REFLECTIONS FROM THE EDITOR KRISTYN KOMARNICKI
Parents (and all who care about children), before you rush to hide this issue of PRISM under your mattress, let me clarify what I mean by “parental advisory.” I’m not advising you to protect your kids from its content—far from it. I’m advising you, first, to expose yourself to its graphic subject. Take a long, hard look at how firmly our culture is held captive by the pornographers and all those that aid and abet them —the CEOs of the entertainment industries (television/film/music studios, fashion, games/toys, etc.) and the media delivery industries (cable, telephone, internet, publishing, etc). Then engage your kids in a conversation about pornography and advise them on how to navigate sanely in an environment that normalizes the abnormal and celebrates the corrupt. I’m asking you, in short, to help your kids rebel against a very real, sinister, and powerful enemy, to help them say “no” to the corporate pimps. Although they rarely see TV and were homeschooled for up to eight years, my sons (aged 7, 12, and 15) live and breathe and have their being in no less a pornified culture than those of their classmates who have significantly more media exposure and less parental oversight. Like secondhand smoke, the pornographic culture exerts a harmful influence on both the ads/products that skillfully target my boys and the conversation/behavior of their peers. Our kids are painfully familiar with what so many of us wellmeaning parents are, to our detriment, not. While I was conducting research for the cover article, my 12- year-old walked
in on a discussion of the celebrity status of pimps in pop culture. “This is the world you’re growing up in, honey,” I said to him apologetically, to which he replied sadly, “Yeah, I know. And it stinks.” I praise God that at least he knows it stinks. If you make a point of minimizing your exposure to media, you might be offended by our use of certain images. But the images, although pornographic in nature, are all culled from mainstream magazines and television. I invite you to look at them critically, for it is only through the lens of media literacy that we see what is really being sold to our children: lies about who they are and what their bodies are for. When we take a clear look at the pervasive effects of commercialized sex, we begin to see that the pornographers have got us right where they want us— asleep at the wheel. Stubbornly supporting a “free market” ideology and insisting that demand dictates supply rather than recognizing that supply often nurtures demand, worshipping the idol of individualism, estranged from a godly understanding of sex and the God who created it, we are easily led—deaf, dumb, and blind —to the altar of consumerism, where we partake uncritically of all that is served up to us. “Consume,” we are told by the powers that be.“It’s patriotic!” But just the opposite is true, as Thomas Merton wrote: “Democracy cannot exist when [people] prefer ideas and opinions that are fabricated for them.The actions and statements of the citizen must not be mere automatic ‘reactions’…signifying passive conformity with the dictates of those in power.” It is helpful to recognize the curious double standard that is at play in our culture. As anti-pornography activist Gail Dines points out, when we see instances of racism or child abuse, we are rightly outraged, as when radio host Don Imus referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ho’s,” for example, and he was forced to make a PRISM 2008
2
public apology and, as advertisers bailed, found his contract terminated. But when the racism or abuse is sexualized, we generally remain silent, as when TLA Video stores rent titles like Black Cherry Coeds and Ravaged School Girls, and we simply shrug our shoulders, calling it “commerce” or “freedom of speech.” While the pornographers’ freedom is so vehemently protected, whose freedom is being forfeited? We know who profits, says Dine, but who pays the price? We all do. The sex industry is ultimately about idolatry, about the yawning spiritual void in all humans and our frantic effort to feed it.When we look to anything other than God to fill ourselves, we pervert and deform, we ravage and rage. The hunger that drives the sex industry is our hunger for God gone wrong, as the Nine Inch Nails song “Closer” so painfully articulates: You let me violate you/You let me desecrate you…/Help me get away from myself .../My whole existence is flawed./ You get me closer to God./You can have my isolation. /You can have the hate that it brings./You can have my absence of faith./ You can have my everything…/Help me become somebody else… As Christians, we are uniquely equipped to be agents of healing in a broken world. Jesus tells us that “The thief comes only to steal, and to kill, and to destroy,” but he came “that we may have life, and that we may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). We see the devastation of the thief and his henchmen; we see the poisonous fare they feed to a spiritually hungry world. Let us choose God instead and nourish ourselves, our children, and our neighbors on the bread of life and truth. [Nothing new under the sun: For a biblical parallel to the challenge we face today, read 2 Kings 23. King Josiah smashed Asherah poles (pornographic idols); scattered the male shrine prostitutes (pornographers and their customers); outlawed child sacrifice (child pornography/prostitution); wiped out the mediums (profiteering middlemen); and tore down altars to the starry hosts (celebrity worship).] n