Is Your Porn Safe?
Lock up your daughters and hide your smut, John Ashcroft is on the
anti-sex warpath, again

By Mark Morford

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/04/28/notes042804.DTL&nl=fix

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.

Is Your Porn Safe?
[...]
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).

Is Your Porn Safe?
Lock up your daughters and hide your smut, John Ashcroft is on the
anti-sex warpath, again

By Mark Morford

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/04/28/notes042804.DTL&nl=fix