Because I'm always looking out for you....
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Is Your Porn Safe?
Lock up your daughters and hide your smut, John Ashcroft is on the anti-sex warpath, again By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
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Can you hear the outcry? Can you feel the snippy puritanical heat?
Can you feel John Ashcroft's hot, predatory breath bearing down on your life and your box of vibrators and your adult DVD collection and snatching away your copy of "Weapons of A-- Destruction #2" and smacking you across the face with a Bible, all before skipping off to the dungeon to feed the flying monkeys?
Because while 9/11 and the process of gleefully decimating your civil liberties via the USA Patriot Act may have delayed him a few years, Ashcroft & Co. is back on the anti-porn warpath, hell-bent on slashing and burning its way through the porn industry like a priest through an all-male boarding school -- oh wait, bad analogy -- like a hot knife through butter -- nope, not that, either -- like a Halliburton exec through Baghdad -- there, that's more like it -- as the U.S. Justice Department sets its sights on punishing the sex industry and eradicating porn and making the world safe for uptight danceless ultra-pious nondrinking white men once and for all.
This is the agenda. This is
the renewed battle cry. The $10 billion porn industry is out of control, they say, and nothing -- not the HBO's fabulous late-night "Real Sex" series, not flirty juicy strip clubs, not your copy of "Bend Over Boyfriend," is safe from prosecution. Hey, it's just like the Taliban, only with more references to Hustler and fellatio!
What, too extreme? Not by much. Ashcroft already has a 32-person task force hard at work on the crackdown, a group of increasingly miserable, sexually benumbed guys who sit around for 10 hours a day watching porn videos and surfing porn Web sites and trolling for porn pictures and lurking in porn chat rooms and gathering huge lists and logs and databases of prosecutable material. Talk about too much of a good thing.
And these poor saps, they are working day and night and spending millions of your tax dollars to recategorize everything in the delicious smut landscape as potentially illegal, essentially labeling anything with an exposed penis and open-mouthed moan as categorically punishable, prosecutable and sinful.
And why? Why now? Because it's an election year, silly. And the Christian Right that put BushCo in office is still pissy about the Texas sodomy thing and the same-sex-marriage thing and the fact that more than 1 million radiant unstoppable women marched in D.C. just a few days back, demanding that BushCo and his pious Christian lizards back the hell away from their reproductive rights, or else.
So it is with the complicit blessing of Bush, and with the outright gushing blessing of the sanctimonious Right (read: the people who spend all day ranting against the evil of sex and debauchery and all night posing as StiffLover12 in AOL's Hot Shaved Bikers chat room), that Ashcroft is launching his attack. After all, what better way to lube the gears of the conservative steamroller than to promise to crack down on all those copies of, say, "Tushy Heaven?" The born-agains eat that stuff up.
The porn biz, meanwhile, is all too aware of Ashcroft's recent promise to the House Judiciary Committee to really nail obscenity. Articles and red flags and ripples of paranoia ran through the industry like a bad acid trip not three years ago, when Ashcroft poured oil over his feet to anoint himself the protector of all things dry and crusty and sexless and flaccid. The biz was steeling itself for an onslaught of lawsuits and arrests and gruesome bloody public flayings not seen since the Salem witch trials. Or "The Passion of the Christ." Whichever.
It didn't happen. For the porn world, 9/11 was the mixed blessing to end all mixed blessings. The tragedy basically forced Ashcroft to set aside his antiporn crusade and instead sent him into a dilirious tizzy of antiterrorism lawmaking and cracking down on innocent immigrants and your rights to e-mail your mother without the FBI recording everything.
But no more. Ashcroft is hungry for smut. He is hell-bent on reversing the Clinton-era approach to porn, wherein Janet Reno's Justice Department was instructed to leave the flourishing mainstream adult industry alone and focus on the true abusers, the kiddie porn and incest porn and anything at all having to do with margarine and goats. Sort of like leaving innocuous pot smokers alone and punishing the guys who deal heroin to 5-year-olds.
Johnny is, in effect, going after the pot smokers. All of them. He is going after everyone in the entire sex industry, because everyone offends him, because this is a man who doesn't believe in dancing. Or caffeine. Or wine. So you can imagine his threshold for wet sticky bliss. Or, better yet, maybe you shouldn't.
Let's be clear. The porn industry is far from pure and gentle and innocent, far from undeserving of any scrutiny or persecution. It's often disgusting and degrading and full of drugs and exploitation and bad boob jobs and Botox and Viagra and inadequate oral sex and fake orgasms and awful scripts and really bad lighting. You know, just like Hollywood. Or politics.
Fact is, given the current laws, the porn biz is probably the least corrupt and least abusive of any of the major entertainment media. Show me an "exploited" porn star, and I'll show you 1,000 waxed buffed puffed tucked liposuctioned collagen-injected nose-jobbed cheek-implanted bleach-toothed Vicodin-addicted anorexic bulimic bipolar Hollywood actresses with $100-per-week Marlboro habits and $200-per-hour psychiatrists, each and every one desperate to land a lousy Pringles commercial to pay for their weekly spray-on tans.
But here is the ironic kicker: Comcast. Disney. Viacom. All the big conservative pro-Bush media conglomerates and CEOs who just so happen to be making a fortune selling hardcore porn, via video rights and chat rooms and cable subscriptions, to Americans of every gender and political party and religious affiliation and state legislature.
And these execs, they have friends. In high, conservative places. And guess what they all value far more than sanctimonious religious puling and Ashcroft's antisex crusade? Hint: It's green and rhymes with "honey," and politicians worship it like sharks crave whale gristle.
Upshot: Your porn is safe. Mostly. Ashcroft will file his suits and blare out his headlines and make many loud Bible-thumping sounds, the politicians will scowl and the never-ending cry will continue to wail right through November: "Who -- pray, who -- will save the children?" (My God but children need a lot of saving these days, don't they? The poor dears. It's amazing they're not all depressed and rebellious and forced by their parents to become addicted to prescription meds. Oh wait).
It is, of course, all one big vote-getting sham, with Ashcroft as the earnest, scowling dupe. And it will all be over soon enough. After November, "the children" will become an instant afterthought. The election will be over and the antiporn battle cry will subside and the politicians can get back to doing what they do best: patriotic, flag-wavin', well-lubed hypocrisy.
And a wary, eternally sex-addicted nation can get back to doing what it does best: watchin' smut, maintaining some semblance of perspective, and happily ignoring the politicians.
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