Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Pornography and the Bureaucrat

Sorry, the title's misleading. My interest in porn has waned over the years.

Today in the Times Nick Chiles attacks black "street lit" in Their Eyes Were Reading Smut -:
"As a black author, I had certainly become familiar with the sexualization and degradation of black fiction. Over the last several years, I had watched the shelves of black bookstores around the country and the tables of street vendors, particularly in New York City, become overrun with novels that seemed to appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures - as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner."
(He reminds me a bit of the reaction to "Peyton Place" in the '50's.) If he's correct, publishers have discovered that young black women will buy racy books. Presumably the bodice busters of the Barbara Cartland school are too tame, but books with "street cred" appeal. [Warning: I'm so out of it the phrases in quotes may be totally inappropriate.]

How's this speculation: pornography is often linked with masturbation, the topic that got the great bureaucrat Dr. Jocelyn Elders fired. Masturbation is often correlated with a lack of sexual intercourse. Lack of sexual intercourse is correlated with a lack of partners. Young black women lack partners because racial prejudice tends to limit their choices to young black males, a huge proportion of whom are locked up. (There's also the possibility that women prefer to marry above themselves, see my blog on Tierney's column.) So young black women turn to porn on Saturday nights as a result of our drug laws and culture. (If this extended chain of argument has any validity, porn in India and China should be exploding among the men.)

No comments: