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Pitching Penthouse
The Military Honor and Decency Act of 1996 bars stores on military bases from selling “sexually explicit material.” But what does that mean? According to the Act, it means film or printed material “the dominant theme of which depicts or describes nudity” or sexual activities “in a lascivious way.” Based on that criteria, the military nixed about two-thirds of the 473 titles it reviewed under the Act. In 2002, the Supreme Court upheld the ban as constitutional. Now dozens of anti-porn groups are lobbying Defense Secretary Robert Gates to remove such titles as Penthouse and Playmates in Bed. AOL News reports:
“They’re saying ‘we’re not selling stuff that’s sexually explicit’ … and we say it’s pornography,” says Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association, a Christian anti-pornography group. A letter-writing campaign launched Friday by opponents of the policy aims to convince Congress to “get the Pentagon to obey the law,” he adds.
Check out the Pentagon’s guidelines here. What do you think of this latest lobbying effort? Could AFA’s resources be better spent elsewhere?
back to top32 Comments to “Pitching Penthouse”
Perhaps the AFA could spend its resources reaching out to families so the boys won’t want to buy this trash when they grow up.
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Wow.. no one has any input on this topic?
I think as some observers have pointed out far better than I ever could, to a large extent we live in a pornified society (Amber Crombie and Fitch ads today are often as salacious as a skin mag would have been from the 50s. Older folks say those were tame by modern standards).
I cant recall the last time I saw an ad for PLAYBOY on TV (it was after the 10pm news/Nightline/Letterman time frame back in the 80s). But perhaps ads for it and other porn mags are no longer necessary. I vividly recall seeing a glib and smiling John Tesch and Mary Hart intro’ing an ET story about the latest goings on at the LA Hef Mansion. ET in those years was on right after the 5:30pm evening news, and I was surprised to see such an icon of the porn industry treated as ho-hum entertainment, esp when kids might be tuning in.
As for the ban on Penthouse and other filth:
Once troops deploy (to Iraq or Afghanistan) the skin mags are not even allowed in the theater of operations. Pornposession–as with ethanolic beverages– is in violation of General order 1A
(The PX magazine rack here, however, overflows with the so-called lad-mags, which –as one fellow admitted– are often merely two bra straps removed from full-blown porn). Wildmon and others should point out the unfairness of allowing smut mags in the BX/PX if you’re stationed in the USA or Europe, but not if you’re in muslim combat zones.
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Well, I’ll admit that I have taken a recent look at Playboy and Penthouse, and neither one is what I would call “sexually explicit”. In fact, they are very tame compared to what’s out there, especially on the internet.
Where there are men there will always be porn. If Rev. Wildmon thinks banning it from being sold at the military base will stop it, he’s living in “la-la” land.
I agree – the men in uniform are fighting for our basic Constitutional freedoms. Why in the world would we keep them from having the same basic freedoms?
One doesn’t have to agree with all of the choices another person makes, including what they read or watch. That’s the great thing about freedom – we all get to make our own choice within the bounds of the law.
We aren’t talking about illegal materials here. We’re talking about Constitutionally protected stuff. It should be available.
I’d like to know where Rev. Wildom gets off marching into the military and demanding that they follow his ideas of morality? He has no more right than Rev. Phelps does. If I were the military, I’d tell him to take a hike.
This is a waste of time and money.
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AFA’s resources are better spent nowhere!
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Anlir – The 2 magazines are clearly “sexually explicit”. They are merely not as egregiously so as many others.
We seem to have defined deviancy down here. A magazine featuring glimpss of labia (Playboy) and mildly restrained gynocological views (Penthouse) are inarguably “sexually explicit”. That they do not involve depictions of things for which I am currrently too tired to come up with appropriate euphemisms only means that they are less “sexually explicit”; it does not convert them to “inexplicit”.
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Over here, they can get it off-base. Over there (Muslim countries) it IS illegal.
They’re not forbidden having it, just from selling it on the base. This is not a Constitutional freedom issue, Anlir.
And it’s not Wildmon who told the military what to do, it was Congress. He’s just using what Congress did (i.e. pass a law) to achieve a result.
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Penthouse no longer shows genitalia, according to Wikipedia. The original mag went bankrupt after switching from soft core to complete hard core porn, along with such niceties as “water sports” and other unspeakable filth. Bob Guccione’s sick perversions were too much for even Penthouse readers, and they cancelled their subscriptions by the millions. They were so short of money that they briefly ceased publication. This was a fairly big news story three or four years ago; at one time Guccione was personally worth over $200 million dollars, and he became completely broke. New owners took it over, mainly for the “brand value” and have apparently toned it down considerably. They evidently still show lesbians making out, but they’re just topless these days.
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Night Train – OK, so still “sexually explicit” but more restrained in its explicitness than before.
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I often wonder about people (like Rev. Wildmon) who spend their entire life being obsessed with other people’s sex lives. I think it’s because they view sex as a “scourge” on humanity. Or they’ve got their own problems (we’ve seen the outworkings of that all too well in the last few years). Either way, it’s a pity.
So the military PX sells Playboy? The world isn’t going to crash and burn for it. Kiddie porn – definitely. Swank – possibly. But definitely not for Playboy or Penthouse.
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Anlir – Accept for the sake of argument here that Rev. Wildeman is sincere in his belief that the rise of porn is a sort of moral decay that will lead to societal collapse if unchecked. Why would one not devote time and effort to checking the moral decay?
Do you wonder the same thing about someone who becomes a virologist and dedicates a career to working wiht the CDC to erradicate malaria?
If one accepts the man’s sincerity (even if one disagrees about him being correct), it is not that hard to understand his efforts.
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Who has time to buy magazines? Right outside of every US military base in the world are bars filled with women who look forward to that time of the month. We call it “payday”, they call it “jackpot”.
Yep, it’s not floors they’re shining.
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Repeating myself. Sex is the equivalent in psychology and morality of nuclear energy in technology.
It’s necessary. It can be constructive and wholesome.
Society has never succeeded in taming and domesticating it. Neither religions nor modern liberal secularism; no matter what tack we take, humans keep on acting “like animals” because we are animals.
In fact, all in all, other animals probably act better than human animals do.
It would be interesting if human biology had a “rut” season for females as do most other mammals.
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KRM,
The Reverend is free to campaign against Playboy and Penthouse. I would note that just because a person is sincere doesn’t make them right.
Rev. Wildmon lives in a country which enables both him and Playboy to exercise free speech. Neither are breaking any laws. Sex has been with us since the dawn of humanity. He’s fighting a losing battle.
With all the child abuse, neglect, problems of poverty, health care, etc., you’d think those would occupy the Reverend’s time and attention.
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Sex has been with us since the dawn of humanity. Therefore Rev. Wildmon will not get the military to follow the laws passed by Congress and not sell smut.
Furthermore, there are poor people, therefore access to smut should continue unopposed.
That makes good logical sense, Anlir.
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Given how desperate the military is for soldiers, I think the base commanders will put the kibosh on his idea.
If Rev. Wildom had his way, you wouldn’t be able to buy anything but Christian magazines on base. Don’t think he’s gonna stop at Playboy and Penthouse. Moral crusaders rarely stop until someone stands up to them. Shoot, even TV Guide would be verboten since it advertises “sexy” shows.
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Anlir, you don’t have to worry about the gung ho pro-war DR buying any magazines on base. He’s another drugstore cowboy who signed up for college instead of the military as soon as he turned 18.
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Wildmon is an ass. He should get a life. It’s bad enough our military has to deal with Muslim folks who don’t want these types of magazines in the Middle East.
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Anlir – I acknowledged that one might well think Wildeman mistaken. But if he believes the problem to be a potentially fatal one for the culture, one ought to work against it. That you would prioritize differently is irrelevant to his analysis of the situation (and we don’t know what efforts he makes in other areas).
Finally, you should recall that he is fighting not to institute a ban, but rather to keep one. The magazines have been prohibited for quite some time. Wildeman wants to maintain the status quo on this.
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#9 (ANLIR): I often wonder about people (like Rev. Wildmon) who spend their entire life being obsessed with other people’s sex lives. I think it’s because they view sex as a “scourge” on humanity.
I think it has much more to do with the “Pornification of the Culture.” It is really very hard today to raise a child with a healthy view of sexuality and sexual function. We are inudated with this slease and it seems impossible to avoid it. I’m not hung up about what people do behind closed doors. However, there are those who think it is important that they broadcast their variety of sexual deviency everywhere–as if that somehow makes it legitimate. “Shut up and do your thing, but not in my face” is a nice motto. And sell it in a brown wrapper in the red-light district. Stay out of my neighborhood grocery store and out of my living room.
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#12 (RN): “Society has never succeeded in taming and domesticating it. Neither religions nor modern liberal secularism; no matter what tack we take, humans keep on acting ‘like animals’ because we are animals.”
And right there, you commit your error. We are much, much more than animals. If we were just animals, we would have a mating season when the female is in heat and the males would beat the stuffing out of each other until the “Alpha” male won. He would then impregnate all the females.
Moreover, our anatomy would be such that the dominant form of the sexual act would be mounting from the rear so that the male and female would not have to look at each other–instead, she would submit to her servicing and the male would trumpet his success for all to hear.
Instead, we were made so that a relationship–lifelong– is promoted and the two become one flesh. Think about it.
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#13 (ANLIR): “With all the child abuse, neglect, problems of poverty, health care, etc., you’d think those would occupy the Reverend’s time and attention.
Maybe the reverend feels he has found the root cause. Maybe there is child abuse, spouse abuse, neglect, etc., because coarsening of the culture to the point where too many people think it OK to do those things.
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I think all porn has coarsened the culture. A little publicized but widely known fact (at least among law enforcemt types): detectives nearly always find porn of all imaginable varieties at the scene of child abductors/murderers.
Also another little publicized fact. Whom do you think contributes the biggest donor check to the proAbort groups? Feminists?
Nope. The smut lords of porn (Hefner, et al).
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Porn and sexual “deviancy” has always been a part of our culture, as have lamentations and condemnations of it. Every attempt to suppress it has promulgated it more.
By culture, I am talking about thousands of years, not a few decades. For one fairly recent and fairly well documented period of time, however, compare the pretenses and the realities of Victorian England.
I have no solution to this problem. At least I don’t pretend I do.
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Moral crusaders like Rev. Wildmon give no thought to our Constitutional freedoms. I dare say if you asked him, he would say his loyalty is to the Bible, not the Constitution. Moral crusaders are typically blinded by one thing: ridding society of that which they consider “evil”. They don’t know when to stop, in fact they cannot stop because their crusade stems from “good vs evil”, “black and white” thinking. Things like freedom of speech and the Constitution are but a piffle to them. In fact, they usually view those things with great disdain.
I really don’t see a big difference between a Rev. Wildmon and the Taliban. Both seek to impose their idea of morality on the greater public. Whether one does it through arm twisting and threats or through violence, the end result is still the same.
One usually finds that people who make a name for themselves as a “moral crusader” invariably turn out to have a few skeletons in their own closet.
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Anlir, reread the first line of the article:
The Military Honor and Decency Act of 1996 bars stores on military bases from selling “sexually explicit material.” and the middle:
In 2002, the Supreme Court upheld the ban as constitutional.
The discussion is whether more titles should be added, not whether Wildmon is ignoring the Constitution. The supreme Court has already supported this act, whose title implies it came from Congress or the upper echelons of the military.
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And #25 is mine–I know preview is coming, I know preview is coming…
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Anlir gets on these hate-the-Christianist tangents and is unable to hit pause. Sigh . . .
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Well, I do have to do these “Public Service” announcements from time to time as part of the Continuing Education requirements to maintain my “Liberal” license. This topic is perfect for it.
So don’t hold it against me or take it personally when I go off on conservatives.
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Anlir – I don’t see much difference between the Taliban and the US Left (speech codes on campuses, political correctness, etc.). The US Left mere fails to acknowledge any particular god as the basis for its desired totalitarian regime.
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#20 Dr. Dave
It is an interesting point that humans copulate face to face and can form bonds that include spiritual bonds. However, I think the development of such traits and abilities is just as compatible with evolutionary development as with claims that it reflects “God’s plan” or some such religious claim.
For example, the Marquis de Sade was a human being rather than a weasel and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was a human being as well rather than a wolverine or a mongoose.
Animals may be rather crude in their sex habits, and the sexual play of praying mantises and black widow spiders is indeed a bit kinky, but for real sicko perversion you can’t beat a human being.
Well, actually you can, but that’s just the foreplay.
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However, I think the development of such traits and abilities is just as compatible with evolutionary development as with claims that it reflects “God’s plan” or some such religious claim.
Evolutionary development = it happened somewhere sometime for some reason. Anything can be atributed to ‘evolutionary development.’ That claim is utterly impossible to prove or falsify.
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DR
This is different from “God made it happen this way” in what maner?
Christians constantly say, “God made it that way.”
There is no “proof” either way. I did not claim there is. Dr. Dave pointed out differences in mating behavior between humans and animals to indicate that humans are not animals.
Neither his argument nor my argument is a proof. However, his type of argument is advanced around here all the time as if it is true beyond doubt.
I think it should be challenged from time to time. If your complacency muscles aren’t exercised from time to time, they get flabby.
As I used to say before I got tired of the joke, I am the strength trainer for evangelical Christians.
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