Letter of the day - Media must not encourage lewd conduct
published: Sunday | January 5, 2003
THE EDITOR, Sir:
IT IS with great disgust that I viewed yet another photo on the cover page of your entertainment section (Gleaner, December 31, 2002) which presented a couple 'getting down to business' on the dance floor at Ratio 5:1.
This type of lewd, sexually explicit conduct and its proliferation in the print and electronic media has become all too commonplace in Jamaica today. When I was a teenager in the 1980s, any young man attempting to grind on our posteriors would have been roundly rebuffed. Unfortunately, this is now regarded as normal conduct in public and no longer reserved for the bedroom, so everybody has become numb to it, in the same way that we have become numb to the use of expletives on stage and the ever-rising murder rate.
I sincerely hope that this year the newspapers will desist from publishing these photos which encourage lewd behaviour, and that CVM and TVJ will also refrain from using these images in the promotion of parties and stage shows.
There was one particularly distasteful advertisement on television this Christmas for a stage show, in which a young woman's rotating posterior was literally shoved in a viewers' faces. The media needs to be much more careful about what it presents to the public, because it has far-reaching impact on the values embraced by any society, and Jamaica is no exception.
