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inclined to. 6 Simply put, sex sells.
I find it ironic that we see any difference at all between two film actors
indulging in a promiscuous act, as opposed to a grown man and a child as
suggested by the Victor etchings. Both acts are, in their own right in my
opinion, demoting values of self-worth and love as well as the privacy hereof.
What has horrified in the past has now become more acceptable to the
masses. Yet, once the line between exciting vulgarity and horror is
overstepped to the point that we need to move out of our comfort zones into
the light of reality, many object.
Of course we get upset when hearing stories about a one-year-old girl
being assaulted by robbers to the extent that brain damage may be present,
although we allow a certain amount of personal censorship in terms of how
vividly we imagine the traumatic experience of this baby and her parents. In
most cases, we gasp in shock at the horror of the event, and within a few
days, most cannot even remember that the girl’s name was Marzaan Kruger. 7
Tomorrow brings its own atrocities, which are quickly forgotten within the
days to follow, and so a vicious (or should I say, a sad) cycle is apparent.
Gabriella Pearse proposes an argument in her poem Today that we live
in an impersonal world where we have little concern for other’s anguish:
A woman with a gash
so deep and wide in
her black soul
came and spilled her
self over me.
Asking to be held
like no one held her.
Asking to be fed
like no one fed her.
She crawled beneath
my skirt trembling and
afraid and clasped
my lifeboat legs.
But I had meetings
to go to,
and a world to save. 8
6
See Sunday Times UK (7 May 2006) Raunch culture and the end of feminism.
7
See Sunday Times (23 April 2010) Assaulted baby in serious condition.
8 G Pearse ‘Today’ in R Malan (ed) Worldscapes: a collection of verse (2008) 254.