Let's ban circus clowns and musicians while we're at it!

[elfs]

So, I'm reading an interview with Alan Sears, the man who once exploited his position as an adjunct to the Meese Commission on Pornography to write a letter to the 7-11 parent corporation telling them that the Attorney general of the United States had identified their stores as alleged distributors of potentially obscene pornography (note the qualifiers there) and asking them to come to the Commission's meeting and explain or defend themselves against the charge. They pulled all their Playboys and Penthouses from the shelves.

How out-of-touch does one man have to be and still seem even the least bit coherent? Sears' definition of "obscene and illegal" material (funny, where is that exception in the First Amendment?) is so broad the only thing it doesn't cover is ordinary nudes, and even those he refers to as "depicting women and other persons as a subspecies of humans to amuse [the viewer]."

I wonder who the "other persons" are in Sears' imaginations. For that matter, I can't begin to approach how he thinks that pornography depicts anyone as "subhuman"; the zoophile market can't be that, can it? And yet it's the "to amuse" part that bothers me, because Sears is clearly signalling his desire to ban amusement as an evil. Let's ban circus clowns and musicians while we're at it.

Worse yet, he wants to define all porn as not having first amendment protection. He can't even really say why. (Dammit, where is that exception in the First Amendment?).

When the interviewer asks, "Is censorship bad?" Sears responds this way:

How do we define either term? Bad for the profits lost by organized criminal activity? Bad for a child molester who wasn't able to trade his "collection" of trophy photographs with others? Bad for potential child molesters who could not get a magazine at the corner store that they would use to lower their inhibitions and eventually end up acting out when they sexually abuse a neighbor's child? Bad for the Internet provider who couldn't let 12-year-olds view his wares at the tax-funded neighborhood library?

Man, if that's isn't the most fnord-laden bullroar laid down in the service of evil today, I don't know what is.

Comments

[dossy.livejournal.com]

Man, we'd better ban zoos while we're at it. You might just catch a glimpse of monkeys fucking.

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

For that matter, I can't begin to approach how he thinks that pornography depicts anyone as "subhuman"; the zoophile market can't be that, can it?

If you're really curious, I could go into detail on what I've concluded on the topic (being a member of that "market" myself :-). Short version: the bulk of animal porn on the market is created by heterospecials^[1], for heterospecials who find the idea of a woman submitting to an animal^[2] degrading to the woman - and thus, exciting. Material produced for the target market of zoosexuals^[3] is highly uncommon - it's a much smaller target market, after all - and tends to be produced on an amateur basis.

[1]: I totally just made that word up on the spot. Let's pretend that it means "people who generally have sex with people, as opposed to animals".
[2]: That's the bulk of what's out there: male animal, female human. The other three possible combinations are all much less common.
[3]: Antonym to the word I coined above; unlike that one, this one's actually got some currency (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoosexuality).

[(Anonymous)]

Until I saw 'internet provider', I thought this interview was from the 1950s.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

I can kinda see what he's saying, if I squint and look sideways.

Depicting people as subhumans whose sexual pleasure is directed solely for the viewer can make sense, but I don't really give him credit for having the awareness to see it.

I'm thinking things like the homophobe who loves watching lesbian porn, but who consistantly yells slurs and would beat up any real lesbian he knew.

Or the racist who likes watching all minority or interracial porn to watch the lesser beings give into their animal natures, while he sits an feels smug jacking off to it.

And in most (not all) filmed porn, the woman seems to be nothing but a collection of orifice designed to be mechanistically penetrated.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

I liked the term "fnord-laden bullroar". :)

[woggie.livejournal.com]

Okay, so theoretically, the reason Sears gets away with this is because Christians are horrified that their children might be having sex at some point in their lives, right?

The opposing view is for freedom of speech, and objecting to someone having the ability to gag us. So we know that secular nations have fewer incidence of the behaviors Christians claim to hate. Is this information (skin mags) contained within that study somewhere?

I can't find the study, dammit. But perhaps somebody out there remembers it?