Questioning Porn
It was a G-rated scene in Sacramento a few weeks ago as members of the pornography industry--actors, strip club operators, sexual appliance distributors and, of course, 1st Amendment attorneys--made a carefully choreographed visit to lobby legislators and combat their back-alley image--the industry’s image, that is.
As public acceptance of the porn industry has grown, at least in the muting of public disdain, these publicity visits have become annual affairs, with ample attention from media and people who never watch porn movies but somehow recognize the actresses with their clothes on.
Recently, Times reporters Ralph Frammolino and P.J. Huffstutter described the growing interest in porn movie and Internet jobs among technicians fearing a strike in legitimate filmmaking and laid-off computer programmers so proud of their new profession they withheld their last names. Web sites offering free sex content mushroomed from 22,000 to nearly 280,000 between 1997 and 2000, which may document porn’s availability more than its acceptance.
Pornography lobbyists argue that their business is legitimate because it employs possibly 20,000 Californians, allegedly produces $31 million in state sales taxes on videos and purportedly attracts an additional $1.8 billion in national Internet traffic. Claiming to produce jobs and revenue is the first tool of modern public relations, used by everyone from team owners seeking new stadiums to pornographers seeking civic legitimacy.
However, if mere money was a legitimate argument, then we should stop hassling organized crime, which, after all, keeps extortionists employed and brings valuable revenue into some neighborhoods. If we only debate this issue on financial or legal grounds, as the purveyors of porn desire, then the majority of tolerant, law-abiding, nonswinging Americans will remain silent, perhaps intimidated.
The real question is not a legal one, about whether the porn industry has the right to do what it does behind closed doors in an open society. It does. The real questions involve individual values: Is it right? Is it healthy? Sometimes such simple but critical measures of human conduct fall into a long hibernation.
We now give smokers, for instance, the right to light up somewhere while acknowledging it is unhealthy. There was a time not long ago when the minority of unhip nonsmokers was so intimidated by the majority of cool smokers that it silently put up with the obnoxious fumes adjacent to such legal but unhealthy activity. Over time then, one by one, in the privacy of their individual minds people began thinking not about whether smoking helps South Carolina’s farm economy and boosts sales tax revenues but whether smoking is right and healthy. A new common sense emerged, ultimately codified in laws.
Of course we’re not suggesting new laws regulating expression of any kind. Instead, amid the widely publicized nudges, winks and chuckles over pop porn, Americans might privately ask those two simple, critical questions--Is it right? Is it healthy?--about something that needs to be delivered in plain brown wrappers. And act accordingly.
