No More Monkey Business
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Donna Rice Hughes says that once a pornographic image has been seen, it can never be totally erased from the mind. That’s one of the reasons she’s working for Enough Is Enough, a nonprofit group that seeks to protect kids from smut and its purveyors on the Internet. It’s a worthy cause, but her point holds for other images as well, including a couple of her that have proved indelible. There’s the one of a pert, 29-year-old Donna Rice perched on Senator Gary Hart’s knee during their escapade on the boat Monkey Business, for example. That was the picture that brought an end to Hart’s bid for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. Then there’s the impudent No Excuses clothing ads that made it look like she wasn’t the least bit sorry. So we did a little double take on first encountering Rice Hughes in her new role as our instructor in the dangers of sex on the Net. We wondered, for a second, if there might be a career path here for La Lewinsky.
Rice Hughes never published an account of her monkey business with Hart (took the high road, she says). But she’s coming to the Chicago area next week to promote a book she’s just written. Kids Online is a user-friendly manual for parents that warns of the perversions kids can encounter at the click of a mouse and explains software systems designed to protect them. Some of these systems filter the Net, some block parts of it, and some, called “closed” systems, present a limited selection of sites from the Internet without allowing Internet access. Rice Hughes says the closed arrangements are the safest, and the one she particularly likes is EdView, which she says sells the only program designed specifically for schools. Among the folks endorsing her book are two current U.S. senators and the president of EdView.
