By Robert P. Lockwood

Defining deviancy down

Perusing the newspaper begs the question: Are we supposed to be horrified or titillated?

Two semi-old codgers who wouldn't know an iPod from a peapod were talking about their introduction to newspaper reading. It's the kind of conversation that can send anyone under 30 running from the room.

My buddy remembered his days as a kid just outside Providence, R.I., poring over the afternoon paper for stories about the rubber match between heavyweight boxers Floyd Patterson and the Swede, Ingemar Johansson. Patterson cleaned Johansson's clock in the sixth round on March 13, 1961.

My first real newspaper memory was right about the same time. I told him about reading every word in the obituaries and sports columns in the old New York Journal-American about the death of Ty Cobb in July 1961. The Journal-American would die five years later, killed by a lethal combination of inept management, declining advertising revenues and rising TV ratings for Walter Cronkite.

It was the sports pages that teased us into functional literacy. Just as we wouldn't sit around doing long division for fun, reading was schoolwork and we didn't see it having any practical application to our daily lives. But then came boxing and box scores, and we were coaxed into print around the age of 11. The fingers have been ink-stained ever since.

There are a lot of 11-year-old kids today who get their introduction to newspaper reading through the sports page as my buddy and I did so many decades ago. But in this day and age, we make sure that the kids have to wallow in a little mud.

A tasteless advertisement has been running lately in the sports pages of a couple of local daily papers in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The ad has the tagline, "Enhance More Than Her Mind..." and features a picture of a girl standing in front of a blackboard with what we used to euphemistically call a "come-hither" look on her face.

The ad is for some kind of snake-oil gimmick that reminds me of the salves they used to peddle in the old Journal-American to cure baldness.

The eyes usually just pass over this kind of stuff, but in this ad the model in question is dressed to suggest a Catholic school girl. Less than sexual, the ad is really kind of creepy, particularly when a reader can turn to the local news section to find out who got nabbed this week trying to solicit online sex from what he thought was a 13-year-old girl, but turned out to be a 30-year-old male cop.

The story horrifies us. The ad is supposed to titillate a guy into buying a product. And make money for the newspaper.

I suppose these ads appear in the sports pages because the reader profiles say that males aged 18-34 are the ones most likely to be checking out spring training games and the news on the upcoming football draft.

Thus squeezed in amid all the high school scores in agate type are ads for area strip clubs. They promise "all-nude-all-the-time" and, as an extra special attraction, a visiting stripper who happens to be a little person.

The late Sen. Pat Moynihan described in classic alliteration an America in 1993 that was "defining deviancy down." He was referring primarily to what he perceived as permissiveness about crime and criminal justice.

The phrase has a wider cultural cachet. It describes a culture where each day the bar is lowered in public trashiness. Just channel surf for five minutes or walk past the display windows and billboards at the mall.

And, lately, they've had the company of a half-dressed model posing as a Catholic schoolgirl parading through the local sports pages for all the kids to see.

It's getting creepy out there, folks. Really creepy.

Robert P. Lockwood writes from Pennsylvania.