Which is more obscene ?

[sarettah]

Max Hardcore and his simulations of S&M, degradation and Rape;

Or The United States in Afghanistan and Iraq with their actual real torture scenes ?



http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=25246

Tortured Logic

The Bush White House Fights for the Right to Continue Torturing Prisoners in U.S. Custody While the Bush Justice Department Prosecutes Pornographers Who Depict Torture. Welcome to the New War on Porn.

Here is how Max Hardcore makes his living: He rams his cock into women's mouths until they vomit, and then he sells videos of the encounters. He sells other videos, too, videos that feature his signature contribution to the world of hardcore pornography: a flexible rubber tube that allows women to suck from their own asses the semen or urine he has just deposited there, often very roughly. Are you turned on yet? Hardcore has been accused (but not convicted) of raping a British porn star named Felicity. He also has been accused of misogyny, a charge that seems apt given that many of his videos feature him shouting degrading insults at the women (often dressed as schoolgirls, complete with pigtails and hairless vaginas) who appear in his films. He describes himself as "an American original" and a leader in the field of "sexual mistreatment," and in addition to his novel use of rubber tubing, he claims both to have pioneered the practice of "anal gaping" and to be at the vanguard of "the misuse of medical speculums."

Will the culture suffer in the slightest if this man is prosecuted for obscenity? We may soon find out.

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Ironically, the behaviors described as prosecutable and obscene in the FBI memo overlap quite directly with behaviors that FBI agents and others have witnessed at U.S. facilities holding prisoners in the War on Terror. At these facilities, actual torture—not adults hurting each other for sexual pleasure, but adults torturing other adults in order to coerce confessions—has reportedly occurred. Pictures have surfaced showing U.S. soldiers engaging in a level of brutality that makes the brutality dished out by Max Hardcore seem gentle in comparison. And at the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an FBI agent has reported seeing prisoners "chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more." One had pulled his own hair out so that it lay in a pile on the floor next to him. Even more ironically, it was Gonzales who, in 2002, as White House Counsel, signed off on a memo widening the possibilities for violent behavior by U.S. interrogators, a memo that led directly to Americans viewing, in pictures from Abu Ghraib and reports from Guantánamo Bay, the sadism, urination, and defecation that Gonzales appears to abhor so greatly in another context.

And still more ironically, this month top Bush administration officials have been fiercely lobbying against a move by Senator John McCain to outlaw any further torture of prisoners held by the United States, with Vice President Dick Cheney emerging as the most prominent and passionate administration defender of torture. Meanwhile, American conservatives have responded positively to Gonzales's move to curtail the sadistic porn available to Americans, with the Family Research Council announcing "a growing sense of confidence in our new attorney general" as a result of the new obscenity squad.

The Justice Department says it has not kept track of obscenity investigations by the squad since it was formed, but the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom says the FBI has wasted little time in acting on its new directive. Three websites, including Max Hardcore's, have been targeted since the anti-obscenity squad came into existence, according to the NCSF. That brings the total number of obscenity cases brought under the Bush administration to 60, the organization says. During the Clinton years, there were only four.

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Of more concern to people in the industry than the continued viability of those three sites is the chilling effect that may be produced by prosecuting people on the sadistic fringe, and the slippery slope that could result if the Justice Department is able to make an obscenity charge against Max Hardcore stick.

Wright admits Hardcore's site is extreme, but she adds: "That's why they're going after it. They get a successful prosecution, and they can go onto someone else."

The Justice Department doesn't exactly dispute this notion.


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So who might be next? Many in the mainstream bondage, domination, and sadomasochism community say they're not willing to wait to find out.

"I know lots of people who have simply gone out of business because they are so afraid of the law," said Lydia McLane, a professional dominatrix based in Seattle, who is now reviewing some of the images on her website for fear they could be thought to constitute obscenity. "There's no definition of obscene. They're not going to be able to define it properly, so there's going to have to be test cases, and a lot of people are simply unwilling to be test cases."

Indeed, insex.com, a bondage and S&M website operated by Intersec Interactive Inc., has announced it is looking for a foreign buyer because "continuing to produce insex.com from the U.S. would be too great a potential liability."

It's a way around U.S. law that a number of operators of similar U.S. websites have said they are considering. A statement on Intersec's website explained: "While Intersec is certain that a potential prosecution would have no chance of success... the staff is unwilling to fight a lengthy and expensive court battle only to emerge victorious but bankrupt."

Other sites that don't have the name recognition or financial wherewithal to justify relocation, such as grandpadesade.com, which operated four low budget S&M websites, have announced they will simply give up rather than try to go forward in the current climate.

"We did not receive any money," the grandpadesade.com site now states. "In fact I have never made a single cent from the lifestyle. We did not have anything about kids, dead bodies, beasts or other such things. There was nudity and there were codes to prevent kids from viewing the material and we signed up for the major child protection programs and porn blocking programs... These sites were about education, answering questions, and just fun. Now they are gone and you ask why? Well, it seems anything to do with S&M is thought of as porno by the Bush dictatorship... Until the U.S. comes back to its senses, and stops these holier than thou folks, we will stay dark."

Subnation, another site that describes itself as primarily educational, posted a similar decision. "I am afraid that the current climate of intolerance and persecution by the FBI has forced me to reconsider whether or not to continue," the site operator wrote. "While I am not worried about my own situation, I must be mindful of what effect any possible prosecution could have on other family members. For that reason I have decided to discontinue this site."

Still other sites are, like McLane's, trying to stay in safe territory by modifying or removing certain images. The popular site suicidegirls.com recently announced it was removing images "with fake blood and any images we felt could be wrongfully construed as sadist or masochist," out of a desire to "ensure that we are not targeted by the U.S. government's new war on porn."

If part of the Justice Department's goal in creating the obscenity taskforce was to send a "very visible" warning to the wider S&M community, it seems it has already succeeded.

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"Everybody's worried because they don't know where it's going, and that's obviously what their objective was," said the Seattle area S&M pornographer who asked not to be identified. He predicted that all pornographers would suffer from an expanded Justice Department crackdown, "except the big guys, who can afford to fight it."

The "big guys," this pornographer and others pointed out, these days include Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and the General Motors Investment Management Corporation, which together own a large part of DIRECTV, a company that beams pornography to hotel and home televisions via satellite. Hotel chains, such as Sheraton, Hilton, Marriott, and Hyatt, and Time Warner Incorporated also make considerable money from selling pornography, the Washington Post has noted. None of them appear to be on the Justice Department's hit list, yet.

"They're just going for the easy targets," complained the local S&M pornographer. "Nobody's going to touch Marriott Hotel chain, General Motors, and all that bunch."

Russell Hammond, who with the help of his wife, his girlfriend, and his wife's girlfriend runs the local bondage site twobigmeanies.com, said that as a small operation, Two Big Meanies can't take the risk of not self-censoring. "We did a shoot that involved play with needles that we're just sitting on, that we're not going to use," he said. They're also obscuring genitalia on their website and cutting portions of videos in which people sound like they might not be having fun.

"There's the idea of a sort of government monopoly on violence," Hammond complains, trying to figure out the rationale behind the administration's simultaneous defense of torture and prosecution of depictions of consensual rough sex play. "The other idea is, if you have a sexually repressed populace, they're a lot easier to keep frightened. It's important to, in a fascist society, keep people sexually repressed. That makes the politics of control easier."

The anonymous local pornographer recalled a former client of his website, a soldier who recently died in Iraq and whose sister called after his death to cancel his account. "He was fighting for the right of Americans to be free to live their lives, so long as they didn't harm others," he said bitterly. "And basically the administration was shooting him in the back while he was over there fighting."

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"I don't know what these clowns think they're trying to achieve," he said. "If [kinky porn production] moves to Holland do they actually think Americans are going to stop downloading kink?"

But most, like Hammond, return in the end to the slippery slope argument. "If they close down," he said, speaking of a site called pissmops.com that he says recently went dark in response to the new obscenity squad, "what closes down next?"