Parental warning: Please do not read this article near a child, i.e., a person under the age of 23. His or her little head may explode.
In the last installment of "Blue Balls," I talked about what it's like to be exposed to porn when you're young. The basic tack of the article was that children inevitably look at porn, so huzzah for a democratic Internet which offers them a multifarious, full-flavored cornucopia thereof.
I'm sure that not all of my readers agreed with this position, but I did get one favorable response, on a political blog entitled "Peace, Love and Erica Campbell," written by an adult film actress named Seksi.
Seksi, who is to star in the upcoming film Strip at Pain, took my argument to support the theme of her blog post, the defeat of a recent plan to create an Internet ".xxx" domain specifically for pornography.
Seksi advocates that parents, not the government or the corporations that control the Internet, are responsible for keeping their kids safe from porn.
She writes: "In the end, it is up to parents to be parents, not technocrats who are intrusted with the care and feeding of the internet, not uptight Judeo-Christian lawmakers that want to legislate their own religious codes as law, not authoritarians that want to experiment with excessive political manipulation of the Department of Justice, and use `obscenity' as a cover for their outrages."
Well put, Seksi. I'm not sure why you think that I'd side with you on this whole parents thing. As far as I'm concerned, the question of whether exposure to sex has a corrupting effect on the minds of children is still up in the air. While I'm mulling over that one, two facts seem evident: one good, one bad.
One: porn stars read the News-Letter. Two: there are a lot of people in this country who think that some people are just too innocent to be exposed to human sexuality.
You probably already knew that, but what you might not have know is that some of these no-naughty-words advocates are policymakers who work for the JHU Office of Residential Life.
As of this moment, ResLife has censored a student poster advertising an upcoming play. When I heard this, I imagined the title must be Peter Weiss' The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed Under the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.
This made sense, because as far as I could see, the only reason that ResLife might reasonably refuse to endorse a poster is that it would obscure an entire bulletin board's worth of other advertising. But the play is Sex a.k.a. Wieners and Boobs, which the Buttered Niblets are putting on in the Arellano Theatre this weekend. ResLife says the title is "crass."
Whuh? The poster is a string of euphemisms. What will ResLife do when someone wants to stage Penetration a.k.a. Cocks and Tits?
In a world before the Internet, a ban on print advertising would probably have killed off the show. Thanks to Facebook, the effect of the censorship on the show will hopefully be paper thin. The Niblets have spent the better part of several months rehearsing Sex a.k.a. Wieners and Boobs, and having caught a snatch of the script, I can assure you it is knee-whipping funny. And as if this campus' record for protecting free speech wasn't down the tubes enough.
ResLife really shocks me; I truly couldn't believe that any center of education would stoop lower than John Jay High School in Westchester County, New York. At the school, the principal recently suspended several girls for uttering a single word, which he deemed obscene, during the school's production of Eve Ensler's revolutionary documentary play The Vagina Monologues. The word, you ask?
"Vagina."
Okay, an intermezzo before I tell you one more tale of ridiculous censorship: A riddle for you.
They number some 3 billion. If you're a Hopkins student, there's a 55 percent chance that you've got one. Do you have one? I do.
And Susan Patron, an American children's writer, describes the word for them as "delicious." What is it? A restraining order? No, it's a scrotum!
Despite the ubiquity of the ball sack, parents, educators and librarians all over the country are up in arms about the appearance of the word "scrotum" on the first page of Patron's 2006 book, The Higher Power of Lucky.
Okay, I've had about enough of this rampant Puritanism. When we will learn? Sex is something just about everyone enjoys.
No one -- 7-year-olds, high-schoolers and collegians alike -- should be insulated from sexual knowledge or language. The high price we pay is allowing the future leaders of the world to languish in ignorance about their own sexuality.
