Porn’s lost sex appeal amid constant exposure

That’s justice well served, but the same day, a jury awarded a Nashville, Tennessee woman US$85,000 in damages after her children were inadvertently exposed to hard-core pornography in a California motel room. It seems that in August 2006, Edwina McCombs and her two daughters, ages 7 and 8, checked into a Value Lodge in Artesia.

While McCombs was taking a bath, her children channel surfed and, according to the lawsuit, eventually stumbled on close-up, explicit images of sex acts. The award was based on McCombs’ claim of “negligence and emotional distress.”

Notwithstanding the fact that offering free porn is probably the best marketing tool an economy hotel chain could hope for (during the trial, an investigator said that Value Lodge does not block porn channels from rooms unless guests request it), McCombs’ lawsuit is sure to elicit smirks from several corners.

For one thing, the girls had to testify at the trial, and it’s difficult to imagine that that experience wasn’t somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 times as traumatic as seeing the pornography in the first place.

For another thing, what kind of pornography is so shocking in this day and age that even limited exposure to it causes US$85,000 worth of psychological damage? I dare say lots of parents would happily let their kids watch hard-core porn for the amount of time required to take a bath, especially if it meant getting US$85,000 out of the deal. By 2017, that sum could pay for college — at least a couple of weeks of it — and the opportunity for the kid to read the work of Andrea Dworkin and then sue her parents for another 85 grand.

Obviously, pornography is not for children — or many adults, for that matter. But thanks to the explosion of Internet porn, X-rated material has gone mainstream. Although reliable statistics are difficult to find, some figures show that 12 percent of Internet sites now traffic in pornography. Other numbers suggest that 20 percent of men and 13 percent of women look at pornography at work, and a staggering 90 percent of 8- to 16-year-olds have viewed it online. In other words, explicit sex has become the wallpaper of our era.

We’re living in the Porn Age. As troubling as that may be, there’s still something surprising — even quaint — about the notion of being traumatized by it.

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