Protect the children: keep porn legal
As a great fan of pornography, I believe that legalising the showing of erections and penetration in the UK was one of New Labour’s more creditable achievements. However, much of my favourite porn is still produced in the US, leaving me concerned on a personal as well as a political level about the US government’s new set of regulations on pornography. While the rules ostensibly serve admirable goals, they are sinister in intent and could prove disastrous in practice.
If you run a US website (or any other kind of publication) depicting anything that could be perceived as porn, you now need to record the name and date of birth (and alias, and maiden name, where appropriate) of all participants. If you didn’t make the film/picture, you need either to keep the same records anyway, or at least to know that the person you acquired the content from has the records. Ingeniously, you also need to publish a physical address where you’ll be available for 20 hours a week, just in case a policeman wants to inspect your paperwork.
The law is couched in terms of protecting children from sexual exploitation. In practice, the benefits here will be near-zero. It’ll make it marginally harder for Traci Lords situations to arise – but then again, fake IDs are hardly difficult to come by, so a determined 16-year-old with huge tits will still be able to fulfil her pornstardom ambitions.
Meanwhile, it will do absolutely nothing to stop actual child abuse or child pornography, neither of which happens in the commercial US adult entertainment industry. The problem the authorities currently have when breaking child porn networks, fairly obviously, is not that they can’t prove the victims are under 18. The problem is that such organisations are generally run as encrypted hard-to-crack communities, in dodgy countries with limited rule of law, or both.
The only purpose the new regulations will have is to make life harder for producers of legitimate porn, in line with the theocratic junta‘s general War on Fun. The history of vice regulation shows that regulators can never be satisfied: once they’ve passed measures like this one, they tend to go for still more restriction (smoking bans are a good example). Worse, the US attorney general has vowed to prosecute obscenity cases aggressively (well, the current administration has ignored every other aspect of the Constitution, so why not the First Amendment too?).
So, we have a case where fictional child protection concerns have directly led to a pointless and stupid regulation, whose impact will be to make life harder (and more stalker- and vigilante-prone, thanks to the address requirement) for people in the adult entertainment industry, and to spoil the fun of depraved deviants everywhere – and are highly likely to lead to even more repressive controls. As events in the UK have demonstrated before, Protecting The Children is a brilliant way of passing any law that would otherwise be abhorred on civil liberties grounds – second only to We’ll All Be Blown Up By Terrorists Otherwise.
But that dramatically understates the dangers of criminalising porn. In the UK in the 1960s, pornography was properly illegal. We had the kind of regime that the US attorney general wants: you couldn’t even view a flaccid penis, never mind chained leather sluts being double-penetrated by hot studs. So, nobody was Corrupted and Depraved by the Sinister Porn Menace, right?
Wrong. What happened was exactly what anyone with any knowledge of human nature or vice politics would expect: Soho’s seedy sex shops were seldom stopped from satisfying satyromaniacs, thanks to cosy relationships between the pornographers and the vice cops (cosy in the sense of staggeringly, enormously corrupt). The pattern was repeated across the country. Occasionally, there would be token raids, but the supply was never substantially interrupted.
So the restrictions successfully served to corrupt the police force, while doing nothing to stop the supply of porn. Fabulous in itself – but worse still, because what they were doing was illegal anyway, and because they were paying the police off anyway, the proprietors of these illicit establishments were rather less meticulous than today’s adult entertainment industry about certain relevant issues. Issues like not selling porn with kids in it, not selling porn to kids, and not making porn using non-consenting participants.
Oops.
At the moment, the US adult entertainment business is about as safe and unexploitative as any branch of capitalism can get. It abides by laws aimed at protecting workers, and at protecting people who really shouldn’t be working. Imposing restrictive measures on pornography would damage this, taking the porn business back to where it was in the UK in the 1960s, and thereby leading to more abuse, disease and general horribleness.
Analogies with the War on Drugs, or indeed any other pointless crusade for the Prevention of Vice And The Promotion of Virtue, barely even need to be drawn.
(BoingBoing and Alternet both have worthwhile takes on the original ‘identity’ story.)
chained leather sluts being double-penetrated by hot studs
I see we’re trying to build uniques from search referrals…
John – that first link comes up blank at FindLaw (or at least, it does when I try it).
Cheers – fixed now – JB
John: I’m with you on the specific case (and indeed would be on drugs, terror and a few others), but I don’t see that this extrapolates across neatly to all forms of social engineering. After all, you could call redistribution of wealth a form of War on Vice and Promotion of Virtue – let’s call it something emotive like, I don’t know, Make Poverty History? Is the War on Poverty a ‘pointless crusade’?
When I say “crusade for the Prevention of Vice And The Promotion of Virtue”, I’m referring to the self-righteous ‘saving people from themselves’ missions – ones that aim to stop people from following pursuits that don’t harm others, like porn, drugs, smoking, etc.
Redistribution of wealth doesn’t really fit here; nor would (eg) a crime reduction campaign or improved education.
The obvious consequence of this rule will be that content providers (I love a management consultant-style euphemism…) will move offshore. Looks like the Bahamas/Bermuda will be getting even more fun.
Andrew raised an interesting point earlier that I’m afraid John B too easily dismissed. Redistribution of wealth certainly does harm some people in the interests of others. It’s fair to ask what injures people more — having their right to make pornography infringed, or their right to hang on to their money? Indeed, most pornographers do it for the money, so it’s not as far-fetched a comparison as you might think at first blush (no pun intended). And isn’t class warfare, at bottom, a war on fun, just as the “theocratic junta” (well, at least you didn’t use that other leftist favorite, the “Taliban right”) is accused of engaging in?
The fact is, all laws are made for moral reasons. It’s just a question of which set of morals you subscribe to, isn’t it?
Joining Andrew and Inkling’s point, but with a more specific example that certainly fits the form of War on Vice and Promotion of Virtue – employment law.
Because of employment protections, we say that people can’t (even if they so choose) sell their labour below a certain hourly rate, or for a contract that doesn’t contain restraints on how it can be terminated, or offers them fewer than 20 days’ annual leave.
If that isn’t ‘protecting people from themselves,’ I’m not sure what is. Now, yes, in part, they’re about protecting people from the power of exploitative employers – but only in part, as this is all about voluntary contract. The same applies with the porn trade, especially given that it tends to want a hire (erm) younger talent.
As Inkling says, all laws are made for moral reasons – we’re always trying to advance vice and oppose virtue, and always pursuing a certain view of human nature.
There’s also a big difference between procedural and substantive restrictions on expression. So far as I can see, these rules are procedural – they don’t affect what is expressed, only how it’s expressed. The particular laws might be stupid, but they aren’t an assault on the First Amendment.
Oh, and ‘theocentric junta': yes, I’ve been shocked by Bush’s caesaro-papist pretensions, too. Just as I have by Blair’s communism.
Freudian slip in that: ‘advance vice and oppose virtue’ is the real Tory agenda, but obviously I meant to say ‘advance virtue and oppose vice’.
If the UK government was sensible, they’d loudly proclaim that they have no intentions of passing any similar laws here and any US porn sites that want to relocate are welcome.
I believe that pornography should be banned/filtered from the internet. If someone wants to watch porn he should buy it over the counter in a sexshop. This would effectively prevent under-eighteens from accessing it so easily.
I speak as someone who had a serious porn addiction for quite a few years. It was very detrimental to me. It caused less sleep, less social mixing, wasting time, slacking on my studies, wasting the phonebill, lying to my parents etc. I’m sure there are millions of internet porn watchers out there who experience the same thing. Someone above stated anti-porn laws are a ‘war on fun’. I believe anti-porn measures can only rescue people from such unedifying rubbish.
I should love to transfer the porn industry to the UK. We’ll even throw in our crack industry for free. Deal?
these regulations were put into effect because there was a scandal a few years back about underage women being in these films. You have to be 18 to participate.
Bob – US porn producers who use under-18 models are already at risk of serious prison time. As I argue above, this is enough of a deterrent on its own; the new measures will do nothing to protect girls from porn.
SSM – I’m unsurprised by your story: you certainly sound like a wanker.
Blimpish – you have a point re employment laws; I’ll need to think about that one (hell, it may even inspire a new article). In terms of the 1st Amendment, -this- legislation is merely procedural, but Gonzales’s generalised War on Porn is not.
Inkling – I’d be entirely up for that deal, as long as the newly-offshored crack industry was still able to target its existing US customers.
And the first inaugural Sharpener award for best put-down ever goes to…
Drumroll, please…
John Band, for ‘you certainly sound like a wanker.’
Sterling work, sir.
John / Blimpish: there’s a big difference with employment regulation. The issue here is power disparity that the state is (in theory) seeking to re-balance. And the voluntary/involuntary contract you introduce quickly breaks down at the bottom, when your benefit has been removed and it’s work or starve.
“One of New Labour’s more creditable achievements…” Except they didn’t legalise it. It’s a bit of common law flexibility. The courts and prosecutors and the BBFC decided they had better things to do. And those changes were well under way–as the evidence that unrestrained internet porn had completely failed to destroy society as we know it accrued–before 1997. I attended a public consultation by the BBFC in 1995 at which they made it pretty clear they were looking for the green light to take a soft line on hardcore.
The letter of the law on indecency and obscenity remains pretty much the same, and has recently been severely tightened in a number of ways by the Sexual Offences Act 2003.
One day I’ll grow up, but the Carry On opportunities here are immense. “Crack industry.” “Quickly breaks down at the bottom.” Titter ye not.
J: No power disparities associated with porn? You’re using the wrong stuff.
I’m confused by the mixed attitude here as to who is being protected. Many of you wish to protect the public from itself, but seem quite happy to view porn in your own homes, as if a ‘responsible audience’ can be distinguished from an irresponsible one. This paternalist, old-Liberal new-liberal hybrid puts me unpleasantly in mind of Asquith suffocated to death with his own fetish equipment.
Clearly, you must accept porn as morally sound at its most basic level, if you accept it under any circumstance at all. The hardest questions reside on the peripheries: what harm can it do to those who don’t chose to view it?
This harm falls into two categories: that which apparantly depraves society and the minds of our men, who then rape women, harm children and comit other deeds they see performed without compunction on a gross home video. This qualm can be dismissed with little effort: the human condition finds us depraved enough already to rape, without watching it first. (original sin: it’s all Eve’s fault. We women obviously deserve what we get). Psychopaths are mentally deficient; they lack – and porn does not remove, it adds.
Possibly the greatest and only harm, then, is done to children tortured as a direct, undeniable result of demand and a correlatedly increasing supply of kiddie porn. John, I agree: publishing the participants’ names etc is not the way to diminish this cycle. But it is neither redundant, nor too late to try and restrict production of and access to what most of us see as an evil.
Child pornography is really very small and the fanfare over paedophilia disguises just how minute a problem is actually is in our society. The huge media attention it receives and its massive focus fools us into labelling all men as paedophiles in the same way the 1970s feminists made many women believe all men are rapists.
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You have to be 18 to take part in porn but have to wait until you are 21 to drink alcohol ? Strange Country.
Terry Rist:
But think of the campaign you could have: Teen Pornstars Against Drunk Drivers. Or maybe an exciting movie.