The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex (88 page)

Videos

Mainstream producers of porn are resistant to abandoning a formulaic approach to plot and content for fear of creating works that could be deemed “obscene” in another state. In a Catch-22 scenario, the censorship of sexually explicit materials limits the extent to which these materials can evolve into a more artistic genre that fewer people might consider worthy of censoring.

The Justice Department’s single-minded pursuit of major adult video distributors in the early eighties produced a firestorm of preemptive self-censoring throughout the industry. If a plot device or sexual activity led to a video’s conviction on obscenity charges somewhere in the country, the device or activity was added to the informal, yet rigid, set of boundaries beyond which porn producers would not venture. The no-no list includes fairly predictable activities such as bestiality, urination, and defecation. It also includes vaginal or anal fisting—the placement of any more than three fingers in the vagina is considered an “unnatural” act. Even female ejaculation is sometimes suspect.

Any hint of nonconsensual activities is similarly avoided, so bondage and genitalsex scenes are rarely, if ever, combined in the same film. Profanity is also scrupulously avoided, to the point where ejaculations such as “Oh God, I’m coming!” are edited out. Drugs and violence have all been white-washed out of modern porn, while images of brand-name products are edited out as well (brand-name sex toys are a welcome exception to the rule!).

Needless to say, the return of Republicans to the White House has put porn producers on high alert. Since the late nineties, when the threat of federal prosecution eased and sales of adult videos skyrocketed, the porn industry has developed something of a split personality. Large companies that release bigger-budget videos and produce soft-core, cable-ready versions of their films have more to lose and are naturally more prone to self-censoring. Smaller, maverick companies that release “wall-to-wall” hardcore videos push the envelope in terms of content. It remains to be seen how this split will play out under the current and subsequent administrations.

During the Golden Age of porn, it was possible to view adult videos that framed explicit sex scenes within the context of dramatic, passionate plots. Rape and murder were tackled head on in videos such as
Anna Obsessed
and
Midnight Heat
, videos with all the moody complexity of Hollywood film noir. Yet these classic films were among the first to go under the editor’s knife in the early nineties when distributors were fleeing the threat of prison or bankruptcy. Other, far more light-hearted classics, such as
Opening of Misty Beethoven
and
Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann,
were also vigorously edited to remove any potentially controversial chunks of plot or dialogue. As an analogy, try to imagine taking classic films of American cinema, such as
Chinatown
or
The Godfather,
and excising all the scenes in which sex and violence are linked. The resulting erotic videos were a shadow of their former selves, rendered practically incomprehensible due to lack of continuity. The fate of porn’s Golden Oldies is a sad reminder that adult video will never have a chance to grow up as long as censorship restricts it to the perpetual adolescence of lowest-common-denominator conformity.

Toys

While sex toys don’t fall under any constitutional protection and have been ignored by federal legislators, several states have their own laws prohibiting the sale of “obscene devices.” Obscene devices are usually defined as those “designed or marketed primarily for the stimulation of human genitals.” Yup, in several states, including Texas and Georgia, sex toys are currently commercial contraband (though Texas does allow the sale of sex toys for therapeutic and medical reasons). While most of these laws are decades old, Alabama made headlines by outlawing sex toys in the year 1998, with the argument that there is “no fundamental right to purchase a product to use in pursuit of having an orgasm.” Upon challenge by the ACLU and a group of six female sex toy consumers and retailers, this deeply silly law was promptly overturned by a District Court.

Adult bookstores in states such as Texas work around the laws by labeling their dildos “condom demonstration models” and their vibrators “novelties.” In other words, folks selling and buying sex toys agree to pretend that they’re being purchased either as a public health service or as gag gifts.

Zoning

Most of the statutes criminalizing the purchase of “obscene devices” date back to the seventies, when the increasing number of adult bookstores and massage parlors opening in major cities inspired opponents to devise whatever legislation they could dream up to limit the success of these businesses. Later, zoning laws became the method of choice for controlling adult retailers. Many cities and towns have zoning ordinances that restrict the location of adult-oriented businesses—specifying that they must be a certain number of feet from schools, churches, residential neighborhoods,
etc.

At Good Vibrations, we ran afoul of similar zoning restrictions when we opened our second store in Berkeley in 1994. We had applied for a permit as a “book and gift store,” as this is how our San Francisco store is zoned. A local resident complained that our store more closely resembled the zoning ordinance description of an adult-oriented business, namely one “which predominantly engage[s] in the sale of products or materials which appeal to a prurient interest or sexual appetite of the purchaser or user.”

When we went before the zoning administrators, we were informed that any business with more than 25 percent of its inventory in sexual products was considered an adult business but that, given our educational mission, they’d allow us to carry up to 50 percent of sexually related inventory. We learned that a condom shop that had opened near Berkeley’s college campus had been forced to limit condoms to less than 25 percent of its inventory…and promptly went out of business. So we went to work measuring the square footage of our fixtures and splitting hairs over which of our products qualified as “adult” versus “educational” materials.

In Good Vibrations’ case, we were able to rally community support, which tipped the scales in our favor. Customers, friends, and colleagues deluged the Berkeley city council with faxes, phone calls, email, and letters of support. The local media had a field day, and five days later, city officials bowed to community pressure and reinstated our permit.

Other adult-oriented businesses in less tolerant communities aren’t always so fortunate. Many people instinctively approve of zoning laws; after all, they’re regarded as keeping adult businesses away from schoolchildren, rather than as violating First Amendment rights. Those who sprang to Good Vibrations’ defense did so because they considered us to be “different” from “sleazy” adult bookstores with video viewing booths. In the eyes of most citizens, however, these fine distinctions would be purely academic, and any outfit distributing sexually explicit materials should be forced to hit the road. It’s important to bear in mind that zoning laws are frequently the thin end of the wedge in attempts to legislate adult businesses right out of town. Whether zoning laws are being invoked to clean up Manhattan’s Times Square, to remove X-rated videos from a mall’s video store, or to keep a Good Vibrations from opening in your home town, we urge you to look beyond the antiporn hysteria to make reasoned judgments of your own.

What You Can Do

You can participate in the fight against censorship both on a national and local level. Check out the organizations listed under “Freedom of Expression” in our resource listings. These national organizations can keep you updated on upcoming federal legislation; it’s crucial that you let your congressperson or senator know how you feel on all censorship-related bills. Don’t assume that challenges to First Amendment rights fall along party lines—Democrats and Republicans are equally capable of trampling over your privacy rights, especially during an election year.

Working for change on the local level can take a bit more courage, since this may entail contacting friends and neighbors to let them know you support access to sexual materials. Since definitions of obscenity and zoning ordinances are influenced by community standards, it’s particularly important that you speak out on the local level.

You can also combat censorship by flexing your consumer dollar. If you enjoy a certain adult director’s work, ask your local video store to order more of his or her videos, and tell all your friends to consider renting them as well. If you crave porn with greater diversity in performers and body types, you may need to spend more to purchase independent videos. If one bookstore in your town carries sex books but another doesn’t, patronize the sex-positive establishment and let its proprietors know you appreciate the range of their selection. Seek out the retailers who present the products and information you crave.

In your defense of sexually explicit materials, you’re bound to grapple with your own preconceptions and subjective interpretations. One man’s porn is another man’s erotica, and one woman’s utterly irredeemable filth is another woman’s entertaining night on the town. You’re certainly entitled to your own responses and opinions, and in fact we urge you to tease out and identify what does and doesn’t give you pleasure in the videos, books, magazines, and toys you encounter. We hope, however, you’ll maintain the point of view that it’s better for there to be a wide-ranging variety of sexual materials than it is to shut down or ban any one genre. The mainstream adult industry suffers from a certain “outlaw” complex—folks who are producing commercial porn are definitely the lowest in the pecking order of First Amendment defense. The hypocrisy of having their work publicly scorned and politically persecuted, yet privately consumed in mass quantities, has resulted in an understandable amount of cynicism. As a result, adult-industry people have an incentive to circle their wagons and reject change rather than to expand the possibilities of their genre. Change will only come slowly and in direct response to consumer demand.

We recognize that it’s much easier to say nothing than to stand up and identify yourself as someone who doesn’t think that anal sex is a “crime against nature,” who is happy that the town bookstore carries sex manuals, or who enjoys renting porn from the neighborhood video store. Yet as long as individuals remain silent about the books we read, the videos we watch, and the toys we enjoy, our rights to privacy and the pursuit of pleasure will continue to be threatened.

PROFILES
in
PLEASURE:

Kat Sunlove

“People fear what they
don’t understand,
and so I put myself
out there as best I can.
When I get on TV
and they have to look
at me and I look like
the grandma next door,
they have to redefine
who they think a
pornographer is.”

K
at Sunlove’s career recapitulates every anticensorship battle of the past twenty years. A funny, feisty woman who still has the gentle Texas drawl and the energetic idealism of her youth, she’s worked to defend sexual freedoms as an educator, writer, publisher, and most recently as lobbyist for the adult industry’s Free Speech Coalition. Although she’s long since given up her teenage ambition to serve as a Baptist missionary to Russia, we thank the Lord that Kat has channeled her missionary zeal into building a more sexually open and free society.

As Mistress Kat, the author of a column on erotic dominance and submission that ran in California’s
Spectator
magazine, Kat made her first foray into the public arena in the early eighties. At the time, she and her partner, Layne Winklebleck, were teaching some of the first public S/M workshops ever held in this country: “S&M was totally and completely in the closet at that point. I knew from the letters I got that there were hundreds of thousands of people with these interests, yet scared to do anything about them—so sexual choice was one of the early censorship battlefields for me.”

In 1992, Kat became publisher of
Spectator,
a weekly magazine that has been in constant publication since its origins in the sixties as the
Berkeley Barb
.
Spectator
features sex-related news, reviews, and pictorials, along with classified ads from sex professionals, and is distributed in coin-operated public news racks. In 1996,
Spectator
ran afoul of a new California law that banned adult newspapers from such news racks. Although the
Spectator
staff fought the law all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, ultimately they have had to self-censor content to stay in public news racks.

Kat has been active in adult industry trade organizations since the early eighties, and when she decided to leave
Spectator
in 1997, she was quickly hired as a lobbyist for the Free Speech Coalition (FSC). The mandate of the FSC is to provide resources, advocacy, and legal analysis on legislation that would impact the adult entertainment industry as a whole. The FSC was successful in challenging portions of the Child Pornography Protection Act.

If anyone has the energy and enthusiasm to change the world one constituent and one legislator at a time, it’s Kat. “When I’m training budding citizen lobbyists, I often tell them, ‘We have truth on our side, all we have to do is tell it!’ I’m a well-educated woman who got into the adult industry in my mid-thirties, very self-consciously. I’m not a victim, okay? I used to be a union organizer for the Hotel, Restaurant and Bartenders International Union—you want to talk to me about oppressed women, let’s talk about hotel maids!” She has taken her message to political events, through the corridors of the state house, and even into “the lion’s den” of televangelist Pat Robertson’s
700 Club:
“People fear what they don’t understand, and so I put myself out there as best I can. When I get on TV and they have to look at me and I look like the grandma next door, they have to redefine who they think a pornographer is.”