In a nutshell, the answer's not clear yet. While the 80's pitted a conservative administration against the adult movie industry in a battle over obscenity, Clinton's liberal reign of the 90's ushered the porn business into a period of unprecedented, explosive growth. Thanks to Slick Willie's mostly hands-off approach to obscenity prosecutions, Porn Valley became the Wild, Wild West of sex. Just as the internet was growing exponentially, the sex industry, faced with unbridled and uncensored competition online and no longer hobbled by the looming threat of obscenity busts, became increasingly more extreme. From sex stunts ("The World's Biggest Gang Bang" series, in which one woman has sex with over 100 men) to freak shows ("American Bukkake," in which as many as 100 men masturbate onto the face of one kneeling woman) to the truly hardcore ("Rough Sex," in which women were physically assaulted and which was subsequently pulled from the shelves), porn took sex to the outer limits.
As the century turned, the LAPD attempted an extreme porn crackdown that went nowhere. The Bush administration's early attempts to crackdown on obscenity were derailed when 9/11 made it clear pornographers were no longer America's Public Enemy No. 1. By 2005, Ashcroft was out and Gonzales was in, and the new attorney general took it upon himself to refocus government efforts on obscenity related busts. That year saw the formation of the DoJ's Obscenity Prosecution Task Force and the formation of the FBI's Adult Obscenity Squad.
But Gonzales, the OPTF, and the AOS found their task was more complicated than they'd expected. OPTF director Brent Ward discovered state US attorneys were disinclined to spend their time and budgets on hard to win obscenity cases, a tug-of-war that played a part in the US attorneys firings scandal. A year ago, the OPTF's first at bat in a Phoenix, Arizona, courtroom saw the US government go up against a pornographer best known for producing bukkake videos and resulted in the pornographer, Mike Leonard Norton, aka Jeff Mike, aka Jeff Steward, slipping out of the government's grasp on what amounted to a technicality. It was an embarrassment. While the feds won their case against Max Hardcore in a Tampa, Florida, courtroom this October, and 2009 is slated to see the Extreme Associates retrial and the likely trial of John "The Buttman" Stagliano, it remains to be seen what Obama's attorney general pick, Eric Holder, will do when it comes to porn.
Holder, a former DC judge, US attorney, deputy attorney general to Janet Reno during Clinton's tenure, and Obama's current senior legal advisor, is a bit of a mixed bag on free speech matters. Holder's best-known public statement on obscenity dates back to 1998, when the then deputy attorney general issued a memo pushing USA's to pursue obscenity prosecutions. Around the same time, adult industry scribe Mark Kernes reports, Holder met with Paul McGeady, the founder of Morality in Media, a hyper-conservative, rabidly religious outfit zealously dedicated to policing what they perceive to be the pornification of America. In a letter from Holder to McGeady, the deputy attorney general wrote: "...I fully share your concerns about the distribution of obscenity..."
What made this year's presidential election interesting, within this context, was how utterly absent any discussion of obscenity was from the public discourse. Apparently, now that porn has gone mainstream (or so they say), obscenity is no longer a hot button topic. When what was once obscene is everywhere, the once obscene becomes everyday.
For the last decade, I've been covering the adult movie industry. What I find to be most interesting in current discussions of obscenity is how liberals continue to posit virtually any restrictions on adult content are a violation of free speech. Take, for example, Salon's Glenn Greenwald, who asserts the conviction of Max Hardcore is akin to a crime against humanity. As I see it, and as I wrote about at length here, the average American's encounters with porn and the day-to-day realities of Porn Valley are two very, very different things. After several years of visiting porn sets, talking to porn stars and directors, and witnessing the making of some of the most extreme porn out there (including the same bukkake movie the United States deemed obscene in the indictment that led to the Arizona trial), I began to realize the business of making porn is a meat grinder for the human condition. This is not to say that porn should not be made. This is not say that I'm not a staunch supporter of free speech. This is to say that porn, to paraphrase Martin Amis, is a rough trade, indeed. More succinctly put, it's not easy to get fucked for a living. While liberals would like to believe a hands-off approach to porn by the Obama administration is what's best for America's collective free speech, it may be of interest for the new party coming into office to note that the last time Porn Valley was left to its own devices, life was hard, really hard, in Porn Valley.
This post is cross-posted at my blog on the Huffington Post, so if you'd like to comment, you may do so there.
