Slouching Towards Gomorrah (24 page)

One response of the entertainment industry to criticisms has been that Hollywood and the music business did not create violence or sexual chaos in America. Of course not. But they contribute to it. They are one of the “root causes” they want us to seek elsewhere and leave them alone. The denial that what the young see and hear has any effect on their behavior is the last line of the modern liberal defense of decadence, and it is willfully specious. Accusing Senator Dole of “pandering to the right” in his speech deploring obscene and violent entertainment, the
New York Times
argued: “There is much in the movies and in hard-core rap music that is disturbing and demeaning to many Americans. Rap music, which often reaches the top of the charts, is also the music in which women are degraded and men seem to murder each
other for sport. But no one has ever dropped dead from viewing ‘Natural Born Killers,’ or listening to gangster rap records.“
⁴
To which George Will replied: “No one ever dropped dead reading ‘Der Sturmer,’ the Nazi anti-Semitic newspaper, but the culture it served caused six million Jews to drop dead.“
⁵

Those who oppose any form of restraint, including self-restraint, on what is produced insist that there is no connection between what people watch and hear and their behavior. It is clear why people who sell gangsta rap make that claim, but it is less clear why anyone should believe them. Studies show that the evidence of the causal connection between popular culture’s violence and violent behavior is overwhelming.
⁶
A recent study,
Sex and the Mass Media
, asked: “Does the talk about and images of love, sex and relationships promote irresponsible sexual behavior? Do they encourage unplanned and unwanted pregnancy? Are the media responsible for teenagers having sex earlier, more frequently and outside of marriage?” The researchers concluded: “The answer to all these questions is a qualified ‘yes’.“
⁷
The answer was qualified because not enough research has as yet been done on the effects of sexual images. The authors relied in part on the analogous question of media depictions of violence and their effect on aggressive behavior, which would appear to be a parallel situation. Some of the studies found positive but relatively small effects, between 5 and 15 percent. “One of the most compelling of the naturalistic studies … found that the homicide rates in three countries (U.S., Canada, and South Africa) increased dramatically 10-15 years after the introduction of television.” That study “estimated that exposure to television violence is a causal factor in about half of the 21,000 homicides per year in the United States and perhaps half of all rapes and assaults.“
⁸

The studies confirm what seems obvious. Common sense and experience are sufficient to reach the same conclusions. Music, for example, is used everywhere to create attitudes—armies use martial music, couples listen to romantic music, churches use organs, choirs, and hymns. How can anyone suppose that music (plus the images of television, movies, and advertisements) about sex and violence has no effect?

Indeed, Hollywood’s writers, producers, and executives think popular entertainment affects behavior. It is not merely that they
sell billions of dollars of advertising on television on the premise that they can influence behavior; they also think that the content of their programs can reform society in a liberal direction. They understand that no single program will change attitudes much, but they rely upon the cumulative impact of years of television indoctrination.
⁹
Why should we listen to the same people saying that their programs and music have no effect on behavior? That argument is over. The depravity sold by Hollywood and the record companies is feeding the depravity we see around us.

The television industry, under considerable political pressure, has agreed to a ratings system for its programs. Since assigning ratings to every program—including every episode in a series—will be much more difficult than assigning ratings to motion pictures, it is doubtful that the television rating system will add much except confusion and rancor. The movie ratings have not prevented underage children from freely seeing movies they were not meant to see. No doubt the same will be true of television ratings. The vaunted V chip will prove no solution. Aside from the fact that many parents simply will not bother with it, the V chip will likely lead to even more degrading programming by providing producers with the excuse that the chip adequately safeguards children, though it does not. And the chip certainly does nothing to prevent adults from enjoying the increasingly salacious and even perverted material that is on the way.

The debate about censorship, insofar as there can be said to be a debate, usually centers on the issue of keeping children away from pornography. There is, of course, a good deal of merit to that, but it makes the issue sound like one of child rearing, which most people would like the government to butt out of. Opponents say parents can protect their children by using control features offered by many services. Both sides are missing a major point. Aside from the fact that many parents will not use control features, censorship is also crucial to protect children—and the rest of us—from men encouraged to act by a steady diet of computerized pedophilia, murder, rape, and sado-masochism. No one supposes that every addict of such material will act out his fantasies, but it is willfully blind to think that none will. The pleasures the viewers of such material get from watching a thousand rape scenes or child kidnappings is not worth one actual rape or kidnapping.

There are those who say that the only solution is to rebuild a stable public culture. How one does that when the institutions we have long relied on to maintain and transmit such a culture—the two-parent family, schools, churches, and popular entertainment itself—are all themselves in decline it is not easy to say. Nevertheless, there is something to the point. Determined individuals and groups may be able to revitalize some of those institutions. For much that afflicts us, that is the only acceptable course. Law cannot be the answer in all or even most areas. And there are signs not just of resistance but of positive action against the forces of decadence. For the very worst manifestations of the culture, however, more directly coercive responses may be required. Whether as a society we any longer have the will to make such responses is very much in question.

Arguments that society may properly set limits to what may be shown, said, and sung run directly counter to the mood of our cultural elites in general, and in particular the attitude (it is hardly more than that) of our judges, many of whom, most unfortunately, are members in good standing of that elite. As constitutional law now stands, censorship would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. In
Miller
v.
California
,
¹⁰
the Supreme Court laid down a three-part test that must be met if sexually explicit material is to be banned. It must be shown that: (1) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (2) the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The first two prongs of the test become increasingly difficult to satisfy as contemporary community standards decline and as fewer and fewer descriptions of sexual conduct are regarded as patently offensive. But it is the third part that poses the most difficulty. There is apparently nothing that a flummery of professors will not testify has “serious value.” When Cincinnati prosecuted the museum that displayed Mapplethorpe’s photographs, the jury deferred to defense witnesses who said the pictures were art and hence could not be obscene. Cincinnati was widely ridiculed and portrayed as benighted for even attempting to punish obscenity.
One typical cartoon showed a furtive figure stepping out of an alley in the city to offer “feelthy pictures” to a surprised passerby. The picture was a reproduction of a Michelangelo. It is typical of our collapse of standards that Mapplethorpe’s grotesqueries can be compared even in a cartoon to Michelangelo’s art.

It is difficult to see merit in the serious value test. Serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value can certainly be achieved without including descriptions of “patently offensive” sexual conduct. This third criterion serves merely as an escape hatch for pornographers whose “experts” can overbear juries. No doubt professors of literature can be found to testify to the serious literary value of the prose found in alt.sex.stories. Some of them are said to be very well written.

Without censorship, it has proved impossible to maintain any standards of decency. “[O]nly a deeply confused society,” George Will wrote, “is more concerned about protecting lungs than minds, trout than black women. We legislate against smoking in restaurants; singing ‘Me So Horny’ is a constitutional right. Secondary smoke is carcinogenic; celebration of torn vaginas is ‘mere words.’“
¹¹
The massive confusion Will describes is in large measure a confusion that first enveloped the courts, which they then imposed on us.

It will be said that to propose banning anything that can be called “expression” is an attempt to “take away our constitutional rights.” A radio talk show host said that the proposal to censor obscenities on the Internet was a denial of the First Amendment rights of teenagers. Such reactions reveal a profound ignorance of the history of the First Amendment. Until quite recently, nobody even raised the question of that amendment in prosecutions of pornographers; it was not thought relevant even by the pornographers. As late as 1942, in the
Chaplinsky
decision, a unanimous Supreme Court could agree:

Under today’s constitutional doctrine, it would be difficult to impossible to prohibit or punish the lewd and obscene, or the profane. First Amendment jurisprudence has shifted from the protection of the exposition of ideas towards the protection of self-expression—however lewd, obscene, or profane. Time Warner, citing the authority of a 1992 statute, proposed to scramble sexually explicit programs on a New York cable channel (the channel, I believe, on which I watched the writhing, oily young woman mentioned earlier). Those who wanted the shows with strippers, excerpts from pornographic movies, and advertisements for phone sex and “escort” services would have to send in cards to the cable operator. A federal district judge in New York, disagreeing with the federal court of appeals in Washington, D.C., granted a preliminary injunction against Time Warner, saying that the statute probably violated the First Amendment. The plaintiffs who produce these shows said the scrambling would hurt their ability to reach their audience and stigmatize viewers who tune in to the shows. Both are results that would have been considered laudable rather than forbidden under the First Amendment not many years ago.

Yet it is clear that if there is something special about speech, something that warrants a constitutional guarantee, it is the capacity of speech to communicate ideas. There is no other distinction between speech and other human activities that go unprotected by the Constitution. That is the point the
Chaplinsky
Court grasped. Non-speech activities can give as much pleasure as speech, develop as many human faculties, and contribute to personal and social well-being. The only difference between speech and other behavior is speech’s capacity to communicate ideas in the effort to reach varieties of truth. Celebration in song of the ripping of vaginas or forced oral sex or stories depicting the kidnapping, mutilation, raping, and murder of children do not, to anyone with a degree of common sense, qualify as ideas. And when something worthy of being called an idea is involved, there is no reason to
protect its expression in lewd, obscene, or profane language. Such language adds nothing to the idea but, instead, detracts from it.

Today’s Court majority would have difficulty understanding
Chaplinsky
’s statement that an utterance could inflict an injury to morality. Morality itself has become relativized in our constitutional jurisprudence, so that the Court no longer has the vocabulary to say that something is immoral and, for that reason, may be banned by the legislature. As Walter Berns wrote:

Berns wrote that in 1976, when he could have had no idea just how far the publification of sex would be carried. We may not know that even now. Our experience after the end of censorship suggests that there are few or no limits to depravity.

It may be too much to ask that the Supreme Court, as presently constituted, revisit and revise its First Amendment jurisprudence. Most people think of the Court as a legal institution because its pronouncements have the force of law. But the perception is flawed. The Court is also a cultural institution, one whose pronouncements are significantly guided not by the historical meaning of the Constitution but by the values of the class that is dominant in our culture. In our day, that means the cultural elite: academics, clergy, journalists, entertainers, foundation staffs, “public interest” groups, and the like. The First Amendment is central to the concerns of such folk because they are chatterers by profession, and their attitudes are relativistic and permissive. The mention of censorship, even of the most worthless and harmful materials, causes apoplexy in the members of that class.