Xtreme Measures

Washington's new crackdown on pornography.

Greg Beato from the May 2004 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

To a certain extent, the federal government agrees with him. In the 1968 Supreme Court case Stanley v. Georgia, Justice Thurgood Marshall concluded that "the mere private possession of obscene matter cannot constitutionally be made a crime." In other words, it's OK to own obscene materials -- you just can't buy them.

Now, thanks to the way technology has changed how pornography is distributed, Zicari and his attorney, First Amendment specialist Louis Sirkin, plan to argue that this state of affairs no longer makes sense. "In 1973, the Miller test had merits," says Zicari. "It gave people a way to control these seedy fucking porno stores in their community. Now, a private citizen buys my shit from the privacy of his own home, and that's where he watches it. Why is the community involved? If you happen to live in an Amish town, does that mean you're not allowed to watch porno or horror tapes? Anything the Amish would object to, you can't watch in your own home?"

The Internet further complicates matters, because anything that's available online is essentially available to all communities. In the analog world, pornographers have often avoided shipping their wares to places known to have very strict community standards. But if a pornographer wants to make his content available to potential customers in New York or San Francisco, people who live in other regions will have access to it too. If the Zicaris and Extreme Associates are convicted on the charge of using an interactive computer service to distribute obscene material, they'll have to shut down their Web site and forfeit their domain name to the federal government. Effectively, the community standards of Pittsburgh will serve as the community standards for the world.

As of yet, no trial date has been set, but Robert Zicari thinks the government's case may already be crumbling. "When they raided our office, they seized five movies," he says. "But then they only indicted us on three. So either the grand jury said those two other movies weren't obscene, or the government didn't present those movies to the grand jury. And one of those movies was Ass Clowns #3, where Jesus comes off the cross after being crucified and rapes an angel. So now my question is, why is the rape in Ass Clowns all right, but the rape in Forced Entry isn't?"

Zicari has a lot of similar questions, if it comes to that. For example, why is pornography held to a higher standard of decorum than other genres of pop culture? Are the two amateurishly simulated murders in Forced Entry somehow more offensive than the dozens of expertly simulated murders in Jason vs. Freddy or Gangs of New York? Is the difference between eating semen-spattered dog food in a porn movie and eating raw pig rectums on Fear Factor really so pronounced that the former deserves a jail sentence while the latter becomes a prime-time major network staple?

"What's the difference between us and Hollywood?" asks Zicari. "We show explicit sex, and they don't. And they make hundreds of millions of dollars, and we're going to have to spend $300,000 [in legal fees] to keep from going to jail. And it's a shame, because it makes me bitter about the United States, and I'm like the biggest fucking patriot motherfucker in the world."

To help finance his case, Zicari has reached out to some of his better-funded peers in the porn business, including Larry Flynt. So far, he hasn't gotten much response. "There's a lot of people in this industry who think it's not them, it's me," Zicari says. "But honestly, if those motherfuckers think that Ashcroft has hired 25 prosecutors to get me and that's it, then they are unbelievably delusional. Are you gonna tell me that Jerry Falwell sits at his desk, and he's got a box of porn, and it's divided into the porn he likes and the porn he doesn't like? You think he holds up a movie from [mainstream producer] Vivid and says, 'This is good porn!' You know what, man, he takes that box and says 'Burn it! Burn all of it! It's all fucking blasphemy!'"

Except for the swearing part, Zicari is undoubtedly right. In starting with him, though, he believes that the Justice Department is taking a risk. "This is the World Series, and they're the Boston Red Sox," he exclaims. "They're getting a chance that they haven't had in 9 billion years, and if they blow this, they can never come back. Because where can you go after a jury says there's nothing wrong with these movies? How do you go after a movie involving a husband and wife and the guy's wearing a condom? How do you get someone to go after that, when you couldn't even prosecute a tape where the guy comes in the girl's mouth, and then he fucking stabs her? This is their one shot, and they fucking know it."

Meanwhile, in the Shadow of the Dildoes...

As the afternoon progresses at the Adult Entertainment Expo, the crowds only get bigger. In a small conference room downstairs from the main event, a seminar entitled "Key Legal Issues Facing the Adult Industry" is taking place. It lacks the flash of what's happening upstairs -- there aren't any nubile strippers or artisan-quality dildoes on display, just Lou Sirkin, three other attorneys, and some PowerPoint slides. Each of these four speakers sounds notes of caution, gloom, and alarm, and to some observers, they probably seem a little paranoid, or at least unreasonably pessimistic. After all, haven't they checked out the show upstairs: the hundreds of booths, the vast array of products, the thousands of fans?

Still, they've been defending the adult industry for a long time, and they know how much certain people would like to shut it all down -- not just Extreme Associates and its ilk, but every company in every booth on the floor above them, the whole shamelessly hedonistic spectacle. "I consider censorship a cancer," Sirkin warns at the end of his talk. "Once it starts, it spreads pretty rapidly."

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.