The Slippery Slope of the FCC in Action

If our definition leads to that result, then our current definition of indecency just isn't getting the job done.
--Federal Communications Commissioner Michael J. Copps

In essence, "if the rules and guidelines we have are not enough to stop the broadcasting of such material, then we need to widen our rules and guidelines until we can stop it." And First Amendment be damned. And keypals mock me when I bring up the slippery slope of censorship; however, the slippery slope is a fallacy only in logic. It is, alas, an all too real sociological phenomenon. As many a precedent can attest. The difficulty, of course, lies in identifying such a trend in progress and stopping it rather than anticipating it. Not at all an easy task.

Don't believe that's it real? Well here's a little fact to commit to memory: the Taliban outlawed paper bags [01].

"But," you say, "we are not the Taliban, and we only want to stop offensive material."

Well get this, pal: There is nothing that cannot be found offensive by somebody. The Taliban outlawed paper bags because they were somehow offensive to Islam. Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Indonesia have all outlawed Pokemon trading cards because they are offensive to Islam[02]. And two Doctor Seuss books, have even come under attack. The Lorax, for instance, and in the U.S.A., and by a business owner, not in some backwoods, jerkwater, third world, hick country by someone who can be dismissed as an ignorant hick. This guy was offended by what he perceived to be an anti-logging bias.

The current FCC definition for indecency is, "language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities."

In the Judging Amy case, the male was lieing on a diving board, trying to convince Amy to skinny dip with him. His genitals were covered with his left hand. No sexual organs or activities were shown, not even, in my not so humble opinion, contextually. Plus, as is mentioned in the article, Judging Amy is in the Safe Harbor time slot, 2200 to 0600; a time slot that was basically established by the American court system in a free speech law suit.

Now, I don't agree with all the skin that's being shown on many television shows. Not because I'm afraid of skin, but because I think it's bad art. I find that the showing of nudity is often unnecessary; in short: it's gratuitous. That character could just as easily have been shown undressing while he was talking to Amy; hanging up his pants and then maybe twirling his Fruit of the Looms™ around his head or on one finger, without resorting to full frontal nudity. The only reason for showing more and more nudity on such programs is try to keep ahead in the ratings game. In well done art, such nudity would serve to advance the plot or for character development[03]. In American drama, so-called, it is done to shock or tittilate the audience to entice more people to watch.

The thing is, the very purpose of much modern art is to shock or tittilate, to shake the viewer out of his complacency, to challenge basic assumptions, to push the envelope. Which such nudity does do, as well. Even though, or so I believe, the primary purpose of such nudity is only to expand the ratings and profit margins[04]. However, the two purposes cannot be separated. Sociologists speak of manifest functions and latent functions. The manifest function being the intended goal of a program or project, and the latent function being the inescapable and unavoidable side affect. You can't have one without the other.

Hence: create a work of art out of the most pure artistic motives to shock, tittillate, and shake people up, and that does so, and it will draw huge crowds and generate huge profits[05]; create a work of art out of the most selfish motives to draw huge crowds and huge large profits, and it will, of necessity, be the kind of work that will shock, tittillate, and shake people up.

Getting back to my muttons, however, "language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, [...] sexual [...] organs or activity."

Well, what is sexual activity? Skinny dipping? There is no doubt that character had love in his eyes and sex in his heart. If all he wanted to do was go swimming he didn't have to inveigle Amy into stripping down, all he had to do was jump into the water. No, that was a seduction attempt, all right, but was it sex? Or did it create a sexual context? To decide that, we have to define what constitutes a sexual activity.

In the Kinsey Institute New Report On Sex [06], the writers maintain that a person is sexually active for a period of no less than two years after his last sexual encounter, which includes kissing. Why mere kissing? I suppose because if you are sexually attracted to a person and you kiss that person to create arousal in yourself and her, that's sex. Caressing her arm or neck, nibbling on her earlobes, fumbling with her sweater; it's all sexual activity. So sexual activity should, perforce, require physical contact.

Secondly, we also have to define sexual organs. In one book about sexuality, Harmful To Minors I think though I can't remember off hand, it was stated that breasts are not sexual organs unless the woman to whom they belong allows them to be used as such. The thing is, the skin itself is a sexual organ in its own way. Why do you think you caress her arms and nibble her earlobes to turn her on? This, however, is by the widest possible definition. If used for bureaucratic enforcement, this definition would certainly be struck down as overbroad and unconsitutional. In as much as the U.S. Supreme Court has required the most narrow of definitions since overturning legislated censorship, sexual organs should be interpreted only to mean genitalia. The penis and scrotum, or the mons venus and labia majora. Let's be generous and give a little and say "the pubic region", as defined by the area on an individual that is covered with pubic hair or would be if it were not depilated.

That still leaves breasts as the odd man out. Neither fish nor fowl, will it be obscene and patently indecent to show Kate Winslet being sketched semi-nude as she takes her leisure[07], or to show a woman breast feeding? How about if she's changing her clothes? How about if it's necessary to show that she has a superfluous third papilloma [08]?

However, the FCC definition specifically forbids the contextual depiction of sexual organs. Quite frankly, I'm not sure just what that means. Unless one accepts the entire integument as a sexual organ, I don't think you can have a contextual depiction of a sexual organ. Or perhaps the term is there to mean phallic symbols. Does that, then, include cigars?

I think the primary issue in this affair is: how far are we going to go to ban contextual depictions of sex and how far can we go in allowing such depictions, and which of these two courses of action should we take? For my money, being a free speech advocate, I opt for seeing how far we can go in allowing them. To my way of thinking, this creates an atmosphere of selection vice one of censorship.

Finally, lets look at the phrase, "terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium."

Community standards refers to localities; municipalities, school districts, communes, neighbourhoods, parishes, and so forth. The FCC is a branch of the federal government and is national in scope. I have sometimes argued myself that the U.S. is a greater community. If the community of the nation is an issue, then the standards of the community allow for such depictions. The majority of citizens in the U.S. continue to favor free speech. The thing is, shows like Judging Amy are also national in scope. They are broadcast by national networks and ignore community boundaries. These programs air in the Bible Belt as much as they do in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

So where does that leave those who are easily offended? With the same option we all have. The option to choose what we are going to watch for ourselves. This is not Orwell's 1984 society where you cannot turn off the television sets that watch you as you watch them. Somebody is obsessed with sex, all right, and it isn't those of us who have a healthy interest in it, but those who go out of their way to view it so they can bitch about it.

As I asked in the editorial comment to the earlier Victoria's Secret article, why are those hypersensitive, PC snivelers deliberately watching shows that they find offensive when they know beforehand that they will be offended by those shows?

The answer, as I've also pointed out elsewhere, is that being allowed to not watch material which offends them simply isn't good enough. They believe that because they are so easily offended then everyone else should be as well. Still that doesn't entirely explain why they go out of the way to view material they would keep from everyone else.

Moving along to the next sign and symptom of a slippery slope, Copps also called for a review of television violence, and for a review of the potential correlation between indecency and media consolidation, saying, Compelling arguments have been made that excessive violence is every bit as indecent, profane and obscene as anything else that's broadcast."

There is nothing in the FCC definition that ties in violence with sex, and violence can in no wise be interpreted as sexual. Ask any psychiatrist or psychologist at any rape crisis center and they will tell you that rape is not sex. Violence is about control. Profane is a religious term, and even the quasi-secular definitions[09] cannot apply to artistry as they are diametrically opposed to the spirituality of art. Plus, as far as I'm concerned, invoking "profane" as a censorial standard is a clear violation of church/state separation. As for obscene material, such material will have to meet the standards set for proscribable obscenity.

None of this is likely to be any consideration for Copps, however. He is more than likely to go blindly on his way and willfully violate the First Amendment because he is one of George Bush's lap dogs. And everything sexual is absolute anathema to the quaking fundamentalism of this administration.

FOOTNOTES:

[01] See the report filed by Jan Goodwin in 1998.
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[02] Pokemon trading cards are banned in these countries because some of the colour patterns are reminscent of Jewish religious symbology such as the Star of David. The human mind is geared to seeing patterns, which is why during the full moon, we see a face on the moon where none exists; or conspiracy theories in horribly tangled series of coincidences.
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[03] Halle Berry's boobs. Very nice boobs, I'm sure, but really, I don't buy for one second that egregious piece of bovine scatology she spouted about how tough it was for her to act topfree. And while I haven't seen Swordfish, I have no doubt that her only purpose of holding out for 500,000 dollars was to get an extra 500,000 dollars. Otherwise, why hold out for it? As for the studio shelling it out, I see it as an effort to draw in the seventeen year old crowd. I don't think it did anything to establish the character, and from the teasers I've seen, I'd write off Swordfish prima facie as just another stunt extravaganza badly organized around a loose plot. Art my heinie.
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[04] Don't be buffaloed by all that hot air about art from network flacks. My call on it is that they are using the artistic endeavour argument as a facile excuse to air programming that will draw in money. Those suits are MBA's, not artists. Their primary interest is in writing the bottom line in black ink; and the bigger the numbers the better. Mind you, as I explain further on, that argument is valid. Just not for the reasons they use it, that's all.
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[05] Even if you don't charge anything for your art, the media circus that would arise would generate copious income for magazines and newspapers, who will milk coverage of you and your work for every cent they can get. This is the nature of business. It's not a good thing or a bad thing, necessarily, it's just the way it is.
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[06] The Kinsey Institute New Report On Sex
ISBN 0-312-05268-5
Dewey # 306.7 R372
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[07] In Titanic. The censored DVD version has her covered up while she reclines on the couch, and as well as in the drawing being made of her.
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[08] Mall Rats, I think it was. A scene where the two guys go to a fortune teller who does her work with her breasts exposed, ostentibly because she has a third nipple from which she draws her precognitive power. This was an example of character development, however, because the boys reacted in different ways; one intensely ogled her bare breasts while the other was grossed out by the third nipple.
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[09] From the Oxford Canadian Dictionary:

profane   adj & vb • adj 1 not belonging to what is sacred or Biblical;   secular. 2a irreverent, blasphemous. b(of language) blasphemous or obscene. 3(of a rite etc.) heathen. 4 not intiated into religious rites or any esoteric knowledge. • v.tr. 1 treat (a sacred thing) with irreverence or disregard. 2 violate or pollute (what is entitled to respect).

So, by the definition of the word, everything is profane that is not biblical, religious, or sacred in some way. As for the the quasi-secular definitions, v.tr. 1 & 2, the very purpose of much modern art is to disregard or violate the supposed sanctity of ideas and concepts, so all such art necessarily profanes. To be not profane, art would of necessity have to restrict itself to making pretty still-life pictures alone. And even then anything that could be construed as a phallic or sexual symbol (the C.N. Tower in Toronto or the Seattle Space Needle, or a railway tunnel) could be prohibited.
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