Parental Discretion Advised but Not Expected

Keen readers of this blog (I fondly imagine there are some) will know that I celebrated my hundredth blog entry by doing a knife job on Stephanie Meyer. That entry required a little research. Actually since all I did was look her up on wikipedia it occurs to me I should probably remove the preposition from that last sentence. Anyway, one of the things the wikipedia entry mentioned was that a feminist newsletter claimed that Meyer was writing "abstinence porn". This is grossly unfair since most pornography I have encountered has been better written than Twilight.

More importantly though; what the hell is abstinence porn? And do people who get off on that really have to wade through the Twilight series in order to get sexually aroused by the lack of sex. Ok, so maybe Bella doesn't engage in sex before marriage. Perhaps Ms Meyer is sending a subtle message to her readership about not engaging in premarital intercourse. If so she is showing a level of skill evident nowhere else in her writing and does anyone else notice that as long as you marry a corpse apparently its ok to have sex with it?

When did making a point or sending a message become pornography? And if it is pornography why are children allowed to have mobile phones? If Twilight constitutes abstinence porn then I think we can make a case for the bible and the koran being classified as religious porn. The argument is a lot stronger at least on the basis of explicit intent. You could carry this argument to ridiculous lengths or rather, to be more accurate, even more ridiculous lengths. Could our court system be considered an example of "justice porn" which, after all, "must manifestly be seen to be done". Somebody was looking to attract voyeurs from day one. Possibly court transcripts should come in plain paper wrapping with a warning label, "Caution, the following pages contain explicit depictions of hard core justice. Reader discretion is advised". Of course there would be the little disclaimer down the bottom, "all participants were over the age of eighteen, we do not tolerate child justice".

Since there is virtually nothing that some person will not find sexually arousing possibly we should just classify the entire human race as suitable for adults only and send our children to Mars until they turn eighteen. Or possibly we should stop using emotive and wildly inaccurate words to describe something we disapprove of. I'm thinking the children on Mars scenario is the more likely.

Does anybody else remember a simpler, more decent time when pornography merely consisted of naked people having sex? Apparently our innocence is long gone.