[little jeremiah]

What concerns me is how the bar has been lowered so much that kids and teenagers have easy access to porn. And adults. Pornography is not benign or harmless. I know more than three or four families offhand whose lives have been devastated by pornogprahy. And a lot of what is currently accepted as regular mainstream literature/entertainment/movies used to fall under the category of X rated.

[Rembrandt_fan]

I'm with you on pornography, and while this is purely anecdotal, I personally know of two marriages broken beyond repair by the pornography addiction of the husband. It's bizarre to me, forsaking the love of a good woman for the sake of detached, vicarious thrills obtained from still photos and film.

The French have a phrase for this (of course): "nostalgie de la boue," which means: 'longing for the muck [of the gutter].'

Some people are like pigs, and like to wallow in filth. I don't understand this attraction to the nasty and horrible, but I know a little about art and literature. The key is intent; that is, what the creator of a given work, literary or visual, intends to arouse in the viewer/experiencer of his work. If a Rodin sculpture depicts a naked man and woman locked in a passionate embrace, we can be assured that Rodin's intent was not to arouse feelings of wanton lust, even if we know nothing of Rodin and his work. If Nabokov describes a middle-aged man's pursuit of an underage girl, we can be assured the author's intent was not to give us the vicarious pleasure of the seduction of an innocent.

The judge who said of porn, 'I know it when I see it' wasn't off the mark. Pornography, written or visual, announces itself. We know it when we see it.