Why Obscenity Laws Must Be Fought

By Monica Shores, $pread Magazine. Posted July 10, 2008.

Last week, just after writing an article praising the adult industry for supporting a Max Hardcore, a man that largely disgusts them, I came across a drawn image of a naked girl pinned to a wall by knives, including one that was wedged between her legs. There was blood at at every point of contact. I couldn't imagine what type of person would want to post this on their personal blog (which was where I encountered it) and, in a clear case of poor judgment, I followed the link back to where it the image was found.

Of course, the images I found were more graphic than the original. They mainly involved extreme violence inflicted on naked girls. There was also a forum for discussion where members wrote about the types of violence that aroused them. (Not violence they enjoyed doing to others, but violence they thought about, and did not necessarily enjoy thinking about.) One particular post outlined a consensually violent scenario that the author and his girlfriend wanted to undertake. This was not a scenario that involved flogging or knife play, or breath play, or piercing. It was a scenario that involved amputation.

The people posting there seemed sincere and even vulnerable. They recommended that new visitors not look at the images. (Occasionally, they seemed to regret the fact that they themselves were drawn to do so.) They recalled being aroused by violence -- just violence, not violence in a sexual context -- as children. They weren't celebrating this condition; they were seeking advice and understanding in a community where they felt safe.

I'm not a total neophyte when it comes to ero-guro; I've seen In the Realm of the Senses, which features actual people. And let me emphasize that all of what I saw was unmistakably drawn. It wasn't even CGI. It was cartoons, but they devastated me. I felt like someone had upended a garbage can in my brain. I was a zombie for hours afterwards. But when I finally started waking up from my shock-coma, I realized that even though the images and ideas there repulsed me, there were no grounds on which I could support them being illegal. In fact, aside from the obvious side effects of making me a total hypocrite and setting a precedent to threaten my own speech, eliminating that forum would be a profoundly unwise thing to do. Was the man who wants his girlfriend to sever a part of his body going to be somehow healthier if he doesn't talk about that impulse? Right. Just ignore the desire to hack off a limb. Never talk about it again, and I'm sure it will go away. Or maybe go see a therapist. You have the time and money to regularly see a therapist, don't you? Sure you do. Everyone with weird impulses does.

Whenever certain content is particularly challenging to me, I remind myself of a line I read years ago in Nadine Strossen's Defending Pornography, which I remember as: "The answer to speech you don't like is always more speech." More speech, not less. Speech you don't like is an opportunity to create speech that you do like, particularly speech that replaces confusion with clarity, or speech that replaces lies with truth.

So this brings me to Barry McDonald, the law professor debating John Stagliano in the LA Times on the the issue of obscenity laws. According to McDonald, people are "harmed" by the existence of obscene materials even if people are not harmed in the creation of said materials. He goes on to helpfully clarify "I'm not a psychologist or sociologist, but it seems to me that viewing them to obtain sexual pleasure cannot be the healthiest way of experiencing sex." Perhaps it hasn't occurred to non-sex-expert Dr. McDonald that some of us, dare I say most of us, might have the capacity to enjoy "obscene" things in the context of a healthy sex life. It clearly hasn't occurred to him that we don't all have cookie-cutter sexualities, and that some of us might be born with a mind that will never adhere to society's dictates of what is arousing and what is not. As John Stagliano responds, referring to his company's pornography, "[t]o me, the pleasure I get from viewing such material is simply a wonderful expression of my biological nature." If a child is watching zombie movies -- government approved, standard horror movie fare -- and feeling some kind of sexual charge, as was described on the guro board, that child may not be in for a life of what society deems "healthy" sexuality.

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