The New Normal

[From article]
But we've lost the cleansing quality of "dirty" speech. Now it's casual, boorish, smooth and corporate. Everybody is walking around sounding like Howard Stern. The trash-talking Jay-Z and Kanye West are superwealthy businessmen surrounded by bodyguards, media consultants and image-makers.
[. . .]
Back in the 1990s, growing explicitness and obscenity in popular culture gave rise to the so-called culture wars, in which the right and the left fought over the limits of free speech. Nowadays no one blames the culture for what the culture itself has become.
[. . .]
shocking history-in-the-making that was once hidden now became visible in American living rooms, night after night, through new technology, TV in particular.
[. . .]
Behind the Internet's success in making obscene images commonplace is the dirty little fact that it was the pornography industry that revolutionized the technology of the Internet. Streaming video, technology like Flash, sites that confirm the validity of credit cards were all innovations of the porn business.
The author of this piece ignores the legalization of sodomy, and homosexual sex. What role does law play in all of these "advances?"

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304451904579238140379017148

America the Vulgar
Whatever happened to the subtle thrill of real transgression?
By LEE SIEGEL
Updated Dec. 6, 2013 7:27 p.m. ET