SEXIS WRONG

have no choice regarding the music and lyrics they purchase.
Wal-Mart and K-Mart assert that the surveys they rely on for
verification show customers approve of the practice (how
were those questions phrased?). Therefore, they deny that
the revisions of the music are prior restraint. It takes openmindedness
to listen dispassionately to many rap and rock
lyrics glorifying fighting and gang solidarity, as well as contempt
for “bitches,” white people, teachers, and police. But
at least part of the defiance serves as a wake-up call about
the astonishing inequalities between classes and races in
America and the results of those inequalities. It’s foolish to
ignore the messages and silence the messenger.
It is as regressive now as it was half a century ago to insure
that teenagers never criticize what teachers, policemen, judges,
clergy, or other “established authorities” tell them about
sex and violence. If it was disingenuous to impose censorship
then by calling it a code of decency, it is even more so to
use current economic jargon to redefine it as “target marketing.”
22 All it is, is good business and the tyranny of the majority,
as was the Code for the comic-book industry. In a country
which prides itself on raising young people to understand all
sides of an issue and to make independent choices, the behavior
of the chain stores, as that of the comic-book industry,
is coarse and vulgar.
The 1990s brought to the Western world designer clothing,
Hollywood’s NC-17 films, day spas for men, gentlemen’s
clubs, and erotic experiences via telephone, hotel-room cable
TV, and the Internet. The general population’s increasing exposure
to sex has been good for the entertainment business.
In the liberal 1960s, when the so‐called sexual revolution was
jump‐started, sex was equally good for the publishing business.
The best evidence is Ralph Ginzburg’s performance, in
an inappropriately colorful blazer and straw hat, before the Supreme
Court, which helped get him a jail sentence in 1963. He
was brashly proud of appealing to prurience in his advertisements,
inflicting a reality check on the Supremes that made
them judge the man, not the material. 23 Ginzburg’s point was
that differences between Grove Press’ scholarly editions of
Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and his Eros
magazine’s erotica were only a matter of the cosmetics of
packaging and blurbs. For most purchasers, furtive curiosity
is a prime impulse. Therefore, Grove benefited less from the
Brennan Court’s rulings than did TV, movies, magazines, and
mass-market paperbacks. Ginzburg implied that the Court,
however idealistic, was being neither logical nor realistic
about the underlying reason—the health of the economy—for
its de‐censorship rulings. Who could blame them, since they
were not at all venal and Ginzburg clearly was a pitch man?
In the mid-twentieth century, and equally today, many people
handled the sex side of their lives in such a way as to encourage
self‐respect and a path to honest affection. When
that happens, the symbiosis between erotica distributors and
authorities who reinforce their power by identifying illicit sex
with degeneracy has truly been subverted. With successful
advocacy of the rights of sexual minorities, and the frank
expression of their desires and sex practices, the subject of
sexual expression has been taken from the closet and asserted—by
a much criticized minority—as legitimate and necessary.
Yet, next to terrorism, and with an equally feverous
distinction between us and them, “sexual permissiveness”
is the easiest straw man to rage against. Karl Rove’s “moral
values” shtick, his focus on the culture war as opposed to the
horrible facts of the unilaterally-waged Operation Iraqi Freedom,
was a factor in the 2004 election.
Comforting belief systems shared by trusted friends and
co‐workers are much easier to ratify than unsuccessful wars
started for discredited reasons. The indignation generated by
Republican spin artists hungry for the votes and money of
Christian fundamentalists has resonance in the hearts and
minds of Americans trained to see survival as a battle between
us and them. Gay marriage, abortion rights, and highschool
sex-education courses seem more personal to many
Americans than the daily horrors characterizing the Bushite
occupation of Iraq. Moral crusades are always political, none
more intensely so than those which occur in times already
scarred by national emergencies. So how far have we come
since J. Edgar Hoover explained that the Reds were planting
pornography in order to demoralize our people and debauch
their children?
III
The eagerness of journalists to cover prurient-interest stories,
be they about erotic images of children or salacious
advertisements, is as regular as cable TV tabloid news.
Spokespeople for sexual decency, whether clergymen, public
officeholders, or police officials, are—as they have been for
a century—entrepreneurs, identifying themselves with their
cause and its righteousness. Erotica distributors do much the
same thing. Whenever it is to their advantage, they say they
are furthering First Amendment and privacy issues, but they
are making a living as middlemen, doing the unpleasant job
of providing taboo material. And how well they have learned
the variety of stories and pictures that would do that! Desperate
Housewives and Extreme Associates are examples. So
were the 1950s sex pulps, 1960s sexploitation movies, and
pioneering porno-chic films like Deep Throat and Behind the
Green Door. Erotica exploits fantasies with which customers
are enthralled, however ambivalent about what they see. Its
distributors’ best friend has always been the opportunistic
moralist who allies with political authority to deplore sexually
312 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG