Sasha Grey, Porn Star, Reads To Elementary School, Parents Outraged

From the Huffington Post:

How would you feel if an adult film star read to your seven year old child? Believe it or not, some parents in California are pretty angry that it happened in their kids' classroom.

Porn legend Sasha Grey was a guest reader at Emerson Elementary School in Compton, California earlier this month, joining first and third grade students in their Read Across America day. Grey certainly enjoyed the experience, tweeting, "Spent the am with Read Across America Compton, reading to the sweetest 1st & 3rd grade students @ Emerson Elementary!"

The problem, TMZ reports, is that parents aren't happy -- and that school officials, instead of addressing the issue, are claiming it never happened.

More here.

Well, of course parents are outraged: a porn star, or rather, a former porn star as the article observes, came into their children's school and read to them. On one level, a shallow surface level, that makes complete sense. Porn star! Sex! Bad! But when you dig a bit more deeply, asking why this is such an outrage, it gets more complicated. Is it because porn stars, even when they're just reading children's literature to children sort of exude a sexual vibe that makes everybody in the room immoral somehow? Is it because these children are in danger of being...what...sexually abused or something? Or, more sinisterly, is it simply because certain segments of our society continue to be stuck hopelessly in the Puritan America described so well in Nathanial Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter?

I'm inclined to gravitate toward that last option, myself. I mean, really, the children are in no danger at all in such a situation. Everybody's supervised. It is highly unlikely, given the circumstances, that said porn star is going to jump into some kind of sex-positive rant which may or may not psychically wound her audience for life--I mean, it sounds like Grey was just trying to be a good citizen, which is something the vast majority of US citizens, porn stars and plumbers alike, don't try to do. No, this is good old fashioned Puritanical sex panic. It's about confirming America's underlying anti-sex bias, which continues to exist in multiple forms in spite of the Sexual Revolution and a mass media positively dripping with exploitative sexual imagery. It's a bias that has a religious component, for sure, but is not always necessarily manifest religiously: that is, you don't have to be a Bible thumper to freak out about a porn star reading to children, even though there is no good reason to freak out.

In the end, the real question here is about what we, as a society, think about pornography and sex work, in general. I'm betting that more than a few of those outraged parents consume pornography themselves: so they'll watch this woman getting nailed by five guys on their computer late at night, but no fucking way is she going to read about the little engine that could to their kids in plain daylight.

Such hypocrisy sickens me. And it's not just the hypocrisy: it's also the moral judgment implied; who are you to say that this or that job, or point of view, or personal identity, is too immoral to have contact with your children? I mean, would you be okay if the Goldman Sachs CEO came to read to your children? With Dick Cheney or one of the Abu Ghraib torturers?

Meanwhile, pedophile football coaches and pedophile priests, who, because of their careers being so bedrock American, continue to have access to children who they use for their own vile sexual pleasure. Our culture is so fucked up.

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