PORNOGRAPHY is virtually inescapable these days. And I'm not talking about a Playboy at the local convenient mart. Our culture constantly is wearing down what once was a much clearer distinction so that simply driving down the road will expose you to a Hooters billboard and worse. My In-box is regularly regaled with spam 'offers' for websites and 'free' passwords. The subject lines are even unrepeatable--yuck! I think many of us can see the truth in the old 'sex sells' maxim, but some folks apparently are into some pretty sick stuff.

My sister's blog (thanks for today's link, by the way) provided a link to a column by Michelle Malkin called 'A generation of skanks' and talking about Christina Aguilera and her new 'song' 'Dirrty'. She's apparently appeared--quite a bit of her, well, pretty much all of her--on the cover of Rolling Stone. Malkin's daughter asks the pertinent question, 'Where's her shirt?' My own 2-year old has asked similar questions of folks on tv before (usually commercials). I've not seen the Rolling Stone cover, but I did see quite a bit more of LeAnn Rimes than I needed to on the cover of some magazine recently.

Yesterday my wife showed me a catalog selling a comforter set for young girls with Britney Spears on it. Britney's face is emblazoned on the shams. And a provocatively posed Britney with hands positioned to accentuate her bosom fills the comforter itself. As Malkin tells us, that's where we get the skanks. I pointed out to my wife recently that all these young girls we see with low pants and midrif bearing tops are constantly tugging their pants up and their shirts down. They want to be stylish, but I don't really think they want to show all they're showing. If they keep wearing it, though, eventually it won't bother them anymore.

Christian Reflection, a journal put out by The Center for Christian Ethics, turns its eye to The Pornographic Culture in the latest issue. I've found Christian Reflection a thoughtful publication. They write,

'Overt sexual imagery saturates our culture. When this imagery is calculated to arouse sexual desires that are inappropriate to a faithful Christian life, and when it distorts the dignity of men’s and women’s bodies, we call it "pornographic."'

Adam and Eve realized upon eating the forbidden fruit that they were naked, and that there was now an inappropriateness to that. What pornography ultimately seeks to do is both normalize public nakedness yet at the same time play on its titillating aspects.