(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

The Boston Herald lists a number of cases that are causing lawmakers to consider legislation. These include “a twisted online posting offering sex with a ‘cognitively impaired’ virgin”, “a pair of caretakers who took their disabled boarder on a ’state-to-state party,’ taking sexual photos along the way,” and “a mentally retarded woman [who] had pornographic pictures taken of her and posted on the Internet by relatives.” These cases hardly dovetail into a single category of activity prohitibable by law. The first doesn’t involve pornography at all. The other two raise a lot of questions. Are laws prohibiting pornography necessary when there are already laws prohibiting assault? Are crimes against disabled people increasing in frequency or in visibility? There is a big difference. In other words, are these crimes really more common? Or are they simply more public? It used to be that, if you were joyriding with a disabled boarder and taking pornographic polaroids, you didn’t have internet groups to share them with.

After alarming everyone with its cases of the disabled and abused, the Boston Herald buries at the end of its story a quote by civil rights attorney Harvey Silvergate. He claims that this legislation is “blatant censorship,” “the latest in a long effort to broaden the definition of obscenity… We’ve already got (laws) against coercion. Why is that not adequate?” Those are excellent questions from a man whose forthcoming book, Three Felonies a Day, argues that “federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition [...] prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior.” To be sure, nobody is saying that abusing the disabled or elderly is innocuous. But do crimes that already qualify as abuse need to have additional obscenity charges tacked onto them just because they involve a camera?

It’s sad to think of all that x-rated celluloid going up in flames. There are so many things that could have been done with it — donate it to the Museum of Sex, digitize it and start a retro porn site, auction it to collectors of rare porn films (they exist). There may well have been thousands of dollars — even tens of thousands of dollars — of rare booty in that bonfire. Why waste it?

Of course, as the saying goes, “one man’s poison, signior, is another’s meat or drink.” And vice versa. The monetary value of old film stock may mean less to a religious institution than the sacrificial value of seeing it going up in smoke. But how come nobody cares when religious folk burn up pornography? If pornographers were to burn 100 bibles in an equally public display of contempt, there would no doubt be an uproar.

It’s an axiom. Nearly every male writer in the history of literature masturbated. Probably a good number of female writers too. Shakespeare? A wanker. James Joyce? Pulled his pud. Author of the Bible? Yeah, probably him too, whoever he (she / they) was. Should scholars be surprised that a twenty-something-year-old Kafka enjoyed a little pornographic stimulation now and then? No.

It’s hard to see why James Hawes’ book, Excavating Kafka, has created such a furor. In recent years there has been a movement to humanize Kafka anyway. Louis Begley’s 2008 biography, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, has also been accused of considering its subject from a familiar or even insolent vantage point. Furthermore, Hawes makes a good point. Kafka has been microanalyzed by scholars for the last fifty years. Seemingly every nook and cranny of his psyche has been put under the spotlight. How is it that this incredible thoroughness has hitherto excluded any consideration of the fact that Kafka subscribed to a magazine whose illustrations included a “hedgehog-style creature performing fellatio?” Somehow it makes you consider a story such as “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” in a different light.

Evidently it’s all a tempest in an academic teapot. Kafka’s taste in porn is interesting to consider, but it would be of even more interest were porn to develop a taste for Kafka. Imagine the possibilities for a Kafkaesque pornography — people turning into bugs while they fuck…

Here is a non-pornographic picture of Ms. Spraggs. Here is another. Here is a blurry grab of the fetish site on which she appears.

Ms. Spraggs’ former partner suspects that this is all the work of a disgruntled admirer. He may well be right. However, there is a larger issue at play. Identity theft has proliferated in recent years, and clearly there is now another sort on the rise: appearance theft. It used to be that only celebrities had to worry about it, as when an advertiser would make unauthorized use of their image to sponsor a product. But nowadays the appearance of a “regular” person can be valuable too. Just think about all the amateur porn floating around out there. Appearances that seem authentic or genuine can have tremendous appeal. Why wouldn’t unethical webmasters start skimming real photos from social networking sites to entice users to join their amateur porn sites, their meet-a-fuck-buddy sites, and so on?

Some have criticized Ms. Spraggs for taking her fight to the media. After all, how many people are going to make the slightest connection between that random image on a web site and the real person to whom the appearance belongs? Not many. But evidently that is a risk Ms. Spraggs feels she can’t take. What if the person who posted the images also writes that the young mother is willing to engage in orgies with kids? She doesn’t want to risk having her children taken away by some government agency. In that sense, taking her fight to the media is the smartest thing she could have done. It publicly discredits the stolen images and reassociates her appearance with the “real” her.

Finally, let the incident serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who posts images — of any sort — online. If you aren’t comfortable with them being grabbed, copied, repurposed, recontextualized, then don’t put them online.

While a number of news outlets carried the story about the pornmobile, none had any images of the display inside the car. One video shows a naughty playing card with a bible visible in the background, but that’s about as raunchy as the vehicle gets once the police have denuded it of evidence. It would be helpful to know if the vehicle — and the porn — was really in sight of any children. If so, people may have grounds for complaint. (But rather than call the cops, couldn’t they have simply asked the guy to be more discreet with his adult-entertainment stash?) If not, then the whole thing is way overblown. If you’re an adult and you’re offended by the sight of the guy’s porn, then don’t look into his car.

That’s the Occam’s Razor explanation of the whole thing. In a way it’s too bad, because it would be much more interesting if there were more to it — if, say, the guy really did get off somehow by arranging little deviant tableaus of porn in his car. You could imagine him placing the naked Barbie — maybe he has a prototype of the forthcoming Fetish Barbie? — amidst this display, adding a devotional air and a note of contrast by placing the bible nearby, then hanging a wireless surveillance camera in a nearby tree to record the reactions of people passing by… It could be an appealing setup to the right perv. But still you’d have to wonder: is it his perversion to arrange the tableau? Or the voyeurism of strangers to pay the least attention to it?

(Thanks to “Chris Finch” for the link.)

Herbert Hoover once promised Americans a “chicken in every pot.” Nowadays they don’t want chicken. They want every computer to be loaded with creampies and cumfarts. Clearly times have changed. Recently food prices have risen. Gas prices have skyrocketed. The real estate market is collapsing. The economy is a mess. But people aren’t worried about missing a meal or a mortgage payment. They’re worried about stocking up on dwarf sex videos.

In a way, it all makes perfect sense. Porn provides immediate bang for your buck. And it’s a sure thing. If you buy a share of stock for a hundred dollars, you might just be pissing it down the drain. But if you spend a few dollars on Porn’s Most Outrageous Outtakes 2, you know more or less what you’re getting: wank fodder. From that vantage point, porn is money well spent. It presents little risk and probable pleasure. And that’s why people — especially the poorest — so often spend their money on sex, drugs, and alcohol. In the uncertain world they inhabit, these things are guaranteed to provide a return on investment.

When you think about it, the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 constitutes a mass experiment in behavioral economics. It poses the question: What happens when you give some three hundred million people a sudden windfall of three hundred dollars each? And now we know the answer: they stimulate themselves.

Hi PervScan dude…

A new law is being passed in the UK on 8 May 2008 that bans “violent and extreme pornography.” Now at first you might think, “Good! We’ll stick that sort of stuff on the same list as child porn and snuff etc.” but once you read the article you realise that “pornographic material which depicts necrophilia, bestiality or violence that is life threatening or likely to result in serious injury to the anus, breasts or genitals has no place in a modern society and should not be tolerated,” says a spokeswoman for the ministry of justice.

Depicts?

If the acts being carried out are real i.e. a real rape, a dude screwing a real corpse etc, then of course the authorities should intervine. But if pornography is made by a legitimate studio, with paid actors, who “act” and use special effects and plot etc to drive a story, then to watch it would be a crime?!?!

I’ve seen Hollywood blockbuster films with major stars that have scenes that would turn you onto a criminal if you still fucking own them? Rape scene from The Accused anyone? Boxing Helena? A Clockwork Orange?

I understand why they are introducing the law, as they think that if people watch violent porn, then they will act out in real life what they have seen and what fuels their desire… But what people should be focusing on in my opinion is what created the desire in the first place. I would think most of these people harbour a fetish for violent sex and seek this material out. I don’t belive people accidently come across violent porn and then become addicted to it, and then go on to act it out.

In fact apart from one case i’m aware of (the Graham Coutts case), i’ve never seen violent porn mentioned as a catalyst for a violent sex crime.

I think more murder and sex crime has been commited by people devoted to the bible/religious causes then pornography! (Just type “priest” and “rape” together in google and search…) But I dont see anyone in any hurry to outlaw the Bible or priests or catholics etc.

And just to finish off, I’m in no way a champion for keeping violent porn on the shelves or internet, my cup of tea is nice fit lasses with lush round bums all oiled up… oh yeah!!, I just think that when censorship or a ban comes into play, then who are the people making the laws and how in touch are they with the real world? And where does it end?

Amen, Chad. The principle behind the law is monkey see monkey do. But if people really acted out the things they see in movies and read in books, you’d have to outlaw nearly every “pernicious influence” except, uh, hell… What would be left to read? Math books? Here’s a prediction. If there were nothing left in the world to read but math books, people would learn to apply numbers to their basest urges. Calculus can be a dangerous weapon in the hands of anyone trying to plot the trajectory of a bomb. And if a rapist had no language other than trigonometry, he would dream of his evil deeds in functions and formulae.

(Thanks for the link to Geekspace, who wrote: “think this is rather at home at pervscan. only in utah. again.”)

At first blush this wasn’t such an interesting story. It seemed like just another episode in which some do-gooder hypocrite was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Such tales have become so common that a truly right-minded person would have to give second thought to undertaking any formal religious education. Becoming a priest, rabbi, or imam is practically a sure way nowadays to end up committing a sex crime.

But you haven’t heard the whole story yet. This is where it gets even more interesting:

Thompson formerly operated Clean Flix — a business in Orem that edited feature films to remove or alter conduct deemed inappropriate for children or discriminating movie-goers. The store closed in December after threats of legal action from Hollywood studios.

The booking documents state Thompson told the 14-year-olds that his film sanitizing business was a cover for a pornography studio. He asked the girls if they would participate in making a porn movie, but they refused, the documents state.

Police found a “large quantity” of pornographic movies inside the business, along with a keg of beer, painkillers and two cameras hooked up to a television. Thompson told police he didn’t know the teenagers were under 18 or that they were paid for sex. He said pornography found at the business was for “personal use,” according to the documents.

His film sanitizing business was really a cover for a pornography studio? Good God. This man isn’t a hypocrite. He’s a genius! A perverted genius! He would take the hard-earned money of people so prudish that they couldn’t withstand a PG film — then he would turn around and give some small fraction of it (a mere $20!) to their daughters for blowjobs. That’s rich, that’s really rich.

To the extent that this is a logical extension of reality tv programming, there is nothing very remarkable about Big Sister. The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé once said that the world exists only to end up in a book, and reality tv has simply updated the assertion: the world exists only to end up on screen. Sex, cooking, travel, the clipping of toenails — it’s all fodder for the camera.

From the vantage point of prostitution, however, Big Sister is a remarkable development. Just think of it. For thousands of years brothels have sold sex. Now Big Sister is giving it away. Or is it? The women who work at Big Sister still sell their bodies for sex, and Big Sister still finds a way to profit from it. The innovation is that Big Sister no longer sells women but rather imagery of women and their clients. In other words, Big Sister makes its money not by catering simply to lust but to a perverse variant of it: voyeurism.

As a business idea, it’s brilliant. However, there are clearly limitations to how far it can go. There will always be men willing to trade their anonymity for free sex, and there will always be women who want or need to engage in sex work. But how many subscribers does Big Sister need to make the whole thing profitable? As the web is glutted with porn, will there always be a sufficient number to cover the costs (which, between the workers, the technology, and the location, must be significant)? Or will Big Sister and the imitators it will inevitably spawn be forced to turn to increasingly melodramatic tactics to attract subscribers? You can imagine variants where the “free brothel” gimmick becomes something else — a farm where bestialists can have free access to a variety of animals, a charnel house where necrophiles can molest all the cadavers they want, provided only that they do it on camera.

Mr. Saunders looks rather like a pharmacist who, when handing you your prescription, lets his hand linger too long on yours. When you walk away, you feel stained by the touch. Probably his victims felt the same way when they realized he’d been secretly taping them. He has eyes that could give a girl cooties.

But even if he is a creep, there is no legal reason for the city of San Rafael to impound his porn. Evidently he had about $10,000 invested in legally acquired visual stimulation. If authorities are refusing to return it, the likely reason is that they have “lost” the stuff. They’ll blame databases or warehouse facilities when really there is free porn drifting back to the homes of bailiffs, transcribers, and legal clerks. The city will end up having to buy him a new porn collection. That will make the taxpayers happy.

Meanwhile you have to wonder about the argument made by Mr. Saunders’ lawyer. If the guy’s watching his porn, the lawyer argued, he won’t be out there peeping in windows. On one hand, that’s ridiculous. The guy had all that porn in his possession when he committed his crimes, so obviously the porn did not distract him from his voyeurism. On the other hand, it has a sensible ring to it. If you deprive the guy of all his porn, he’ll probably be more desperate for stimulation and thus more inclined to reoffend. Give him back his porn and maybe he’ll be satisfied, at least for a while.

Of course, this line of thinking also opens up a more general question: can pornography work as a surrogate to drain the danger from deviant impulses? If so, should sex criminals be furnished with free porn in order to keep them from reoffending? After all, heroin addicts are sent to methadone clinics. Should sex criminals be sent to porn clinics?