It’s been a bumpy few months for pornography in America. In early September 2013, three performers in a row were “quarantined” within the industry after reportedly contracting HIV on the job. In a press conference, the performers—Cameron Bay and Rod Daily, along with Patrick Stone, who had also recently tested positive for HIV—gave an emotional plea for greater regulation of the porn industry, including more frequent testing and mandatory condom use. Poignantly, a fourth victim, John Doe, joined the press conference anonymously over the phone, in order to avoid industry backlash. In December, an anonymous actor with a positive HIV test again brought the industry to its knees.
These few months brought to a head one of the great tensions that pornography represents in America. An industry lobby argued that condoms were bad for business, and that performers often opted instead for twice-a-month STD testing. However, veteran performers from around the industry fought back: if the pornography industry really cared about their health, it would require condom use.
Performer safety has always been an issue in the industry. Recently, though, organizing efforts to combat dangerous conditions have begun gaining steam. Back in 2010, Jenna Jameson called for a performers’ union to advocate for testing and protection regulations; in late 2012, the voters of Los Angeles County, America’s porn capital, voted to require condom use on set. Still, problems remain: large studios often simply ignore the new law, and performers fear an industry blacklist if they insist on protection. Meanwhile, outbreaks of sexually transmitted infections—including HIV, gonorrhea, and syphilis—continue.
This tension between performers and industry executives illustrates a larger tension, with implications beyond simple workplace regulation. According to a June 2007 paper from the Centers for Disease Control, industry standards affect the general public: “[t]he portrayal of unsafe sex in adult films may also influence viewer behavior. In the same way that images of smoking in films romanticize tobacco use, viewers of these adult films may idealize unprotected sex.” The industry doesn’t owe safety to performers alone; it has an obligation to members of the general viewing public, who are unquestionably influenced by what they see on the screen.
This sentiment—that what we see on the screen dictates in large part how we will behave—has been present since the invention of moving pictures. Herein lies the fluid boundary between the bodies of performers and the bodies of viewers, between the responsibilities of the entertainment industry and the vulnerabilities of its consumers.
“ONE SOLID YEAR IN NEW YORK”
Nearly 100 years before the CDC report, Traffic in Souls fired a bold shot into the then-vacant battlefield of free speech, sex, and public morality. The film, which capitalized on a panic surrounding a supposed rise in forced sex slavery, follows the story of young women in New York City as they fall victim to charming men, who seduce them and then put them to work as nameless “madams” in brothels around the city. By the end of the film, the women are safe, and the brothel owners are in ruins.
Performer safety has always been an issue in the industry. Recently, though, organizing efforts to combat dangerous conditions have begun gaining steam. Back in 2010, Jenna Jameson called for a performers’ union to advocate for testing and protection regulations; in late 2012, the voters of Los Angeles County, America’s porn capital, voted to require condom use on set. Still, problems remain: large studios often simply ignore the new law, and performers fear an industry blacklist if they insist on protection. Meanwhile, outbreaks of sexually transmitted infections—including HIV, gonorrhea, and syphilis—continue.
This tension between performers and industry executives illustrates a larger tension, with implications beyond simple workplace regulation. According to a June 2007 paper from the Centers for Disease Control, industry standards affect the general public: “[t]he portrayal of unsafe sex in adult films may also influence viewer behavior. In the same way that images of smoking in films romanticize tobacco use, viewers of these adult films may idealize unprotected sex.” The industry doesn’t owe safety to performers alone; it has an obligation to members of the general viewing public, who are unquestionably influenced by what they see on the screen.
This sentiment—that what we see on the screen dictates in large part how we will behave—has been present since the invention of moving pictures. Herein lies the fluid boundary between the bodies of performers and the bodies of viewers, between the responsibilities of the entertainment industry and the vulnerabilities of its consumers.
“ONE SOLID YEAR IN NEW YORK”
Nearly 100 years before the CDC report, Traffic in Souls fired a bold shot into the then-vacant battlefield of free speech, sex, and public morality. The film, which capitalized on a panic surrounding a supposed rise in forced sex slavery, follows the story of young women in New York City as they fall victim to charming men, who seduce them and then put them to work as nameless “madams” in brothels around the city. By the end of the film, the women are safe, and the brothel owners are in ruins.
In the real world, there were very few cases of so-called “white slavery,” officially documented or anecdotal. Still, the fear was there: immigration from “non-white” countries in Eastern Europe and Asia had peaked, and xenophobia was nearly a state religion. Audiences flocked to see Traffic in Souls to indulge their worst fears: not only seeing a young white woman wake up (after a drugged kidnapping) in a brothel, but seeing her wake up in a brothel and be instructed to put on a kimono.
Audiences flocked to see the film—one of the first full-length features of its day in America—because of a mantra Hollywood has since come to realize more fully: sex sells. Even though there was never any nudity or sex in the film itself, its advertisements made the most of the provocative content that was present—featuring women caught in compromising or vulnerable positions, or whips about to crack down on kidnapped victims. The film was banned in several states, but it still managed to have one of the most successful opening weekends in American history to that date, making $450,000.
But Traffic in Souls also marked an important recognition of film as a social tool, an engine through which massive numbers of vulnerable viewers could be influenced. At the time of its premiere, the film received a mix of reviews, though all acknowledged the controversy it had created. The Sunday Times, in one representative example, claimed that, although the film presented sex, “all offensiveness and suggestiveness has been rightly eschewed.” Meanwhile, the film’s producers claimed that “the whole subject [of forced prostitution] is one which requires proper ventilation in order that the necessary volume of public opinion may be created to lead to the elimination of the evil.”
This statement aptly summarized the central talking point at the time: the film was important because it brought attention to a problem in society that ought to be fixed, and the public needed instruction on what to think and feel about it. It was propaganda, for a worthy cause. Still, many thought that the crowds of people spilling into nickelodeons weren’t prepared to respond to the immorality of such films. What if, far from accepting the social critique that the film claimed to put forth, audiences were simply encouraged to emulate the deviant sexual behavior they saw on the screen?
“WHOLESOME ENTERTAINMENT FOR ALL THE PEOPLE”
Enter Daniel Lord. He and Martin Quigley, both devout Roman Catholics, observed what they saw as the degenerative effect of motion pictures on the public mind and sought to fight it. At the time, Catholicism was one of America’s strongest moral arbiters. Lord sought to tap into the broad community of American Catholics concerned about film, and specifically, about what their children would learn from it. In a pamphlet, Lord—himself an actor and storyteller almost singly credited with inspiring the Catholic faith of young people in early 20th-century America—spoke directly to his concerned confederates: “It is no longer a matter of a single scene being bad, of occasional ‘hells’ and ‘damns’ or girls in scanty costumes,” he said, but “a whole philosophy of evil … depicted with an explicitness that [has] excited the curiosity of children and the emulation of morons and criminals.”
Audiences flocked to see the film—one of the first full-length features of its day in America—because of a mantra Hollywood has since come to realize more fully: sex sells. Even though there was never any nudity or sex in the film itself, its advertisements made the most of the provocative content that was present—featuring women caught in compromising or vulnerable positions, or whips about to crack down on kidnapped victims. The film was banned in several states, but it still managed to have one of the most successful opening weekends in American history to that date, making $450,000.
But Traffic in Souls also marked an important recognition of film as a social tool, an engine through which massive numbers of vulnerable viewers could be influenced. At the time of its premiere, the film received a mix of reviews, though all acknowledged the controversy it had created. The Sunday Times, in one representative example, claimed that, although the film presented sex, “all offensiveness and suggestiveness has been rightly eschewed.” Meanwhile, the film’s producers claimed that “the whole subject [of forced prostitution] is one which requires proper ventilation in order that the necessary volume of public opinion may be created to lead to the elimination of the evil.”
This statement aptly summarized the central talking point at the time: the film was important because it brought attention to a problem in society that ought to be fixed, and the public needed instruction on what to think and feel about it. It was propaganda, for a worthy cause. Still, many thought that the crowds of people spilling into nickelodeons weren’t prepared to respond to the immorality of such films. What if, far from accepting the social critique that the film claimed to put forth, audiences were simply encouraged to emulate the deviant sexual behavior they saw on the screen?
“WHOLESOME ENTERTAINMENT FOR ALL THE PEOPLE”
Enter Daniel Lord. He and Martin Quigley, both devout Roman Catholics, observed what they saw as the degenerative effect of motion pictures on the public mind and sought to fight it. At the time, Catholicism was one of America’s strongest moral arbiters. Lord sought to tap into the broad community of American Catholics concerned about film, and specifically, about what their children would learn from it. In a pamphlet, Lord—himself an actor and storyteller almost singly credited with inspiring the Catholic faith of young people in early 20th-century America—spoke directly to his concerned confederates: “It is no longer a matter of a single scene being bad, of occasional ‘hells’ and ‘damns’ or girls in scanty costumes,” he said, but “a whole philosophy of evil … depicted with an explicitness that [has] excited the curiosity of children and the emulation of morons and criminals.”
Hollywood could not be trusted: it was too enticing a path toward sin. The bodies of actors portraying this sin were not only theirs; they were ours, too. Entertainment owed a public debt of decency.
Thus, in 1930, the “Hays Code”—named after Postmaster General Will Hays, but authored primarily by Lord—went into effect. Just a few decades after the very first film, the industry opted to regulate itself rather than risk harsh congressional action due to Catholic pressure. The code was a harsh dictate (by today’s standards) of precisely what could and could not be shown in theaters. After all, it claimed, “[m]ankind has always recognized the importance of entertainment and its value in rebuilding the bodies and souls of human beings. But it has always recognized that entertainment can be of a character either helpful or harmful to the human race.” The motion picture industry, then, had to consciously choose between “entertainment which tends to improve the race, or at least to re-create and rebuild human beings exhausted with the realities of life; and entertainment which tends to degrade human beings, or to lower their standards of life and living.”
It didn’t stop at the Hays Code: at every major technological shift in the entertainment industry, we have been reminded of the importance with which we should consider the fate of those bodies on screen. The Comics Code Authority of the 1950s was based loosely off the motion picture code two decades its prior. It contained roughly the same off-limits topics, too: lawlessness, gore, sexual innuendo, and certain challenges to authority. Comic books changed in the same way as film. Characters dressed more conservatively. Batman lost his gun. Wonder Woman was a pacifist at heart.
Ten years later, read Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to the assembled members of the National Association of Broadcasters: “Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America … It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world … [Just] as history will decide whether the leaders of today’s world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind’s benefit, so will history decide whether today’s broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or debase them.”
Thus, in 1930, the “Hays Code”—named after Postmaster General Will Hays, but authored primarily by Lord—went into effect. Just a few decades after the very first film, the industry opted to regulate itself rather than risk harsh congressional action due to Catholic pressure. The code was a harsh dictate (by today’s standards) of precisely what could and could not be shown in theaters. After all, it claimed, “[m]ankind has always recognized the importance of entertainment and its value in rebuilding the bodies and souls of human beings. But it has always recognized that entertainment can be of a character either helpful or harmful to the human race.” The motion picture industry, then, had to consciously choose between “entertainment which tends to improve the race, or at least to re-create and rebuild human beings exhausted with the realities of life; and entertainment which tends to degrade human beings, or to lower their standards of life and living.”
It didn’t stop at the Hays Code: at every major technological shift in the entertainment industry, we have been reminded of the importance with which we should consider the fate of those bodies on screen. The Comics Code Authority of the 1950s was based loosely off the motion picture code two decades its prior. It contained roughly the same off-limits topics, too: lawlessness, gore, sexual innuendo, and certain challenges to authority. Comic books changed in the same way as film. Characters dressed more conservatively. Batman lost his gun. Wonder Woman was a pacifist at heart.
Ten years later, read Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to the assembled members of the National Association of Broadcasters: “Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America … It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world … [Just] as history will decide whether the leaders of today’s world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind’s benefit, so will history decide whether today’s broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or debase them.”
CENSORSHIP AS PROGRESS
And in magazines, and in social media, and in video games, and in everything else. Time and again, America is confronted with the same fundamental question: what effects do those ‘representative’ bodies—and what happens to them—have on viewers? Has the devaluation of life in violent videogames made us more violent? Do lax laws surrounding hate speech on the Internet promote a more aggressive, offensive discourse?
Still, these sorts of discussions aren’t always fire and brimstone. Perhaps ironically, the conversations around bodies and sex in pornography are perhaps the most forward-thinking of any entertainment medium. In Cindy Gallop’s 2009 TED Talk “Make Love, Not Porn,” for example, she asserts, “In an era where hard core porn is more freely and widely available on the Internet than ever before, and where kids are therefore able to access it at a younger and younger age than ever before, there is an entire generation growing up that believes that what you see in hardcore pornography is the way that you have sex.”
Gallop’s statement encapsulates all the keywords from a century of proclamations concerning public morality. Just like Daniel Lord, Newton Minow, and the Comics Code Authority before her, she is in effect saying: ‘entertainment is teaching children a lifestyle for which our progressive society ought to have very little tolerance. What we need, therefore, are institutional bounds and regulations to ensure that the bodies represented on the screen capture the values we wish to re-create in real life.’
This self-censorship is a fascinating process that marks a transition (for better or worse) in any medium. Whether in film censorship, condom use, video game ratings, or “family settings,” the viewing public often imposes its own morality on the bodies it sees on the screen, for fear that those bodies—if left unregulated—will have an undue negative influence on them and on their children. That this morality is in the public interest is assumed almost on its face: issues of public morality are truly democratic. Still, this most recent turn toward a more realistic and safe depiction of intimacy, even in an industry sometimes considered shameful by its own customers, offers an interesting question: as a country, can we finally talk about sex?
And in magazines, and in social media, and in video games, and in everything else. Time and again, America is confronted with the same fundamental question: what effects do those ‘representative’ bodies—and what happens to them—have on viewers? Has the devaluation of life in violent videogames made us more violent? Do lax laws surrounding hate speech on the Internet promote a more aggressive, offensive discourse?
Still, these sorts of discussions aren’t always fire and brimstone. Perhaps ironically, the conversations around bodies and sex in pornography are perhaps the most forward-thinking of any entertainment medium. In Cindy Gallop’s 2009 TED Talk “Make Love, Not Porn,” for example, she asserts, “In an era where hard core porn is more freely and widely available on the Internet than ever before, and where kids are therefore able to access it at a younger and younger age than ever before, there is an entire generation growing up that believes that what you see in hardcore pornography is the way that you have sex.”
Gallop’s statement encapsulates all the keywords from a century of proclamations concerning public morality. Just like Daniel Lord, Newton Minow, and the Comics Code Authority before her, she is in effect saying: ‘entertainment is teaching children a lifestyle for which our progressive society ought to have very little tolerance. What we need, therefore, are institutional bounds and regulations to ensure that the bodies represented on the screen capture the values we wish to re-create in real life.’
This self-censorship is a fascinating process that marks a transition (for better or worse) in any medium. Whether in film censorship, condom use, video game ratings, or “family settings,” the viewing public often imposes its own morality on the bodies it sees on the screen, for fear that those bodies—if left unregulated—will have an undue negative influence on them and on their children. That this morality is in the public interest is assumed almost on its face: issues of public morality are truly democratic. Still, this most recent turn toward a more realistic and safe depiction of intimacy, even in an industry sometimes considered shameful by its own customers, offers an interesting question: as a country, can we finally talk about sex?