Tweet
CITY LIGHTS: Pornification offers lots of naked ladies
Ed Kemmick
CITY LIGHTS
The first volunteer work I ever did was driving around with other Boy Scouts picking up bundles of old newspapers. With one adult or another behind the wheel, we'd fill up the backs of station wagons and then toss the bundles into a semitrailer parked on the playground of St. Jude of the Lake School. Eventually, the paper was hauled off for recycling.
It was fun work anyway, but there was a darker motive behind my volunteerism. After the paper drive, the semitrailer would sit there for a day or two, doors open and untended. My brother and I, accompanied by a few friends, would head up to St. Jude late in the afternoon, climb into the trailer and go prospecting.
We would scratch and paw our way through tons of newsprint, our hands getting blacker by the minute, in search of what was then a scarce and infinitely valuable commodity: a copy of Playboy magazine.
It's hard to describe the thrill of spying, half buried beneath a hillock of black-and-white newsprint, a patch of naked flesh, or the unmistakable glossy glow of a Playboy cover. We could almost always count on somebody tossing one issue of Playboy, and if it was there, we were going to find it.
At that time - this would have been the mid-1960s, and I would have been 11 or 12 years old - Playboy was virtually the only source of salacious photographs that had yet come to the attention of anyone I knew. Somebody might turn up on occasion with a pack of playing cards adorned with what we invariably called "naked ladies," and the friend of a friend was rumored to have laid eyes on a nudist magazine, but that was only a rumor.
The only other possible source of even mildly titillating material was National Geographic, which earned the gratitude of millions of young boys by including at least one photograph of a bare-breasted woman in every issue. Being tolerant, broad-minded boys, we didn't care what continent the seminaked ladies hailed from.
One time, during class at St. Jude school, a nun discovered me lost in contemplation of a particularly interesting photograph of a woman from the Congo, or possibly Tanzania. The knuckle blow to my head wasn't nearly as painful as the mortification of being caught.
A bit of a change
Those days, in case you haven't noticed, are long gone. It is now more difficult to avoid seeing naked flesh than finding it used to be. The pornification of our culture, as one writer has dubbed it, seems to be nearly complete.
That's why it's hard not to feel some sympathy for the people who crowded into the Yellowstone County Commission meeting room last week to urge commissioners to adopt an ordinance aimed at fighting obscenity, closing strip joints and sharply regulating sexually oriented businesses.
But adopting an ordinance seems like a hopeless attempt to order the genie back into the bottle. The commissioners, wisely enough, did their best to seem concerned but cautious, which tells me they aren't likely to approve such an ordinance themselves. They won't complain if a petition drive puts it to a vote of the people, but I don't see them leading the charge.
If a gang of armed pornographers were herding people into strip joints, adult arcades and massage parlors, government action would be useful and well warranted. But when adults exercising their First Amendment rights walk into these establishments of their own free will and lay down their hard-earned money, it's hard to imagine at what point the government can reasonably intervene.
And it would help if one of the ringleaders of the fight, Dallas Erickson of Stevensville, looked liked he was on a crusade, not a career path. He's been thumping the morality tub for at least 15 years in his home county of Ravalli, where the local government has been embroiled in court battles - at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars - since Erickson helped adopt an anti-obscenity ordinance there in 1994.
The proposed ordinance Erickson and company presented to Yellowstone County commissioners looks likely to do nothing to stop the spread of obscenity and plenty to enrich lawyers. One portion of the definition of nudity speaks of the unconcealed "anal cleft" of a man or a woman.
That's what the rest of us would call a butt crack. If strippers were prohibited from exposing this anatomical feature, would sheriff's deputies be expected to start ticketing plumbers, too? That would be a heck of a court battle.
This is a burden the County Commission shouldn't be asked to bear. If a majority of residents want to ban naked ladies - and my memories of rooting through those semitrailers tell me they don't - let them do it by petition and ballot.
Contact Ed Kemmick at [email protected] or 657-1293.
http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=r...ld/local/60-porn.inc
Ed Kemmick
CITY LIGHTS
The first volunteer work I ever did was driving around with other Boy Scouts picking up bundles of old newspapers. With one adult or another behind the wheel, we'd fill up the backs of station wagons and then toss the bundles into a semitrailer parked on the playground of St. Jude of the Lake School. Eventually, the paper was hauled off for recycling.
It was fun work anyway, but there was a darker motive behind my volunteerism. After the paper drive, the semitrailer would sit there for a day or two, doors open and untended. My brother and I, accompanied by a few friends, would head up to St. Jude late in the afternoon, climb into the trailer and go prospecting.
We would scratch and paw our way through tons of newsprint, our hands getting blacker by the minute, in search of what was then a scarce and infinitely valuable commodity: a copy of Playboy magazine.
It's hard to describe the thrill of spying, half buried beneath a hillock of black-and-white newsprint, a patch of naked flesh, or the unmistakable glossy glow of a Playboy cover. We could almost always count on somebody tossing one issue of Playboy, and if it was there, we were going to find it.
At that time - this would have been the mid-1960s, and I would have been 11 or 12 years old - Playboy was virtually the only source of salacious photographs that had yet come to the attention of anyone I knew. Somebody might turn up on occasion with a pack of playing cards adorned with what we invariably called "naked ladies," and the friend of a friend was rumored to have laid eyes on a nudist magazine, but that was only a rumor.
The only other possible source of even mildly titillating material was National Geographic, which earned the gratitude of millions of young boys by including at least one photograph of a bare-breasted woman in every issue. Being tolerant, broad-minded boys, we didn't care what continent the seminaked ladies hailed from.
One time, during class at St. Jude school, a nun discovered me lost in contemplation of a particularly interesting photograph of a woman from the Congo, or possibly Tanzania. The knuckle blow to my head wasn't nearly as painful as the mortification of being caught.
A bit of a change
Those days, in case you haven't noticed, are long gone. It is now more difficult to avoid seeing naked flesh than finding it used to be. The pornification of our culture, as one writer has dubbed it, seems to be nearly complete.
That's why it's hard not to feel some sympathy for the people who crowded into the Yellowstone County Commission meeting room last week to urge commissioners to adopt an ordinance aimed at fighting obscenity, closing strip joints and sharply regulating sexually oriented businesses.
But adopting an ordinance seems like a hopeless attempt to order the genie back into the bottle. The commissioners, wisely enough, did their best to seem concerned but cautious, which tells me they aren't likely to approve such an ordinance themselves. They won't complain if a petition drive puts it to a vote of the people, but I don't see them leading the charge.
If a gang of armed pornographers were herding people into strip joints, adult arcades and massage parlors, government action would be useful and well warranted. But when adults exercising their First Amendment rights walk into these establishments of their own free will and lay down their hard-earned money, it's hard to imagine at what point the government can reasonably intervene.
And it would help if one of the ringleaders of the fight, Dallas Erickson of Stevensville, looked liked he was on a crusade, not a career path. He's been thumping the morality tub for at least 15 years in his home county of Ravalli, where the local government has been embroiled in court battles - at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars - since Erickson helped adopt an anti-obscenity ordinance there in 1994.
The proposed ordinance Erickson and company presented to Yellowstone County commissioners looks likely to do nothing to stop the spread of obscenity and plenty to enrich lawyers. One portion of the definition of nudity speaks of the unconcealed "anal cleft" of a man or a woman.
That's what the rest of us would call a butt crack. If strippers were prohibited from exposing this anatomical feature, would sheriff's deputies be expected to start ticketing plumbers, too? That would be a heck of a court battle.
This is a burden the County Commission shouldn't be asked to bear. If a majority of residents want to ban naked ladies - and my memories of rooting through those semitrailers tell me they don't - let them do it by petition and ballot.
Contact Ed Kemmick at [email protected] or 657-1293.
http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=r...ld/local/60-porn.inc
Ed,
After reading your article " Pornification offers lots of naked ladies " online, I thought I would reply with a few thoughts. I too am apalled at the excessive sexuality to which our children are exposed. Between suggestive music videos with divas shaking their scantily clad anatomy in sexually suggestive ways, to sexual inuendo in children's movies, our children are becomming programmed to be lustful at much ealier ages than you and I were programmed. Yes, YOU were programmed by society to be lustful. If you hadn't been, you wouldn't have participated in the desparate search for naked body pictures in that trailer. Societal norms make lust an acceptable behavior by teaching children to objectify the human body. Much like sexual abuse, there is a certain "grooming" process involved. It starts in subtle ways such as the above mentioned scantilly clad divas doing virtual pole dances on the music channels. Our young children learn to dance by watching the simulated sex. I was aghast the other day to hear my eight year old daughter singing "I like to move it, move it". I found out it was a song in one of her children's movies.
But the media is not entirely to blame for this decline in our country's morals. It may seem innocuous, but Uncle Ed has a big part in this. Yup, our own family members are reinforcing the decline. When children hear an adult make lustful comments such as " I wouldn't kick HER out of bed", it reinforces the concept of judging people based upon their appearance, which is objectifying.
Nudity, itself, is not a negative thing. The Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction would never have been an issue in certain Scandinavian countries. This is because there, nudity is not taboo. The innocent exposure of the female breast need not be (pardon the pun) titilating. In America, we have objectified the breast so much that some men can focus on nothing else when talking to women. In some African cultures, nudity was the dress code until "civilized" world came in and changed the culture. So, lust is not inherant to nudity. So, eliminating nudity is not the solution. To the contrary, I believe that "normalizing" casual, non-sexual nudity would reduce lustful reactions. Children are not born with lust. they are taught it. They are, however, born with curiosity. If you keep something covered, it stirs curiosity. This curiosity becomes heightened when children are told that "those parts" are dirty or shameful. This causes the taboo and kicks the curiosity into hyperdrive. When societal influences are added to the mix, the sexual aspect is developed. And there you have the recipie for lust. Now, if the taboo was not there, and the sight of the human body was commonplace, then the sight of it would not stir errotic thoughts as readily. Of course, we would have to eliminate the soft porn on music videos and tell Uncle Ed to grow up. But it is the elimination of lust, not the covering of our God given bodies which should be the goal.
Have a GREAT Day!
Kevin
"God created two body types, male and female. Each is essentially the same with the same parts in the same places"
Comment