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From: andrews@ubc-cs.UUCP (Jamie Andrews)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: Slippery definitions
Message-ID: <100@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 15-Nov-85 14:05:30 EST
Article-I.D.: ubc-cs.100
Posted: Fri Nov 15 14:05:30 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 15-Nov-85 21:17:39 EST
References: <85@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: andrews@ubc-cs.UUCP (Jamie Andrews)
Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 44
Summary: 


     Holy cow!  I go away from net.women for a few days and I return to
find that everyone is clamouring for *my* definition of porn.
I thought people would be tired of definitions by now.
     The most common point seems to be that even material which is
arguing *against* "harmful sex" practises would be banned.  I agree
that there should be some clause about the "intent" of the maker or
distributor.  I have no problems with this because I understand intent
is an important concept in many laws (e.g. assault, rape, hate
literature, etc.).  Others may disagree on the usual libertarian
grounds, but I feel that if a jury is deciding the degree of intent
involved, it's OK to use that term.
     (Phew!  More legalistic than I wanted to get in net.women.)

     So here's a revised definition list.
Harmful sex:  sexual acts in which one or more participants
  (a) are unwilling, or
  (b) are under the age of consent, or
  (c) become physically injured.
Pornography:  sexually explicit material in the communications media that
  (a) depicts or describes harmful sex acts, with the intent of
      abetting or encouraging such acts, regardless of whether it was
      made by such acts; or
  (b) was made by acts of harmful sex, whether or not it depicts or
      describes such acts.
What to do with pornography:  make it a criminal offense to produce or
  distribute it.

     If you have comments in the spirit of improving an imperfect
definition (rather than throwing out an imperfect definition), I'd like
to hear them.
     Before flaming on this, please refer to my original "Slippery
Definitions" article.  (The title referred to the Dworkin law, not
mine! :-)  That contains additional comments.
     As in the original article, I am fully aware that this is limiting
absolute freedom of speech, which I don't believe in.  I am also aware
that S&M is covered by this law; I don't think we should encourage S&M
any more than we should encourage hard drug use.  And as I said above,
I am aware that the term "intent" is subject to jury interpretation.
Flames on these points will be ignored.

--Jamie.  (spokesman(jamie, X) <-> eq(X, jamie))
...!ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!andrews
"I believe in Santa Claus, and the DoD believes in Ada" -- D.Parnas