BECAUSE COULD IS NOT SHOULD, II
Legally could is not morally should, and untangling the two dooms the latter.

In the 1960s, Ralph Ginzburg’s conviction for promoting obscenity through his magazine of “literate eroticism” was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost the case, but NPR isn’t the only one to have dubbed him a “free speech icon” in the historical record. Debatable if what he fought for is considered free speech, but he certainly shouldn’t be elevated as an icon for publishing obscene and erotic materials.

The fight may seem silly to the generation of today, as there remain almost no limits on what can be published or filmed anymore. Worse, such materials no longer garner notice through delivery in the mail or ducking behind a curtain to a secluded section of a store, as all of it comes directly to a private handheld screen, or in an innocuous cardboard box, without anyone the wiser.

A win for free speech, absolutists and liberally-minded say. In a strictly legal sense, perhaps, but standing upon the wreckage of society wrought by that supposed victory, debate is smithereened by the undeniable wrongness of the cost. That battle was a harbinger for the fate of the morality war, a war long since clouded by terms and rationalizations around unfettered freedoms and absolute legalities. Thus, the battles rage, but clarity, and thereby the war, can only be won with unyielding, unassailable adherence to the conviction that legally could is not morally should.

Recent studies show that Gen Z wants to see less obscene material in books and entertainment, and though some may profess puzzlement at these results, they’re entirely logical. As they came to shelter under the aegis of free speech, travesties like obscenity, pornography, erotism began appearing everywhere, from big-budget Hollywood films to books for young readers. The current generation has been so inundated by the never-ending ticker tape parade celebrating the mainstreaming of immorality seeing it is no longer edgy but numbing and meaningless. Proliferation led to oversaturation, so much became too much. Then again, Gen Z’s preferences may not be anchored in morality, but rather in eventually rejecting something they saw everywhere, through easy, ready, and constant access. The mind may eventually forget, but the eyes cannot unsee. Thus, the role of the reliable moral guardrail, the knowing that could is not should.

Consider the rebranding unrepentant individuals have welded upon the porn industry. Despite the absurdly high rate of suicides by women, and men, reports act surprised at such inevitabilities, describing several in a row as having shaken the industry to its core. They’ll speak about terrible treatment from an industry insensitive to costs of healthcare, mental health, abuse, harassment, exploitation, drug and alcohol use, and more, in addition to the self-destroying doubt that comes between signing one job and wondering when the next will knock. Never mind the unspoken truth that shame has a way of creeping in unrelenting when the day is quiet and the mind is unoccupied. As the average lifespan for a female so-called adult film entertainer is below forty, anyone with a functioning mind and intact moral compass knows that the fault is not in the treatment, but the industry’s very existence.

And for those about to wail about free speech, expression, association, and the like, think very, very carefully about what it means that a woman might commit suicide after a career spanning about three years and two hundred films. Two hundred films. That’s, at minimum, two hundred partners in three years. You call this freedom, expression? You call this entertainment? You’re shaken by a rash of suicides? You think a soul dies just because the body no longer listens? No, you’ve fallen prey to thinking that legally could may as well be should.

If absolutists and activists are so psychotic as to still support the allowance of this industry, if other nut jobs are adamant about rebranding so everyone can hide behind a false, brittle shield of self-worth, then society itself must make it unimaginable for the existence of such “entertainment” resulting in a multi-billion-dollar industry, let alone anyone willingly admitting to being part of it. Laws should make it impossible to profit, society should make it impossible to allow without honest, devastating shame.

So brazen, so lost has the distinction become that the industry has award ceremonies. The industry has a hall of fame. The industry calls popular and “high performers” stars. Some are even married, which means their spouses allow them to participate in this so-called “work.” As if there never was a case in the history of man of a job negatively impacting a worker.

Mainstream film isn’t much better, which could be why Gen Z is rejecting its excess entirely. Mainstream film also features nudity and eroticism and essentially pornography by another name, just with bigger budgets and more recognized studios. How did Hollywood get around laws of indecent exposure? What’s the difference between a stripper and an actress who takes her clothes off in a film? The camera? The salary? The mansion at the end of the day? Who are we kidding with slogans of speech and freedom in recognizing just how far things have been allowed to go?

But I didn’t ask for it! I didn’t sign on!

No, you probably didn’t, and you probably skip when the scenes come up, but it must go beyond that. Laugh at it for being ludicrous, but change won’t come until enough people walk out of a theater and demand a refund in middle of a film including nudity. It can start with one, but it must grow to many, so theaters are forced to tell Hollywood the movie is tanking because of this perverse inclusion. Cancel a streaming service and tell them why. Return a book and say it’s “did-not-finish” because of content. Hit them in the wallet while such purveyors unrelentingly, unashamedly go after yours. Do not rely on the excuse of “we’re all adults here” so “they could do whatever they want.” We remain broken until we fix it through returning to could is not should.

Hollywood has been clever over the years when it comes to self-regulation, first in adhering to the Hays Code when they acknowledged the one-time power of the Catholic Church over culture, and then again with a self-designed rating system, which has gradually loosened its standards over the years. It isn’t difficult to trace the devolution of content and recognize what’s happened over the decades, the results on the national moral compass, especially without a society-wide rejection that doesn’t heavily rely upon laws and politicians. And that aside from those who don’t care about either side, whether in the name of libertarianism or simple apathy.

Watch a film from every decade to see for yourself how the compass lost its bearing. In the early years of film, men and women were hardly ever shown in a romantic embrace. This quickly morphed into the slightly comedic “press faces against each other, pull away and sigh” which was the forerunner to an actual kiss. When the kiss came it was short, a press of the lips to the elongated who-knows-what of now. In between came longer kisses, then the grand-ending kiss, followed by applause for some reason. If you sat in a park, on a bus, in a library and watched a couple make out, let alone applauded at the end, no one would call that art. If you watched two people joined only by business contract do the same, and you reacted in like manner, no one would think that normal. If you sat and watched a man or women disrobe, you would rightly be marked a creep. If a man or woman disrobed in public, no one would think that a good indication of their mental state of being.

Yet films include this all the time, when actors, with or without relation to each other, embrace, with or without clothes, for your supposed viewing pleasure. Because art and story and free speech and expression, or some such. Because someone somewhere convinced everyone that film and books and entertainment wouldn’t sell without. Because no one ever bought a clean book, especially of literary merit before the changes of the 1970s. Because no one ever watched a movie until nudity was allowed. It’s a wonder humanity endured for centuries without the books and films to show us the way! How did Shakespeare ever sell a play presented by only male actors and without a single real embrace? How did anyone manage to express themselves before such so-anointed rights were protected by law? What bafflements of history!

Consider some of the films consistently ranked as the best of all time. Citizen Kane has no nudity. The Shawshank Redemption relied on no romance. The Godfather has endured as a top film for decades for the acting, the actors, the story, not because of a random topless woman in a dark bedroom. How many viewers recount that scene in discussions of the film, even without focusing on the greatest moments? You may brush the scene aside as irrelevant, and yet a woman was told, and agreed, to take her shirt off for the camera. The fact that it’s oft forgotten is further proof of the irrelevancy of such a scene, as basically every scene of nudity is.

She didn’t have to! No one forced her to do anything! Freedom of something or other!

All the more egregious when done under the banner of storytelling. Do you truly think this is what capital C Creator intended with the gifts He granted us, the very same we call “rights”?

Disagree? If your wife or girlfriend or sister did the same with some random guy at a party, how do you know it wasn’t just an expression of art? Or exercise of freedom? Or whatever other weak excuse we use to justify, to numb ourselves to what we’re shown over and over in film and literature? Because, you know, we’re all adults here.

When a mother shows off a video of her teenage daughter’s first “onstage kiss” during a show at a performing arts high school, the correct reaction isn’t squealing or delighting but befuddlement, even outrage, at her obvious pride. Never mind the actual show the high school had chosen, why are we pretending that teenagers making out on stage is fine, even laudatory?

We recognize it’s wrong when it’s someone close to us, when the cameras and studios are far away, but somehow a “professional” doing the same for millions of viewers and dollars is different. And we’re meant to be impressed when they send most of the film crew out before stripping down. Don’t say, well, great art has nudes, because someone sat for those glorifications of the human form. But that’s for another day. Either way, the point remains that no fictional story, in any medium, hinged upon the inclusion of explicit nudity, or more. Fictional is specific here as documentaries using historical footage are obviously of another nature entirely.

For all the screechers shrieking about women’s rights, where’s the outrage over an actress who can’t sign a desired role without agreeing to kiss some dude or take her clothes off for the screen? It’s not empowering, it’s not a symbol of control, because there’s no contract otherwise. The signee is being controlled, used, degraded, objectified, and all under the euphemisms of rights, expression, and empowerment. The soul is alive though the body has been numbed to incessant calls that this is wrong, that there’s a moral underpinning between could and should.

Don’t be such a prude! No one forced anything! Everyone makes their own decisions!

Correct. And when you perform for the public, the public has what to say about it, including a rejection of such public displays. We’ve bungled the railway as a society when such has not been shamed and condemned off the tracks.

Storytelling of all shapes used to be about messaging and morality; today it’s about how far the line can be nudged in pursuit of the mistakenly glorified progressive. Reverting to animalistic behavior and practices devoid of human dignity is nothing but regressive.

There’s only one way we get to this state and it’s the same reason for why society is the way it is of late. Everything, everything, comes back to the removal of G-d, and thereby morality, from society. Cry all you want for rights and freedoms, but we’ve seen the results these so-called wins have wrought. We are fighting against the toll they’ve enacted, for the parallel tracks of removal and degradation are not incidental. Even human reason celebrated by the much ballyhooed Enlightenment cannot prevent this slide, but rather unwittingly precipitated it. Because the human mind can logically discern the difference between could and should, but only Divine morality mandates uncompromising submission of the former to the latter. Rights, after all, were given by capital C Creator, and on this He not only says shouldn’t but don’t.

Before you shrug all this off as an angry diatribe of a cat-lady prude, note the annoyance or resistance to the icky fingers of shame that latch on in acknowledgement of this truth. Note the twisted pretzel of reason for allowance in the face of simple observance of results.

We could fix this, and we should. Maybe not all at once, and maybe not many at a time, but each can focus on his own life and decisions. Each can take one step at a time to push back against the so-called victory which has resulted in so much loss.

We need only hold tight to the millennia-old moral compass with conviction. We need only remember that rights protected by legalities still come from a single, infinite Source. We need only once more recognize the vital moral difference between could and should.

(Because Could is Not Should, I)