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

If there are few such places today it is not because the police have shut them down but because the striptease has given way to new forms of "dancing," the topless and then the nude. This new dancing is not confined to sleazy establishments; according to newspaper accounts, the clubs in Atlanta especially are "big, expensive, and clean, and they cater to yuppies." Unlike those at the old Star and Garter, their dancers are yuppies too, or aspiring yuppies, college girls in fact. As Sasha, one of the dancers, said: "I have undergraduate degrees in chemistry and marketing, and I'm going to law school in the fall and I hope this will pay for it." Sasha (her real name is probably Katherine Anne, or Mary Elizabeth) wears glasses when she dances - except for the stiletto heels, that's all she wears - but they're fake, she admits. "When I wear them, I become a secretary, a librarian; I've cornered the intellectual market here."

According to the Georgia Hospitality and Travel Association, these clubs contribute as much as $3 million to the city's economy each year in taxes and license fees. As one club owner put it, Atlanta has become a "debutante city with urbane pretensions," and, as such, it no longer considers nude dancing (and the taste for it) something to hide or be ashamed of. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that most democratic of political philosophers, was obviously correct when he said, some two hundred years ago, that "vice hardly insinuates itself by shocking decency, but by taking on its likeness." Correct and, as these various examples demonstrate, prescient: in today's "urbane" America nothing is seen as vice because everything, at least everything connected with sex, is seen as decent.

One Man's Vice ...

Of course, there are still people who profess to be shocked by Madonna and our other entertainers. But, to paraphrase only slightly a remark made a few years ago by Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, we now realize that one man's vice - or as Mrs. Core learned in 1988, one woman's pornography - is another's lyric.

Wife of a United States senator (at the time) and mother of four, Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Gore mounted a campaign against the recording industry and its sexually explicit rock lyrics. She wrote a book about it, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, and called upon Congress to do something about the problem. For this she gained little or no public support; in fact, she was ridiculed in the New York Times and Washington Post, denounced by the American Civil Liberties Union, and called a "cultural terrorist" by rock star Frank Zappa.

Still, she might have persisted had her husband not mounted a campaign of his own, in his case for the Presidency. Knowing that any hint of Comstockery would, to say the least, jeopardize his chances for the Democratic Party's nomination - which, in itself, speaks volumes - the two of them decided to go to Canossa, or the closest place to it in modern America, Hollywood, where they met "privately with entertainment leaders to discuss [Mrs. Gore's] campaign against pornographic rock lyrics." Reached afterward in Chattanooga, she said that she now felt she had made a mistake, not by meeting with the record-industry executives, but by campaigning against pomography, and especially by making a big deal of it by testifying in a Senate hearing. By doing so, she said, she may "inadvertently [have given] encouragement to advocates of censorship." A couple of months later, during the height of the presidential primary season, she wrote a piece for the New York Times in which she reiterated her opposition to censorship. "I detest it," she said.