Pornography

On Thursday, CNN anchor Carol Costello credited Dan Gainor, the head of the Culture and Media Institute, as a leader in the charge against a new MTV series, which was supposed to follow virgins seeking to lose their virginity. Costello read Gainor’s quote on air: “This is part of the media attempt to mock people who have morals and to treat virginity like a disease that must be cured. She observed that “conservative critics fought back” against the show, forcing its cancellation.

The MTV series, called “My First,” was going to follow virgins preparing to lose their virginity. The casting call for the series read: “We’re looking for adults who are ready to go all the way. Let MTV come along your journey… as you try to lose your virginity!”

Video after the jump.

Dan Savage, the controversial sex advice columnist and noted anti-bullying activist, caused quite a commotion at a high school journalism convention in Seattle two weeks ago when he actually cursed at the youth audience as he spoke negatively about the Bible.

Citizen Link reported August 18 (video also follows with commentary, serious vulgarity warning):

On Monday's CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose accused GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum of focusing too much on foreign policy and social issues, instead of the economy: "You talk about President Obama being an appeaser. You talk about [Obama] being soft on pornography and those kinds of things, rather than the bread and butter economic issues that you say are essential to who will win."

Earlier in the interview, Rose hinted at the left-leaning talking point that the Republican Party was waging a "war on women." He asked the former Pennsylvania senator, "Do you believe that there are particular issues of concern to women more than other voters?" [audio clips available here; video below the jump]

In light of Rick Santorum's promise to "vigorously enforce" federal obscenity laws, CNN questioned whether any candidate should even be talking about pornography right now. Host Fredricka Whitfield expressed her disbelief that the subject was even in the news conversation, during Friday's 11 a.m. hour of Newsroom.

Santorum has not made the issue the centerpiece of his campaign, as GOP strategist Ana Navarro pointed out. It is, however, an important matter for social conservatives who make up a strong voting bloc for the candidate. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Bill Maher unsurprisingly took some vicious cheap shots at Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on HBO's Real Time Friday.

In his final New Rule segment, Maher said, "If Rick Santorum is your youth minister, you’d ask your parents to switch you to the one who just molests" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Rick Santorum had a bit of a testy exchange with NBC's David Gregory on Sunday's Meet the Press.

After Gregory asked if Santorum was going to "rail against areas of our culture that [he] disagree[s] with" if elected president, the former senator smartly replied, "It's so funny. I get the question all the time, 'Why are you talking so much about these social issues'...as people ask me about the social issues" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It didn't take long for CNN to buy into the hype of New York's legalization of same-sex marriage and pose this question: Is it time for marriage equality in America? CNN asked the question on both the 11 a.m. 12 p.m. EDT hours of Newsroom.

The network referred to the words of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who stated that he believes "it is time for marriage equality all across the country." Cuomo signed New York's same-sex marriage bill into law over the weekend.
 

Vice President of Business and Culture Dan Gainor appeared on the January 24 broadcast of Headline News' “The Joy Behar Show" to discuss the raunchy new teen drama from MTV “Skins.” Gainor, who appeared on a panel with Tina Wells, CEO of Buzz Marketing Group and Rachel Sklar, editor at large for Mediaite.com, highlighted MTV’s blatant push for ratings and lack of consequences on “Skins.”

Video below fold

Derrick Burts, 24, started working as a porn-film actor in June. By October, he'd contracted the HIV virus. The AP story on Burts contained this jaw-dropping sentence: “He said he began to have doubts about the business after contracting chlamydia, gonorrhea, and herpes in his first month of work, but was convinced to keep working.”

Burts claimed "I wasn't stupid or oblivious, I knew what was out there. But it's not something you think about when they fill your head" with lucrative offers and promises that the work is safe. Lured into the porn world with the promise that he looked like money, Burts concluded his greed was unwise: "Making $10,000 or $15,000 for porn isn't worth your life."

Vanity Fair’s attacked conservative men with its latest political satire: a soft-core pornographic, borderline homosexual and obviously photoshopped “Official 2010-2011 Republican Beefcake Calendar.”  Humorous perhaps, but also an attack on those candidates and certainly not the magazine’sfirst jab at Republicans and conservatives.

In an effort to possibly shift “GOP tidal-wave” dialogue or to simply make depressed Democrats laugh, Vanity Fair has showcased a racy, crotch-shot-laden calendar of headline-making GOP men just one week prior to the important 2010 midterm elections. While only a few of the photographs actually improve the image of the Republican men, by making them look extremely masculine with rippling muscles, most of the photos mock the men by photo-shopping their heads onto men in arguably “gay” poses.

Liberals are never so alive as when they’re speaking out against anachronistic straw men. That’s why, in their estimation, the Tea Parties are racist lynch mobs and conservatives who wonder about President Obama’s ties to anti-American radicals are sinister McCarthyites.

So it’s not surprising that The Huffington Post is making a big deal of “Banned Books Week.” The house organ for the self-important Hollywood left – you know, all those “artists” constantly threatened by censorship – featured a string of articles on various aspects of the banned book topic. The week, according to contributor Jonathon Kim, “celebrates the wonderful freedom of being able to read whatever one likes, and reminding us that it's a freedom that must be fought for constantly.” Kim’s article had to do with a new movie about the 1950s obscenity trial of beat poet Allen Ginsburg’s work, “Howl.” (To their sorrow, an awful lot of English majors know first-hand that Ginsburg won.) Elsewhere, HuffPo linked to a New York Times article that suggested “Ten Ways to Celebrate Banned Books Week.” These are for readers to do “with your students, your children and anyone who believes in having ‘the freedom to read.’”Readers can adopt a “challenged” book (one that parents or civic groups have demanded be removed from school or public libraries). They can “create a map of challenges to demonstrate that book bans and challenges are not isolated phenomena, even in the United States.” (In other words, even parents who don’t live in jerkwater conservative areas care what their kids read.)

In a report on the Republican senate primary in Delaware on Tuesday's CBS Early Show, correspondent Nancy Cordes portrayed tea party favorite Christine O'Donnell's conservative social views as being on the fringe: "[She] has crusaded for abstinence and against porn. Writing once that 'when a married person uses pornography, it compromises the spouse's purity.'"

Cordes noted O'Donnell's position on those issues following a sound bite of primary opponent Mike Castle declaring: "I think she's too extreme for Delaware." In another sound bite after Cordes's comment, editor-in-chief of The Hotline, Reid Wilson, explained: "If Christine O'Donnell wins the primary election she's going to have a very difficult time winning in what is still a very blue, very Democratic state."

In concluding the report, Cordes observed: "...until recently this seat in Delaware seemed like it was in the bag." Fill-in co-host Erica Hill replied: "Ah, but no longer."

Following the report, Hill interviewed O'Donnell, focusing on the candidate's position in the polls and financial issues being raised in the campaign. Throughout the interview, the headline on screen read: "Primary Day; Controversial Tea Party Candidate Takes On Establishment."

The popular classifieds website Craigslist may not have a legal liability when it comes to use of its services for sex trafficking and prostitution, but they have a social responsibility to address the issue, Culture and Media Institute Assistant Editor Nathan Burchfiel told CBN's "Newswatch" Sept. 9.

The site recently shut down its "Adult Services" section after 17 state attorneys general sent a letter to the company outlining its role in illegal activities including child prostitution and sex trafficking. The section is no longer available to U.S. users, but Burchfiel pointed out that the change doesn't seem to have had much effect.

"What they've done is blocked off this one section of the site in the United States only, it's still available internationally, and these companies, these businesses that have been advertising essentially prostitution, some of them underage prostitution, illegal sex trafficking, have just moved those ads to different parts of the site," he told anchor Wendy Griffith. "They're still getting up there. They're still really easy to find, frankly."

A Sept. 8 Culture and Media Institute report noted that while Craigslist appears to have addressed the issue, ads for brothels and other "adult services" are still readily available across the site. Dozens of listings appeared in other sections of the Washington, D.C., Craigslist, including numerous ads for business under investigation by local authorities.

Children today are often so voracious and versed in the latest communications technology that they make their parents feel like Miles Standish and Betsy Ross. Three-fourths of young people between 12 and 17 now own cell phones, reports the Pew Internet and American Life Project.  And get this: 87 percent of those who send text messages told researchers that they sleep with or next to their phones. Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, and one in three send more than 100, or more than 3,000 texts a month. By contrast, only 30 percent of teenagers talk on those caveman “land line” phones.

But all this cell-phone (not to mention Internet) usage carries new risks – even new crimes.

Last year, the hot trend was sexting – teenagers sending each other lascivious messages (and often nude or semi-nude photographs). If a teenaged boy received a nude photo of a friend and e-mailed it to buddies or posted it on a Facebook or MySpace page, there was the very real possibility of being prosecuted for distributing child pornography.

Now there’s a new and related crime in the court houses. It’s called “sextortion.”

E! Online "The Awful Truth" columnist Ted Casablanca on Aug. 21 called the graphic depictions of sex and violence on HBO's vampire drama "True Blood" "highly ironic" and promoted the show as "great fun."

Casablanca defended the show on Fox News Channel's "Geraldo at Large" in a discussion with host Geraldo Rivera and Culture and Media Institute Assistant Editor Nathan Burchfiel. The debate was sparked by the controversy surrounding a recent Rolling Stone magazine cover that depicted "True Blood" stars naked and covered in (fake) blood.

Burchfiel pointed out that while the shows originate on premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime, many "worst-of" clips are available online within hours of broadcast, and many popular shows like "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City" have found their way onto basic cable via syndication, a likely future for "True Blood."

"It's highly ironic, Geraldo," Casablanca said of the show, adding, "It's a highly intelligent, very clever indictment of the very conversation that we're having right now and it's an allegory to our times."

Hugh Hefner, America's most celebrated and legendary pornographer, has less and less reason to celebrate. His Playboy magazine empire is crumbling — he may even be bought out by competitors — and his prototypical leering pose with girls young enough to be his great-granddaughters is now just plain creepy. His 2009 Christmas card featured 83-year-old Hefner standing between two 20-year-old twins who are his newest live-in girlfriends. Each was wearing a pink tank top with "Hef" painted on it in white. Hefner's women are forever the plastic toys under his tree.

Into this sad picture comes documentary filmmaker Brigitte Berman with a gushy new two-hour infomercial titled "Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel." How gushy is it? Washington Post critic Michael O'Sullivan found "the Hugh Hefner in this movie is Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas Gandhi and William Kunstler all rolled into one."

In fact, Berman is so in love with her subject's cultural and political influence, she told one interviewer that when the news came out that Martin Luther King Jr. had cheated on his wife, Coretta, "that never affected 'I have a dream,' so I found it really curious" that Hefner couldn't be seen more as a civil rights hero and less as a seedy porn king.

CNN refreshingly devoted an entire segment on Wednesday's American Morning to highlighting pornography's destructive impact on society, especially Internet porn. Guest Gail Dines detailed the harmful impact of pornography on men's sexuality, and anchor John Roberts even cited a study that found that 56% of divorces "involve one party...who has an obsessive interest in pornographic websites."

Roberts brought on Dines, a professor at Wheelock College in Boston and author of "Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality," at the end of the 7 am Eastern hour. After citing the gargantuan number of pornographic websites on the Internet, the anchor first asked, "You say in your book and in studies that you've done that pornography today is not your father's Playboy, that it's mostly gonzo porn that's really changing our attitudes towards sexuality and women. What are you worried about?"

Dines answered that her concern was the "level of brutality and cruelness, in pornography's affecting the way that men think about women, and it's affecting the way they think about themselves and the way they construct ideas about sexuality. Because the more men view pornography, the more they begin to think like the pornographic world."

Eccentric comedian and former talk show host Roseanne Barr claimed on her blog July 8 that Republicans are avid kiddie porn viewers who like to have sex with young children.

The liberal activist and comedy queen was blogging about sicko children's author K.P. Bath, who was just slapped with a six years prison term for child porn possession last week.

In an item titled "typical republican child porn consuming geek," Barr posted a mug shot of Bath and wrote that he was "a typical republican who loves reagan and palin and despises the 'nanny state' and socialism."

The Bravo cable network has a new reality show called “Work of Art,” a competition dedicated to finding the next great American artist. The half-dozen contestants, 20-something aspiring artists all, enter the famous Phillips de Pury art auction house. Mr. de Pury himself ushers them into the special room where they are presented with a collection of paintings by Andres Serrano, the man who came to fame in 1989 with the ghastly photograph, sponsored by the National Endowment of the Arts, depicting a crucifix dunked in a jar of urine. They are hugely impressed. The final painting they are shown is just that — the original "Piss Christ." They are in awe, quietly expressing their amazement at the talent. And then the door opens and in steps the master. The students freeze, eyes bright, mouths agape. The curator announces, "the great, great Serrano!" One girl instinctively bows reverently.

Serrano explains his art. "Life, art, politics. It's all the same s—-.... People in general always think their s—- is the best. So if you really want to see some real s—-, check out my s—-." Six times he utters the expletive; the students giggle with glee.

It must be difficult to offend a company that makes its money off pictures of naked women (to be fair, there are also articles ... apparently). The folks at Playboy Portugal managed to do just that.

On Wednesday, news broke that the Portuguese edition of Playboy magazine published several photographs depicting Jesus Christ observing pornographic scenes.

On Thursday, the parent company, which licenses the Playboy name to international publishers, distanced itself from the controversy.

"We did not see or approve the cover and pictorial in the July issue of Playboy Portugal," Playboy's vice president of public relations, Theresa Hennessy, reportedly told the gossip blog Gawker in an email. "It is a shocking breach of our standards, and we would not have allowed it to be published if we had seen it in advance.

Marking the death of an atheist by depicting Jesus Christ in sex scenes might seem like a non-sequitur. Somehow, it made sense to the Portuguese edition of Playboy magazine.

The magazine features an actor portraying Jesus in at least four pornographic photos, including the cover, where he cradles an apparently dead - and bare-breasted - woman. Another photo depicts Jesus watching a lesbian kiss, while another shows him observing a topless woman reading a book.

The images are reportedly meant to commemorate the death of Portuguese author Jose Saramago. He wrote, among many other books, "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ," which "explored the psychological motivations that led Jesus to become a prophet." Saramago later wrote that the controversy around the book led him to move fromPortugal to the Canary Islands.

It's not the first time an international edition of the "men's magazine" has caused a stir by depicting a Christian figure. In its December 2008 issue, the Mexican edition featured a model dressed - barely - like the Virgin Mary

ABC has pulled its ads from gossip blogger Perez Hilton's Web site, PerezHilton.com, after he caught legal flack for posting upskirt photos of 17-year-old Disney star Miley Cyrus. However, several big-name companies still have ads running on the snarky blogger's site.

Amid speculation that Hilton may be slapped with kiddie-porn charges over the lurid photos, ABC has removed its ads for "The View" from the popular gossip site. But other advertisers appear to be sticking by Hilton. TV Land still had a full-page background promotion and two smaller ads on PerezHilton.com, and Apple iTunes and Microsoft's search engine Bing still had advertisements up as of Wednesday afternoon.

The drama started Monday, when Hilton posted a link to a photo of Cyrus getting out of a car in a tight white dress - and apparently, no underwear. Outrage erupted over the photo, with some calling the image "child pornography" since Cyrus is legally a minor. Hilton quickly removed the picture, but has brushed off the incident as a "fake" controversy.

It's odd that Microsoft, which owns Bing, would opt to keep advertising. It has recently been touting its own crusade against kiddie-porn.