"I feel like I just won the Academy Award. If an artist can offend so many people that he has to go to prison..."

"... to protect society, that's really saying something. Most shock artists dream of this kind of attention, without the prison part."

Ira Isaacs, sentenced last month by a federal judge — this is in the United States— for 4 years, for violating obscenity law. The Huffington Post — considered a liberal website, and, again, this is in the United States — began its article about the sentencing with a joke: "Looks like someone's career went down the toilet." (The movies included the simulated consumption of feces.)

There is no shame anymore. And yet there still are obscenity trials. Absurd.

I'm finding this story now because I happened across an account to the trial in an article published last March at Reason.com: "Porn So Icky That It Can't Be Obscene" (by Jacob Sullum), describing the argument made at trial, which describes the argument made by Isaacs's lawyer:

"My intent is to be a shock artist in the movies I made," [Isaacs] testified, "to challenge the viewer in thinking about art differently... to think about things they'd never thought about before." Similarly, [his lawyer Roger] Diamond argued that the films have political value as a protest against the government's arbitrary limits on expression, illustrating the "reality that we may not have the total freedom the rest of the world thinks we have."

Sullum wrote:

I will be impressed if Isaacs, who faces a possible penalty of 20 years in prison, can pull off this feat of legal jujitsu, transforming the very qualities that make his movies objectionable into their redeeming value — especially since at least some of the jurors... found the evidence against him literally unwatchable. But if the jurors want to blame someone for making them sit through this assault on their sensibilities, they should not blame Isaacs. They should blame the Justice Department, which initiated the case during the Bush administration, and the Supreme Court, which established the absurdly subjective test they are now supposed to apply. Will they take seriously Isaacs' references to Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, and Piero Manzoni, or will they dismiss his artistic name dropping as a desperate attempt to give his masturbation aids a high-minded purpose?

But here's some up-to-date news from 2 days ago: Minutes before Isaacs was to turn himself in to the  federal Bureau of Prisons, Isaacs go a call from his lawyer saying "don't go." The judge had approved his motion for bail pending appeal.

Isaacs told XBIZ that today's events were so surreal he had felt like he was in an episode of the "Twilight Zone" or a Quentin Tarantino movie....

"Last night, I was thinking it would be my last night of freedom," he said. "I really thought that this would be it; that I would be sleeping in prison the following night... and that would continue for a very long time."

We'll see what happens in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and — if we're lucky — the Supreme Court.

"There are some short transitory passages between the various sexual episodes..."

"... but, for the most part, they only set the scene and identify the participants for the next orgy, or make smutty reference and comparison to past episodes."

An amusing sentence from Justice Clark's dissenting opinion in the 1966 case Memoirs v. Massachusetts, attempting to explain what is in the text of "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," because he is "obliged to portray the book's contents, which causes me embarrassment." He avoids actual quotations from the book because it would "debase" the set of volumes that contain U.S. Supreme Court opinions. I was also amused by: "The pubic hair is often used for a background to the most vivid and precise descriptions of the response, condition, size, shape. and color of the sexual organs before, during and after orgasms."



The narrator in "Memoirs" is a prostitute named Fanny Hill, and Justice Clark, addressing actual legal arguments made in this First Amendment case, writes: "To say that Fanny is an 'intellectual' is an insult to those who travel under that tag. She was nothing but a harlot — a sensualist.... As an empiricist, Fanny confines her observations and 'experiments' to sex, with primary attention to depraved, lewd, and deviant practices."

I was also amused by Clark's dismay that one expert at trial had claimed that the book had literary merit because the verb "waddles" was used instead of "walks" to describe a fat woman entering a room and that another expert said that the 18th century book contributed to an understanding of history through its repeated descriptions of "the male sexual organ as an engine... which is pulling you away from the way these events would be described in the 19th or 20th century."

It's funny now, when you can get the book through a simple click. Feel free to read just the dirty parts, in other words — if I am to believe Justice Clark's opinion and as they say in the blogosphere — read the whole thing.

ADDED: I love the idea of insulting those who "travel under the tag" "intellectual." That's something I know I try to do whenever I can. And I'm fascinated by the expert's inadvertently causing us to picture a giant penis-locomotive dragging us into the past. That's quite a time machine you've got there! And the notion of pubic hair as a background for a visualization of male genitalia. It's like pubic hair is to cock as black velvet is to Elvis.

AND:  Why the sudden interest in Justice Tom Clark? My conlaw casebook has a squib on this case:

[I]n Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 383 U.S. 413 (1966), a plurality of three (Warren, Brennan, and Fortas) restated Roth as follows:

[T]hree elements must coalesce: it must be established that (a) the dominant  theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex; (b) the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters; and (c) the material is utterly without redeeming social value.

As Chief Justice Burger later noted in  Miller, “While  Roth presumed ‘obscenity’ to be ‘utterly without redeeming social importance,’  Memoirs required that to prove obscenity it must be affirmatively established that the material is ‘utterly without redeeming social value,’ [a] burden virtually impossible to discharge under our criminal standards of proof.” Nevertheless, this formulation was the most widely applied, even though no majority of the Court could agree on a standard to determine what constituted obscenity. Warren, Brennan, and Fortas subscribed to the Memoirs variation; Black and Douglas asserted that obscenity was constitutionally protected; Harlan held to his Roth view; and Stewart thought that both federal and state governments could suppress “hard-core” pornography. Justice Stewart’s famous epigram in his concurrence in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964), dramatized the problem of defining “obscenity.” Speaking of hard-core pornography, Stewart said: “I know it when I see it.”

I'm counting: Warren, Brennan, Fortas, Black, Douglas, Harlan, Stewart. That's only 7. Somebody's not getting any respect. The other unmentioned Justice? Byron White.

"Like any physically-demanding, socially-vexed form of labor, sex work isn't easy work...."

"... not least because of the stigma and meager income.... We should remember to celebrate Arpad, the sexy man behind the scenes and in front of the camera who gave so much of himself for our desire, and not condemn a choice privately considered and personally significant enough to result in such extreme measures."

Arpad Miklos, popular star of gay porn, commits suicide at age 45.

***

From the essay "Big Red Son," which is about the porn business, by David Foster Wallace (himself a suicide):

Thirty-four-year-old porn actor Cal Jammer killed himself in 1995. Starlets Shauna Grant, Nancy Kelly, Alex Jordan, and Savannah have all killed themselves in the last decade. Savannah and Jordan received AVN's Best New Starlet awards in 1991 and 1992, respectively. Savannah killed herself after getting mildly disfigured in a car accident. Alex Jordan is famous for having addressed her suicide note to her pet bird. Crewman and performer Israel Gonzalez killed himself at a porn company warehouse in 1997.

An LA-based support group called PAW (=Protecting Adult Welfare) runs a 24-hour crisis line for people in the adult industry. A fundraiser for PAW was held at a Mission Hills CA bowling alley last November. It was a nude bowling tournament. Dozens of starlets agreed to take part. Two or three hundred adult-video fans showed up and paid to watch them bowl naked. No production companies or their executives participated or gave money. The fundraiser took in $6,000, which is slightly less than two one-millionths of porn's yearly gross.

That essay, published in 1998, quotes the industry's gross income at an estimated $2-2.5 billion. You might guess that the number has shrunken since then, what with piracy and all the free stuff on the internet, but I'm seeing a recent estimate that puts the number at $14 billion.

"Pornography 'Weakens our Resistance to the Communist Masters of Deceit.'"

"And other warnings from the 1961 film Perversion for Profit, the Reefer Madness of porn."

Unlike today, criticism of pornography proceeded as if the average viewer would be unfamiliar with it. "These highly colorful magazines depict stark nudity on slick paper," Putnam patiently explained. "They often present their subject on a bed or couch, in positions indicative of intercourse or other sex acts, obviously calculated to stimulate the reader." Back then, they also thought that "the nakedness, the nudity of these magazines is defended and foisted on the people by a vociferous minority in our society," an argument even anti-porn crusaders don't make today.  

Court: "Although her pornography career has concluded..."

"... the ongoing availability of her pornographic materials on the Internet will continue to impede her from being an effective teacher and respected colleague."


Lawyer: "We were hoping we could show you could overcome your past.... I think she’s representative of a lot of people who may have a past that may not involve anything illegal or anything that hurts anybody."

"Due to the intense interior lives that these animals have, you have to enrich their environment to stimulate them physically and psychologically...."

"The surprise was when they found that within a few days, Gina was not only using the remote control perfectly well, but that she also used to choose the porn channel for entertainment...."

"In recruiting women over 40 years of age, companies are finding young women who will misrepresent their true age on application forms."

"Legendary jukujo performer Mariko Kawano was one of the first, apparently claiming to be 34 when in fact she was really three years younger."

Gender role reversal on a very old — and lame — scenario.

"A British woman is divorcing her hubby on grounds the erotic bestseller 'Fifty Shades of Grey' failed to get a rise out of his languishing libido."

"Ensuring condom use on porn sets called challenging."

So the people voted for it, but who will enforce it? 

The passage of the law created an outcry Wednesday in the adult entertainment industry. Porn producers have long said consumers will not purchase movies in which actors wear condoms and on Wednesday, executives and directors once again threatened to move from long-time production sites in the San Fernando Valley to other California counties, Las Vegas or Hungary, Europe's center of adult moviemaking....

In a letter to county supervisors, the head of an industry lobbying group called the law "untenable for adult production" and said the group was preparing a lawsuit to stop it from going into effect on 1st Amendment and other grounds.

I look forward to reading the Free Speech arguments!

ADDED: Everyone knows that an ejaculation is a part of speech. Oxford English Dictionary definition:

The putting up of short earnest prayers in moments of emergency; the hasty utterance of words expressing emotion.

"I'm very looking forward to a Republican being back in office... When you're rich, you want a Republican in office."

The Politico headline says "Jenna Jameson supporting Mitt Romney," but I think you might want to credit her with cleverness. That might be a cute way of saying she's for Obama. Be alert for humor from sly porn stars.

IN THE COMMENTS: I have a lot to say to the people who question whether Jameson is smart.

AND: Watch her stand up to Bill O'Reilly:

"Self-reliance — the new edgy lifestyle for the trendsetters among America’s youth?"

Glenn Reynolds asks in a NY Post column.

In today’s culture of immediate reward, a work ethic centering on self-discipline and the ability to defer gratification is almost, to use a favorite term of the avant-garde, transgressive. Hmm: With so much of our economy and politics now based on the absence of those characteristics, maybe it really is a bit transgressive.

He's looking at a new reality show — "Princess" — that makes entertainment out of forcing young women how to live within their means. And he's comparing it to pornography, which isn't exciting anymore. Supposedly. Despite the big "Shades of Grey" trend (which he mentions).

Could self-reliance become trendy? Maybe if it's imposed on some annoyingly bratty girl on television, but self-reliance is a low-profile matter in real life. It's about not getting noticed, not asking for help. Pornography is truly exciting when it interacts with shame. That's why the word transgression comes into play. There used to be shame in taking advantage of handouts and welfare, and people would apply themselves quite seriously to the tasks of remaining independent — staying off "the dole," as people used to say.

These days, half of Americans are getting government benefits. We've gotten comfortable leaning on each other, and where's the shame? People feel entitled, and we don't want to lose what we have, even if we perceive that what we're depending on might be/must be collapsing. But even if we did feel shame about our dependence, becoming independent would not be the escape from shame that one feels from pornography. When a person escapes shame through pornography, he is going ahead and indulging in the things that were the cause of shame. In the analogy, it's dependence on others that would be the source of the shame, and avoiding that dependence would be refraining from doing that which you're ashamed of. So quite aside from the present-day absence of shame, the analogy doesn't work.

You can't get to excitement and edginess unless you transgress — you move toward the behavior you were ashamed of. It might nevertheless — and for different reasons — feel beautifully rewarding to behave so well that you don't suffer from shame. But let's be clear about the analogy: self-reliance corresponds to chastity.

"Porn, stripping get Octomom Nadya Suleman off welfare."

"There's really nothing I won't do to support them or care for them.... Every good mom or dad can identify with that, providing for their safety, their well-being."

Pinterest — where you display pictures of stuff you like — fosters "the feeling of being addicted to longing for something..."

"... specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the feeling of longing for the thing."

The site’s name combines the words “interest” and “pin,” in reference to “pin boards,” which are also known in various creative professions as inspiration boards or mood boards — basically a large board onto which appropriated images... are juxtaposed to evoke in the viewer a certain feeling, atmosphere or mood. Once the exclusive province of advertising art directors, designers and teenage girls in boarding-school dormitories, mood boards and their electronic equivalents have exploded online. Not just on Pinterest, but also in the form of dopamine-boosting street-fashion blogs and cryptically named Tumblr blogs devoted to the wordless and explanation-free juxtaposition of, say, cupcakes and teapots and shoes with shots of starched shirts and J.F.K.

Mood boards used to be an "exclusive province," something for the "creative professions," and now ordinary people are doing them too. Reminds me of the relationship between journalism and blogging. There's something disconcerting about everybody getting into the act. And the riff-raff who do what was once exclusive must be disparaged. Something missing with these people.

The author of the linked piece Carina Chocano (writing in the NYT Magazine) makes a big point of distinguishing Pinterest picture-posting as different from "curating" and more like advertising, because a curating makes us "more conscious" (like the creative professionals in their exclusive provinces), while advertising makes us less conscious (you peons!).

Why less conscious? Chocano seems to think that operating in the dimension of intuitive desire is lowly — a notion that spikes me to a higher level of consciousness where I observe that Chocano is dealing in elitism and snobbery. (In the New York Times!) She even refers to these pictures as "lifestyle pornography," calling to mind the old feminist argument that pornography shouldn't get First Amendment protection because it doesn't express any ideas. It merely stimulates feelings.

Here's Pinterest if you want a taste of the feeling of being addicted to longing.

ADDED: I just happened upon an aphorism that seems relevant: "In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing."

"What sexbots will do is widen the already growing chasm between the sexes, until only the fittest of the fit... can successfully leap across it to woo a human companion in the way that our genetic overlord intended."

Writes Heartiste, noting that "fitness is whatever gets one’s genes to the next generation, whether beneficial to civilization or note." I got there via Instapundit, who got there via Helen Smith, who makes the present-day observation that "20% of the alpha males [get] about 80% of the women" and says:

Those men who have more trouble getting women turn to porn and seem to ignore or be oblivious to women. I wonder how Sexbots will further change the landscape?

Here's my long-term view of that landscape. As men get absorbed into virtual-reality sex, there will be sex machines for women, replete with the elaborate stories women find titillating (including many things that are too dangerous to pursue in real life about which they currently read voraciously). The women, further relieved of motivation to form loving partnerships with men, will turn more and more to the government for support. Witness "The Life of Julia." There will be more and more of that as men depart from real life and submerge themselves more deeply in machines and women consequently feel more entitled to the government's functioning in the role from which men have escaped.

Women have the voting majority, and what will stop us from employing it in the interest of women as men demonstrate their lack of interest in us?

Will women still want to raise children? Some will, especially when it is well incentivized with government support brought about by unstoppable female voting power. We will have our choice of prime semen for artificial insemination. I'm sure the government will provide us with free services and facilitate our selection of the genetic traits we think will make the best children. Who knows what the next generations will be, as mothers produce children not because they found love from a man, but because of their ideas — possibly delusional — about what would make an excellent child? That's a new experiment. Presumably, in a world where men absent themselves from the real-world life of love and relationships, these women will choose, overwhelmingly, to have daughters. Those daughters will grow up and become part of the Electorate of Julias, further depressing any political power for men.

As this process goes on, perhaps that 20%/80% split Dr. Helen observes will be the actual ratio of men to women. But those men will not be alpha men. They won't even be beta men. And the men in the women's sex machines will be The New Alpha+++ Men. There will be no way to go back.

But this can only happen in America and whatever other free, wealthy, technologically advanced democracies there may be. So don't worry. It won't last that long.

"I am interested in the culture... and in sexuality, so I'll talk about what it might mean that so many women are reading a novel that depicts sado-masochism."

Said I, in the comments to this morning's Drudge in B&W post, which invoked the popular novel "Shades of Grey, " and prompted a commenter (Surfed) to ask "to what effect have these novels affected [sic] Althouse that they are constantly (if not on an everyday basis) referred to? Is this a question best posed to Meade?" I said:

I don't read many novels, and I don't read any novels that are not on a fairly high literary level. So, genre romance and porn aren't in my Kindle. 

I am interested in the culture... and in sexuality, so I'll talk about what it might mean that so many women are reading a novel that depicts sado-masochism. In fact, Meade and I just had big conversation about that. I wondered whether women's fascination with this kind of fiction indicated that something is missing in present-day sexual relationships. Meade expressed the view that this is what women over the ages have in fact found titillating. I didn't disagree, so it's not as though we were opposed. I think it's a good issue, worth discussing, so feel free to carry on with that.

I'm making this into a new post, because I really do think it's a good topic for discussion and would like you to carry on — in this discussion or whatever other activities you have in mind. For example, Surfed asserted that he has "used the novel to great effect in my own personal life these last 6 months or so." All right then!

I've made a "Shades of Grey" tag so you can see the old posts on the subject and see what I've already said about this series of books.

Let's take a closer look at those porn stars.

Bill Clinton's does a new photo op... that reminds us folks here at the Althouse blog of that old photo op.

Feminists, please weigh in.

ADDED: One of the porn stars, Brooklyn Lee, according to Wikipedia, "appeared in Pink's music video for 'Raise Your Glass' in 2010 with three other LA Direct Models. They were shown blindfolded and being milked to fill a bottle to feed a calf." You can watch that video (after a commercial) here. The image in question looks like this:



Cows!

Feminists, please weigh in.

Where can the Althouse commentariat talk about the S.E. Cupp flap?

Here.

Wherein I call bullshit cowpie of distortion.

What watching porn does to a woman's brain.

A study "showed that far less blood was sent to the primary visual cortex, while the women were watching the most explicit porn."

The same thing happens in the brain when a human conducts a non-visual task—like memorizing a list of words—while being shown some sort of visual "distractor" stimuli. Interestingly, when watching normal, non-smut films, extra blood is sent to the visual cortex.

Now, why would this be? Sex is nonvisual for women — that seems like the working theory. If so, porn movies don't make sense: watching causes not watching.

40,000+ "ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, all dressed in black suits and white shirts" rally — at the Mets' stadium — about "the dangers of the Internet."

The NYT reports:

For the attendees, many of whom said they came at the instructions of their rabbis, it was a chance to hear about a moral topic considered gravely important in their community: the potential problems that can stem from access to pornography and other explicit content on the uncensored, often incendiary Web....

“Desires are out there,” [said Shlomo Cohen, 24, of Toronto], adding that men could be particularly susceptible. “We have to learn how to control ourselves.”...

Eytan Kobre, a spokesman for the event, delivered a more intense message to reporters outside the stadium. “The siren song of the Internet entices us!” he pronounced in a booming voice. “It brings out the worst of us!”

Book reviewer's weapon: the Kindle search.

Chez Amazon, a customer review — voted overwhelmingly "helpful" — complains about bad writing in the form of repetition and proves it via search tool. (The book is the huge lady-porn bestseller "Fifty Shades of Grey: Book One.")

According to my Kindle search function, characters roll their eyes 41 times, Ana bites her lip 35 times, Christian's lips "quirk up" 16 times, Christian "cocks his head to one side" 17 times, characters "purse" their lips 15 times, and characters raise their eyebrows a whopping 50 times. Add to that 80 references to Ana's anthropomorphic "subconscious" (which also rolls its eyes and purses its lips, by the way), 58 references to Ana's "inner goddess," and 92 repetitions of Ana saying some form of "oh crap" (which, depending on the severity of the circumstances, can be intensified to "holy crap," "double crap," or the ultimate "triple crap")....

*UPDATE*: Thanks to the many other perturbed readers who have shared their own choices of the most annoyingly overused phrases in this masterpiece. Following up on their suggestions with my ever-useful Kindle search function, I have discovered that Ana says "Jeez" 81 times and "oh my" 72 times. She "blushes" or "flushes" 125 times, including 13 that are "scarlet," 6 that are "crimson," and one that is "stars and stripes red." (I can't even imagine.) Ana "peeks up" at Christian 13 times, and there are 9 references to Christian's "hooded eyes" and 7 to his "long index finger." Christian's "mouth presses into a hard line" 10 times. Characters "murmur" 199 times and "whisper" 195 times (doesn't anyone just talk?), "clamber" on/in/out of things 21 times, and "smirk" 34 times. Finally, in a remarkable bit of symmetry, our hero and heroine exchange 124 "grins" and 124 "frowns"... which, by the way, seems an awful lot of frowning for a woman who experiences "intense," "body-shattering," "delicious," "violent," "all-consuming," "turbulent," "agonizing" and "exhausting" orgasms on just about every page.

I'm exhausted just reading about it. I found the Kindle search tool very useful in examining Obama's "Dreams From My Father" — here and here — in something of a different way, but, thinking about new searches that might prove fruitful, I got distracted by some searches that involved similar "creative writing" tics describing characters. For example, I noticed that people "nodded" 51 times — which is disconcertingly suggestive to those of us — I used to not be one — who nod off while reading.