The porn report: how to evaluate it

THE PORN REPORT: HOW TO EVALUATE IT

HEREWITH A GUIDE on how to respond to the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, whose findings have been so widely derided.

1. It was a mistake for the Commission's Executive Director, Alan Sears, to write to merchandisers who handle the big three pornographic magazines (Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler) using language both hortatory and intimidating. (You "are involved in the sale or distribution of pornography . . . Failure to respond will necessarily be accepted as an indication of no objection'--i.e., to pornography.) He was properly rebuked by the Court for exerting quasi-legal pressure without due process.

On the other hand, it is disingenuous to take the position that the three mags are not pornographic. In order of appeal to lubricity, they rank: Hustler (sick), Penthouse (much porn), Playboy (least porn), so let us speak of Penthouse, as la revue moyenne sensuelle. There are many definitions of pornography. The accusation has been made that the commission never defined it. Well, it did: Porn, said the commission, is material that is "predominantly sexually explicit and intended primarily for the purpose of sexual arousal.' The best way to cope with the argument that Penthouse also publishes non-pornographic material is to laugh at it. Ask yourself the question whether Penthouse would survive three months without the sex. Its readership would be about the size of The Homiletic and Pastoral Review's.

2. The commission attempted to demonstrate that reading pornography inclines some readers to illegal behavior, for instance rape, or "aggressive sex.' It is probably correct that it does, but almost impossible to prove. It would be much easier to prove that liquor enhances lubricity, than that Penthouse does. In the twenty-first century, they're going to be arguing about whether capital punishment decreases capital offenses. Well, we all know that it does, but would have a difficult time proving it beyond cavil. The commission, in other words, accepted a mandate it could not hope to handle.

There is hardly any question that Penthouse et al. arouse and semi-satisfy lust. One asks these days, Well, is that bad? Lust is a human predicament, and just as hunger is satisfied by food, so lust needs satisfaction. The civilized answer to this is of course that lust as appetite is satisfied in marriage, and that unlike food, which is necessary to prolong life, sex can be, and everywhere is, contained and even sublimated. People enter voluntarily into celibacy.

The main argument against the pornographers is less than they depict lust, than that in doing so they depict not the desire of Romeo for Juliet, satisfied by love and marriage, but the sexual hunger of Joe for any Jane he can lay his hands upon. A typical ending of a sexual episode in the pornies sees Joe off after a casual encounter with Jane, in search of other prey.

3. Now, a free country countenances publishers who advocate callousness toward women, cocksmanship as the primal urge, utter insouciance and irresponsibility for the fate of others: The Devil himself is free to publish in America.

But so is public sentiment free to react. It violates no one's rights at all to organize boycotts of any store that traffics in material the effect of which is to encourage uncivilized behavior. If a boycott were organized against bookstores that sold books and magazines urging racial discrimination, preaching the utility of the black man primarily as a menial, urging the view that the Jew is genetically avaricious or untrustworthy, one doubts that the American Civil Liberties Union would object that the boycotters were acting unconstitutionally.

The Commission on Pornography in effect encourages such boycotts, and the wonder is that the firestorm in the cultural press is aimed not at the philosophizers who preach the kind of activity, governed by the priapic imperative, that results in illegitimacy and broken homes, but at those who seek to call public attention to smut-for-profit. The critics join many libertarians in wondering how this all became a federal question. The answer to that is that the First Amendment is invoked whenever and wherever efforts are made to counteract the smut peddlers. If the Supreme Court is going to become involved every time a citizen objects to The Devil in Miss Jones being shown at the local theater, then you are going to need federal findings on pornography.

And, finally, it is the feds who pay the cost--that part of the cost that is payable --of wanton sex. Aid to Families with Dependent Children costs about $15 billion per year. And it will take any social scientist about five minutes to find a correlation between the birth of the sexual revolution in America, and the multiple birth of the bastard in America.

COPYRIGHT 1986 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning