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The city has gone porn.
Walking through Times Square or Chinatown, in Brooklyn or even the cloistered Hasidic Jewish precincts of the Lower East Side, we of traditional family values (some would call us prudes, goody-goodies or, worse, parents) are assaulted by a roving cavalcade of smut.
It’s enough to make a person angry. Or, depending on one’s orientation, aroused.
On a six-story Times Square billboard planted before Christmas was soccer god David Beckham, using his R-rated masculine beauty to hawk H&M undies. He defied female and male viewers to keep from hyperventilating as he stood, with rock-hard abs and excessive tattoos, wearing mainly his imagination.
In the front window of the Lower East Side ROX Gallery hangs a photo of a narcissistic lady pleasuring herself, as casually as one might balance a checkbook.
Not so many years ago, pornography was treated with shame. We hid it from the kids, covered it in brown paper, and segregated the worst to the former red-light district around 42nd Street. We knew where to find porn. We could ignore it.
But as Times Square has been cleaned up, replacing its XXX rating with Olive Garden, the Crossroads of the World has tarted up.
Dirty pictures have bounced from underneath wrappers to signs selling anything from food (deep throat a sandwich?) to upscale designers. (Tom Ford uses pretty images of group sex to sell clothes.)
No longer does a guy need to pay with wrinkled bills to see a woman commit an act that used to be illegal in the Bible Belt. Today, it’s free.
We’ve become so desensitized to random acts of sexuality, we no longer even call it pornography. It’s art.
Or maybe commerce. Is there a difference? It’s sex for sale.
“Is this something we should applaud?’’ asks art critic Roger Kimball, editor and publisher of The New Criterion. “Does it give us greater freedom? Or is it a sign of our degradation? I think there’s good reason to think the latter.’’
At the Invisible Dog gallery in Brooklyn, photographer 2Fik bares his bum and his beard and wears latex gloves in a feminine pose (above). “What is going on? a dad asked via e-mail. “Is this another example of pornography as art?”
But gallery director Lucien Zayan insisted, “There’s nothing porn here . . . If you bring kids to the Metropolitan Museum, there’s nudity everywhere.”
For true blue action, visit the ROX Gallery on Delancey Street, where Natalie White appears on a large canvas in the window that shows her, as she put it, “making love to myself.’’ When cops paid a visit last month, Natalie ingratiated herself by leading authorities on a tour, topless.
“In 2 1/2 decades of representing people engaged in public nudity, the single, shining trenchant fact is that police officers like looking at naked girls, too,’’ laughed her lawyer, Ron Kuby.
Only after a community outcry, including from yeshiva boys and parents of Asian tots who endured 2011’s “Pornucopia’’ at the Allegra LaViola Gallery — featuring a huge, in-your-face picture of a woman’s naughty bits — did ROX cover Natalie’s genitals with stickers.
Porn has grown so pervasive, people committing it sometimes are confused as to why they feel dirty. Former Victoria’s Secret Angel Kylie Bisutti, 23, told The Post that she quit her high-flying modeling career and moved from New York to Montana after realizing the job went against her Christian beliefs.
“I was being paid to strip down and pose provocatively to titillate men,’’ she said. “It wasn’t about modeling clothes anymore. I felt like a piece of meat.’’
Kimball bemoans the loss of decency. “Things your grandmother was embarrassed about, is that a sign of our great emancipation? Well, maybe not. The idea that something is widespread doesn’t mean it’s not toxic. We have to ask ourselves, is that moral progress on our part? Or is it moral paralysis? I’d think it’s the latter.’’
It makes a parent wonder — how low can we go?
Shot heard ’round the city
The number of deaths by gunfire in the city, including homicides, suicides and accidents, plummeted to 366 in 2011, less than half the per-capita national average, the Department of Health reported.
Incredible! Will it last?
Speaking with life-and-death urgency, Mayor Bloomberg defended the police practice of stopping, questioning and frisking suspicious characters. This method could have saved the life of Bronx teen Alphonza Bryant, gunned down, for nothing, at 17.
The despicable New York Times, which hates stop-and-frisk like a disease, printed not a word about Bryant’s death, said Bloomberg. Hizzoner also went after the elitist New York Civil Liberties Union, and Democratic mayoral candidate pinheads, all of whom have vowed to trash stop-and-frisk if elected, or cut it severely.
It’s too late for Alphonza Bryant. Peace could soon be a memory.
No Maher nonsense
Lefty HBO comic Bill Maher astonishingly argued after the Boston Marathon bombings that Islam, not Christianity, too often preaches hate. Common sense didn’t last.
Maher claimed last week that Boston cops created a “police state,’’ and were not justified in “firing into the boat where the kid was hiding.’’
“The kid’’ is full-grown 19-year-old accused bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Hours before cops got him, Tsarnaev and his jihad-loving late brother threw grenades at cops, and allegedly killed an MIT cop sitting in his car.
Maher was fired from ABC for calling the hijackers who took down the World Trade Center “brave,’’ while trashing American forces as “cowards.’’ There’s no justification for his continued employment.
A day in the strife of Ben
Ben Affleck isn’t about to faint.
The actor/director tweeted, to great fanfare, that he was joining celebs like Josh Groban who are subsisting Monday to Friday this week on food that costs a mere $1.50 a day, as a way to draw attention to hunger. But after I wrote about Ben’s quickie foray into poverty tourism, a publicist told me something Ben failed to say. He’s spending even less time cutting back on lattes — a single day.
Guilt-ridden folks normally spend a work week participating in The Global Poverty Project’s “Live Below the Line’’ starvation campaign. But Ben is committing just 24 hours to saving the world. I hope he makes it.
No match for Martha
Like many an ex-con, Martha Stewart is hungry for a man. So the domestic dominatrix, 71, signed up for Match.com on the “Today’’ show, writing a profile seeking a “youngish’’ “successful’’ and “active’’ male with whom to have sex and fall asleep. More than 1,000 men have lined up for a date. But who could please Martha? George Clooney? Prince Harry? The mythical alpha male sought by the exacting Ms. Stewart sounds suspiciously like her own self.