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Porn Nation 8/8/2002
America's alabaster cities are saturated with pornography from sea to shining sea. It's big business, and it's not confined to the “dirty” bookstores and peep shows in the sleazy part of town. Porn is piped into homes, hotels, and corporations in every metropolis and hamlet via cable and satellite television, dial-a-porn, and cyberspace—and unfiltered Internet access brings it into public schools and libraries, to America's children. A recent article in the New York Times Magazine makes some comparisons to show how the $ 10 billion-a-year pornography business has become one of the most flush and vigorous in America: It's bigger than the combined revenues of all the professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises. It's greater than the take at all the nation's movie box offices. Porn apologists say it has no adverse impact on society, while critics charge that there are consequences for America's economy, morals, public health, and safety. The late U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote: “There is a long-recognized legitimate interest in regulating the use of obscene material in local commerce and in all places of public accommodation. ... The States have the power to make a morally neutral judgment that public exhibition of obscene material, or commerce in such material, has a tendency to injure the community as a whole, to endanger the public safety, or to jeopardize the right of the states and the Nation ... to maintain a decent society.” This article focuses on obscene, hard-core pornography, which the Supreme Court ruled in 1973 (in Paris Adult Theatre 1 v. Slaton) is not protected by the First Amendment and is illegal under federal and most state laws. In that case, the Court cited “a few plain examples” of material that may be found obscene: “Patently offensive representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated. Patently offensive representations or descriptions of masturbation, excretory functions, and lewd exhibition of the genitals.” BIG BUSINESS Porn is big business for organized crime, as noted in the 1986 Final Report of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography. But today, with the allure of immense profits, corporate giants such as General Motors (owner of DirecTV, which offers X-rated channels) and AT&T have brought the respectability-starved porn industry to Wall Street. Nonetheless, the decision by AT&T to offer hard-core porn on its digital tier of pay-per-view cable television has resulted in the filing of a proxy resolution by a coalition of religious investors that controls 1.6 million shares of AT&T stock. The resolution requires the company to explain why it's carrying the Hot Network, which AT&T admits will provide XXX-rated material. “I'm not a weirdo or a pervert--it's not my deal,” says Bruce Biddick of Centex Securities, a stock underwriter in La Jolla, California. “I've got kids and a family. But I can see as an underwriter going out and making bucks on people being weird. Hey, dollars are dollars. I'm not selling drugs. It's Wall Street.” Hotel chains, including Marriott and Hilton, make more money from pay—per-view pornography—about $ 190 million a year--than from snack and drink sales in minibars. “Porn doesn't have a demographic; it goes across all demographics,” says Paul Fishbein, the 42-year-old founder and editor of Adult Video News, the trade publication for the “adult” industry. “There were 11,000 adult titles last year versus 400 releases in Hollywood. There are so many outlets that even if you spend just $ 15,000 and two days-—and put in some plot and good-looking people and decent sex--you can get satellite and cable sales. There are so many companies, and they rarely go out of business. You have to be really stupid or greedy to fail.” Adult Video News claims: “The largest credit card company makes up to $ 35 million per month off of e-porn.” American Express, however, stopped accepting charges at Web porn sites because chargeback rates are too high due to disputed charges by customers. Visa and MasterCard impose fines on sites that fail to keep rates within 1 percent of total monthly transactions. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the New York State attorney general filed suits last August against scores of porn Web sites for billing thousands of Web users for supposedly free services and for billing other consumers who have never visited the sites at all. Last year, an FTC task force began investigating complaints of Web pornographers' “page-jacking” and “mouse-trapping”--when an Internet user is directed, through deception, to a Web site and trapped there by disabling his computer's Web browser. Last February, the FTC announced a court settlement with an e-porn company doing just that. RISE IN PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDERS Stephen Pesce, a New York City psychotherapist, agrees: “The sex down on Wall Street is unbelievable, with the prostitution and the porn.” Cybersex compulsive is a term coined in a recent study to define at least 200,000 American adults who visit sex sites at least 11 hours per week. According to researchers Al Cooper, David Delmonico, and Ron Burg, writing last year in the journal Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, “This is a hidden public health hazard exploding in part because very few are recognizing it as such or taking it seriously.” Other psychology experts see many American men's yen for porn as signaling a huge and growing problem in their relationships with the opposite sex, a trend that could result in yet more divorce and sexual abuse. “Constant bombardment by images of buff, sleek, airbrushed, ideal women is giving rise to a new mental disorder among men: the centerfold syndrome,” psychologist Gary Brooks told a meeting of the American Psychological Association in 1996. This is resulting not from any increase in the circulation of porn magazines--with their steamy centerfold photos—but from the vast upsurge in X-rated material on cable, videocassette, and the Internet. Xerox fired employees for porn surfing on company time. The dean of Harvard Divinity School resigned after porn was found on his office computer. A consultant hired to improve security for the Clinton White House computer network “found massive pornographic video files passing through the system's Internet firewall, including bestiality, gay, and teen sex,” according to an article on the Web news site Worldnetdaily.com. Speaking of former President Clinton, last March, Adult Video News asked pornographers, “How likely is it, would you say, that we are going to enjoy the same benevolent neglect that the industry has enjoyed under Janet Reno?” The industry had predicted such a hands-off policy in 1993, with the News saying that “obscenity prosecutions certainly will not have the priority with Attorney General Reno that existed in the last two administrations.” The “benevolent neglect” prompted a congressional hearing last May to ask officials of the Reno Justice Department why they weren't enforcing federal obscenity laws. The Justice representatives didn't identify a single obscenity prosecution, provide any figures on fines and asset forfeitures against the porn industry, or name any of the major producers and distributors of hard-core, sexually explicit material. This policy of “benevolent neglect” may partly explain the new surge of pornography in America. President Bush has promised to “insist on vigorously enforcing federal antipornography laws.” Time will tell whether the John Ashcroft Justice Department lives up to this vow. PUBLIC HEALTH, SAFETY, AND MORALITY New York City, for one, was not swayed by the latter arguments and spent huge amounts of time and money in the courts to rid Times Square of its porn emporiums, defending the city's adult-business ordinances. In Los Angeles, the Pussycat Theater operated from 1977 to 1994. During that time, the Los Angeles Police Department made 2,000 arrests for lewd conduct on the premises. The conservative estimate is that every arrest required four hours of police work for two officers at a minimum of $ 55 per hour for each officer. This does not include the substantial costs attendant on review by a supervisor, prosecution, court proceedings, and probation. America's children, excluded from brick-and-mortar “adult” businesses, are viewing hard-core porn through unfiltered Internet access in homes, schools, and libraries across the country. There are approximately 70,000 sexually explicit Web sites, according to a PR Newswire article last October, most of which provide scores of free “teaser” images of bestiality, sex that includes urine and excrement, and bondage, torture, and rape-related sex that are accessible to kids--no credit card or adult I.D. required. Last November, Internet pornographers were discovered rerouting traffic to their Web sites to increase Christmas profits. They buried the names of 12,000 well-known children's toys in the software “metatags” in their Web sites. An innocent search by a child looking for Pokemon, My Little Pony, and Action Man, according to an article in the Times of London, revealed thousands of links to porn sites, 30 percent of which were deemed hard-core. In addition, evidence of crimes with a pornography connection is multiplying around the country. These include a slew of instances of homosexual and heterosexual rape, child molestation, assault, and murder. SEX-FILM INDUSTRY DISEASES In the same article, a sex-film star notes how threatening the work is to performers' health. “Nearly everyone has STDs [sexually transmitted diseases],” said Chloe. “If you're a porno performer,” she continued, “your latest HIV test is your work permit. ... The tests we take test only for AIDS. We've contained AIDS in the industry, but what about all the others? You know we're now up to hepatitis G?” In addition, sex-film performers are persuaded by lucrative pay to engage in frequent sexual relations with serial partners, increasing the health threat they face. “In 'gonzo porn' [wall-to-wall sex scenes with no plot], you're paid not by the picture but by the scene,” Chloe said. These days, porn consumers no longer have to go to “dirty” bookstores or sleazy theaters to get satisfaction. With new technologies such as videotapes, pay-per-view TV, and the Internet, their personal privacy and comfort are virtually assured. Thus, it would seem that conditions are ripe for a huge increase in the industry's extension into U.S. homes--especially with Americans being some of the biggest spenders in the world on personal luxuries and Fortune 500 businesses, lured by hefty profits, entering the field. Yet America is probably the most religious--its critics would say moralistic and puritanical—of Western nations, and its religious culture is sharply at odds with porn's increasing prevalence. A battle royal may yet be in the offing. Janet M. LaRue, a lawyer who is an expert in pornography law, is chief counsel with Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization in Washington, D.C. |
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