If it's available, someone will sell it. And the poor addicted suckers will seek it out. The suckers and people around them will suffer, while the dealers get rich. We're talking about illegal hardcore pornography, not illegal drugs. Unless the United States Justice Department and its law-enforcement partners overseas close down the hardcore pornography racketeers, the worldwide porn pandemic will get even worse.
Consider this small example of the way profit seekers will find a way, as pushers always do: In New York, porn movies on DVDs are being home-delivered like pizza. Two young entrepreneurs with a 300-movie library, a moped, and ads in the Village Voice and Screw magazine hope to gross $250,000 in a year at $7 per movie. They call the business City Vice. Customers get a return envelope to send the movie back by mail within a week.
On a larger stage, it appears that the next big thing will be soft and hardcore porn via mobile phones with high-resolution picture transmission, video streaming, and high quality sound and graphics. Porn production companies like Private Media Group have been discussing deals with the telecom companies. The telecoms are already making money off telephone sex lines and TV porn via satellite and cable. AT&T's broadband cable service, for example, distributes pornography through the Playboy Channel and the Hot Network. These companies likely will stick with porn unless vigorous obscenity law enforcement puts the porn producers out of business.
On the other hand...
There's reason to be hopeful. Take City Vice's return envelope. Unmarked, it gives no hint as to its contents, out of deference to the fact that people still don't want it known they watch this virulent trash. And the porn trade paper Adult Video News last January carried word that California Federal Bank was closing the corporate account of a company named Forbidden Films. The company's owner speculated that the bank was "worried their investors are going to pull money from them for servicing the adult industry." Good for them.
Overseas, just in the last few weeks, the Indian government has rejected suggestions that the government sanction the showing of pornographic films in public theaters. In Indonesia, the State Minister of Information and Communications has urged the Press Council to abolish pornography. And in New Zealand the School Trustees Association president called for action to deal with the "serious problem" of pornography in the country's schools.
Up at Yankee Stadium, civility was the team's order of the day when the Boston Red Sox came to town in late July. Fans wearing crude anti-Boston sayings on their T-shirts could not get in to see the game unless they turned their shirts inside out. Predictably, some fans shouted "CENSORSHIP," but to no avail. The ruling stuck. Those banned T-shirt sayings really were crude.
On a porn movie set in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, the talk was political, the Los Angeles Times reported recently. Would the Valley secede from sprawling LA? Would that be good for the sin trade? Would new political leaders include "religious types" (read, bad for business)? Then this, from an editor of the porn trade paper Adult Video News who was on the set that day: To cut down on immorality, he cracked, "they should have an ordinance that says you can't have a school within a hundred yards of a Catholic church." One of the cast members chirped in with, "Yeah. How often do you hear about a porn star raping a 10-year-old boy?"
This, from people whose addictive products paint the mental pictures that sex abusers have in their heads when they commit their crimes.
Researchers at the National Foundation for Family Research and Education (NFFRE) in Canada have found that using pornographic materials leads to several behavioral, psychological and social problems.
The authors of the study concluded that exposure to pornography puts viewers at increased risk for developing sexually deviant tendencies, committing sexual offenses, experiencing difficulties in intimate relationships, and accepting of the rape myth.
"Our findings are very alarming", said Dr. Claudio Violato, a professor at the University of Calgary and Director of Research at the Foundation. "This is a very serious social problem since pornography is so widespread nowadays and easily accessible on the Internet, television, videos and print materials."
The study, published in March in the scientific journal Mind, Medicine and Adolescence, was conducted by Dr. Violato and two colleagues at the Foundation, Dr. Elizabeth Oddone-Paolucci and Dr. Mark Genuis.
"Our study involved more than 12,000 participants and very rigorous analyses. I can think of no beneficial effects of pornography whatsoever. As a society we need to move towards eradicating it," Dr. Violato said.
A quadriplegic who could not get his wheel chair into the lap dance room of a strip club in West Palm Beach, Florida, has sued the club on the grounds that the club violated his rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The FBI's announcement on March 18 that 89 persons had been charged in the first phase of "Operation Candyman" sounds like great news until you notice that the FBI estimates there were more than 7,000 members of the Candyman e-group maintained by Yahoo; 4,600 of them are in the United States. E-groups allow pedophiles - or others with some common interest - to correspond with each other via e-mail, chat "rooms," bulletin boards and file transfers.
Still, any progress is welcome, and there was more.
The U.S. Customs Service reported early in August that 45 children - including 37 American youngsters - had been rescued from sexual abuse in "Operation Hamlet," which it described as "a global investigation into a ring of pedophiles who sexually molested children and distributed child pornography over the Internet." Customs reported that 20 arrests have been made, ten of them in the United States, the others in Europe. Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner said some of the children had been molested by their own parents. The Danish National Police and INTERPOL have been involved in the operation.
In another international operation involving police from 11 countries, Customs reported in March that a dozen members of an Internet child porn ring had been arrested, one of them in the United States, and that 12 computers, 600 CDs, more than 200 videos, floppy disks and external drives, a video camera and a book on how to seduce children had been seized.
Significantly larger numbers have been used by the Justice Department to report results in its "Innocent Images" operation, which has chalked up more than 3,000 arrests and convictions since 1995 on charges of online sexual exploitation of children and the distribution of child pornography.
There's a civil rights case to watch in the Minneapolis library, where a dozen librarians have complained that their exposure to Internet pornography being viewed by library patrons creates a hostile work environment, which they have a right to be protected from. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) concluded last year that the library violated the law by subjecting the librarians to the forbidden sexually hostile work environment, setting the stage for a suit, either by the Department of Justice or the librarians. A lawyer from the Department of Justice, which has the first option to sue, interviewed the librarians and others in Minneapolis in May. This has to be a troubling case for First Amendment absolutists, especially those in the American Library Association, who have argued for unfiltered access to the Internet, porn and all, on library computers.
Citizens for Community Values (CCV) set off a chain of events this summer that led the Cincinnati Marriott Northeast hotel to drop pornographic movies from its in-room pay-per-view television offerings. And they made it all look easy. There could be a pattern in all this for action elsewhere.
Two CCV supporters checked into the hotel, ordered two of the eight pornographic movies on the hotel's schedule, aimed a video camera at the television screen and left the room. Later, CCV sent the videotape to Warren County Prosecutor Tim Oliver, whose staff investigated and subsequently advised the hotel manager that the hotel "might be in violation of Ohio's obscenity laws," according to CCV's report. On July 24, the hotel confirmed in a letter to the prosecutor's office that it will drop pornographic movies from its offerings.
MTV busies itself making promiscuous recreational sex look good to youngsters whose hormones don't really need stimulation.
Now, in a peerless act of self-serving hypocrisy, MTV is running public service announcements to warn its audience against "risky" sexual behavior. My Aunt Helen would say, "That beats all!" And she'd be right.
You may have heard that Parents Television Council, convinced it had erred, agreed in July to pay World Wrestling Entertainment $3.5 million to settle a libel suit in which WWE charged that PTC falsely claimed that a 12-year-old boy killed a 6-year-old girl playmate in imitation of wrestling moves the boy saw on TV. The boy was convicted but it turned out he was not watching wrestling at the time he killed the little girl.
But another case "does show that imitation of television causing severe injury can and does occur," according to Dr. Norman A. Silver of Children's Hospital of Winnipeg, Reuters Health service reports. In that case, a 5-year-old boy severely injured his 22-month-old cousin while imitating a violent wrestling move.
The Israeli Knesset voted in July to tighten a loophole in the year-old law that bans cable and satellite television broadcasters from showing pornography except in cases in which it has cultural, scientific or journalistic value. The loophole, now closed, had allowed porn on pay-per-view television. The bill's sponsor said the measure was not "religious, but cultural and social." Opponents, sounding like civil libertarians in the U.S., argued that the law amounted to official state censorship. (There's that "C" word again.)
Film critic Michael Medved's analysis in USA Today (7/23) was that movie theater receipts are booming (up 20% over last year) because, after decades of dwindling audiences, Hollywood has finally gotten the message: Movies aimed at family audiences do better than R-rated films. He noted that the downturn for movies coincided with the "1966 scrapping of the old Production Code that had placed strict limits on harsh language, graphic sex and excessive violence in motion pictures."
Mr. Medved's findings jibe with The Christian Film and Television Commission's report in May that movies with strong moral content grossed just over $48 million in 2001, an average more than twice the earnings of movies with sexual content and nudity.
With young girl after young girl gone missing in various places around the country in recent months, TV continues its morbid fascination with sex and violence. This fall's lineup will feature the usual assortment of cops, gangsters, sultry women naked under bed sheets, teenagers in thong underwear, adolescent locker room crudities that are supposed to pass for humor, and so on.
But there appears to be a new reason for hope that sanity and decency may have its day in TV. A study by the American Psychological Association this year has found that sex and violence in television programs "impair memory for television ads." From that observation, and a few others, all kinds of good things may flow. The study, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, reached a conclusion with multiple points of interest. It is worth quoting at length here:
"Research from hundreds of studies conducted over several decades has shown that televised violence causes an increase in societal violence... Far less research has been conducted on the effect of televised sex on sexual behavior. However, there is an emerging literature demonstrating that sexually explicit media promote sexual callousness, cynical attitudes about love and marriage, and perceptions that promiscuity is the norm... Moreover, media in which sex is combined with violence may have particularly pernicious effects... Thus, televised violence and sex can have harmful effects on society.
"It is unlikely that moral appeals from parents and other concerned citizens will influence the TV industry to reduce the amount of violence and sex on television. The bottom line - profits - actually determines what programs are shown on television. If advertisers refused to sponsor them, violent and sexually explicit TV programs would become extinct... The current findings suggest that advertisers should think twice about sponsoring violent and sexually explicit TV programs."
So, with a push from advertisers, TV may finally get the decency-pays message.