Sears Accused of Selling 'Porn'

Having just returned from a trip overseas, I had a log layover in a Paris airport where I shopped for some magazines to read. The French section had several magazine featuring bare-breasted women. No, wait. Actually, one of them was an English-language tabloid. But among the French magazine covers was one of Francois Sagat, the muscular, tattoo-headed gay porn star, in an embrace with a female counterpart.

Sagat is a big cross-over celebrity in France, which probably speaks volumes about the differing attitudes about the human body there and here. Anyone who has been in Europe and turned on the TV has seen ads featuring women's exposed breasts. It's not salacious; usually the ads are for a product as innocuous as soap or yogurt.

In the United States, on the other hand, there is a vocal minority that finds any hint of a woman's breast to be the height of filth. When When one of Janet Jackson nipples may have been exposed for a nanosecond during half time at a Super Bowl game, the film became the most analyzed since Zapruder turned his camera on Dallas' Grassy Knoll on Nov. 23, 1963.

And now we have Donald Wildmon. The head of the American Family Association may well have become most famous for the spectacular un-success of his boycotts of such American corporate institutions as Walt Disney and Ford.

Now Wildmon is setting his sites on Sears. The giant retailer's sin? It is apparently marketing posters that Wildmon finds obscene. That these are about as salacious as Ursula Andress emerging from the ocean or Farrah Fawcett-Majors tossing back her blond tresses -- or even Betty Grable peeking from behind her well-defined derriere -- doesn't bother Wildmon.

Incidentally, the posters are apparently available only online.