The nudes of art are not so distant from pornography as prudish pedants pretend. – Mason Cooley
The label “pornography”, like the word “prostitution”, represents an attempt by lawheads to pretend that their personal hang-ups about sex can be reduced to a rule by which “good” sex can be distinguished from “bad” sex, a bright, clear taboo line which it is not permissible for anyone, even in private, to cross. Ironically, the neofeminist position on the issue is actually more coherent than that of the government; it simply states that any sex not initiated and totally controlled by a woman for her own pleasure (and for no other reason) is fundamentally wrong. The more radical neofeminists (such as Sheila Jeffreys) go even further, declaring that any heterosexual sex is a tool of male oppression. Obviously, this is mad-dog lunacy, but at least it’s consistent lunacy; lawheads, by contrast, try to come up with ridiculous “tests” by which prostitution can be distinguished from other female sexual behavior and pornography can be distinguished from erotica or sex scenes in “literature”. We’ve often discussed the former, but today I’d like to look at the latter.
Gloria Steinem opined that “Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality,” and though many anti-porn feminists still try to promote that as a valid definition, anyone who’s seen more than three porn films (or read more than two erotic stories) knows it doesn’t hold water. D.H. Lawrence was a far better writer than Steinem, but his definition is even more vague: “Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.” Very clear, D.H.; I’m sure many a judge has found that a precise and usable rule. And speaking of judges, the most honest (though least helpful) “definition” of this type was that pronounced by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in his famous concurring opinion on Jacobellis vs. Ohio (1964):
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case [Les Amants (1958)] is not that.
Though later courts attempted to use high-sounding words like “contemporary community standards” and pseudo-objective criteria such as “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific values” to disguise Stewart’s axiom with a veneer of respectability, the naked truth is that the only meaningful difference between the “obscene” and the acceptable is the opinion of some “authority”. The inanity of the whole thing has been laid bare in the federal obscenity prosecution of fetish filmmaker Ira Isaacs:
……Isaacs argues that the disgust evoked by works such as Hollywood Scat Amateurs 7 and Japanese Doggie 3 Way is a crucial part of what makes them artistic. “My intent is to be a shock artist in the movies I made,” he testified, “to challenge the viewer in thinking about art differently…to think about things they’d never thought about before.” Similarly, [defense lawyer Roger] Diamond argued that the films have political value as a protest against the government’s arbitrary limits on expression, illustrating the “reality that we may not have the total freedom the rest of the world thinks we have”…Isaacs…faces a possible penalty of 20 years in prison…but if the jurors want to blame someone for making them sit through this assault on their sensibilities, they should not blame Isaacs. They should blame the Justice Department, which initiated the case during the Bush administration, and the Supreme Court, which established the absurdly subjective test they are now supposed to apply. Will they take seriously Isaacs’ references to Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, and Piero Manzoni, or will they dismiss his artistic name dropping as a desperate attempt to give his masturbation aids a high-minded purpose?
There is a third possibility…they could reject the very notion of sending people to prison for distributing sexual material, no matter how icky, produced by and for adults…AVN correspondent Mark Kernes reports that in his jury instructions [the judge], who had worried aloud about the possibility of nullification while the jurors were outside the courtroom, was “careful to note that even if the jury disagreed with the law, it was still their duty to follow it.” Nonsense. Yes, this is the same obscenity case that was interrupted by the fuss over images on Judge Alex Kozinski’s computer, a controversy that ultimately led to a mistrial…
As it turns out, this one ended in a mistrial as well thanks to two women who refused to convict a man for making movies. This is called “jury nullification”, and it’s a power the Founding Fathers intended juries to have, despite vigorous attempts by the “justice system” to hide and deny that fact. Two mistrials should send a clear message to prosecutors that (at least in Southern California) most people don’t want self-appointed censors telling them what they can see, but power-mad “justice department” officials discarded the prohibition against double jeopardy long ago and may keep trying Isaacs until they achieve the desired result. It’s certainly possible; though social conservatives represent California as Sodom, there are enough anti-porn busybodies there to push through the “condoms in porn” law which will soon drive the lucrative industry from Los Angeles…and one city, nearby Simi Valley, wants to make sure it doesn’t migrate there:
…”The bottom line is we don’t want to be known as the porn capital of the world,” said Mayor Bob Huber, who is one of those pushing for a measure similar to one the L.A. City Council approved in January…Under its proposed law, the city would require producers to hire on-set medical professionals, who would attest to appropriate condom use. At the end of a shoot, the producers would have to send their unedited video to the police department, where employees would scrutinize it…The city’s preemptive strike is pointless, said Diane Duke, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition…”Very little filming is done in Simi Valley, and I doubt that the production studios are planning any increase at all in the area…However, I am amused at the thought of Simi Valley hiring people to sit around and view porn on taxpayer dollars. I wonder what the training for that would look like.”
More laws, more power, more intrusion, more tax money wasted enforcing the whims of control freaks. Westerners have allowed the anti-sex crowd to make them so afraid of mere images that they’ve given governments vast censorship powers. And when such power is handed over to an uncontrolled entity whose chief goals are to grow and consume (more money and more power), this sort of mishap is inevitable:
Reminiscent of the mooo.com screwup in the US, where Homeland Security’s ICE division “accidentally” seized 84,000 sites and plastered them over with a warning graphic about how they’d been seized by the US government for child porn, the Danish police similarly “accidentally” had 8,000 legitimate sites declared as child porn sites that needed to be blocked. Among the sites listed? Google and Facebook. Visitors to those sites…were greeted with the following message (translated, of course): The National High Tech Crime Center of the Danish National Police [NITEC], who assist in investigations into crime on the internet, has informed Siminn Denmark A/S, that the internet page which your browser has tried to get in contact with may contain material which could be regarded as child pornography…Upon the request of The National High Tech Crime Center of the Danish National Police, Siminn Denmark A/S has blocked the access to the internet page.
And people wonder why so many people around the world were so concerned about the threat of something like SOPA — which would make DNS blocking at the ISP level a lot more common…this “accident”…“began when an employee at the police center…placed a list of legitimate sites in the wrong folder…Before [he became] aware of the error, two ISPs retrieved the list of sites”…The fact that just one employee can change the list seems wide open to abuse. And the fact that the list seems somewhat automated beyond that is even more problematic…
Even if you don’t live in Denmark or the US, you still ought to be concerned; the US government has now claimed the right – and has the practical power due to much of the internet’s backbone being located on American soil – to seize any domain ending in .com, .org, .net, .biz, .cc, .tv and .name no matter what country it’s registered and based in. And that means if federal prosecutors want to, they can impose prudish American standards of “obscenity” on the great majority of internet content in the entire world.
One Year Ago Today
“March Miscellanea” reports on a Florida vice squad spokesman who can’t make up his mind, South African police taking revenge against those who protested on International Sex Workers’ Rights Day, and the efforts of Indian prostitutes to get avails laws repealed.
He’ll prolly have to cut a “deal”.
I have a friend who’s a defense attorney, and we were talking about year ago about the Federal Justice Department and how it operates. My friend pointed out to me the fact that once the Justice Department has set its sights on you – it’s just a matter of time before you go down. The Justice Department will bring to bear incredible resources to bring you down once they have it in their mind you need to be taken down. They will work at it for years until they get a case to put you away. If you happen to WIN a victory – that victory only fuels their anger and determination to re-double their efforts to take you down.
Witness Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards. The indictments on him started in early 1985 … and Edwards defeated them successively, each time ridiculing Justice. This was his big mistake though – they kept at it until they got something that stuck in 1998 and put him away for a spell.
It’s the same old story – they charge and indict you – you defeat them. They come back with a different set of charges – you defeat them. Eventually they resort to the “everyman’s a criminal” type cases – and put you away for income tax evasion or something.
My attorney friend told me … “Once Justice is on your “six” – you may as well cut your losses – they won’t give up.”
So I think Isaacs will have to cut a “deal”.
“At the end of a shoot, the producers would have to send their unedited video to the police department, where employees would scrutinize it…”
So how do I get that job?
Probably you just have to be someone who hates sex and is easily offended. (Or if you can fake it you might have a shot.)
Maggie,
there is a long description of the Wiliam Penn case of 1670 and the jury nulification that happened at that time in this book. Pages 53 and 54. I have retyped it if you would like me to quote it. I will put it in a separate post below which you may or may not approve.
If would recommend that any of your readers who truly would like to understand common law, admiralty law, and how the US is now in Admiralty Law read this book. I am well into it now and it is quite a brilliant work.
http://commonlawjurisdiction.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/pied-pipers-of-babylon-verl-k-speer-common-law/
And this is the quote. It goes into the case in quite some detail.
On page 53. 54 you will find.
“Consider the courage of the jury that tried William Penn. Penn and Mead were indicted in 1670 for preaching before an unlawful assembly. (sound familiar?) After heaeing the evidence the jury retired to consider its verdict. Within an hour and a half, eight jurors returned to convict but four refused to return to court until ordered to do so. The jury was threatened by the court and sent back for further deliberations. When they returned they found Penn guilty of speaking at Gracechurch Street but refused to say whether he had been addressing an unlawful assembly. Sent back again, they returned with a verdict of not guilty for Mead and Guilty of preaching to an assembly for Penn. The recorder then addressed them@
“Recorder: Gentlemen, you shall not be dismissed til we have a verdict that the court will accept; and you shall be locked up, without meat, drink, fire, tobacco; you shall not think thus to abuse the court; we shall have a vedict by the help if God, or you shall starve for it.
Penn: My jury, who are my judges, ought not to be thus menaced; their verdict should be free, not compelled; the bench ought to wait upon them, but not forestall them. I do desire that justice may be done me, and that the arbitrary resolves of the bench may not be made the measure of my juries verdict.
Recorder: Stop that prating fellows mouth, and put him out of the court.””
I’m not sure jury nullification is a “right” but it’s certainly a “power” that juries have, and it’s one I support.
But it’s extremely difficult to do it in a coordinated fashion with other jurors. The first time you open your mouth to say … “well the prosecution proved the case but this is a trivial matter and this man shouldn’t have his freedom removed for it” – all it takes is for one juror to pull a “Shockey” (snitch) to the judge and he can have you removed from that jury. He can remove anyone all the way up to the point the verdict is decided.
It’s easy for ONE JUROR (YOU) to “nullify” – but coordinating it with the other jurors without talking about it is a hat trick indeed.
That’s why the women in this jury came out with that hogo bullshit about “art”. You can’t claim the law is stupid, so you have to claim the prosecution didn’t prove its case somehow and proceed from there, 12 Angry Men-style.
Did you see what I did thar with the “Jeremy Shockey” reference? 😛
Actually, I’m only joking on that account because I like Shockey and still do – even if he ratted the Saints out!
Hey Maggie, can you come back home to New Orleans for about a year? Saint’s need a temporary coach.
It shouldn’t be too hard … it’s a “turn-key” operation and they just need someone to crack the whip on these boys!
Krulac,
you are talking about an Admiralty Court. In an Admiralty court the jury is ADVISORY to the judge. They have NO SAY AT ALL. It is all in that book. All the courts you know about are ADMIRALTY courts.
In pre 1066 Common Law courts there were NO JUDGES. Judges are the agents of the king/state to make sure that the decisions go the states way most of the time if not ALL the time.
The subversion of Common Law began right after 1066 in England. Common Law has been subverted so long that few people bother to read about how Common Law worked in England, Ireland and almost ALL “primitive” societies.
By the way. In a Common Law court the jury has TOTAL CONTROL over the outcome as there is NO JUDGE. So the jury has the right to question the LAW as well as the guilt of the party. Indeed, in a Common Law court the jury can find the defendant guilty, can find the law fair and just, and STILL issue a Remedy Instruction of NOTHING should they deem that the circumstances require it.
The golden rule of the Common Law is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.
That means the jurors are to put themselves in the position of the guilty party and create a remedy instruction that they would agree and accept as fair and just if they were the guilty party.
Obviously this means that if a starving man steals some food you do not jail him, you give him a JOB!
In Common Law there are NO JAILs because the law is REMEDIAL. You make amends or you LEAVE. Its that simple.
It is worth reading up on.
British Common Law did not appear until the Middle Ages under the Normans. There was never a time when Jury Only courts existed, even during Saxon times.
Pre 1066 and the Norman Invasion, there was already a set of formal laws set out by the King, plus a whole mess of local traditions and customs, often unwritten.
Courts were at the Hundred level, and presided over by the King’s Reeve and attended by all the important folk, like a town hall meeting.
Above that was a Shire court, presided over by the Shire Reeve (Sheriff), the Ealdorman and the Bishop.
Innocence and guilt was mostly based on the giving of oaths of innocence by the defendant and a specified number of oath supporters.
If that failed to settle matters, the parties to the case could resort to Trial by Ordeal. The main ordeals were Water – both parties were blessed and thrown into water to see who drowned, or Iron – both parties held a red hot iron bar and walked nine feet.
Penalties for the “guilty” were fines (usual), mutilation (rarer) and death (very rare).
Additionally, the Normans introduced Trial by Combat, a mainly Germanic custom. There are records of even divorce cases being settled by combat. (So much for passive medieval damsels.)
maggie,
“Westerners have allowed the anti-sex crowd to make them so afraid of mere images that they’ve given governments vast censorship powers.”
Not only westerners.
http://digitaljournal.com/article/275524
Given my fav#1 comes from the Ukraine I have discussed this with her. She has a 19 year old son. She paid what is for her a FORTUNE for his university fees. He refused to go but lied that he was going. She lost all that money as the uni was not about to give the fees back. We have talked many times about his lack of ambition and lack of willingness to work….and ditto for her brother by the way. She looks at me and how I have worked so hard all my life and she is asking for help with her son. She is at something of a loss as to how to get him to be more like me at that age. A nice compliment by the way.
The other day I said words to the effect.
“Your son knows that if he has a baby it can be taken from him at any time even if he does nothing wrong. He also knows that porn is now illegal. He knows he can be turned into a criminal for looking at a girly magazine.
So the message is clear. He is a third class citizen in his own land. Why the hell WOULD he want to work? And you might note you are not saying ANYTHING about this to your government so you agree with the position your son is a third class citizen. Do you think this is lost on your son?”
I presume plenty of sex workers have sons so this is a very relevant comment for them.
How in the name of all that is good and holy, are the Ukrainians going to police that law!!?
Seriously I have a friend in NSW, Australia and he told me that hardcore porn is technically illegal there, yet nobody bats an eyelid, and the cops certainly don’t give a hoot.
Easy…they will just randomly throw some young men in jail and publicise it to scare the others…just like they do with income taxes. Income taxes are not mandatory in ANY english speaking country. They are voluntary. But every now and then they throw some high profile person in jail, like Wesely Snipes, for not paying something he has no obligation to pay.
Its called tyranny. This is how it is done. It has worked or millenia.
FYI.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2118655/Twelve-men-arrested-dawn-raids-sex-trafficking-gang-24-child-victims.html
Well, that is a suspicious quote from the cops. So these (22 total) girls have been drugged, tortured, and raped and at least SOME don’t consider themselves “victims”? Hmmmmm.
Also – I was posting the other day about “chivalry” and how truly “chivalrous” people don’t “brag” about their heroic actions. Why is it, that the first thing the “chivalrous” police do in these instances is get on the tube, beat their chests in “look-at-me” fashion – which totally pollutes the jury pool? What’s the point of that?
All that said – it could be a very legitimate bust, we’ll see. If this indeed what the cops think it is – the men involved should get a punishment similar to the old English punishment for Treason.
Reminds me of the infamous Simpsons episode in which Marge is campaigning against Itchy and Scratchy (too violent) only to get caught up in the Lovejoy’s campaign to ban “filth” like the nude statue of Michaelangelo.
Then there was a time when Gustav Klmit’s ‘The Kiss’ was seen as obscene.
The law really is an ass.
“It’s filth! It graphically portrays parts of the human body, which, practical as they may be, are evil!” -Helen Lovejoy
Yeeeaaah!
Who defines vulgar right?….I find most advertising to be…and much art these days is so much like advertising, or maybe it simply is advertising…..
There is a movement in the programmer community, led by EFF, to make such “takedowns” no longer possible by “crowdsourcing” the domain name system. Some tools for doing this are already available. Look for them on eff.org.
Maggie, British law merely confirms what you say about pornography being just the opinion of someone in authority.
According to the UK CPS website, porn is defined as :
“An image is pornographic if it is of such a nature that it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal. Whether an image is pornographic or not is an issue for the District Judge or jury to determine simply by looking at the image. It is not a question of the intentions of those who produced the image. Nor is it a question of the sexual arousal of the defendant.”
Note the words “simply by looking at the image”.
And what picture of a scantily clad or naked woman is not meant ultimately “for the purpose of sexual arousal”?
Slightly OT, the neofems might take heart from the fact that an increasing number of men are indeed no longer looking at women as sex objects. In the famous Nana Plaza red light area in Bangkok, more and more of the bars are becoming “Ladyboy” (the locally preferred term which the girls themselves use) only bars, offering very feminine transsexual women (pre-surgery). Numbers of non-gay tourist customers are growing for the ladyboys, whose motto is “We can do anything”, or as one interviewed ladyboy said :
“We can do anything right from the start, and I mean anything! Not the same as a silly lady, “Oh, I cannot, I not like, it not good, it too long, it too fast”. We don’t complain and we can do anything!”
So wives take heart, other women are not going to steal your husbands any more 🙂
Au contraire! The worst of the neofeminists consider drag and transsexualism to be more “objectification of women”, and I’ve even read a few who want them banned so that only genetic women are allowed to dress as women. Can you imagine how cops would behave under such a regime?
Isn’t there something in the “truth in advertising” laws that would prevent neofems from describing themselves as women? (kidding).
Their logic is so strange that you really begin to wonder what actually landed near Area 51. Where are the MIB when you need them?
I’ve often thought that each cop shop ought to have a set budget limit they can spend on catching each type of criminal, depending on charge.(Perhaps murder and kidnapping can have no limit.)
So let’s say we set a maximum of $1000 on catching a hooker. That includes cop hours. Once they reach that limit, they are done for the year, or, they need to go public and explain why it’s so important they catch that person, and why they’ve failed to do so and why everyone ought to pay more taxes so they can continue.
Of course, being cops, they’d fins a way to corrupt and cheat that system.
I remember hearing about a find of ancient texts buried in the Egyptian desert a few years ago. The dominant written material in the hoard? Porn. More of it than anything else.
They are fighting human nature. Good luck on that.
Wow..you think cops are there to catch criminals?
Several times I’ve been summoned for jury duty. Never have I been chosen. I could probably site this blog as something that would so scare prosecutors that I’d never be chosen!
Which is too bad, because I would be fair, and I do know about nullification, but wouldn’t apply it unless I thought that the law was in error.
But of course, THAT just scared off any prosecutor who was still considering me.
I have a great love for the Pre-Raphaelite school of art and was once lucky enough to see an exhibition of Edward Burne-Jones’ work. I bought reproductions of his Pygmalion series and proudly hung them in my home.
Once I noticed a young (16 year old) female cousin staring at them, and assuming that she felt admiration, commented on how beautiful they were, did she know anything about the painter. She shook her head, saying that wasn’t what she thought. What, then? I asked. She said, I wondered why you have pictures of naked people on the wall for everyone to see.
Of course, I also had 4-6 other pictures hanging, all ART, but none others that showed…gasp..nudity. Even the tasteful soft focus nudity of Burne-Jones.
I stared for a moment and said something like..umm..so they’re naked.. They’re still beautiful. And, I mean, everyone has a body, right? Not like it’s a super super SEEKRIT….. sigh..
I’ve got a few Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo posters in my place. Nobody asks me why I have naked people on my walls. Now, in some of them the people aren’t quite naked, but in one or two they are.
The domains could easily be seized from the US government by national governments, simply by mandating that ISPs in their jurisdiction should use their national DNS servers as the root DNS. (Indeed, the domains were hijacked by the US government several years ago in just this manner). But the price of this is utterly fragmenting the internet.
“Even if you don’t live in Denmark or the US, you still ought to be concerned; the US government has now claimed the right – and has the practical power due to much of the internet’s backbone being located on American soil – to seize any domain ending in .com, .org, .net, .biz, .cc, .tv and .name no matter what country it’s registered and based in. And that means if federal prosecutors want to, they can impose prudish American standards of “obscenity” on the great majority of internet content in the entire world.”
Is it any wonder, with this “We are the WorldPolice” attitude of the USA’s political class, that their actions get met with :
“Alluah Akbar! Death to America!”
Is it really that much of shock?
Let me put it this way: None of you, World, have the *right* to interfere with my legitimate vices; you may try to dissuade me, but not use either force of arms, nor force of law; should you do so, you can expect me to retalliate in like manner.
Of course, if my choices cause *true harm* to another person *directly*, they are not vices, they are crimes. That’s a different story. Sexuality isn’t special in that regard.
But then, women are more and more often weaponising sexual behaviour as a control tool. Naturally I find that despicable; it reflects awfully on the true nature of the person doing that.