I’m putting this in GD because although it’s partly an answerable question I’d like to debate the desirability of executing the laws referred to below, if indeed they are still applicable.
I was astonished by this. I thought that all the old US Federal laws about sending pornography through the mail were no longer operative. How is it possible that pornography from American sites thrives so on the web? Have the authorities loosened the definition of obscenity? (Although judging by other paragraphs on that page that is not the case.) Or is it simply a case of non-enforcement of the law as in the marijuana issue?
And this brings me to the debate. If these laws are still in force but not actively pursued, should they be? Personally I’m fine with porn on the net but there is some pretty nasty stuff out there. I’m not talking about child porn over which there shouldn’t really be any debate and which in any case the Feds still go after vigorously but material like torture porn, abuse of women, etc. (Or are the Feds active in those areas too?)
I realize this is all pretty subjective stuff and one guy’s threat to civilization is another guy’s harmless fun but those Federal laws don’t seem to equivocate. Should they be used not to eliminate pornography but to get a handle on its darker elements? Oh and another question. Do individual states battle pornography using their own laws? Could you be arrested in one state for putting up a pic of your wife pleasuring you orally while in another state you’d be fine or is this solely a Federal matter? And if it isn’t shouldn’t it be? Otherwise there would seem to be such an imbalance that an American citizen’s freedom would depend on the lottery of his residence.
Republicans and the Trumpites have recently started on banning Porn ( HuffPo ), but economics means they are not going anywhere. They will continue the policy of passively permitting it.
America is the World’s Arsenal of Pornography, the greatest producer there ever was. 'Americans are the biggest porn lovers in the world, with the longest porn-watching sessions on the planet.’ ( ZeeNews 2013 ). It is a major employer in America, and accounts for a good share of the American economy.
In fact, every year, Hollywood releases roughly 600 movies and makes $10 billion in profit. Porn industry? 13,000 films and close to $15 billion in profit. The porn industry makes more money than Major League Baseball, The National Football League and The NBA combined. It’s clear which sports people prefer the most.
From the US alone, the industry generates roughly $10-12 billion every year. This is astounding when you realize that making a porno or acting in one is not legal in most states of the USA.*
How Big Are They ? 2016
Tedious gender-studies stuff from The Atlantic 2016
Trump may go along with the Republicans in seeming to suppress the industry, but in the end the Constitution will be found to be the greatest defense of the freedom to create and consume Porn. It is a vital part of many millions of Americans’ lives, and may unite them all against the government in open revolution if one of their basic needs is seriously threatened.
The definition of obscenities is laid out in Miller and is included in the link you provided. The short answer is the things that you are astonished by are not obscene.
It’s not just the Trump administration. Many media outlets have been censoring porn for years now. Amazon, Google, Reddit and a bunch of others have been guilty.
I’m not sure if you even bothered reading your own link, but that article is far from “tedious gender-studies stuff.”
It is, in fact, largely about the business and intellectual property and marketing and technology aspects of the porn industry. There’s a little bit near the end about the implications for women, and for changing attitudes to sex and sexuality, but most of the article is not about that.
I guess, when the article described the academic as “Shira Tarrant, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Cal State Long Beach,” you just switched off and didn’t actually read the content?
I shouldn’t think it is a Trump concern, nor of his right-wing buddies, but something the moralistic conservative wing of his Republican allies ( same as Cameron in Britain ) wants to feel strongly about.
According to the HuffPo link your president himself has appeared in porno films, which is one of those things one might consider interrogation material.
Then he did guest-appear in Clinton-Era sitcoms, so even then he liked attention.
I found it very boring, but then I find all business related stuff boring. Porn in itself is also uninteresting as a subject and the people no better than bankers.
I switched off reading her view: “Watching free porn is the equivalent of walking into the grocery store and walking out with food that you’re not paying for.”.
Using the power of the state to stamp out porn would be a failure or succeed at the cost of damaging society, similar to other prohibition efforts. Better to attack porn through grassroots movements and consciousness raising, similar to the anti-cigarette campaign.
It’s not just the Trump administration. Many media outlets have been censoring porn for years now. Amazon, Google, Reddit and a bunch of others have been guilty.
It’s not just the Trump administration. Many media outlets have been censoring porn for years now. Amazon, Google, Reddit and a bunch of others have been guilty.
Pornocalypse is a term used.
[/QUOTE]
This is pretty funny to me because porn is *absurdly* easily available on the internet. If Google and Reddit are censoring it, they're not doing a very good job.
I’m glad to see porn makes more profit than Hollywood because a major slice of Hollywood profits is from explicitly violent movies with no socially redeeming content. Violence is the worst thing in our world, and fing the best. Hooray for fing! And I don’t mean farting, that’s number 2!
However a very good point, in that what the Law calls “obscene” (falling afoul of the Miller Test on all counts) does not necessarily map one to one with every instance of what we commonly call porn (in the inimitable words of Justice Stewart, “I know it when I see it”) but very many people believe it does. Due to the “community standard” of the Miller test, what will get you fined for obscenity in one town won’t even get a second look in another one.
I believe that from there arose a legacy effect – that it just sort of happened that whatever back in the 70s under the Miller rules was deemed OK to sell from behind the newscounter or to show inside adult theatres and on rental VHS tape (where you could control who was your customer) was presumed in the 1990s to be just as legal to put online (where it’s not as easy), and since has expanded and mutated in the wild beyond what anyone expected.
In the early-mid 1980s, during the Reagan administration, efforts like the Meese Commission on the right and the Dworkin-type ultrafeminists on the left tried to “prove” that porn was harmful to society and provoled violence, molestation and rape. Guess what, Mr. and Mrs. Suburban Middle America *liked *their rental tapes, the mainstream commercial porn producers self-policed about some of the rawer variations, and in the end some of the best classic porn dates from the Reagan years.
That said, YES, hardliners do keep seeking to revive the whole notion of using obscenity laws to crack down on regular porn, and they keep making noise about it every so often and I would not be surprised if they did this time around as well. Some current-generation pornsters don’t help themselves, by pushing the envelope a bit far.
Of course, Facebook and Google as private entities can be as prudish as they wish and jump to cancel and ban anything as soon as more than one person complaing about even the existence of a page by a pornstar, that’s a different story.
The financial numbers in the porn biz have always been kind of confusing. At various points in time either the industry OR its detractors have overinflated, the ones to make themselves seem more economically valuable, the others to exaggerate the “threat”. Add how in the 70s and 80s the porn box office was often an exercise in blatant money laundering.
Everything I’ve been reading about the mainstream commercial porn biz points to the makers’ margins and the performers’ paychecks dropping due to web saturation.
