In his September Update in YNOT NEWS Legal Briefs, Larry Walters said the DOJ is preparing 49 more obscenity cases in addition to one already settled and one pending. The one pending, against Extreme Associates, involves up to 50-year prison terms..U.S. Justice Department lawyers are brewing up a dangerous situation for many, if not most, adult Webmasters. We need to get serious and take action.
In his September Update in YNOT NEWS Legal Briefs, Larry Walters said the DOJ is preparing 49 more obscenity cases in addition to one already settled and one pending. The one pending, against Extreme Associates, involves up to 50-year prison terms.
Larry believes the government plan is to start with extreme content and work up to mainstream porn. He cites the Assistant U.S. Attorney heading the current prosecution, who says even Playboy may be considered obscene in some parts of the country.
If that is their view, are any of us safe?
This is an all out, political-religious attack on our industry. The Justice Department resembles a Middle Eastern dictatorship like the Taliban when it comes to freedom of sexual expression. They fight against the Taliban in the War on Terror, but they seem to be joining the Taliban for a “War on Porn.”
We can stick our heads in the sand, or we can take action.
We still have some freedoms in this country that we can use to help restore sanity. As Larry points out, we should all support and join the Internet Freedom Association and the Free Speech Coalition.
But there is more we can do, a way we can help ourselves at the same time we help our industry. We can start to provide an antidote to the negative political rhetoric by getting the word out about the positive benefits of porn.
That’s why I wrote an article, “Attackers Ignore Porn Benefits”, which is available for anyone to reprint free of charge in accordance with the copyright permission notice at the end of the article.
The article points out that porn helps reduce rapes and other sex crimes, improves the status of women, provides potential health benefits, can help reduce adverse pressures on marriages, and can help a society move forward in many ways. If you don’t believe it, read the article. There is a lot of supporting evidence.
If more people understood these benefits, they would be less susceptible to the anti-porn diatribes of religious fanatics and vote-hungry politicians.
Reprinting the article somewhere on your sites can help shift public opinion, make your visitors feel better about enjoying your adult content, and increase your text content that is readable by search engines. And it costs nothing. All I ask is please include the credit link I placed at the bottom of the article.
The greatest danger to freedom is silence. Some adult industry members and many of our customers are understandably too embarrassed to speak out in favor of porn. But if just a few of your visitors, and a few of everyone else’s visitors, get the idea that porn is a good thing, not a bad thing, we can help sway public opinion.
Already a large portion of the voting population wants the government to stay out of our bedrooms. The prosecutors, however, are bringing their cases in the jurisdictions with the most restrictive community standards. But even in those communities our industry has customers, maybe especially in those communities. We can affect community standards just by reaching a relatively few people with the truth about the benefits of porn.
Beyond that, we can help swing national public opinion against any officials who want to drag us back into the dark ages of repression and censorship. The desire for freedom and progress is not limited to one political viewpoint. It occupies the whole spectrum from liberal to conservative. No matter what one thinks about other political issues, in the light of truth all reasonable people can agree the “War on Porn” is wrong.
There are small steps we can all take, like reprinting or linking to my article, or writing your own or finding other ways to speak out. If we do, the small steps will add up to a big step in the right direction for the public relations of our industry, and help protect us from this dangerous storm the Justice Department is brewing for us.
John C. Boseman (pen name) holds an M.A. in Psychology and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology. He writes about porn, humor, naked women, and sex at Bojiggly Naked Women. Bojiggly is a trademark of Benala Vista, LLC, as is its main tag line, “Saving the World from Excess Clothing on Beautiful Women.”
