Bottom right. Easy access at Walgreens.
Diane Black, a U.S. Representative from Tennessee, has been getting a lot of media attention for her belief that grocery store porn is a “big part” of the “root cause” of why school shootings happen.
Or something like that.
“It’s available on the shelf when you walk in the grocery store.” she said. “Yeah, you have to reach up to get it, but there’s pornography there.
“All of this is available without parental guidance,” the 67-year-old Republican candidate for governor added.
Puzzle porn at Kroger.
I decided to see if there was anything to Black’s claim. Saucy glossies are still in demand, if greatly diminished in number since the Internet made just about anything you can imagine in this arena free and available on our phones. But can you really get it in every grocery store easily and without adult supervision?
Not at my Kroger (Pop/Cleve 4-evvs). Unless you’re talking about Cosmo.
And whatever you think about the Cosmo is Porn campaign, we’re pretty sure any smutty advice they may or may not have printed about “polishing your partner’s assault rifle” was pure metaphor.
Newsweek had a really super-naked picture.
There were Sudoku puzzles, sports rags, teen-crush mags, Little Golden Books and a Wonder Woman coloring book on the bottom shelf. I asked an employee where all the porn magazines were. She looked at me suspiciously (cant say that I blame her) and said these were the only magazines she knew about.
This one caught my eye though.
What kind of gun is that dude pig hunting with? It makes me feel all funny down there, if you know what I mean.
So maybe Black misspoke. Maybe she meant corner stores or pharmacies. Some of them sell groceries too. So I went to the Walgreen’s across the street.
You know, I do remember a time when porn seemed to be everywhere. I remember being eight or nine years old and looking at the dirty magazines on the bottom rack of a musty general store in Malakoff, Texas. I was a chubby kid and shirtless, wearing a big black cowboy hat with a big red and black feather band. It was the ’70s, man — even youngsters like me were letting it all hang out.
US Rep. Diane Black R-Tennessee
The pinch-faced prude behind the counter didn’t tell me to put down the porn or say “This ain’t a lending library,” or anything like that. “Developing young ladies should cover themselves,” is all she said to me. So, yeah, I was introduced to porn, and body/gender issues on the same sunny afternoon in Texas.
Porn magazines started losing “readers” in the ’80s — when video became cheap to manufacture.
At some point, magazine porn did get wrapped and placed on top shelves. And then it seemed to disappear from a lot of places where it used to be ubiquitous. I couldn’t even find porn at convenience stores where you can buy homeopathic sex pills and bongs.
“Try Walgreen’s at Poplar and Cleveland,” one convenience store employee suggested. Clearly I live in a porn desert.
Walgreens was also a bust, with content similar to what I’d seen at Kroger. Stuff on the top shelf included news magazine special editions and Popular Science. A few titles did catch my eye though down on the bottom shelf, in more or less the same part of the magazine rack where 8-year-old me first encountered porn way back in the disco era.
Check out Sniper. So. Hot.
And this Guns & Ammo AR-15 “pistol edition” with an assault pistol the cover. Or, whatever.
Precision Rifle Shooter has yet another sexy rifle on the cover.
And then there’s all the 2018 Handgun Buyer’s Guides right where little hands can reach them, free from parental guidance.
Long story short: Black’s weird claim just doesn’t seem to be true. Can we please get back to the time-honored business of blaming society’s ills on comic books, Atari, and satanic messages hidden on Black Oak Arkansas cassette tapes?
UPDATE: Similar porn deserts identified in Nashville.