Free Speech, Advertising, and Public Decency

The Argus Leader has gotten on my bad side this week. The Argus has already caused my journalistically minded friends significant annoyance with its web redesign, a great jumble of links and far-too-slowly updated podcasts and other whizbangs crowding out the news headlines. The Argus has perhaps tried to alleviate this problem by pulling the local, region, state, and business news links up to the top of the page, but even in that effort, the Argus as slipped, giving readers a view of only one headline at a time under each heading on the front page. (More information, fewer doodads, please!)

But it's not web layout that's getting my goat. (A quick look at my websites should demonstrate I'm in no position to cast stones on that issue!) Bothering me much more is the appearance of ads for a sex-toys store in Sioux Falls. Of course, the business (which, in a fit of quixotic prudery, I will not give the pleasure of free publicity by name here) makes no mention of sex in its ads. It euphemizes itself as an "adult supercenter." Its ads do not name or depict its products. The sex-store's ads simply try to build name recognition, pique curiosity, and overcome people's nagging sense that porn shops just aren't places for decent people. (Darn shame when conscience and good upbringing limit a business's market.) The current ad urges us to forget Tupperware and purse parties and instead "spice it up!" with an at-home party.

I take umbrage at such advertising on a number of levels. First, if I were a newspaper editor, I'd be uneasy placing such an ad next to a number of articles. I found the ad popping up next to stories about the death of one of my Montrose students and the upcoming retirement of SDSU President Peggy Miller. Both people deserve more respect than to have their faces placed next to an ad for sex toys. Later I encountered the same ad beside a story about a Rapid City man sentenced for possession of child pornography. That juxtaposition was as crass as placing an ad for Jack Daniels next to a story about drunk driving. Ads for sex toys just don't fit in a discussion of the day's news.

Such ads really don't fit into any sort of civil discourse. Take the ad and its message out of the context of the newspaper and place it in a public, face-to-face conversation. If I were to talk about this store and its products at work, my co-workers and students could easily sue me for sexual harassment. If my discussion of such matters infringes on the civil liberties of the people I work with, doesn't the presence of ads for a sex-toy store on news website open to the public constitute a similar form of harassment? I would argue the same is true of other ads for this store that shout out at us from radios and billboards throughout the work day. At the very least, shouldn't a responsible newspaper restrict such advertising to adults-only sections of its website, where everyday readers and students won't be bothered by it?

Now my offense at such ads is not based purely on some weird puritanical distaste for sex derived from growing up around lots of reserved Midwestern Lutherans. Sex is perfectly acceptable and enjoyable human behavior. But sex should not be a commercial good, something to commodify and mechanize and advertise. Sex should be a healthy physical and emotional relationship between two committed people, not a ménage à trois including some profiteer selling perverted plastic junk from China. If a relationship is lacking, nothing at an "adult supercenter" will resolve that problem. No sex toy or dirty movie -- no consumer product of any sort, decent or indecent -- will make up for a lack of genuine love and respect. We shouldn't need a business to "spice up" our relationships... and businesses should not try to make a profit by convincing us otherwise.