A View from Riverside Drive
Commentary by Ed Hynes
May 2004
European Parliament blocks a vote on ‘insidious invasion of the sex industry’
The Sunday Herald newspaper in Glasgow, Scotland, ran a story in its April 11 issue reporting that European Parliament Member Marianne Eriksson has laid out a proposal to deal with “the insidious invasion of the sex industry [into] our daily lives.” However, opposition Members in Parliament blocked debate on the matter, sending her report back to committee, where Ms. Eriksson fears it will die.
At a meeting of international experts organized by Ms. Eriksson at European Union headquarters last January, she laid out the scope of the challenge in Europe, where prostitution and trafficking in women and children for sex slavery are growing problems: “We are faced with a very wealthy and powerful industry, one of the richest in the world, which is quoted on several stock exchanges … Such a well-equipped industry can easily remain one step ahead of law makers, and can profit from any existing gaps in the law, for example, in relation to Internet and audiovisual policy. In my report, I demand that the Commission and the EU Member States act to fill those gaps."
When her report was sent back to the Committee of Women's Rights and Equal Opportunities, Ms. Eriksson said: "It's too bad that MEPs are afraid to tackle this issue, just because they cannot see beyond the discussion on whether or not prostitution should be legalized. I regret that they have not understood that the purpose of my report was to extend the debate and look at the impact of the enormous growth of the sex industry on our daily lives. We are faced with the ‘normalization’ of pornography, which [is] causing huge problems in our society, and the majority in the European Parliament are not even willing to debate this."
Straight talk on porn
In its April 11 story, the Sunday Herald quoted two Scottish scholars. Greg Philo, a professor of sociology at Glasgow University, said, “Pornography has become more normal which indicates a change in sexual behaviour in society. What you see in a sex shop though are images of women being put down, images of violence. Pornography and prostitution have been about for a long time, and it is a cultural issue of our times how we treat women – sexual equality on one hand has brought benefits to women and on the other taken them away.”
David Hutchison, senior lecturer in media policy at Glasgow Caledonian University, said, “Sexual content is so much more widely accepted now. . . . I’m not a prude by any means, but you have to wonder what boundaries are left. I am deeply alarmed by sex on the Internet because anything you can think of is out there pushing the limits of the law. And even the most liberal of liberals has to ask would you ever let your daughter work in the pornography industry? The answer is no.”
Doublespeak in the porn racket
During the meeting of experts at the European Parliament in January, Janice Raymond, Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies and Medical Ethics at the University of Massachusetts and Co-Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, made an important point: "The sex industry thrives on renaming its sexual exploitation as 'sex.' Pornography is called 'erotica' or 'adult videos'; prostitution is renamed 'sex work' or 'sexual services'; pimps are now called 'third party business managers' or 'erotic entrepreneurs' and lap dancing sex clubs are called 'gentlemen's entertainment'."
People in the porn racket (aka the “adult entertainment industry”) understand that changing the language changes perceptions, which is the next best thing to changing reality. And so they do this all the time.
For example, when the Justice Department announced the return of Bruce Taylor to help prosecute obscenity crimes, porn lawyer Paul Cambria told The Guardian newspaper in England, “It’s censorship.” Mr. Cambria knows better; he knows that censorship is a prior restraint by government, while what prosecutors do when enforcing obscenity laws occurs after the crime has been committed. Prosecution is not censorship. It’s law enforcement. But Mr. Cambria went on: “It’s an effort by the Department of Justice to interfere with adults’ right to adult materials. We deal in plain old vanilla sex, nothing really outrageous.”
Plain old vanilla? Like gangbangs, domination and subjugation, rape/torture/murder, fisting, incest, bestiality, sex with “barely legal” teens, computer-generated “child porn,” defecation and urination, and unsafe sex galore, all of which are produced by the hardcore pornography “industry” that the Justice Department is pursuing. It sure sounds outrageous. Really outrageous.
Robert Zicari and his wife Janet run Extreme Associates, which is definitely not in the plain vanilla business. He’s known in the “industry” as Rob Black, she as Lizzie Borden, which was the name of a woman who killed her father and stepmother with an axe in the 1890s. The Zicaris are charged with sending obscene materials through the mail and via the Internet. If convicted, they would face up to 50 years in jail and fines of up to $2.5 million. In its overview of the porn problem on both sides of the Atlantic, the April 11 Sunday Herald carried this quote from Rob Black: “After September 11 the polls started sliding, and they [the Republicans] realized the only way they are going to get the nation back is to go after porn and secure the three or four million voters who are on the hardcore Christian right.”
So that’s it!
Mark Kernes, legal affairs reporter at Adult Video News, the pornographers’ trade paper, says: “We are concerned that Taylor’s appointment probably means the federal government is getting ready to mount more prosecutions. . . . However, I don’t think they’ll be successful. Adult entertainment is simply too popular in America, even among many conservatives, for indictments of anything short of the most extreme material to be successful in front of a jury.”
That’s what Mr. Kerns thinks, or says he thinks. We’ll assume he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The fact, as uncovered by Wirthlin Worldwide in a public opinion survey for Morality in Media in early March, is that “eight out of ten Americans (81%) believe the federal laws against Internet obscenity should be vigorously enforced.” Wirthlin got essentially the same result two years ago.
A story posted on MSNBC’s web site, dated June 2002, reports that “Mark Kreloff, president and CEO of New Frontier Media, a Boulder, Colo., company that delivers adult content via the Internet, satellite and cable TV, defends Web pornography as educational, and says he doesn’t buy the concept of porn addiction. ‘I think that aspect of our business is grossly blown out of proportion by people that don’t like the business that we’re in. . . . I generally think that our programming leads to healthier sexual relationships.”
People in the hardcore pornography “industry” refer to porn performers as “talent” or “stars.” Some of the “talent” worry that their partners are walking death traps. But not to worry. During the height of a sexually transmitted disease scare in porn valley last year, Jeff Mullen, director of marketing and media for New Sensations, came up with a positive spin. He told the trade paper AVN in August 2003, “The simple fact is that our audience likes to see completely naked sex and we are in the business of pleasing our customers. The girls in this business are a lot safer than the ordinary girl on the street and we feel with the improved and expanded testing now required we are at the highest level of safety ever.” Translation: The “talent” does not use condoms at New Sensations.
AIDS virus strikes five and counting in Porn Valley
But here we are in May, 2004, just nine months after Jeff Mullen’s bravado with other people’s lives, and five performers in porn valley have been diagnosed with the AIDS virus in the last few weeks, bringing porn production pretty much to a halt. (If AIDS can have a silver lining, that would be it.) Reuters called it the “largest outbreak of the AIDS virus in Southern California’s porn industry in six years.”
The current outbreak was reported to have begun when a male performer named Darren James tested positive in mid-April. By May 5 four other performers had tested positive, including three women who reportedly had onscreen sex with Mr. James.
Reuters reported that Sharon Mitchell, director of the Adult Industry Medical Foundation, said the woman found to be infected most recently “did realize that HIV was an occupational hazard.” Is that compassion, or what? Ms. Mitchell also said that partners of that woman have been tested and found to be negative and will be monitored for another 30 days. “This is the benefit of containment,” she said. “They haven’t been out working. They have been under quarantine.” With their fingers crossed, no doubt.
Calls for tougher inspection protocols and mandatory condom use on porn sets have elicited a negative response from people—surely not the “talent”—who worry that such measures would drive the “industry” out of the country.
So?
Fact checkers please note
Misinformation is easy to come by.
While reading the Sunday Herald story of April 11 about Marianne Eriksson’s porn proposal in the European Parliament, we found a classic example of how facts can be transformed, even with no intent to deceive, into something that looks right but misses the truth by a mile. Here’s what happened.
Back in March and April of 1998, MSNBC posted a 59-item survey questionnaire on its web site, inviting adults who had used the Internet for sexual pursuits at least once to describe their on-line sex-related behavior and motivation. More than 9,000 such persons responded to the questionnaire. Of these 9,000, 86% were men, 14% women. These percentages apply only to the survey group, not to the general population of American adults, because each of the 9,000 had done something not all Americans have done: they had surfed the Internet for sex sites.
But the Sunday Herald of April 11 reported, “An MSNBC poll in February 2002 found that 84% of American men pursue sex-related activities online, as do 16% of women.” How the Sunday Herald came up with those “facts” is not clear. The date was wrong. The percentages were slightly off. And they were misapplied to the general population. What is clear is that the paper’s “facts” now have a life of their own. They will remain in the minds of the Herald’s readers and in the files of that newspaper and others, where they will be uncovered repeatedly by reporters, editors and anyone else looking for “facts” in the future. Stories entombed in newspaper “morgues” never die.
Real men of Abilene are putting prayer and shame to work against a porn shop
The February issue of the American Family Association Journal had a great story about some folks in Abilene, Kansas who are using persistence, persuasion, prayer and one more—outright shame, a powerful motivator if ever there was one—to drive a new and unwelcome business out of town.
The business is an “adult” toy store (is that an oxymoron or just moronic?) and video outlet called the Lion’s Den—a name that may help skulking patrons recover some self-respect; but maybe not. The store opened last September. Incensed townspeople formed an organization they call Citizens For Strengthening Community Virtues (CFSCV) and went to work. There were 80 men involved at first, and about 140 now, taking turns on picket duty at the store. They’re also working with city and county officials on law enforcement issues, writing letters to the local editors, and calling on citizens to pray for God’s intervention.
To get to the Lion’s Den, potential customers must drive past CFSCV members holding large signs that read, “Think Again Or We Will Report.” Truckers coming off the nearby Interstate 70, and corporate travelers in town on business can’t miss the implied message: Go into the Lion’s Den and your companies and bosses will know about it. One of the CFSCV leaders, Phillip Cosby, told the AFA Journal that about 30% of the potential customers “either drive on by or turn around in the parking lot and then drive away.” If it’s not shame at work it might be fear. Or grace.