What Does Obama's Attorney General Pick Mean For The Adult Movie Industry?

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 that 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 (OPTF) and the formation of the FBI's Adult Obscenity Squad (AOS).

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 the US 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.

Comments

[lisa12345]

I agree with you. We need to face what we have done here in the United States. The large variety of women in the United States that allow themselves to be humiliated in porn disturbs me deeply, we should ask ourselves why women continue to internalize a certain kind of masochism. I am disheartened by the porn everywhere--I am stunned that people are still saying we are repressed. Are you kidding? I grew up in the eighties--the sexual libertarianism ran rampant. It caused a struggle for the kids. College? Promiscuity in the dorms, porn showings with signs in the hallways pointing the way. Walking down the street in the city--ads for stripjoints and massage parlors all over. In the small town I now live in, a "massage parlor" has moved in. Three racks of porn (of women) in the local grocery store. Very violating. I feel that my opinion or feelings don't count, and it is all very oppressive to me. I know many women who have broken off with men over porn, it made them rougher, but that is talked about too much in the MSM.

I wonder when we will stop pretending we are repressed sexually and acknowledge that we have made a big, big deal out of sex, and we use this stuff like a drug to numb us because we are so stressed and disconnected in this society. Civil liberties over the common good?

[SeanGardner]

"Salon's Glenn Greenwald, who asserts the conviction of Max Hardcore is akin to a crime against humanity."

Any case, any opinion, any perspective, and any one positing a view that Greenwald disagrees with is, in his mind, "a crime against humanity".

Whether Greenwald likes it or not, Obama will indeed crackdown on some aspects of the porn industry. And he should.

[Lon]

There doesn't seem to be any real answer to Greenwald here. Why should movies of disgusting behavior between consenting adults not get 1st Amendment protection. Obviously if Greenwald believed that Potter Stewart had the right standard, he should see the videos in question. But equally obviously he does not think that should be the standard. We are a country with a history of prudery. When obscenity laws were first passed they included discussion of abortion because some people find abortion disgusting. Why should we think they were right about the standard but wrong about what fell under it?

It is also not clear why you take Max Hardcore sometimes as an extreme case, and sometimes as a representative case. It is not surprising that pornography is not the most pleasant job. It is not really like having sex. But it does not follow that it is less pleasant for the money than many other jobs we don't object to people taking. So is there reason to think that the focus here is not really based on a certain view of sex more than simple concern about what is disgusting?