I’ve seen several stories over the last few months which seem to indicate that the feds are putting forth an effort to crack down on the more, shall we say, “aesthetically displeasing” forms of pornography.
My question is, why are they doing this? The effort isn’t getting alot of mainstream publicity, so it seems publicity isn’t the point. But if that’s not the point, then what is it?
I’m not arguing, by the way, that they shouldn’t do this. Nor am I saying it’s good that they are. I’m not debating the merits of the policy. I’m just asking–why are they doing it? Why now? Who’s getting what out of this?
I remember this being a big point with Ashcroft after becoming AG, but with the War on Terror kicking off I think that the adminsitration got a bit sidetracked. There were all sorts of worrying articles in Playboy and Hustler around that time.
Maybe this is a signal that they’re about ready to wrap up the WOT and get back to the War on Liberty.
While I have serious doubt that “Toilet Man 6” is a film whose loss will deeply harm American culture, the answer to your question is simple: we have censorship because Republicans are in office. Republicans=censorship, it is as simple as that. Nothing complex about it.
That said, I don’t think you’re going to see a groundswell of public support for “Toilet Man 6.” As long as the Feds are canny about whom they prosecute, and they’ve certainly been “canny” about Toilet Man 6, they’ll likely be able to operate with little publicity.
Frankly, I think far more damage to our culture is being done to Visa and Paypal’s very very successful attempts to snuff out mom & pop pornographers by denying them any venues for getting paid. The small-time porn operations have often been milder, gentler stuff, and have tended to have a humanizing effect on porn. This, too, gets little publicity outside the sex industry, and not much there, as the attitude of the big players is generally “good riddance”. It’s a very short-sighted attitude, as without the mom and pop guys as cover, the big porn guys are increasingly isolated, and hence, better targets.
On the internet porn is a billion dollar industry. Somewhere ,someone must like it. How do you stop anything that huge. They can keep their moral decisions to themselves. It is posturing and pandering to the base they think is for it.
The feds have been doing this ever since Bush came into office. It’s not a new thing. I saw reports on the Smoking Gun from the beginning of Bush’s term about the crackdown on this type of porn. For some reason, it usually involves scat. Or perhaps the Smoking Gun just likes to focus on that sort of thing (for good reason, the descriptions in the affidavit are pretty funny in a sick sort of way. I can just imagine an FBI agent sitting down watchiing his scat video writing dow all the action. Great use of our taxpayer dollars).
But as I said, it doesn’t seem like the point of this activity involves publicity. I have to search to find stories about this. That indicates to me that this isn’t being done for election purposes, at least not directly.
Maybe there’s some auditing going on behind the scenes? Some bean-counters say they’ve put in X hours and made Y arrests. If all they’ve been doing is fighting teh War on Terror, X is a really big number and Y is actually pretty dang small. They’ve gotten a lot of flack for how they’ve gone about coming up with those numbers.
On the other hand, if they say “Well, we also put in T hours hunting PORNOGRAPHERS, and we have U arrests,” they don’t catch quite so much flack for that, and some people are willing to cut them a little slack on their numbers?
They are doing this because they have to be seen doing something to appease their religious-right constituency. They are focusing on stuff like Toilet Man 6 because it appeals to a very small niche market of consumers, most of whom, even in this day and age, would be too embarrassed to complain publicly about losing access to their brand of fetish porn. If they tried cracking down on Penthouse or Hustler, OTOH . . . Well, they wouldn’t try.
