Читать книгу Field Guide to the Wild World of Religion: 2011 Edition - Pamela J.D. Dewey - Страница 11

If you were a man in his 30s living in a small town in 1962, and were drawn to pornography, it wouldn’t have been all that easy to feed your addiction. There would likely have been no place locally where you could find movies or live action. You would have had to travel as discreetly as possible, making excuses to friends and family, to some nearby city. And once there, you would have had to go to some really sleazy neighborhood to find a triple-X rated movie theater, a neighborhood that you would normally have been afraid to travel in after dark. If you lived near enough to a larger city, you might even have had an opportunity to go to a real burlesque house, where women performed live. But finances and time (and believable excuses) would likely have limited your opportunities to make this trek.

Another possibility would have been to answer a cryptic ad in the back of a “men’s magazine” that promised celluloid pleasures—likely, cheap 8 millimeter black and white films of amateur ladies in various states of undress, doing mundane things like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. They would come in a brown paper wrapper with no return address, and you’d hope that your wife or kids (or parents, if you still lived at home) wouldn’t get to the package before you.

Maybe, if you had just the right sophisticated friend from a bigger city, you might persuade him to order an actual “dirty French movie” for you. But then you’d have to figure out how to explain to your wife why you needed to rent a 16mm projector for a poker night with the guys.

Imagine such a man time-travelling to the 21^st century. If he didn’t think it was blasphemous to say so, he’d likely think he was in Paradise! The video rental shop on the corner in almost any small town will offer him a large collection of full-color videos of full-length movies, full of less-than-scantily-clad young women, doing much more than making lunch. He can play such videos on the same DVD player on which his kids watch cartoons, as long as he waits long enough until everyone in the house is fast asleep, and uses headphones to make sure no one hears what he’s listening to in the family room. If he travels for his job and stays in motels, it will be even easier to just watch the Playboy Channel on the cable TV in his room, or order the latest X-rated film on Pay-Per-View. Even more conveniently—he can just download the most grotesque, raw porn from the Internet directly onto the hard drive of his own laptop computer, and view it anywhere, including at his office during work hours if he is daring enough.

What does this have to do with the Wild World of Religion of the 21^st century?