Lisa and I live about an hour from Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is a quite conservative part of Michigan. The local TV station there, WOOD-TV 8, always seems to be running some muckracking moral story or another. Recently, though, it took out radio promos advertising an upcoming story describing a truly shocking event — a local school held a magazine fundraiser which included an “adult” magazine.
So we figured in the worst-case scenario maybe one of those checkoff order forms with Playboy on it made its way to the children, or more likely it included magazines like FHM or Maxxim.
Nope, the “adult” magazine in question turned out to be that purveyor of pornography, Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. Here’s how WOOD-TV’s web site describes the fiasco,
It is natural to assume that magazines purchased through a school fundraising drive would be suitable for children, especially since children are the ones doing the buying and selling. So you can imagine a Grandville mom’s surprise when her daughter was able to order a magazine full of sexual content.
Asimov’s Science Fiction is the magazine in question, and from the outside cover, doesn’t look like an “adults-only” publication. But open it up and you will find it is.
Damn. All those teenage years spent sneaking Playboy and Penthouse when I should have went for Asimov’s and Analog (what is that “plugging the Analog hole” stuff that Cory Doctorow is always complaining about?)
Here’s how WOOD-TV described the offending material in Asimov’s,
Inside the magazine she [parent Marilyn Becker] found various short stories, science fiction, yes, but with strong adult content.
Becker read some of the explicit tales about sex, drugs and molestation inside the magazine for us that included, “Young girls with no panties, young girls in white socks, young girls looking at his wank-mags with him, young girls doing it with one another while he watched.”
Becker was disgusted by what she was seeing on the pages of her teenage daughter’s new magazine. “I was appalled…I was very shocked…literally shaking when I was reading it,” she said. “We’ve never had concerns with the program before.”
The real shocker, though, came after the report when I was trying to find a book on medieval witchcraft in my wife’s collection and came across her brazenly displayed collection of adult magazines,
She tells me she only buys it to look at the pictures than read the sex-soaked stories, but I’m not so sure.