A Most Excellent Thought
From Touchstone Magazine September 2007- by David Mills
"Why, a reader wrote me, do people produce movies like one (whose title I won't mention) about men who are sexually intimate with horses, which was to debut at a prestigious film festival? To get the attention, plus praise, plus money, of people already bored and jaded by less outrageous perversions, is the answer that came to mind.
This profitable appeal to the prurience rests on the belief that knowledge is always good and cannot hurt us, with the small and increasingly meaningless qualification "if it is age appropriate" adulthood (now defined by the movie industry as beginning at 17) being thought the age which everything is appropriate. People believe this, I think, because they have never asked the basic question of what knowledge is for. They have no reason to know anything-and therefore no reason not to know everything."
"Why, a reader wrote me, do people produce movies like one (whose title I won't mention) about men who are sexually intimate with horses, which was to debut at a prestigious film festival? To get the attention, plus praise, plus money, of people already bored and jaded by less outrageous perversions, is the answer that came to mind.
This profitable appeal to the prurience rests on the belief that knowledge is always good and cannot hurt us, with the small and increasingly meaningless qualification "if it is age appropriate" adulthood (now defined by the movie industry as beginning at 17) being thought the age which everything is appropriate. People believe this, I think, because they have never asked the basic question of what knowledge is for. They have no reason to know anything-and therefore no reason not to know everything."
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