SEXIS WRONG

depends on the cultural metaphor of choice. In the most
basic sense, a culture can be construed as a transmitter of
customs, values, mores, and attitudes, all of which outline
a domain of meaning. For a critic such as E.D. Hirsch, for
example, culture is simply the background information that
we need to make sense of the world. More formal information
theorists think of culture as active, a gigantic information
processor, its operations determined by constantly shifting
hierarchies of channels. The more channels, the more they
need content, and they must get it from somewhere, in the
interstices of a post-industrial society or along its edges.
Theorists such as Niklas Luhmann introduce biological metaphors,
making culture into a quasi-organic, self-organizing,
intelligent communication system. In that kind of formulation,
noise becomes paramount as a source of novelty, much
as mutations arise in DNA when biological meta-editors accidentally
reproduce new combinations from the string of
meaningless codes imbedded in genetic plasm. The notion
of noise as a generator of cultural information resonates, for
example, in Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: Rap Music and Black
Cultures in Contemporary America (Wesleyan University
Press, 1994). Here noise is cacophony, subversion, marginal
messages deprecated by mainstream culture until such time
as those messages can be understood by the mainstream.
Our culture still tries hard to
marginalize sexual representation in
order to endow it with outlaw status.
Because many Americans until quite recently condemned rap
music as obscene, it resembles other forms of sexual representation.
Other critics suggest that the recycling and transformation
of noise or trash in a culture can best be described
by “viral communication,” “contagious media,” or the kind of
synchronicity popularized in games of six degrees of separation.
In any case, other questions arise, chief among them the
question of how pornography retains its marginal status,
its edginess, long enough to function as a source of powerful
novelty. Our culture still tries hard to marginalize sexual
representation in order to endow it with outlaw status (the
Janet Jackson episode is a case in point), trying to reestablish
pornography as reliably transgressive. This was easier a
few decades ago, when organized crime was involved with
the distribution of various porn genres, especially magazines,
when such materials were still illegal. During the 1960s and
1970s, the Mob moved aggressively into peep parlors, arcades,
and adult-movie houses, where visual materials could
be exhibited and sold, and rival factions fought, cheated, and
killed each other for turf. In New York, for example, organized
crime figures most often leased or purchased real estate in
seedy neighborhoods, then subleased the premises to sexbusinesses
at exorbitant rents, or operated protection rackets,
in effect taking profits from adult arcades and shops. 27
Organized crime thrives, of course, on providing goods and
services that are forbidden but in high demand. Until gays
revolted against police persecution at the Stonewall Bar (operated
by the Mafia) in New York City in 1969, for example,
organized crime owned or controlled virtually all homosexual
meeting places in municipalities. 28 Once homosexuals began
to enjoy the rights of other citizens, the Mafia saw its profits
erode.
Similarly, as the distribution of sexual materials was decriminalized
(de facto if not de jure), organized crime began to retreat
from adult enterprises. Courts have continued to convict
pornographers with ties to organized crime, most recently
Ken Guardino, head of Metro Video (the first porn video company
to go public on a stock exchange), in 1997. 29 Relentless
prosecutions by the Justice Department, however, have seriously
weakened crime families. Competition has cheapened
all forms of pornography and reduced profit margins. Zoning
regulations and home videotape players have put most porn
arcades and theaters out of business. The Internet, a technology
impossible for the Mob to control, now distributes
pornography on a massive scale. Public tolerance
for most forms of sexual expression undermines
the hold of criminals. In fact, some
experts believe that strip clubs and bars may
be the only type of sexually-oriented venue in
which organized crime still has a large financial interest, and
the connection probably has more to do with opportunities
for skimming profits and laundering currency than with erotic
activities per se. 30 But some taint remains.
Likewise, Americans have linked pornography with violence
as a way to marginalize the former. One of the most enduring
legends associated with porn is the secretly circulated
snuff film. Cherished urban myth to the contrary, American
authorities have never discovered a snuff film (i.e., a film in
which a person is actually killed in a sexual act). There was,
to be sure, a softcore film in the 1970s with the title Snuff.
To the delight of the distributor, feminists in what has been
described as a moral panic picketed it for months, thus assuring
the commercial success of a movie that is almost totally
incoherent. Generally speaking, the violence in most genres
of porn comes nowhere near levels of aggression in, say, Hollywood
movies. Pornography can of course be unpleasant,
nasty, and repugnant to many not-particularly-queasy Americans.
Moreover, formal sadomasochistic and bondage scenarios
do use ritualized aggression in genres of that fetish.
Nevertheless, American pornographic genres preponderantly
146 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG