New Yorkers above a certain age remember the old Times Square. If you created a list of words to describe it, “depraved” would be near the top.
Peep shows, adult bookstores and live sex shows stretched on for block after block. But New York was hardly alone; major cities across the country had their own red-light districts.
When I started my freshman year at a college in Nashville, the city’s Lower Broadway was a miniature version of Times Square.
To reach the tiny, tourist-friendly sectors of downtown, you had to drive down Lower Broadway, past peep shows, strip clubs and open prostitution.
And now? While no one would call Times Square entirely family friendly, it is radically different from the 1970s version captured in HBO’s prostitution-and-porn series “The Deuce.”
So is downtown Nashville, now called the bachelorette capital of America. Lower Broadway is so packed with tourists that locals steer clear — not because it is debauched
but because it is just so darn crowded. In places like New York and Nashville, rezoning, economic development
and law enforcement crackdowns on illegal activity helped corral the sex trade and revitalize the cities in question.
We’re overdue for another cleanup of our public spaces. But this time the work to be done is not on city streets but in the wilds of the online universe.
And we can use our successes in Times Square, Lower Broadway and elsewhere as a conceptual legal model for reforming these virtual public spaces.
The core issue is kids, specifically kids’ extraordinarily easy access to pornography online.
For the nation’s youth, their smartphones can and too often do function as a hand-held version of Times Square, circa 1975 — but without any age limits.
They can plunge into the darkest of adult worlds, and they can do so without their parents having the faintest idea of what is filling their young minds.
Last week, The Free Press published a powerful essay with a provocative title: “I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway,” by Isabel Hogben, a 16-year-old girl.
She wrote of discovering porn at age 10 on a website that had “no age verification” and “no ID requirement.” It didn’t even have an age prompt asking her if she was over 18.
And what did she see after she clicked the link? “Simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism and unthinkable physical violence.”