I never thought I’d be publishing “dirty stories.” It’s not that I’m a prude; I was just surprised to find myself in a situation where the issue came up at all. I’m a software engineer turned computer publisher, so how’d I end up editing and publishing a book with “erotica” in the title? And why am I so proud of it?
For ten years, I’ve lived a significant portion of my life in cyberspace. In addition to using the net during those years, electronically communicating with people around the world, I’ve worked on some of the software the net is made with, consulted for people expanding the net, and I’m the author of a book and several articles about networking and the Internet. So I paid special attention when a few members of the far–right started pushing an awful net bill through the United States Congress. The so–called “Communications Decency Act” (CDA) attempts to reduce all material on the Internet to a level appropriate for children, making it impossible for so adults to communicate about important issues.
A new law isn’t needed. The net is already subject to the same laws against obscenity and child pornography that apply to any media. The Internet is interactive; you must set out to find what you’re looking for. So adults can decide for themselves what they want to see. Parents can control what their children access on the net, by direct supervision or by software which denies access based on parental criteria. (Surfwatch and NetNanny, for example, not only have a set of categories they automatically screen for, but can also be tailored to avoid anything else a parent finds objectionable.)
The CDA criminalizes network speech that is constitutionally protected in print and available from any bookstore or library: material that is “indecent” or “patently offensive.” Both terms are unconstitutionally vague (they have no absolute legal definition, referring to “community standards”, what standards apply to a global Internet is not clear) and overbroad (less restrictive means would obtain the desired effect). The ridiculous result is that, for example, you could be jailed or fined for creating Web sites containing the full text of the Supreme Court’s Pacifica Decision (which includes a transcript of George Carlin’s “dirty words” that broadcasters aren’t supposed to use). Not knowing exactly what might be indecent has an incredibly chilling effect, worse than the actual censorship itself. Law–abiding citizens are forced to second–guess the prosecutors, and must err on the side of the conservative. Under the CDA, don’t bother trying to create a legally acceptable Web site that deals with issues like the prevention of rape or the spread of AIDS or other serious issues. Under the CDA, this essay is probably illegal to post on the net (because later I use the word “pissed”).
Perhaps most importantly, the global nature of the Internet and the technology of which it is constructed makes it impossible for a U.S. law regarding content to have much useful effect. Any “objectionable” material will still be on servers in Amsterdam and elsewhere, still available to anyone in the world. (An interesting aside is that various projects undertaken on the net provide the full text of books banned anywhere in the world, so they are available everywhere in the world.) Thus, the CDA can’t possibly have its intended effect of eliminating material from the net. While it can serve to repress what U.S. citizens say on the net, it can’t repress what they read on the net.
The battle against the CDA has been waged by an overwhelming collection of common citizens, corporations and experts against a small number of radical right–wing kooks and a misguided Congress. Some of the plaintiffs in the lawsuits seeking to overturn the act include: the American Library Association; the American Society of Newspaper Editors; America Online, Inc.; American Booksellers Association, Inc.; American Civil Liberties Union; Apple Computer, Inc.; Association of American Publishers, Inc.; CompuServe Incorporated; Electronic Frontier Foundation; Health Sciences Libraries Consortium; Magazine Publishers of America, Inc.; Microsoft Corporation; National Press Photographers Association; Newspaper Association of America; Planned Parenthood; Prodigy Services Company; the Society of Professional Journalists; and the Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition, representing nearly 50,000 individual Internet users.
This June, a Philadelphia federal appeals court struck down the CDA, saying in part, “Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects... As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion.” A second federal appeals court (in New York) came to similar conclusions soon after. Those decisions are being appealed by the government to the U.S. Supreme Court, so this particular fight is not yet over. Even if we prevail here, we must always be ready to defend our rights. There will always be those who think their morality should be forced on the rest of us by the government.
o0o
But What Does Senator Exon Have To Do with Erotica?
Senator Exon (and the other sponsors of the bill that became the CDA) played a very important role in the publication of this book. They found it a publisher.
From the first time I heard about the bill that would become the CDA, I helped the fight in whatever small ways I could. Since I’d been a net citizen for ten years, the CDA wasn’t just an abstract injustice for me to object to; it very directly threatened my personal civil liberties and my professional livelihood. I was pissed.
I was already a member of organizations that would lead the fight against the act (the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility), I later joined the Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition (thus adding my name to the list of plaintiffs in the legal case against the CDA) and I signed whatever petitions and letters I could to add my dissenting voice to the messages heard by our lawmakers.
Naturally, I followed the fight against the CDA by reading on the Web. During one session, I followed a link labeled “Why I Write Erotica.” I liked the essay I read there. I strongly agreed with most of the ideas it expressed. I went on to read several other things by the same author, Mary Anne Mohanraj. Her writing was clear and powerful. I read that she was looking for a publisher for an anthology of her work. My first thought was ‘I’m a publisher, but my company doesn’t publish that kind of stuff.’
As I thought about it more, I realized that it was actually a good fit for IAM and that it was something I really wanted to do. I’d started my company as a more socially responsible place to work (a place where the human bottom line was just as important as this quarter’s financials), and I had a chance to make good on that goal in several ways. The CDA stunk, and what better (or more ironic) way to protest it than by publishing “dirty stories” found on the Internet while giving full credit to Senator Exon and friends. Besides, Mary Anne already had a strong following of Internet fans, and IAM had one of the first commercial Web sites accepting orders via online forms (before there was even a company named “Netscape”). So, we’d be in a good position to market the book to that waiting Internet audience.
Most importantly, Mary Anne isn’t just any writer of erotica.
She uses erotica as a tool rather than as a means unto itself. As an author, she wants us to consider deeply the intellectual, philosophical, and ethical problems of our world. Some of those problems have to do with our own personal sex lives, or about what we tolerate in other people’s sex lives. Other problems can still be examined metaphorically in erotic work. How better to bring them to our attention? Mary Anne’s writing is certainly not only ‘literature designed to be read with one hand.’ It is stimulating and exciting, intellectually and otherwise.
Though I decided to go ahead and publish the book, I still had some reservations. I thought ‘maybe this or that is over the line, and maybe we ought to cut it.’ After talking with Mary Anne about it, and after thinking about it more, I realized the importance of keeping her work completely intact. If I wanted to draw a line, where would I draw it? Ernest Hemingway once submitted a piece to the editor of Esquire with a letter that said “Here is the piece. If you can’t say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co–habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment.” I wanted the reader to have a strong impression of Mary Anne’s vision, without the dilution of heavy–handed editing.
I found a new appreciation of how important and relevant art is in today’s world, characterized this summer by the jumbo–jet which fell to the ocean without explanation, and a pipe–bomb exploded at the Olympics. We need desperately to drop old prejudices and to see new alternatives. We’re comfortable with our usual perspective, and different views are sometimes uncomfortable.
Art that never disturbs us rarely moves us. We need to be moved.
Dale L. Larson, Intangible Assets Manufacturing
dale@iam.com
http://www.iam.com
o0o
For more information on free speech and electronic civil liberties, see:
http://www.eff.org — Electronic Frontier Foundation
http://www.well.com/user/freedom/index.html — Feminists for Free Expression
http://rainbow.rmii.com/~fagin/faic/ — Families Against Internet Censorship
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/banned-books.html — Banned Books Online
People are fascinated by sex. It’s a fact that can’t be denied, however much the Moral Majority might like to. We see this daily, in the tools of the ad–men, in the whispers of the gossips, in the schoolboys sneaking looks at Playboy after school. This isn’t a bad thing, in and of itself. Without sex, we wouldn’t be around very long — doesn’t it seem reasonable that we would take interest in such an innate biological drive?
What’s interesting is that we choose to create a taboo about sex. No matter to what corner of the globe you venture, every culture has raised some proscriptions against sex. Often they contradict each other. The effect is to make sex even more desirable, since humans yearn for the forbidden, the taboo. So every senator thundering against the proliferation of smut on the Internet sends fifty or five hundred rushing out to get net accounts. Sex is a joyous and important act, and the discourse surrounding it can be a powerful tool. And what have we done with that tool? We’ve neglected it, and worse — we’ve left it in the hands of those who use it irresponsibly.
I’m talking partly about the moralists; the scared ones. The ones who point to sexuality as the cause of every ill on this earth, and preach that the only cure is absolute abstinence, or fidelity within a state–sanctified marriage. The ones who see every loving act as a crime against women, or against children, and so play on our fears till we feel slime in every caress and see a monster in every man. That’s ridiculous and unfair, and gives far too little credit to our own ability to discriminate between danger and delight. We raise our daughters with fear rather than strength — then throw the blame on sex.
I’m also talking about men. Don’t get me wrong — I’m very fond of men, and this isn’t meant as some mass condemnation. But for far too long, men have had far more freedom to be really sexual beings than women have (though men have been repressed by society in different ways). Men have possessed more freedom to think about sex, to talk about it, to do it, while too many women have been ashamed of their sexuality. Even the most liberated man may contribute to the problem. I can’t count the number of times I’ve met one of my readers — who then recoils, startled. “You mean you’re really a woman?” They’re then too embarrassed to even speak to me. I’ve turned from a fantasy or a delusion into a real breathing woman — one who discusses sexuality openly, and that’s a creature that simply can’t exist in their world–view. That’s not their fault — it’s the fault of a society which has dictated that “good” women, “nice” women, don’t discuss sex. At least not in front of the menfolk. And so public sexuality has been left in the hands of the men, especially those men willing to exploit its vast potential.
I’m talking about the porn industry, which makes millions cranking out garbage. By garbage, I don’t mean sex–related material — I mean sex–related material done badly, with no thought for portraying realistic people or emotions. Not to say that all porn needs to be sophisticated, subtle and elegant; I certainly think there’s a place for writing that’s simply fast and hot and maybe even a little cheesy. Neither need it all be factual; you’ll see s more than a few magical characters in my stories, and I think fiction would be poorer without that option. What I do object to are those unrealistic aspects that are damaging. For example, there are far too many stories where a woman is gang–raped, bleeding badly and still orgasming wildly. That’s a frighteningly dangerous myth to be spreading. Or to take a less extreme example, too many porn–makers seem to think that a woman must have huge firm breasts to be sexy, or that men must have foot–long penises. Real people are sexy — people who sweat and swear and have sweet sagging breasts and get tired once in a while. A man isn’t a machine, after all, and a reader who expects real life sex to be like the porn mags is in for a shock. I think it’s long past time for intelligent thoughtful people to turn their energies in this direction — to use and shape this field to do something worthwhile. That’s what I’m trying to do (along with quite a few others of course, but not enough — not nearly enough).
I’m fascinated by people, in all their strengths and weaknesses, and to my mind, nothing illustrates a person more effectively than how and what he or she loves. I attempt to use the vast power and majesty of sex to show the secrets of the human heart... and I admit to being an idealist. I want to change the world and make it a better place. I feel that human sexuality has been twisted for a long time. In my opinion, our culture (American culture is what I know, but I think it applies to most of the world) has an unhealthy fear of sexuality. We punish people for enjoying sex, for celebrating sex, for having sex with people of the wrong religion, race, gender, or even having the wrong kind of sex. I think that leads to people being unwilling or unable to talk about sex, and that leads to miscommunication and heartbreak. Take the problem of date rape alone — I wonder how many of those situations would have even come up in a society where sexuality was openly discussed and appreciated.
So I write these stories as part of my own attempt to change the world. I write stories with strong consenting women, to remind people that strong women are sexy and that consent is crucial. I write stories with characters of various sexual orientations and genders, to spread a little awareness. I write stories dealing with taboo subjects. Mainly, I try to write stories with real people — people who love and hate and fear and sometimes have sex for all the wrong reasons; people who have lives and hopes and dreams beyond the immediate sex act. I’m trying to shape a healthier world — a lofty goal, but I have help. Writers, publishers, the ACLU, reasonable people in government (few and far between, but they do exist).
You readers are the most important — you’re willing to read my words; that’s a big step. So there’s my rant, and I leave you with instructions:
Have safe, sane, consensual sex (or don’t) with whomever you choose, however you choose...
Fight for the right to do so and the right of everyone else to do so...
Fight for the right to talk about it, or they’ll take that right away from us too...
And perhaps most importantly, spread the word.
Silence is the great death.
Mary Anne Mohanraj
San Francisco, October, 1996
The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. —John Gilmore
So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life. —Richard Nixon
Damn all expurgated books; the dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. —Walt Whitman
I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too. —Thomas Jefferson
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.—John Fitzgerald Kennedy
The pillars of truth and the pillars of freedom—they are the pillars of society. —Henrik Ibsen
Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. —Sinclair Lewis
Nudity is the most natural state. I was born nude and I hope to be buried nude. —Elle MacPherson
Take off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and report: There’s a naked person outside! —Mike Nichols
There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth. —F. H. Bradley
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which a it is clothed? —Michelangelo
In America, sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world, it is a fact. —Marlene Dietrich
It’s red hot, mate. I hate to think of this sort of book getting in the wrong hands. As soon as I’ve finished this, I shall recommend they ban it. —Tony Hancock
Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate. —Bertrand Russell
Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters. —Friedrich Nietzsche
When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don’t own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet. —Rick Kelly and Lyle Myhr
Exon me! she cried, as I licked her hot wet Gorton. She writhed under my teasing tongue as her Gramm washed over her, her juices pouring out. I moved up to suck and nibble her Heflins, only to have her clutch my Byrd, and drive my aching Helms into her waiting Gorton. “Coats!” she said, “We’re being quoted in a political text!” —Anonymous on the Net