Dear Richard,
It feels indecent and disquieting to address an issue that's been reported as a catalyst in the murder of a child, but you're absolutely right, and of course I have something to say about this. Can you imagine any other form of entertainment, any religious organization, or any political party that they could be so unequivocal and yet so ambiguous about in a public forum without getting their pants sued off or set on fire?
Indeed there was no indication in the piece that followed just what kind of pornography was found in the home of the accused. Was it child pornography? First of all, child pornography is a misnomer. Real pornography is made by people who follow guidelines regarding age, where people are paid for their efforts (albeit poorly at times) and consent to the activity. Children being abused, sexually and otherwise, on film for people's pleasure is not pornography.
Now, if the accused happened to have real pornography - as in depictions of adults having consensual sex with each other in whatever form that would take - how this leads one to kill and dismember a child is a leap in logic I cannot conceive. Or was Blatchford referring to porn as in the industry: the vast capitalist network that produces warehouses full of cheap, tacky merchandise and stacks and stacks of unwatchable films?
If we're going to make careless conclusions, then let's talk about the accused's passion for playing violent video games and watching horror films, which has been also been inferred as a cause, but not quite so explicitly. Oh, but wait, we can't really do that because as a society, we sanction violence over sex by allowing it to be splashed on billboards and readily available on television and in film. If porn was available as widely, we couldn't condemn it the same way, could we?
More people than we know enjoy porn to an extent that would be deemed "unhealthy" by officials (whoever they are). The police could burst into many houses in Toronto at any given time and find some very interesting things. Because peoples' porn collections are generally not openly discussed or chronicled, when they're found they seem much more nefarious than they might be - especially when their owner has been accused of atrocities. What if people were ashamed of having apples in their houses and didn't discuss their apple consumption? Would we then have headlines that read "Apples Possibly Played a Role"? Blatchford was permitted to attach or was given that deceptive headline because porn is society's ass pony when shit hits the fan. Plain and simple.
At the risk of sounding glib, people were assaulting and killing one another people long before there were images available to "incite" them to do so. I, for one, would be more than happy to have something concrete to blame for human brutality (yes, even porn), but the fact is it isn't that simple. I'm not always fond of defending the porn industry - capitalism sucks, and the porn industry is capitalism at its worst - but I do get tired of people being lazy in their conjectures, and I'd rather live in a place where images of explicit sex were more common than those of pointless violence. And really, if imagery has such a profound effect on us, why doesn't the immutable beauty all around us in film, in architecture, in nature, and in the human mind, make us consistently less hostile?
