TING AND I, Pornography

In my elementary school days, the Riverside Drive in NYC phase, the search in the apartment building cellar for return-deposit bottles would on occasion produce a dividend, an issue of Esquire magazine with a nearly naked woman, the source of much fantasizing. In later years, Esquire was supplanted by Playboy, but I had moved on.

As a married man, I have avoided the ever-more-explicit photos available on the Internet, not seeking them out and moving on rapidly if they cross my path. In one of my few agreements with ex-President Jimmy Carter, I believe it is disloyal to lust after any other woman than my wife, even if nothing more comes of it. Sadly, we hear of men “addicted” to Internet porn, another negative consequence of the sexual revolution, now exacerbated by enhanced communications technology.

Unfortunately, as a society we are sex-saturated and sex-obsessed. It is irritating to me to see that even the female news presenters on the programs I watch are wearing tops designed to emphasize and display cleavage. Emphasizing that aspect of your “talents” in a newscast seems to me to be a kind of cheating, something like surreptitiously putting alcohol in someone’s health drink. One nightly cable commentator often arranges to show us the scandalous things being done by others....

Just as we frown on conspicuous displays of wealth, or at least some of us do, we should frown on other displays likely to arouse envy, arouse desire that cannot be legitimately fulfilled. We don’t want to go too far in the other direction, either. I recall a recent cartoon with a census-taker interviewing a resident:

“Sex?”

“No, we’re British.”