Ken wrote:

>>I worked with a guy 11 years ago who came from eastern Nassau County near
the Suffolk line, and he said Long Island was a haunt of Evil.<<

While I don't agree with this entirely, it is sobering to think that Long
Beach, Long Island was a place where, up until the mid-twentieth century I
think, the Klan was so well ensconced and so fully accepted that they
marched without their hoods. There was an exhibit about this some years ago
where I teach and the photos were quite chilling.


>>Maybe Hef wanted a whole world based on the pursuit of pleasure,....<<

Maybe, but then the (obvious) question is whose pleasure and whose terms.


>>Picture Hef as a guest on _Sesame Street _fondling Miss Piggy.  Picture 
Grover looking at the centerfold with a weirdly rapturous expression on 
his fuzzy face.<<

When I was 19, I worked at a sleep away camp as a counselor for 6 and 7 year
old boys, one of whose sister kept sending him girlie magazines. I forget
whether they were Playboy or Penthouse. I was told I could not take the
magazines away from the boy and so the result was that all 10 or 15 boys in
my bunk would on occasion sit in a circle and pass the magazine around,
examining the women's bodies in minute detail. The most disturbing part of
this was that what they said to each other expressed not a young boy's
fascination with the female body per se but were rather imitations of the
kinds of things I am sure they heard from the men in their lives, older
brothers, fathers, uncles, kids on the block: "Get a load of those tits!"
"She's got a juicy cunt!" And so on. For these boys, those magazines and the
context in which they had first learned about them--and, as I remember it,
the magazines were not unfamiliar to any of them--were so clearly a first
lesson in the sexual objectification of women that listening to them was the
beginning of my own questioning and searching in terms of what pornography
meant to me and why I wanted to look at it.


Richard