one-handed reading

I bought the new issue of Utne because I was intrigued by the cover teaser, "Porn Culture: What it's Doing to Us."
The package inside didn't so much provide the promised answer. I found the opening essay by Julie Hanus to be particularly lifeless. But a few pages in comes this fascinating little piece by Charles Foran, "Damage on Parade: As we shed our inhibitions, we shed our humanity." I'm not sure I completely agree with the argument he poses about porn's impact on community standards, but there are lines that did stick in mind:

Flickering across a million monitors in a hundred countries at this moment are images of women and men, most of whom are performing lewd sexual acts before a camera because they are poor or damaged, or because they have been coerced into doing so. It shouldn't be so easy to ignore this while we are pleasing ourselves.

What's most interesting here, I think, is a point that the Utne package makes abundantly clear: Popular culture and porn culture are increasingly the same thing.

Exhibit A: Choose your own Cleaning Hunk. Note that it follows the classic porn script: Hot stranger arrives to perform a service (he dresses as either a construction worker or a gladiator!) then strips and "gets the job done." Ahem. Instead of the money shot, you get a sales pitch.

Exhibit B: The Lion of Chelsea. Full disclosure: I have a friendly relationship with Michael because of my job, and he's scouted my apartment as a possible location for one of his films. (It wasn't used.) I'm not including the link to his profile out of any sort of moral judgement, but when you have the mainstream press spilling so much ink over a guy who makes gay porn, it's clear that something major is going on in our society.