March 28, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:A lot of anger about
A lot of anger about the labeling issue. Andy Freeman writes that there's too much disagreement about porn to label it:
Some folks think that it's topless. Some folks think that it's bottomless. Some folks think that it's suggestive behavior. Some folks think that it's smoking. Some folks think that it's violence/blood. (Is the opening 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan porn?) I can go on and on. (Abortion information? Saudi articles about Jewish pastry ingredients?) Note that many of the smoking/violence folks aren't bothered by exposed flesh, and visa versa.
Well, first of all, this merely implies a set of, say, twenty labels instead of one. This is not an insurmountable problem.
Second of all, parents -- raise your hand if you're okay with your kid looking at porn as long as she's wearing a g-string. Or if your children are unaware of what smoking looks like and you want to make sure they don't get any pictures of it.
Movie standards were promulgated as much to prevent things that the "busybodies" don't like from looking cool as to keep kids from looking at adult content. Smoking is a public activity, unlike (in most cases) parading around au natural It's not really that hard to draw most of these distinctions. Sure there will be room around the edge -- there's room around the edge in any standard ever promulgated for the conduct of human relations.
Nor do I think it is fair to refer to them as busybodies. The social libertarian idea that the most permissive standard should become the de facto public one is every bit as oppressive as the Jerry Falwell idea that we should all hew to his idea of morality in the public sphere. The fact that many people want to have adult content on the net should not mean that parents have to watch their children every minute to keep them from being exposed to content they don't approve of. Personally, my parents were liberal on that sort of thing -- I saw my first R rated movie at aged 10, with my Dad (National Lampoon's Vacation, it was, and I can't remember why it was rated R). But they also didn't have to contend with the possibility that I might discover pictures of behavior that might frighten or appal me in casual cruising, which is not as hard to do as my correspondants have implied. I've stumbled across things I hadn't even known existed by following links that looked perfectly innocuous. (Yes, I suppose I'm sheltered. No, I'm not going to elaborate. Shame on you!)
Lane McFadden weighs in with the sensible point that the stuff we're arguing about is less than 1% of the porn on the net. I think a 99.5% effective filter is about as well as one can expect to do in an evironment as large as the net, and I'm pretty sure that most parents would agree it's better than nothing.
I'm not so much advocating labels as kicking the idea around and looking at it. I don't know what the solution is. But I think that anti-label advocates are going to have to come up with better arguments than
1) People who don't want their kids (or their employees) looking at porn are just prudes and they need to get with the program
2) It's too hard -- it can't be done. (The MPAA shows it can. Whether it's worth the social cost is another question)