Learning to live with sex and violence - Congress' reluctance to regulate sex and violence on television and in other entertainment media - includes related article that defends the right of pornographic expression as simply another form of dehumanizing information

National Review, Nov 1, 1993 by Walter Berns, Ernest van den Haag

Many years ago, at a supper club in Chicago, I asked a waiter (decked out, as I recall, like some character from the Arabian Nights) why they served their steaks on flaming swords. "Simple," he replied. "The customers like it and it doesn't hurt the meat."

I thought of this recently as I watched a Senate committee solemnly (but less flamboyantly) respond to complaints from its customers, a few angry parents, by serving up what it would have them believe is a solution to the problem of violence on primetime television. Prohibiting or somehow regulating it was, of course, out of the question. The senators had it on the authority of Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, that government has no business prescribing "what people read, listen to, or watch." Thus, rather than allow the networks to take the high ground by invoking the First Amendment, Senator Paul Simon (D., Ill.) and his fellow committee members accepted a promise from the network executives to attach warning labels to their products, labels similar to those attached to cigarettes and sex films: "Attorney General's Warning: Mayhem may be bad for your body," or "Due to some violent content, parental discretion advised."

No one, surely, least of all the typical network executive, expects these labels to have any effect on the amount of violence now filling the television screens. The assumption behind "adults only" labels is that parents will do,

and will want to do, what the law is reluctant or forbidden to do, but these assumptions are questionable at best. When the law is forbidden to make moral judgments - this because the Supreme Court effectively put the censors out of business some 25 or 30 years ago - it is foolish to think that parents will be able to enforce them, or even want to make them. Whatever the reason - whether out of indifference or a sense of helplessness - parents today seem to be content to allow the schools to take care of their children's behavior (which may explain why the new Surgeon General can call upon the schools to pass out condoms with the cookies) and they allow the market to fix their children's tastes in music, films, and entertainment generally.

Like Son, Like Father

In fact, it turns out that parents share those tastes. As the entertainment industry knows very well, adults (including lots of parents) have a taste not only for violence but for sex. Like their children, they enjoy it (vicariously, at least); they enjoy watching Madonna, for example. On stage, in films, and on videos, she bares her breasts, rubs her crotch, masturbates with bottles and animated statues of black saints (or, as Camille Paglia puts it with becoming delicacy, she "makes love" with them), and hops into bed with naked men while exclaiming about the size of their sexual organs. Not only children but millions of adults enjoy her act. And why not? She helps them "get in touch with their bodies," as they say. With their custom, she has become a star, a national celebrity; her face and figure appear on the covers of the respectable news magazines, and Jack Valenti brags about the fact that he once took her to lunch.

Parents who serve on juries today find nothing offensive in Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs (for example, of one man urinating into the mouth of another) or in rock lyrics that their parents would have been ashamed to listen to - or, because the judges then would have forbidden the lyrics to be put in evidence, would not have been allowed to listen to. ("Some respect must be paid to the purity of our records," the judges used to say.) For example, a recent Florida jury found nothing offensive in violent - but rhythmic, very rhythmic - accounts of men amusing themselves by grabbing women by the hair, breaking their backs, and tearing open their, well, vaginas. "Representing a cross-section of the community as we do," declared the jury foreman (a member of the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church choir), "the lyrics were just not obscene." On the contrary, they were said to have "artistic value."

Parents (and not only those who sang in church choirs) used to educate by instilling a sense of shame in their children. "Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" a mother would say by way of admonishing her child for an act done or left undone. Except perhaps among recent immigrants ("?No estas avergonzado de ti mismo?"), I doubt that such admonitions are much uttered today, which is just as well because they would carry little weight.

Too much has gone on - or, thanks to the ACLU and the Supreme Court, too much has come off - since Chicago schoolboys, for example, would sneak down to the Star and Garter Theater (corner of State and Van Buren Streets), where, in the company of a large number of dirty old men, they could watch some not particularly attractive women slowly and artfully remove their outer clothing and, at the end, reveal, at a minimum, what are called their pasties and G-strings. The Star and Garter was what used to be called a "sleazy" joint, and those who gave it their custom were supposed to be ashamed to be seen in it or to be known to patronize it. It was tolerated, more or less, but, unlike the rock and rap concerts and Madonna's performances, it was not licensed or sanctioned by the law. On the contrary, citing one or another city ordinance, the police would occasionally raid the place and close it down for a while, which had the desired effect of reinforcing that sense of shame by reminding its patrons of its illicit character.