Does Censorship Kill Brain Cells?

It used to be argued by weird village priests that sex destroyed brain cells. As a result, generations of Catholic boys grew up fearing that they would blow an exam if they masturbated. That theory never had a shred of scientific foundation and has been discarded. But a modified version of it seems plausible in light of current data. Recent experience suggests that thinking about other people's sex lives kills portions of the brain.

Sex makes people crazy. Not actually doing it; that's usually a release from mental tension. What drives some people nuts is the notion that others may be having lewd thoughts. How else to explain the sexual-censorship madness that afflicts some Americans?

Look at the character who went after the rap group 2 Live Crew down in Florida. This guy thinks he's Batman. No kidding. He drinks out of a Batman cup, wears a Batman watch and has a Batman poster plastered across his refrigerator door. This caped crusader, Florida lawyer Jack Thompson, told a reporter for the L.A. Times that his enemy, Luther Campbell, leader of 2 Live Crew, is "the Joker." You can't make stuff like this up.

The attacks on artistic freedom emanate from a tightly knit circle of fundamentalist right-wingers. Thompson says he got turned on to the crusade against 2 Live Crew after the Reverend Donald Wildmon's notorious censorship lobby distributed a transcript of the rap group's lyrics. (It was Wildmon's group that initiated the attack on the National Endowment for the Arts last year—by complaining about Andres Serrano's controversial photo Piss Christ. Wildmon also tried to get Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ banned.)

Unfortunately, many civil libertarians—horrified by what they perceived as the sexist and violent content of 2 Live Crew's lyrics—shirked this latest challenge. Why is it so easy to forget that freedom is indivisible? As noted First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams puts it, "One of the real tests of a dedication of a people to free expression is always whether they are willing to protect expression that they find really distasteful."

Abrams links this case with the suppression of a National Endowment for the Arts–funded exhibit of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe, which the censors managed to get pulled from the prestigious Corcoran Gallery in Washington. The director of a Cincinnati museum that exhibited the works was arrested. The Mapplethorpe case has received far greater support in establishment circles than have the rappers, but Abrams thinks both are victims of the same violation of the First Amendment. "We are at a turning point in enforcement of the obscenity laws," he says. "I don't separate the 2 Live Crew album from the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit."

Neither does Batman/Thompson, who boasts, "There is a cultural war going on."

Thompson is not given to doubt about his calling by a higher power. "I believe the world is headed toward apocalyptic destruction," he told an L.A. Times interviewer, adding that "Government exists to point people God-ward." So much for the separation of church and state.

A secular explanation of Thompson's crusade against him and his music is offered by 2 Live Crew's Campbell. In 1988, Thompson, a Republican, ran unsuccessfully to unseat Dade County State's Attorney Janet Reno, a Democrat, and Campbell helped produce a record favoring Reno. "He lost the election and has been after me ever since," Campbell insists.

Those who attack 2 Live Crew because the group's lyrics are sexist may have qualms about Thompson, their strange bedfellow. During the 1988 campaign, according to The Miami Herald, he handed Reno a questionnaire insisting she check the appropriate box after the line "I, Janet Reno, am a bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual."

Thompson's letter carried the following warning: "If you do not respond ... then you will be deemed to have checked one of the first two boxes." Reno refused to reply and won the election anyway.

You have to be a bit odd to be pushing the censors' line at this historical moment when it is so clearly out of sync with the time. Hungary has marked its move to greater freedom by permitting the publication of a Hungarian edition of Playboy. In eastern Europe, the lifting of the dead hand of Stalinism means the end of puritanical restraints that would have made Batman/Thompson redundant. I never have understood why the right-wing fundamentalists in this country don't embrace communism as it is being practiced in places such as Cuba under Castro and as it was practiced in pre-Gorbachev Russia. You cannot take it away from Castro, Señor Clean, that he fundamentally altered the erotic life of Havana, turning it from perhaps the most permissive, even decadent, spot in the world into the capital of squeaky clean. Cincinnati should adopt Havana as a sister city.

But the Communist world is going over to freedom, which means that people have the right to check out what they want to check out. Last year in Moscow, I saw films at packed showings at the Writer's Union that I have yet to find in this country. One in particular, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo or 120 Days of Sodom, would turn Batman/ Thompson blue. I have not met anyone in this country who has seen the Italian film, even though, aside from being rough and extreme at times, it is an important statement on the sexual basis of fascism. Will Moscow now become the center of the avant-garde, and will we be the new reactionaries?

As the rest of the world lunges to embrace our vision of freedom for consenting adults—buy what you want when you want it—America's home-grown censors seem more virulent than ever. They claim to be conservatives but are frantic to shove the big nose of Government into what should be the most private recesses of our imaginations. Evidently, they detest the very market forces that eastern Europeans now embrace. Make no mistake, not only do these zealots wish to deny artistic freedom and shred the Constitution but, Lord save us, they are true subversives who seek—in the manner of Brezhnev's central planners—to control the market. Their record is distinctly un-American: Record sellers and musicians are arrested, gallery exhibits shut down, museum directors and trustees indicted and convenience stores intimidated into removing publications that readers want to buy. The sovereignty of the consumer is denied; some censor knows better how to spend the customer's hard-earned dollar. That's what it's all about, isn't it? You want to buy a ticket to a show or buy a book, and they won't let you.

When I was younger, it was the works of Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce that I could not legally purchase, no matter how many dollars I put aside. Hey, Ed Sullivan wouldn't even let me see the lower half of Elvis Presley's body. Today, if the censors have their way, it's rap music and X-rated videos that are taboo. Same difference. Of course, in our free society, the censors go to work only when a book, film or record is too explicitly sexual. Not when it is wrong, racist or violent, only when it may send blood to the privates.

Censors are inevitably liars. They almost never admit seeking to ban a work because of its social content, because that would patently violate the spirit of the First Amendment. So they find a convenient loophole by insisting that sexual ideas are not ideas at all. Call someone a kike or a nigger and you are constitutionally protected. Sell extremely violent movies such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or, more recently, The Omen, in which women are routinely decapitated, or even Batman, in which violent death is the norm, and the law leaves you alone. But dare to refer, in what some consider a prurient manner, to sexual activity and they can slam you into jail.

Time out for a crash course in constitutional law as it applies to obscenity: The Supreme Court has tended to define broadly the free-speech guarantee of the First Amendment, with one glaring exception—the expression of ideas about sex. This absurdity, rendered in the "obscenity standard" codified in the Court's landmark Miller decision of 1973, created the one major loophole that has so far been torn in First Amendment protections. In Miller, the Court held that the expression of sexual thoughts or imagery can be banned if it runs afoul of current community standards and lacks redeeming artistic or political value.

Think of that for a moment. Ideas that violate a community's racial or religious norms are constitutionally protected. So the Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, had a right to march, swastikas and all. They could shout that Jews deserved to die in Hitler's gas chambers or that blacks should be slaves—and that would be protected as part of the traffic in ideas—as it should be. But if 2 Live Crew's Campbell raps that women want to commit impersonal oral sex, he can be thrown into jail.

The argument is that Campbell is not expressing ideas but merely seeking to arouse his audience. The distinction is meaningless. Surely, the Nazis seek to rouse their audiences emotionally. Are only anemic ideas, those without emotional impact, to be constitutionally protected? Who are we kidding? The album As Nasty As They Wanna Be did not come to our attention because of its erotic or even pornographic content; it's a weak competitor in that category. The album irritates precisely because of its ideas.

What could be more provocative, given this nation's sick racial and sexual history, than the specter of black male sexuality? Some may be troubled by what used to be called "race mixing" at 2 Live Crew concerts. "As several white female teens danced with and kissed black male teens to the beat of a thundering bass that shook the building floor," Lee May of the L.A. Times wrote, "reporters who remember Georgia's old racist climate joked that the rap group's name ought to be Your Worst Nightmare."

Taken at their worst, ignoring any possibility of a spoof or hyperbole, Campbell's lyrics assert that women, including white women, want to be sexually used by males, including, obviously, black males. One can condemn this idea as misogynist, even fascist, but not at the same moment deny its being an idea—indeed, a powerful one. The album is threatening precisely because it has thoughts that are bold and ugly.

Campbell is right in arguing that he is subjected to selective prosecution. The sentiments expressed on his album are widely advanced by others who are not harassed. He mentions Andrew Dice Clay and Guns n' Roses, whose albums remained on the shelves when 2 Live Crew's were banned. There are many other examples.Eddie Murphy Raw, widely available on cable television, far more effectively evokes the claims of male sexual domination than do Campbell's lyrics. Why not also ban the movie 9-1/2 Weeks, the films of Lina Wertmüller, the novels of D. H. Lawrence and almost every romance novel ever written? Hey, and what about that lustful Roger Rabbit?

Batman/Thompson recently initiated a campaign against the critically acclaimed movie The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Maybe if he succeeds with such respectable targets, we'll awake from the apathy that surrounds the 2 Live Crew case. But censors are vultures who thrive on the blood of their victims, and a defeat for Luther Campbell will make it all the more difficult for the next victim to defend himself. A case in point: When Bruce Springsteen had the courage to permit his music to be used in 2 Live Crew's Banned in the U.S.A., Batman/Thompson responded with a crusade against the Boss himself. "Bruce and Luther can go to hell together," he thundered, adding that "Bruce Springsteen is facilitating the sexual abuse of women and the mental molestation of children."

Banned in the U.S.A. does not contain sexually explicit lyrics. The song's message is an attack on censorship, not an attempt to rouse the prurient interests of adults or children. Yet Thompson had no reservations about smearing Springsteen's defense of artistic freedom with the smut brush.

Thompson is a dangerous joke. The serious villains here are the music-business executives, on both the production and retail ends, who have made megabucks from the energy of their artists but run for cover at the first hint of attack. As Campbell notes, "In some areas, we have radio stations supporting us. But the record industry, no." According to a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America, Nasty was "the first recording in the history of popular music to be deemed obscene." A pretty serious precedent, but many music retailers quickly joined the offensive against the record, pulling it from stores when no legal order required them to do so.

Who are the gutless wonders who run Musicland, the nation's largest chain of record stores, who dared to ban Nasty from all their outlets? Even the Federal judge who ruled against 2 Live Crew blasted that sort of prior constraint as a violation of the Constitution. Still, eager to escape Batman/Thompson's hate salvos, other chains followed Musicland's lead, pulling, or not restocking, the record—even in communities where prosecutors had not acted because they felt the lyrics did not violate community standards. Why have the top music profiteers been so chicken in coming to 2 Live Crew's defense?

The Thompsons and Wildmons of this world are nothings when stripped of their power to frighten. But when they can make entertainment executives—not to mention judges and prosecutors—get down on their knees without a fight, we are in serious trouble.