Journalist for Life
We’ve all heard it. “You anti-abortion people are obsessed with one issue.” Actually we’re pro-life and it’s you who try to make us monomaniacal by calling us anti-abortion. Mind you, to be opposed to the mass slaughter of the most vulnerable people in society is hardly anything of which to be ashamed and it’s surely activists who obsess about taxes or animals or free trade who are the strange ones, not we who fight against murder.
But even the basic premise is wrong. We don’t just care about the unborn, but the elderly, the sick, the terminally ill, the moral state of our society and the family, children and childhood. We also know that as sensitive and difficult an issue as sex and sexuality may be, unless we can remind people that sex does have a greater purpose than mere brief physical fulfillment we are in serious ethical trouble.
Which brings me to the CRTC, our betters in Ottawa who decide what is allowed on television and radio decided earlier this year that two new pornography stations have to be carried on our televisions and that they must – yes, entirely true – include local performers: 50 per cent Canadian content is the minimum for Alberta, 20 per cent for Quebec. Evidently cowboy hats are sexier than poutine. Remember that this is the same CRTC that refused to allow Christian television for many years and permitted Playboy TV to air long before Mother Angelica’s EWTN!
Aside from the increasing absurdity of the state controlling what we watch and listen to, this girl-on-girl-on-bureaucrat action is gruesome on so many levels. Even in its premise it’s pretty hilarious in that the boys and girls at the CRTC don’t seem to have realized that there is something known by young people out there as “the internet” and it apparently contains million of free pornographic images and movies. In other words, sad guys can self-abuse themselves blind and pay absolutely nothing. And the abuse of the self is precisely what this is about – physically, emotionally, sexually.
In that the use of porn is inherently embarrassing because it shows either that you cannot form a real sexual relationship or that you do not have a fulfilling marriage, most men – oh yeah, it’s still overwhelmingly men in spite of sordid and wishful fantasies – deny using it and the computer is far more anonymous than the television.
It’s also an ethical issue in that unlike other forms of what is considered entertainment this is not morally neutral and demands the objectification and degradation of women and the exploitation of what is supposed to be intimate for the most vulgar public titillation. It is abusive by nature and in reality even more so – proven connections to drug-dependency, sexually transmitted diseases, crime gangs, prostitution and rape.
Only an extremist would call for pornography to be banned, but only a fool would pretend it had no consequences and was desirable. The most obvious repercussion is that it perverts men’s expectations of sex. Numerous studies have shown that after long-term pornography use men, including married men, assume a sexual passivity and agreement from their partners that is emotionally abhorrent and sometimes physically repulsive. Sex should be for mutual pleasure whereas porn and its masturbatory sibling is all about the self.
What the CRTC has said is that Canada must support and encourage its porn industry, just as we might support and encourage acting and singing or mining and farming. We must guarantee that Canadian girls are used as piece of meat, we must ensure that Canadian women perform acts on men for money that they never otherwise do unless they were desperate. Must demand that Canadian little girls grow up to be what are in fact sex-dolls. The decision injects a legitimacy and an approval into what, while always with us, should never be affirmed and in particular by a government agency.
There are of course some men and a minority of feminists who will argue that it’s all liberating and healthy. Ask them if they’d like their daughter to be porn actresses or enjoy it if their husband watched the stuff every night. It’s generally poor, vulnerable and ill-educated women who appear and wealthy blob men with bad cologne and worse souls making the big money from it all. Now a government commissioner will star in “Deep Throat With A Grant” and everybody will pretend to be happy. Really? Ask a few wives whose marriages have broken down because of pornography addiction, a few children whose dads ignored them because they preferred their laptop screens, a few women whose lives are wrecked because they performed like animals for money. It’s not television that’s bad but what’s on television that’s bad, and this is horribly, seriously bad.
Coren can be booked for public speaking at www.michaelcoren.com
