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US Declares "War on Porn"

18:52 / 26.09.05

Washington Post: "Recruits Sought for Porn Squad"

the article is a laugh riot... I just wish it weren't true.

when are these people going to learn that they can't prevent consententing adults from performing, documenting, and viewing any sexual activities they damn well please?

I can see how they could put an end to beastality with the claim of animal rights (might even get some lefties on their side), but it looks like they're main approach is - surprise, surprise - "community standards." But with most of this kind of thing being on the internet, are the old rules of community standards still applicable? Isn't the "community" in question here simply everyone with internet access? How do we judge the "community standards" of the entire human race?

The whole thing seems a bit surreal for me (and even the FBI seems to agree... check out the "office cooler jokes" from that article).

18:56 / 26.09.05

oh, and it gets better.
because of low recruitment, agents are being diverted from the Child Endangerment Department.

nice guys. you really thought that one through.

All Acting Regiment

20:02 / 26.09.05

Whatever you think of porn, you can't stop porn from happening. Simple fact. At the moment there's some stuff out there that's acceptable as far as I'm concerned- even though I don't have any use for it- and some stuff that isn't acceptable, even to people who use porn regularly. Just read the newspapers.

Make everything illegal, though, and you drive everything underground- putting what could loosely be called "sexy fun" in the same place as snuff movies. I can see this becoming like our drugs problem: like cannabis and magic mushrooms occupy the a part of cultural space that's near Heroin, despite being very different entities.

I think it's reasonable to have a personal problem with the "honest" i.e. currently legal pornographer who makes a website advertising "Bitches getting fucked in every hole". Personally, I don't think that's a nice headspace to be in, or a good one to provide to other people.

However, this sort of businessperson is probably the best placed agent to weed out the genuinely horrific stuff- at least the women on his site are consenting and being paid a fair ammount for their work. By shutting him down and making his work illegal, the government push the above-board pornographer into the same place as the rapist.

Is that a reasonable statement? I'm trying to reconcile the idea of sexual tolerance with the idea of being opposed to a commodification of sexuality.

22:39 / 26.09.05

I read about the new War On Porn on another webboard a couple of days ago. Sadly, it doesn't even surprise me anymore — it's pretty much the kind of sick joke I've come to expect from the powers that be in the current social/political climate.

For some reason, it also reminded me of Bill Hicks:

"Supreme Court says pornography is basically anything without artistic merit that causes sexual thought, that's their definition, essentially.

"No artistic merit, causes sexual thought. Hmm.

"Sounds like... every fucking commercial on television, doesn't it?"

Not that they'd see the humor in it, of course...

22:48 / 26.09.05

oh, and it gets better.
because of low recruitment, agents are being diverted from the Child Endangerment Department.

nice guys. you really thought that one through.

Well, TeN. Come on, think this through logically. Don't you know that people who watch porn rape and murder children? Crack down on porn, no more child endangerment! It makes total sense, silly.

Seriously, though, Eric Schlosser's book Reefer Madness includes a pretty fascinating history of the adult entertainment industry, with all of the govt's attempts to quash it from beginning to present. This is nothing new, though it is certainly absurd in the year 2005.

If anyone actually pays attention to this ludicrous endeavor, there's probably going to be some (justified) outcry over the government's targeting those segments of porn that are more "prosecutable" - scat, S/M, etc. You can't deliberately go after the "more obscene" without sparking a discussion on what obscenity is and who's to say what's more "obscene." Traditionally, obscenity laws are measured by the extremely vague 'community standard of decency' idea. As difficult as that would be to pinpoint in 1955, it's basically impossible in 2005. Is online porn measured against the online community? Or the local community where the parent company is based (and good luck finding them)? Et cetera....

05:59 / 28.09.05

I wonder if anyone would have a problem if pornographers started submitting their "smut" to professional galleries.

06:07 / 28.09.05

they could, but i'm not sure it would work.
religious folks can get upset by art too.

06:43 / 28.09.05

Of course they can, but at least in this instance the pornographers can claim something at least approaching the moral high-ground. Even if the content of what they create hasn't changed, the audience has - moving from illiterati masturbating into socks to the gleaming, preening aesthetic avant-garde.

And if all else fails, the pornographers can lambaste their critics for spelling "culture" with a "k."

11:54 / 28.09.05

Thank God for the War on Porn! Hopefully it'll be as effective as the War on Terror (remember when you didn't have any Terror in the US, before TWAT?) or the War on Drugs (remember the bad old days when there were Drugs just lying around willy-nilly?). Maybe the inevitable War on Weather will teach those hurricanes a thing or two as well.

We could have World Peace if the US govt. would only declare War on War...

13:51 / 28.09.05

T.B.H if the US declared war on war, they'd probably be as effective as all the other "war on...." and the world would soon descend into total war. Now if they declared war on peace, we might actually see some results.

ONLY NICE THINGS

15:23 / 28.09.05

And back to the actual news under discussion...

Question: Why is this a priority? It's easy to say that it's a conservative administration pushing a conservative morality, but what is the actual value add? Possibles:

1) BushGov is profoundly concerned about the damage being done to people both involved in and consuming the products of the pornography industry, and has concluded that government action needs to be stepped up to ensure that society is protected.

2) BushGov sees an opportunity to justify increased Internet surveillanc and invasion of privacy under the guise of an initiative that will play well with its core audience.

3) BushGov does indeed see the enforcing of a moral standard on others as one of the duties of government.

It's interesting to note that currently under consultation in the UK is a move to make certain forms of pornography illegal, apparently in response to pressure from the family of victims of crime performed by people who consumed them. These include sites which depict murder or violence (in which case, of course, they are _already_ breaking the law) or, and this is pretty important) those which depict a convincing facsimile thereof. It has yet to be made clear how this would work - as Alex mentions elsewhere, New Labourt policymaking does seem to be tending toward the populist but unenforcable at present.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

18:25 / 28.09.05

You've missed out 4) It'll play well with the religious right, thus strengthening popularity among a core voting demographic, and it's a fairly good bet that the majority of Republicans who don't like the War On Porn AREN'T gonna switch allegiances over this.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

18:26 / 28.09.05

(Which I know is kind of covered in 2), but I'm meaning the popularity thing as more of a priority than a covering tactic).

ONLY NICE THINGS

23:24 / 28.09.05

For future reference, could we assume that all "war on...: gags have now been done and stick to the topic at hand?

23:56 / 28.09.05

wait, Haus, did you just delete my post from my own thread

dude, you're the moderator, and it's no big deal or anything, but wtf?

ONLY NICE THINGS

00:48 / 29.09.05

Once again - nobody on Barbelith can delete a post. People suggest deletions, and other people agree them. In this case, I moved your post for deletion, yes, in part because I had already moved Lord Morgue's post for deletion when he posted exactly the same image, so it would have been unfair if I gad let yours lie just because you had started the thread. In general, starting a thread doesn't give rights over it. It does give you the chance to write the topic summary, which then guides the thread subsequently, and which also gives moderators a guide on what is and isn't threadrot. In this case, given that this is a Switchboard thread, I felt that veering off the specific topic in order to veer _onto_ the far more general "war on" gag, and further onto comic strip treatments of it would be deleterious to the quality of the thread. I hope that makes sense - to avoid further threadrot, if not could we go to Policy or PM?

07:17 / 29.09.05

Haus: I think it's option 3, but if asked they'd cite option 1. Pushing your morality onto others is always big with the christian right, but it's nearly always notionally done in the best interests of those they are "saving".
However this is from my godless liberal viewpoint, so I'm hardly going to be supporting Bushgov.

lord henry strikes back

10:35 / 29.09.05

I think that there is another option along the lines of: porn, like abortion, like prayer in schools, is a well established red flag issue for both liberals and conservatives. An announcement like this will spark a predicable and well trodden media debate about freedom of speech, moral values, etc. More importantly this debate is a theoretical one which does not involve dead american service men or appalling disaster planning. It will, however, knock these issues out of the spotlight, at least for a short time, and give a somewhat embattled BushGov a bit of breathing space. They might even get a few high profile arrests which would amount to a few more days of Iraq et al being off the media radar.

I'm not saying that the above is definately the case, there may be genuine, if in my view misguided, desire to rid america of this 'filth'. Ulterior motives, however, cannot be ignored.

trouser the trouserian

09:52 / 11.10.05

The FBI recently (last week) closed down a text-only adult site Red Rose Stories

The sites creator, Rosie, says the FBI is charging her with obscenities for hosting fantasy stories that involved bestiality, bondage and domination, S&M, and sex with minors. No images note, just stories.

15:10 / 11.10.05

[slightly off topic]

Meanwhile Flemish news paper De Morgen (say our local version of The Independent) offers their readers the chance to buy cheap dvd's of movies that were once or are still forbidden/highly controversial. (Last Tango in Paris, Baise-Moi, Caligula, etc...)

I've just bought Deep Throat that way.

08:18 / 13.10.05

I think that there is another option along the lines of: porn, like abortion, like prayer in schools, is a well established red flag issue for both liberals and conservatives. An announcement like this will spark a predicable and well trodden media debate about freedom of speech, moral values, etc. More importantly this debate is a theoretical one which does not involve dead american service men or appalling disaster planning. It will, however, knock these issues out of the spotlight, at least for a short time, and give a somewhat embattled BushGov a bit of breathing space. They might even get a few high profile arrests which would amount to a few more days of Iraq et al being off the media radar.

There was also the issue of Attorny General Gonzalez. Namely, that Bush had been thinking about nominating him to the Supreme Court, but religious conservatives didn't think he was conservative enough on cultural issues. All of a sudden, he announces that his Justice Dept. is beginning a crackdown on porn.

It didn't seem to reassure conservatives enough, I suppose, because he went for the evangelical Miers instead, but now they think she isn't conservative enough, either.

13:03 / 14.10.05

I sort of get the feeling that this segment of the right would only be content if they got James Dobson or somebody like that nominated to the court.

00:17 / 21.10.05

I just saw the documentary Inside Deep Throat. Without digging too deep it stated that since the so-called athletic performances of Harry Reems & Linda "I was forced" Lovelace, obscenity laws in the States have become more severe. Yet, the US produce several more porn movies than regular Hollywood crap.
At the end of that HBO documentary, it was mentioned that a new crusade against porn was about to begin. Some asshole of the FBI (who participated in the original hunt against obscenity back in the 70's) said that it was a pity they have to use so much resources in the war against terrorism.
As long as you get your priorities right, I guess?!??!!