I'm sure my PG readers will understand if I confess I was most definitely not one of the 111 million TV viewers watching the Pittsburgh Steelers defeat the Green Bay Packers at the XLV Super Bowl on Feb. 6.
Or, did the Packers whollop the Steelers?
The closest I've come to being a gridiron fan was in my younger days when I was not infrequently called a "tight end". (Gravity has since then taken its toll on my playing field. Scrimmages have been few and far between.)
Super Bowl Sunday has become America's de facto big bucks holiday, with heavy wagering on which team will garner the lion's – lower case, to be sure – share of monetary benefit from team jubilation, betting, multi-product soft and/or hard sell.
TV commercials go for $3 million per 15-second product promo. Marshall Bruce Mathers lll's Chrysler ad cost a near $9 million. That's a lot of good and plenty automotive promo, featuring something of a rah-rah touch down for the Motor City. (By the way, Eminem: $9 million might have been better spent on upgrading DPS student educational programs and health needs.)
The ancient Romans called their sports "bread and circuses." Instead of Steelers against Packers, it was lions – again small cap – versus Christians. This season's TV viewer participation was the highest ever since games were first televised some 40 years ago. Oddly enough – very oddly indeed – there was non-televised competition taking place in some 350 fundygelical churches: National Porn Sunday. Purportedly world-wide.
What prompted these churches to stage pulpit ranting and frank discussion of porn on the same Super Bowl Sunday one can only speculate. (Maybe it was the suggestive language – wide receiver, tackle end, corner back, line backer, first and ten. Maybe it was the on-field butt whacking, goal post male-to-male hugging, or the bend-over-guys huddle downers.)
Whatever. The Internet has brought porno into greener biblical pastures. Onanism's no longer the solitary vice. Masturbation's now an adjunct to looking at X-rated sites for fun, games, surreptitious sinful pleasure. Adam and Eve go deep throat. The wily serpent goes long snapper.
Three years ago Christianity Today in its editorial, "Porn's Stranglehold," warned born-againers, "One evangelical leader was skeptical of survey findings that said 50 percent of Christian men have looked at porn recently. So he surveyed his own congregation.
"He found that 60 percent had done so within the past year, and 25 percent within the past 30 days. Other surveys reveal that one in three visitors are women." (Women? Wow, you've got to be kidding.)
The CT editorial quotes one porno backslider,"I'm a guy. And just about everybody has struggled with this at one time or another. But we don't talk about that at church usually." (I shouldn't wonder, Brother Whack.)
The editorial adds, "Disclosure of sex addiction or porn use is so stigmatizing that it is best handled in a confidential, small-group setting in which participants agree not to pass judgment. They also grant each other 'the right to call' 24/7 for unannounced check-ins." (St. Craig's List option.)
There's no question about it. Porn is all pervasive, affecting saint and sinner alike. Americans rent 800 million porn videos yearly. (One in five of all rentals.) There are 40,000-plus Web sites. The industry ejaculates about 11,000 per anum, er, annum. (Hollywood's mainstream movie output is about 400.)
As someone who watches porn more frequently than I watch NFL football games, NBA basketball games, PGA golf games, tag team wrestling, I'm finding Internet porn to be ho-hum, repetitious, a now-and-then reminder I need to remove my over-the-bed mirror, go on a diet, frequent LA Fitness, take cold showers.
Porn works best when it's forbidden fruit. O Gawd, bite the dirty apple! That's probably why National Porn Church Sundays will be around for decades to come. (Let those without XXX-rated sin cast the first XLVl new-season NFL stone.)
