University of Virginia Library

The Senate's Pornographic Public

By Timothy B. Walthall

Last Tuesday the Senate voted
60-5 to reject the Report of the
Commission on Pornography and
Obscenity. The vote must be
heralded as another preposterous
victory in the Congress' long-waged
and losing battle to keep sex out of
the life of the American schoolboy.
But I'm wondering to just what
state of hypocrisy this nation has
evolved.

The damage done to the poor
commission members was irreparable.
The Senators claimed the
commission didn't fulfill their
"mandate" — and, by golly, this
time those wise old moralists were
right! The commission didn't fulfill
the Senate's mandate because, in
good conscience, they couldn't.

The Senate's directive was
clear: bring home a verdict against
and a sentence for those pernicious
promoters of filth. The Senators
bade the commission "after a
thorough study ... to recommend
advisable, appropriate, effective and
constitutional means to deal effectively
with such traffic in obscenity
and pornography."

Nothing New

The commission didn't find anything
new to anyone but the Senate
ostriches. It affirmed that Americans
weren't particularly bothered
by pornography, they had such
trifling matters as Vietnam, the
economy and crime to worry
about; that 80% of adult males have
in their lifetimes been voluntarily
exposed to explicit sexual material,
although "only" 40% have been so
exposed on a regular basis in the
last five years. Armed with such
evidence, the commission recommended,
not more laws, but repeal
of present statutes.

Thus, the commission walked
into a kangaroo court and was
hung. Rather than accept the report
as the result of the honest and
professional work of reasonably intelligent
men, the Senate voted to
deny any complicity in the matter.
The Senators turned the commission
members' minds into "marshmallows"
and their morals into salt.
They cast doubt on the character,
competence and intelligence of the
commission members.

This is the regrettable self-righteousness
that you would expect in
so fluid an area as legislative morality.
Still, it would be interesting to
know just what was going on in our
Senator's birdseed minds as they
reacted with disgust to the findings
of three years and $1 million worth
of research. The fact that it was a
stale Johnson committee must have
been a factor, given the current
trend to repudiate everything Johnsonesque.

Dual Standard

But it goes much deeper. Man, it
seems, subscribes to a dual standard
of public and private morality. Publicly,
there are few among us who
would resist the opportunity to rail
"smut" or "the producers of filth."
Privately, we are wiling to condone
almost any sexual conduct we
can get away with short or rape. As
for pornography, most of us have
better things to ponder than what
kind of pictures our neighbors are
looking at. Through our electoral
process, the Congress represents the
mean of the mean of American life.

As such, it gravitates toward
support of our greatest national
myths. These include those inherited
from Western Religious ethics
— the strongest of which is sexual
suppression. And Congressman
need seldom doubt the support of
public opinion while their cars are
filled only with statements of public
morality. Thus, it was no sure
prise when the Senate rejected finding
so at odds with their image of
American and themselves.

What about the American public,
the distribution around the
mean? Available evidence indicates
widespread sexual activity. Since
World War II, it's been one continuous
baby boom. The rate of population
growth has just recently been
curbed, thanks, not to the Senate
but to the effective distribution of
contraceptive information. From
this, we must perforce conclude
that vast numbers of people are
getting first-hand, sexually explicit
experience, which we all know is
much better than second-hand
pornography.

Copulatory Desire

The fact that the Senate cannot
shout down is that Man's desire to
copulate is second in strength only
to his need to eat. And it follows
that since people can't always have
direct sexual relations, a large number
will settle for the vicarious
experiences provided by pornography.

If the American people were
against pornography Congress
would not need to make laws
against it. People simply wouldn't
buy it. But the fact is that the
consumer demand for sexual material
in this country is quite large.
One need only inspect the volume
and diversity of legally available
prurient material. Sex, it seems, is
as flexible as Man himself and finds
its way into most of his activities.

Perhaps the best indicator of the
lascivious desires of the U.S. consumer
is the media: radio and T.V.
advertising, magazines, paperback
novels and the movies. The advertising
industry has always kept a good
index of what the American people
are thinking.

And here the sexual motif boggles
the mind. In the last decade,
there has been a mammoth proliferation
of sexy young ladies
vying for our attention and, more
importantly, our pocket money. If
John Q. Public didn't want to see
it, it would have died out before
now.

Novel, Not New

The literature of the prurient
novel is not new. But today back
writers are threatening to kill it
with over-exposure. The drugstore
bookstands wallow in a plethora of
poorly-written sex novels. And the
books are there because the masses
of American book consumers
gobble them up faster than the
hacks can serve them.

The best-seller lists are usually
capped by three or four sex hits.
"Naked came the Stranger," the
first corporate attempt to make a
sex novel fail, bounced back with
resounding success. The book's success
gives credence to the
hypothesis that the American public
is culturally poverty-stricken find
actively seeks out the worst available
art form.

In movies, there is often times an
inverse relationship between the
MPAA rating and attendance. The
movie-makers have found that the
infamous "skin flick" needs neither
acting nor a plot to sell. When "I
Am Curious, yellow" finally did
leap onto the American screen, you
couldn't keep this nation of the
original "dirty old man" from
flocking to it. As a result, a
mediocre-to-poor movie seemed as
if it might approach "King Kong"
and "Gone With the Wind" in
popularity. Fortunately, someone
in the crowds finally noticed that
the production was as bare of originality
as the acting was of clothing.

'Playboy'

Of the magazines dealing in this
"legal pornography," "Playboy"
funs loose where "perverts" fear to
tread, there must be something
about this magazine that distinguishes
it from those of the
"smut-peddler." And it doesn't
take the critical observer long to
spot what it is. Simply, it captures
idealized sex.

It helps our clean-cut young
men to remain beholden to the
naive, idolized, puerile sexual conceptions
formed during adolescence.
Young males are reassured
that they need only copulate with
smooth, feline women with big
bosoms. The magazine merely
depicts average American girls
caught in candid poses as they go
about their everyday business.

And its subjects are necessarily
cleaned fish, purged of ugliness.
Gone are public hairs, flat chests,
penises, and sexual aberrances. This
idealized portrayal is generally common
to the other forms of "legal
pornography," and is what insures
them their immunity from legal
sanctions.

Irksome Hypocrisy

This is particularly irksome
hypocrisy on the part of the Senators.
They do not accord equal
treatment o the two, and for all
they know equally harmful, types
of sexual material. Who's to say as
much or more harm is not done by
the suggestive erotica of television
advertisement as by the "hard
core" pornography? This of course
stirs up the question of just what
the hell is pornography anyway?
And the answer is that it's a matter
of taste and shouldn't be legally
defined at all.

So what are our moral little
law-makers to do? Politically, as
always, they will ignore the issue.
They will duck it in favor of
extolling the ever-present virtues of
their favorite subjects, the voters.
But if they continued in the same
vein, the only logical thing they
could do would be to repeal the
American public. More feasibly, it
will be the other way around and
we'll have to wait until the voters
repeal the Senate.