Porn Free
Pimping for pornography is a habit the alternative press should break.
by Carole Bass

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed a small change in recent issues of this newspaper: The Temp of the Town column is no longer "the Advocate's Take on New Haven's Quality of Life, Compiled by Carole Bass." Rather, the news summary/scorecard is now labeled "Carole Bass' take."

What prompted the change from an apparently Advocate - endorsed viewpoint to one that was my view alone?

In a word: porn.

I had written an item celebrating the eviction of an "adult" video store. That nakedly anti-porn stance, I'm told, provoked some "rumbling in the cubicles" from colleagues who consider it antithetical to what the Advocate is all about.

The Advocate, you see, is an "alternative" weekly newspaper. And everyone knows that alt-weeklies and porn go together like bump & grind, like T&A, like love & marriage--well, scratch that last one. We style ourselves as the papers of sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and progressive politics. We stick it to The Man while sticking up for the little guy. We think for ourselves.

We think for ourselves, that is, on most issues. There is no Advocate party line on the politics of gentrification, or affirmative action, or Wal-Mart. Nor do we expect an uncritical embrace of entire genres of pop culture automatically equating folk music with workers' rights, say, or indie rock with grassroots creativity.

Why, then, do we reflexively pimp for porn? What's so alternative about that?

Porn as Sex

I want the old-timey, bare-knuckled, aggressively macho left "the porn-loving left," my colleague Tom Gogola wrote in these pages a year ago.

Why macho and porn-loving?

The same issue carried an anti-porn letter to the editor which we branded, in a headline, "very weird."

Why is it weird to criticize the Advocate , as the letter writer did, for "glorifying porn every week"?

The letter noted that we gave a local video store a shout-out for, "unlike Blockbuster, stocking porn!"

Why is that praiseworthy?

In all three cases, the Advocate delivered its pro-porn message casually, almost unthinkingly. It seems that promoting porn is a core value for alt-weeklies, one that--like civil rights or democracy--requires no explanation.

I'm guessing the assumptions run something like this: Sex is good. Porn is sex. Therefore, porn is good. To be anti-porn is to be anti-sex, which is to say prudish, if not downright censorious. Someone who expresses a dislike of porn is someone who wants to take away other people's pleasure, or even their constitutional rights to privacy and free expression.

So let's look at those assumptions.

Sex is good

That's like saying "food is good" or "music is good." There's good food and bad food, good music and bad music, good sex and bad sex. The Advocate doesn't praise CD stores for carrying boy bands or Christian rock. We don't commend grocers for selling factory-farmed chickens.

Anti-porn equals anti-sex

We make distinctions all the time about political viewpoints and cultural expression. If a writer criticizes a peace demonstration for being shrill or flaky, that doesn't make the writer anti-peace. If she slams '80s big-hair bands as a scourge on the music world, that doesn't make her anti-rock.

Criticizing porn is attempted censorship

Look, most forms of pornography are legal and should stay that way. So should the Ku Klux Klan and the Rev. Fred Phelps' "God Hates Fags" brigades. End of First Amendment discussion.

Of course there are anti-porn activists who want to curtail people's rights. I'm not one of them. This isn't an argument about rights, about how speech must remain free no matter how despicable. It's an argument about what's despicable.

Porn as Neighbor

The Temp-est that prompted removing the Advocate's name from my Temp of the Town column was this: A church in Milford was unhappy about the presence of a porn shop in the church's mostly residential neighborhood. So the church bought the building and, last month, moved to evict the shop. I gave that move a "plus" rating.

My thinking was this: A neighborhood porn shop is a quality-of-life issue. For porn consumers, I suppose the store's presence enhances the quality of life. For others--well, maybe there are porn stores that make good neighbors. But I'm betting they have a pretty lousy track record.

Take the family that lived upstairs from Video Pleasures in Milford. Bishop Jay Ramirez of the nearby Kingdom Life Christian Church met one member of the family a few years ago. She was a teenage girl who went to school with Ramirez's daughter. Three other girls lived there as well.

"What struck me was the girl describing what she had seen behind the building," Ramirez says: "Men masturbating, comments that were made to them, like, 'Come over here.' They were afraid."

That's a quality-of-life issue. It's not censorship. Milford has tightened its zoning rules to keep sex businesses out of residential areas, but that's not censorship either. Video Pleasures could have moved to a commercial section of town. Ramirez says his church has no intention of going after sex businesses elsewhere.

When neighbors protest a liquor shop or convenience store on their block, it's not because they're against Budweiser or Cheez Doodles. When they campaign to get a pay phone taken off the corner, it's not because they hate the idea of people talking to other people. They're upset about the things that go along with those uses: drunks, litter, drug dealers.

Last year, people in New Haven's Dwight neighborhood organized against a raucous party house. They weren't anti-Yale or anti-singing group, as my colleague Chris Arnott--one of the neighborhood organizers--carefully pointed out in an Advocate article. Rather, the neighbors were responding to unneighborly behavior by students who happened to be members of an a cappella group.

In that context, and in many others, the Advocate applauds neighborhoods that organize to rid themselves of a slumlord, a junkyard, a crackhouse. Why not a sex shop?

In his response to this article, Tom Gogola scoffs at Ramirez's story of porn-shop customers masturbating and harassing teenage girls. Why, Tom asks, should we take the word of a "fake ’bishop' who routinely sells believers a bill of goods about Jesus Christ's imminent return to earth"?

To be sure, Ramirez's second-hand account is not proof. But there's no reason to think that, simply because he holds unverifiable religious beliefs, Ramirez is likely to fabricate stories about what's happening in his neighborhood. Like most people who buy beer and wine, I don't hang out in front of liquor stores, drinking 40s and smashing bottles. But I wouldn't be surprised by such a story. Likewise, I think it's a credible scenario that a porn shop would attract some customers who engage in sexual behavior in the parking lot.

Porn as Industry

The pornography industry, overwhelmingly run by men for men, is deeply exploitive. That's well documented, and I won't try to prove it here. It's also a very big and very lucrative industry, drivenlike much of capitalismby greed. So the "alternative" media, champions of the underdog, should at the very least be suspicious of pornography.

Sure, there are women who like porn, including some who make a feminist case for how it's sexually liberating and economically empowering. That's a distinctly minority viewpoint. How many women do you know who think porn is a good thing? How many women do you think get rich and powerful from the porn industry? Are you rooting for your sisters and girlfriends and daughters to choose a career in pornography? With few exceptions, it's an industry run by men, selling images of women to other men.

And porn is a commodity. It's not a vehicle for art or ideas. Legally it may be considered "speech" or "expression," but that's sort of like referring to a one-night-stand as "making love." There's no love involved. There's no speech. Porn is a product.

The Advocate has reviewed porn books, DVDs, skin-flick soundtracks. They take their place alongside the other consumer products we write about. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me is when we adopt porn as a cause.

Porn as Cause

Damn, I just love pornography," writes Annalee Newitz on alternet.org. "As a woman and an upstanding American, I'm supposed to recoil with horror from pornographic images and situations; I'm supposed to think that the people involved are being exploited and that it's a degrading, icky business."

That's just a throwaway introduction to Newitz's article, headlined "Your Brain on Porn." Her real subject is an attack on the Christian right. But first, Newitz establishes her intellectual courage: She doesn't think what she's supposed to think, feel what she's supposed to feel. Damn. Probably hates veggie burgers, too.

Porn advocates love to cloak themselves in this pseudo-rebelliousness: "Hey, look at me! I'm not doing what I'm supposed to! The PC left and the puritanical right are both trying to tell me what to do. But I think for myself!"

The pose of rebellion is part of the reason free-thinking, free-wheeling alt-weekly types are expected to embrace pornography. But there's nothing progressive about pornography. Nothing smart or cool or alternative. Nothing that makes the world more just, more peaceful, more creative, more free.

Liberating? Sure, just like sweatshop labor liberates us from high prices.

Alternative? Soft-core porn is everywhere, and it's as mainstream as you can get. It's called advertising. As for the hard-core stuff, Chris Arnott pointed out in a DVD review a few months ago: "[P]orn has of course mainstreamed.... Memoirs of porn stars routinely make the New York Times bestseller list, and there've been several major movies based on the exploits of Johnny Wadd Holmes alone."

Besides, some taboos are worth preserving. There's a good reason why alt-weeklies don't toss off casual endorsements of female genital mutilation--even when some of the females in question insist it's an important part of their culture. How about an aggressively macho, polygamy-loving left? Try selling that as a progressive cause.

Porn is popular. So is McDonald's. So are gas-guzzling SUVs and racist comedy and music that boasts about rape and gay-bashing. Perhaps there's room in alternative newspapers for a thoughtful, passionate appreciation of those things. But if there's a case to be made, we've got to make itnot fake it. Otherwise we're just a purveyor of silicone-enhanced pseudo-journalism, passing ourselves off as the real deal

Slings and Eros
Porn vs evangelical Christianity? Porn!
By Tom Gogola

I totally disagree with my colleague Carole Bass. It wasn't just "a word" porn that caused all the consternation in the office. The issue wasn't just the porn itself but the people who are opposing it, and those people are moralizing evangelical Christians intent on foisting a repressive (as against progressive) value system on our citizenry; theirs is a value system at complete odds with that of the alternative media, this paper included.

The Milford mega-church that drove the mom-and-pop porn shop out of business is part of the anti-rationality, anti-science, anti-choice, anti-homosexual brigade in this country, the same people who have given us the presidency of George Bush. Theirs are not values shared by this paper. When Carole gave the porn shop's closing an up-arrow in her Temp of the Town column, some of us sided with the porn shop. That's because when "Bishop" Jay Ramirez buys a building in order to shut down a porn business, it is a victory not only for anti-porn activists, but for the entire evangelical agenda.

Great hay is made over preacher Ramirez' claim about the now-closed porn shop's alleged danger to the community. Bass takes the word of a fake "bishop" who routinely sells believers a bill of goods about Jesus Christ's imminent return to earth, who passes along an unverified story that strongly implies that men who watch porn are perverts. Ramirez says a resident told him that there were creeps hanging around the shop harassing children? If that's so, where's the police report?

Moreover, even if there is "well documented" evidence that the porn industry exploits women, Bass says we don't need to know the details. We all just know that porn degrades women, because she says it does. But it is also well-documented that the world of pornography is very different from the one that anti-porn activists would like us to imagine.

Nowadays (to take one example) there are hundreds of amateur-porn sites on the web. These sites feature men and women, ordinary people in all their frumpily erotic glory, who enjoy getting it on for the camera, and whose pornarific enjoyment is evident, non-coerced, non-degrading and profoundly non-exploitative.

A long, hard look at the current porn universe exposes a million points of porn out there, many of them homegrown and wildly "alternative." Nerve magazine, the lesbian porn of the magazine On Our Backs, the soft-hued porn stylings of Andrew Blake, the women of the Seymore Butts porn series, hippiegoddess.com, sex writers Tristan Taormino and Susie Bright, Real Sex, porn star and safe-sex activist Nina Hartley, voyeurweb.com, Annie Sprinkle, the entire nation of Germany, the gazillionaire one-woman porn industry known as Jenna Jameson, webcam hotties, adultfriendfinder.com...

The point is: The horse has left the porn barn, taking most of the old-line feminist arguments against porn with it. The argument, rhetorical or otherwise, is not whether or not we want our sisters and daughters to be making porn: They already are , and many are quite happy to be doing so. If the new frontier in porn makes Carole uncomfortable (and it's not for me to say if it does), that's a reasonable position to hold. What's not reasonable is comparing a porn shop to a crackhouse by way of defending "Bishop" Ramirez' censorious eviction.

The Advocate as a general rule rails against large landholders evicting chump-change tenants. Yes, it's perfectly legal for the church to use its big bucks to buy a building and evict tenants it deems "undesirable." But the might-makes-right logic of capitalism is something the alternative press has always questioned. When big money imposes its prudery on small moneywhen Wal-Mart makes sure that people in rural areas can only buy CDs with inoffensive lyricsthat does a huge disservice to the community Wal-Mart is supposed to be serving.

Question: Does the multimillion-dollar gay porn industry degrade women? I can't imagine that the Temp item in question would have supported Ramirez if he had targeted a gay porn shop. Porn has helped many a gay man help come to terms with his sexuality, since a visual representation of gay sex acts provides a liberatory platform for men struggling over identity questions. That struggle has played out not only within the pages of Honcho, but in the out-and-loud pages of the alternative press since the post-Stonewall 1970s. It's part of a long struggle for free access to outré materials, part of the same tradition as the "community standards" and "decency" fights over Lolita, Naked Lunch, Howl, Tropic of Cancer and Huckleberry freaking Finn. It's not "end of story" because Bass tells us she's a proponent of free speech, legally speaking. What troubled me mostly about that point, beyond its solipsistic premise and I'll admit to making a few solipsistic arguments in my time, was that Carole again chose to equate porn with the worst of the worst: the Ku Klux Klan and the "God Hates Fags" organization in Kansas.

I have a lot of respect and admiration for Carole Bass and of course I believe she is entitled to think porn is the enemy here, even if her support for Ramirez brings to mind the old Sun Tzu maxim about the enemy of your enemy being your friend. I'd only have wished Carole's loyalties were less with the forces of religious tyranny, and more with the forces of transgression, eros, and, yes, hot and nasty sex.

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