Back in the beginning we were all related. From the days of the cave people, everyone was somehow related to everyone else. We are all probably cousins if you go back far enough, right?
We know all the so-called rules about who you can marry and what is verboten. You’re allowed to marry your cousin, as long as it isn’t too close a cousin. The children of too-close cousins can experience major physical or mental problems. So, even though we were raised together, it really isn’t a good idea to cohabitate and for the most part, we don’t. Of course, we do know of cases in which cousins have cross-pollinated. My bet is that many of the people who are reading this now are aware of cousins who may have broken the unwritten rules.
Just think about it. Many of us were raised with cousins who were our closest friends. We do know that romantic relationships often spring from proximity. Our parents and closest relatives quite frequently set the rules that we play by and we are told that violating the rules may end up causing problems down the road, we are most often loath to violate those rules. We are not dogs who have been known to cross the very ethical physical boundary lines that we live by.
Nevertheless, we live in a world where many rules are regularly violated. The standards for those rules are often set by parents, teachers, and religious institutions. Our society has been sexualized, and we see a proliferation of sex in every one of our media outlets—movies, newspapers, television, magazines. We as a society have been seduced by all this material and one cannot even open a major Sunday paper without being subjected to material that may, at one time, have been considered unacceptable by our major institutions. Nevertheless, the close-to-porno stuff keeps coming. Sex sells.
If you think for a moment about the advertisements that regularly feature sexually oriented content, it doesn’t take much to place yourself in the room in which the ads that we read are made up. The people who write and produce these ads know that they can seduce a lot of eyeballs just by sexualizing content. A mere twenty years ago, these ads would have been considered unacceptable. If you think about what you are seeing on today’s billboards and subway ads, you have to conclude that the people at the advertising agencies know what works and what doesn’t work. They know exactly what they are doing.
There was a time in this country that what passed for pornography was to be found in Playboy, Hustler, and Penthouse. That meant a lot of magazines were sold. But that quickly became passé as the internet took over. On the internet, virtually nothing is forbidden.
In the old days, pornography had clear limits of acceptability in popular culture. Magazines that were available at the corner store came in brown paper wrappers. People snuck in the back doors of X-rated book shops. Today, however, there is a sort of “damn the torpedoes” approach to use of pornography. It has been developing for years in current magazines and general literature.
We have now arrived at a place where there are no rules on what is permissible and what is not. Since so much of our literature and writing tests the limits of what is acceptable, it is hard to imagine what is not permissible.
There is something about pornography that attracts people to it. We have been approaching a place where there are no limits on what can be written or what can be seen. It’s hard to imagine that we will reverse course and start to limit what can be put out there. I can’t believe that we need to reestablish such limits.
