciousness. It's a fact, a law of nature, inescapable objective reality. And up until Larry Flynt teamed up with the ACLU, local governments were able to control porn shops. Now it's a free for all, with countless teenage kids (and younger ones) getting warped views of sex at an early age. Will all be ruined? No. Will many be adversely affected? Yes. I personally know of a handful of kids who have seen either outright porn or what used to be considered X rated, to their extreme detriment.
And the excuse "Well, it's the parents' responsibility to control what their kids see and hear" - that's easier said than done, considering that library computers can often access porn, high school libraries carry some really strange books, friends' houses may contain porn. It's like living in the midst of a garbage dump - no matter how clean you keep your house, if all your neighbors throw their trash everywhere and their dogs crap in your yard, your house will be full of flies and rats too.
The other day there was a news photo of Jenna Jameson (porn) that simply described her as "an actress."
"Actually I am not obssessed by porn."
Sorry if it came across that I meant you were obsessed by porn. I meant our culture seems to be obsessed by it right now.
Yes, I read the article. But you missed my point. I take it you've never been to France, Germany, Belgium, or the Netherlands?
It is indeed a saddening, yet repulsive commentary on the kids my age. It's even more disgusting that this is the price our country's paying because of the 60's and 70's, and the Liberals' trophy gains made during that era.
I don't blame the entire Baby Boom generation. To criticize an entire group is not right. Nay, I lay the blame primarily on the SCOTUS, the era of radical Feminazism, and the burgeoning pop-culture movements that started in the late 1950's and have continued to the current moment.
It is because of Nutty rulings such as Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, and Miller v. California--all made during the so-called "Sexual Revolution" or "Hippie" era that opened the floodgates of filth, and have effectively put American society beyond the realm of easy repair via the legislative organs.
To effectively pull us out of the garbage dump of popular society, nothing short of a miracle--manifested in Constitutional Amendments and a very conservative, strict-constructionist SCOTUS can effectively right these wrongs.
We grew up in filth. We saw filth in all forms quite literally from the cradle--the emergence of heavy metal, rap, and violence in video games, to rampant sex and children posing as virtual sex slaves on the Internet.
And generally we've been forcefed Liberal, if not purely Marxist ideas by teachers via bureaucracy and manipulation of the curricula by teachers' unions, unscrupulous politicos, and special-interest groups.
God and the Good Book have been yanked out of our schools and now my generation, by whom here I shall figuratively represent by two people--Johnny and Jenny, are learning revised subjects out of heavily censored texts and politically-sensitive terms. We find in their classroooms Gaia and black books on gay sex have been substituted in place of the morning prayer and Holy Scripture.
Johnny was drugged on Ritalin almost literally on the orders of Nutty public-school indoctrinators. Little Jenny was denied the lessons of reason, freedom, and the pursuit of truth in the perverse majesties of introducing "diversity", "tolerance", "opening new ideas", and "multiculturalism."
Both Johnny and Jenny graduate from high school and attend the State University. Johnny drinks heavily, drops out of college, and becomes a regular deadbeat in the county jail. Jenny's parents flip through the cable channels after watching the 11:00 news and find a GGW ad where Jenny appears drunk and naked on the cover.
What makes this even sadder and all the more disturbing is that this can quite literally be the current (albeit largely generalized) lifestory of any American my age. It is a telltale reminder of the apathy and the age we live in. It is a commentary of excesses seen as pride in a world where excesses have always led to decadences have always led to the destruction of civilized orders.
And accelerating this is the disturbing trend of Conservative and Judeo-Christian thoughts in the high schools and the Colleges and Universities are systematically repressed, and we who hold these persuasions are forced to go underground for fear of reprisal--academic or otherwise.
Is it thus any wonder that such a generation that almost literally suckled on the teats of obscenity and moral relativism produces it for all the world to see? Is it any wonder the circle of perverse behavior completed itself, and is set to do so for much of perpetuity?
Is it a coincidence that the Libs' moral relativity has fed more and even worse depravity in our society? Absolutely not.
Every time I see a GGW infomercial on TV, and every time I hear about the latest orgy on Greek Row, I cannot help but feel ashamed of my generation. Every time I see an advertisement for Spring Breaks that seem to offer nothing more than Sun, Booze, and Sex in the hallways and the campus newspaper, I scratch my head in disbelief.
And every time I hear of Lefty professors trashing all that is good with America, only for my classmates to parrot the garbage, I fill with anger, my fists almost clenched in rage.
Our generation has been failed. And unless we can work tirelessly to shift the public into deglamourizing sex, the depravity will continue to eat our society and rip our nation apart at the seams, inevitably leading to the apathy which has felled the great empires of the world.
My point: Don't let America, the greatest bastion of liberty, clearly the best and brightest union of men, genius, and hope, and the world's oasis of freedom and prosperity, die an agonizing death and perish to nothing more than the annals of history.
In conclusion, I find I cannot stay silent any more. We are in a war for our very survival. This war isn't being fought with military forces per se--each of us are soldiers in this fight.
A lot of our ancestors left places such as France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and more to get away from the societies there, try to start over in the U.S. afresh. And many still are, to state the obvious.
The U.S.A. is in this sense, "superior" as civilization to at least continue to contend with the protections of some degree of public decency. I think most of Europe stopped trying a while ago, certainly Paris and the Netherlands did.
HELL YEA!!!
Uh..Ya might need to cut down on your dose of Viagra dude.
Ok. Then why make a comparison to a cartoon character? That's a bit odd.
"Make it one for my baby -- and one more for the toad!"
How 'bout a VIDEO instead?
From Frontline (PBS), a documentary on the U.S. porn industry, viewable online. It is depressing but interesting.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/porn/view/
It says that the porn industry exploded because Janet Reno and the Clinton administration stopped porn prosecutions.
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