Brian McNair's interest in pornography is academic. That doesn't mean necessarily that he's got it right. Mr. McNair is on the film & media studies faculty at the University of Stirling in Scotland, where he teaches, as he puts it, "a course called Sex, Society & the Media which examines, among other things, pornography."
He is also the author of "Striptease Culture," a book that was published this year by Routledge, a London-based publisher. On its web site, the company says it specializes in "academic books, particularly within the social science and humanities subject areas. It focuses on three academic sectors: undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate; research and reference; and professional education and development." Given all that, you'd have to figure that stripping has been laid bare, so to speak, in Mr. McNair's book.
In an article published online by European Intelligence Wire on October 1, Mr. McNair says, "I don't evangelize on behalf of porn, nor do I campaign against it."
But the headline on his article - "Sexual liberation out of the blue thanks to pornography" - sounds a bit judgmental in favor of porn, and the article itself confirms the impression. Mr. McNair writes, "the expansion of porn coincides with huge improvements in women's and gay rights in the West. Those places in the world where porn is banned or most tightly controlled, usually for religious reasons, are also those where women and gays are most brutally treated: Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan under the Taliban, northern Nigeria where a pregnant woman is at this moment under sentence of death by stoning for the crime of adultery."
Mr. McNair concludes, "A society mature enough to cope with the explicit depiction of sex between consenting adults is likely to be one comfortable with sexual diversity and women's equality."
So, let's see if we've got this straight. Societies that are open to hardcore pornography are mature and good, and those that ban porn are immature and bad.
Eighty percent of adult Americans want our obscenity laws enforced, so the good old U.S.A. must be immature and bad. Right? What we need to do is just grow up and scrap the obscenity laws! We'll just have to forget about the rights of children and women to be protected from sexual predators, and the essential role of families in society, and the societal importance of the institution of marriage, and all the values of public decency and civility that are cheapened by the porn culture. Things like that.
You have to wonder what former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren could possibly have been thinking when he said from the bench in a 1964 obscenity case, "(There is a) right of the nation and of the states to maintain a decent society." Chief Justice Warren’s quote reappeared in a 1973 obscenity case—in which the Supreme Court held that a state can prohibit distribution of obscene materials—even when the garbage is exhibited to an audience consisting of “consenting adults.”
As we've seen in Brian McNair's European Intelligence Wire article, the "M" word for sexual libertarians is "maturity," not "morality." Here's another example. (Do they have a playbook?)
There's a debate on in Barbados because someone there said prostitution should be legalized. One of the participants, University of the West Indies lecturer Peter Wickham, in favor of the idea, wrote in the October 2 issue of Barbados Nation Online that "we in Barbados should move our thinking out of the proverbial dark ages." (More on that in a moment.)
Moral relativism is at the core of Mr. Wickham's argument: "Our refusal to accept the fact that some people see life differently prevents us from addressing issues that affect our entire society in a timely manner."
He goes on: "It would seem that prostitution shares much in common with homosexuality and acts of 'gross indecency,' since these are all forbidden by the laws of Barbados while there does not appear to be any logical justification for the existence of such laws other than the apparent need to preserve the 'morality' of Barbadian society."
And on: "I frequently assist clients in the pursuit of political objectives, although I have strong reservations about the wholesomeness of these persons... However, a true professional quickly learns that there is an appropriate place for one's private morality and perhaps the same should apply to a mature society."
There we have it. They do have a playbook.
Peter Wickham should try his "let's get out of the dark ages" line with the thousands of women and children who are being sold every day into a life of prostitution by slave traders here in our "enlightened" 21st Century. The United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention reports, "Trafficking in human beings is now the fastest-growing business of organized crime. According to recent estimates, more than 700,000 people are trafficked every year for the purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labor. They are transported across borders and sold into modern-day slavery."
But legalize prostitution, Mr. Wickham says, so the prostitutes can get proper health care for their own good and to eliminate the threat they pose to public health. Okay. But legalize them? Can't those who want help be liberated, medicated and repatriated? Can't their pimps and customers be brought to justice?
The Progress and Freedom Foundation describes itself as "a market-oriented think tank that promotes innovative policy solutions for the digital age." In August each year, the Foundation sponsors a prestigious conference in Aspen, Colorado, for senior corporate officers, educators, legislators, and trade association leaders. There were 170 conferees in attendance this year. Remarkably, in the midst of an agenda loaded with issues of privacy, copyright protection, broadband regulation, and other technical and policy matters, two of the speakers took time to attack sexually explicit material on the Internet.
The online news magazine CNET reported that Peter Chernin, president of media giant News Corp., which owns 20th Century Fox and Fox Television, said sexually explicit material on the Internet "is a lot more than an insult to common decency... It's an increasing reason to keep kids and families off the Internet." He described the Internet as a "moral-free zone" whose future is threatened by pornography, the theft of copyrighted material, and the unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail known as spam that clutters electronic in-baskets in homes and offices everywhere.
The Rocky Mountain News reported that Leo Hindery, president of AT&T Broadband and Internet Services, paused in his presentation to speak as a concerned father: "Today, we have to worry about whether our 10-year-olds will stumble across sex sites on the Internet by plugging in words they might come across in their homework…” Mr. Hindery's remarks would have been even more heartening if he had also said something about getting rid of the pornographic cable TV programming on AT&T Broadband.
According to AVN News (a publication produced by the “adult entertainment” industry in California), Comedy Central’s first original movie, “Porn ‘n Chicken,” is based on the “true story” of Yale University’s “Porn ‘n Chicken Club,” an “underground [student] group that gathers weekly to eat chicken and watch pornography.”
In “real-life,” says AVN, the club once invited a “porn-star” to the Yale campus for “a screening and discussion of one of her works”—which explains why in the Comedy Central production - shown Sunday night, October 13 - two porn "performers" make "cameo appearances" as guest speakers at a reality-based club meeting.
One of the real-life porn performers tells AVN that the movie is "a hilarious comedy which has a great message about our attitudes toward authority, sex and pornography." Can you imagine what the message is? Read on.
The movie includes clips from such porn "classics" as "Deep Throat" and "Debbie Does Dallas." But "It's not really about porn" the Comedy Central publicity director somehow manages to say in AVN's report. "It's a coming of age story. There's a lot of discussion about porn and what it means, what it reflects about society." AVN adds this: "When the club attempts to make porn of their own, university officials attempt to intervene. Along the way, each student is forced to re-examine their futures and their convictions while learning a thing or two about rebellion, sexual freedom and love."
Hey, this is serious stuff. A little respect for the artists, please.
Comedy Central, by the way, is owned by Comedy Partners, which is a 50-50 joint venture of Time Warner Entertainment Company and Viacom.
We reported in April that Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo let porn film producer Adam Glasser’s company, BBE, Inc., plead no contest to a public nuisance charge and pay a $1,000 fine. Glasser himself walked out of court instead of standing trial on obscenity charges. The obscenity charges were based on the sale of an "extreme" porn video in which two women engage in a bizarre sexual practice called "fisting." Under the plea agreement, Glasser can continue selling the video.
This would have been the first obscenity trial in L.A. since 1993 - the year Bill Clinton's hands-off-porn policy took effect. An obscenity conviction would have had a chilling impact on Glasser's peers in the San Fernando Valley, the hardcore porn movie capitol of the world. Instead, the plea deal has encouraged the porn producers to think that the constitutional state obscenity laws will not be enforced any time soon.
Mr. Delgadillo's actions in this case were baffling and deeply disappointing, but Adult Video News (online) has revealed the facts in a story dated October 2. Turns out, AVN reports, Mr. Delgadillo's actions were not baffling after all, and the outcome of the case was a "stunning victory." Well, it was stunning.
According to AVN, the City Attorney was persuaded to drop the obscenity charges by Glasser's assertion that the practice of fisting is "pervasive" among heterosexuals, lesbian women and gay men. Fisting? Pervasive? Among heterosexuals? And the City Attorney bought that? Glasser said of the case: "It's a small step for the adult industry, but it's a large step for freedom of speech."
But what does the City Attorney of Los Angeles say? Is he ideologically opposed to obscenity laws? Does he believe that hardcore pornographic depictions of one woman sticking her fist into another woman’s very private parts “acceptable” under the contemporary community standards of the state of California?
The Internet carries more than seven billion e-mail messages each day, a third of them from spammers, the companies that send unsolicited commercial messages in bulk by the thousands to e-mail addresses that they've acquired one way or another. Much of the spam is from hardcore pornographers.
Ordinary spam is bad enough. No one needs to have his or her electronic mail box jammed with unwanted sales messages. But it's more than merely annoying when the message is from a hardcore pornographer who thinks you'd be interested in buying what the bum has to sell, and the bum doesn't mind the chance that the salacious stuff will be seen by children in the homes he's invaded.
I recently reported two porn spams to obscenitycrimes.org, Morality in Media's hotline link to the United States Attorneys across the country and to their headquarters at the Justice Department in Washington.
How do the spammers get our Internet addresses? Any way they can. One way is to hack into the customer databases of the Internet service providers we all use to get onto the Internet, and into the address files of companies that forward electronic mail for legitimate businesses.
I'm rooting for law enforcement.
The Internet Watch Foundation in England runs a hotline for people who want to report what may be illegal pornographic material on the Internet. Reports that appear to IWF to be potentially illegal are referred to police for investigation and have led to arrests in the years since the Foundation was created by British Internet companies in 1996. Child pornography is IWF's "first priority." The latest analysis we've seen, for 1999, shows that the Foundation received 4,889 reports for the year and that 1,196 were referred to the police. Of these, 77% involved pornography sent from sources in the United States; only 4% originated in the United Kingdom.
Wonder what the Internet Watch Foundation would say about the goings on at Amazon.com, where the pedophile-friendly book, "Understanding Loved Boys and Boylovers" is up for sale with support from an online review section where visitors with a sexual interest in young boys can help promote the book. Asked to remove the book, Amazon.com said it doesn't want to censor unpopular views.
From Paris comes a report that it has begun to dawn on some Frenchmen that a rise in sexual violence among young people just may be linked to the x-rated films shown on TV on Saturday nights since 1984. Gang rapes of teenagers by other teens were mentioned particularly. Of course, the French government has appointed a commission to study the matter. The French could save a lot of time and money by contacting their cousins in Canada at the National Foundation for Family Research and Education (NFFRE), which has found 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.”
And it wouldn't hurt to check out what the American Psychological Association, which reported earlier this year that, "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..."
In Montgomery County, Maryland, last May, a 25-year-old man was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for sexually assaulting and then beating to death a 48-year-old married woman, the mother of two children. She was jogging in a public park when he attacked her. The prosecutor said he had been watching pornographic movies in his home that day, and that the attack "was inspired by" the movies. The man was arrested after trying to drag another woman into his home four months after the murder. He was convicted in 1996 in another sexual assault case.
Napster, Inc., the online song-swapping site where the recording industry says its copyrighted property was traded illegally, has closed its doors in bankruptcy. Private Media Group, Inc., a publicly traded porn producer and marketer based in Spain, announced an offer to buy the Napster trademark and Internet address for 1 million shares of Private Media, valued then at $2.4 million. Instead of music, Private Media would offer a free porn-swapping service — “adults only,” of course.
If Private Media’s plans include distribution of hardcore pornography, the stage may be set for the question, will federal prosecutors be as diligent in protecting the public interest by enforcing criminal Internet obscenity laws as the recording industry was in protecting its own pocketbook by instituting civil proceedings for copyright infringement?