The National Porn Sunday Elephant

Greta Christina

No, really.

I swear, I am not making this up.

Elephant
It sounds like one of my stranger dreams. “I dreamed that a right-wing Christian organization was trying to stop pornography by carrying a giant inflatable blue elephant from town to town.” I was almost tempted to file it in my dream diary.

But this is a real thing. There’s an anti-porn Christian-Right campaign that has selected October 7th as National Porn Sunday, a day to draw attention to what they see as the national problem of pornography. Because they see porn as the “elephant in the room” (or the “elephant in the pew”) that nobody talks about, they are publicizing National Porn Sunday by taking a 25-foot inflatable blue elephant on a 20-city tour.

The National Porn Sunday Elephant.

I have been having giggle-fits about it all day.

Monty_python
The thing that keeps striking me about the National Porn Sunday Elephant is how much the phrase sounds like “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” A collection of adjectives and nouns that are grammatically correct, and yet apparently selected almost entirely at random. Like a phrase someone would say if they had brain damage in Wernicke’s area. Noam Chomsky composed a famous sentence (I believe it’s in Bartlett’s Quotations) to demonstrate that a sentence can make perfect syntactical sense without making any semantic sense: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” That’s what the National Porn Sunday Elephant sounds like.

I’m not going to get into the actual hysterical absurdity of trying to stop pornography by carrying a giant inflatable blue elephant from town to town. I’m certainly not going to get into the assumption that the existence and use of porn is a problem. I’m not even going to ask why the National Porn Sunday Elephant is blue.

I’m just going to say over and over again:

Elephant
National Porn Sunday Elephant.

(Via Feministing. The finest source for all your porn Sunday elephant news.)

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The National Porn Sunday Elephant

About the author

Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on Facebook.
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5 thoughts on “The National Porn Sunday Elephant”

  2. Chris
    2

    I’m now coming up with ideas about how us pervert people should celebrate National Porn Sunday. A few years ago, the lovely Hanne Blank responded to “National Protection from Pornography Week” by calling for “Protection From Crappy Pornography Week,” and I think it’s a tradition that needs to be reborn. The pervs need a day of their own.

  4. Iamcuriousblue
    4

    National Porn Sunday Elephant – sounds almost like one of those “Japlish” Japanese porn titles like “Inside Charge Mania New Drug Experiment Club” or “Jesus Clitoris Superstar Special”.

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