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Still, if adults choose to purchase legal entertainment that shows consensual adults engaged in consensual sex acts? That’s their constitutional right.

Telus offers six different subscription “adult” channels, including the Penthouse Channel, which boasts “a higher standard of hardcore” and Maleflixxx, dedicated to gay male porn. Shaw offers four channels, including the Playboy channel, where “Bunnies jump out of the centrefold and onto your TV screen.”

Both companies say their material has been approved by Canadian film censors and that parents can use security settings to prevent kids from seeing it.

Frankly, though, Kowalcyzk’s focus on “television pornography” is antediluvian.

Television is the 20th-century’s medium. Young viewers today get their entertainment online, whether they’re watching Gilmore Girls on Netflix, or something steamier on Pornhub. The Internet is for porn.

Photo by Ian Jackson / Epic Photography

Even if Telus and Shaw pulled their “adult” offerings, there are now easier, cheaper and much more private ways to access porn than your family’s rumpus room TV. Trustees can no more stem the tide with their letter campaign than they can command the sea to go back.

That’s not to say the Catholic church shouldn’t be talking about exploitative porn as a moral issue.

And that’s not to say schools don’t have a vital role in this cultural conversation.

All schools, Catholic and secular, should be talking frankly to students about the toxic, false and ludicrous messages in much pornography. Sensitive teachers can draw kids into meaningful discussions about healthy sex and respectful relationships. Thoughtful teachers can talk about the way popular culture sexualizes and commodifies women, about the ways mainstream film and television depict sexual relationships. We need to discuss porn, not just as something dark, forbidden and enticing, but within a larger political and social context. We should teach kids the media literacy, the analytical, critical thinking, to deconstruct porn as the sleazy flimflam act it often is.

What we need is a grown-up conversation about adult entertainment. Too bad elected educational leaders would rather lecture private businesses than teach their students how to navigate this hyper-sexualized world with moral maturity and moral confidence.

psimons@postmedia.com

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