The government’s porn panel set out to nuke the sex revolution, but facts got in the way in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Ed Meese Gives Bad Commission
It was a commission that Ed Meese could kiss. The administration needed 11 cooperative men and women to overturn the 1970 presidential report that acquitted pornography and put the blame on prudery. But trying porn in broad daylight is always risky business. Similar governmental panels in Great Britain (1979) and Canada (1984) ended up pardoning dirty pictures. The only way to rule out embarrassment was to fix the mix of the judges.
Somebody upstairs in the Justice Department made the appropriate arrangements. The attorney general had to be tickled by the casting: a Franciscan priest who rescues runaways in Times Square; a Reagan-appointed Mexican-American judge from Sacramento, California, with seven children; a pro-spanking Christian evangelist whose best-sellers include Dare to Discipline and What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women; a conservative Catholic council-woman from the sunny side of Scottsdale, Arizona; a nail-biting law professor who believes that porn is closer to dildos than to free speech; the editor of Woman’s Day in the token media seat; a psychiatrist specializing in bizarre sex crimes who consults for the FBI; an expert on rape victims from Columbia University; and the president of the California Consortium of Child Abuse Councils.
Meese could bet his badge on this all-white, middle-aged, upper-class, and presumably heterosexual citizens’ council, but he was not taking any chances. An independent chairman of uncertain sympathies might ruin the sting. What the attorney general required to lock up the case was an enforcer, preferably an ambitious Republican stiff with a long antiporn record. The ideal candidate would be a pale, balding, humorless ex-deputy sheriff of narrow reading, tastes, and interests who lusted after a U.S. attorney’s post.
Henry Huson was Meese’s ace in the hole. Known as “Hang-‘em-High-Henry” for his obsessive pursuit of crime-doers, the 38-year-old commonwealth’s attorney for coddle offenses of the venereal type. “I live to put people in jail,” he told the Washington Post. His campaigns against massage parlors, adult bookstores, and prostitution paid off with a White House commendation in 1983.
Completing the inside job, Hudson designated the 11th member of the commission — Harold “Tex” Lezar — vice-chairman. When the Dallas lawyer was counselor to Attorney General William French Smith III, which followed his service to William F. Buckley, Jr., John Connally, and Richard Nixon, he helped in the creation of the panel that Edwin Meese brought forth.
And just to ensure that there were no slips between the cup and the lip, the day-to-day executive director was drawn from the Justice Department’s talent pool of young assistant attorneys. Alan Sears, a 34-year-old Kentuckian working out of Louisville, was first exposed to the trade when he prosecuted two 14-year-old boys whose exploding Coke bottle went off inside a 19-year-old actress while they were making a home porn movie.
Even the process invited a hanging. Unlike the 1970 commission, which was lavished with $2 million and a two-year deadline, Meese wanted a cheap and quick decision. Although his branch squandered $786,000 on a crackpot study of men’s magazine cartoons, he granted only $400,000 to this broad investigation and gave it just a year to finish. Without money for new research or time for unhurried deliberation, the group faced a rat-race schedule of six cross-country hearings in eight months from June 1985 to January 1986. The final report is due in June 1986.
The witness list, essentially controlled by the gumshoe staff, was jammed with vice cops, Capitol Hill lightweights, Godfearing professors, uptight D.A.s, current and retired FBI men, sad-sack “victims” who confessed their sexual sufferings behind screens, and several twisted sisters of Women Against Pornography, whose Squeaky Fromm faction grabbed the mike at the New York hearings and demanded the commission declare that porn enslaved all women.
Despite iatrogenic disarray, everything seemed to be going Hudson’s way in the business meetings, when the commission discussed and voted on findings of fact. The majority seemed to be Meese’s kind of people who, after repeated exposure to retina-burning stimuli like Black Beaver Fever, would recommend bending the law to clean up the commonwealth.
Ellen Levine, the commissioner from Wellesley (‘64) and Woman’s Day, was no Helen Gurley Brown. Despite her association with the libertine Cosmopolitan, where she was decorating and food editor, nobody at Justice took her for a screwball or wrote off her vote. If balance demanded a representative of the press, then Levine was a safe choice. As the mother of two teenage boys, she was personally concerned about dial-a-porn and cable erotica; mothers who read her magazine also expressed alarm. Meese could count on the author of Children’s Rooms, Waiting for Baby, and Planning Your Wedding not to make a big scene. Her rendezvous with censorship was a learning experience that did not call for grandstanding dissent.
Even so, Levine appeared exasperated by the proceedings. Smart, sophisticated, and well upholstered in colorful ensembles and sweeping hairdos, she resisted the Revenge of the Herbs in her fashion. The clash of cultures broke surface in Miami during a hapless attempt to define pornography. Chairman Hudson opened the discussion with a definition lifted straight from the Indianapolis civil rights ordinance written by ultraradical feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, which treated porn as discrimination against women. (Levine was delighted when the Supreme Court knocked down the Indianapolis statute in February.)
According to the chairman, pornography is “the graphic, sexually explicit portrayal of women, men or children, whether in visual depiction or words, that also includes one or more of the following: … 2. Women, men or children are presented as sexual objects for the mere purpose of sexual pleasure ….” Hudson threw the ball immediately to Levine.
“The thing that pops out at me would be number two,” she remarked. “I would have to say that there are many instances of pictures of men and women presented as objects for the purpose of sexual pleasure which would not come under a definition of pornography by any stretch of the imagination.”
Utterly at sea outside the courtroom, Hudson missed Levine’s point. “There’s a difference between pornography and obscenity,” he replied. “We’re talking about pornography as opposed to obscenity.” He meant that pure fun-of-it pictures may not be legally obscene, but they were patently offensive to him, and that’s what he called pornography.
But, said Levine, trying to be gentle, “Sexual pleasure is often a purpose of normal relations. I don’t understand it in the definition of pornography.” And neither did the chairman, who abandoned his proposal without a struggle.
In her heart Levine knew that the process was insane and that some of her colleagues were certifiable on the subject, yet she continued to play along. As a vice-president of CBS magazines, which owns Woman’s Day, and a member of the board of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, she enjoyed the inside game.
Some observers familiar with the commission felt that she was being used and that her polite demurrers had little effect. They were disappointed that she had not risen up and denounced the deviant sexual politics of all the attorney general’s men. After six public hearings and several group meetings scattered over 8 months, the panel retreated to Scottsdale, Arizona, for four days of uninterrupted debate in late February. The main issue was harm: Did pornography cause it or not? Until now no national study had been able to prove any connection. Without an unambiguous declaration of harmful effects, the final report would be merely another whitewash and a Bitburg-size disaster for Ed Meese. If Levine was going to mount a serious challenge, Scottsdale was her last resort. Only she appeared to stand in harm’s way.
THE WOMEN’S REVOLT
The pivotal meeting of the commission began on Wednesday morning, February 27, in the basement of Scottsdale’s white adobe city hall. All the members were present except for the vice-chairman, Tex Lezar, who was otherwise occupied at a trial in Texas.
The first item on the agenda was the so-called Koop report, a slippery inside move indicating both the right-wing tilt and methodological madness of the panel. Way back at the first public hearing, Chairman Hudson beseeched Surgeon General Everett Koop, himself an ardent foe of pornography, for some help in reviewing the scientific literature. Although Koop promised cooperation, nothing ever happened. Instead, the commission relied on the limited offices of Dr. Edna Einsiedel, the staff social scientist, to do all the hard searching and analysis. The professors who testified at the Houston, Texas, hearings provided further data of the laboratory kind. Yet no consensus emerged. The scientific case against porn, as every previous commission discovered, had not stood up to scrutiny.
Phyllis Schlafly, the scourge of tennis-shoe Republicans, got wind of this discouraging development and wrote Ed Meese a letter of complaint. Schlafly pressed the attorney general to follow up the Koop option with the expectation that he would turn up some smoking data and save the commission from the same mistake that the 1970-body made. Schlafly’s wish came true. Eight months after Hudson struck his failed bargain with Koop, Meese decided to fork over an additional $50,000 to pay the bill for a “meta-analysis.” Another $50,000 would come from Koop’s department.
Hudson liked the idea of accommodating a friendly administration witness, even if it delayed the final report, but he was not going to postpone today’s overdue plebiscite on harm. “There may be no substantial departure from our findings,” Hudson said of the surgeon general’s study. “If there is, I think we have a duty to reconcile it and incorporate it into our findings.”
Dr. Park Dietz, a psychiatrist/sociologist without tolerance for violent porn, spoke against the fishing expedition. But the evangelical Dr. James Dobson, who boasts about not sleeping around, was insatiable. Expecting damaging evidence, he wanted everything Koop could lay his hands on. “The issue of causal relationships and psychological harm is the foundation of everything else that we’re doing,” said Or. Dobson, going far afield of the panel’s mandate.
At this point, the Cosmo girl inside Ellen Levine quietly erupted. “I find this very difficult,” she said. “Meta-analysis and statistical extrapolation that would go to the core of whether or not something was a harm seems to me something we should have had before we started to talk — not at the end. It doesn’t affect just the social sciences, but anything we do. To say that we’re waiting for this [Koop] report and we’re going to look at it five minutes before we go to press doesn’t work for me. We would want to be able to verify the response itself.”
Hudson, a palooka when put on the spot, had no comment. Since the executive director, Alan Sears, was the lone contact with the surgeon general, Levine suggested tabling the discussion until Sears himself showed his face later in the morning.
Now aroused for combat, Levine waited for the right moment to drive a stake into the heart of the commission. But first she listened to Dr. Dietz ’s taxonomy of pornography. Before harm could be assessed, the genre needed to be classified into various types. Dietz had devised an unwieldly scale of ten different species of porn that he whittled down to four. Nudity was assumed in all categories, but not genital display, which Or. Dietz called “irrelevant.” Keeping covered below the waist did not save materials from pornographic labeling.
Henry Hudson was Meese’s ace in the hole. “I live to put people in jail,” Hudson told the Washington Post. His vice campaign in Virginia earned a White House commendation.
Herewith, Dr. Dietz’s scale:
- Class I — Sexual activity, actual or simulated, with violence, regardless of what else is present (i.e., slasher films, rape scenes).
- Class II — Sexual activity, actual or simulated, with degradation, humiliation, or domination, but no violence, regardless of genital display (i.e., scatology, S & M).
- Class III — Sexual activity, actual or simulated, without domination, humiliation, or violence, regardless of genitals (i.e., Hollywood films, prime-time TV, men’s magazines like Penthouse and Playboy).
- Class IV — Pure nudity, without sexual activity, violence, or degradation (i.e., works of art, Calvin Klein ads, men’s magazines).
Dr. Dobson, generally considered a yoyo by other commissioners, objected to this elaborate porn grid because it neglected any reference to perversion, “a component that is present in most pornography today.”
Levine pounced on the Spanker, who sees Satan’s mouth on the other side of the glory hole. “It’s not necessarily present in most pornography,” she said. “It varies between five and 15 percent, depending on how you define it.”
Having settled on the procrustean classes, the panel moved next to judge their supposed harms. The aberrant method of analysis proposed by the chairman assured a hostile verdict. Unlike the 1970 presidential commission, which based its conclusion on the evidence of social science, the Meese 11 were not satisfied with mere facts. Realizing that facts alone would probably exonerate pornography, Hudson cleverly constructed a three-tiered approach to evaluating harm.
First, the panel would consider social-science data-what the professors and researchers had discovered about the effects of porn. The second tier involved “the totality of evidence” — the accumulated testimony of all the witnesses at the hearings. And third, “moral and ethical considerations” — God’s take on centerfolds. Whatever Hudson lost on the first tier he could swiftly regain on the second, because the witness list was stacked with conscious and dedicated anti-eroticists. The moral and ethical tier merely added a heavenly whack. It would be easier for Al Goldstein to pass through the eye of a needle than for porn to escape this triple-threat booby trap.
The staff social scientist, Edna Einsiedel, a young Filipino-American who inconveniently resides across the border in Calgary, Alberta, briefed the conclave on the alleged harms of Class I violent porn. According to laboratory tests, young college fellows purposely overdosed on sex and slasher movies like Swept Away and Halloween pressed shock buttons too long, expressed untoward sympathy for rapists in mock trials, and tended to blame the victims. “So on the basis of exposure to sexually violent materials in the laboratory,” Einsiedel said, “the evidence shows that these harms have been demonstrated in these areas.”
Hudson called for a vote on the social-science findings in Class I: Did violent pornography cause harm? This was a crucial moment. Once harm gained an official foothold, Hudson would never let go. The chairman went around the table. Diane Cusack, Scottsdale council woman, yes. Or. Dobson, yes. Dr. Dietz, yes. Judge Edward Garcia, yes. But Levine said no. She was not impressed by the narrow scope of the experiments and felt that Hudson was pushing the commission beyond the claims of the scientists themselves. Her polite rejection of Hudson’s harm-at-any-cost agenda started a chain reaction that risked sabotaging the main purpose of the commission.
Dr. Judith Becker, a psychiatrist from Columbia, voted next. She was Levine’s closest pal on the panel and seemed skeptical about turning the screw on popular forms of erotica. “I have some difficulty with the word harm,” she said. “I’d call it a harm if people then went out and raped or engaged in violent behavior against someone. What the laboratory experiments demonstrate is a negative impact of exposure to sexually violent material. That’s all I’m willing to say.”
Deanne Tilton, a faint-spoken California child-abuse expert who usually went along with the majority, joined Levine and Becker in protesting the verbal overkill.
Father Bruce Ritter, the fighting Franciscan, preferred the mortal sin of harm to the misdemeanor of negative effect. But Professor Fred Schauer, a First Amendment wimp from the University of Michigan Law School, endorsed negativity.
The revolt of the three women was fouling the works. If Hudson could not squeeze “harm” out of this class, the whole ball game might be lost. Given the shift of terminology suggested by Dr. Becker, the chairman decided to go around the table again. This time the vote was between harm or negative effects. Astonishingly, the lesser evil won because the brilliantly erratic Dr. Dietz threw in with Schauer and the liberal triumvirate of females. The harm bloc could have tied the vote if the inscrutable Judge Garcia, who had sworn himself to silence, had not flaked out when his turn came to choose, saying, “I don’t care.”
The commission immediately recessed for lunch, Levine stood up, glanced at the small gallery of observers, and strutted out of the room, looking satisfied at last.
THE BIG VOTES
The afternoon session had to cheer the chairman. Freed from the straitjacket of social science, the panelists could vote their passions on the next two tiers. According to the “totality of evidence” tier — that is, all the testimony heard and read — violent pornography was deemed harmful in several areas. (This use of “harmful” was loose and did not carry scientific weight.) The tallies were unanimous except on “the institution of the family.” Father Ritter argued that depictions of sexual violence were worse than child porn and poisoned the possibility of stable family life. Levine disagreed once more, puncturing the romantic idea of the golden age of families immune from violent stimuli. “Pornography is a symptom, not a cause,” she said. The five-member Levine coalition forced a tie.
Unanimity returned in the evening deliberations when the panel got to play God (Old Testament version) in the third tier, that is, moral and ethical considerations. They all supported Dr. Dietz’s proclamation: “Sexually violent materials are immoral and unethical, and the willing production, distribution, and consumption of them are an offense against humanity.”
(ACLU lawyer Barry Lynn amused some spectators by cracking that the press should headline this news: FED PANEL SAYS A-RATED FILM FANS AKIN TO NAZI EXECUTIONERS.)
The relatively rare pornography of Class II (i.e., golden showers, sexual slavery, bestiality) was much less controversial. Even Levine could not bring herself to a constitutional defense of the off-putting exhibits in this category. Executive Director Alan Sears described his harrowing expedition into a smut store, where he saw books and magazines featuring slave-master series, Nazi and Soviet domination, etc. “We had a hard time finding vaginal intercourse,” he said.
Yet research on this material was not extensive. The best the commission could do on the social-science tier was to vote the following conclusion: “Social-science research is limited in quantity and very few sources. Most that exist show negative effects of very few kinds.”
As for the second tier, the panel agreed that the totality of evidence indicated several so-called harms apropos men, women, family, and society.
Consensus was achieved on the divine tier, too, but rather than call Class II “an offense against humanity,” they knocked down the charge to “an offense to human dignity.”
Why the difference? Perhaps because the ever-unpredictable Dr. Dietz averred there may be an “international human right to this material.”
Having done most of the Right Thing about violent and degrading pornography, the commission moved on to more accessible turn-ons Thursday morning. Dr. Dietz labeled this third universe of sex fantasia “depictions of sexual activity without violence, dominance, or humiliation.”
“Is this erotica?” Father Ritter wondered.
“No, that’s Group Four,” said the chairman.
Although conceding taxonomical fuzziness, the commission plunged into the social-science findings. Had the experts determined that mainstream entertainments like Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls and centerfold sensuality caused crime?
The evidence, as usual, was sketchy. Edna Einsiedel wasn’t sure if the experiments she reviewed dealt with the material at hand. She mentioned a few studies that might be relevant. For instance, she casually cited a Canadian paper reporting “no negative effects.”
“I thought there were some studies that showed positive effects,” Dr. Dietz piped in. Dr. Becker, keeping her composure, remarked, “I know of no research that indicates the viewing of consensual sexual activity results in antisocial behavior. Some say it is even helpful.” She pointed to a survey that she had personally conducted with sex offenders.
But Father Ritter grasped for some shred of evil. Didn’t the material “maintain,” if not cause, perversions? he inquired.
Executive Director Alan Sears joined the assault on Class Ill. Eschewing social science altogether, he went for the anecdote. The adult bookstores that he personally cruised sold many pictures of anal intercourse and oral sex in which the man assumed the dominant posture. Was this material harmless? Sears did not seem to think so.
“Alan,” Dr. Becker shot back icily, “some people would argue that the missionary position is dominating.” The Kentuckian seemed deflated.
Hudson saw that the ambiguity surrounding Class III was giving people fits. He asked the panel if they wanted further refinements. “Should this group be broken down?” They told him to buzz off.
Out of nowhere, Father Ritter decided to roast same-sex erotica. “So much of the available pornography is homosexual pornography,” he grumbled.
“Is this commission obliged to say … that heterosexual activity is no more normative to society than homosexual behavior?” he asked with arched eyebrows.
At this, Ellen Levine shuddered and warned that the panel was straying from its mandate. However, Sears thought the commission could squeeze in another deviation. Their charter, he reminded everyone, ordered an examination of pornography and antisocial behavior.
Chairman Hudson put the matter to a vote. Did the panel have the mandate to determine “what certain types of sexual behavior [are] normal, abnormal, anti-social?” Gay activists had warned that homophobia was on the Meese agenda. And here it was.
But Hudson, who constantly fretted over a looming deadline, did not want the panel sidetracked by faggotry. The forlorn friar rallied only the loquacious Schauer to his side and lost an 8-2 vote. Incredibly, the Spanker chose not to gaybait. (Phyllis Schlafly will have Dr. Dobson’s head for this!)
The commissioner from Vatican City was a sore loser. During the subsequent debate on the Class Ill materials, he broke in every few moments to sermonize about the panel’s “right, duty, and mandate” to lay out its position on proper and improper sexual behavior.
When the vote on the social-science data was finally called, they found unanimously that the available research indicated “predominantly no negative effects” among users of Class III porn.
This was an important ballot. The beheading of violent and degrading erotica in the previous classes was not surprising. But this category, Father Ritter astutely noted, was the panel’s “biggest challenge.” Anti porn zealots — counting on the Meese 11 to nuke Playboy, Penthouse, and the like — could not have been pleased by this unanimous vote. Why hard-liners like Ritter and Dobson voted their heads and not their hearts here is something they will have to explain to a power greater than themselves.
Next up was the freewheeling “totality of evidence” tier. First concern: Did the material foster the pernicious myth that women enjoy rape?
Speaking for the prosecution, Sears recalled testimony that this porn depicted “women as whores by nature.” He also remembered that some witnesses had problems with the “dominating” men in pictures of back-door sex.
Dr. Dietz cried foul. It was not fair to isolate such photos. They are “no different,” he said, than “TV portrayals of women in subordinate positions in employment hierarchies.”
Dr. Dietz carried the day. The panel voted 10-0 to forget the rape myth. Sears was having a tough morning.
The commissioners then faced the sensitive question of “effects upon the family.” Father Ritter argued that promiscuity-promoting books and pictures legitimized adultery, the breakdown of marriages, homosexuality, and the disintegration of the family, and shook the foundations of Judeo-Christian civilization itself.
Dr. Dietz lit another cigarette and explained the case for “mixed effects.” On the upside, porn of this class showed new positions and techniques for family members in need of more fulfilling sex lives. For moms and dads with desire problems, X-rated books and videos could be aphrodisiac.
On the downside, such material stimulated dangerous sexual appetites; some fellows may see Deep Throat and demand that same treatment at home.
Mrs. Cusack expressed sympathy for wives who feel “inadequate” next to the beautiful babes in their husband’s dirty magazines.
Hudson moved the question quickly. Commissioners could vote that the material was “predominantly harmful,” “predominantly not harmful,” or had “mixed effects” upon the family.
Cusack, sitting on Hudson’s left, led off and chose “mixed effects.”
Dr. Dobson, worried about kids who get hooked on men’s magazines and then switch to harder stuff, said, “Predominantly harmful.”
Judge Garcia, once again off the reservation, okayed “mixed effects.” For him, it was a clear matter of vocabulary. He heard some good, he heard some bad, so it had to be mixed.
Likewise Dr. Dietz.
Ellen Levine complained that the material was poorly defined and opted out with a “no answer.”
Dr. Becker went with a firm “predominantly not harmful.”
Ms. Tilton — sometimes taken for Linda Evans, according to her husband — furrowed her brow and seconded Levine’s “no answer.”
Father Ritter predictably blessed “predominantly harmful.”
Professor Schauer selected “mixed effects.”
Chairman Hudson found Class III to be “predominantly harmful” to the family.
When the dust cleared, “mixed effects” had four votes; “predominantly harmful” got three votes; “predominantly not harmful” had one vote; and there were two abstentions.
What on earth? The Meese Commission — conceived by prosecutors and ordained by the legions of decency — had just voted that pornography could actually help families. The panel retired for the day with the cloud of failure looming over Scottsdale.
THE AGONIZING AFTERNOON OF DIANE CUSACK
Diane Cusack, 54, had a miserable afternoon. While her colleagues took siestas or swims, she agonized over her mixed emotions. Although a conservative Catholic who obviously despised pornography, Mrs. Cusack had joined the liberals in winking at coffee-table erotica. Why had this mother of two turned her back on Jim Dobson, Father Bruce, and Henry Hudson? She blew the family vote and she felt awful. When the commission reconvened for the evening session, Cusack asked for the microphone.
“Henry,” she said in a strong voice. “I want to reconsider [sic] my vote to ‘predominantly harmful.’”
She had three reasons. First, she explained, the pornography in question did not “strengthen” the family. Second, she feared bestowing legitimacy on anything which could be legally obscene in some communities. And third, Cusack speculated about the effect of this material “upon one’s spouse.” She admitted that the last point was born out of “personal experience,” but she provided no details.
The Spanker spoke next. He asked whether this material would include depictions of “five women” engaged in sexual activities, “including cunnilingus and fellatio.” Told that it did, Dobson blinked: “So this commission is going on record saying that obscene material is not harmful to the family?”
Chairman Hudson said no — that with Mrs. Cusack’s switch, the panel had voted to find “predominantly harmful” effects.
Ellen Levine recoiled and made her move. “I want to change my vote to ‘mixed effects,’” she said forcefully. The panel was now deadlocked 4-4-1 and one abstention.
Father Ritter broke the silence with another sermon against casual sex: “Sex-educational materials can be healthy but [don’t belong] in the same category as group sex. I can hardly imagine that this kind of depiction is healthy; it taxes the very institution of marriage.”
This may have roused Ms. Tilton into action. After the priest finished, she requested that her abstention be changed to “mixed effects.” “I just don’t think we know enough …. I don’t want to take the chance of diluting our credibility,” she said softly. Now the vote was 5-4-1 for “mixed effects.”
This maneuvering, which exposed the real politics of the members, led to a fierce three-hour debate.
Father Ritter wanted “sex education” materials in this category separated from rougher items. Levine asked where he drew the line on what was educational and what wasn’t. The editor pointed out that The Joy of Sex and hard-core films could be educational to married couples.
Dr. Dietz rose from his chair with a magic marker in hand and strode to the front of the room. The boyish criminologist listed sexual activities contained in the category that seemed at odds in some minds with therapeutic and educational aims. On a large sheet of white paper, he wrote:
- More than one man
- More than one woman
- Prostitution
- Promiscuity
- Adultery
- Fornication
- Oral-Genital
- Anal-Oral
- And maybe masturbation.
He sat down while the commissioners bit pencil tips and stared at his work. They were more confused than ever. As debate raged anew, Dr. Becker seemed a million miles away. She passed the time leafing through a marked-up copy of Vogue. At one point, she came to a sizzling spread for Calvin Klein’s Obsession, featuring an erect female nipple. She brought the scratch ‘n’ sniff strip of the perfume next to her nose, inhaled, and then offered a hit to Ms. Tilton, who breathed deeply and smiled. They neglected to offer Father Ritter a whiff.
Alan Sears described his expedition into a smut store. “We had a hard time finding vaginal intercourse,” exclaimed the prosecutor, who posts the Ten Commandments in his office.
At his end of the table, Dr. Dobson didn’t like the smell of things. Apparently, he needed consolation from another world. During a break, he huddled in prayer with Michael McManus, a sympathetic religious journalist who put his arm around his besieged brother. They bowed their heads and closed their eyes long enough to call down a storm of locusts and frogs upon Levine, Becker, and Tilton.
Back at the debate, it appeared that consensus was beyond reach. Still, Father Ritter urged a last-ditch united stand: “If this commission is split … in this category, we’ll be laughed out of existence.” But even Chairman Hudson was worn down and floated the notion of a “hung jury” on the family issue.
Father Ritter kept trying to strike a deal. But the priest lost the moderates when he insisted that only depictions of sex acts starring real-life married couples could be considered harmless to the family.
“You mean, no unmarried couples could be in sex-education materials?” asked Levine coolly.
“Yes,” the helpful Mrs. Cusack said soothingly. “That comes under fornication.”
Hudson threw up the white flag, proposing that 11 separate statements be prepared on Class Ill porn and the family. The exhausted group accepted the assignment.
Thus, after condemning the most egregious and extreme forms of pornography (S & M, chainsaw sex), the Meese Commission failed to nuke corner-store erotica — where most of the action is. Hudson’s fail-safe, three-tiered approach to porn fell apart in the crunch. The women’s revolt stripped the smooth running gears of the majority. Dr. Dietz and Professor Schauer, who did not shrink from censoring hard-core, were not sufficiently aroused about lesser forms of porn to swing their votes Hudson’s way. Scottsdale spelled stalemate in the erogenous zone.
THE $100,000 GIFT
Scottsdale is the national headquarters of the Citizens for Decency Through Law (COL), a powerful antipornography organization. And next-door Phoenix is the home of COL founder Charles Keating, a wealthy real estate developer with a whopping aversion to dirty pictures. As a member of the 1970 presidential panel, he wrote a ranting dissent and demanded a congressional probe of the whole operation.
The COL has the ear of the Reagan administration. In 1983, then — presidential counselor Meese personally boosted a book containing the kamikaze critiques of COL counsel Bruce Taylor. In Criminal Justice Reform: A Blueprint, Taylor called for a federal antiporn statute that would outlaw providing minors with any material showing a naked female breast.
The CDL’s Taylor, a cocky young moral-squader, breezed into city hall one afternoon during the Scottsdale deliberations and spent a 15-minute recess in whispers with commission attorney David Carr. Taylor was somehow sanguine about the panel’s progress: “Let’s wait and see what happens at the end of all this. Let’s wait and see.”
Zealous in pursuit of its goals, the COL brazenly paid public tribute to a sitting commissioner last November-a week before the panel ’s hearing in Miami. The occasion was a $1,000-a-plate ball in Scottsdale. Offering the benediction was — mirabile dictu — Father Bruce Ritter. COL honored the Franciscan with its first annual Charles Keating Award and a $100,000 check for his Covenant House activities.
Although Father Ritter accepted his “gift” publicly, nobody screamed about this conflict of interest. Imagine the uproar if Morton Thiokol Inc. had donated six figures to Challenger investigator Dr. George Fennyman’s Cal Tech department while the presidential panel was looking into the shuttle tragedy. Fennyman would have been disgraced and thrown off the case.
Father Ritter’s impropriety was especially hypocritical considering that some unfriendly witnesses before the commission had been grilled on their financial ties. For example, Chairman Hudson badgered ACLU people with questions about Playboy Foundation money. And University of Wisconsin Professor Edward Donnerstein Was asked pointedly if Penthouse paid him for granting an interview.
When accused of conflict of interest last April, Father Ritter cried “smear” in a casuistic letter to the attorney general. Yes, his House got the COL money. And yes, his House took $1.25 million from Ed Meese’s department in the past three years. But all the funds went to his kids. So the priest denied “even the slightest appearance of ‘conflict of interest.’”
NUDITY BEATS THE RAP
Meanwhile, back in the windowless bunker in city hall, it was time for softball. If Class IV nudity were all the porn there was, then there would not be a Meese Commission in the first place. The attorney general was not ostensibly riled up by girlie magazines (the President’s son works for one) or flashes of areola in Hollywood movies (the President himself catches R-rated flicks and has Clint Eastwood to the White House despite the kinky blowjob he extorted from a cheap hooker in Tightrope). The A.G. was after the real nasty business in Classes I, II, and Ill, but he would not mind a clean sweep of the newsstand.
“The intensity of pornography, the amount of violence that’s involved in it, the amount of perversion that’s involved has changed over the years,” he remarked on CBS’s “Nightwatch.” “And I think it’s a good time to take a look.”
Class IV pornography, as outlined by Dr. Dietz on Friday morning, meant nudity without force, sexual activity, violence, or degradation. Vulgar photos of genitals fell into Class II degradation and in-and-out shots were covered in Class III explicitness. The comparatively innocent range of this group encompassed Joan Collins in Playboy, Greta Garbo topless in People, the White Rock Girl, and Manet’s Déjeuner sur I’Herbe. Surely, the panel would gallop through this material without embarrassing itself. But noooo.
Father Ritter, a prisoner of a Catholic sexual morality that divides the naked body into partes honestas and partes inhonestas, worried about close-ups of the genitals in Michelangelo’s David.
Dr. Dietz cited nudes of obese and deformed persons as a potential hot spot.
Spanker Dobson said: “There’s a tremendous difference between a nude woman with a bandolier with one foot on a chair shot from below compared to a Michelangelo nude. Can’t we have a category for artistic nudes?”
“Who is to judge?” asked Levine.
“Who is to judge anything?” replied Dobson.
“That’s the trouble here,” Levine snickered.
On and on they went, but in the end, despite Father Ritter ’s amazing anthropological leap into the nudity taboo, Class IV was officially exculpated on all three tiers by a landslide.
What on earth? The Meese Commission — conceived by prosecutors and ordained by the legions of decency — had just voted that pornography could actually help families.
The accumulated nuttiness of the Scottsdale summit, culminating in Friday afternoon’s Bunuelian symposium on provocative versus nonprovocative nudity, pushed Dr. Becker over the edge. Like Levine and Tilton, she had kept her distance from the bashers on the panel. Although rumored close to resignation last fall, the psychiatrist specializing in sex aggression and sex victims stuck around without stirring up a large fuss. But no longer. In apparent solidarity with Levine, she was ready to burn some bridges. Asking for the floor, she launched into a tirade against the intellectual treasons of the string-‘em-up caucus of Hudson-Ritter-Dobson-Cusack:
“One of the mandates was to determine the relationship between pornography and antisocial behavior and the commission of sexual crimes. I’d like to comment that I don’t think there is in the social-science data any conclusive causal relationship between this type of material and the commission of sexual crimes. I think the data show that in certain experiments attitudes change, and I think one makes a quantum leap from attitudinal changes to committing sexual crimes ….”
“My request is that when we write our essay, we state why we have come to the conclusion that we have. My opinions are based on ten years of experience in work with sex offenders and a knowledge of the literature on violence and antisocial behavior. But I think that some people have come to their opinions because of divine revelation, because of common sense, because they know in their heart of hearts that pornography is wrong, because you’ve heard compelling evidence from criminal-justice people and from victims.
“I don’t believe in what I call the Simple Simon theory of antisocial personality. That is, people will see something and go do it. I think human behavior is much more complicated than that.”
How did the chairman greet this grapefruit in his kisser? Over his head when ideas are in dispute, Hudson said, “Is it your belief that … we have inadequately addressed the connection between certain forms of pornography and their behavioral effects?”
“I do,” replied Dr. Becker. “I don’t think the evidence is in yet because some of the studies have not been done or can’t be done to show that pornography causes people to commit sexual crimes …. What we’re saying is going to determine public policy. People should know why these individuals have come to the conclusions they have.”
After lunch, Hudson tried to blunt Dr. Becker’s nut-crunching attack by calling on Dr. Dietz, whose credentials in psychiatry and publications equal or surpass Dr. Becker’s.
Anticipating the question, Dr. Dietz was ready with a chart indicating an indirect connection between the beaver and the bludgeon. After all, he explained, social science cannot even prove a causal link between “proper guidance at home and healthy children.” Dietz was convinced that pornography is somewhere in the overall picture of sex crimes. “A factor that counts for some nontrivial share is called one of the causes,” he put it.
Levine clearly admires Dr. Dietz, but she subverted his argument when she inquired, “So is alcohol more or less a contributing factor to sex crimes [than pornography]?”
Dietz responded honestly, “My estimate is that it’s more.”
The panel’s schedule collapsed under the weight of the agenda. By Saturday, the commission still had to discuss organized crime, finally define pornography, and attend to other key matters. An additional week of work sessions was scheduled for the end of April in Washington. But, incredibly, Hudson and Sears were still insisting that they could meet the June 20 deadline for the final report. They explained that they had no choice — the allocation was almost spent and the staff would soon be history.
Levine was astounded. She saw no way the panel could wrap so quickly. Along with Professor Schauer, she pleaded with Hudson to get more money from Meese. Henry promised to do what he could.
But the chairman was not going to make waves. An admiring President had nominated him to be the next U.S. attorney from the Eastern District of Virginia.
EPILOGUE: THE 1970 COMMISSIONER
Dr. Morris Lipton is one of the experts who brought us the 1970 presidential report that dared to urge the repeal of obscenity laws. Then as now, this research psychiatrist labors at the University of North Carolina Medical School, where he will attain emeritus status next year.
Tales of the odd practices of the Meese Commission have reached his ear in Chapel Hill. He refrains from taking a poke at his successors before reading the final report, but he knows which way the wind is blowing.
“My concern is that science not be perverted in the service of politics.” He said through a film of cigarette smoke. “If they have scientific evidence that significant numbers of adults are damaged by pornography, then do away with it. We could not find evidence like that in 1970. Maybe they have it now.”
To this day, Dr. Lipton cannot fathom why he was dratted in 1970. His specialties were mental retardation and mental illness. Nevertheless, he devoted 1,000-plus hours to the task as a member of the effects panel.
His team set out to test the notion of satiation to pornography. He got 23 male undergraduates to spend time in a room, 90 minutes a day, five days a week, for three weeks. The students could do anything except homework or fall asleep. For their diversion. Dr. Lipton provided a filing cabinet with four drawers containing (1) porn movies, (2) porn still photos, (3) porn books, and (4) old copies of popular magazines. Urine specimens were taken before and after each session and measured for a telltale enzyme in prostatic fluid that flows during sexual arousal.
“We found quick satiation,” Dr. Lipton said. “After a day, they were looking at Popular Mechanics. The only antisocial effect was that they borrowed the movies to show back in their dorms.”
Although Dr. Lipton is the kind of commissioner that the Meese gang loves to hate, his fairness is indisputable. Personally, he would prefer the disappearance of dirty pictures. In fact, he expressed regret in the 1970 report that pornography was not nailed:
“We would have welcomed evidence relating exposure to erotica to delinquency, crime, and antisocial behavior, for if such evidence existed we might have a simple solution to some of our most urgent problems. However, the work of the commission has failed to uncover such evidence. Although the many and varied studies contracted for by the commission may have flaws, they are remarkably uniform in the direction in which they point. This direction fails to establish a meaningful causal relationship or even significant correlation between exposure to erotica and immediate or delayed antisocial behavior among adults. To assert the contrary from the available evidence is not only to deny the facts, but also to delude the public by offering a spurious and simplistic answer to highly complex problems.”
Although Dr. Lipton concedes that some people are damaged by exposure, he also blames chocolate for causing severe allergic reactions, even death. “We can’t protect every individual from every stimulus,” he said. “Given the major issues of the day, pornography is a trivial issue.”
A week later, Dr. Lipton telephoned our office in New York. He had an interesting quote to read.
“Here it is,” he said. “‘The life of the people must be freed from the asphyxiating perfume of our modern eroticism, as it must be from unmanly and prudish refusal to face facts. In all of these things the aim and the method must be governed by the thought of preserving our nation’s health in body and soul. The right to personal freedom comes second in importance to the duty of maintaining the race.’ Who do you think wrote that?”
“Ed Meese?”
“No, it was Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf.”
All of us old enough to have been in the industry when the Meese Commission rolled out can tell you that it was not a fun time around here. Of course nobody listens to any of us old enough to have been in the industry when the Meese Commission rolled out anymore, so there’s that. If you really want to read the final report, you still can, but be aware that it pushes 2,000 pages, and it will not be nearly as fun as you might imagine. (This is the part where those of us old enough to have been in the industry when the Meese Commission rolled out laugh uproariously to ourselves, because no one will listen.)
