jobs. (See what I did there?)
In today’s National Post (online), they’re not nearly as crafty in their Q&A with Keri Russell, which is headlined like this:
I love how the NatPo opted for “oral sex” in the headline, 
but the URL hints that maybe it actually started out as “blow jobs”, since that’s what the URL still indicates (http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/02/21/qa-keri-russell-talks-on-screen-blow-jobs-and-what-its-like-to-play-a-russian-spy-on-the-americans/). Maybe some editing was done, but not enough. The text of the piece goes right ahead and blurts it out.
Q: There are several scenes that are quite sexually graphic, notably your opening scene and your character’s rape flashback. Was that hard to shoot for you?
A: The rape scene wasn’t that hard to shoot, we did it pretty fast. It always helps when the actor is good and just kind of does it and we’re done. I love what it says about the character. It tells you so much about her and her introduction to sexuality and how that’s going to inform the rest of her life. For me, anyway, it forgives her for a lot of her behavior. For her coolness and her self-protective qualities, and I think it makes it more interesting. I like that she’s so cold and tangled up in her intimacy issues. I also like the juxtaposition of her being so outwardly sexual for her work. You know, giving guys blow jobs in hotel rooms and then not even be able to be warm or touch her husband, which is real intimacy.
So big deal, right? Well yeah. It kinda is.
No, I’m no prude, actually, so you can just dispense with that BS (see?). And I should note that I’ve long ago given up, as they have, on the pretense that the mainstream media is anything like “good” or “professional” or even ethical or anything like the bastion of even a modicum of decency or morality.
But really. Have we now decided to just let ‘er rip, and let everything go now, in every institution in our lives? Including in what what used to be our august national press? Does nothing get edited out any more? I mean I guess post-Bill Clinton and his “oral sex” under his desk and his lying about it, and the press totally forgiving him and in fact adoring him all the more, it’s not impossible to imagine that’s where it’s heading.
So should we just walk around farting and having sex in parks on park benches? And then what, after that?
We encourage our kids to read the paper. Papers constantly encourage it themselves, and sponsor childhood literacy and youngster spelling bees. Are newspapers now to be pre-read by parents so our kids don’t read one then ask us what blow jobs are?
I just feel like I could have lived without reading that today. The National Post might want to consider taking a stand on some decency.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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