Ellen Ratner discovers Internet porn:
The other day I was at the gym at 4:30 p.m. mindlessly ticking off those calories one by painful one when I read the VH1 trailer, “Coming up next: Celebrity Sex.” The program proceeded to show various ill-gotten photos and videos of celebrities gearing up for, having or having just engaged in sexual activity. VH1 then showed the audience of little monsters how to search for and click onto these videos and photos from their own computers.
VH1 is not exactly a porn channel, but they must understand that pornography is big business. There are more porn Web pages than there are Americans in this country. Yet we have hardly heard a peep out of the usual self-anointed suspects. Tom DeLay, Jerry Falwell, Bill Frist, Rick Santorum, James Dobson – to name a few – are so focused on making a mountain out of a molehill with regard to gay Americans that they are getting crushed by an avalanche of what my mother used to call, “debauchery.”
Seriously, is she kidding? I don’t know about the politicians, but Falwell and Dobson have never hesitated to preach against the ills of pornography. But Ms Ratner practically on top of this new porn sensation by recent standards; she’s only years late instead of the decades it took for Michelle Malkin to discover that girls were cutting themselves and for Maureen Dowd to learn that men don’t particularly want to date career women.
I’m not saying that a columnist should be able to identify every porn star making a cameo in a Eminem video, but if you don’t even know who Jenna Jameson is, you do not possess the requisite information to express a meaningful opinion on modern American society.
It was clear to me that things were changing when, ten years ago, a discussion of CD-ROMs at the Computer Game Developers Conference revealed a telling fact. The number of reported CD-ROM-based software sales was 25 percent less than the number of CD-ROMs manufactured and sold. There was much discussion of various conspiracy theories on the part of the software publishers, until one bearded fellow raised his hand and asked if porn CDs were included in the reports.
As it turned out, they weren’t. And there’s your missing 25 percent, which is probably more like 35 percent of DVDs these days. America is not a Constitutional Republic, it has devolved into a pornocratic krinocracy.