Zack, Miri and the Pornification of our Culture |
by Catherine Larson |
In glancing through upcoming movie titles earlier this year, I saw the title Zack and Miri Make a Porno. My stomach turned. I read the description of this mainstream, coming-to-a-theater-near-you movie:
Zack and Miri are two lifelong friends who are deep in debt and enlist the help of their friends to make a porno movie for some quick cash. But as everybody starts "doing" everybody, Zack and Miri realize that they may have more feelings for each other than they previously thought.
Aww... isn't that sweet? Bleh. It's enough to make you want to spew your lunch. What makes me even sicker is thinking about the teens who will go see this movie.
I'm not alone, though, in lamenting the pornification of our culture. Thankfully, other voices are joining the chorus that says enough is enough, especially when it comes to our kids.
This week Newsweek turns an eye to the trend:
The idea for a book about porn culture came to Kevin Scott the day his daughter decided she absolutely had to have a Bratz-doll pony. For months, the 5-year-old had begged him for a Bratz doll—clad in spike heels, fishnets and miniskirt, enormous puppy-dog eyes protruding from her oversized head. Her sexy look seemed a little too sexy for a preschooler, so he and his wife bought her a different doll, which she was happy with. Except that a few months later, Bratz came out with Bratz Babyz. "If Bratz had looked like Barbie hookers, these looked like baby hookers," Scott says. Again, he convinced his daughter that My Little Pony was just as cool—and for a moment, the conversation ended. Until, of course, the Bratz came out with Bratz Ponyz. And then, says Scott, an English professor at a small college in Georgia, "I realized porn culture and I were in a death match for my daughter's soul."
In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn't take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives. Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.
But it isn't just sex that Scott is worried about. He's more interested in how we, as a culture, often mimic the most raunchy, degrading parts of it—many of which, he says, come directly from pornography. In "The Porning of America" (Beacon), which he has written with colleague Carmine Sarracino, a professor of American literature, the duo argue that, through Bratz dolls and beyond, the influence of porn on mainstream culture is affecting our self perceptions and behavior—in everything from fashion to body image to how we conceptualize our sexuality.
I think all of us today have to be more vigilant than ever that we don't allow society's nonchalance toward sexual sin to permeate our own thinking and that of our children. The price we pay if we do is not only a legacy of pain for our children, but the desecration of the Imago Dei, the image of God in each one of us. Whenever a human is reduced to a commodity, there are going to be ramifications.
We see that clearly in a movie I, like Gina, would recommend you go and see, Call+ Response.
(Image © The Weinstein Company)
I take issue with only one point, Catherine -- our society is anything but nonchalant about sexual sin. No, if anything there's an outright affection, a desire, a headlong rush to higher highs and lower lows. It's almost like sex, from its pseudo-"innocent" curiosity and experimentation to its outright lowest blatant depravity, is like some kind of societal drug.
Which makes me wonder: what would rehab look like?
Posted by: joel | October 14, 2008 at 03:23 PM
They posted an ad for this piece of trash on my Facebook page! ARGH!
Posted by: Darcyjo | October 14, 2008 at 08:05 PM