It’s hard to believe that less than 60 years ago movie and television censors considered a husband and wife sleeping in the same bed as being too risqué. This was also a time in the media where you could watch someone get shot by a machine gun on screen and no blood would ooze from their bodies, where newborn babies looked more like 1 year olds, where women seemed to awake wearing a designer gown and black people pretty much didn’t exist.
But I digress.
People were portrayed back then as having simple, less hedonistic lives. Partying until the wheels came off may’ve been as simple as going out for ice cream every Friday night. It was definitely a time of innocence. My case in point is the lyric to a popular song that came out in 1928 called Let’s Do It. Try running those lyrics up the flagpole at any elementary school today and I’m sure that you’d get a wide range of very, err, colorful responses. But for the sake of my argument I want to extract some of the lyrics to drive my point home:
“I’ve heard that lizards and frogs do it
Layin’ on a rock
They say that roosters do it
With a doodle and cock”
If you were to ask a child back in the 30’s and 40’s what the song was about, more than likely they’d say “it’s about falling in love”, which is what the song was about. But to a child of today the title of Let’s Do It would probably mean something much more colorful. Throw in “doodle and cock” and I’m sure that you’d probably need to have a signed hold harmless agreement, a good attorney and some strong ears.
There is something to be said about innocence, about it being preserved and about it being valued. Unfortunately in our quest to “keep it real” sometimes innocence becomes the kid who, instead of wearing the brand new Jordan’s to school, wears corrective orthopedic shoes that have heavy metal braces adorning them.
It comes as no secret that we all want “the real thing” in our lives. Whatever that “real” thing might be, that’s what we want. We don’t want to be teased with the watered down second string version of it. We want the in your face, genuine article, it don’t get no better than this sho nuf real thang!
In the department of relationships it’s real intimacy that people want. That’s the sweet spot that we all crave. It’s the pièce de résistance of life, being able to share your brokenness with someone else who is equally broken, and together all of those broken pieces make a beautiful mosaic. The problem is that in our instant gratification world people sometimes aren’t willing to pay the price for it. Intimacy ultimately requires both parties to give up something of themselves, and that can be scary.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that intimacy is difficult to define in our very fast paced world. It’s difficult because it’s not a one-size fits all ideal. What is intimate to me may not even be in the same neighborhood as intimacy to someone else. Couple that with the fact that men, in general, have a harder time expressing intimacy because of how we’re wired, and socialized. Women can battle through the maze of emotional intactness a little more easily than men can. Without sounding sexist or the slightest bit condescending, it is, also, how they’re wired.
Sex has long been considered to be the ultimate expression of an intimate encounter. Unfortunately the sex industry, namely pornography, has stolen that car, stripped it of anything of value, and then returned it to its owner completely and utterly useless.
The rapid growth of the porn industry is directly proportional to how society has grown to overemphasize convenience, excess and a disdain of innocence.
I’ve heard proponents say that being anti-porn means being anti-sex. This is a non sequitur argument because comparing pornography to sex is like saying driving your speeding car off a cliff is the same as cruising along the coastline with the top down and your arm around the person you love.
The two are not even remotely similar.
The porn industry has a higher STD rate than prostitution. There are more cases of HIV among porn actors and actresses than any other profession. That alone should scare people away, the fact that you’re doing things, in many cases, that the human body is not designed for and the body simply can’t handle it. And while testing is highly recommended it is not illegal to not be tested. These tests are paid for by the performers themselves, so reliability is sketchy at best.
“But it’s their own personal choice. They can choose to do something else if they wanted to.”
Really? The vast majority of the performers in this industry are young girls who have dropped out of high school, have abusive environments that they’re trying to escape, or who already work as prostitutes. They’re not capable of understanding the lifelong ramifications of their decision, as most teenagers don’t. All they see is the money, and producers pray on this type of naiveté. And it’s not just girls either. The pay-to-be-gay movement among young men is just as strong. If you’ve never heard this practice before it’s when a supposedly heterosexual male will perform homosexual acts on camera, for money. Thus the moniker exists: pay to be gay.
Probably most damaging is the fact that participation in this industry is the equivalent of painting a huge red mark on your fore head. The advent of the internet pretty much insures that your children and grandchildren will get to see what grandma did for a couple of bucks. That’s awesome! But seriously, one of the reasons that many of these performers wind up committing suicide is because, after they’re used up, they’re banished to a prison of varying degrees of lifelong solitude.
I’m not beating up on the porn industry for the sake of sport. I see it becoming more and more of an issue because, well, quite simply, young people don’t think and are primed to be convinced that they can get in and then get out (no pun intended…okay, maybe) without being scarred for life. This is simply not true. So many young women, and men, have thrown their lives away by falling victim to the artificial glam and glitz that this industry promises. In reality it’s more like a meat grinder with society left to pick up the pieces. Families are being torn apart due to addictions and false standards that no one can live up to in real life. So, in conclusion, all of this leads me to the conclusion that, as glamorous as the industry tries to make itself, if there ever was a pig in lipstick the porn industry is that pig.
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