The (Im)morality of Porn

In 1842, the importation of “indecent and obscene” pictures was banned in the United States. This encompassed “all indecent and obscene prints, paintings, lithographs, engravings, and transparencies.” They even included certain items that were in a more scholarly context than a sexual one. A book burning was sanctioned for certain scholarly texts that contained pictures of a somewhat erotic nature.

Although it is safe to say that the passage of time has ameliorated many social issues (albeit marginally), the progression of time (and subsequently the progression of technology) has eroded the ethics of pornography. While certain issues, such as the objectification of women, remain relatively stagnant, other issues have risen or worsened. For example, porn is much harder to regulate or monitor because of usage of the internet. It is also much easier to spread or consume as a product. The internet has also provided a much higher level of easy accessibility.

Also, with the reasonably new additions of porn videos and “cam girls,” pornography has evolved to exploit more real people in more harmful ways, compared to lithographs or drawings that were more prominent in the nineteenth century.

Also, (though this doesn’t seem to be a new development) there is an issue with the ridiculous amount of fetishization and racist imagery that goes into porn. A lot of porn also uses violence as a sort of sexual stimulant, which in turn often encourages the audience to do the same to their partners, because they might assume that this sort of behavior is normal.

Even the existence of porn confuses me sometimes, because it is completely unnecessary. Clearly no one needs porn, yet people are still exploiting and hurting others to make it. People are still profiting off of it. Many people are still watching it. It’s a huge industry, but it is entirely unessential.

The Failure of Prohibition

It is widely agreed that the prohibition movement was a failure. Enforcement of the laws was greatly ineffective and the consumption or selling of alcohol did not waver too much – it just moved underground.

The Eighteenth Amendment of the Constitution outlawed “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors,” but it was vague and barely detailed any guidelines for enforcement. There were several issues with enforcing these rules: Congress and the states both waited for the other to take the lead and therefore did nothing, the effort was underfunded, the dry agents were corrupt or inadequate.

Many believed that the prohibition laws unjustly favored the rich, and that the poor were more closely scrutinized and more likely to receive harsh punishments. The great masses who broke these laws seemed to be indifferent to the illegality of these situations, as bootleggers were relatively open to revealing their profession.

Because the liquor industry was so profitable, even government officials (police officers and politicians) tried to prevent the enforcement of prohibition.

The prohibition era is reminiscent of the crime of music piracy today, although music piracy is a much easier crime to commit, as it is through the internet and therefore harder to regulate. People have even fitted the term “bootlegging” to music piracy. With the general public, the practice has been normalized and is almost disregarded as a crime (and does not come attached with any moral connotations that most other crimes do). Though it was most likely unintentional, music piracy laws tend to target the poor like prohibition was thought to – poorer people have more trouble affording music and are more likely to resort to illegally downloading music, although people who have the funds may still continue with the illegal route regardless of their money. Music piracy is widespread to the point that even people who have more than enough money to afford music legally don’t. For example, Kanye West has been accused of using illegal music sharing sites (although, to be fair, he has received a fair amount of backlash for this).

What’s interesting is how these laws, particularly the music piracy ones, are barely regarded as crimes, with no moral assumption cast upon the person who commit the crime. Music piracy does have some ethic background – artists worked and spent money on this music, only to have others take it with no compensation – yet many people in the United States aren’t too bothered by that. Is this just because so many people do it that it’s become okay? What does that say about the malleability of our morals?

Government Regulation

Julien Comte’s article “explores the failure of prohibition enforcement in Pittsburgh over the course of the 1920s and early 1930s.” Pittsburgh was considered to be the the “wettest spot in the United States” “This title reflected not only the attitudes of most Pittsburghers regarding the prohibition issue but also the ineffectiveness of prohibition enforcement in the city.” Citizens living in the city at the time, still created a large market around making, selling, and diverting alcohol. One way private citizens combatted against prohibition laws was by, bribing federal officials. The restrictions forced upon private citizens by the government bred more crime than they were trying to prevent.

In class the question was raised, “Should the government be able to regulate what you consume?” My initial thought, would be to say no, but as our class talked through how we thought cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs should or shouldn’t be regulated. I still believe that the government should not be able to tell citizens what they can or can’t ingest. Recognizing that there are a lot of unintelligent people in the world, that would probably not work out so well for society. So to counterbalance that point, I would suggest that the government should not be allowed to regulate what I consume in the privacy of my own home. The regulating should start as soon as I cross my house’s threshold.

The law for buying alcohol is that you need to be 21 years old. By being 18, a person can drive, vote, and fight for the rights of people to buy alcohol when they turn 21, but they aren’t allowed to drink themselves. There should be a way for an 18 year old (or younger) to be able to consume alcohol in their home if they want to. If a parent goes out and buys their kid beer and they drink it in their house that should be fine. The regulating should begin when the parents or kids leave the house then they would be subjected to the current laws that are in place.

Commercialization of Sex

Prostitution as a business has always been a corrupt industry to some degree. In the 1800’s and early 1900’s we see not only women turning to prostitution to make end meet, but men and families contributing to the commercialization of sex in one form or another. In Gilfoyle’s “City of Eros: Bawdy Houses” instances of failed business owners turn to the brothel business in order to make money are described. Whole families would rent out a bedroom of their house to a prostitute because they cannot pay their rent.

We see that when times are tough financially, many people flock to a more lucrative industry, in this case prostitution and brothels. Every kind of business from furniture stores to saloons and bars would be in business with brothel owners and prostitutes. There was such a demand for sex that it almost became commonplace for normal/respectable people to enter the industry of prostitution.

With prostitution work becoming more common and absorbed in the city it inhabited, prostitutes and madames worked up the social class ladder and some were considered of high class. There was even a fancy ball thrown by a famous madame which was attended by high class New Yorkers. The commercialization of sex work, made it more pallatable to the general class of the city.

The Arts of Deception

In Cook’s piece “The Feejee Mermaid and the Market Revolution” we are introduced to P.T. Barnum, a con-artists and entrepeneur. Throughout his career, Barnum sold tickets and posters to unbelieveable sights: an old maid to George Washington, bearded ladies, the marriage of two midgits, conjoined twins, and a fish/money hyprid creature. A lot of what Barnum charged money for the public’s viewing was embelleshed one way or another. But people were still intrigued to see what Barnum had to offer. People were willing to pay to see these exhibitions whether they believed they were true or not.

Barnum set a precedent for marketing and advertising of the world today. Companies and media outlets use shocking or unbelievable tacticts to get customers and viewers, much like Barnum. Using buzzwords and clickbait material, companies and enteties are able to reel in the interest of potential customers in order to attempt to make a sale. Every company uses the tactics that Barnum used to an extent; Barnum was more shameless about what he was doing.

Pornography: Once a Criminal Act Yet Legal Today

The book Licentious Gotham, Erotic Publishing and It’s Prosecution in Nineteenth Century New York’s fourth chapter, called The Publisher’s and written by Donna Dennis, focuses on the banning of “indecent and obscene” pictures in America. A law was passed in 1842 that banned “the importation of ‘indecent and obscene’ pictures”. Unsurprisingly, the vigorous market in pornographic books and photos went on all the same. For example, Henry R. Robinson was the first to be arrested for this crime. A quote from the text itself explains in what formats Robinson’s illegal documents were found:

“The Herald floridly reported that, upon their arrival, ‘such a scene was presented to the eyes of modest men as would cause a blush to gleam from the face of brass.’ They found a huge cache of erotica in a variety of formats, ranging from engravings, etchings, paintings, lithographic sketches, and prints to pamphlets and books ‘of all sizes and shapes, with every possible characteristic of obscenity and lewdness that could be presented to the eyes or ears.’ On the spot, the police confiscated ‘several thousand Prints and Books all of an obscene nature,’ allegedly valued at nearly twenty thousand dollars.” While Robinson was potentially facing charges, he nonetheless continued to sell his prints, “Though he still offered a ‘very large quantity’ of obscene prints for sale, he kept them ‘in a small room partitioned off for that purpose.’”.

Another example of a man not obeying the law was the one of Richard Hobbes in 1842. “Whereas Robinson specialized in lubricious prints, Hobbes was the source, according to the Herald, of ‘nearly all the obscene and infamous books that flood the city’”.  Hobbes also faced charges but seems to have avoided conviction as well. Clearly there were some high profile crackdowns on obscene and pornographic material after the law was passed, but even those major players seemed to have avoided conviction.  

Dennis points out that rather close up shop, “Publishers and dealers in obscene materials, rather than passively accept the strictures of the law, focused on ways to manipulate the rules to serve their own ends”. They seem to have mostly succeeded. Contemporary America has a far more relaxed attitude towards pornography, and much of what would be considered commonplace today would have been extremely indecent in 1842.  Flipping through a playboy magazine or watching porn are considered “normal” in modern society and not signs of sexual deviance.

Of course there are some forms of pornography and imagery that are still illegal, for example child pornography. For the most part it seems that the line has been drawn around consent, and for those who cannot give consent, like children, pornography can never be justified. This line seems fair, logical and intuitive, and seems to be respected by the vast majority of Americans. Donna Dennis’ text however does suggest that the banning and prohibition of certain items gives rise to the difficulty of fighting black markets and that for some problems there may not be easy solutions other than vigilance and making a social commitment to fighting certain terrible acts.

Dangerous Work

In Huyssen’s “Killing Workers for Profit” chapter, in his book Progressive Inequality, the author explains the horrible and violent conditions that working class men and women faced in their jobs at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20st. Huyssen’s chapter is oriented around explaining and ascribing the pervasive violence the working class faced to the powerful and influence of the wealthy.  “Nevertheless, some workers saw clearly that whatever the apparently immediate cause for their foremen threatening them, strikebreakers punching them, private security personnel kicking them, police arresting them, or judge’s fining them and sentencing them to the workhouse on unsubstantiated charges, the primary human movers of violence were almost always numbered among the wealthy.” Given this level of treatment, it would be natural to wonder how these jobs were ever filled. According to Huyssen, the only alternative for these workers was often dire poverty, a life on the streets. This lack of options gave their employers incredible leverage to commit acts of violence against them.

More generally, it meant that people were willing to do extremely dangerous and undesirable jobs for low pay simply because they had no alternative, and employers would fail to pay to make those jobs safe because it was cheaper to simply hire more workers. For example, around the 1870s George Westinghouse started to market air brakes that couple train cars automatically. Rather than pay for the new technology that would have taken their employees out harm’s way, the companies insisted that workers did their job manually “regularly and unnecessarily placing those workers’ flesh and bone between tons of swiftly converging iron and steel.” And as Huyssen later on explains, “Paired with faulty coupling mechanisms, this practice continued to cleave bodies in half at the hips, crush internal organs, and unceremoniously amputate healthy limbs—a veritable production mechanism of agony and death.” The conditions being described by Huyssen did not sound so different to the working conditions in some concentration camps during the Holocaust. Of course there are important and profound differences, the workers under discussion here could after all choose to leave, but the fact that so many chose to stay in such grueling and dangerous circumstances is strong evidence that their available alternatives were very poor. In the end, the result was as theologian Lyman stated,“So long as brakes cost more than trainmen, we may expect the sacrificial method of car coupling to continue.” For the companies the logic was quite simple, “Your device would be more expensive than Paddies are”.

An important question could be how people, customers, politicians or anyone else was able to tolerate this behavior and this violence towards innocent workers? Was there simply a lack of awareness or was there in fact widespread apathy? Huyssen partially explains this question.  Most of the low wage workers were immigrants, especially in New York, or African-American, “The lack of enforceable safety regulations in the building trades meant regular exposure to death and dismemberment for predominantly foreign and African-American workers”. These groups lack the political or social power to push through policies that would have protected them.

Nowadays conditions have clearly improved, even for many low wage workers. While there are definitely some jobs that are safer than others, few if any are as dangerous as a normal factory job a century ago, and most workers have far more options. But it is important to recognize that workplace accidents still occur since there are to this day  many dangerous occupations. On the website of “AFL-CIO” there is an article titled “ death in the job report” which pretty much speaks for itself. It states, “In 2014, 4,821 workers were killed on the job in the United States, and an estimated 50,000 died from occupational diseases, resulting in a loss of 150 workers each day from hazardous working conditions.” To be quite honest the number really shocked me and I wonder how much the WHO examines and suggests appropriate measures to prevent work related deaths.

 

http://www.aflcio.org/Issues/Job-Safety/Death-on-the-Job-Report

 

Prohibition could never work

Julien Comte, in his piece “Let the Federal Men Raid: Bootlegging and Prohibition in Pittsburgh”, details the inadequacies of both the state and the federal government to enforce the prohibition of alcohol. He states that enforcement could not “stop the  manufacture, transportation, sale, and consumption of alcohol in the city” (167). According to Comte, there were a number of reasons for this. The Prohibition Unit of the Treasury Department was severely underfunded and could only afford to have seventy-two officers in Pittsburgh’s prohibition district “which consisted of the western judicial district of Pennsylvania plus the entire state of West Virginia” (169). Along with being given poor training, these agents were also paid low salaries. This, in a way, became a strong factor in how susceptible they were to corruption.

Meanwhile, judges “began accepting plea bargaining as a way to unclog the courts” (170). This was one area where I was confused as the phrasing made it seem as though that plea bargaining in America was born out of Prohibition era. However, after researching a little more it was clear that although plea bargains had not been unheard of in America, they got more popular only during the early twentieth century. The reason? The same as in nineteenth century, Prohibition-era, Pittsburgh: an easy mechanism for judges to “unclog” courts with. This raises an interesting question about plea bargains and their validity. If the times that they are most used, are the same times that courts are simply too overwhelmed with cases, then is plea bargaining a ‘good’ way to ‘bring people to justice’.

Another intriguing point the piece made was how mayors who “welcomed the wet vote [cultivated] it by letting ward bosses and police captains profit from prohibition” (167). I am not sure of incidents of these sorts happened in America even at that time, but in India, there are countless cases of local (and even national) politicians illegally distributing bottles and bottles of alcohol in the public to get peoples’ votes. Charles Kline did something a little similar but far more passively. Kline first ran for mayor of Pittsburgh in 1925 and after he won, was considerably relaxed in terms of enforcing Prohibition laws. In fact, during his time as mayor, “federal agents and state constables rarely conducted dry raids with the help of the police” (174). Kline, along with the Director of Public Safety, believed enforcement to be the task of federal agents alone. In their eyes, the police force of a city existed to protect “the life, the property, and the liberty of [the city’s] citizens” (175). The fact that Pittsburgh’s citizens were against Prohibition meant that Pittsburgh’s police, or any part of the local government, was not to enforce any measures on them that would curb the aforementioned liberty.

Killing Workers for Profit

One of the most interesting aspects on this piece is the fact that it’s rarely something thats talked about. Either in the modern world or in the 1900’s there are many worked related issues, but rarely is violence the problem being discussed. Huyssen states that “Behind the daily, often invisible violence of the shop floor— which included refusal to address unsafe conditions, abuse of workers’ bodies, and sexual harassment (a practice unrecognized in the language of the day, but experienced regularly)— lay the frequently realized threat of firing and economic privation.” This statement speaks to the problems that poor workers on a daily basis would have to worry about. Many workers did not have any other options for jobs and needed the small amount of money for survival. Because of this, many would deal with the problems of mistreatment and sexual harassment. Another problem that faced these workers was being taken seriously when trying to change the treatment in the work place.”The presence of rich women on streets and in courtrooms during the shirtwaist fight created a way to mea sure the significance of class as a predictor of violence. When rich women stood shoulder to shoulder with their poorer sisters, violence tended to dissipate, and court judgments grew more lenient. When the society ladies turned their attention elsewhere or simply failed to show up, force and harsh sentences returned with a vengeance.” Although discussing, I wasted surprised by the fact that people would pay attention to these workers rights only when the rich, in other words, the only people worth listing to were involved in the protests. The police of course could easily get away with harassing and arresting lower class woman.  

White Slavery

In Kiere’s essay written about her interpretation of the white slavery scare in the US, she explains the capitalism that was embedded in the scare. She talks about how the idea of white womanhood needing to be protected from greedy corporate abductors who would sell them into sexual slavery was an attempt to make the woman seem less culpable in being a prostitute. In writing a separate essay on Chinese prostitution in the same time period, and the reality of Chinese women being sold into the US for the sole purpose of prostitution from the age of 12 years old, the idea of a white slavery scare seems like a call for attention. Whether the scare was a response to the people being afraid of capitalism being too much intertwined in their lives, being afraid of women being capable of choosing prostitution rather than the struggle of low wage labor, or a need for white people to make it about them, the idea of white slavery is an unacceptable comparison to black slavery which had only very recently been abolished. As we talked abut in class, Kiere seems to overlook the racial aspect of the white slavery crisis. She hardly mentions that fact that white people were taking a term that applies to what they inflicted on african americans for 245 years and using it to describe a made up situation in which men in suits were taking pure white ladies and throwing them in brothels in epidemic proportions. The real attention need to be paid to the problem of both black women and immigrant women being coerced into prostitution because the prejudice against them made it virtually impossible to find housing or a decent job. The other problem, as stated before, is that there was a shift to men taking responsibility for women becoming prostitutes rather than recognizing it as an unfair treatment of women in society that caused selling their sex to be the best and most profitable option. I think that the need to make women seem like weak damsels in distress is to this day one of the main motifs in misogyny. These women were in distress but they were using prostitution as a way of escaping that and making a decent living. That is not the case for all prostitutes however and it is true that many were taken advantage of or sold into the business. Was the law against importing Chinese women for immoral purposes more to save the women or to prevent the Chinese from entering at all? How many of the laws made to protect women were actually for the gain or white male America?