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From: edhall@randvax.UUCP (Ed Hall)
Newsgroups: net.legal,soc.singles
Subject: Re: Commission on Pornography -- *sigh*
Message-ID: <547@randvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 23-Sep-86 03:46:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: randvax.547
Posted: Tue Sep 23 03:46:38 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 26-Sep-86 20:55:57 EDT
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Reply-To: edhall@rand-unix.UUCP (Ed Hall)
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Some open questions to Mark T.:

Your opponents generally seem to feel that the Meese Commission Report
is biased, and was undertaken with a specific outcome in mind.  Since
I consider Ed Meese to be only slightly more liberal than Atila The
Hun, and since several commissioners already where on record as having
strong opinions on pornography (all against!), I find the accusation
of bias a reasonable one.  It seemed very, very clear that great pains
were being taken not to make the same ``mistakes'' that Nixon did
fourteen years ago.

You've done little to rebutt this charge of bias.  I think you need to
do so--going back to the politics which generated the commission and
the way they discharged their mission--before you continue to use it
in your anti-pornography arguments.  Why rely on this report to
buttress your arguments when the people you're arguing against don't
support it as a source of unbiased information?

More to the point: where are your other sources?  Surely there are
many out there--some of which support a benign view on pornography.
Look them up, study them, see where the logical fallacies and
statistical inaccuracies lie.  Certainly there have been studies since
the Nixon era that support a viewpoint contrary to the Meese
Commission.  Where are they wrong?  You can't claim to have an open
mind on the subject until you've done some digging for opinions
different than your own.

[Yes, I've read up on the anti-pornography side, from Meese to Dworkin
to Linda Lovelace.  I've got better things to do with my time than
read an entire rambling thousand-plus page report, though.  Besides,
most porn really isn't to my taste, and the pages and pages of
explicit plot summaries in the report--have YOU read them?--are
nothing but porn in themselves.  Funny that they'd do that--you don't
see the government handing out cocaine just so people can see how bad
it is!]

Remember that two commissioners--two women!--publically repudiated
many of the findings of the male majority, claiming the majority had
no factual basis to support said findings.  Have you investigated
this?  Have you read the Nixon-era report?  Have you visited adult
bookstores and moviehouses so you can see with your own eyes just what
it is you're talking about?  [I've not an extensive amount of
experience here, but my suspicion is that the S&M-laced stuff the
Meese Commission concentrated on is pretty uncommon, and that scenes
of domination feature women in the dominant role as often as men.]

One final comment: the discussion seems to be degenerating into a
religious argument (and anything based upon American Protestant Ethics
is a religious argument at core).  Consider that some of the most
sexually explicit paintings and writings of other cultures come from a
religious base.  Consider also that one of the most productive
industrial nations on Earth--Japan--has one of the lowest rates of sex
crimes yet consumes enormous amounts of often violent pornography.  We
consume less, condemn it far more, yet rate number one in terms of sex
crimes.  The reasons for this difference are doubtless complex, as is
the issue of pornography--far, far more complex than the Meese
Commission ever considered, which is why I dismiss its findings as
superficial propaganda and seek the truth elsewhere.

		-Ed Hall
		decvax!randvax!edhall