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Date Posted: 03:34:37 06/12/03 Thu
Author: Weird_Enigma
Author Host/IP: 67.30.199.29
Subject: Wal-Mart is a dang prude


Wal-Mart's blue-law special

We can all sleep a little better at night. Wal-Mart has announced that it will drape modesty screens over four women's magazines.

Wal-Mart has emerged as the nation's nanny, a holier-than-thou scold standing picket against the barbarian hordes who are out to subvert the American heartland with double entendres, wink-and-nudge lyrics and rather more skin than Sister Mary Margaret would ever allow.

The mother of all retailers says it was responding to customer complaints when it decided to allow shoppers little more than a peep at the titles of Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Redbook and Glamour. But in fact, the discount chain had been under sustained harassment from religious-right outfits to crack down on what used to be ladies' magazines but are now, to hear the voices of organized prudery tell it, little better than hussies' magazines.

It was their partial nudity that led Wal-Mart, deferring to griping from the same quarters, to ban three racy men's magazines a few months ago -- Maxim, FHM and Stuff . The beef against the women's magazines was not nudity but the fact that they sometimes feature articles about -- pardon my French -- it. You know: It.

This is getting to be a habit with Wal-Mart.

The chain long since announced it would have no truck with "software with any vulgarity or nudity."

The retailer has as a result banned a video game in which some female characters appeared with their, uh, things showing. And CDs either are banished or must be bowdlerized with beeps. Lyrics about homosexuality, abortion and Satanism are forbidden and cover art that is judged untoward -- for instance, an illustration with a sort of nude angel and devil -- is air-brushed into proper piety.

(The censorship sometimes gets a bit more personal. Wal-Mart wouldn't carry the Sheryl Crow album with the line, "Watch out sister, watch out brother, watch our children kill each other with a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores.")

It is to maintain a family-friendly atmosphere, the company says, that Wal-Mart bars all entertainments carrying a Parental Advisory sticker.

The chain even drove poor, pregnant Midge into the snows. Midge is Barbie's oldest and very, very best friend and was part of a Happy Family set, no less. But Midge's husband was sold separately, leaving impressionable girls to wonder whether her wedding ring might just be a cover up for sluttiness.

As the country's biggest seller of CDs and magazines -- and in small towns, whose other retailers it has pretty much killed off, often the only source for them -- Wal-Mart swings a huge mace in the culture wars.

You don't have to be a fan of the often execrable taste of much current popular culture to wonder whether the answer is to reduce customer choices to the going attitudes of Bentonville, Ark.

And you can even live in Bentonville and still wonder whether Midge deserved to be banished just because she and her husband -- well, you know.


Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.

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