When I visit anywhere, I always inevitably end up seeking out the local porn shops and strip clubs to see what they have going on. I know what you might be thinking right about now if you know me at all — “Hey, Heidi, you have been surrounded by porno for every day of your professional life non-stop for the last TEN YEARS. Do you really need to see that shit when you are supposed to be on vacation, too?”Well, I guess I do. I genuinely love the stuff and I love seeing how different stores display it well or don’t display it well. I love checking out retail sites online to see what things are selling for and how people are reviewing and marketing new releases.
I am currently visiting a Midwest state in a county that is pretty much porn-dry. Yep, no all-adult stores here and not one strip club in the entire county — and the local government wrote the zoning laws to make it that way. You can, however, find porn DVDs for purchase. It’s a little too easy for my liking, though. You see the stores I have been going into, well, it would be as easy as cake for a child to get into the diminutive adult sections and that’s not OK. One video store had a door located near their drama section — the door was completely away from the clerks and it took seconds for me to get my hands on the latest entry in Third Degree’s Chicks and Salsa series. Another store had no door at all, just an easily ignored sign that meant I was two steps away from Club Jenna’s Janine Loves Jenna. (Spoiler — the two love each other A LOT.) Other stores all had their “dirty” back rooms but all were very, very, easy to get into with no clerk actively monitoring who got in there.
I love me my porno but making it available to kids is really not OK. Children should never, ever be exposed to adult materials and it shouldn’t be easy for a kid to get to the stuff. While parents ideally should be monitoring their children at all times, we all know from our time eating in this nation’s restaurants and shopping in this nation’s Targets that a lot of people simply just don’t put the effort into their kids that they should.
XXXChurch.com with Ron Jeremy just made a PSA that expresses that kids shouldn’t have access to entertainment that’s not meant for them and ASACP tries to assist parents in keeping their kids away from porn online, but I really believe that porn producers could and should be doing more to keep their materials away from young people who just aren’t meant to be consuming it. From a sheer PR and marketing standpoint, it makes a hell of a lot of sense. It kills the immoral pornographer argument in a heartbeat by showing the industry as being made up of people with active consciences and it shows responsibility for communities. No director or producer that I have ever met making porno expressed that they wanted kids to see their movies and standing up and saying so loudly would go a long way towards breaking down the arguments for zoning porn out. Adult webmasters should be supporting ASACP and providing information on filtering their sites away from children on their opening pages, for sure. It shows a real concern for the lives at the other end of the transactions and that goes a long way to keeping your product available to the masses.
