Sun News is highly offended. And apparently, all Canadian taxpayers should be too.
For the past week, allegations have been splashed across the network’s website claiming the CBC used government money to purchase a pornographic TV show for Tou.tv, one of Radio-Canada’s video-on-demand websites. The show is called Hard, a series produced by France’s Canal+, or as Sun News’ Ezra Levant called them, “French pornographers.”
This would be quite outrageous, and a total misuse of taxpayer’s money — if only it were true.
Hard isn’t a porno. It’s a genuinely funny sitcom about a woman who takes over her late husband’s porn production company. It has scenes of nudity and simulated sex. But the sex isn’t the focus of the show. Hard deals with the complexities of life, relationships, and family conflict.
That doesn’t sound like the videos I get while trolling Internet porn sites.
My favourite interracial ménages-à-trois have — at best — flimsy plots that tend to include hot dates, business meetings and beach houses. At worst, the videos have absolutely no plot and are shot with amateur equipment in a dingy apartment with rock posters taped to the walls. Either way, I have to mute them to cut out the dialogue.
The politics of news spin aside, there’s a big issue here. Who gets to decide what’s pornographic? The lines of propriety are so blurred by personal preference, culture and ideology that it’s hard to say definitively what is too sexual. But I don’t think that a sensationalist tabloid with an anti-CBC mantra should dictate what is appropriate programming for me.
Pornography is generally described as material that is sexually explicit and intentionally arousing. But again, this is so subjective. I can’t watch Power and Politics without getting a little bit aroused and while the show isn’t explicit, the things I would do to Evan Solomon would make even a seasoned madame blush.
HBO’s True Blood, about to head into its fifth season, deals with a lot of vice. Like a lot of HBO programming, there’s a lot of murder, lust and drugs. Beautiful, naked bodies and passionate sex are in nearly every episode. How could such beautifully erotic scenes not be intentionally arousing? You better believe I fantasize about vampire sex. Yet, my 15-year-old sister watches True Blood religiously, sometimes with my parents.
I could go on about the films, books and art that I love, that I think are beautiful and artistic, but are stimulating in all senses of the word. The erotica I consider literature is what another would deem a vessel of vice and moral degeneracy. To each their own, but nobody should tell me that I can’t read it or that I shouldn’t have access to it.
As sexual and social beings, I think it’s important that we pay attention to the decisions about sexuality that are made for us in the public sphere.
Sun News, and MPs sympathetic to the cause, made progress in their crusade against the CBC’s lewd programming. Now, Hard can only be accessed on Tou.tv between midnight and 4 a.m. Personally, this makes me more uncomfortable than a dominatrix orgy.
