I’ve written in this space before about ordinary people generating risqué content for online distribution, and questioned if anybody other than the people involved and their families (and, presumably, their customers) have any real right to complain about it. Granted that somebody who us posting adult content on social media while also broadcasting who they work for probably shouldn’t, complaining about content that you had to track down and then pay to access is reminiscent of the joke from the last century about somebody being offended by nudist neighbors they had to use a telescope to see at all – that is, it’s stupid. But if anyone out there is surprised about private school faculty and/or religious organizations going berserk over such a situation, I’ve got to ask if you are at all familiar with American culture…
You can pick up the story from the People magazine Human Interest page, or from the local television station’s story about it, but the case seems to be spreading all over the Internet. It seems that the local Catholic diocese has decided to expel three students from their school in Sacramento, California, because parents of some of the other kids found out that their mom posts “adult” pictures of herself on a subscription site called “OnlyFans.com.” Up until the scandal broke, the mom in question was an unremarkable member of the community, who actually served as a volunteer teacher’s assistant or “Room Mom” for one of the second grade classes as the school. Now, however, she and her children appear to have been blackballed from all Church facilities in the diocese…
It seems worth noting that the woman at the center of this case insists that none of her pictures are actually pornographic, and that this is not being disputed by the school, the Church, or even the other parents raising an (anonymous) ruckus over the matter. I should also point out that “OnlyFans.com” is a subscription site that does check the ages of subscribers, and that the mom in our story doesn’t advertise her work; you’d have to know who she was, deliberately go looking for her, and then pay to get access to her pictures before could see them. I could also point out that by the time any child is old enough to have any interest in risqué pictures of any kind there is no power on Earth that will prevent them from finding some, even if they aren’t pictures of a classmates’ mother…
Now, I’m not about to suggest that any organization should be required to utilize volunteers or employees regardless of who those people are or what else they do. Certainly, there are people I wouldn’t want directly interacting with a room full of seven-year-old school children. Moreover, a religious school is, by definition, a private organization, and is therefore not subject to Equal Opportunity Employment laws or First Amendment protections. But throwing three children out of your school because you don’t approve of something their mother does on her own time to make extra money and/or improve marital relations does seem a bit harsh. It’s hard to imagine what harm the kids themselves could possibly be doing to anyone – and if any parents are allowing their seven-year-old children to access adult sites on the Internet, with or without adult supervision, they probably deserve whatever happens as a consequence…
The other question that strikes me is, how did the parents who sent in the packet of pictures to the school authorities get them in the first place? It’s possible that somebody’s kid got access to their credit card or hacked the site’s firewall, but given the vast amounts of pornography available for free online it seems unlikely that anyone would bother. Absent any evidence to the contrary – and the school hasn’t even claimed to have any – I think we have to assume that someone in the community got wind of the mom in our story posting adult pictures of herself, and then spent hours or days combing through the seamier side of the Internet until they found the pictures. At which point my first question isn’t even “Why do you care?” so much as it is “If you are so against this type of material, why are you surfing adult websites in the first place?”
Think about that one really carefully before you answer…
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