Inside The Meese Commission

Down in Arlington County, Virginia, the lady dancers at what the locals call "tittie bars" had best be wearing pasties, or prosecutor Henry Hudson will bust them. He once was quoted as saying, "I live to put people in jail."

For the past six years, Hudson has also been going after video stores and threatening to shut them down for renting movies depicting nonsimulated intercourse. "Our vice squad has a reputation," he has told me, "for checking periodically in the stores, and the people are careful about what they sell in the county; yes, sir, they are. I don't apologize for that; I'm proud of that. We have a good family community here."

That stand-up-to-porn spirit caught the attention of the President of the United States, who commended Hudson for his actions and vowed to keep his eye on the young prosecutor.

One day in the spring of 1986, I find myself in Hudson's bailiwick in the Arlington civic center, in a cubbyhole at the end of a corridor decorated with wanted posters. I am there because Hudson has now become a national figure as the chairman of Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography, whose activities I am tracking for my newspaper, the Los Angeles Times. We are sitting in his cluttered office, discussing more variations on a single theme—sexual conduct—than I have ever discussed with anyone. The topics range from the limits of anal sex to the many varieties of sodomy. Hudson talks about the proliferation of pornography and how he sees it as his obligation to return this country to the clean good old days.

I ask him, "By good old days, do you mean when they banned James Joyce's Ulysses or the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and D. H. Lawrence, all of which have been censored?"

"I can't say I've read or seen the items in question," says Hudson. "I don't have time to read books or go to the movies."

"What is this thing called pornography you're now investigating?" I ask.

"Pornography, to a degree, is like the word love; it means different things in different contexts."

"Great," I observe, "but you're head of a commission that wants to get rid of it, so what is the it?" Hudson then riffles through the search warrants and Miranda confessions in his briefcase but can't find the (continued on page 157)Meese Commission(continued from page 60) working definition with which his commission has been playing for a year (and on which it never manages to agree).

"Let me take a stab at it," he offers gamely. "It's any portrayal that is designed to be sexually arousing, that depicts sodomy, sexual degradation, humiliation, domination or violence."

Why sodomy? Hudson launches into a stern, finger-waggling lecture on the menace of sodomy and how I obviously misunderstand the sodomy laws as they affect what the pornography commission calls "rubber goods" and oral sex.

A career of reporting, from Saigon to Presidential primaries, has not adequately prepared me for this moment.

It seems that, as Hudson views the law in Virginia and quite a few other states, it is a felony to have oral sex with your spouse, even in the privacy of your own bedroom. That's sodomy. And apparently there isn't anything you can do with a dildo, including sticking it in your ear, that Hudson and his law will tolerate.

Depictions of violence, by the way, are Ok, as long as they're not connected with explicit sex. The video stores in Arlington that are now forbidden to rent the unedited version of Debbie Does Dallas are doing a brisk business in I Spit on Your Grave, Tool Box Murders and other splatter flicks uncensored by prosecutor Hudson.

As the manager of one of Arlington's more popular video stores said, "I can rent movies that dismember and mutilate but not those that show sex." He held up one cassette and said, "In this cute one, a woman is sun-bathing by a river and this killer comes along and chops her head off with a shovel, and you see the blood spurting out. And then it gets worse. But it's legal; it's not considered obscene. There's no explicit sex."

When I ask Hudson how he could possibly find films that show the decapitation of sexy women less objectionable than portrayals of sexual intercourse, he responds, "I just enforce the law, and the law refers to sex, not violence."

Now, why am I, an investigative reporter of some experience, telling you all this as if it mattered to anyone not planning a trip to northern Virginia? Why, indeed. Because the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, which Hudson heads and of which, if you're like most people I know, you've probably never heard, has attempted to extend the legal mores of Arlington County to the rest of the country.

It has been a weird odyssey for Hudson and his fellow commissioners, hand-picked by the Attorney General and charged with slogging through smut, the better to know it, the better to regulate it. These pilgrims, or "sewer astronauts," as Vonnegut has called them, have trekked through tons—I'm pretty sure that's literally true, by the way—of photographs, video tapes, transcripts and paraphernalia. But it was necessary. Witch-hunts need witches, and that meant hearings in six American cities, a parade of witnesses and "experts" and born-again porn stars and vice cops and all manner of people testifying as to the evils (mostly) of porn.

•

The goal of the commission was politically charged from the start. As announced by Meese in the charter of the commission, its purpose was "to make specific recommendations to the Attorney General concerning more effective ways in which the spread of pornography could be contained, consistent with constitutional guarantees." Note the wording: to "contain the spread," not to dispassionately examine the possible harm, if any.

Meese was taking up the rallying cry of an extremely odd alliance of New Right religious fundamentalists (such as Jerry Falwell) and a small but vociferous band of antipornography militants (such as ultraradical feminist Andrea Dworkin) who held that the increased availability of pornography was responsible for a rise in all kinds of crime, particularly against women.

Unfortunately for their cause, a Federal commission reporting in 1970 to President Nixon had "found no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior." This did not deter them from their new campaign. Meese claimed that research conducted after 1970 would show evidence of harmful social effects and that, besides, pornography had become more violent. To overturn that earlier finding and recommend new laws dealing more harshly with the purveyors of pornography, the Attorney General chose 11 men and women, a majority of whom had already sided with the antiporn crusaders.

Chief among them were Hudson and his side-kick, another prosecutor and porn buster, executive director Alan Sears. From Kentucky, he, too, had made a name for himself by finding smut peddlers to prosecute. He was to figure prominently in the drama that enfolded the commission in its final days.

The other members included Father Bruce Ritter, a Catholic priest committed to banishing porn from Times Square. Father Ritter was always forthright when, during breaks in the hearings, I questioned him about his views on sex outside marriage (it's a sin) and within marriage (it "wastes the seed" if the sex is not strictly for procreation). At one meeting, Ritter said, "I would say pornography is immoral, and the source of my statement is God, not social science." I must have missed the day God gave testimony to the commission. In any case, Ritter was an earnest commissioner, never batting an eye as the armada of law-enforcement officers (68 out of a total of 208 witnesses) testified as to how rough it was out there in the land of dildos and plastic-wrapped fetishist magazines.

James Dobson, a fundamentalist radio counselor, was considerably more emotional, though perhaps more practiced. He regularly broadcasts tales of sexual depravity on his radio program, Focus on the Family. Nevertheless, during the hearings, he exhibited an unnerving propensity to half pop out of his chair, with a "Gosh, no!" look on his face, at every new tale of a pornography victim's woe. Although Dobson is undoubtedly sincere, there appear to be other forces driving him. He announced in a speech that since joining the commission, he had become the victim of "satanic" attacks. He claimed that a mysterious black Porsche had been the demonic agent of accidents to his son and daughters.

Commissioner Diane Cusack, a council woman from Scottsdale, Arizona, had attempted to get re-elected by crusading against local adult-book stores. Among other things, she suggested that antiporn activists photograph the license-plate numbers of people attending an adult-movie theater. To boost her fortunes, some said, the commission even met in her home town. She lost her election.

Commissioner Harold "Tex" Lezar had been an editorial assistant at William F. Buckley, Jr.'s, National Review and a Nixon speechwriter before serving as an advisor in the Reagan Administration's Justice Department, where he helped formulate the idea for the porn commission. A solid antiporn vote, he was instrumental in choosing the commission's members.

This conservative majority was rounded out by Reagan-appointed Federal judge Edward Garcia of-Sacramento, who had been a municipal-court judge with a reputation for being hard on defendants in obscenity cases. Garcia, to his credit, did appear capable of boredom and often seemed to doze off during those sessions he managed to attend.

Commissioner Park Dietz is a psychiatrist and criminologist specializing in violent crime and sexual disorders. Thought at first to be a hard-liner, Dietz occasionally showed that he marched to his own drummer, though it was not always clear what the music was. He has written that he believes that all pornography is in some sense tainted with "sadism and masochism" and that masturbation can lead to "sexual disorders"; but during the hearings, he frequently expressed the view that violence, not sex, was the key problem.

(It was Dietz and Cusack who provided one of the high points of the year. Wrestling with some testimony about odd sexual practices, Dietz said for the record, "I think more people would agree that it's bad to encourage rape than would agree it's bad to encourage ejaculation in the face."

(Another member of the commission noted, "One's a felony," at which Cusack, ever the eager teacher's pet, piped up with "Maybe both should be.")

Frederick Schauer was another one who was capable of surprise. A professor of law at the University of Michigan, he believed that the First Amendment did not apply to pornography. Nevertheless, as time went on and staff director Sears attempted to pressure the commissioners into accepting a sweeping, jail-all-pornographers draft, Schauer protested that it was "so one-sided and oversimplified that I cannot imagine signing anything that looks even remotely like this." He later said that he would write the report, an offer that was to prove a mixed blessing for all concerned.

The rest of the commissioners turned out to be more difficult to classify. But it is worth noting that, on a panel whose male members would often discuss the best ways to protect women from the dangers of pornography, three of the four female members on the commission formed the core of the loyal opposition.

Judith Becker, a Columbia University psychologist and head of an institute specializing in sex offenders, had the most professional experience of any of the commissioners in dealing with people who commit sex crimes. Through the months, she became increasingly dismayed by the misuse of available scientific data. "There simply is no serious body of evidence of a causal connection between pornography and crime," she would say. But the commission wasn't listening.

Deanne Tilton, the head of the California Consortium of Child Abuse Councils and an appointee of Republican governor George Deukmejian, had been counted on by Hudson as a solid antiporn vote. Instead, she emerged as a sharp internal critic.

Ellen Levine, the editor of Woman's Day, was the strongest dissenting voice on the commission. As she said to me at one point, "What I like is erotica and what you like is pornography." A strong defender of both constitutional and women's rights, Levine became a thorn in Sears's side.

Although Hudson, Sears and the other conservatives loved the fact that they could drape themselves in women's liberation to combat porn, they deflected the criticisms from the three women by referring condescendingly to them as "the ladies" and by taking shots at their professional affiliations. (Levine's employer, the owner of Woman's Day, is CBS, whose interests in cable and records made a tempting target for Sears.) As a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, Sears often made it clear that he could not abide Levine's more cosmopolitan ways, which included what he clearly perceived as an unseemly propensity, for a female, to independent thought. Toward the end of the commission's life, the two were barely speaking to each other and communicated by exchanging bitter notes.

The bitterness came not just from the clash of philosophies but from the fact that within weeks of the commission's creation, several of the commissioners had begun to feel as if they were on a runaway train.

•

For nearly a year, the commission and I wandered this country, seeking out the sickest, most pathetic examples of human sexual fantasy; the search went on for so long that it almost seemed as if all that was typical of American eroticism. But what we watched, in large part, was shit. And, again, I mean that literally.

For reasons best known to the staff (Sears and his aides), the commission exhibited an uncommon fascination with the scatological fringe of the porn world. No simple tits and ass for this crowd. Forget garter belts and even whips. This Federal commission spent much of its time—and your money—on fist fucking, golden showers, child porn, asphyxiation, anilingus, with side trips into such rarely considered fetishes as toenail-clippings collections, being squirted with real mother's milk and the private, carefully contoured world of sweat sniffing.

If all of this seems removed from your experience, join the crowd. The commission shunned the kind of mainstream erotica most of us might encounter—though carefully culled slides of Playboy and Penthouse photos were shown—in favor of the extremely bizarre. As attorney Barry Lynn of the A.C.L.U. would write, "It is as if finding the most despicable scene of sexual conduct ever photographed, the commission would be justified in urging suppression of all sexually oriented material."

Lynn, a United Church of Christ minister as well as a lawyer, a 37-year-old family man with a wife and two children and a station wagon, played an unusual role in this trek. Often staying at cheap hotels, he operated as a one-man truth squad, attending every hearing and preparing summaries for the press explaining the implications of some of the wilder proposals.

Was this hunt for the despicable, as Lynn charged, a campaign to smear erotica with the brush of the grotesque? Or did it reflect the sexual fascinations of the staff and the army of vice-squad officers who led them through descriptions of various dens of iniquity? Being there, I found it hard to tell. The commissioners mostly played hard to get to. A studied indifference permeated their responses to talk of sexual stimuli, as if they were biologically as well as ethically beyond the reach of their effects.

But because I was there, I can also tell you that the commissioners' public air of detachment was at odds with their more private comments. At one point, in New York, I happened to drive a carload of them, including a couple considered to be conservatives, up Broadway from lower to mid-Manhattan, in slow-moving traffic. The conversation about the often off beat passing sidewalk scene was urbane. "Nice-looking hooker," said one, and there were approving grunts. They had been around a bit themselves and did not seem to be overly disapproving.

On another occasion, a woman commissioner was talking with one of the men, who had loudly declared his belief that masturbation could lead to sexual disorders. He remarked offhandedly, "Of course, none of this would happen if women learned how to give a really good blow job." When the woman objected, he said, "That's a lot of feminist crap."

•

Traveling with that crowd, I frequently became overwhelmed by the mountains of material, all of it unrelentingly squalid, all of it fodder for this evangelical soap opera. Lynn later estimated that 160 of the 208 witnesses before the commission—or 77 percent—had favored tighter controls on sexually explicit material. The intent of the men running the hearings was so transparent that it was almost embarrassing: transportation provided free of charge for those testifying to the evils of porn; tough, unrelenting questioning of those few who said otherwise.

In brief, it was surreal to be in an audience in which high heels and uplift brassieres were the norm even among women sporting antiporn buttons. Among the men, there was an obvious excitement in the air, much like that of a Rotarian stag show of old, when a disgruntled Playmate or an aging but feisty Penthouse Pet showed up, or when the lights were dimmed for a screening of the "hot parts" of X-rated movies confiscated by Sears's Kentucky State Police.

The pattern of what was to follow in each city was established at the opening session in June 1985 in the Great Hall of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, with Dr. C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General of the U.S., as lead witness that day.

Perhaps it was the early hour, 8:45 A.M., but Dr. Koop came through as a bumbler. The title is impressive; the man's mind is not. He spoke of caring deeply about the subject of pornography and wanted to assure his audience "that we are not operating in the dark on this matter, as may have been the case a decade or two ago," when the 1970 commission entered its report that porn had not been proved harmful. Koop stated that the earlier report "was based upon a very limited universe of scientific literature," and you would have thought that he was leading up to the presentation of some new findings.

Well, the Surgeon General had no new findings to present and seemed to regret it. He spoke emotionally about the new technologies of video tapes and cable, through which pornographers "have expanded their markets of sleaze and trash."

When Hudson asked, "Do you, based upon your experience and the evidence that you have seen over the years, find a direct connection between pornography and public health?" Koop replied, "Well, the simple answer to that question is, yes, I definitely think there is a connection. But ... sir, that is basically, at the moment, an intuitive reaction, rather than one based upon lots of science."

Koop's objectivity will soon be of some significance, because he has promised to present a report attempting to summarize the social-science data on the effects of pornography.

Immediately after the Surgeon General had spoken, the commission presented the first of a long parade of porn "victims."

Bill sat in protective anonymity behind a screen, presumably because he and the commission did not want the world to connect him with his crime. Bill, who said he was 40, told how he had been convicted of molesting two 14-year-old girls while they were visiting in his home.

"I would like to tell you," he stated, as if on cue, "briefly what happened and what role pornography had to play in these events. In both cases, the girls were sleeping over with my daughter, and I had been drinking very heavily for several hours. After going to sleep, I awoke very abruptly, almost like someone had kicked me. With compulsion, I was driven to go into the room where the girls were sleeping. It was like an inner voice giving me instruction and direction."

For the benefit of the stilled audience, Bill provided further detail. "The first time this happened, I removed the sheet from the sleeping girl, fondled her breasts and vaginal area. After a brief moment, I committed oral sodomy on her. ...

"In looking back on my life," Bill continued, "I would like to tell you a few things that happened that I feel led to these crimes that I just alluded to. I was raised in a Christian home, the third child of a police officer." He faltered, sensing quicksand—Christian cops causing crime? Bill recovered: "There was, and still is, a great deal of love between us. I would not ever say or think that my family had anything to do with causing me to commit these crimes."

No, it was pornography. According to Bill, it started with the kid next door, who showed him bodybuilding books; and from there, it was a predictable journey to nudist magazines and, finally, through exposure to men's magazines in the Armed Forces. "Hustler became my bible, and I had maybe the largest collection in the country," he noted with what seemed to me a faint trace of the pride of an art collector. "In closing, I suggest to you, distinguished panel members, pornography did not make me commit my crimes. No, I am held accountable for my actions. What I would like to suggest is the pornography industry is guilty of journalistic malpractice hiding behind the First Amendment. It is much like the person yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theater." Or yelling "Sex!" in a crowded church. Just how Bill had come to be familiar with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's argument on the First Amendment was not made clear in his testimony. Nor did the commissioners ask.

There was, however, some cross-questioning.

Levine: Can you tell me whether or not drinking was also a problem of yours and whether or not it continues to be?

Bill: Drinking was a problem in my life. I was drinking approximately two to three six-packs of beer daily.

Levine: Was drinking in any way one of the triggers that allowed you to do things that otherwise you wouldn't have done?

Bill: Yes, it certainly was.

What Levine was driving at was the body of evidence connecting such deviant behavior with alcoholism. As in countless times to come, the link between deviant behavior and alcoholism was touched on but never followed up. Instead, Ritter came to Bill's rescue: "Bill, do you think that you could describe pornography as the match that lighted the fuse to the explosive?"

Bill: Yes, sir, it certainly did.

Ritter: Do you think that your use of pornography actually helped shorten the fuse to the explosive that ultimately injured these children?

Bill: Yes, it did.

Ritter: Do you think that your continued use and exposure to pornography actually increased the explosive fuse and abuse of those children?

Bill: Yes, it did.

Ritter: Thank you.

Hudson: Thank you very much, Bill. We appreciate your testimony this morning.

Just to complete the circle, Bill, who had started life in a good Christian home, reported, "Right after I was arrested, I met the Lord, Jesus Christ, and I turned my life completely around."

Levine said that later, in private session, she had told Hudson that the witness seemed to have been coached, but Hudson had evaded the issue. The commission's questioning of Bill was typical of what would happen for the rest of the year—pandering to the antiporn witnesses to buttress the case and attempting to discredit those with a different position.

A particularly clear comparison was to be the sympathetic treatment of a Playboy Playmate whose wild charges, including murder, went unchallenged, while former Penthouse Pet Dottie Meyer, who still works for the magazine and claims to love it, was grilled by the commission. Dietz all but snarled back at Meyer lines from the text that appeared in Penthouse and asked sarcastically, "You like your men rough and tumble, living on the edge of danger?"

She zapped him back with "Yes, I married a policeman."

I could go on with other highlights, but those snippets should convey the flavor. Well, just one more. We've had a medical expert and a criminal, so let's try a cop. That would have to be Dennis DeBord, investigator for Virginia's Fairfax County Police Department, who testified at some length about his specialty—the busting of adult-book stores. He put on the usual slide show, featuring such highlights as "another section of magazines appealing to different interests, magazines with deviant behavior, such as Mother's Milk or Poppin' Mamas. The 'poppin' mamas' are pregnant women engaged in various sexual acts, while the other is of women with milk in their breasts. Also, a magazine commonly known in this culture is Fist Fucking."

Investigator DeBord went on to relate his own sad tale of victimization by porn—in this case, in the hallways outside peep booths in adult-book stores.

"This investigator has also been solicited outside the booths in the hallway. Individuals have solicited me in various ways, such as asked me straight out to commit oral sodomy, anal sodomy, etc. I have also had my buttocks fondled in the hallway."

It's rough out there.

•

Enough of anecdotes. What, after all this effort, did the commission uncover that might have been overlooked by the 1970 commission?

That earlier panel, much better funded—a two-year effort costing $2,000,000—and more serious about its work, commissioned more than 50 independent studies on the effects of pornography. The Meese commission made none. Meese would pony up only a miserly $500,000 for a year of commission hearings, including staff salaries and travel expenses. By Washington standards, that's lunch money.

It's also $250,000 less than this same Justice Department had previously given one antiporn crusader, Judith Reisman, a former songwriter for Captain Kangaroo, to do a survey of three magazines, including Playboy, to determine their pornographic content. Her study, among other travesties, counted each panel in the cartoon strip Little Annie Fanny in a running total of instances of pornographic child imagery (the original Orphan Annie was a kid—get it?). It came in for much Congressional ridicule, and The New York Times included the Reisman study in an article about Government-funded projects "with an ideological tilt bordering on fanaticism." Lawmakers were appalled at the lack of objectivity of the "research." For starters, she likened Hugh Hefner to Adolf Hitler.

To the evident frustration of the zealots on the commission, however, Reisman proved a bust as a witness when she testified at the Miami hearings, raising a shrill warning against "shaved genitalia," which she charged has "emerged as a new key phenomenon." She denounced Gahan Wilson's cartoons and Helmut Newton's photographs—to the discomfiture of at least one commissioner whose living room features Newton prints.

At hearing after hearing, the commission would gear up with high anticipation, bold claims about revelations to come and long witness lists, only to founder, as it did in Reisman's case, on the paucity of any reliable social-science evidence to make its case that the 1970 commission had been wrong and that pornography caused antisocial behavior. The key researchers in this field refused to be drawn into Hudson and Sears's political agenda.

The star witness in Houston, for instance, was to have been Edward Donnerstein, a psychologist whose studies of college-student response to erotic and violent material is considered pioneering in the field. If there had been new evidence since the 1970 commission on the harmful effects of porn, it was expected to be found in Donnerstein's work. In one laboratory study, it had been shown that men exposed to a rape scenario—not common in most porn—showed some increase in "negative attitudes" toward women. The crusaders had seized on that finding to claim that porn in general led to violence toward women. But Donnerstein emphasized repeatedly to the commission that the crucial variable was not sex but violence and that nonaggressive sexual material produced no such effect. Commissioner Schauer asked Donnerstein if there were any "laboratory studies showing increase in aggressive behavior after exposure to nonviolent, sexually explicit material."

There it was, the $64 question, upon which the future of the sex-censorship roundup was riding. It was as open a question as you could get. Were there any lab studies, any at all? Give the wrong answer and you give away the ranch. And with a rare hush in the audience, Donnerstein responded, as cool as a killer of dreams in a Western, "Not that I am aware of."

"The problem," Donnerstein and his associate Daniel Linz later said, "centers on what we mean by pornography. Are we talking about sexually explicit materials? If we are, then one would have to conclude that there is no evidence for any harm-related effects. Are we talking about aggressive materials? In this case, the research might be more supportive of a potential harm-effect conclusion. The problem, however, is that the aggressive images are the issue, not the sexual, in this type of material."

Bam! The commission was up against a stone wall. This is what it was all about, right? Evidence that depictions of sex cause harmful effects. But here, the only witness so far to present cold, detached, nonanecdotal evidence tells the commissioners that it's not sex but violence. The same violence implicit on children's television and in toy stores in the forms of Rambo and Masters of the Universe? So if there's any serious intent, wouldn't the commissioners have stopped dead in their tracks at that testimony? Not bloody likely. That would mean redirecting the New Right's pop cause of pornography to that of violence, which seems to be built into the very red-white-and-blue muscle of American culture.

The Meese commission, of course, did nothing of the sort. Hudson's immediate response, since he was discombobulated by Donnerstein's testimony, was to cut short the discussion of scientific findings and turn the meeting over to the next slide show. Enter Sergeant W. D. Brown of the Houston vice squad. If the sergeant ran true to form, he would do what vice cops in the other cities had done: provide a juicily horrifying tour of his terrain—the now-familiar landscape of sleazy bookstores and scatologically oriented publications.

But Brown didn't deliver all the commission might have hoped for. "Presently," he said, "there is no child pornography that is being sold readily over the counter, nor is there any bestiality or defecation or those types of films."

Child pornography is, of course, that most toxic of terms, the great rallying cry of the antiporn witch-hunt. But society clearly recognizes its obligation to protect minors, and no serious person disputes it. As Lynn suggests, "It's a convenient way of getting everyone excited, but the fact is that the laws are very severe on child pornography and it exists only as an illegal cottage industry."

What does exist, as Brown went on to document with a slide show, are sad watering holes for primarily poor consumers of adult fetishist material. To underscore this fact, obvious to any visitor to the neighborhood of a downtown bus station, Brown intoned along with his slide:

"This is another typical bookstore that we have in Houston. You will notice that they also advertise giant booths. The booths that you will see in a moment are places where individuals go to have anonymous sex relations with other individuals in the bookstore. This is a typical counter which you will find in a bookstore. The shelves are stocked with different rubber goods and devices to stimulate sexual activity."

For some reason, dildos fascinate police forces more than any other item of erotica, as Brown's testimony indicated; and in Texas, as he noted, "possession of six or more of these items is a class-A misdemeanor. They are listed under Texas law as contraband and can be confiscated. Presently, Houston, I guess I would have to say, has the largest inventory of rubber goods. At last count, we had 27,000 of these things located in our property room."

Consider, if you will, the presence of 27,000 arrested dildos stacked neatly in the property room of the Houston jail. The commissioners sat in respectful and intent silence, apparently unaffected by the absurdity of the moment, as Brown marched bravely forward to the matter of rubber dolls that "are primarily used for sexual relations with individuals." Grotesque though some of the paraphernalia may be, no one broke the silence with the questions that begged to be asked: Is it harmful? Might it even be calming to some people and, therefore, to society's benefit?

So that the commission might fully examine the question of whether or not the public display of porn had harmful effects, it was determined that slides of these dingy sex stores would not suffice; the commissioners had to see for themselves. Research. So Sears hired transportation and marched them as a group, accompanied by Houston cops, into one of these establishments. In fact, it had been cased in advance by the police. As everyone watched, a bullet-headed vice cop yanked open the door and announced in a loud voice, "And here we have two men engaged in an act of oral copulation!" The two men looked up in astonishment at the 11 commissioners.

One commissioner said she couldn't tell the cops from the customers—except for the cops' white socks. And Lynn said it was all he could do to prevent the edgy police from arresting everybody there.

One might understand if this had been a meeting of the local board of health. But what business was it of a U.S. commission on pornography to get down and dirty into the pathetic attempts of some of this world's most forlorn, desperate and lonely inhabitants to find a few moments of whatever brings them as close to joy as they will get? These were two human beings!

And what did this field trip yield?

Hudson: Sergeant Brown, have you or any other member of your department developed any statistical correlations between the increasing number of adult-book stores and the incidence of sex-related crime in those districts?

Brown: No, sir, we haven't. We haven't done any kind of studies in that regard. It would be impossible for me to give you a definitive answer.

The lack of reliable studies was to dog the conservative commissioners throughout the hearings. Sears and Hudson had made the mistake of hiring their own expert—an honest social scientist. Unfortunately for them, Canadian sociologist Edna F. Einsiedel is a scholar of integrity and issued a disquieting report to the commission summarizing existing studies.

After reviewing studies done on televised soap operas, men's magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse and other magazines such as Time and Reader's Digest, Einsiedel reported, "No evidence currently exists that actually links fantasies with specific sexual offenses; the relationship at this point remains an inference."

Her report also risked the heresy that erotica could be good for you. Therapists, she noted, have used erotic material "to help patients with sexual dysfunctions overcome their fears and inhibitions." Also available was a 1982 report by Donnerstein and his colleague Neil Malamuth concluding that "exposure to certain types of pornography can actually reduce aggressive responses." (Playboy photos had been used in that study.)

As a result of Einsiedel's study, when the commission convened in Scottsdale last February to summarize its findings, for one moment it came dangerously close to passing a logical resolution: that, according to the evidence, "nonviolent" and "nondegrading" pornography caused no harm.

Hudson quickly called a recess. The commission had to be brought to its senses. The commissioners met in private and Sears announced that any working papers including the Einsiedel report were to be secret—in effect, classifying them. Einsiedel herself, as if privy to the secrets of the Stealth Bomber, was placed under a gag order not to talk to the press.

That was when Lynn stepped in on behalf of the A.C.L.U. Suing under the sunshine laws, which require Government proceedings to be open to the public, he forced Meese's Justice Department to back down. Papers were released, the report was made public and all hell broke loose.

It seemed that among the papers that had come to light in the A.C.L.U. action was a letter that had been dashed off by Sears. Among the commission's witnesses had been a Reverend Donald Wildmon of Tupelo, Mississippi, a man driven for the past several years to monitor all manner of publications and broadcasts for signs of dirt. He puts out a newsletter keeping a running count of corporations that sponsor offensive TV shows and advertisers who buy pages in Playboy or Penthouse.

The newsletter informs its readers that "Sara Lee is leading Porn Pusher" and "'Cosmopolitan' Fulfills Definition of Pornographic." Wildmon testified to the commission that such major U.S. companies as CBS, Time Inc., Coca-Cola and others were "distributors of porn" because of various direct and indirect connections to material he deemed offensive, and that adult magazines had been linked to all manner of crime and social ills.

As usual, the commission did not cross-examine Wildmon, who made unsubstantiated charges that Playboy and Penthouse had been linked to "violence, crime and child abuse." When it was suggested to Sears that the corporations named by Wildmon deserved an opportunity to answer the charges, his response was to clip together ten pages from the testimony, without attribution, and send them to corporate officers with a letter on Justice Department stationery telling them that their failure to respond to the unattributed allegations would "necessarily be accepted as an indication of no objection."

It was an outrageously effective job of smearing. Most of the corporations answered the charges defensively and hastily, and one of them, the Southland Corporation, under constant attack by Wildmon and his pickets and mailing lists for more than three years for carrying Playboy, Penthouse and Forum in its 7-Eleven chain stores, capitulated. Between the letter and the drafts that had come to light proposing that an offending store's assets might be seized, someone at the Dallas-based company said, "Whoa. Child porn? Forfeiture? The Justice Department? Bail us out!" All three magazines were promptly dropped in what a spokesman admitted was a response to the Meese hearings.

•

If the commission now proves to be a menace, I was not among the first to recognize it. Like those of a Presidential primary, the antics of the commission had seemed little more than harmless fun and games, a lot of holier-than-thou rhetoric accompanied by winks of acknowledgment from the real world. The air of flirtation in the hearing rooms, the female witnesses in see-through blouses denouncing porn, the constant references to sex all had a carnival-like effect. This can't be serious, right?

So, charged with this sense of the inevitability of the sex drive and convinced that no one was truly intent on putting the sexual-freedom genie back into the bottle, I spent too many hours sitting at the hearings with Lynn, reassuring him that the republic was not about to fall.

In part, I was informed in my optimism by my conversations with Levine, Becker and Tilton, all of whom were alarmed at the prospect of being party to an assault on the First Amendment and being cast as the arbiters of individual taste.

All three had been opposed to the frenetic pace at which the commission was being rushed to its conclusions. Levine told me that she had refused to join in voting on positions by mail, because she thought debate was needed. When Tilton was about to leave her Los Angeles home for the final stretch of meetings in April, she was startled to receive yet another two-foot stack of commission staff reports, memos and proposals for legal changes. As she said, "We have a 1200-page staff report to go through and a rival report prepared by Fred Schauer. My sense is we're not going to be able to get through more than one third of this material in the allotted time. We have asked for an extension and it's not been granted. I feel like I'm in fantasyland."

That morning, Tilton was inclined to look back on her year with the porn commission as time "largely wasted." Her only consolation was the fact that she had pushed through some strong language and new concepts on child pornography, but she felt that her concerns in this area were being used to support far-reaching measures for control of adult erotica on which she was not prepared to act.

In the end, she and the other moderates won a few battles but lost the war.

•

The last meeting of the commission took place in a dreary corner of the old granite-and-marble Federal Home Loan Bank Board building in northwest Washington. The moment of truth was at hand. The commissioners had 72 hours to write and approve a report that would set out in detail what American society should do about the "pervasiveness" of pornography, according to Meese's mandate.

They were 11 men and women, some hardly speaking to each other, bored to tears with this material that was supposed to be more addictive than heroin, looking at their watches, thinking of the planes they had to catch. The only problem was, they didn't have a report.

What they had was a disjointed, Draconian and moralizing staff summary prepared by Sears, which a number of them felt was an acute embarrassment—the same shrill, hysterical document that had already had an effect, calling for vigilante groups, for the naming of corporate "porn" distributors, etc. Schauer had said that to sign it would be a travesty, and offered to write his own version, which he hoped the full panel would endorse. Schauer, it will be remembered, is the lawyer who believes that most sexually oriented material does not deserve First Amendment protection and did not have major policy differences with Sears's version; he simply didn't want to be laughed out of court.

And so, in the space of a couple of weeks before the legal deadline, Schauer wrote a 192-page draft. In its pristine form, it is a discursive but highly opinionated march through the history of constitutional law and censorship, a lifetime's worth of lecture notes by a professor who suddenly had a nation for a class. Sears did not want it on the agenda he had drawn up. The session opened with Ritter's moving successfully that the commission use the Schauer draft as the basic document into which it would meld Sears's proposals. Since it is highly probable that few of the commissioners actually read all 192 pages, what followed was a kind of insanity.

During those final days, the commissioners would gather around the table, which was usually piled high with documents, as Hudson read aloud from the Schauer draft. It made sweeping statements about pornography and the role of sexuality in America—all of it one professor's opinion. Hudson would finish one ten-page section and ask, "Everyone agree with the wording?"

The commissioners would then toss new phrases and wording at each other and, depending on whether or not they had been heard amid muttered remarks about betrayal, proceed to get lost in a thicket of proposals and counterproposals. No two commissioners with whom I spoke at the end could agree on what was definitively decided during those sessions. One member would offer a horse trade on a proposed jail sentence in return for a softer line on a constitutional question; another would make a sarcastic amendment to a hard-line declaration. Entire topics would be left to be called up for a vote later on—though some would never be.

"We were told we had to have a product," said Becker. "We couldn't even see galleys, because Sears insisted that time didn't permit. When my colleagues ask me about this report, I've suggested they stop reading when they get to this commission's recommendations."

As voting on sections of the draft continued under deadline pressure, members would later admit that they were unsure of which sections were being passed and which tabled, which votes were binding and which not. At one point, when it seemed as if an important vote—nothing less than the exemption of print and cable from censorship—had been taken, I interviewed Dietz and mentioned the votes that I'd already reported in the Los Angeles Times, as had other reporters.

"We didn't pass them," insisted Dietz.

I said we should check with Sears. So we trooped over to his office and, after 15 minutes of conversation, established that the commission had, indeed, voted 6-5 on just those points—but it was now agreed that the vote would be recorded as a divided one, not as a recommendation of the commission. You figure it out; I couldn't.

One thing on which the commissioners did agree was that there was no agreement on the definition of pornography. As an alternative to a single definition, they came up with a three-tiered one.

The first part, category one, was to include sexual violence, and there were no demurs, even when Dietz said Miami Vice was an example in this category. No one quarreled with judging this material offensive, if not necessarily legally obscene.

Category three—defined as nonviolent pornography that is nondegrading and nonhumiliating—was also easier to deal with. That was the category that had come close to being judged not harmful in Scottsdale but had instead been recorded as a split vote at Sears's insistence.

But it was category two—pornography defined as nonviolent but "humiliating and degrading"—that gave the commissioners their real trouble. Until the very end, they were not clear as to what kinds of materials fell into this class. Did Lady Chatterley's Lover? Did Playboy? The debate wore on. Sears passed around ads and photo spreads from Vogue and Cosmopolitan and suggested that they, too, might fit the category. Levine responded with what one wag called the "Bloomingdale's exemption," asking, "Do you want to take on the entire fashion industry? The ads for Bloomingdale's are just as sexy."

In frustration, an angry Dobson said, "Wouldn't you say a photograph of a woman masturbating, with a look of ecstasy on her face, is degrading and humiliating? I would!"

Other members said they would not, as long as the woman appeared to be enjoying herself. One commissioner said later she could not believe that these conversations were taking place in the final week of the meetings. The concept of degradation of women had been introduced to the panel when Andrea Dworkin testified before it. She had denounced the "humiliation" of women in mainstream publications, and her comments had obviously caught Dobson's ear. What the Christian broadcaster of traditional family values had perhaps overlooked was who his new ally was, for Dworkin had written, in an attack on the very idea of traditional heterosexuality, "I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together."

In the middle of the voting, when the wrangling and confusion were at their height, Dietz dropped a bombshell. He announced to the panel that he had prepared a paper summarizing the "sentiments of the commission," though no one had been asked for one. Reading his newly minted manifesto aloud, Dietz tried to cut through Schauer's verbiage and get to what he saw as the heart of the matter—that pornography was just no good. "A world in which pornography was neither desired nor produced would be a better world," Dietz proclaimed. He called most pornography an "offense against human dignity," asking all Americans to shun it because "conscience demands it"!

There it was, as if handed down from the mountain. Ritter, the Catholic priest who had been so adamant about condemning any form of sex outside marriage, dramatically removed his white clerical collar and presented it to Dietz. The dissenters, Levine and Becker, were astonished. The moralists were obviously thrilled: The commission—for a moment, at least—had been reborn in their eyes. Hudson asked for a show of hands. No one is clear on what the vote was, but it was agreed that Dietz's declaration of morality would be included in the report as a personal statement and that the commissioners who agreed with it could affix their names to it.

As can best be reconstructed, what was voted on and would be recommended as this article went to press was a series of battle orders in a sweeping war against sexual explicitness. The report calls for the elevation of pornography to a level matching that of drug trafficking or organized crime: a national emergency. As the final draft was being prepared by Sears, these were the major recommendations to the Attorney General:

• The creation of a national commissioner—a porn czar—to push for and coordinate more vigorous prosecution of Federal obscenity cases.

• The forfeiture of assets by any business found to be dealing in obscene materials, as is now done with drug traffickers.

• Banning the use of performers under 21 in "certain sexually explicit depictions."

• A vast computer-bank system, involving state and Federal cooperation, to prosecute producers of porn more effectively.

• The elimination of the requirement, to trigger Federal intervention, of proof that obscene materials have crossed a state line.

• The establishment of an automatic, mandatory felony conviction—with 20-year sentences—for second offenses in the selling of obscene materials.

• The enlistment of the Internal Revenue Service to use its auditing power to go after porn producers.

• Endorsement of citizens' action groups to boycott, picket and "socially condemn" local sellers of offensive materials, whether obscene or not.

As noted, the commission agreed to exempt printed words and cable television. These categories were strongly defended by such big guns as Time Inc.'s cable executives and by top book publishers, while magazine publishers and film makers did not show up in strength. (Historians may wish to note that vibrators, which were nearly criminalized by Hudson and Sears—to be left to languish like those 27,000 dildos in the Houston jail—were allowed to hum on.)

What would come of these recommendations? As far as the law is concerned, the answers will come from the Government bodies that must enact the recommendations. But just as the earlier drafts have already had an effect on the market place, so will the final recommendations have their effect, with or without enactment.

What all the commissioners were concerned about, however, was the report that would precede the recommendations—the revised Schauer draft. This was what was supposed to make sense of the year and summarize the members' conclusions. It had been left to Schauer to return to his university office and assimilate the votes of the preceding week into his original draft report.

It was a daunting task, but the problem was that he had only five days in which to perform it. Why? Because, despite the national implications and the complexity of what he was to write, he wanted to make a previously scheduled trip to China.

Schauer delivered. The manuscript is a testament to the ability of word processors to merge disparate ideas and contradictory facts into a seemingly consistent whole. But upon reading it—and not many will—one realizes that the attempt to summarize 11 views on hundreds of points of law and morality and philosophy is, like the attempt to define pornography itself, futile.

Schauer accompanied the draft with a letter to his fellow commissioners informing them that he would not accept any changes that weren't agreed to by the ten others, including those in "wording and style and anything other than blatant grammatical errors." He wrote that the report was a "house of cards, as to which what in itself [sic] appears to be a small change might ultimately destroy everything." Then he left for China.

The report does not define pornography. In fact, it begins by saying that it cannot define pornography, nevertheless, it claims that "degrading" pornography—whatever that is—was found "likely to increase the extent to which those exposed will view rape or other forms of sexual violence as less serious than they otherwise would have." Schauer adds that as to violent sexual material, the commissioners are "unanimous and confident" that exposure leads to antisocial acts and sexual crime.

The wording in the Schauer draft led The New York Times to report that the Meese commission had concluded that "most pornography ... is potentially harmful and can lead to violence." But the fact is that studies do not suggest anything like that. Becker, whose institute in New York has treated more than 700 sex offenders and who was originally recruited as the commission's expert in this field, had just finished reading the report when I contacted her on the day the Times story appeared. "It is wrong and it is ludicrous," she said flatly. "Not only did we not define what 'degrading' pornography is but no social science or data has shown any causal connection between even violent pornography and crime." As to the conclusions' being "unanimous and confident," Becker and Levine were preparing their own dissent as the Times story hit the newsstands.

Schauer gave the right wing what it wanted—the words, if not the data, to repudiate the 1970 commission findings that porn is not a social menace. Virtually the only erotica given a clean bill of health were nude statues. "Michelangelo will not be banned," Sears said to me soothingly when I asked him for his score card.

Lynn, winding up his watchdog role from the audience, went back to his office to prepare a thick briefing book on his own. In a long discussion after the final tally, he summed up his perspective.

"It's just as bad as I feared from the onset," he said. "It calls for a McCarthyite witch-hunt against material about which there is no evidence, whatsoever, of harmful social effects. The report has hysterical statements that presuppose that pornography plays a major role in causing a variety of social ills, even though after a year of work, the commissioners have not made the case. Our country would never allow the regulation of a food additive or a prescription drug on the basis of evidence as flimsy and tangential as the evidence the commission has heard to regulate pornography. The FDA would laugh these studies out of the agency.

"In my view, they have morally condemned virtually every kind of sexually explicit material, even that which depicts consensual, equal, loving, monogamous sexual activity."

Dietz conceded that point during a post-hearing interview. "Pornography is not a productive substitute for a relationship," he said, so why should any of it—except for a few "art" pictures—be protected? Did he mean there could not be any redeeming feature to pictures that were simply erotic? "As a steady diet," said Dietz, "they are the source of mischief."

Mischief? At last, it seems clear that the real issue is that would-be censors are elitists, convinced that while they can wallow in smut for a year and be unaffected, most people cannot and must be protected; and that they alone know best how Americans should conduct their sex lives.

•

When Meese announced the commission to study pornography, he chose his language carefully. "The formation of this commission," he announced, "reflects the concern a healthy society must have regarding the ways in which its people publicly entertain themselves."

Meese didn't attend the hearings, but all of this happened under his name, under the authority of the office of the Attorney General of the United States. I know Meese. I even like him. But talk about how one entertains oneself publicly: I was with him at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, during the 1980 campaign, when he was a bit tipsy and was eying the scantily clad cocktail waitresses, as any Rotarian from Oakland would do when away from home in the big city. As I might do. This was the same guy left hanging in public by the Senate for more than a year while the boys deliberated over whether or not his financial dealings were too sleazy for him to become the nation's chief law-enforcement officer.

We all have standards, tastes, as well as personal centers of hypocrisy, and we all know it. Maybe we should lead different lives; maybe some do. But, one might ask, what have the Feds to do with it? And what are the all-American, God-fearing right-wingers doing leading the pack? Isn't it the most profoundly conservative, profoundly American impulse to keep the Feds' noses out of our private business?

In my opinion, much of what is lumped under the label of pornography is vicious and disgusting—no question. Sitting at the hearings, even a purist on the First Amendment is moved by the truly sad tales of victims of malicious, pimplike producers of seedy porn movies. In my view, all child pornography is foul, and society has an overriding obligation to protect minors. The celebration of violence, sexual or not, the cheapening of life, male or female, cannot but have a bad effect on a society. And that includes Rambo, celebrated by Reagan, as well as your low-budget, X-rated mutilation flick.

But more disturbing than the excesses of pornography is the denigration of all erotica, making it the scapegoat for the larger ills of society. I came away convinced that for all their rhetoric, the majority of the commissioners were not serious about decreasing violence or sexual exploitation in our culture. They were serious about stopping sex that they didn't approve of.

They turned their backs on proposals to go after the much greater amount of violence found in most R-rated movies in favor of a crusade against sexual explicitness. They consistently went after erotica instead of violence, despite irrefutable evidence from virtually every witness, friend or foe, that it's violence, not sex, that's the problem. Becker said bitterly that she had tried in the final days to raise the topic of marital rape—which is still legal in some states—but Sears refused to consider it. In its zeal to make the nation march together in a lock step to paradise, the commission also rejected programs for sex education—proposals made by commissioner Deanne Tilton, its own expert on child abuse—because those programs ran against its notion of the proper Christian family.

In a piece on Reagan (The Reagan Question, Playboy, August 1980) during the 1980 Presidential campaign, I predicted—erroneously, it may turn out—that he would not be a hard-liner on this type of issue. I cited the freer lifestyles chosen by Reagan's children, with his apparent approval, as evidence of his essential tolerance, his apparent faith in the ability of the next generation to make personal-lifestyle decisions free from the heavy hand of Government-sanctioned conformity. This is a President who seems, by all accounts, to be untroubled and even pleased that his son Ron has found gainful employment as a Contributing Editor of this publication.

In any case, until the formation of the Meese commission, I figured that the regular denunciations of porn I would hear from Reagan, Bush, Meese and points right were just rhetoric to please the fundamentalist fringes who vote. After all, as Reagan said during a 1980 interview with me for the Los Angeles Times, he wasn't born yesterday. When we discussed the pervasiveness of loose morals, he pointed out that he'd been a Hollywood actor and even quoted from the trial of Oscar Wilde: "I have no objection to anyone's sex life, so long as they don't practice it in the street and frighten the horses."

Something disturbing has come out of these hearings. Never mind frightening the horses. In their zeal to make the nation conform to their tastes, the more zealous members of the Meese commission have, as McCarthy did, twisted the very ideals of freedom they claim to cherish. It's not what we may do in the streets that these people fear. It's what we do in our heads.