Tuesday, October 03, 2006

And Now, A Word About Pornography

For various reasons, I was in a hotel room the other day scrolling through the menu of options on my TV. Current movies (including "Little Miss Sunshine" which I STILL haven't seen), TV shows, a Howard Stern channel (of course) and "Adult Desires," also known as porn. I'm not an avid consumer of porn, I know the stories of the exploited kids who enter the industry (often runaways or coming from abusive families etc) and so on. But porn is there, so I look. What do I find? Porn featuring blacks, whites, Asians and Latinos. Naughty nurses. Guys who want you to sleep with their wives. Best Buddies who want you to sleep with their moms. Girl on girl action (of course). And on and on. At the very end of the extensive list available at the Sheraton I was staying at, there were two movies with threesomes, one involving two men and a woman, though the text assured me that there would always be women involved in every scene. (Thank God.) What didn't I find? Gay porn. I actually felt insulted. Is the Sheraton telling me that the filthy-minded customers who want to look at pornography can't even bear the thought of seeing that gay porn is an option for the Sheraton's customers. Are they suggesting the people who want to fork over $15 for porn would actually be offended by simply seeing some gay titles were offered? Did the Sheraton know that a substantial portion of gay porn is purchased by straight women? Was I crazy to find this bizarre and obnoxious?

1 comment:

Michael in New York said...

No, the religious right is at least consistent in attacking all porn. It frustrates them that porn permeates our society; it's widespread and omnipresent, frankly. Many, many major corporations are tied into porn in one way or another. Every major hotel chain offers on demand fare and ALL of them include porn. They also presumably include -- likee Sheraton did -- parental control to block their kids from purchasing porn (assuming they think to go into the kids room and do it) though I don't know whether the kids can still giggle by reading the descriptions of what's available. But since the porn IS there and since they include every type of porn -- including lesbian porn because otherwise Howard Sterrn would have 10,000 guys protesting outside corporate headquarters in an hour -- except for gay porn, I find that offensive too.