THE "WAR AGAINST PORN"-AGAIN
Rule, James B.
Having failed at reducing unemployment, reviving the Middle East peace process, stopping the burgeoning national debt and controlling the arms race, the Reagan administration has evidently...
...Hardly anyone defends the involvement of children in pornography...
...The virtues of not interfering with pornography are largely negative virtues—the virtues of not minding others' business, and of not creating state machinery that could well end up minding our business in matters quite unrelated to pornography...
...By analogy, junk food may be disagreeable to contemplate and harmful in public health terms...
...In matters of political speech, the case is clearer...
...Does this administration really care about pornography...
...A number of academic researchers protested the commission's interpretations of their studies to buttress naive, hasty conclusions on the effects of porn in such contexts...
...And so, back to politics...
...11 For authentic democrats, these are always tough questions...
...Meese's pornography commissioners took great pains to show that pornography does indeed hurt the helpless...
...Here, as Straus suggests, we have much stronger evidence of palpable bad effects...
...Here it is hard to believe that porn in itself has caused suffering remotely comparable to the Reagan administration's curtailment of occupational safety enforcement, its actions against aid to dependent children, or its quiet efforts to condone racism and job discrimination...
...Having failed at reducing unemployment, reviving the Middle East peace process, stopping the burgeoning national debt and controlling the arms race, the Reagan administration has evidently decided to take on something it can handle: pornography...
...We seek protection for expressions of revolting beliefs, in hopes that the same safeguards will protect unpopular but enlightening ideas...
...Don't hold your breath waiting for that kind of action from this administration...
...Well, almost...
...The porn commissioners logged a year's work in an effort funded to the tune of half a million dollars—less than the cost of two hours of Star Wars research...
...Pornography may thrive in all sorts of broader social conditions that are only too familiar—the high rates of unemployment, the built-in disadvantages women face in the labor market, or the fact of widespread male domination in a variety of spheres...
...Do its elite strategists ccnsider the commission's recommendations remotely as important, say, as resisting social justice in Chile or South Africa, or fattening the military budget, or getting its big business supporters off the hook from environmental regulations...
...Its ninety-two recommendations range from making it a crime to employ others for live sex performances to prohibiting pornographic transmissions by telephone or cable...
...Attacking porn brings far greater political dividends...
...The Reagan administration's war on porn is simply the domestic equivalent of its invasion of Grenada...
...But many social arrangements—from expressways to vaccination programs—offer the possibility of harm to innocent bystanders, without anyone's suggesting that they be suppressed...
...Now here is an authentic objective for any administration really concerned with the moral well-being of our nation's children —curtailing the diet of violence served up to them for hours a day via the ubiquitous household box...
...But does that warrant stopping people from producing or eating it...
...Does it really do damage commensurate with the revulsion that some of it inspires...
...When it comes to advisory reports commissioned by policymakers, one gets what one pays for...
...Like its stands on abortion, prayer in the public schools, and other "traditional values" issues, the administration's war on porn plays to a very important gallery...
...To ask such questions is to answer them...
...And yet this and other on-the-cheap domestic posturings perform an important role in its larger political strategy...
...But what about other kinds of harm...
...The immediate reactions could have been predicted: congratulations and chest-thumping from Jerry Falwell, nervous applause from those strange bedpartners in the antiporn wing of the women's movement, commercially calculated outrage from the publishers of Playboy and other dermatologically oriented periodicals, and wellfounded anxiety from civil libertarians...
...Nor do any credible research techniques enable us to specify precisely the role played by pornography when a consumer of it carries out sexual aggression...
...Yet we stretch a point to expect much enlightenment from pornography...
...But these are conditions that the Reagan administration has accepted or encouraged, rather than attacked...
...The sociologist Murray Straus, an eminent researcher on family violence, has objected in par12 ticularly telling terms to the thesis that pornography causes rape: "[IN one is concerned with the effects of media on rape," he writes, "the problem lies with the prevalence of violence in the media, not sex in the media...
...Most of the recommendations would take months if not years to implement, and it is far from clear that this administration will apply the political muscle needed to this end...
...And the spectacle of women and children subject to the sadistic lusts of men surely encourages action on such sadistic desires by consumers of pornography...
...Even those most determined to protect it have a hard time convincing us that dirty books, movies, pictures, and the like are a source of life-giving ideas that we couldn't find elsewhere...
...In this case, two panelists bolted rather than support some of the commission's less credible conclusions...
...In fact, both these assertions are diabolically difficult to substantiate through any kind of dispassionate research...
...Since such material is selling to millions of apparently satisfied customers, it seems obvious that the data gathered (in the commission's inquiries) is not well balanced...
...But of course any efforts against this kind of moral evil would strike at a major sector of big business...
...That's fine as far as it goes...
...To find people willing to acknowledge their personal consumption of erotic and pornographic materials and comment favorably about their use has been nearly impossible...
...In the longer run, one has to wonder about pornography and its place in public life...
...And when it is a moral evil, how evil should it be before warranting state coercion against those who produce or consume it...
...When they hurt those who can't protect themselves, one stock answer has it...
...From the tedious pages of this plodding document, one lucid observation from the two dissenting panelists, Judith Becker and Ellen Levine, leaps to the eye: . . . it was hard enough to find witnesses willing to speak out about their negative experiences with pornography...
...SOMETIMES TILE FACT OF VICTIMIZATION and the helplessness of the victims are plain...
...Last summer, to much fanfare, Attorney General Meese accepted with relish the report of his Commission on Pornography...
...Small potatoes indeed...
...In sharp contrast to the more intellectually weighty efforts of a federal advisory panel on the same subject back in 1970, this report finds pornography not only an abomination but indeed a clear and present danger...
...That is the constituency of millions of bewildered folk who sense themselves being swept along by big forces in an increasingly cynical America, and who know that no one has asked them how they feel about where these changes are leading...
...Presumably risks must be quite marked and potential victims quite unable to look out for themselves before we start curtailing private pursuits, even bizarre or unedifying ones...
...And one does proceed with caution when attacking something that many people seem to like, at least in moderate doses...
...Is porn necessarily a sign of special moral weakness...
...Yet the immediate policy effects of the report seem negligible...
...We have no reliable census of all pornography, for example, against which to measure the proportion of any one type...
...The violent sorts of pornography are indeed on the upsurge, the majority of the commission assure us...
...Again, when are the evils of porn evil enough to justify suppression...
Vol. 34 • January 1987 • No. 1
