I am sick and tired of pornography, and I'm not going to read it anymore. Furthermore, if I see you indulging in porn, I am going to snatch the paper out of your hands, turn off your TV or pull the plug on your computer. It's the only way to stop this toxic porn slick from oozing through the American brain and drowning it.
Now, it's not the sex stuff I'm talking about here; that battlefield is crowded, and the war may already be lost. And I'm not even sure that consensual adult tanglings are as dangerous as what I call the Four F's of porn — Food, Fashion, Fitness and Finances. They are insidious because they masquerade as news you can use while crowding out the genuine information we need to make informed decisions.
Food Porn makes me sick to my stomach. It's either puff pieces about expensive restaurant repasts created by artiste chefs and washed down with pricey wines whose grapes were squeezed by naked blind monks on hillsides owned by movie stars, or very cheap restaurant meals (say, 5,000 calories of sugar and soy for 99 cents) that can be washed down by chemicals with a fizz — fun food for folks near the poverty level.
People who spend more than $50 for a meal should be detained for indecent consumption, and parents who allow their kids to hate broccoli should be arrested for child abuse.
When fashion is lewd
If you really hate all food, you could become a dealer of Fashion Porn, which seems to start on the red carpet of all those celebrity parades where mostly too-skinny women show off dresses, which they got to wear for free, by designers who will make cheap knockoffs for regular-sized people. The genius of Fashion Porn is that the boutique dress you had to have last year now marks you as a loser, and that also goes for middle-class-priced sneakers, T-shirts, boots and jackets.
Anybody who judges people by their lapels or their labels should be locked up for lewdness.
The sweaty little secret of Fitness Porn is that it came about because a lot of people don't do much for themselves any more. Since they don't chase after their own kids, clean their own houses or mow their own lawns, their blood turns to sludge and their muscles to marshmallow. So they have to be seduced into shaking their booties with trendy exercises in chic gyms while wearing stylish workout gear (tie-in to Fashion Porn). Some of the newer exercise programs — such as power yoga and aerobic boxing — are beyond oxymoronic; they subvert the purpose of those ancient basic activities.
If you want to get fit, after you eat your fruits and vegetables, put on inexpensive, low-logo shoes and old clothes and take a long, energetic walk. Afterward, lift a heavy book in each hand while stretching. Or clean your house, mow your lawn and chase after your kids.
The worst porn of all may be Financial Porn because it can make you covetous, greedy and depressed. The flow of other people's cash should be as private as the flow of their bodily fluids. I hate reading about what lottery winners are going to do with the $10 million they just won (quit delivering the mail, buy a house for Mom, take a cruise), and I hate reading how unhappy they are a year later because all their cousins showed up with hands out.
And those stories about CEOs and hedge fund managers who make millions a year rarely tell us exactly what it is they do. I wouldn't be surprised if the companies they run and finance are behind the F-Porn sites, which push their products; they earn their big bucks by hiring the PR hacks to lobby lazy reporters to convince us that this is worth our attention.
The only Financial Porn story that touched me in recent years was the one about a million-dollar lottery winner who asked for his prize in a lump sum instead of 20 annual payments so he could spend it on an experimental cancer treatment. The lottery officials refused, and he died. If the tale is true (after all, it was a Financial Porn story), the officials should be sentenced to life in spandex on an exercycle eating mad cow burgers.
Eclipsing the real news
Since there's only so much media shelf space, the F-Porn sites, which are hardly news, squeeze out what used to be called "hard" news. Maybe it's a conspiracy and maybe it's a coincidence, but as F-Porn expands across the shelf, the information we need to know about the political process, the conduct of the war, the state of the environment, health care and education becomes harder and harder to find.
Now, isn't that obscene?
Robert Lipsyte is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
