"Can there be any doubt that the middle of the road isn't where it used to be?" asks Janet Maslin in a huffy New York Times article titled "Yesterday's Shocker Is Today's Must Read."
"It does not take the pornography star Jenna Jameson's conquest of the best-seller lists this month to demonstrate that what is risibly termed the adult-entertainment industry has come to permeate many aspects of the culture," writes the Times' Guy Trebay in "What Fashion Owes to XXX"
"Most of us navigate quickly past the come-ons. But for some who are enticed to open these cyber doors, one click can ruin their lives!" warned an August 20/20 report on Internet pornography.
The dreaded "pornographized" world Andrea Dworkin warned us about, "Cassandra-like," has finally arrived, declared Naomi Wolf in a New York cover story last October.
And these days, it seems that every mainstream media outlet seems to agree with Ms. Wolf and Ms. Dworkin (and, ironically enough, with Morality in Media, Inc., whose founder warned us twenty years ago that pornography was no longer downtown: "Now it's downstairs.") And it's coming to get you!
While we're open to the possibility that current pop culture is dirtier than it was the last million times people complained about its corruption — Women in pants! Elvis on Ed Sullivan! — we'd like a little proof beyond the fact that a porn star's book is selling well.
While Trebay's article actually offers evidence — the work of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Terry Richardson and Larry Sultan — it seems safe to say that a stack of art-house books by photographers long known for explicit work doesn't necessarily back up Greenfield-Sanders' assertion that "porn has become much more acceptable because of the Internet and fashion." Acceptable to whom? Certainly not to anyone in a position of political power.
Janet Maslin's article starts out with snarky comments about Jenna Jameson's autobiography ("…[She] is no stranger to tricky positions. After all, she does some of her best work gyrating against a stripper's pole") and goes on to complain about books being too dirty (Very Naughty Origami) or too boring (Jane Pauley's Skywriting). This piece — and, lately, so many others — reads like a party game: Use Jane Pauley and Jenna Jameson in the same article. Connect with this thesis statement: "The formerly outré, freaky and unthinkable now constitute business as usual in popular culture." And, go!
Sorry, but last I heard, Viacom was fined $500,000 for a blurry nipple, sex toys were being banned in the South and Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet In Heaven was selling briskly. So why are liberals decrying pornography with the same fervor as the Christian Coalition?
Think that's an exaggeration? The cover of this week's The Villager, a weekly paper for and about the former capital of bohemia, reads: "Villagers try to sweep out smut."
The culture wars are alive and well. By implicitly calling for the return of the brown wrapper, the "liberal media elite" is making strange bedfellows. While it is certainly true that pornography is a big business, so, these days, is repression. n°
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
