Trustees should mute TV porn crusade

We’ve got trouble. Right here in River City. That’s trouble, with a T. And that rhymes with P. And that stands for porn.

Edmonton Catholic school trustee Larry Kowalczyk has just made the shocking discovery that some TV cable providers have specialty services that allow adults to order and pay for pornographic programming.

At the school board meeting Tuesday, Kowalczyk asked trustees to support a motion calling on the Alberta Catholic School Trustees’ Association to write letters to Telus, Shaw, Bell and their competitors, telling them to stop offering porn.

“As a Catholic school board, I think it’s a no-brainer that we respect our bodies as temples of God,” he told the meeting.

“This is the kind of counterculture action a school board should be taking,” agreed fellow trustee John Acheson, who condemned pornography and “every sitcom on TV” for trivializing sex.

Trustee Cindy Olsen tried to inject some common sense, arguing that fighting porn was not the board’s core business.

For an elected body to tell broadcasters what they could and could not show, she said, reminded her uncomfortably of Orwell’s 1984. Instead, she suggested, parents could use parental controls on their televisions, and schools could educate students about appropriate sexuality.

But in the end, Olsen buckled. The anti-porn resolution passed, unanimously. Since fractious Catholic trustees rarely agree on anything, I suppose we could applaud them for coming to a unanimous agreement on something.

But is it too much to dream of a day when they might focus on the business of running Edmonton’s Catholic schools? This board already has a huge credibility problem thanks to constant infighting and past refusal to follow Alberta Education directives. At a time when school board autonomy across Canada is under fire, it might be prudent for them to focus on their jobs, not on random moral crusades.

As a feminist humanist, I sympathize with the trustees’ argument that much pornography demeans and exploits women. As a parent of a teenager, I dislike the absurdly artificial messages about sexuality, human relations and body image in much pornography.

There can be profound social isolation when porn consumers forgo the risks of real human intimacy in lieu of an erotic mirage.

Still, if adults choose to buy legal entertainment that shows consensual adults engaged in consensual sex acts? That’s their constitutional right.

Telus offers six different subscription “adult” channels, including the Penthouse Channel, which boasts “a higher standard of hardcore” and Maleflixxx, dedicated to gay male porn. Shaw offers four channels, including the Playboy channel, where “Bunnies jump out of the centrefold and onto your TV screen.”

Both companies say their material has been approved by Canadian film censors and that parents can use security settings to prevent kids from seeing it.

Frankly, Kowalczyk’s focus on “television pornography” is antediluvian. Television is the 20thcentury’s medium. Young viewers today get their entertainment online, whether they’re watching Gilmour Girls on Netflix, or something steamier on Pornhub. The Internet is for porn.

Even if Telus and Shaw pulled their “adult” offerings, there are easier, cheaper and much more private ways to access porn than your family’s rumpus room TV.

That’s not to say the Catholic Church shouldn’t be talking about exploitative porn as a moral issue. And that’s not to say schools don’t have a vital role in this cultural conversation.

All schools, Catholic and secular, should be talking frankly to students about the toxic, false and ludicrous messages in much pornography. We need to discuss porn, not just as something dark, forbidden and enticing, but within a larger political and social context.

We should teach kids the media literacy, the analytical, critical thinking, to deconstruct porn as the sleazy flim-flam act it often is.