The crusade is nothing new. Moral judgment is cyclical. : Kicking Smut in the Butt

Everyone needs a cause. For some, it is saving the endangered snail darter, for others upholding the right to life by bombing abortion clinics. Women march for equality and men for Budweiser. Someone is fighting somewhere at this very moment for a belief they would gladly die for, although its details might be difficult to recall three months from now.

Well, I have a cause too. It’s smut. I’m for it.

What brings this to mind is an ordinance proposed by City Councilman Hal Bernson that would ban so-called adult businesses from so-called residential areas in so-called Los Angeles.

A meeting was held the other day in Reseda to focus on problems in the Valley, namely bookstores, motels and bars which, for a variety of reasons, appeal to the basic needs of grown-ups whose thirsts are not otherwise quenched. Right. Lust.

Mr. Bernson wants his ordinance to be retroactive, which has naturally upset the owners of existing adult places who feel that their constitutional rights are being trampled upon.

The councilman insists that morality has nothing to do with the proposed law, that it is simply a matter of zoning. But we all know what the truth is. It’s the start of another Kick Smut in the Butt Crusade.

The Board of Supervisors is trying to close a nudist colony in Topanga Canyon, Agoura Hills has banned topless dancing at the Bear Cabaret and now the council wants to shut down Candy Cat and Candy Cat Too, which are local establishments whose female dancers shed their upper clothing for the benefit of a predictably male audience.

The crusade is nothing new. Moral judgment is cyclical, swinging from full acceptance of bacchanalian delights to the era of the virgin king in which we now find ourselves.

Back in the days before sex was considered a spectator sport, the moral antecedents of Hal Bernson were busily predicting the end of human decency if women were allowed to bob their hair and little boys to rebuckle their knickers below the knee.

Dancing was thought to be a ritual of the Devil, card playing the moral equivalent of prostitution and doing anything but praying on Sunday the very apex of evil.

Moralists, however, have never sat idly by while humanity teetered on the brink of hell. Medieval crusaders slaughtered heathens by the bushel, Grand Inquisitors cleansed heretics by setting them afire and here in our own good old U.S.A. we managed to similarly charbroil those whose religious beliefs had seemed to trickle toward witchcraft.

Smut peddlers fought back by introducing, though not necessarily in this order, dirty books, the bikini, X-rated movies, pornographic neckties and that old standby, the obscene telephone call.

We have soft porn, medium porn and hard-core porn, its categorization determined, like a thermometer in the sun, by the degree of heat generated in the process.

Filmatic depiction of a man and wife in their own bed doing something under the electric blanket might be considered, say, soft porn, while eight college students and a duck frolicking naked on the lawn of the First Presbyterian Church would be, all together now, s-m-u-t.

For the sake of curiosity and certainly not any, snicker, prurient interest, I dropped by the Candy Cat Too in Canoga Park to see for myself just what it was that was lighting Mr. Bernson’s fire.

It’s a rather ordinary place, actually, with the possible exception of the comely young lady dancing on a stage by the bar.

She wears a bikini bottom and a loose top for 26.5 minutes of the dance, which is a combination of interpretive jazz and classical strip, then divests herself of the loose top to cavort for the last 3.5 minutes with her bosom, like Old Glory on foreign soil, exposed for all to see.

I found that probably two-thirds of the men in Cat Too were more interested in the pool game in progress than in the woman’s abundant charms. For, while her precise form of semi-nudity was something they might not witness at home, since most wives won’t strip and dance at the same time, they can see it in movies if they want to.

“Hell,” said club co-owner Joan Urrutia, a pleasant lady in her early 40s, “some wives send their husbands here to get them out of the house. We baby-sit them.”

Speaking of which, a complaint against the existence of establishments like Candy Cat Too is their influence on youth. I am pleased to report, however, that the dancing was confined to the premises and did not flow, with jungle verve, onto the sidewalk where passing children might witness the performance and be tempted to join in.

I see no end to civilization in naked dancing. I do see an end to civilization in naked power. Perhaps we have gone too far in our determined celebration of sexuality, but then we’ve gone even further in our precipitous worship of military primacy.

Our moral priorities, if we are going to exist at all, need reexamining. All things considered, I’d rather be bare-breasted to oblivion by immoral means than sacrificed on the altar of nuclear morality by virgin missiles fired in the name of God and Armageddon.