Be careful little eyes...

There has recently been a minor kerfuffle in England about 'lads mags'. For the uninitiated, 'lads mags' are magazines aimed at men who are still too ashamed to buy pornography openly in a newsagents, and have already purchased the 'Daily Sport'.
They are full of gross-out stories and soft-porn pictures of scantily-clad pneumatic models. Sometimes there might be a decent witticism in amongst the torrent of extreme swearwords in the prose, but it simply serves to remind you that you're participating in the prostitution of intelligence.

Now, these horrid little booklets are usually displayed, barely twenty inches above the floor in the newsagents. Right at the same level that the magazines aimed at little children are usually displayed. So your little one innocently asked for a Teletubbies magazine because it's got stickers with it, and you'll have to contend with the fact that they've also probably just seen a picture of two glamour models simulating lesbian antics.

Anybody with any sense of propriety and decency should see what's wrong with this picture. And many people did, as legislation was proposed to compel the magazines to have decency wrappers on them or to be put on the top-shelf.

There was precious little chance of it becoming law, due to the idiosyncracies of the English parliamentary system, but still. The airing of legitimate concerns was very useful.

I noticed, in particular, a rather telling response from one of the editors of these magazines, who had gamely agreed to be interviewed with a group of very cross mothers and anti-pornography activists.

The word exploitation seemed to set of a conditioned response in him. He kept saying "But the women in the pictures are doing it freely, they're not being exploited."

It completely escaped him that it was the exploitation of children - both in seeing, and in purchasing these magazines, as there is no age-limit on them - that was the issue. He couldn't see past the end of his nose.

It was a response I noticed time and again from men defending 'Loaded' and 'Nuts' on forums and in popvox interviews.

"These women shouldn't be complaining about indecent images of women, because those women are making good money out of it, and they enjoy it"

For a start, I felt rather sorry for the men reading the magazines. They are so bamboozled by different messages in our culture that it must be hard for them to know just what their response should be.
They had no idea that their very objectifying women by ogling them left them unable to see women as separate beings, some of whom may well be very offended by the images, and more so, wanting to protect their children.

Perhaps the idea that children might be taking this kind of thing in was too distasteful for them to acknowledge.

But my lasting impression was of the utter bankruptcy of feminism. Here it was, distilled into the sentence;

'I have the right to be a sex object'

Our culture has imbibed the womens rights mantra so thoroughly that we have come right back down to the debasement of women with the stunning twist that women actually volunteer for the maltreatment.

The men who dispute legitimate concerns about these mini-porn mags do so from an Alice-in-Wonderland logic that has taken the cry of womens lib and turned it into female self-destruction.

The issue is, of course, that the human heart hasn't changed. In fact, the human heart was the problem all along - the actual imbalances between the sexes, in education and a few other areas were caused by the evil in the human heart, and first wave feminism was just a sticking plaster. It gave way to second wave feminism which was another product of the rotten human heart. Down and down the spiral went, until we now have this bizaare situation.

The crux of the matter is that until we are made new, some women will be willingly seen as objects, men will grab hold of the first excuse to engage in lust, and the imago Dei will be continually debased, even in front of our children.