There Is Nothing Rebellious Or Countercultural About Being “Pro-Porn”

From a NYT article entitled “Federal Effort on Web Obscenity Shows Few Results” we learn about a Justice Department grant to a conservative religious group called “Morality in Media” that pays people to review “sexual Web sites and other Internet traffic to see whether they qualify as obscene material whose purveyors should be prosecuted by the Justice Department.” The article notes:

… The grant, about $150,000 a year, has helped pay for Mr. Rogers and another retired law enforcement officer in Reno, Nev., to harvest and review complaints about obscene matter on the Internet that citizens register on the Justice Department Web site.

In the last few years, 67,000 citizens’ complaints have been deemed legitimate under the program and passed on to the Justice Department and federal prosecutors.

The number of prosecutions resulting from those referrals is zero. …

The article further reports: “In the seven years of the Bush administration, the department has prosecuted about 24 obscenity cases, several centered on film producers who failed to keep proper records showing that their models were not minors.” As I argued here, conservatives like to pretend they energetically oppose pornography, while liberals like to pretend that porn is under attack. Neither is true, but the respective heuristics are so useful to partisans that no one wants to pay attention to what is actually occuring, which in my opinion is that porn has become socially nomalized so effectively that the industry and its output is less subject scritiny and criticism than McDonald’s commercials. The Playboy corporation adorns household goods and children’s toys with its bunny logo and observers talk about how mild and innocent the naked photos in the company’s magazine are, willfully ignoring the fact that Playboy’s main source of revenue is via the production and distribution of hardcore pornography.

Social conservatives love to use soundbites about the evils of pornography to pretend to be moral and decent. Liberals use soundbites about the evils of censorship of pornography to pretend to be hip and protective of individual freedoms. Yet unless it is child pornography that is at issue, few people want to address the nexus between sex trafficking and the economic, emotional and physical coercion that mires women who don’t want to be there in prostitution and pornography. So much for decency as a conservative value or freedom as a liberal one.

–Ann Bartow