Xtreme Measures

Washington's new crackdown on pornography.

Greg Beato from the May 2004 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

This dire take on the situation isn't particularly novel. In 1873 Anthony Comstock, America's first great vice hunter, lamented the state of the union in his diary. "Why is it that every public play must have a naked woman?" he complained. "It is disgusting; and pernicious to the young. It seems as though we were living in an age of lust." In 1965 Citizens for Decent Literature produced a movie called Perversion for Profit. "A floodtide of filth is engulfing our country in the form of newsstand obscenity," its narrator intoned. "It is threatening to pervert an entire generation of our American children." In June 2002 John Ashcroft continued the tune, unbroken for over a century now, at a symposium for federal prosecutors in Columbia, South Carolina: "Obscenity invades our homes persistently through the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV, and now the Internet. Never before has so much obscene material been so easily accessible to minors."

Never before, indeed, except for the last time and the time before that. Perhaps because we somehow managed to survive Comstock's age of lust and Perversion for Profit's floodtide of filth, and perhaps because the idea of the federal government as marriage counselor lacks a constitutional underpinning, the pornography-as-moral-threat argument isn't entirely convincing to many Americans. To make their crusade more appealing to such people, vice hunters frequently emphasize the even darker perils of porn. Invariably, they link consensual adult pornography with child pornography and other forms of child abuse. Invariably, they champion the notion that porn can systematically turn otherwise healthy, law-abiding individuals into violent sexual criminals.

Consider the August 2003 conviction of Michael J. Corbett and his ex-wife, Sharon Bates. Their crime: selling Outdoor Pooping Paradise, Scat Sampler #2, and approximately 50 other videos and DVDs via their Web site. For this, Corbett received an 18-month prison sentence, three years' probation, and a $30,000 fine. Bates got a 13-month sentence, three years' probation, and a $10,000 fine. They also forfeited $15,010 seized from their bank accounts and the equipment they used to produce their videos. In order to save their home, which was legally the government's to seize because it was used in the sale of obscene materials, they agreed to pay an additional $60,000. Finally, their Internet domain name, Girlspooping.com, is now the property of the United States.

In the wake of this conviction, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John G. Malcolm, head of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), strained to convey the import of the victory: "This type of material has a coarsening and desensitizing effect on our society, and can lead some to commit other degrading, and sometimes violent, sexual offenses against others."

I'll spare you the details, but the affidavit that summarizes the content of these videos makes absolutely no mention of violence or any other form of coercion, either real or feigned. Instead, the videos mostly appear to depict solo, purely elective pooping and urination in a sexualized context. Gross? Yes. Potentially illegal under the arbitrary standards of federal obscenity laws? Sure. But how was Malcolm able to conclude, either empirically or rationally, that these happy celebrations of human elimination cause some of their viewers to commit "violent sexual offenses" against others?

Making the Porn Industry's Fears a Reality

While today's vice hunters employ rhetoric like that on a regular basis, what may be most unsettling about many of them is how reasonable they appear to be. In conversation, Morality in Media President Robert Peters is genial and open-minded, a far cry from the stereotypical finger-wagging crotch cop. When I ask him what he hopes to accomplish in his Sisyphean battle against obscenity (he's worked for Morality in Media since 1985), he replies: "If we could just send a message to people that this is not what sex is all about, we will have won more than half the battle. Whether you're a creationist or a Darwinist, sex is linked to something greater than masturbating to depictions of other people having sex. It's linked to a person. We have a capacity to love."

Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney overseeing the Extreme Associates prosecution, is, like Peters, even-keeled and pragmatic. "We don't have the resources to prosecute every instance of the illegal distribution of obscenity," she concedes. "But if the law isn't enforced, the material is going to proliferate and become more violent, more degrading, and more disgusting. So there have to be limits."

In other words, just go after the worst of the worst, right? Not quite. Today's vice hunters may seem relatively tolerant at first, but their tolerance has definite limits. Buchanan, for example, isn't concerned only about content; when it comes to obscenity prosecutions, size matters too. "We're trying to focus our resources on the material that causes the greatest harm," she says. "And the greatest harm could be caused by producing the most egregious material, but it could also be caused by a distributor with a large area of distribution."

This is exactly what today's most fervent vice hunters want to hear. To them, cases against fringe operations like Girlspooping.com are little more than annoying foreplay. "The prosecution bar is far too high," complained Jan LaRue, chief counsel of Concerned Women of America, in the aftermath of the Girlspooping.com conviction. "Come on, DOJ. Go after the big guys....It's time to make the porn industry's fears a reality. It's time to send a message to the white collars on Wall Street who think selling porn is a good way to improve the bottom line."

Three years ago, LaRue and her anti-porn colleagues believed George W. Bush and John Ashcroft were the answer to their prayers. Throughout history, vice hunters have blamed the scourge of pornography on various nefarious entities: the French, the Communists, the Mafia, and of course Satan himself. But most recently, an even greater fiend has taken the blame for the current floodtide of filth. "For the eight years during Bill Clinton's administration, [obscenity] laws were not enforced, and that's why the sale of obscene pornography became so rampant across the country and on the Internet," charges Citizens for Community Values President Phil Burress.

According to Morality in Media's Peters, federal obscenity prosecutions climaxed at 80 during 1989, then dwindled to six in 2000. "If you want to make certain offenses a priority, you have to make sure that you have the resources to investigate them, and that you have prosecutors who are trained to prosecute them," says Mary Beth Buchanan, who served as an assistant U.S. attorney from 1988 to 2001. "During the Clinton administration, those things were not happening."

According to the American Family Association Journal, George W. Bush promised during the 2000 campaign that "his administration would make it a point to enforce obscenity laws." To seal the deal, he even signed a "letter of commitment" after repeated entreaties from the American Family Association. Ashcroft made similar promises in the early days of his tenure, meeting with representatives from more than a dozen anti-pornography groups in May 2001. "We gave him a ton of information and actual evidence as to who the major pornographers were," Phil Burress recalls, "and he seemed determined to do something about it."

Then came 9/11. Momentarily, at least, the terrors of the Code Orange Age were deemed a greater threat to the nation's well-being than pornography. The vice hunters were sympathetic at first, but they've grown increasingly restless as the promised prosecutions have failed to materialize in sufficient numbers. The announcement of the Extreme Associates indictment in August pleased them to a certain degree, because while Extreme isn't a major player in the porn industry, it is the highest-profile producer that the Department of Justice has gone after in more than 10 years. Still, they yearn for a bigger, more ambitious crackdown, one that will put the fear of prosecution into the hearts of every hard-core pornographer, including the most mainstream ones. "I've almost done handstands with joy about what's happening with digital downloading," says Robert Peters, referring to the music industry's decision to file lawsuits against individuals who engage in unauthorized file sharing. "There's no way they're going to stop downloading through law enforcement alone, but it really has sent a phenomenal message. Supposedly, file sharing has been cut by 50 percent. So a relatively little law enforcement could go a long way."

"Aggressive [obscenity] prosecution had a major impact in the '80s," says Phil Burress. "They took homes, they took boats, they took cars, they took property. They took millions and millions of dollars in assets, and they basically drove the pornographers back underground and made the industry smaller."

Comments

Debra|11.4.09 @ 9:55PM|#

Please do something about the Porn in America it is on the TV,and magizines even in childrens shows we have to see skin.Please,Please help us wives and children and grandmothers,in the US.We all deserve better from what we have all struggled to achieve and become ,good wives,mothers ,daughters,business owners and to have to face this is unexceptable.Not to be able to watch a normal show on normal TV without butts or boobs or some act of sex,would be so extremely appreciated by us all.Help our tomarrows children and give them,a sex free on TV and porn free world to suceed and have famlies therselves.Please help us.