Going Backward

[Steve Sloca]

Frank Rich's column in today's Sunday New York Times brilliantly
illustrates the points I have been trying to make about the major
changes that have been taking place in our society--all the while
Playboy has been sleeping on its laurels and "following the leader" of
Maxim and the celebrity-undressing "laddie" mags.  Jerry Bruckheimer
seems to have his hand on the pulse of the real current of American
culture, much like Hef had in the '60's; and his development of media
to fill that current of thought, desire and interest is exactly what
Playboy needs today.  Those like Donna and Dan, who believe that
Americans are forever mired in puritanism and repression of their
sexuality and that Playboy must accede to that attitude, may want to
rethink their positions; while the rest of us can take heart that the
Sexual Revolution is still moving forward.

Here is a link to the column:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/arts/27RICH.html

....for those who can't (or are unwilling) to join the Times' website,
I enclose the full text of the column below (if Peggy allows it), as I
think it is well worth pondering:

(Headlined) Finally, Porn Does Prime Time

LAST Monday Jerry Bruckheimer was anointed by Variety as the first
producer in Hollywood history to field the top two highest-grossing
movies in a single weekend, the buddy-cop fender-bender "Bad Boys II"
and the Disney theme-park spin-off, "Pirates of the Caribbean." 
Mr. Bruckheimer, as many are fond of saying, has that most prized of
show-biz attributes: the golden gut. He knows what the American
mainstream wants and he supplies it, often with a patriotic tinge. His
two-decade hit parade includes "Top Gun,""Armageddon,""Pearl Harbor"
and "Black Hawk Down."

So what is Mr. Bruckheimer doing for an encore this fall?  "Skin," the
first prime-time network series to take on what is euphemistically
called the adult entertainment industry. And with a soupcon of
Shakespeare, yet. "Skin" tells of the forbidden romance between a
17-year-old Mexican-Irish Romeo, whose father is the Los Angeles D.A.,
and a 16-year-old Jewish Juliet, whose father is a porn king. Or as
the show's Web site sums it up: " `Skin' is about sex and race. `Skin'
is about politics. And most of all, `Skin' is about skin: complexion,
beauty, desire, attraction, obsession and prejudice in contemporary
Los Angeles."

Such an assertion raises a philosophical conundrum: How much redeeming
social value can be shoveled onto two hot bodies in a single Fox TV
series? If the smartly made pilot is any indication, there are more
than two hot bodies and a fair amount of message, including the
prospect that Ron Silver's porn mogul may turn out to be more
principled than Kevin Anderson's self-righteous lawman.
Mr. Bruckheimer didn't get where he is by being ahead of the curve. He
is the curve. His gut tells him, accurately, that porn is not just
well within the American mainstream but overdue to be stripped of its
plain brown wrapper in prime time.

We've come a long way, baby, from the supposed Sodom and Gomorrah
nadir of the Clinton era. In retrospect, that was a time of relative
cultural Puritanism. The country was outraged in early 2000 when Fox,
seizing the post-Monicagate initiative, introduced a new show called
"Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?" that seemed like nothing so
much as a "game show built on prostitution," as Howard Rosenberg put
it in The Los Angeles Times. It was killed after a single episode.

But now essentially the same concept, "Joe Millionaire," is a major
Fox hit. Voyeuristic reality shows in which sex is a commodity traded
for either money or celebrity by preening bachelors and bachelorettes
are a staple of most networks. (Monica Lewinsky has even hosted one,
"Mr.  Personality.") On CBS, "Big Brother" featured its first sex act
this month, The Washington Post reported, though it was only disclosed
to those buying the show's 24/7 Web cast from CBS.com ($24.95 for the
season).  At Showtime, CBS's cable sibling at Viacom, a reality series
called "Family Business," produced by some of the same minds behind
"Big Brother," graphically charts the life of Adam Glasser, the
hard-core pornographer ("Tushy Con Carne" is a typical title) whose
nom de porn is Seymore Butts.

Taboos are falling so quickly that the word taboo itself increasingly
has an archaic ring. Wal-Mart may drop Maxim and hide the cover of
Cosmo, but last month CMT, the country music channel, joined MTV and
VH1 in raciness by exposing Joe Don Rooney's tushy in a new
video. Cirque du Soleil, its countercultural past well behind it, is
readying its first sex show for Las Vegas, "Zumanity." It arrives just
as Nevada considers meeting its education budget by applying its first
tax on the services provided by its legal whorehouses.

For all the jousting about which female author might be the summer's
nonfiction champ - Hillary, Hepburn or Coulter - the sleeper may yet
prove to be the former porn star Traci Lords, whose new memoir,
"Underneath It All," just made its debut on The New York Times's
extended best-seller list.  Ms. Lords, an underage porn performer
until her career was ended in 1986 by an F.B.I. bust, is now a happily
married 35-year-old actress and singer. Her book offers a redemptive
tale of rising above a past in which, by her account, she was first
coaxed to have sex on videotape with lies and drugs.

On a blazingly hot day two weeks ago, hundreds of fans lined up on
East 14th Street in Manhattan for her book signing at the Virgin
Megastore: men, women, couples of most ages and ethnicities. Though
some thanked her for speaking out about the sexual abuse she had
suffered as an adolescent, not everyone seemed to be there to
celebrate the author's current reincarnation as a healer. Others
turned to the book's photos, which are somewhat livelier than those in
Hillary Clinton's "Living History."

But Ms. Lords, out of porn for 17 years, seems taken aback by how
semi-respectable her discarded vocation has become.  "When I was in
porn, it was like a back-alley thing," she said when I interviewed her
the next day. "Now it's everywhere." As if to prove the point, she
appeared with Matt Lauer on "Today," with Larry King for a full hour,
and on "Dateline NBC," which all illustrated her appearances with
flashbacks to images of the preliterary Traci. Soon she was sharing
the bill on Fox's "Big Story" with the other big story du jour (and
possibly de l'ann?e), the Kobe Bryant rape case, although the irony
of that pairing seemed to be lost on everyone.

Is the mainstreaming of porn the end of civilization as we know it? 
Even SpongeBob may have to hold on to his SquarePants now that Playboy
is collaborating with Stan Lee, the creator of "Spider-Man," on "Hef's
Superbunnies," a new animated series for a major network.

But few bemoan the porning of America these days. Except for the usual
fire-and-brimstone sermonizers in pulpits and on the Supreme Court
(one of whom, Clarence Thomas, has himself reportedly been a porn
consumer), most conservatives have joined most liberals in giving up
the fight against all but the scourge of child pornography.  (The San
Fernando Valley porn industry, eager to avoid costly disruptions
post-Traci Lords, long ago joined the battle against child porn as
well.)

A classic example of the political turnaround is the current attorney
general, John Ashcroft. In his 2000 senatorial campaign, he attacked
his Democratic opponent for "standing with the producers of
pornography and Hollywood's worst trash" by accepting a $2,000
contribution from Christie Hefner, the chief executive of Playboy. You
no longer hear Mr. Ashcroft, or anyone in the Bush administration,
complaining about far larger political contributions from News
Corporation and Rupert Murdoch, AOL Time Warner, Viacom or Marriott,
to name just some of those who stand with the producers of pornography
by either making their own soft-core variants or taking a cut when
porn-industry videos are beamed through cable and satellite into
hotels and homes. In its latest issue alone, Adult Video News, the
industry trade journal, reviews more than 500 new movies. Some of
those profits fuel the ambitions of Democratic and Republican
politicians alike.

The only major cable operator that refused to distribute the stuff,
Adelphia Communications, has reversed itself now that its
family-values-preaching founder, John Rigas, and his sons have been
indicted and ousted for Enron-style shenanigans. Meanwhile, the
administration's hand-picked F.C.C. chairman, Michael Powell, is in
the process of giving other porn-spewing media giants even more power
over the marketplace. The best Mr. Ashcroft has been able to do to
fight back against adult porn is to requisition a blue curtain to hide
the bared breast of the Spirit of Justice statue at the Department of
Justice. If nothing else, this poignant gesture on behalf of decency
provided welcome comic relief to a grateful nation during the early
months of the war on terrorism.

Paul Cambria, a lawyer who represents Larry Flynt and Vivid
Entertainment, among other porn potentates, argues that even if
Mr. Ashcroft were to go on an anti-porn crusade, he'd be shocked by
how unwilling juries are to rule that it violates community standards.

"There used to be a hypocrisy factor in juries," Mr.  Cambria
says. "We don't see it today. Jurors realize that adult entertainment
is no big deal and don't have a problem saying it's no big deal." Ten
days before Mr. Ashcroft lost his Missouri Senate race in 2000,
Mr. Cambria won a case instigated by Citizens Against Pornography in a
small Missouri town, where a largely middle-aged, all-female jury
refused to rule as obscene the tapes "Anal Heat" and "Rock Hard," both
available for rent at the Family Video chain.

The cliche has it that when the formerly contraband becomes accepted,
it loses its cachet. With sex, that is not really an option. What does
seem to be happening is a digitalization of sex - and not only in the
sense that porn is distributed digitally, whether by Internet or DVD
or television or spam. In a more profound sense, the erotic is being
figuratively and literally dismembered as it is broken down into its
various discrete bytes, like albums that are atomized into their
individual songs to be downloaded from the Web. Paul Fishbein, who
founded and runs Adult Video News, says the newest trend in hard-core
porn movies is the "eschewing of plot"; each body part or type, sexual
taste, fetish, whatever, boasts dedicated videos catering exclusively
to that particular niche as clinically and single-mindedly as
possible.

In the mainstream movie industry, paradoxically enough, sexual content
is actually declining: the number of studio movies rated R for sex (as
opposed to violence) is down to eight this year, a fall of more than
50 percent from last year, The Wall Street Journal reported. In other
words, porn-industry product is eroding the market for conventional
sexy movies to the point where an adult visitor to the multiplex may
have to settle for either the sex-free "Pirates of the Caribbean" or
head to the video store for a hard-core rental.

Surely there's still a lucrative market for adults who want something
between these two extremes, a whiff of that all-encompassing R-rated
body heat of yesteryear. This, of course, may be exactly what that
cunning master of the market, Jerry Bruckheimer, has in mind as he
prepares to sell America his idea of prime-time "Skin" this fall.