You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (34 page)

The religious right did not stand passively by as the courts prevented censorship. Conservative commentators decried the “flood” of pornography “deluging” the nation,
¹⁰³
and politicians wholeheartedly agreed that pornography was a national concern. However, politicians and prosecutors needed evidence that pornography harmed society. Scientific evidence would show the courts that they were not merely using the police to force Victorian sexual morality on the entire population.

In 1967, Congress authorized the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography to study the causal relationship of pornography on antisocial behavior for two years and then recommend tactics. The Commission was a remarkably objective attempt to cut through a polarizing issue with factual analysis. The Methodist theologian on the commission said “I consider the birth and ensuing work of this commission to have been a milestone in the history of human communications— the first time in history in which men cared about the problem enough to seek the truth about it through the best methods known to science.”
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If the commission was a milestone in scientifically seeking the truth regarding sex, it would not be repeated. The majority of commissioners recommended that all laws regulating the sale of erotic material to adults be repealed and that sex education for children be bolstered. Despite funding a number of surveys, retrospective studies, and fourteen controlled experiments, no evidence of pornography causing antisocial behavior was found. In fact, the evidence suggested that those deprived of exposure to sexual material were
more
likely to be antisocial.

Studies showed that compared to sex offenders, the average person had significantly greater exposure to erotic materials during adolescence. In one study, incarcerated rapists were found to have an average age of eighteen for first exposure to images of heterosexual intercourse, while the average age for the general population was fifteen.
¹⁰⁵
In Denmark, rapes plunged after censorship ended in 1967, and continued to fall as sexually explicit materials permeated Danish commerce.
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Even the popular conception that exposure to pornography resulted in “calloused attitudes” toward women was found to be unwarranted, and in fact, no negative impact on character could be found.
¹⁰⁷

Despite the Commission finding that sixty percent of Americans agreed that there should be no restrictions on the sale of erotic materials to adults,
¹⁰⁸
the Senate voted sixty to five to completely reject the Commission’s report.

To dam the pornographic flood, President Richard Nixon installed the conservative Warren Burger as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In a 1973 ruling, Burger allowed obscenity to once again be judged by local community standards. Although the Burger court reestablished that the United States of America could easily ban books, its enforcement has been sporadic.
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The cultural tide turned in the 1970s. The Weatherman group was bombing government buildings and Charles Manson’s cult was on trial for committing gruesome murders. In 1975 only an empty gun chamber prevented Manson adherent Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme from assassinating President Gerald Ford. These fringe groups represented a microscopic percentage of the counterculture, but their violence allowed authorities to brand the entire movement as a threat to America’s safety.

Another contributing factor to the left’s demise was the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam in 1974. Opposition to the war had unified and inspired divergent progressive interests, and the end of American bloodshed weakened the movement considerably.

During this fracturing, the feminist movement turned completely against First Amendment sexual protections. Feminists began attacking the recently liberated pornography as a “bastion of misogyny.” They were incited by the sexist attitudes prevalent in the industry, its sadomasochistic imagery, and its sometimes demeaning portrayal of women.
¹¹⁰

Feminists chose not to acknowledge that sexist attitudes were also prevalent in most of the 1970s corporate world. Nor did they recognize that although sadomasochism is the achieving of sexual pleasure through the giving and receiving of pain, it is consensual and women are prominent in both roles.
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The female sadist, the dominatrix, is the epitome of womanly power.

In focusing on the demeaning portrayals of women in pornography, feminists ignored the fact that men were often portrayed in ways that were just as vile. For example, the inflammatory June 1978 cover of
Hustler
had a woman’s legs sticking out of a meat grinder with meat coming out the other end. However, in 1977
Hustler
had portrayed a man grinding his own penis.
¹¹²

The feminist position against pornography was galvanized in the mid-1970s. It began with a
New York Post
article in October 1975 that reported snuff films were allegedly being made in South America and imported into the United States.
¹¹³
Snuff films are extreme erotica featuring real rape and murder. Were South American actresses being killed so that American men could be diabolically titillated?

Four months later a shoddy horror movie featuring a pornographic murder
entitled
Snuff
opened in New York. Filmed in Argentina, its tag line read, “Made in South America . . . where Life is CHEAP!” Feminists nationwide went berserk with a wave of protests. In Rochester, New York, women picketed the theater carrying
Snuff
for four days straight and smashed a window to destroy the
Snuff
poster. In California, an anonymous group of women threw bricks through four theaters’ box office and lobby windows, and another theater had cement dumped down its toilets. High-profile feminists pressured the Manhattan district attorney into launching a murder investigation.
¹¹⁴

The reaction to
Snuff
was astounding, because the movie was a hoax. A B-movie distributor named Allan Shackleton capitalized on the buzz around the
New York Post
article and purposely presented his cheap movie as an actual snuff film. It is likely that the film’s initial protesters were even paid by Shackleton.
¹¹⁵
The horribly amateurish portrayal of the alleged murder in
Snuff
, for example tomato sauce blood and a detached finger reappearing attached, suggests that its frothing critics never bothered to watch it.

Despite the fact that no snuff films have ever been found, their symbolic appeal was too appealing for feminists to care.
¹¹⁶
Snuff films were the feminist metaphor for pornography incarnate—men’s lust literally killing women. Shortly after the
Snuff
hysteria, stopping pornography became feminism’s primary focus.
¹¹⁷

While leftist activists floundered and broke ranks, the oil crisis of 1973 hit the economy. In retaliation for supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War, the Arab members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) refused to export to the United States. This quadrupled the cost of oil and caused the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The affluence of post-World War II America had allowed young adults to be less concerned with preening themselves for corporate employment and more involved in social causes.
¹¹⁸
In the harsh 1970s job market, youth could no longer afford such independence, further decimating the left.

Facing the collapsing economy, politicians did not take responsibility for the
government policies that contributed. Instead, as they have throughout history, they found it easier to distract the populace with imagined sexual crises.
¹¹⁹
Increases in rape, teen pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases were held up as the just desserts of the “sexual revolution.”

This deceitful rhetoric was distilled in a cute and unsubstantiated critique of society. It is still reformulated every several years to fit the alarming youth behavior
du jour
, and takes advantage of the positive bias of human memory.
¹²⁰
It is usually presented in a form similar to the following:

None of this was based on facts.
¹²¹
Teen pregnancy rates hit their highest twentieth-century level in 1957. However, most of those girls were married by the time they gave birth, so there were more unwed teenage mothers in the 1970s.
¹²²
Changing marriage patterns—not changing sexual habits—were the cause. “Shotgun weddings” became rarer as women gained financial independence and bastardy’s stigma lessened. Moralists still use the unwed mother figure to foster false images of 1950s sexual purity, forgetting the 1950s’ loveless forced marriages.
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Arrests for forcible rape did quadruple between 1958 and 1975.
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However, this was because the feminist movement had pressured the criminal justice system into taking rape seriously.
¹²⁵
Prior to the 1960s it was extremely difficult to convict a rapist.
¹²⁶

Some of the hurdles were that women’s testimony had to be corroborated and evidence of resistance was required. In addition, there was a strong bias against convicting rapists who knew the victim (now referred to as “date rape”), and promiscuous women or women who dressed provocatively were often deemed to be
“asking for it.”
¹²⁷
For example, a gunpoint rapist was acquitted in 1971 because the unmarried victim had a lover.
¹²⁸

Due to the low probability of successful prosecution and the stigma applied to the victim it is reasonable to assume victims often chose not to report.
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Although it is incredibly naive and counterintuitive to believe that rape did not occur prior to the sexual revolution, as an emotionally charged issue this assertion was an effective smear of sexual freedom.

Another argument made in these lists is that students did not suffer from sexually transmitted diseases in the good ol’ days. The prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases did rise in the 1970s. However, this was because a medical respite had been provided. Since the 1940s, gonorrhea and syphilis could be easily cured with penicillin. This brought about a remarkably anxiety-free sexual atmosphere that lasted through the 1970s. This respite, combined with the proliferation of the birth-control pill, contributed to a decline in condom usage, but in 1979 the herpes virus was discovered. Genital herpes was not debilitating and its oral equivalent (cold sores) carried little stigma. Despite this, genital herpes was publicized as payback for the sexual good times and the media made it a national crisis.
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Even the supposedly objective
Time
magazine wrote in its cover story, “Perhaps not so unhappily, [herpes] may be a prime mover in helping to bring to a close an era of mindless promiscuity.”
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The discovery of herpes was followed by the discovery of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in the early 1980s. Unlike herpes, AIDS was deadly; however, its initial appearance in America was confined to the gay community, so whereas herpes had quickly garnered headlines, AIDS was ignored.
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Publicizing AIDS would mean discussing homosexuals and anal sex.

President Ronald Reagan, keeping his word to the Christian Right who helped elect him,
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kept sex sacred and did not mention the word AIDS in a speech until five years into the epidemic, when over five thousand Americans had already died and countless more were infected.
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This White House press briefing, with Reagan’s Press Secretary Larry Speakes on October 15, 1982, is demonstrative: