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The Ontology of the Pornographic Image: the Meese Commission and the Rise of Sexual Media

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The Ontology of the Pornographic Image: the Meese Commission and the Rise of Sexual Media List of magazines from United States Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography: Final Report (1986). 104 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00199 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00199 by guest on 26 September 2021 The Ontology of the Pornographic Image: The Meese Commission and the Rise of Sexual Media STEVEN NIEDBALA In October 2015 the editors of Playboy announced that the magazine would no longer feature images of nude women. The managers of Playboy ’s multimedia empire, credited with “tak[ing] sex in America from furtive to ubiquitous” by the New York Times , claimed that the publication was a victim of its own suc - cess. As executive Scott Flanders told the Times , “[The] battle has been fought and won. You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free.” 1 The editors’ requiem, which traces a direct line from Playboy to Internet pornography, begs critical scrutiny. As Beatriz Preciado notes in Pornotopia , the magazine recast the American domestic sphere as a stage for multimedia sexual exploration, forging a “constructed masculinity that emerged as a result of the use of image and information technologies.” 2 Playboy was revolutionary in the use of print and television for the benefit of a pervasive erotic potential. However, the company has dis - covered that the power of this erotic network exceeds the con - trol of any single entity. Despite the company’s efforts to maintain profitability with the emergence of videocassette technology and the Internet, the organization never adapted to the erotic potential suggested by these new media. The generic erotics of the Playboy Bunny and Playboy ’s insistence on the cultivation of masculinity beyond masturbation—the magazine was padded with interviews with personalities from Malcolm X to Vladimir Nabokov—can no longer compete with the speed, accessibility, and variety of the Internet’s pornographic network. The montage of “Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex . .” that founder Hugh Hefner promised in the introduction to the first issue can now be assembled by the individual user who simul - taneously opens the Paris Review and Pornhub in his (and now her) Internet browser. 3 However, one need not speak exclusively of the Internet to determine the grounds for Playboy ’s decline. As early as the 1980s, pornography had abandoned the limitations of Playboy ’s carefully curated Bildung for the nascent sexual imaginary of videocassette and broadcast media. Oddly, American censors— Hefner’s antagonists in the “battle”—realized this before him. In 1986 Playboy filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Edwin Grey Room 64, Summer 2016, pp. 104–123. © 2016 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 105 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00199 by guest on 26 September 2021 Meese and the Commission on Pornography, an investigatory panel ordered by President Ronald Reagan to determine legal mechanisms against the deleterious effects of sexual media. The commission had informed several major booksellers that they would be identified as “pornography distributors” unless they reviewed their stock and removed objectionable material. As the letter failed to identify which magazines and books were pornographic, 7-Eleven and several other chains dropped Penthouse , Forum , and Playboy from their stores. While the commission had previously ruled that Playboy was “plainly not obscene,” the obscenity of a particular work was no longer a question in the estimation of Meese and his colleagues. 4 The commission sidestepped the difficult task of proving a specific work obscene and instead sought to confront pornography at its point of entry into the consumer market. To grasp the wider relevance of Playboy ’s legal and financial woes since the 1980s, one must revisit the history of sexual media and its antagonists. Defining pornography primarily in terms of content, previ - ous attempts at obscenity regulation in the United States had fallen into a protracted struggle to secure the boundaries of acceptable representation against ever-expanding limits of pub - lic tolerance. In response, the Meese Commission emphasized content less than the nature of the technologies employed in the transmission of the pornographic imaginary. Bernhard Siegert’s media archaeology of the eighteenth-century postal system offers a model for understanding the development of sexual media from blue laws to the Meese Commission, from Playboy to Pornhub. In the language of Siegert, the novelty of the Meese Commission lies in its discovery that human beings are “no longer . the relay and ground” for a sexuality dis - persed over televisual networks. 5 The decline of a porno - graphic imaginary parallel to Siegert’s postal system, in which “people became entangled in the discourse” of sexual com - merce at pivotal sites, led Meese and his colleagues to investi - gate the nature of pornographic networks over pornographic Top: Vernon P. Becker, 6 content itself. Hence Playboy could be subject to regulation dir. Dagmar’ s Hot not as an obscene publication per se but as an agent in the Pants, Inc. , 1971. pornographic infection of networks. Recognizing the novelty of Frame enlargement. the commission’s analysis, we may term this expansion of the Bottom: Bernardo sexual imaginary through the power of emergent communica - Bertolucci, dir. Last Tango in Paris , 1972. tion networks sexual media. In order to grasp the new porno - Frame enlargement. graphic imaginary, however, the Meese Commission would resurrect a mythos of human relays in sexual media. If no single actor could be held responsible for the pornographic infection, then all producers and consumers in the network would be reinscribed as guilty agents in the expansion of sexual media In the United States, obscenity regulation had attempted to keep pace with mediatic development since the late nineteenth century. The first obscenity prosecutions in Western society followed the 1663 English precedent of King v. Sedley , which convicted its intoxicated defendant for delivering a “series of profane remarks” from a tavern balcony and pouring “bottles 106 Grey Room 64 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00199 by guest on 26 September 2021 filled with urine on the crowd below.” 7 As the 1985 commis - sion notes, the case established a new model for the regulation of speech, defining Sedley’s actions as “crimes against public decency” rather than as a direct affront to political or religious authority. 8 However, obscenity prosecutions would remain rare in the United States until postal clerk Anthony Comstock found an ideal means of regulation through his office. Targeting the distribution of obscene publications and contraceptives through the postal system, Comstock led a national campaign for decency in the mails. His efforts culminated in an 1873 law restricting the transmission of “obscene matter” through the postal service. The 1873 law characterized obscenity law for the next century. The law targeted “any person who shall knowingly deposit, or cause to be deposited, for mailing or delivery” obscene materials. 9 From the beginning of American obscenity legislation, therefore, obscenity was the collusion between the producer of obscene material and the power of a network. The medium-centered approach provided a definite object for obscenity law. The language of the 1873 law could otherwise grapple only with murky definitions, defining the prohibited material as Niedbala | The Ontology of the Pornographic Image: The Meese Commission and the Rise of Sexual Media 107 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00199 by guest on 26 September 2021 [any] obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, pic - ture, paper, print, or other publication of an indecent character, or . any article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent use or nature . [or] any written or printed card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or of whom, or by what means either of the things before mentioned may be obtained or made. 10 Elevated to the position of special agent to the Post Office, Comstock himself defined obscenity as the devil’s “snare,” “baited to allure the human soul.” 11 Comstock’s methods were effective insofar as the postal service was considered the priv - ileged network for the formation of the private subject. In Relays , Siegert describes the eighteenth-century postal system as the necessary condition for the era’s literature. The role of human relays in the postal network allowed for the possibility of literature in the form of the intercepted message. The “pos - sibility of confirming a soul (an unconscious) was determined by postage,” making it “impossible for any letter not to reveal its secrets—or those of the soul—to the disciplined eye of its pedagogical recipients.” 12 Literature was thus the interception of the private, a domain that emerged only through the notion of the confidential letter. Comstock’s interceptions led not to literature but to the prosecution of souls exposed to the postal system. However, as Siegert notes, the postal system in Comstock’s time was fading in the wake of the telegraph and other transmission technologies that eliminated the necessity for human relays and, therefore, the possibility of interception, whether literary or investigative. After the death of Comstock in 1915,
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