With talk about offense, porn, virtual child porn, and the First Amendment! Yay!
I get to take a First Amendment law course this fall, so I’ll probably definitely have lots more on the subject.
I’m a free speech hardliner, you see. I believe that the best way to foster dialogue and to just know what those crazies are up to is to keep that shit legal and out in the open, as much as possible. Even when it’s things I absolutely hate, like racism, sexism, and anything Hillary Clinton’s said on the campaign trail in the last two months.
I defend not only free speech rights, but your right to burn the flag, unlike Hillary Clinton. Though I find them utterly repugnant, I agree with this guy that a proposed law to ban display of nooses, burning crosses, and swastikas in Philadelphia is unconstitutional, and just plain wrong.
And porn? Yes, porn, as long as it has the consent of those involved, is free speech. It falls under the same categories as art (though many people would be offended by that comparison–that’s another book’s worth of ideas in its own right). Child porn is not free speech or art because it cannot have the consent of those depicted–we define children, depending on the laws in different states, as being unable to have informed consent to sexual acts.
Jill over at Feministe has an excellent post up about the recent Supreme Court decision on child porn. The comments are pretty damn good, too. Read ‘em. Jill brought up the comparison to art as well, and asked where the line is between a sexual image and art. The discussion was on virtual child porn, or porn rendered by artists or digitally manipulated so that the actors appear to be children, and whether it should be illegal. My own comment there was that we tend to overlook the real issues at stake with child porn (as well as with rape and murder) and just lock people up and want to throw away the key. (Wendy Kaminer has more on the case.)
We want to control the speech–the symptoms–without dealing with the problem.
Take racism and sexism, for example.
(I had this discussion in a bar at 1 AM last night with perfect strangers who happened to be having a conversation about the campaign at the same time as I was.)
We cannot put a label on which one is “worse” (and we certainly should not ignore the ways in which they intersect, overlap, and feed each other). But we can probably agree that sexism can still be more overtly stated. Hecklers at a Clinton rally can yell “Iron my shirt” and nobody beats the crap out of them. If someone yelled “N****” at an Obama rally, well, his ass would be toast. (Or her ass, because certainly not all racists are men.)
Does that mean that racism is gone? Or that we’ve just forced it into the closet, only to see it erupt in Don Imus or Hillary Clinton or Geraldine Ferraro or all those people in West Virginia?
So if we force virtual child porn into the closet, are we going to get rid of the feelings that make people want it or are we just going to force them underground in trying to find it?
As was pointed out on the Feministe thread, it’s almost impossible to get statistics on child porn’s possibly causal relationship to child molestation because it’s illegal, the only people who get busted with it go to jail and nobody’s going to believe them when they say they never molested kids, right?
When it comes down to it, the speech is and should be protected. If we want to say that virtual child porn–a cartoon video, say–is illegal, the next thing you know Lolita is illegal, or any sexual drawing that could be extrapolated to be of people below the age of consent.
The actions in the videos are what should concern people. The anti-all-porn crowd dislikes porn because it’s harmful to women, and they often argue that what’s in the video can incite people to do similar things at home–or worse, since they often cite porn as cause for murder. (See Ren.) Me, I don’t care what’s in the damn videos as long as there’s proof somewhere that the people in them–not just women, thanks, let’s make our concern for all people instead of assuming that the men are horrible patriarchal abusers and the women hapless victims–are old enough to consent and have given their full informed consent.
Children cannot give full informed consent. So making porn with them in it is illegal. (other than the fact that age-of-consent in itself is an arbitrary line, but one I would argue that in this case we do need to make, and more on that some other time when I feel like it.)
Adults can give full informed consent, we assume. They can drive a car, shoot a gun, go to war. They can damn well have sex on video for money–or for free, if they like. They can have sex that would make me cringe and possibly even want to throw up. Because it’s not up to me.
Caroline has plenty of goodness on the recent UK ban on “Extreme pornography.” Read it, because she knows way more than I do about it.
I used to joke that I should go through a boy’s porn collection before deciding to get into a relationship. This after a guy whose porn consisted of titles that should’ve warned me he was going to want to do things I didn’t want to do.
But there are plenty of women out there who do enjoy those things. Mazel tov, right? Not my problem, not with that guy anymore (for reasons unrelated to his particular kink and more related to the fact that he was a lying, cheating SOB, but that’s a story no one needs to hear).
I can’t legislate away his kink because I don’t share it. I can’t legislate away someone’s racism by banning a noose. Republicans (and Bill Clinton) can’t legislate away homosexual life partners by the Defense of Marriage act or a Marriage Amendment. And though I’m sure we all wish we could, we can’t legislate away pedophilia by banning child porn–if we could, that shit would be gone because it’s damn sure been illegal
So while sex with children remains and should remain illegal, drawing it, writing about it, or whatever should not. For one thing, the slippery slope argument holds up. For another, it could be our best chance to examine pedophilia without harming children or monsterizing the people involved.
The anti-porn argument from the feminist side often seems to go like this: porn causes rape, men watch porn, men are in porn, men are all rapists, men are BAD! I go both ways on this issue. When I’m walking alone at night, you better believe I feel like all men are potential rapists. And because I don’t believe in “monsters” or “evil” human beings, I do believe that on some level we are all potential rapists, murderers, etc. Not all men, but all people.
Racism, sexism, and violence are not black and white issues, they’re on a continuum and we have to examine that to understand why, yes, some people do rape and some do not. Some people kill and some do not. Why I feel very deeply to my core that I could never hurt another person unless we’re in a ring and both wearing gloves, and I had a problem with a boyfriend who wanted me to slap him in the face during sex. (Didn’t think he was a bad person, but couldn’t bring myself to do that.)
All people who watch adult porn don’t commit the things they see in porn, just like all people who watch violent movies and play violent video games and listen to violent music don’t commit violent crimes. Media just does not have that effect on people. So logically, perhaps, all people who watch virtual child porn will not molest children, just as all people who read Lolita do not molest children. Maybe they do. I don’t know.
I do know that the argument for free speech means nothing if we do not defend speech that we deem offensive. Particularly for someone like me, whose opinions run so deeply counter to the ingrained political power structure so much of the time, it is terribly important that unpopular opinions remain safe and protected. I’m no Emma Goldman and I don’t want to go to jail for my opinions. And I certainly don’t want to go to jail for my sex life. What I consent to is nobody’s business (even if I do make it your business sometimes by blogging about it). Don’t forget which way morality laws tend to go: the way of the white male power structure.
“We cannot put a label on which one is “worse” (and we certainly should not ignore the ways in which they intersect, overlap, and feed each other). But we can probably agree that sexism can still be more overtly stated. Hecklers at a Clinton rally can yell “Iron my shirt” and nobody beats the crap out of them. If someone yelled “N****” at an Obama rally, well, his ass would be toast. (Or her ass, because certainly not all racists are men.)”
That commentary implies that nigger is the only epitaph that can be thrown at a POC. There are just as many direct and demeaning phrases that are thrown at people of color on a daily basis as there are sexists comments aimed at women. Trust me, I get it from both sides as a WOC.
Very true. What I wanted to explain is the way that Hillary Clinton is able to defuse sexism aimed at her–she can openly talk about it and deny that racism exists, and Obama has to basically agree with her because somewhere in our national psyche we’ve shoved racism to the back like it doesn’t happen anymore.
And the saddest part of that whole story is that it’s got lots of self-identified feminists agreeing with her.
Hey, came here from Feministe (and Ren’s place). These three articles express, better than I can say, the sham that is a lot of streams of radical / cultural “feminism”.
It’s pretty pathetic that a woman can slut-shame and objectify other women, then think that they can hide that be dressing it up in “radical feminist” clothing.
(OT, it’s pretty cool that we’re both in the same city.)
Yes, exactly.
Totally agree, Sarah, and made some posts with similar arguments a while back. Basically, if something is criminal to do to begin with, then certainly filming it does not automatically elevate it to the level of free speech. I don’t think anybody is arguing that, though I think the not-so-free-speech-friendly side of feminism likes to set that up as a straw man.
By analogy, I think if there are exploitative labor practices in making porn, one can certainly critique and work against that without making it a free speech or “social effects” argument. Again, the fact that the anti-porn side so freely mixes the two arguments is about muddying the waters.
And the whole radfems for Clinton thing – ugh! Did they just sleep through the entire 1990s and early 2000s, where the Clintons and the Democratic Leadership Council where criticized for moving the Democratic party to the right? To hear some of the pro-Clinton feminists talk about it, you’d think she was leading the progressive wing of the Democratic Party!
well, you know where the whole “porn isn’t free speech” deal came from, right?
most notably, in feminism, from Catherine MacKinnon; but also, the influence of Judith Reisman is undernoticed (her Playboy “study” is cited without comment at Sam Berg’s place and in/by at least a couple of other similarly-oriented radical feminists I’ve seen around the ’sphere). She is, well, besides being completely batshit, Not A Friend, to put it mildly:
http://www.jesus21.com/content/sex/index.php?s=kinsey
In the early 1980s “the US Justice Department had given Reisman a grant for $734,371 to study pictures in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler.” [ 3 ] Reisman used the grant to confirm her conclusion of “Kinsey’s role in child sexual abuse and the link to children appearing in mainstream pornography…” [ 4 ] Dr. Reisman poured over thousands of pages of pornographic literature. She felt herself persecuted at every turn and complained of a conspiracy to derail her efforts, going so far as to blame the Kinsey Institute for her inability to get published by a legitimate publishing house. [ 5 ]
And to an extent, she was persecuted, though not for the reasons she assumed. The Reagan-appointee who had commissioned the study, Alfred Regnery (the head of the conservative publishing house, Regnery Press), admitted he had been wrong to do so. Avedon Carol writes:
It was a scientific disaster, riddled with researcher bias and baseless assumptions. The American University (AU), where Reisman’s study had been academically based, actually refused to publish it when she released it, after their independent academic auditor reported on it. Dr Robert Figlio of the University of Pennsylvania told AU that, ‘The term child used in the aggregate sense in this report is so inclusive and general as to be meaningless.’ Figlio told the press, ‘I wondered what kind of mind would consider the love scene from Romeo and Juliet to be child porn’. (Carol, 1994, p.116) [ 6 ]
Dr Loretta Haroian, the cochair of the plenary session of Child and Adolescent Sexuality at the 1984 World Congress of Sexology, an expert on childhood sexuality, commented on Reisman’s work,
This is not science, it’s vigilantism: paranoid, pseudoscientific hyperbole with a thinly veiled hidden agenda. This kind of thing doesn’t help children at all. … [Reisman's] study demonstrates gross negligence and, while she seems to have spent a lot of time collecting her data, her conclusions, based on the data, are completely unwarranted. The experts Reisman cites are, in fact, not experts at all but simply people who have chosen to adopt some misinformed, Disneyland conception of childhood that she has. These people are little more than censors hiding behind Christ and children.” (Carol, 1994, p.116). [ 7 ]
http://www.alternet.org/election04/20744/
Reisman has cast herself as the anti-Kinsey, a self-styled moral monger in an existential – and admittedly personal – battle with the forces of cultural decay and sexual permissiveness. In her writings and lectures, Reisman conjures a dark world in which Playboy magazine insidiously pushes kiddie-porn, where homosexuals crusade for the hearts and behinds of America’s youth and “erotoxins” as powerful as crack cocaine fill the somatasensory cortexes of porn watchers. From Reisman’s writings and lectures, one could get the impression that this world is entirely the creation of Kinsey, the Master of Perverts.
While Reisman’s ideas have naturally endeared her to a Who’s Who of ornery theocrats and survivalist militia types, in recent years she has found herself kibitzing with the likes of GOP senators and Bush administration officials. Though the “Dr.” that precedes her name on her book and her web site is practically cosmetic, earned with a degree in communications, [November of '04] she provided expert testimony on Capitol Hill for Republican Sen. Sam Brownback on the scientific perils of pornography. There, she also lobbied for the reintroduction of a bill that would mandate an investigation into her claim that Kinsey sexually abused children during his research. Through friends in the Justice Department, Reisman has helped push for an increased focus on prosecuting porn. And she is a favorite speaker at conferences of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, a federally funded non-profit which provides technical assistance to controversial abstinence-only programs in public schools. As Reisman gathers influence in Republican-dominated Washington, her work is bearing an increasingly apparent mark on the Christian right’s political agenda and by extension, on the White House’s social policy…
So how did a little old Jewish lady like Reisman earn rock-star status on the right? How did a red diaper baby active in the Labor Youth League in the 1940’s come to blame Kinsey for all of America’s social ills? And how did the daughter of Yiddish-speaking immigrants begin equating Kinsey with the Nazis who liquidated much of her extended family in Europe?…
[read on, it's rather grimly fascinating. but anyway:]
…Yet the Bush administration’s entry into the White House in 2000 was a rising tide that promised to lift the boats of Reisman and her fellow culture warriors. Reisman’s anti-porn crusade gained steam with the February, 2003 appointment of her longtime friend Bruce Taylor to senior counsel to the assistant attorney general. Taylor has prosecuted over 700 obscenity cases in his career, including the famed 1981 Ohio vs. Larry Flynt trial. With a $5 million budget earmarked for 2005, Taylor is in charge of a beefed-up FBI task force dedicated to cracking down on porn. And like Unruh, his work is inspired by Reisman. “We should probably call her Detective Reisman for finding the hidden clue to Kinsey’s crimes against children and families,” Taylor said in a quote Reisman published on her personal web site. “‘Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences’ is a blueprint for justice for victims of sexual exploitation and abuse.”
…Reisman spent a week on the Hill at the invitation of Sen. Brownback, the Catholic Kansas Republican, to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space on “The Science Behind Pornography Addiction.” In her testimony, Reisman presented her discredited Playboy/kiddie-porn report to reinforce her contention that, “Pornography triggers myriad kinds of internal, natural drugs that mimic the ‘high’ from a street drug. Addiction to pornography is addiction to what I dub ‘erotoxins’ – mind-altering drugs produced by the viewer’s own brain.” She added, “A basic science research team employing a cautiously protective methodology should study ‘erotoxins’ and the brain/body.” Her call for a research team was both a tacit admission that her presentation was bereft of any scientific evidence, and yet another plea for federal grant money for her studies…
***
therefore, you see: not free speech; one is Under the Influence. I am not making this shit up.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/jul/14/farout
According to Dr Judith Reisman, pornography affects the physical structure of your brain turning you into a porno-zombie. Porn, she says, is an “erototoxin “, producing an addictive “drug cocktail ” of testosterone, oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin with a measurable organic effect on the brain.
Some of us might consider this a good thing. Not Reisman: erototoxins aren’t about pleasure, they’re a “fear-sex-shame-and-anger stimulant”. Reisman’s paper on the subject The Psychopharmacology of Pictorial Pornography Restructuring Brain, Mind & Memory & Subverting Freedom of Speech has helped make her the darling of the anti-pornography crusade, and in November last year she presented her erototoxin theory to the US senate.
Under the auspices of Utah’s Lighted Candle Society (LCS), Reisman and Victor Cline, a clinical psychologist at the University of Utah, began raising money from American conservative and religious organisations. They hope to raise at least $3m to conduct MRI scans on victims under the influence of porn and so prove their theories correct. They foresee two possible outcomes: if they can demonstrate that porn physically “damages ” the brain, that might open the floodgates for “big tobacco”-style lawsuits against porn publishers and distributors; second, and more insidiously, if porn can be shown to “subvert cognition ” and affect the parts of the brain involved in reasoning and speech, then “these toxic media should be legally outlawed, as is all other toxic waste, and eliminated from our societal structure “.
What’s more, people whose brains have been rotted by pornography are no longer expressing “free speech ” and, for their own good, shouldn’t be protected under the First Amendment.
Good research, BD. Reisman truly is a piece of work, and its very telling when a lot of her writing on “porn addiction” or even on Kinsey gets quoted favorably by “radicals”.
“It was a scientific disaster, riddled with researcher bias and baseless assumptions.”
That sounds familiar.