When I was a kid, my history teacher, Jim Brennan, showed us a film that made Full Metal Jacket look tame. It was essentially a documentary made from home movies taken by soldiers in Vietnam. I must admit, it almost made going to Vietnam look like a non-stop frat party. Drinking, carousing, girls… I bet at least one of my classmates joined the army after graduation just because of that part of the film. (Of course, the latter part of the film, where guys were crying after watching their friends die, that resonates in my memory with far more volume).
Today’s Army? It doesn’t sound like much of a party to me. Nevertheless, the Army finally loosened its grip on “traditional values,” by allowing the base PX to carry nudie mags.
In addition to a number of other weighty topics, a Pentagon panel this week cast its vote to allow magazines that are not “sexually explicit” to be sold on bases, something an assortment of conservative social groups were hoping would not happen.
The sale of “sexually-explicit material” has not been allowed on military bases since the 1996 Military Honour and Decency Act was passed by Congress. The Act forbids any film or publication “which depicts or describes nudity – including sexual or excretory activities or organs – in a lascivious way.”
Naturally, groups opposed to all forms or erotic expression insisted that the available publications violated this law and penned a May 4th letter of complaint, emphasizing their concern about “pornography’s destructive impact” upon the men and women serving domestically or fighting in the bloody streets of Afghanistan, Iraq, and other hotbeds of violence. The groups also expressed fears that viewing such materials might negatively affect the wives and children of service personnel once they return home from their combat duties. (source)
Does it not seem ironic that the men and women who are told “you are fighting for our freedom” don’t actually get to have their full First Amendment rights. I can see gag orders on GIs talking about troop movements or even morale issues. But to keep Playboy from a GI seems to suggest that they are fighting for nothing.
Oh, and for anyone who thinks that censorship is a disease of the Right Wing … note the year that Congress passed the “Military Honor and Decency Act” (the act that stripped the PX of adult materials). Yep, 1996. While Bill Cliinton was penetrating Monica Lewinsky with a cigar, he signed a law that forbade military personnel from looking at dirty magazines.
