Pornography refers to any writings, images, and video deemed obscene, or contrary to public standards of morality. The pornography industry has become a big business. A 1972 government study estimated that the pornography industry made sales worth $5 million to $10 million; in 2000 the Forrester Research Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, estimates that it is a $10 billion industry. Off-line pornography sales account for $8 billion of this total.
Adult-video sales earn $4.2 billion and account for 32 percent of all video sales. Furthermore, pornographic movies have become available through cable and satellite television. The 8.7 million subscribers to DirecTV, a General Motors subsidiary, buy an estimated $200 million worth of hard-core pornography through pay-per-view television. The EchoStar Communications Corporation, the second-largest satellite provider, whose chief financial backers include Rupert Murdoch, makes more money selling graphic adult films through its satellite subsidiary than Playboy Enterprises makes from its magazine, cable, and Internet business. The AT&T Corporation, the nation’s largest communication company, offers a hard-core sex channel called Hot Network to subscribers of its broadband cable. Nearly one in five of AT&T’s broadband cable customers pay an average of $10 a film to see “real life” sex.
The Internet has also made pornography available to a large audience. Forrester Research estimates that sex sites on the Web generate at least $1 billion a year in revenue. There are 60,000 such sites. According to two Web rating services, about one in four regular Internet users, or 21 million Americans, visit one or more of these sites at least once a month—more people than go to sports or government sites. NetValue, a management company, reported that children spent 64.9 percent more time on pornography sites than they did on game sites in September 2000. Over one quarter (27.5 percent) of children age 17 and under visited an adult Web site, totaling 3 million underage visitors. Of these minors, 21.2 percent were 14 years old or younger, and 40.2 percent were females.
Two of the most popular sites are owned by New Frontier Media, a Boulder, Colorado, company. It does business with several major companies, including EchoStar and In Demand, the nation’s leading pay-per view distributor, which is owned in part by AT&T, Time Warner, Advance-Newhouse, Cox Communications, and Comcast.
Pornography has also become accessible through the cable and satellite television found in many chain hotels. Recently, the Omni Hotel chain announced it no longer would carry pay-per-view pornographic films in its hotels. This decision cost the chain an estimated $1.8 million per year, but the company received letters from 50,000 people supporting this decision. On the other hand, the Marriott hotel chain, whose owners have close associations with the Mormon Church, continues to provide direct-pay television showing pornographic films. One of the largest suppliers of sex video and other forms of room entertainment to hotels is LodgeNet, whose chairman, Scott C. Peterson, reports doing a $180 million annual business.
The Supreme Court has paid special attention to the definition of obscenity and pornography, because government regulation on the topics skirts so closely to constitutional protections of free speech and press. In 1957, the U. S. Supreme Court, in Roth v. United States ruled that obscenity does not fall within the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, or the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. It also established a three-prong test for the legal definition of obscenity: 1) the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex; 2) the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters; and 3) the material is utterly without redeeming social value. Roth also explicitly noted that sex was not necessarily synonymous with obscenity, but was obscene only when it is dealt with in a wholly prurient manner. In 1966 the Supreme Court’s decision in Memoirs v. Massachusetts overruled the Roth decision, arguing that there are no exceptions to the First Amendment’s protection of speech, and that society has no interest in “overriding the guarantees of free speech and press and establishing a regime of CENSORSHIP.” Seven years later, in 1973, the Supreme Court reversed itself again in Miller v. California, which ruled again that obscenity is outside the First Amendment’s protections and reaffirmed the first two of Roth’s original three-prong test for obscenity. It differed from the first two points, however, in that it left the determination of obscenity up to “local community standards,” rejecting the necessity of national standards.
Though the Court has since refined its test for pornography, it has adhered to the underlying decision that obscenity lies outside the bounds of constitutional protection. This position has inspired criticism from a variety of groups. Some contend that the First Amendment protections of free speech and artistic expression prohibit any form of censorship. Such opponents argue that since the line dividing obscenity and serious art is subjective, restrictions infringe on personal liberty and freedom of thought. Some argue that since judgments regarding moral standards most often reflect religious heritages, then any form of governmental censorship necessarily violates the principle of separated church and state. Therefore, they argue the decision to access or not to access pornography involving consenting adults should depend on individual choice. This view is held by many political LIBERALS, as well as political Libertarians. A growing thread of radical feminist theory also defends pornography as a component of sexual liberation. Liberal feminists, however, reject this view, arguing that pornography amounts to the exploitation and objectification of women. Cultural conservatives and religious critics agree and argue further that pornography invariably undermines the institution of family, increases the rate of divorce, and desanctifies MARRIAGE. Many critics believe that pornography can become psychologically addictive, and may lead to depression or even manifest itself through sex crimes. These views are vigorously contested by censorship opponents and others.
Since the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1992, the debate over pornography has assumed an added dimension. Previous discussions of obscenity and pornography rested on the assumption that minors could be easily restricted from accessing offensive materials through physical barriers; for example, a door to an adult bookstore, or a teller at an adult movie house. Censorship opponents often argued that offended consumers could avoid pornographic materials by choosing not to enter the adult-oriented establishments. Pornography on the Internet, however, has no such physical barriers; minors, as noted above, can access obscene material in the privacy of their homes. Pornography flooded the Web almost as soon as it opened to the public, and indeed was a prime driver of the medium’s growth and commercialization. In response, concerned lawmakers included the Communications Decency Act (CDA) within the widely supported Telecommunications Act of 1996. The CDA specifically prohibits the transmission of “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent” material over a telecommunications device to a minor. Though the act applied to any telecommunications device, including telephones and cable television, the Internet promised to be most affected; any Web site administrator who knowingly published obscene materials in a manner that could be viewed by minors could be liable to prosecution. Since the World Wide Web is based on anonymous transactions, the CDA significantly complicated the business of providing pornography over the Internet.
The bill received overwhelming majorities in both houses (91 to 5 in the Senate; and 414 to 16 in the House), and President William J. Clinton signed it, despite his concerns that it was unconstitutionally broad. On that very day, anticensorship groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and 18 other organizations, filed lawsuits against the government arguing that the CDA unfairly censored free speech. Many Internet promoters who consider “cyberspace” and the World Wide Web to be a kind of libertarian utopia joined the opposition.
On June 26, 1997, the Supreme Court ruled in Reno v. ACLU that the CDA violated the First Amendment because it failed to adequately define obscenity, and because it failed to provide any mechanism for parental consent, or for providers to prove socially redeeming value. The ruling, whether it intended to or not, was received by many as an endorsement of the idea that the Internet is immune to any form of censorship, other than child pornography. The following year, Congress passed the Child Online Protection Act (1998), which requires Web site administrators to put in place some form of electronic adult certification process to prohibit minor access of pornographic materials.
See also CENSORSHIP; LEMINISM; gay and LESBIAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT; MARRIAGE; SEXUAL REVOLUTION;
Supreme Court.
Further reading: Gordon Hawkins, Pornography in a Free Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Frederick S. Lane, Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age (London: Rout-ledge Press, 2000).
—Aharon W Zorea
World History
