Porn, Pervasive Presence
The creepy wallpaper of our daily lives.

By William F. Buckley Jr.
From the November 19, 2001, issue of National Review

The editors introduced a running feature called "Man at His Best." Its theme — What shall we do? What shall we think about? — was given by the editors for serial weeks in the month of February. For Valentine's Day (Week Two), ". . . we recommend the Valentine's Day Sex Tour at the San Francisco Zoo. Learn that chimps make it with their sisters. Marvel that a male lion can copulate up to 50 times a day." For Week Four, there is a dark observation: "Observe Ash Wednesday on February 28th, if that's your thing." Quickly followed by, "Also [i.e., something else to look for in February's Week Four]: Nicole Kidman is expected to bare butt yet again in Miramax's Birthday Girl."

The same page gives us, on column right, insights on recent automobile models. The commentary begins with a warning: "Unfortunately, getting some backseat action has gone the way of the drive-in. But we miss the backseat. We miss the contortions and the , is that your elbow?' and how the smell of high-test can fire our passions."

A second feature of the "Man at His Best" section concerns Food & Drink. We turn to wine. "Of course it has to be rose champagne, because the bubbles, the blush of color — do I really need to explain this further? Try one of these and she'll be giddy enough to say yes even if she harbours doubts."

We turn then to a section labeled "Read Her Mind." "Getting your desired one to see the sun rise from your corner of the world is the hard part." (Interesting question: Why hard? Why should she be reluctant?) We are given "some helpful hints." They include the Canine Code. "We know you consider your dog to be an extension of your heart, and we aim to please. But when it's time to get naked, Fido goes or we do. " Esquire knows when one has to get down to business.

More advice. "What sort of flowers should I buy for my lady friend?" Flowers "will soon droop and die, but love songs live beyond the moon and stars. And more: They're sure to get you laid." Other considerations are deftly dealt with. "What's the deal with my morning erections?" and, How to deal with the prostitute? — "You can expect to arrange the act before it's performed, so please stay within the limits set. If you said you want a blow job, don't try to stick it in her ass. This ought to go without saying." But nothing goes without saying in the contemporary Esquire.

We are not nearly through — the groundwork for our inquiry into Pervasive Presence needs to be solid. We come upon Esquire's feature section: "Take This Job and...Insert Gently." It recounts the empirical responsibilities of an employee of a sex-toys outfit, a married 26-year-old woman who, on this night out, is experimenting with a pair of thong panties to which a brand new apparatus is attached. An explanation: "Inside this plastic butterfly is a tiny electric motor and a receiver. The receiver is activated by depressing the button on the small plastic box in [her husband's] pocket which, it turns out, is a wireless remote control with a range of twenty-five feet. Upon such activation, the motor causes the butterfly to vibrate. It's not so quiet that it would be inaudible in a board meeting, most probably, but it's more than quiet enough to be employed overtly in a bar. Or in a movie theater. Or at the opera. Certainly during the loud parts."

On to a second main feature, "One Woman, Five Senses," described as an extended exploration of women's five operative senses and leading to a third feature called "46 Women Who Were Not My Wife." Details? "I have cheated on my wife with thirty-two women I can name (perhaps even correctly) and another dozen or so who flash into recall only as situations . . ." A final long feature is of an elderly adult-movie maker. A picture of one of the stars has a caption that tells the story. "The pornographication of the American girl has proceeded at such a pace that the fact of Gregory Dark directing a Britney Spears video seems not so much anomalous as inevitable." Like the modern Esquire.

A Steep Degeneration
The pornographication of the American girl! Esquire's language. About itself? Don't answer that, but think back to the Esquire of days gone by. Ernest Hemingway published "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in Esquire. Tom Wolfe, in a renowned essay, singled out Esquire as the primary home of inventive literary journalism in his generation. It published 5,000-word pieces by Norman Mailer and Garry Wills (and this author). It was the monthly magazine of Dwight Macdonald, movie critic, and Malcolm Muggeridge, book critic. Is the Esquire given over to erotomania unique? Of course not, but it isn't just one more girlie magazine. It is a sign of the times, the day of pervasive presence. Eros is crowding at us on all sides, as the erotic and the pornographic merge.

I stopped by at the local Abercrombie & Fitch for sailing wear. I waited, at the counter, for my package and looked down on the A&F Summer Catalogue. You could see the handsome young man on the cover, but the catalogue itself was bound in cellophane. My eyes turned to the card alongside. "To subscribe: Fill out this card and head to the nearest A&F store with a valid photo ID." With a valid photo ID? I thought that odd and asked the young man behind the counter, who was perhaps 19 years old, why IDs were required for purchasers of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue. He said, "Well, uh, it's kind of porny inside."

Abercrombie & Fitch has been from time immemorial a sportswear store renowned for its wholesome regard for the outdoor life. I smile still at the story recorded in The New Yorker generations ago. It was of a gardener in Long Island who yearned to buy a genuine A&F barometer and finally saved up the money to do so. He brought the beautiful thing back from Manhattan to his little house on the south shore, tapped it a few times impatiently, and stormed back to Manhattan to complain to the salesman that it was defective, its needle stuck at the mark "Hurricane." Abercrombie returned his money and the plaintiff returned to Islip to find that his house had been blown away.

Abercrombie's barometric needle had pointed resolutely at the impending hurricane of 1938, and presumably the company's current managers are confident that its current clothes line is also pointed surely, though the summer A&F catalogue seems to be suggesting that young men and women are better off wearing no clothes at all.

It is introduced by a 150-word essay under the title, "The Pleasure Principle." A definition ensues: "In psychoanalysis, the tendency or drive to achieve pleasure and avoid pain is the chief motivating force in behavior." And then an amplification: "Summer being our favorite time of the year and all, we've worked extra hard to bring you our best issue yet by letting the pleasure principle be our guide through the hottest months."

The lead page gives us a jaunty blonde clutching her hair, wet from the ocean she has just emerged from. If she is wearing anything, it would be below her pelvic joint. Above it, which is all the viewer can see, there are no clothes.

Next, a two-page spread of above-the-navel photos, six young men and one girl. One does spot a shoulder strap on the girl that may be a part of a bathing suit, subterranean and not reached by the camera. But lo, she does wear a watch, sheltering the wristnudity. The men wear nothing. A few pages on, a boy wears tennis shoes (unlaced) and a towel over his head. On his knee a camera rests. His shorts are given perspective by the young man's erection.

Whereas the young man a few pages on is entirely naked, leaning slightly over one knee. Across the page are worshipful photos of his windblown face in six differing exposures. . . . On to another young man entirely naked, one knee (the windward knee) held up. He is reposing on the deck of a sailboat, his back resting on an unfurled mainsail. The very next page gives us a girl wearing a T-shirt on which one can actually make out the name of our hosts: "Abercrombie" is discernible, and then something on the order of "Open Beauty Pageant." That shirt tapers off at the lady's waist. Below the waist there is nothing at all, except, of course, her naked body. A few pages later the young man is naked again on the boat, but wearing a drenched jacket which reaches only as far as his waist. A few pages later we have five beautiful blondes in full summer wear, draped about a Byronic young man evidently lost in the poetry of his reflections, a loose towel over his crotch.

There was never a pitch more nakedly designed than Abercrombie's to stimulate erotic appetites. The last part of the catalogue actually depicts clothes of one kind or another, but the reader, getting that far, is hotly indignant: What are all those shirts and shorts and pants doing, interrupting my view of the naked kids! I mean, I showed you my ID, didn't I?

The Number-One Sport
Neither of us (I am co-opting the reader) is suffering simply from being the last guy in town to get the word. Erotomania is the phenomenon. The ubiquity of merchandised sex is hinted at by such displays as Esquire's and Abercrombie's, which are merely byways to full-blown porn.

Frank Rich did a thorough piece, in May 2001, for The New York Times Magazine, nicely titled, "Naked Capitalists: There's No Business Like Porn Business." The raw figures he assembled astonish. We learn that $4 billion a year is spent on video pornography, that this sum of money is greater than what is spent on major league baseball; indeed that pornography is a bigger business than professional football or basketball. That 700 million rentals of porn movies occur every year, and that people pay more money for pornography in America than they do for movies. Perhaps we should say, more carefully, than for "non-adult" movies. Every year, 400 regular movies are made. The porn people make 11,000.

There used to be laws — not of the kind that would interfere with Esquire or Abercrombie, but laws that said: That product is obscene; and you can't peddle it in our marketplace. (There still are such laws, as Jay Nordlinger emphasizes in the following article; it is largely a question of attention and enforcement.)

In 1965, crusading lawyer Charles Rembar set out to defend Fanny Hill, a volume no less pornographic for having achieved classical status. Rembar persuaded a jury that Fanny Hill was not obscene because it had other than merely prurient dimensions. What happened rather quickly on the heels of that decision, and another that cleared the way to sell Lady Chatterley's Lover, was a wholesale adoption by the intelligentsia, and a contingent adoption by the courts, of the slippery-slope catechism. That line of reasoning holds, in effect, that if you forbid Deep Throat to be shown at the local movie house, the next thing you know you will be forbidding Ulysses at the local bookstore.

Charles Rembar celebrated his victory in a book strikingly titled, The End of Obscenity. Published in 1968, it gave us the aphorism that pornography is "in the groin of the beholder." That definition is provocative and amusing; but no doubt unintentionally, it is also telling us that, yes, there is such a thing as pornography.

Charles Rembar was arguing that because obscenity is indefinable, it is impossible to legislate against it. That fatalism isn't held only by First Amendment fundamentalists. James Jackson Kilpatrick, a thoughtful and influential conservative writer and essayist, some time ago publicly gave up on the challenge of regulating traffic in obscenity. His reasoning might be assailed as circular (Because I can't define obscenity, nobody can) but it is not unreasonable. If you can't define it, how can you expect the legislature to succeed?

The non-interventionists had a second challenge. They were prepared to insist on the nescient definitional point (How can we tell it's obscenity? ), but it was more difficult to overcome the democratic point, which held that the local community should decide the question.

Congress and the Supreme Court came up with a pragmatic devolution of authority. So obscenity can't be defined, does that mean it does not exist? The combatants crowded around the latest aphorism, which was Justice Potter Stewart's. He opined that whatever the difficulties in definition, "I know it when I see it." The statement reassured the fundamentalists by suggesting that porn was in the eye of the beholder; but that didn't make it invisible.

The Court pursued a demographic cultural line. There are different standards by which erotic/pornographic material is judged. The book or movie an urbane New Yorker might read or view without raising an eyebrow, in other jurisdictions might be deemed obscene and offensive. The landmark ruling (Miller v. California, 1973) held that material is obscene when 1) an average person, applying contemporary community standards, finds that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest; when 2) the work depicts in a patently offensive way sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law; and when 3) the work in question lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The federal prosecutor, seeking to comply with the Miller decision, elected in 1976 to prosecute Deep Throat in Memphis, banking on a Sunbelt jury's granitic determination to declare obscenity obscene. Deep Throat, then, was judged obscene, but appeals went on for so long that the film, far from suffering censorship, became something of a risqué cause. The movie continued full-bodied on the screen, not only in Memphis, where it played for months, but in venturesome movie theaters everywhere. Everybody wanted to know exactly what it was all about. A body of editors of the New York Times trooped to it one afternoon as something of a delegation, deferring to judicial equivocation by paying their own way, instead of charging their tickets to the Times as a professional expense.

But how to judge a work obscene under the law if it has extra-prurient value?

I remember the showcase event. A juror in Cincinnati was questioned in 1990 by a New York Times reporter curious about the Not Guilty verdict handed down the day before, exonerating the Cincinnati Museum of violating state obscenity laws. The museum had exhibited photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe.

How did you reach that not-guilty conclusion, the reporter asked the juror?

Well you see, he explained, it isn't that we didn't think the Mapplethorpe exhibit really was obscene. There is no question about that, it certainly was obscene. But there was the other question . . .

What kept the jury from a guilty verdict, it transpired, was the expert witness who came in to testify that there was redeeming value in the photographs. "I don't even like Picasso!" the poor, emasculated juror confessed. Who was he to argue about the work of the artist called Mapplethorpe, never mind the photo of a male rectum with the bullwhip sticking out.

The survival of Deep Throat had meanwhile pretty much established that you didn't really need artistic cover, of the kind that was adduced by the defense of Mapplethorpe in Cincinnati. If you lost on the artistic-value front, you could winnow your way back into the protection of the First Amendment from the deepest imaginable throat. First Amendment aggrandizement, and the raindrop pressure of commerce, had anachronized the censors. With the result that there is porn — everywhere.

Well not quite everywhere, and this leads to cable TV.

In the Morning, In the Evening . . .
Playboy-TV wanted badly to stretch its legs a few years ago, which meant getting permission from the FCC to broadcast 24 hours per day.

The FCC's original refusal had turned on the so-called signal bleed, under the authority of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Technological cable-TV expansion had had the effect of channel crowding, permitting sex-talk or sex images to leak into adjacent channels. To guard against this, Playboy had been ordered to remain silent until 10 P.M., when image frontiers were easier to govern and when such leakage as did occur came in at adult hours.

The plaintiffs argued that this deprivation imposed burdens that ran into their First Amendment rights. Broadcast television is properly governed by FCC rules, the fundamentalists conceded, but cable television should be left alone unless the case can be made that it is "a pervasive presence," i.e., for all intents and purposes, impossible to exclude from view. The Playboy Channel, its sponsor argued, comes in only on schedules especially invited into the house. That being so, any attempt to block its entry should be done only after "strict scrutiny" constitutional pleading, keeping in mind that First Amendment rights superordinate regulatory laws, which are legitimately invoked only on broadcast material that comes into the room like sunshine, and is therefore pervasively present.

The plaintiffs won. They persuaded the tribunal that cable television was not omnipresent, not a pervasive presence. The new ruling meant that those who bring in cable and subscribe to a menu that includes the Playboy Channel should be free to get porn round the clock. If twelve-year-olds are caught looking in curiously at gangbangs at eight in the morning, why . . . spank them.

It's certainly true that subscribing to a schedule that includes Playboy is a volitional act, even as renting a porn movie requires a foray of sorts. For one thing, to get a porno, unless you are ordering by mail, you actually have to leave the house; step out from the neighborhood, so to speak, to bring in that porn. And then Blockbuster, the corner store of video TV, doesn't even carry Adult Fare. Therefore, a Playboy Channel customer, far from posing as an innocent bystander victimized by porn's juggernaut, is better likened to the man or woman free to buy a ticket to see Deep Throat.

While the question of cable TV as a pervasive presence was being considered, along came the Internet. We are advised (though I stare at the figure with obdurate skepticism) that the Internet has 70,000 porn outlets. Anybody who wishes, and learns how to twiddle the dials, can now drink deep of porn at home or, as contrived, in leisure moments in the office. To be sure, you are supposed to be older than 18, which requires you to feign to be older than 18.

But even the Internet, though there are about 130 million users in this country, is one step removed from what one is exposed to in normal, pedestrian life. Television, on the other hand, is truly universal. By relaxing its grip on pre-10 P.M. cable porn, the FCC has moved in the direction of porn as a pervasive presence. Still, Playboy argued, the individual subscriber, to satisfy himself, needs to seek Playboy out, so that it remains one stage removed from, say, the radio left idly on in the house or garage.

Yes . . . and no. It is reasonably argued that porn on TV is a pervasive presence. And then to ask, Is there still an ethical question kicking about? If something is wrong, viz., distributing materials assembled with only the purpose in mind to gratify prurient interests, what leverage is left to questions of right and wrong? Questions of ethics? What sanctions, if any, do objectors have who claim concern for community standards?

The issue of Esquire cited above has that wonderfully patronizing line for those of its readers casting about for something to do during the fourth week of the month. "Observe Ash Wednesday on February 28th, if that's your thing." Your thing. Your thing! Your fetish. Christianity.

Christianity isn't the only ethical system spawned by religious beliefs that opines on sexual commerce. Judaism, of course, and Islam have sexual codes. The questioner keeps asking, What are the wells from which these strictures against sexual exhibitionism flow? Primarily they are deposits of religious creeds and maxims. But they have a life of their own, reiteratedly stressed in non-religious chambers. The New York Society for Ethical Culture posts its credenda on a single page: "We Believe . . . that ethics is the central factor in human relationships." That "all individuals are validated and strengthened through our interconnectedness with others." But why should others, unburdened by religious doctrine, be affected by mores that were created by religion, or that derive from them? Are those who make the case for the revival of public codes on pornography left with an obligation to come up with empirical secular justification for doing so? Do we need bastard children and AIDS and syphilis to make the case for condoms or for sexual restraint?

Ethical codes exist independent of material consequences, notably the commandment to charity. But a search for utilitarian means of making the case for sexual restraint is rewarding. It takes us to the most obvious historical case study, if concededly the most facile, which is the Lewinsky episode in President Clinton's career.

Never mind what Clinton did. Focus only on the factor of shame.

During his, and the republic's, ordeal, it was endlessly reiterated that what he did was irrelevant to his tenure as president.

Perhaps. But why was it necessary to make this point endlessly? Because contrary judgments were endlessly arrived at; indeed, President Clinton was impeached. To uphold publicly his rights to private sexual conduct necessarily gave rise to public questions about normative sexual conduct. The pornographic code holds that consensual exchanges of whatever nature are, at the very least, interesting to read about, and abstractly innocent. But to aver that what-he-did-in-the-bedroom was irrelevant to his tenure as president is different from saying that what he did "in private life" should be immune from ethical criticism. Not justifying impeachment is different from not meriting disapproval.

From which we deduce that there survives, buffeted and defensive, an extant code of sexual behavior that, while countenancing pornography, disapproves of it and is properly alert to the challenge, What to do about it?

Acknowledging collective concern takes you beyond the counsel to self-abnegation. We have a code of ethics that tells us that indeed Clinton ought not to have done what he did, and the rebuke is made at different levels of sternness, reflecting the ardor with which one holds to standards of behavior. The failure to live unerringly by the marital code, to single out that aspect of Clinton's conduct, is so commonplace as to escape reprimand in positive law except when the betrayed partner decides to enter a claim in a divorce court. But that which isn't illegal isn't therefore blameless, as a rudimentary esteem for honor reminds us. Carefree commerce in pornography is a consequence of permissive interpretations of the Constitution, but the courts' rulings do not repeal a sense of what is and isn't proper. Nobody of public consequence comes to mind who flatly dismisses the marital ideal and appropriate sexual behavior as anachronized, on the order of laws against witchcraft or heresy, or even laws against sodomy. These are not only ignored, they are disowned as errant moral judgments of history; which is not likely to happen on the question of the marital contract.

In the United States v. Clinton, A.D. 1999, ethical forces, demoralized by partisanship, distracted by constitutional scruple, and weakened by moral irresolution, stopped short of exacting the capital penalty of removal from office. But the code of conduct was not so laggard as to fail to exact some form of deference: Bill Clinton apologized for his conduct.

Against Complacency
It has not been established that viewing a movie about wanton sexual behavior prompts wanton sexual behavior, though common sense comes into play. What are the progenitors of current sexual behavior? Prohibiting advertisements for cigarette smoking is an ongoing objective of those who assume there is a nexus between the display of a product and commerce done in that product. Nobody argues the contrary in respect of liquor. If cigarette ads sell cigarettes, why doesn't Esquire sell sex?

It is established by common sense that stimulants stimulate. What are the defensible weapons against beady-eyed sexual commerce? If conduct of a certain kind is wrong, how does one argue that point? Traditionally one asks for more merely than soliloquies by the tablet keepers, eulogizing community codes. In the presidential campaign of 1996, Candidate Robert Dole chastised Hollywood and, in the interpretation of some, even threatened it.

Threatened it with what? Public strictures?

A movement should begin, however modestly. (For possibilities, see Mr. Nordlinger's article.) And a key to it is the concept of the pervasive presence. Twenty-five years ago, Malcolm Muggeridge commented on the American scene in The New York Review of Books. "Never, it is safe to say, in the history of the world, has a country been as sex-ridden as America is today. The great advertising industry has helped by producing a quenchless flow of effective, if sometimes crude, propaganda. Likewise the publishers and the entertainment moguls. Even television has now joined in. Faced with a formidable array of forces, pockets of resistance have been forced onto the defensive, and even to retreat."

How did Muggeridge find all that out? The argument that, after all, non-porn fare on television/radio/books/magazines outnumbers porn fare by 100 to 1 is as persuasive as to argue that a dwelling with a single window only proportionately lets the eye travel to the outdoors. Porn has become a pervasive presence and a counteroffensive should begin. A modest objective would aim at the decision involving the Playboy Channel. Hack away at that station's arrant, demeaning, corrosive obscenity. Tell it no — tell the porn merchants to stay on the other side of midnight, in the dark hours. Revive the spirit of Miller v. California. Accept the challenge to declare as obscene and without artistic value the sons and daughters of Deep Throat, and do so to the satisfaction of American jurors, who, paradoxically, can emerge, as in Cincinnati, as the most sophisticated moral arbiters around. Free them from the guile of the expert who can find enduring social value in ordure.

Is the willpower latently there? Muggeridge completed his thought about porn in America with a distinction. "Love especially can prove a highly subversive force in that it stimulates individual and particular emotions and loyalties, whereas eroticism is generalized and therefore conducive to a conformist state of mind." It would be a significant step forward if we were to take a step back, to how it was in 1975, about which Muggeridge wrote, warning us then of the complacency that besets us now.