Mainstream Porn?
Story by Christopher Patrick Nelson // art by Hector Gonzalez

Hollywood Video is a neighborhood video chain with close to 2,000 stores entrenched throughout America. The attitudes mainstream movies encourage toward women are not, for the most part, considered outrageous, and so Hollywood Video is not a subject of controversy.   But hardcore pornography should set off an alarm for anyone who has a mother. That's why Movie Gallery, who carries these films in more than 400 of their stores, urging Hollywood Video to sell out to them, should raise an outcry. If the estimated $850,000,000 they've put on the table defeats more principled concerns, those close to 2,000 Hollywood Video stores will be outlets for adult movies – in your neighborhood and mine.

As a Muslim, I take the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, who said, “Women are the equals of men,” as my example in life. Which is why I see some very basic problems bound up in the nature of pornography. When sex is commodified, individual women are sized up according to the profitabillity of their individual body parts, as a cow would be.   Apart from being dehumanizing in the extreme, writers such as Naomi Wolf have pointed out that when images of women are held up as ideals of sexual beauty this is also used to dismiss women who do not conform to what is currently on the market. This is then used to attempt to control women on the street and in the workplace who challenge their female lower-class status. For the Muslim, who is told, “Revere the womb that bore you,” this is monstrous.

Already the backlash has begun against Movie Gallery's bid to consume Hollywood Video. Groups as diverse as Concerned Women for America, Citizens for Community Values, and the Parents Television Council have joined forces with others for Speaking Out Against Pornography: The Campaign For Corporate Responsibility. And, because it is nothing strange to find explicit R-rated and NC-17 videos slipped in with the general releases outside the pornography rooms in Movie Gallery stores, groups like the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families have joined as well. Kids are seeing this. I'm sending a letter to my neighborhood mosque urging that we speak out against this degradation of our sisters and ourselves. This is jihad.