Page 61 - AVN October 2016

by MARKKERNES
We Have Met the Enemy Conservatives wage war on porn ... and sex in general
“The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.”
—Mark Twain
has proven to be a mixed bag for Americans’ sexual
rights. Even as the public becomes more and more
For those paying attention to current events, 2016
comfortable with adult content in just about all media,
repressive governmental groups like the Dallas City
Council and anti-adult activists like the National
Center on Sexual Exploitation prevented Exxxotica from putting
on a show at Dallas’ publicly owned convention center, and got
the fledgling TeXXXas show bounced from two venues before it
finally found a home in a strip club. And while the U.S. Supreme
Court has legalized same-sex marriage, Alabama Chief Justice
Roy Moore has ordered his subordinates to refuse to issue such
licenses.
Though one of the most talked-about adult movies of last year
was Kaitlyn Gender: Based on a Not So True Story, legislators in North
Carolina passed HB2, which not only prohibits transgender
students and others from using restrooms that match their
gender identities, it also allows for anti-gay discrimination in
multiple venues—and they’re hardly the only state to have passed
or is considering passing one of these. And let’s not forget the
American Family Association’s targeting of Target stores for
allowing its patrons to make similar bathroom choices.
Also, we’re guessing that most people don’t even want to know
how bent out of shape religious pro-censorship groups have
been in targeting anything remotely sex-positive on TV—like the
“lesbian kiss” on ABC’s fairytale show Once Upon a Time (used to
wake the heroine from a “sleeping curse”), not to mention the
mere existence of shows like Black Jesus (featuring Jesus as a poor
black man who helps tend a marijuana garden), Lucifer (where
The Devil, a snappy dresser who also owns a hip nightclub,
takes a vacation to Los Angeles and winds up helping a lady cop
solve crimes), and Angel From Hell (featuring a real-life lesbian,
Jane Lynch, portraying a hard-drinking, pill-popping, swearing
Guardian Angel). And don’t even get them started on the recent
commercial for Carl’s Jr.’s “Bacon Three-Way Burger,” which
features three bikini-clad models acting sexy around ground beef.
But for some reason, the big news in early September was an
op-ed published in the (ultra-conservative) Wall Street Journal on
August 31 by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and sex symbol Pamela
Anderson titled “Take the Pledge: No More Indulging Porn.”
Longtime adult industry watchers will remember Boteach as
a pal of anti-porn blogger Luke Ford, but the real mystery was
why Anderson signed onto the screed. After all, she first came
to fame as lifeguard C.J. Parker on the babe-centric TV show
Baywatch—and then to even more fame as the “female lead” in
the 1995 internet (and later DVD) short video Pam & Tommy Lee:
Hardcore and Uncensored, a sex tape the then-married couple had
made which was stolen and put online for the world to see—
but the point is, she and her husband made porn for their own
enjoyment. (She’d also created an earlier sex tape with musician
Bret Michaels, frames of which appeared in Penthouse in March of
1998, but it was never released in full.)
A new meme was born: Porn was no
longer simply immoral and sinful, because that
doesn’t fly with today’s media-savvy, mostly
non-church-going millennials. Instead,
according to the Utah Resolution, porn
“perpetuates a sexually toxic environment”
and is “potentially biologically addictive.”
Anderson has also appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine 14 times, first in October 1989 and
most recently its January/February 2016 issue, the last issue to feature nudity, copies of which she
autographs and sells for $500 each, the Washington Times reported, to benefit her Pamela Anderson
Foundation. And the latest reports have her returning to her roots by appearing in a Baywatch movie
scheduled to debut in 2017.
Also, a week after her anti-porn op-ed appeared in print, she posted a nude photo of herself on
Instagram. Or as Dr. Marty Klein observed, “Apparently she only opposes porn that she’s not in.”
While it’s unclear how much of the piece was authored by Anderson, its purpose was to bash
former Congressman Anthony Weiner, who once again had been caught sexting to an unidentified
young woman—but from there, Boteach and Anderson go on to rant about “porn addiction” and
how easy access to sexually explicit material will turn today’s kids into “crack babies of porn.”
They also call for a “sensual revolution” that would “replace pornography with eroticism,” even
as “we must educate ourselves and our children to understand that porn is for losers—a boring,
wasteful and dead-end outlet for people too lazy to reap the ample rewards of healthy sexuality.”
And it seems that just about every news outlet in the country has found this horseshit to be worth
reporting, both in print/internet postings and on TV.
And speaking of boring, wasteful, dead-end outlets, there’s the modern-day Republican Party!
Admittedly, they were a bit slow getting out of the gate, but as expected, the party has stepped up
its calls for persecution of the adult industry—and just in time for election season!
Frankly, we were a bit worried that the religio-conservatives had forgotten how much they
hate sexual freedom in general, and porn in particular. One of the few early attempts was last
November’s “Presidential Questionnaire” from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation
(NCOSE), where the organization tried to get the then-voluminous gaggle of candidates to promise
to “allocate the law enforcement resources necessary to aggressively combat the demand for
commercial sex”; “amend the Communications Decency Act of 1996”; “direct the U. S. Department
of Health and Human Services to ... abate the effects of pornography addiction”; “direct the U.S.
Department of Justice to vigorously enforce federal obscenity laws”; and “insist that the FCC
vigorously enforce the federal indecency law designed to protect children from damaging sexual
content.”
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