 That's something that she's been talking about quite often in the past as a feminist as someone who cares very much about civil liberties and that is the issue of pornography and is censorship the answer. So here is Joan Kennedy Taylor. Well first of all let me say that the conference announcement listed this as a debate but no one wants to debate and I don't blame them because what American would come to a group called the Free Press Association and say she was against freedom of the press. So I'm going to try to follow Lord Acton's dictum which is that you should make a better case for your opponent than that opponent could make and I'll debate myself. The issue is pornography. In contemporary America it's sometimes hard for a romantic to know where to look. From paperback racks to the drug stores of resort hotels to the controversial billboard that announced I am black and blue from the Rolling Stones to newsstands on Fifth Avenue we are barraged not just with images of nudity and copulation but of beatings, bondage and the sexual exploitation of children. Those with eye trouble appear to see what is playing in the neighborhood movie house at their peril because it's apt to be see the native virgins sacrificed. What's a nice instinct like sex doing in a place like this? That's a psychological question that I can't fully answer except to say that it seems as if one of the appeals of pornography is that it must be wicked. So as our society has become more permissive and labeled most sexually explicit material as not wicked at all the issue of pornography hasn't disappeared but a lot of the pornography publicly available has become kinkier where once the pastoral romance of Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper violated marital and class taboos as well as taboos against sexual description and vulgar language. Now those who need to imagine forbidden indulgences have to seek the images and hustler of women being run through meat grinders. Earlier Michael Grossberg said I was going to talk about is it a problem so perhaps I should pause for a minute just to discuss that issue. There's a two-fold division here that we're talking about. There is on the one hand the wicked kinkier material that I've just described and there is also sexually explicit erotic material and there is a lot of evidence that the market is shifting very very much in favor of the latter kind of material. For instance home videos. Originally almost all home video tapes were x-rated then movies became available on home videos and now x-rated videos are somewhere between five and fifteen percent of the market and that's all and of those only 37 percent are bought by men 32 percent are bought by women and the rest are bought by couples and this shift in the buying population has already influenced the material towards more just explicit sexually arousing heterosexual stuff which does not really in its nature unless you think that sex itself degrades women does not in its nature project a negative image of women. It seems to me that we have to make clear have clear in our minds that there's nothing necessarily wrong with the concept of treating somebody as a sex object as long as this is done with friendliness and affection. What's wrong with the concept of a sex object is when this is combined with an attitude of of dislike and disdain and this is what some of the material and that is available seems to be doing and this is the basis of the feminist argument against a lot of this material. The feminist argument against pornography is that women as a group are being vilified by such images such as women being run through meat grinders which was actually a picture in hustler magazine several years ago just as Jews as a group were vilified by the cartoons depicting them in hostile terms in early Nazi Germany. We know is that better okay we know that the reports of rape wife beating and child abuse have increased in the culture over the same period in which these degrading images of women have appeared with increasing frequency. We may not know the causal relationship if any between violent pornography and violent behavior but if we as a culture look with equanimity on the depiction of the debasement and torture of any group of people aren't we implying that that group is somehow subhuman and deserves such treatment and if this kind of depiction goes on indefinitely without protest even if it's not causing violent action now might it not lead to a sanctioning of violent action as it did in Nazi Germany. Local governments have a tradition of enforcing community standards shouldn't our communities protest the public displays of such offensive materials. Would we allow pictures of men in white hoods hanging terrified blacks or titillating descriptions of Auschwitz from the Nazi point of view to be similarly displayed and sold? In fact a 1952 Supreme Court decision held that statutes making it a crime to defame racial or religious groups are constitutional. The right to utter libel is not considered protected by the First Amendment and Boharney versus Illinois held that libeling an ethnic group is equivalent to libeling an individual and therefore not protected speech if there is a specific statute enacted that makes it a crime to defame the group. Actually this was applied to racial or religious groups. The statutory requirement is because there is no common law concept of group libel. I may make libelous statements about groups that I could be sued for if I made them about a specific individual. That basically is the feminist argument for action. The civil libertarian argument I'm now debating myself would quarrel with the Boharney decision to hold that the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press not just for acceptable material but as Oliver Wendell Holmes once put it freedom for the thought we hate. In the name of freedom of speech Nazis have been allowed to march on the streets of Skokie Illinois books critical of the government are published and any pernicious social or religious doctrine if seriously expressed cannot be suppressed. The Supreme Court didn't directly consider the issue of freedom of speech until 1919 and in that case it lost. In Schenck versus the United States the court unanimously upheld the conviction of socialists who had printed a pamphlet arguing that the draft was unconstitutional and distributed it to men awaiting induction as draftees and this is the case in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said you can't shout fire in the theater and cause a panic that if speech or writing will create a clear and present danger that they will bring about evils that the congress has a right to prevent they are not protected. The history of this doctrine the clear and present danger doctrine goes uphill from then. The clear and present danger concept was later used to strike down convictions of a Jehovah's Witness for breaching the peace by playing an anti-Catholic record in public and a conviction of an unfrocked Catholic priest who made an anti-Semitic speech to an audience of 800 people both on the grounds that any danger was not clear and present. Notice that in both these cases there was not a specific statute forbidding the defamation of a group. It was merely that it was considered that it might cause disturbed the peace cause riots or something of that nature. But the late Justice Hugo Black who sat on the Supreme Court from 1937 to 1971 and held that the words no law in the First Amendment mean no law is credited with shifting the legal discussion about speech from the question of what are the limits to free speech to the question are there any? And gradually the clear and present danger test as well as other tests that the court had applied fell into disuse as far as political and religious and social ideas go. Three categories of speech are still considered exempt from First Amendment protection libel fighting words that is if you swear at somebody and obscenity. A fourth category commercial speech is in a more amorphous position and its position is changing. I won't go into that. There have been two general Supreme Court decisions defining tests to be applied to question the material to determine if it's obscene. In Roth versus United States 1957 the test was whether to the average person applying contemporary community standards the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to purient interest. This caused a lot of problems and the court went through a number of years in which they could not agree and in which they reversed a lot of lower court decisions and finally in Miller versus California in 1973 the Berger court gave a new definition which was they felt fuller and less apt to be misunderstood which was whether the work taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value as well as appealing to purient interest and depicting sexual conduct in a patently offensive way. Both of these would be determined by community values and the case that the present Supreme Court has agreed to hear this term turns on whether it is constitutional also to apply community standards to judge the literary, artistic, political or scientific value of allegedly obscene works. But those who agree with Justice Black that no law means no law do not think that there should be an exception to the First Amendment coverage of written material because of sexual content or because as a number of decisions have held sexual interest was being commercially exploited and commercial interests are not protected. Perhaps the most horrendous of such cases was the 1966 upholding of the conviction of Ralph Ginsburg who went to jail for five years for advertising his publications as pornographic although they were not. The civil libertarian argument in its purest form is that there should be no legal category of obscenity which has always been impossible to define anyway. If I was speaking on behalf of an organization to suppress pornography I would answer by saying that although such organizations have tried so far in vain to have the spirit of the Boharney decision applied to women by getting various communities to pass ordinances declaring that pornography violates women's civil rights by far the most wide speaking and I'm sorry wide sweeping and effective actions that have been taken have been those of boycott. Surely a group like the Free Press Association a national network of journalists committed to individual rights would hold the groups that band together to withhold buying power in order to apply economic pressure in accordance with their values are exercising their property rights. That is what a coalition of feminists and fundamentalists have been doing on a nationwide basis. To quote from an editorial by Marty Zupan in Reason Magazine this summer why was it perfectly okay even virtuous for grocery stores to refuse to stock non-union grapes and lettuce in response to pressure from Cesar Chavez and his followers but it's not at all okay. It's downright un-American for convenience stores to pull playboy and penthouse from their shelves in response to pressure from Jerry Falwell and his followers. Good question. There's a partial answer to that question but it's not a good one nor is it one that journalists should support. It rests in the increasingly common assumption that the First Amendment guarantees something to the reader as well as to the writer. Not only are we free to write and publish this theory goes but we should have access to the ideas that we may value. This is the assumption or one of the assumptions behind the fairness doctrine in television and radio and is also behind the increasing pressure which some of you may be familiar with to force newspapers to grant equal time to the opinions of those that they disagree with. This is not a rights-oriented view of the First Amendment. Certainly not a prior property rights view of newspaper owners. It is the view that we allow diversity of opinion not because people have the right to express ideas but because society benefits from a marketplace of ideas. The distinction may not seem important until the time comes when the ideas that went out in the marketplace seem to some to be potentially harmful to society. Then those who hold the social value view of speech will want them suppressed. So if much pornography is vulgar, demeaning, and hostile to women and if boycott is a proper way of trying to affect one's values, are we talking about censorship at all? Censorship is government action, not private action no matter how effective. Well there is some government action lurking in the wings here. First of all there's the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography and its letters to publishers, bookstores, and convenience stores. Time magazine pointed out that more than 10,000 stores across the country including such mammoth chains as 7-Eleven and Right Aid have removed Playboy and Penthouse from their shelves, many of them acting after receiving a letter from the Mies Commission suggesting that they might be cited for distributing pornography. The letter signed by the Commission's Director told the recipients that they had been accused by an unnamed witness, offered a chance to rebut the accusation, and warned that refusal to reply would be interpreted as acquiescence to the charges. A federal district judge later ordered the Commission to retract this implied threat calling it a prior restraint on speech. An October article in The New York Times says that in the past 18 months more than 17,000 stores have stopped carrying sex magazines. About half of these stores succumb to pressure including picketing from an unlikely combination of conservatives and feminists who feel that pornography degrades women. The rest of the stores fell into line after they got a letter last February from the Mies Commission warning that they might be named in the panel's report. So the estimate is that the boycott produced half the effect and government threats did the rest. The Mies Commission report is having indirect effects as well. It has created a climate of opinion in which local police action against publications considered questionable is stepping up. Times cites Steve Holman, Director of Citizens Concerned for Community Values of Greater Cincinnati, as saying that the report quote will give momentum nationwide to obscenity law enforcement, end of quote. The report called for more legal action against those publications that can be considered legally obscene and also called for citizen action against those publications that are not legally obscene such as Playboy and Plant House. In this new climate of opinion, the definition of obscenity is being stretched out of recognition. It was never very good to begin with, but consider this. In June, the City Council of Tyler, Texas passed an anti obscenity statute ordering retailers to put all magazines that featured pictorial nudity behind the counter in plain brown wrappers. Now you must understand many magazines rely very heavily on so-called impulse stales in stores or new stands. Penthouse, for instance, gets 96% of its sales that way. So you can understand that the editors of Cosmopolitan were concerned when policemen in Tyler began ordering stores to put the July Cosmo in plain brown wrappers because of an illustrated story on cosmetic surgery that included before and after photos of breast surgery and tummy tucks. There was a legal controversy. Cosmopolitan won, but as a side effect, at least one chain of convenience stores, Brookshire food stores, according to Savvy Magazine, pulled the July Cosmo from all its stores, not just those in Tyler, and also decided to permanently discontinue carrying the magazine. A decision to remove offending material because of police action is hardly a response to Boycott. The Boycott front itself is also moving more towards the mainstream and what must be considered overreaction or maybe it's not. The real targets are the hard core stuff, but they aren't sold in convenience stores and other places that women pad for eyes. They're sold in adult bookstores. So the Boycotts are organized against non-obscene targets because that's where they can be effective. In May, an issue of American photographer was pulled off some racks in Kansas because of a photo that showed a woman's breast. This photo had previously been run in town and country. Walmart stores stopped selling all rock and roll and teen magazines in all of their stores after Jimmy Swaggart criticized them. Magazine distributors have reported complaints about the annual swimsuit issue of sports illustrated. Good housekeeping got, quote, numerous complaints, unquote, for running a jockey shorts ad. The University of Wisconsin Union, attacked for carrying Playboy and Penthouse, discontinued 67 other magazines, including Vogue. The company that runs 850 magic markets in 14 states stopped selling Penthouse, Wee and Gallery last spring as a result of pressure. Shortly thereafter, a magic market in Tampa was threatened by pickets from the local chapter of the National Federation for Decency who wanted the store also to remove national lampoon and mad. Why? Because those magazines promote rebellion against parental authority. Are these the bedfellows that feminists want to choose in this magazine fight? Economic Boycott is a powerful tool, but it has unexpected side effects. The Cosmopolitan Plastic Surgery story reminds me of the fracas a couple of years ago, when Ms. Magazine was banned by some public school libraries because it ran an article against pornography that authorities thought was itself pornographic. If feminists are going to strengthen the clout of fundamentalist forces, they can expect three results. First, the one I just discussed, that this clout will be used to try to ban discussions that feminists may not want to ban, like rebellion against parental authority. Second, that they are going to economically harm magazine distributors who may not be able to carry the variety of publications that they have in the past. Magazine distributors already are losing up to a million dollars a month in revenues just from the drop in Playboy and Penthouse sales. Some newsstands that have dropped these high-volume magazines may find themselves no longer supplied with any magazines, as distributors cut back to reflect lower profit margins. Will Playboy and Penthouse go out of business? No. They may cut down on the literary content of the magazines, which are now about the highest-paying market for serious fiction and non-fiction, but they are already planning to diversify into x-rated videotapes. The third effect of joining with the religious right in these boycotts may be to take us back in history. The laws against obscenity rely, as I mentioned before, on prejudice against commercial activity. The federal government got into the act in the first place through the power to run a postal service and the power to establish customs regulations. Until this century, obscenity laws were concerned not primarily with books, but with conduct and with articles of commerce. The first effective anti-obscenity federal statute was the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it a crime to mail an obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy, or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance, or to inform someone through the mails where such illegal objects may be obtained directly or indirectly through a written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind. It was stretched to include books, but from the time of its passage it was enforced against contraceptive devices and contraceptive information. Anthony Comstock, who designed the law and even worked as an unsalaried postal inspector in order to enforce it, entrapped doctors and birth control advocates by writing letters claiming to be a desperate woman whose life would be endangered by childbirth. According to an article in Playboy in 1976, quote, in 1913 he boasted of having convicted some 3600 persons and of having driven at least 15 to suicide, unquote. The religious right campaigns not only against pornography, but against abortion and for at the very least limits on birth control. Do those of us who criticize hardcore pornography want to run the risk of a move to revive the original meaning of the Comstock Act, which is still on the books? Those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it. We all have an undoubted right to express our values in speech and through economic action, but we had better make sure that that is what we are doing. The combination of letters on Justice Department stationery and economic boycott has created a situation for two magazines, Playboy and Penthouse, that has drastically affected their circulations, has changed their advertising base, has affected the distribution of all magazines because they were among the most widely distributed and profitable magazines in the country and may have given a badly needed boost to the diminishing market for X-rated videos. That will at least get sexual material off the streets and into the hall. But Playboy and Penthouse may be easy targets, but they are not the real targets. No one thinks that they are pornographic, not the courts, not the Mies Commission, and not even most feminists. As an article in Savvy pointed out, a trip to a well-stocked magazine rack is all it takes to realize that Playboy and Penthouse, with their scantily-clad women and provocative poses, are pretty mild stuff. They hardly represent the cutting edge of what's available in sexually explicit material. The real target is not sold in stores. Feminists fear that a hostile and degrading attitude towards women does not violate community standards. That it is part of community standards. We want to change souls, which is a worthy and important cause. But since we have not yet succeeded in doing that, some of us are settling for destroying businesses instead.