With the recent increase in obscenity prosecutions, reports of the Department of Justice declaring adult obscenity one of its highest priorities, and new legislation pending in Congress that would dramatically expand the nature and amount of material subject to 2257 record keeping requirements, one gets the feeling that our industry has not only touched a governmental nerve, but that nerve is reacting as though it has been poked with an electrified acupuncture needle.So-called “family” organizations, various federal mouthpieces and assorted talking heads in the media insist that overwhelming demand from the American public at large is the genesis of the intensified scrutiny and increased vigor of the anti-obscenity effort. With annual expenditures on pornography by Americans amounting to billions of dollars, however, one can only conclude that a pretty sizeable portion of that self-same American public appreciates and supports the ready availability of pornography.

The dilemma, socially, politically, legally, is nothing new to humankind. Questions of propriety, social decorum and sexual freedom (or lack thereof) are as fundamental as the human persona itself; as ingrained an intellectual quandary as our very identity and self-awareness. To reduce the anti-pornography effort to an obsession of the “Religious Right” not only mischaracterizes the anti-porn movement (which is more precisely a diverse gumbo of separate, individual movements), it also serves to underestimate the very real possibility that much greater restrictions on access to adult pornographic material could be imposed in the near future.

Groups with essentially nothing else in common, ranging from liberal feminists to a wide variety of religious denominations both Christian and otherwise, all find something very threatening, fundamentally immoral, and inherently corrupting in pornography, and “extreme” hardcore material in particular. They point to a wide range of perceived ill-effects of pornography, most of them falling under the rather elusive and vague heading of “secondary effects.” Even some within the adult industry are quick to condemn producers and distributors of material that they find personally offensive, or that they feel (not erroneously, I might add) will result in added scrutiny of the adult entertainment industry as a whole.

While many civil libertarians and Free Speech activists take heart in a number of legal successes, in particular the US District Court’s dismissal of U.S v. Extreme Associates, the Extreme case has an appeal pending in the Third Circuit, and is likely far from over. The government prosecutors handling these cases are emboldened by 38 successful adult obscenity convictions adjudicated from 2001-2004, and what they see as a clear “right of the Nation and of the States to maintain a decent society,” as famously stated by Chief Justice Warren Berger in the 1973 Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton decision.

As I don’t believe anyone is advocating that any individual or group should be forced to view pornographic materials (other than the juries, judges and assorted other parties involved in obscenity prosecutions, ironically), and pornography is something generally consumed in private these days, as a legal question, the debate appears to come down to a familiar balancing act; individual rights and freedoms versus the right to that “decent” society Berger asserted some 32 years ago.

What of the perhaps deeper, implicit questions that reside beneath the technical legal jurisprudence of it all, though? What exactly constitutes “decency”? What of other “indecencies,” scores of which have nothing to do with sex, nudity, or other naughty things which have traditionally put the collective knickers of more reserved members of our society in a twist? I’m an avid and enthusiastic carnivore, for example, but I suspect that I would find the inside of a slaughterhouse anything but “decent.”

It is there, I believe, that we find the roots of the divided thinking where porn, violent movies and video games, or any number of other controversial products of our culture, are concerned. Just as I am comfortable with gnawing down a chunk of animal flesh slathered in a savory sauce of some kind, yet simultaneously unwilling to confront the very visceral reality of the process which produced that tasty morsel of meat, so are many in society enamored of the “miracle of birth,” for example, but not too keen on the other potential applications of sexual conduct – those sex acts engaged in for purposes of pleasure, pain, joy, humiliation, mutual ecstasy, degradation, or any of a million other rationales for jumping in the sack with one or more partners, or masturbating removed from any other company at all.

Every once in a while, usually in an attempt to make a rhetorical point about the triviality of a piece of legislation endorsed by one of their peers, a legislator will propose something called a “sweater law.” The tongue-in-cheek legislation (though rumor has it that these laws have been suggested in complete seriousness on several occasions) will include a provision like, “When the temperature dips below 55 degrees Fahrenheit, all citizens are required to wear a sweater or coat when outdoors.”

In my opinion, obscenity laws, and their assorted “vice law” cousins, regulating among other things the distance to be maintained between an erotic dancer and her clientele, are a legislative animal directly related to sweater laws. Designed to mask more unseemly realities of our nature, and promote that elusive “decent society,” I’ve come to call them collectively the “Canine and Equine Sweater Laws” – a continuing dog and pony show intended to promote the idea that anything beyond a certain shade of perverse is an aberration, and not something that a “decent society” should tolerate.

As very effectively pointed out by my colleague Connor Young during a panel discussion concerning obscenity at the Florida Internext in August, we already have laws that regulate sexual behavior, identifying criminal sexual conduct and the penalties thereof. As such, is there really a need for separate laws that criminalize the filming, distribution, selling and viewing of consensual sex acts being performed by adults of their own volition, and being consumed by adults that specifically wish to view such acts?

I join Connor’s argument that there is no such need, and that the enactment, enforcement, and adjudication of such laws is a colossal waste of time and energy on the part of governments and various other organizations bent on protecting us from ourselves, and attempting to foist their own standards of social propriety upon those of us who may not subscribe to their definition of “decent”.

I’m reminded of something a respected member of the University of Arizona’s Department of Psychiatry once said to me: “If we are to be held liable for our inner thoughts and fantasies, then nobody’s head would escape the guillotine.” Morbid curiosities, violent notions, ugly impulses of all shapes and sizes slip in and out of even the most balanced, stable and sane minds among us. It’s no coincidence that slasher flicks are a big box office draw, that millions tune in to “CSI” and “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” reruns on a nightly basis, that HBO’s documentaries depicting actual autopsies garner big audiences, and – yes – that more extreme porn continues to grow in popularity; we are driven by impulse as much as we are by governed by reason, or guided by principle.

In my opinion, the “decency question” will never be fully and finally decided. Imposing restrictions on sexual expression will no sooner create a “decent” society than outlawing gravity would allow us to fly under our own power. We are what we are; a talking animal with a nifty thumb, eternally at odds with itself over crises of identity, individuality, commonality and social obligation.