Today was a day of follow-up from last evening's photo display of porn on one of Ottawa's main drags.
Nothing prudish about thinking that hard-core sex and bondage scenes depicted by dolls in a store window at eye-level to children is not appropriate.
The key is to get those with so-called authority to respond and insist upon change.
Looks like the Business Improvement Area (BIA) people were a little too busy to do anything about my phone message which they would have received first thing this morn. Nothing done by 11:00 am when I called them and a last-minute email at the end of the day said they were aware of the window and would look into it with bylaw. This means that they've done nothing and that the window still stands.
City Hall has done nothing vis-a-vis complaints before and once again, have done nothing. They represent bylaw and so ditto above.
Was there ever anything called a Morality Squad in city police departments? The person answering the main number could not even pronounce the word or spell it. A non-starter there although when I was frank and said that there were dolls in a store window on Bank St. depicting anal sex, he said he'd send a car over. (I think it's called Vice now and one of their functions is to deal with pornography.)
And the Ottawa Citizen. What about their response. They thought the store might be looking for just this sort of publicity to put them on the map for Christmas. Said they'd seen this happen at Halloween with a store on Rideau St, the other horse in this two-horse town.
When a young reporter assigned the story called me, he had no idea what the window was about, had not seen it. I have not been sending around the worst of the photos but this time, I did. I wondered aloud how he'd feel walking down the street with his mother or daughter and viewing the window together, "Oh Daddy, look, dolls."
Remains to be seen how long the offensive window display stays up.
