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Are These Posters Sold at Sears Pornographic or Merely 'NSFPL'?
On Wednesday, I discovered the "Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood" and its brave crusade against the "horrifying" action figures currently found in McDonald's Happy Meal boxes. Today's discovery: the "American Family Association" and its battle to get Sears to stop selling the type of posters that most teenage boys have had on their bedroom wall at one time or another.
The AFA has carved some time out of its normal agenda of condemning homosexuals and seeking a complete ban on the construction of mosques to peruse the posters on sale at Sears.com, and it is not pleased. "Extremely graphic and offensive" and "pornography," as they see it. AFA says that it has "tried more than a half-dozen times to reach out to Sears quietly
and professionally. Sears' public relations department has refused to
return our calls and emails." According to a website called LifeSiteNews that is supportive of AFA, a Sears employee stated that “[w]e … have reviewed the products in question
and found that they do not fall outside our marketplace guidelines.”
As part of my investigation into this matter (which took place at a public library due to an Internet outage), I navigated past the not one, not two, but three separate warning pages provided by the AFA telling me that I was about to "view pornographic material sold by the Sears company." I finally got to the "material," however, and offer the following conclusions:
1. Most of what is seen in the posters can also be seen every day at the beach, in the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine, on the walls of Abercrombie & Fitch, etc.
2. Notwithstanding conclusion number 1 above, the posters did not pass the "acceptable to view at the Great Falls Public Library without significant awkwardness" test. I guess that means that at a minimum they are NSFPL ("Not Safe for Public Library")
You can draw your own conclusions on the arguably NSFPL Sears posters here after going through the three warning pages.
Posted by Bruce Carton on August 13, 2010 at 12:19 PM | Permalink
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