Naughty By Nature
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NAUGHTY BY NATURE?
The pornography business has grown rapidly since the 70s, with the introduction of the Super 8 mm projector. With the 80s came the video cassette, allowing for easy home viewing pleasure. The 90s saw the introduction of a new medium to distribute and display pornography, the internet. The internet itself has gone under intense scrutiny, as pornography has and still does. The debate over whether or not pornography should be censored continues to grow in intensity and frequency. Advocates feel censorship can make the internet a secure place for kids, as well as making an attempt to kill off (or at least maim) a multimillion dollar industry. Others feel that censorship of internet pornography threatens our most basic and fought over civil right, the right to free speech. So the question arises, should the internet, with its vast expanse of endless pornographic sites, be censored?
Congress and then President Bill Clinton certainly thought so. He signed the 1996 Communications Decency Act, intended to ban online pornography and help make the internet “safe” for kids by eliminating “indecent” material. An amendment to the CDA was the Exon Bill, which attempted to outlaw obscene material and impose fines of up to $100,000 for and prison terms of up to two years for anyone who knowingly makes “indecent” material available to anyone under the age of 18. The definition of “indecent” was broad to say the least. “Indecent” included anything from a personal email to a friend telling them you were “pissed off” to pornographic material. Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe described it as “Ðfrontal assault on the First Amendment.”
Another attempt by the government was “voluntary censorship”. It started in 1996 with the Telecommunications Act. Television stations were “allowed” to “choose” to rate their programmed shows so people could identify shows with excessive violence, sexual content and obscene language. “A complementary ratings system of television programming debuted in January 1997.” (www.Benton.org) This way, parents could avoid shows they deemed inappropriate for their children. “Last year, the FCC adopted rules requiring all television sets with picture screens 33 centimeters (13 inches) or larger to be equipped with features to block the display of television programming based upon its rating. This technology is known as the “V-Chip.” The V-Chip reads information preset in the television shows programming and then blocks certain shows based on the conditions set by the parent. The FCC has been urged to carry this enforcement to include personal home computers.
Much to the delight of anti-CDA activists, three weeks after President Clinton signed the CDA, a panel of three judges in Pennsylvania ruled that it was “unconstitutional on its face” and “profoundly repugnant”. They “declared the internet a medium of historic importance”. Judge Stewart Dalzell wrote, “As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the internet deserves the highest protection from governmental intrusion.” On June 26th, 1997 the Supreme Court decreed that the CDA violated the First Amendment. The V-Chip however, remains in effect.
Some feminist writers also felt that pornography, internet based or otherwise should also be not only censored, but banned. Andrea Dworkin says, “the whole purpose of pornography is to hurt women.” Catharine MacKinnon, a professor of law at the University of Michigan, states, “The question pornography poses in cyberspace is the same one it poses everywhere else: whether anything will be done about it.” “In her book Only Words, MacKinnon denies that pornography consists of words and images, both which would be protected by the First Amendment. She considers pornography — in and of itself — to be an act of sexual violence.” (McElroy) MacKinnon seems to be saying that pornography is more than pictures and words, it also carries violence and demeaning tones towards women.
Not every woman feels this way though. Nadine Strossen, the author of Defending Pornography, and President of the ACLU, challenges the notion that pornography is intended to be demeaning to women. She says censoring porn would do women more harm than good. She feels that it would “undermine their equality, their autonomy and their freedom.” (Elmer-Dewitt) Perhaps by embracing pornography, women have become empowered by it. Rather than holding anger, hatred and fear towards pornography, more women should accept it and use it to their advantage. More and more women are becoming actively involved on the other end of the camera. Another aspect of her argument is that “pornography must be tolerated because there is no way to restrict some speech without getting on the slippery slope towards restricting too much speech and the wrong speech.”
Carlin Meyer, a professor at New York Law School feels that instead of removing internet pornography, people should view it in another light. “She argues that if you dont like the images of sex the pornographers offer, the appropriate response is not to suppress them but to overwhelm them with healthier, more realistic ones.” (Elmer-Dewitt) Sex over the internet may actually be good for young people. She writes, “[Cyberspace] is a safe place in which to explore the forbidden and the taboo. It offers the possibility for genuine, unembarrassed conversations about accurate as well as fantasy images of sex.” Perhaps youth can work out their sexual inadequacies over the computer, therefore protecting themselves from the real thing. The computer cant give or receive