I visited a medical office today, my four-year-old daughter in tow. Someone had tuned the TV set in the waiting area to AMC, and the movie on the screen turned out to be Taxi Driver — not suitable kiddie fare by any stretch. We happened to come in right at the moment when vigilante-in-training Travis Bickle witnesses a convenience-store robbery. Five seconds before he pulls out a gun and blows away the perp at almost point-blank range, I quickly opened the 101 Dalmations book we'd brought, then held it straight up ten inches from the tip of my daughter's nose and began reading the conversation between Old Towser and Lucy the Goose out loud.
I guess I could instead have sprinted over to the TV to turn it off or change the channel, but there was the small fact that at least two other people had their eyes peeled on the screen. If I'd been in their shoes, given the presence of a young child, I probably would have offered to switch the TV to another station, but they were oblivious, and I can't say it bothered me much.
Not to get too self-congratulatory here, but I think I handled it relatively sensibly: I shielded my daughter from age-inappropriate images, without presuming to tell other people what they may watch in her presence. No fuss, no harm.
Then I thought about how coincidental it was that on my computer screen at home, I had just pulled up two news stories to blog about, both describing rather similar 'problems' but with different attempted solutions. To wit:
• Billy Ford, a Georgia man who was exposed to scenes from the moderately raunchy HBO series Rome on a recent Delta flight, is still mad, even though Delta stopped showing the program on the overhead projector after he complained. The airline later explained that projecting the show for all to see had been a rare mistake, and reiterated its policy of only showing anything with potentially objectionable content on passengers' individual seat monitors, where patrons have the option of changing the channel with a simple button push.
Not good enough, fumes Ford, who finds himself supported by Morality in Media, a New York-based group that rails against pornography and other 'indecent' entertainment.
They say sexually explicit programs should not be allowed even on the personal screens because neighboring passengers are exposed to the images, regardless of whether they want to be. An airplane "is a public place," said group president Robert Peters. "It's not a private home where some adult pays extra money to bring HBO into their home." Peters said that children could order the adult-themed programming if they are seated away from their parents or if the adults are sleeping or not paying attention. They also could be exposed to them by neighbors. "I often find myself watching someone else's screen," Peters said. "I typically read and write when I fly, but you get bored, you get tired and instead of turning on your own television, you look around."
In response, Delta says that
...passengers, including parents, may request that access to the on-demand programming be shut off to their seats, and that customers who request to be moved away from someone watching a program that offends them will be accommodated when possible.
Which strikes me as a pretty good compromise. It's infinitely preferable to having one man or woman determine for everyone else what may be viewed and what's off-limits — a widespread but infuriating moralistic impulse that I and hundreds of other passengers were on the receiving end of on a flight we took a couple of years ago.
I have a hunch that Robert Peters is one of those people who actually like trolling for objectionable content. After finding it, these folks eagerly complain about its shamefulness with an eye on announcing to the world how unblemished their souls are, how pure their morals — all the while worrying that someone will spot the involuntary erection in their pants.
I would personally draw the line at passengers viewing actual pornography in plain sight, but there's obviously quite a chasm between close-ups of sexual penetration in Debbie Does Dallas and a few seconds of suggested nookie in Rome, where the worst you'll see is a toga that falls off a young woman's shoulders, thus — curses! — exposing a few square inches of her breast.
If Messrs. Peters and Ford are so mortified by movie scenes with lovemaking or hints of nudity, perhaps they shouldn't ever travel — or leave the house, for that matter. After all, in our age of video iPods and DVD-equipped laptop computers, there's always the chance that someone, somewhere will be watching something out in the open that's several degrees more risqué than, say, 101 Dalmatians.
• To continue the theme, I also should mention this story from Chicagoland, where a billboard for a local spa (click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image) features a woman who, I'd wager, wears between 300 and 500 percent more clothing than the average Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. Still, that's too racy. With thanks to reader Ben Young for sending me the link:
"I was shocked," said Regina Thibeau. "I was offended as a woman, angered as a mother and embarrassed as a resident of Glenview."
The 10-foot-by-36-foot sign along Willow Road near Patriot Boulevard depicts a model lying on the beach with lines pointing to "problem" areas on her body, such as facial lines and wrinkles, and corresponding "solutions," including Botox.
So, for good measure, it's not just the amount of bare flesh that disturbs Thibeau; it's also unacceptable to her that most people have different views than hers about what constitutes female beauty. Almost everyone appreciates smooth skin, for instance. Well, how dare they?! Ban those offending images from public view!
"It doesn't represent us as people whose beauty emanates from within," Thibeau said. "I'm a mother, a wife, a member of the PTA, and this is an affront to everything I work for and try to instill in my children."
Has Thibeau sufficiently impressed you with her bona fides? I mean, she's a woman. She's a mom. She's a wife. How wonderfully quaint and old-fashioned that she seems to claim her moral authority mostly based on her possession of a vagina. But hey, congratulations to her husband and her children, of course. She sounds like a real prize, what with all that natural beauty "on the inside." Plus, she's very talented, at least when it comes to spreading her nanny disease deeply-felt outrage:
By Tuesday, more than 300 people had signed petitions asking the owners of the salon and medical spa to replace the billboard, Thibeau said.
As I wrote in my e-mail to Ben,
These people are going to have heart attacks if they ever travel in Europe. In which case, I hope the Europeans have trouble finding the defibrillators.
A man in Ohio goes to the post office and gives the clerk an envelope addressed to yours truly in Maine. Said clerks weighs it, charges 75 cents postage, and sends the envelope on its way. After it arrives at my local post office, I am charged 22 cents "postage due."
My request to him was to draw the (non-existent, as far as I know) Chinese Changsha Bigfoot, perhaps flanked by some likeness of my daughter — and boy, did he come through. Coincidentally, as if by osmosis, he even used my favorite color, yellow, for the background, in roughly the hue of my beloved convertible.
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