[lbo-talk] Porn and Children (was Chip Berlet on Hustler)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Dec 20 10:34:34 PST 2005



> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >The party line of the left is pro-porn. Now the party line may be
> >correct in this case. It often is. But let's not deceive ourselves
> over
> >the overwhelmingly pro-sex/pro-porn consensus on the left for at
> least
> >40 years.
>
> Man, you really are out of touch out there in the cornfields.
> There's no party line. It's quite controversial. Where do you get
> these ideas?
>
> Doug

You can always find fringe rightists gearing up to censor porn -- after all, it's America! -- but they don't have power to put the porn industry out of business. Rest assured that they won't be able to take your beloved smut out of your sweaty palms.

It's another story entirely when it comes to children and pornography. The media, as well as government, have literally made a federal case out of it. Just yesterday, the New York Times ran a huge investigative story whose reporter helped initiate federal prosecution of associates and clients of a young boy -- Justin Berry -- who willingly made himself into a "camwhore": Kurt Eichenwald, "Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World," <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/national/19kids.ready.html>.

At the same time as adults' right and freedom of sexuality has expanded, age limits to sexuality have in some ways become more strict.

The idea of protecting women from obscenity went out of fashion through the sexual revolution; protecting children has become the dominant idea of sexual discipline -- through law enforcement, media spectacles, etc. -- since the late twentieth century on.

Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>



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