The Pleasure Police: How Bluenose Busybodies and Lily-Livered Alarmists Are Taking the Fun Out of Life.

AuthorWooster, Martin Morse

Most demographers will agree that life is growing less risky every year. But if you pick up a magazine or newspaper or turn on the nightly news, chances are you'll see at least one report warning of some previously unknown terror. Three drinks will make you an alcoholic. Most men are date rapists. Eating causes cancer.

Read or watch enough of these scary reports, and you'll want to spend the rest of your life in bed, living on bean sprouts, distilled water, and the occasional carrot. Today, you're a bold and daring iconoclast if you order a steak, a smoke, and a sherry when you go out for a night on the town.

Why do we live in such a repressive age? Why has the three-martini lunch become as retrograde as the smoking jacket or the hoop skirt? Those questions are addressed by David Shaw, the Los Angeles Times's media critic since 1974. In his first book, Shaw examines why the Stairmaster has become more fashionable than the seven-course dinner.

Much of what Shaw discusses will be familiar to readers of REASON, such as the foolishness of the war on drugs, the truth about cancer risks, or the real dangers of secondhand smoke. Regular readers will already know much of what Shaw has to say about public policy.

But The Pleasure Police isn't at its heart a book on public policy; it's the autobiography of David Shaw interlaced with analysis. Shaw never fails to present himself as a good liberal who just wants to be able to smoke a nice cigar or enjoy an issue of Playboy without being denounced by some prude. Despite his departures from '90s P.C. orthodoxy, Shaw is a '90s guy in his desire to reveal personal secrets many readers would rather not know: He tells us his 27 favorite foods, including his five favorite kinds of chicken. As a callow lad at a repressive Christian college, Shaw tells us, he referred to women's breasts as "oaklands." (To this longtime resident of the East Coast, his desire to use his book as a confessional seems very Californian.)

Still, whenever Shaw stops talking about himself, he has interesting things to say. He's at his best in The Pleasure Police when he criticizes the press. He argues that journalists primarily worry about people like themselves. As newsrooms restrict smoking, for example, journalists are prompted to write misleading stories about the alleged dangers of secondhand smoke. As journalists age and worry about preserving the remnants of their lost youth, they are more prone to write exaggerated stories about...

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