What happened to the 'Support Our Troops' motto so vehemently espoused by the far right?
Via USA Today:
WASHINGTON — Ten years after Congress banned sales of sexually explicit material on military bases, the Pentagon is under fire for continuing to sell adult fare, such as Penthouse and Playmates In Bed, that it doesn't consider explicit enough to pull from its stores.
Dozens of religious and anti-pornography groups have complained to Congress and Defense Secretary Robert Gates that a Pentagon board set up to review magazines and films is allowing sales of material that Congress intended to ban.
"They're saying 'we're not selling stuff that's sexually explicit' … and we say it's pornography," says Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association, a Christian anti-pornography group. A letter-writing campaign launched Friday by opponents of the policy aims to convince Congress to "get the Pentagon to obey the law," he adds.
On a tangential note there was a time period in America, referred to as "masturbation hysteria", when all sorts of weird and whacky, religiously affiliated ideas emerged concerning the horrible sinful, shameful, self-gratifying act of masturbation. People like Sylvester Graham (yes father of the graham cracker) or John Harvey Kellogg, (yes, Corn Flakes cereal inventor) who believed and argued in his books that masturbation could lead to blindness, epilespy, atrophy of the testes, heart disease, cancer of the womb (yes masturbation applied to ladies too), urinary diseases, nocturnal emissions, impotence, extreme mental and physical deibility, oh and was the primary cause of acne. In his book Plain Facts For Old and Young he wrote "neither the plague, nor war, nor small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism."
Kellogg's and Graham's prescriped remedies--which were dieting (only 2 meals a day) and not eating meat--in order to avoid the temptation of masturbation were, however, much more kosher (from an adolescent boy/man's perspective) than some of the other more, umm, shall we say barbaric methods such as straitjackets, cauterization, or the Chastity belt, seen in the picture below:
Or Albert V. Todd's contraption which was "designed to prevent masturbation by inflicting electric shocks upon the perpetrator, by ringing an alarm bell, and through spikes at the inner edge of the tube into which the penis is inserted."
I can't even imagine that people would actually make their sons do this...Im glad Alfred Kinsey came along to tell us that there was no need for spike tubed, electric shocking, metal panties...cause otherwise I think I can safely say that I would have had a much more tramatic childhood compared to the few emabrassing incidents of 'being caught in the act'.
Wikipedia has an entire history of masturbation article which you can access here.
(I love the fact that the ancient Egyptians creation story was that the god Atum masturbated them into existence. God the Egyptians were cool.)
*I wonder if the word 'onanism' derived from someone who went oh no--splurt--and then decided to make it an -ism...
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