i keep seeing stories on the newswires about some woman's father-in-law being arrested for having kiddie porn in his home. the woman is missing, and the discovery of porn adds a little spice to a tale that's sure to fester and ooze like a large, running sore. first, though, here's some dirty talk discovered by CBS infotainment:
Report: Susan Powell's father-in-law liked discussing sex with his kids - Crimesider - CBS News: "Details emerged Wednesday about Steve Powell's past in a 1992 divorce case from Spokane County. Case documents reviewed by The Associated Press show Steve Powell's ex-wife accused him of keeping pornography, damaging his children's respect for marriage and inappropriately discussing sex issues with the kids.then he ripped off her panties and grabbed her coochie...
Terri Powell wrote in the divorce papers that Steve Powell talked of teaching his children about birth control methods when they were as young as 9-years-old. Terri's sister, Becky Mulcahy, wrote in the documents that Steve Powell told her that he had shown his youngest children books about sexual intercourse when they were 6- and 8-years-old.
Terri Powell said her husband viewed people as animals and that they should be able to have sex with anyone at any time. She recalled a conversation in which Josh referred to a girl his brother, Johnny, liked. "All she is good for is her body, right Dad?" Terri recalled Josh saying. "Yeah, that's right," Steve Powell replied, according to the declaration."
what is the point of publishing this lurid horseshit, especially by a once-reputable news organization? obviously public taste has always run to the salacious, lurid and otherwise barbaric, and even if this is an age of awesome technological progress we haven't managed to budge the meter when it comes to our fascination with sexual dysfunction -- hell, we haven't even been able to move beyond the puritanical obsession with sex that has two sides like a coin: fascination and repulsion.
baby, lick my lollipop...
people say all kinds of stuff in divorce procedings; it's basically (very basically) he said, she said. so why is this to be run up the flagpole like dirty laundry? in what way does it advance the public discourse on whatever seems to be at issue here?
i have no opinion in the matter personally as to when it is best to introduce children to sexuality and normal sexual functions. i have seen little evidence that treating the subject as some great taboo has been at all successful in producing healthy, well-rounded adults. but hey, you raise your little nippers any way you like, you hear...
back to the subject at hand: some guy's sexual peccadilloes does not tell us a lot about him in other respects -- take bill clinton as an example of a cad who played a successful leader on the world stage. i do not know about this current subject of the national obsessive disorder we file under the "crime news" category.
what i do know is that at a time when national statistics show a continuing (though inexplicable) decline in serious crime, the infotainment industry spends an inordinate amount of time and resources magnifying a relatively small number of incidents in such a way that the entire nation is both fascinated and terrified by this type of reporting.
the folks in TV land cower behind their locked doors and have an insatiable appetite for the details of sex and death as experienced by real people, somewhere else.
No comments:
Post a Comment