Xtreme Measures

Washington's new crackdown on pornography.

Greg Beato from the May 2004 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

In certain respects, this is true. Campaigns like Project Postporn, a Department of Justice initiative which targeted pornographers who marketed their products through mail-order catalogs, did put many companies out of business. Still, the government's efforts had little impact on the demand for adult videos. According to AVN, U.S. viewers rented 75 million adult videos in 1985, 490 million in 1992, and 686 million in 1998. In other words, the increase in annual rentals was actually highest during the time that the Department of Justice was most aggressively prosecuting obscenity cases.

Phil Harvey, a First Amendment activist and the founder of the mail-order catalog Adam & Eve, was the target of two obscenity indictments in the '80s. (Full disclosure: He has also donated to the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine.) It took him eight years, $3 million, and one lawsuit to successfully defend his company against the charges the federal government brought against it, but there was an unexpected upside to this effort to put him out of business: Adam & Eve grew substantially during those years, as the government improved its market opportunities by shutting down other mail-order companies. "For about four years, there were fewer outlets and less competition for us," he says. "Other competitors stayed away because it was a high-risk environment."

Vice hunters sometimes talk as if law enforcement, or the lack thereof, is the only factor in the proliferation of porn. Press them, and they'll acknowledge that technology has played a major role too. In the '80s, VCRs brought porn into the nation's living rooms; in the '90s, premium cable and pay-per-view eliminated the need for furtive trips to the video store, and the Internet brought porn into the workplace. Still, none of these developments would matter much if there were no demand for the product: Porn proliferates mostly because millions of people enjoy porn.

The vice hunters press on, though, organizing, proselytizing, and constantly demanding that police and prosecutors enforce obscenity laws. While a few figures in the adult entertainment industry have defended their rights with a similar zeal, passive expediency is a more common reaction.

"Too many people in my business haven't stood up and fought," exclaims Robert Zicari. "The feds are kicking themselves in the balls right now because they hit me first. Anybody else in this industry would have already copped a plea, and that's just what the government wants. They don't want millions of people debating this issue. They don't want a big firestorm of publicity. They want to do this quietly."

Son of a Pornographer

Zicari is a second-generation pornographer. In the late '60s, before he was born, his father owned nearly 40 adult bookstores in upstate New York and the surrounding area. By the time Zicari was a teenager, his father had scaled back his operation to just four stores. Zicari started working at one of them at the age of 14, sorting quarters from the peep show booths into rolls in an upstairs room. "I got to keep whatever didn't fit into these $100 boxes, so I'd hit the batting cages with, like, $80 worth of quarters," he remembers.

When Zicari turned 18, he started managing his father's store in Rochester. But he had other ambitions too, including college. In 1996, however, without telling his father, he used some of his school money to produce and direct his first porn movie, Tender Loins. After Zicari completed a second video in similarly clandestine fashion, his father found out and they had a temporary falling-out. During that time, Zicari moved to Los Angeles and created the character Rob Black, a loudmouthed provocateur who was determined to shake up the porn industry by producing filthy, twisted porn that boasted as much violent misogyny as standard Hollywood fare, along with lots and lots of spit, gaping orifices, and surreal images like men ejaculating onto crackers at an outdoor picnic. The difference between Zicari and Black? "I have bad taste," explains Zicari, "but Rob Black has even more bad taste."

Zicari immediately alienated many of his porn industry brethren. In 1996, when he first started releasing videos, the aggressive federal crackdowns of the late '80s and
early '90s felt like a thing of the past. Suddenly, the industry was penetrating the mainstream in a completely consensual, very profitable manner, everyone was making money, and almost no one was going to prison. To keep things this way, virtually every producer of commercial consequence scrupulously obeyed a set of unwritten guidelines: Urination, defecation, and rape and incest themes were all taboo, and bondage videos could not show penetration.

Then people like Zicari and a former UPI photographer who called himself Max Hardcore started flouting standard industry decorum. Their tapes were controversial, but thanks to their novelty, the attention they received, and their taboo nature, they were also popular. In 1998 AVN named Zicari Best Director at its annual awards show. Soon other producers were jumping on the shock porn bandwagon, and with the Internet making it increasingly easy for anyone, including international producers, to make and distribute pornography, the kind of material that was relatively hard to find just five years ago is now only a mouse click away.

As all of this played out, however, Zicari himself seemed to lose interest in the pornography business. In 1999 he founded a professional wrestling league called Xtreme Pro Wrestling. In 2001 he ran for mayor of Los Angeles. But with the inauguration of George W. Bush raising the specter of another federal crackdown on obscenity, Zicari found a new cause to take up. In an episode of the PBS newsmagazine Frontline that aired in February 2002, an interviewer asked Zicari if he worried about the possibility of an obscenity charge. "I'm not out there saying I want to be the test case," Zicari replied. "But I will be the test case."

Zicari's appearance on the show put him on the Justice Department's radar, and in the spring of 2002, under the direction of Mary Beth Buchanan, the federal government started pursuing a case against Extreme Associates. Eventually, a postal inspector used an "undercover credit card" to purchase five videotapes from the company and to join the members-only section of its Web site and view at least six of the video clips that were available there. Buchanan presented this material to a grand jury, and on August 6, 2003, it filed an indictment against Extreme Associates and Robert and Janet Zicari, charging them with conspiracy, sending obscene materials through the mail, and distributing obscene materials via an interactive computer service.

While Buchanan says her office has received numerous requests from citizens to enforce obscenity laws, did any Pennsylvania resident actually complain that Extreme Associates content was available in the state? "I can't comment on that," Buchanan says when I ask her. Zicari, on the other hand, has plenty to say on the subject. "Nobody walked into a video store and was forced to look at this stuff," he argues. "You couldn't even go into a store to purchase Forced Entry. We knew it was strong material, so we didn't even make it available to video stores. You had to go to our Web site or call us up and request it."

Unlike the Miller test, Zicari's own definition of obscenity is extremely specific. "You know what obscenity is to me in the adult industry?" he says. "It's a child getting fucked, or a dog. And people laugh at me when I say dog. They're like, 'Dog? Who gives a shit about a dog?' But personally, I find that fucking obscene."

Zicari's general sense of decency actually extends beyond prohibiting child porn and dog sex. "I'm not a person who thinks that everybody should watch pornography," he insists. "If you want to open up a giant porno store with jack booths and stuff like that, and you're gonna plop it inside a [residential] community with nice lawns, and they don't want it, I'm the first person who's like, 'Dude, you're totally right, it's kind of fucked up we put this place right here in the middle of your neighborhood.'" But he also believes that people should be able to view his videos in the privacy of their own homes. And he thinks that he should have the right to make and sell them without facing obscenity prosecutions.

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.