pornography

Ethics, Porn, and the Creepy Professor

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Ronald Ayers saga raises the intriguing, Weiner-esque ethical issue of whether a college professor being creepy is sufficient reason to fire him.

The former economics professor was fired by the University of Texas for viewing pornography on an office computer, which the University’s policies forbade. The chain of facts has the ring of Kafka: 1) a student claims he hears “sexual noises” emanating from Ayers’ office, which 2) is considered sufficient provocation (the professor denied the accusation that he was not “master of his domain” at work) for the school to search his computer, which 3) uncovers evidence that he looked at some pornographic sites, and 4) also that he searched for the term “teen,” which 5) the university deems sufficient to indicate that he was searching for child pornography, so 6) they fired him, after three decades and tenure on the faculty.

University records say Ayers at first denied the allegations that he viewed pornography, but when confronted with a printout of his computer records, admitted that it may have happened “at the end of a long work day.” Ayers later told administrators seeing the porn was for “academic research.”

Uh-huh… Continue reading →

The Naked Teacher Principle Strikes Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Once the class sees Teacher like this, it's over...

The Naked Teacher Principle holds, in essence, that once a teacher is seen by his or her students cavorting in the nude, school administrators and parents are not being unreasonable or unfair if they decide that the teacher can no longer teach effectively. From the classic example involving internet photos, to exceptions like the male teacher appearing in a community theater production of “The Full Monte”, to strange corollaries like “the Naked Butt-Painting Teacher with a Paper Bag Over His Head Variation,” naked teachers create headaches for their schools, giggles (at least) for their students, and anxiety for the teachers involved.

Now we have another variation. Continue reading →

The Ethics Verdict on GQ’s “Glee” Spread: Ick

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The watchdog group Parents Television Council is condemning the Gentleman’s Quarterly’s buzz-generating photo spread of actresses from “Glee”adopting sexually provocative poses more or less in character. Since their characters on the show are teenagers–minors—the Council equates the feature to pornography and pedophilia. “It is disturbing that GQ, which is explicitly written for adult men, is sexualizing the actresses who play high school-aged characters on Glee in this way. It borders on pedophilia,” said PTC President Tim Winter.

He’s right, of course. Continue reading →

Porn: Finding Ethics in the Strangest Places

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

It should surprise nobody that Amy Fisher, the “Long Island Lolita,” now out of jail for shooting her lover’s wife, married and in her mid-thirties, is outfitted with nifty breast implants and making money shooting porn films. At least her notoriety is being exploited in a manner that does not confer true celebrity status for her misconduct, unlike, for example, Michaele Salahi, who has been featured in glamour shots by the national media as a  direct result of her crashing a White House social event with her equally shameless husband. Amy was dismissive of her part-time porno career in a recent interview, and the woman she shot in the head, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, suggested in a follow-up interview that Fisher was ethically clueless (a not too far-fetched conclusion, all things considered), and that the fact that she made her living being photographed performing various sex acts despite being the parent of small children proved it.

This got me thinking about pornography..no, no, wait!—I mean about the ethics of pornography. Continue reading →

Thought Police at the Transportation Security Administration

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Leave it to the Government to give us a definitive example of this problem: how do we tell if someone is being unethical or just infuriatingly dumb? Most of the time, of course, we can’t tell.  You can conclude, however, that when high-placed leadership in a government agency, without a legitimate reason for doing so,  takes action that makes those who worry about excessive government intrusion into private thought, speech and conduct quake in their boots, the end result is the same. Such actions cause an erosion of trust, the lifeblood of democratic societies. That makes the conduct dumb and unethical. Continue reading →

Neighborhood Ethics and the Snow Babe

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It’s time to play “Who’s the Worse Neighbor?”!

It’s clear that the media take on the New Jersey story about the risqué snow sculpture will favor the snow-artist neighbor and ridicule the Puritanical neighbors, but the ethics fouls may be on the other side.

A brief summary: a woman and her son used the ample snow on their lawn and the their substantial sculpting talents to make a life-size, headless, armless, torso and trunk of a rather well endowed naked woman instead of the more traditional Frosty the Snowman. If this  “came to life one day,”  that traffic cop would arrest it for indecent exposure. Continue reading →