Empowerment

Really, the show is all about empowering, and who these women can be, and how they can use their position to get what they want.
---Chad Hodge, executive producer of The Playboy Club, a new NBC network show slated to run this fall

I was nine years old when I first saw it.  My friend down the street found a Playboy in her parent's bedroom, and we studied the women's naked figures with a mixture of fascination and disgust.  My stomach turned with an intuitive "this is not right" feeling.  I ran home to tell my mom, and she tried her best to spit out a definition of what I saw.  I am sure she was shocked herself and struggled to find the right words.  I remember trying to make sense of what I saw with the little I knew about sexuality and trying to reconcile it all with what I was being taught about God at the time, a God who created us to be holy and reserve our body for the partner that we would marry.  I don't know why; maybe mom thought it was just what happens in the world, but she let me continue to go to that friend's house.  She might not agree with pornography, certainly my dad wouldn't have it in our home, but that's just life.  Perhaps that was her rationale. 

In the next year, my friend a few blocks over introduced me to the stacks and stacks of magazines in her house.  Sure, there were a few Playboys, but those were mild.  Magazines with titles like Penthouse, Hustler, Forum.  We'd grab stacks out of her dad's room and go study them in the clubhouse we had made in the garage attic.  A couple years later, I'd find it in my own house.  A Playgirl in my sister's desk drawer, dirty magazines under a few things in my brother's room.  I was a snoop, and therefore, my discoveries had to be a secret.  My mom always said that she respected our privacy and wouldn't look in our rooms for things.  She upheld her end of the deal.  She forgot about the quiet daughter, the one who explored and found things she shouldn't.

The damage is cumulative. We think a dirty magazine here, an inconspicuous show there: it doesn't matter much.  Right?  We think what's a little light porn between a few adults, but we forget.  We forget about the lives of the women who get paid for doing that, the harm that it's doing them.  Empowering?  Step by step, they are learning to trade their sexuality for power or for what they think is love, compromising the essence of who they were created to be.  They may say it is "their choice", but is it really their choice anymore? 

We forget about the children, the children who in most cases discover it, evaluate it, have their budding sexuality molded by it.  As adults we can sit idly by and let another show like The Playboy Club enter our radar screen in our highly sexualized culture, and it doesn't phase us.  We think as long as our parenting skills are up to par and we censor material appropriately, it is all going to be OK. 

But is it that easy?  Is life that individual?