What I Learned at the Library

I’ve discovered the library. To be more specific, the Harold Washington Library, the behemoth flagship branch of the Chicago Public Library. True, I’d actually been there once before, nearly twenty years ago when the building first opened. But I didn’t really explore it the way I have in the past several days. Circumstances have conspired to force me out of my home during my days off from the aerosol cheese factory. And a good friend suggested that I go get lost in the library. So I have.

Did you know you can take all the books you want? For free? And this particular branch has, I have discovered upon thorough perusal, every book ever published. It has the dishy theater/moviemaking memoir by Josh Logan that I owned when I was about ten, but was too young to appreciate the context of most of the anecdotes contained therein. It has multiple copies of Suzanne Somers’ book of poetry published before she rocketed to the success of Three’s Company. It has a bunch of cookbooks. And unlike at the bookstore, they don’t frown upon me taking one aside and copying a recipe or two. It has the score of every opera and most musical comedies I could think of. It even has a complete stock of the New Yorker, enabling me to sit down one day and read every brilliantly rendered film review Pauline Kael wrote in the 1970’s. All this for free.

I may never have to buy anything ever again.

Then there’s the computer word processing and internet access. I thought this would be a prime opportunity to resume my writing habits just like at home. Only at home, I don’t have anyone else sitting at either elbow, muttering curse words and gigglin. Responding, perhaps, to voices that other people cannot hear, smelling of that telltale combination of urine and… well, okay just urine mostly. But then again, conditions down at the aerosol cheese factory can be similar in terms of close quarters and olfactory overwhelm. (True, the scent of artificial cheddar-bacon-flavor may be heavenly when you first pop open that spray can of cheese product, but after a while, it wears on you.) What eventually got to me was not the experience of snuggling up between two people who were off their meds and inattentive to their hygiene. What was really distracting was the pornography. Each monitor is equipped with a privacy screen that effectively blocks from view the content of screens to your left and right. But the screen ahead of you, in the next row, is fully, dare I say, exposed.

I asked a librarian about the policy. She looked embarrassed and apologetic, wincing a little, and told me people are free to look at any misogynist, obscene, pornographic allowable by law.

It turns out, the Chicago Public Library has one of the most liberal policies in the country regarding using the internet to access porn. And I just don’t know what to think about that. It’s not as though I was traumatized by the site of it. It's not like I'm sitting here adding up the dollar amount to match the emotional distress I’m gonna sue them for. Rather, it’s the combined revulsion at the idea that my (not many, I’ll admit) tax dollars are helping to defray the cost of letting gross guys do gross stuff in the Public Freakin’ Library. There’s a bit of seediness about looking at porn in general, and I shudder to think how much seedier is the person who wants so very much to look at porn that they’re willing to make a trip to the library for it. These are not your average porn viewers. These are guys willing to sit elbow to elbow among rows of perfect strangers while watching their porn. These are people for whom watching porn is so important, they have decided it’s worth it to toss aside any scrap of dignity to which they might have been clinging, and sit in a public place, essentially announcing their creepiness to the world.

I’ve always been under the impression that there’s more or less one objective being pursued when people look at porn. But I’m pretty sure, however liberal the CPL’s policies are, they’re not likely to permit any one-handed typing. So ya gotta wonder how someone is getting much of a thrill under library porn-viewing conditions.

I advise you: Don’t wonder too long. You’ll soon realize, as did I, the logical conclusion that watching porn in close proxemity to you is a central part of the thrill for these guys. See? You’re grossed out now, aren't you. You thought about it too long, didn’t you? Now you have the same sick feeling that I did, don’t you?

The thing is, having internet access to porn at the library does not invite your average porn-watching guy into the fold. They are appropriately ashamed of themselves like good, healthy Americans. No, the CPL policy inadvertantly invites the guys who think a lot like sex offenders. Guys who choreograph their sexual behaviors to include others as tools (objects) in seeking their own gratification without regard to the impact of their behavior upon others. Now, I’m not saying the guys you can find at any given time watching porn at the library are necessarily child molesters. I’m just saying they think like them.

But what are we to do? It is perhaps the stickiest among sticky wickets, ain’t it? Should we put filters that prevent viewing porn on library computers? Other major libraries have done this. But then we get into that whole dilemma about what’s obscene and what isn’t, and I, for one, don’t want to march down that road. We might cordon off a certain area for unfiltered internet viewing so us decent folk don’t have to look at it. But that smacks of a social quarantine that could essentially limit freedoms by creating untenable stigma, the internet access equivalent of a poll tax meant to exclude some people. Besides that, it would likely force some art student to sit among the creepy porn guys in order to access information about some controversial modern art thing or other. And I ask you, would you want to be the librarian stuck with the job of monitoring the porn room? Would you want to be the custodian who cleans that place up at the end of the day?

I thought not.

So even though I’m loathe know think about what better uses for the library budget there might be than to support the habits of creepy porn guys, I have accepted that it’s the painful cost of freedom for the rest of us. And I have decided upon my own policy. Just as the First Ammendment should protect right of some behaviors I find objectionable, it should also protect my right to walk up behind them and say, “Hey! That’s my cousin, Myrna!” and proceed to detail the ups and downs of Myrna’s difficulty keeping a job, inability to collect child-support, and her struggles with crystal meth addiction. I may not have a choice about being used as an object whose presence may facilitate creepy sexual behavior, but I can sufficiently humanize Myrna (and her three to five friends) to rain on the porn parade for at least a little while.