As you might have heard, an organization called the XXX Church (well-known for their participation in a touring series of on-campus debates that pits their founder Craig Gross against ubiquitous porn industry personality Ron Jeremy) has organized an event called “Porn Sunday” to take place on the same day as the Super Bowl.
XXXChurch is actually a lot less bothersome to me than most anti-porn groups. For one, they aren’t as inclined to go around demonizing members of the porn industry as are some of our other critics, and their message is more about being honest with your loved ones and controlling your own impulses than it is about the myriad “evils of porn.” Having said that, the XXXChurch does occasionally resort to making some of the same tired, intellectually lazy, unfair, poorly-reasoned claims that other anti-porn groups do, including drawing a causal connection between watching porn and committing sex crimes.
In response to their publicity campaign surrounding this year’s edition of Porn Sunday, and the organization’s use of NFL players to help deliver their message in particular, I’ve penned an “open letter” to Mr. Gross and the XXX Church. It’s less a refutation of their various assertions about pornography and more a satirical extension of their logic to the game of football. I’m hoping that Mr. Gross and friends will take it in the spirit it is offered: good fun and a lighthearted ribbing rooted in their own rhetorical approach.
Click here for the pdf version of the letter, or you can read the text of it below.
Enjoy. 
Dear Mr. Gross,
As the world gears up to watch the biggest football game of the season, I just wanted to express my thanks to XXXChurch for choosing to draw upon the input of NFL players for your organization’s nationwide “Porn Sunday” discussion. After all, if anyone is fit to lecture the world at large on subjects of sexual ethics and morality, it is clearly the upright, socially responsible and law-abiding athletes of the NFL…. just ask any of the dozen or so women who have accused NFL players of sexual assault or other sexual improprieties in 2010, alone.
Look, I get it: the Super Bowl is very big news, and associating your event with it is a good way to draw eyeballs to your organization and its cause. But, given that Ben Roethlisberger, a man who accused of multiple sexual assaults is starting for one team and Brandon Underwood, another man accused of multiple sexual assaults is starting for the opposing team, is the NFL really the organization with which you want to align your sex-related public relations campaign?
I’m not saying they are necessarily guilty, but you know how it goes in the public relations game; it is all about the appearance of impropriety. Sure, it’s completely, absurdly unfair to tar the entire league with the same brush and suggest that just because some percentage of football players are criminals that they must all be criminals…. but people make such assertions with respect to the adult industry all the time, so why spare the NFL the same treatment? What’s good for the Gonzo Goose is good for the Gridiron Gander, no?
Anti-porn groups like XXXChurch are fond of offhandedly drawing a causal connection between the consumption of pornography and the committing of crimes like sexual assault and the sexual exploitation of children. Granted, there’s no actual empirical evidence to support either of these assertions, and just about anybody who has done even a few seconds of research into the question of what drives pedophiliac behavior knows that the second of those claims of causality is utter nonsense – but why dwell on such minor details, right? Obviously, it is a lot more convenient to simply blame a person’s bad and/or compulsive behaviors on some nefarious external influence than it is to examine their underlying motivations and personal character.
Instead of debating the finer points of cause and effect, let’s have some fun: let’s indulge in the same sort of “monkey-see/monkey-do” analysis that groups like XXX Church routinely apply to pornography consumption, only direct it at football, and see if there’s any presumptive downside to watching football that might mirror the assumed detriments of porn viewing. (To make this analysis seem more official and academic, from here forward let’s refer to this practice as performing an “MS/MD analysis.”)
Football and Violence: Does watching football regularly make a person more violent? It has been widely reported that incidents of domestic assault ‘spike’ on Super Bowl Sunday, and clearly the only conceivable explanation for that increased violence is the impulse-control-inhibiting effect of watching 22 men bash into each other at high speed.
Sure, the actual data available on this subject doesn’t bear out the ‘domestic violence spike’ assertion at all, but I think it makes enough sense on an intuitive level that we can just say “to hell with the data” and declare football to be a major contributor to violent domestic assault. In fact, let’s just go ahead and declare a direct, causal relationship, and extend our MS/MD-borne assertion to a more emotionally charged conclusion: Watching the Super Bowl makes men kill their young daughters. (Not every man, mind you, and not every time…. but the pattern is clear, so long as you already believe it to be clear, and you are immune to any facts offered to the contrary.)
See how easy that was?
OK, so this sampling of MS/MD analysis does not yield an assertion that would be considered “valid” by the tenets of formal logic, but this is the world of public relations; logic has no more place in this realm than the concept of basic fairness does in the court of law!
Football and Respect for Women: It’s a well-known fact (or a well-known “factoid,” at least) that having women dress up in skimpy outfits and prance about for the entertainment of men is a fundamental degradation of those women. There are no exceptions to this hard and fast rule, which brings me to my second, inexorable MS/MD conclusion: Employing female cheerleaders is no different from being a pimp and NFL owners should be prosecuted accordingly.
Naturally, there’s a second direction that one can reasonably go when examining this particular football-related issue, and that direction puts the blame squarely on the cheap harlots bearing pom-poms, themselves. In this alternative MS/MD analysis, the conclusion is clearly: NFL cheerleaders are nothing but whores…. or maybe strippers with better choreography.
You know, I never realized how easy it was to come to reliable conclusions about the nature of the world around me without using an ounce of deductive reasoning until I started using the MS/MD analytical approach. It’s all so clear to me to now – and I finally understand the epiphany that converts to Christianity experience when they are ‘reborn.’ Thank you, XXX Church, for showing me the way to Truth! All I had to do was stop thinking critically, and the veils of worldly deceit peeled aside like the skin on an onion!
Delivered with a naughty and knowing wink,
Quentin Boyer
Minister of Sarcasm
Pink Visual
flickr
|
That’s a potsnig full of insight!