Die Hard IV: Kindergarten Cop

I'm a cultural conservative. What does that mean? Well, for instance, it means that when I read a Garance Franke-Ruta op-ed arguing that we need to raise the age of consent for appearing in a pornographic film to twenty-one, in order to shrink the talent pool available for amateur smut purveyors like Joe "Girls Gone Wild" Francis, I think: Age of consent? Why not just throw the creep in jail on an obscenity charge? And when Garance explains that going after the pornography industry directly is too hard, because it would require "moralistic sermons and abridgements of speech," I think no, you actually don't need the moralistic sermons; a nice stint in prison does the trick just fine.

But being a cultural conservative doesn't mean being a puritan. You have to be able to distinguish between Debbie Does Dallas and D.H. Lawrence, between Ron Jeremy and James Joyce, between the violence in Hostel and the violence in The Godfather. You have to recognize, above all, that there are certain magnificent works of art that aren't supposed to be fun for the whole family - works of art whose greatness is inseparable from their willingness to show the world as it really is, warts and gunshot wounds and all - works of such raw genius and unsurpassed integrity that to censor or compromise them in any way would be akin to painting clothes on the nudes in the Sistine Chapel, or hanging a pair of Hanes on Michelangelo's David.

I'm speaking, of course, of the Die Hard movies. But apparently not everyone feels the same way.

(hat tip: Peter Suderman)

Comments

You're probably the person on the blogosphere I find myself most ideologically close to, but this is where we part ways.

I'm sorry, but a) I don't think that pornography has the kind of awful rotting influence on society that you keep suggesting (but never provide an argument about), and b) I just cannot believe that a majority or a regime that would throw Joe Francis in jail would take a stand for the artistic integrity of, say, the creators of Six Feet Under and refuse to "hang a pair of Hanes on Michelangelo's David." It just doesn't add up. Freedom of speech is freedom of speech is freedom of speech.

Posted by PEG | May 8, 2007 2:18 AM

j. francis' 'soft core' is a lot more repulsive to me morally & ethically than a lot of 'hard core' (DP & all).

Posted by razib | May 8, 2007 2:22 AM

I'm with you, Ross. Die Hard is a great series.

Posted by mark | May 8, 2007 7:14 AM

pornography is a natural and inevitable consequence of the imbalances beteween male and female sexuality. these imbalances will never be eradicated, pornography will never go away.

also, isn't there some evidence that pornography has helped in the reduction of rape over the past thirty or so years? (i know it's sketchy evidence, but if it checked out, would that change your view, ross?).

and of course, it doesn't surprise me that a devout catholic is opposed to pornography: it affords that most dangerous of things, luscious pleasure, to millions.

Posted by lucretius | May 8, 2007 10:02 AM

Disordered pleasure, dangerous to the soul.

In a pinch, I would rather have no Lady Chatterley's Lover, if that's a necessary price to get rid of pornography. Fig leaves on statues is acceptable too.

Posted by withywindle | May 8, 2007 11:26 AM

Ross,
Throwing someone in jail is, itself, a moralistic sermon. Further, the Supreme Court's obscenity doctrine has been notoriously subjective and therefore unworkable. When the government renders aesthetic judgments to distinguish among obscene, indecent, and conventional art, it's offering authoritative verdicts on matters of opinion, a classic gesture of totalitarian states that helps render their civic life a rotten and cramped simulation of freedom. Our use of this legal regime is selective; our version of it tries to exempt politics from its censoriousness, and obviously one can't equate the atmosphere of our culture with the violent, absurd, pervasive dogmatism of, say, China's Cultural Revolution. But the felt need to control the imagination exists in both instances, and if it's one of the main ethical reasons we object in the totalitarian case, then we should ask ourselves why the same value hadn't ought to apply to our response to works produced in our own culture that we personally find distasteful.

Posted by jason | May 8, 2007 11:48 AM

I'm a former lit major, now gainfully employed in less important pursuits, with multiple works of Joyce criticism (ok, mostly by Hugh Kenner) on my shelf. I'd gladly lose Ulysses to de-pornify the culture a bit, so count me with withywindle.

Anyway, ULYSSES and Lawrence were a lot more fun when they were a bit hard to find. As lucretius notes, porn isn't going away anytime soon. It might be less prevalent, profitable, and acceptable if legal harrassment and such were applied, and I doubt the literati would have trouble getting ahold of bootleg LOLITA.

Posted by the marquis of carabas | May 8, 2007 11:48 AM

What Ross is getting at is this: Conservatives need to be concerned with moral significance when they evaluate an artifact of our culture - not with a superficial examination of how many curse words, how many instances of nudity - etc.

As for jailing Joe Francis. Doesn't it just sound like a good idea?

I'm kidding. Sorta.

Posted by Michael Brendan Dougherty | May 8, 2007 11:54 AM

pornography is a natural and inevitable consequence of the imbalances beteween male and female sexuality. these imbalances will never be eradicated, pornography will never go away.

What does that even mean?

Raving leftist though I am, I basically share Mr. Douthat's view of pornography. But the free speech issue is real, and I don't know how to deal with it, or we can dismiss it so cavalierly. Douthat is clearly able to distinguish between worthwhile art (which definitely includes Lolita, by the way*) and pornography, but do we really want the state trying to do that? I'm afraid laws designed to protect those directly involved in pornography may be the best we can do.

*Unless you're John Derbyshire and really do enjoy it as porn: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODM4MzkyNzVmMjhhYWM0NWM2OWRkNDE5OGVhMmJhYTc=

Posted by BP | May 8, 2007 1:08 PM

BP - you wrote: "But the free speech issue is real, and I don't know how to deal with it, or we can dismiss it so cavalierly."

what does this even mean?

what *i* meant is clear to anyone over the age of fourteen: men and women have different sexual tendencies in a whole range of different ways, and pornography is one manifestation of this truth (things like romance novels are another).

why would this be difficult for anyone to grasp unless they didn't want to because they were 'opposed to pornography' and that's that?

Posted by lucretius | May 8, 2007 2:36 PM

withywindle, i thought you were kidding for a minute but maybe you're not. 'disordered pleasure'? please help me out on what this means. as for 'dangerous to the soul': until it's determined that such a thing as 'a soul', then the jury must be out on what is and what is not 'dangerous' to it.

would i rather have pornography in the world, or mumbo jumbo?

Posted by lucretius | May 8, 2007 2:47 PM

BP,

Are you kidding or do you really think Derbyshire enjoyed it as porn? Sure sounds like he reads it as literature to me.

Posted by Klug | May 8, 2007 2:58 PM

Klug: Only partly kidding. Didn't you find that review deeply creepy? The bit about using rapists a barometer of normal human sexual desire? And blaming the fact that our society is "feminized" (and the rest of that long, unintentionally hilarious list of adjectives) for trying to hide the hard truth that we all want to rape 13 year olds? He can only speak for himself on that account.

lucretius: I suppose that unlike Douthat, I'm not opposed to pornography in theory, just virtually all of it that exists in reality. Whether it reflects an innate difference in male and female sexuality is neither here nor there; if men are naturally inclined to violent misogyny, that hardly makes it right.

Posted by BP | May 8, 2007 3:45 PM

I don't see why lucretius can't see that one could hold that pornography is a "natural" (in the sense that one would expect it to exist) element of our world, arising from (in part) the differences he notes, and that it might be eminently prosecutable and bannable.

Rape, as a large scale phenomenon, exists, perhaps, for similar reasons; so does spouse abuse. We have no trouble banning these things -- they are objectively bad.

Now, you will reply that these have objective harms -- they are not "victimless" crimes. But we society judges many freely consented-to (in theory) things unacceptable -- working below the minimum wage, for example. There is (except for the hard libertarian) little ground to stand on that grants an a priori philosophical dismissal for the idea of banning porn.

Of course it would still exist. You might wish to consult history for some notion of what laws _do_, if that is your objection.

Posted by the marquis of carabas | May 8, 2007 3:52 PM

oh, marquis, i am in no doubt that porography might be 'eminently prosecutable and bannable', my point is that it would be wrong so to do. as you point out, pornography is victimless - it is consenting adults watching consenting adults do stuff to other consenting adults - but more than that, it gives pleasure on a vast scale. absent any indication of commensurate costs, what on earth would be the justification for banning it?

your minimum wage comparison is embarrassingly feeble: firstly it is highly debatable whether minimum wage laws are good in the first place. however, more pertinently, proponents of minimum wage rules argue that low paid people are 'victims'. the rules exist because of certain assumptions made in our society about economic 'fairness'. if there were no (real or perceived) 'victims' of the system, there would be no minimum wage.

it seems to me that ross and anti-porn people generally project their discomfort with aspects of human sexuality into a desire to ban other peoples' fun. this is and has always been a fundamental religious impulse, and it's as insidious now as it always has been.

Posted by lucretius | May 8, 2007 4:47 PM

marquis: Self-expression, including directly conceptual as well as more ambiguous aesthetic forms, is a different order of freedom, closer to the core of the concept, than economic concerns. Precedent for this view is abundant in Supreme Court First Amendment doctrine. Further, the harms minimum-wage laws exist to prevent are direct, intrinsic to the status quo ante, and objective, whereas the harms pornography laws aim to prevent are indirect, speculative, subjective, and highly contested.

Posted by jason | May 8, 2007 4:50 PM

lucretius, Jason:

Yes, but these are rather narrower objections that only hold if I assume your viewpoint, which is pseudo-libertarian or at least libertine. Of course this is a religious impluse -- just as, essentially, notions of "fairness" beyond getting one's own are religious impulses.

Basing the argument against banning porn on points that no "cultural conservative" will accept is silly -- of course porn harms people, and those who don't see that are deluded and degenerate, by and large, even if otherwise nice people.

And Jason -- Supreme Court First Amendment doctrine is a silly place to look for anything resembling principles of how society ought to be ordered -- given that somehow it has found its way to protecting pornography no one writing the First Amendment would have imagined might ever be legally protected, and banning political speech (the point of the Amendment in the first place) in ways that many of them would find very problematic.

Posted by the marquis of carabas | May 8, 2007 5:37 PM

More to the point -- reasonable people who might speak up for LOLITA and ULYSSES like myself, given this "everything goes is the only option to protect these things!" rhetoric -- well, if everything must go to have these things, then best to side with the know-nothings and we can live without ULYSSES. Chaucer is too old to be eliminated, and really, the artistic acheivements of humanity up to the time of ULYSSES, even if you remove all the somewhat porny stuff (Catallus, my friend) -- well, what's left over is good enough that I'm willing to side with the radical censors if the alternative is the current pornographication of society.

Posted by the marquis of carabas | May 8, 2007 5:43 PM

at this point:

"of course porn harms people, and those who don't see that are deluded and degenerate, by and large, even if otherwise nice people."

i.e., the point at which baseless assertion and desperate name-calling supersede reasonable debate, the conversation is officially done.

Posted by lucretius | May 8, 2007 5:49 PM

Sigh. Yes, the conversation has nowhere to go, as usual. The problem is, it isn't baseless -- it's fairly obvious to anyone holding anything like a traditional sexual morality. From my POV, your assertions -- that porn gives "pleasure" rather than, say, debasing male-female sexuality away from a natural function ordered to the creation of children and the permanent union of spouses and into a gland-based selfish search for objects for use -- are not only baseless, but patently absurd.

We have no way to communicate, except perhaps Mao's way, at the barrel of a gun. Fortunately, for now, we mostly stick to the ballot box.

Posted by the marquis of carabas | May 8, 2007 5:58 PM

(PS I put in the silly "From my POV" as a shibboleth since we've clearly, yes, fallen to the inevtiable "That's what _you_ say" stage of every argument that touches on differing first principles (as Raymond Smullyan, I think, noted))

Posted by the marquis of carabas | May 8, 2007 6:04 PM

BQ:

I like Derbyshire's writing, most of the time. But it did seem a little TMI. He's trying to write seriously about a seriously creepy subject, so maybe that's part of it.

Were you more bothered by the review or the following theorizing? I think that the "barometer" theory is odd, but interesting. The 12-15 y.o. thing is a hypothesis about jailbait, basically. I'm not keen on thinking about these things, but if you're writing about Lolita, it seems natural to go there.

Posted by Klug | May 8, 2007 6:06 PM

You know, its not like we have to invent some imaginary world. In 1961, in John Kennedy's America there was virtually no publically available pornography. It certainly wasn't in the 7-11's. But sex was readily available and indeed we were in the midst of a baby boom.

As with so much of the 60's rot that decade destroyed the public square. If 1961 America is the same as the Cultural Revoloution in China or the Taliban than words have no meaning.

The radio did not spew epithets, naked people did not occupy the magazine wracks and men did not expect their wives or girlfriends to 1) apply tatoos or 2)shave in particularly uncomfortably places.

The good thing about being a conservative is that you can point to a free country that did not have the moral relativism, abscence of standards and depravity on every corner now cheered by the lucretius' of this world. It was called America.

If America circa 1960-1964 was a tyranny that word has no meaning either.

Posted by jjv | May 8, 2007 8:31 PM

and, jjv, let's continue to celebrate the america that still permits people who are clearly mad write comments on blogs.

btw, one of my favorite bits about america in 1961? segregation.

Posted by lucretius | May 8, 2007 10:38 PM

The idea that pornography exacts no "cost" either from its performers or from its consumers seems so counterintuitive as to qualify as fanciful. There is a case to be made that this does not justify limiting the exercise of free expression, to be sure, but one need not deny the existence of harms to do it. Yes, it is reasonable to point out that there is no dividing line between our reputedly Puritanical past and the onset of hedonism, whether this is dated to the rise of Hef and the Playboy empire or to the Summer of Love; certainly frequenting prostitutes and other forms of "oat-sowing" were less stigmatized at points in history. But the debasement of sex from an expression of love to a hormonally-driven act is certainly a relatively recent phenomenon, one that seems to have accelerated with the rise of the internet as a medium for distributing pornography and with the casualization of pornography from a trench coat in a dingy theater sort of stigma to something socially acceptable for mixed company and for partners to enjoy together. Further evidence of this debasement is the casualization of exhibitionism, of which Francis is partly a catalyst and partly a beneficiary, and the transition of kink and fetish from the nether reaches of the newsstand to the cover of Cosmo. If you call yourself a conservative and you are not at least mildly fearful of a cultural iceberg effect, you need to re-read your Burke.

Posted by Anonymous Conservative | May 8, 2007 10:55 PM

It seems my discomfort with porn has almost nothing to do with these right wing types'. I think the problem with a lot of porn is that it actively exploits its performers--there's plenty of evidence for this--and that it espouses an unhealthy (to put it mildly) view of sex built on objectification, domination, and violence, even if it doesn't always do so explicitly. The victims are overwhelmingly young women (though of course the gay porn industry treats young men in the same way).

Anyway I never said it should be banned. I leave this thread by agreeing with lucretius that if you think America in 1960 was a free or just society there is something wrong with you.

Posted by BP | May 9, 2007 1:28 AM

That Derbyshire article is very creepy. It would be one thing (and probably true) if he said that women over 24 became gradually less attractive; his apparent belief that after 24 they almost immediately become not attractive at all is ludicrous. The use of rape statistics is weird because I would think the idea of destroying the young and seemingly innocent would be part of the appeal for the rapist. (This also makes me wonder: How old is Mrs. Derb? I was always under the impression Derb didn't tie the knot until he was over forty; is she twenty years younger than he?)

Posted by James Kabala | May 9, 2007 10:57 AM

I leave this thread by agreeing with lucretius that if you think America in 1960 was a free or just society there is something wrong with you.

Of course it wasn't. Do you think ours is? I don't think there was any inherent connection between less toleration of porn and, say, racial segregation. Just as, if one hundred years from now, hard anti-Semitism has come into style again and Harvard has a Jew quota again, it would make sense to point back to now and say "oh please; don't criticize that by pointing to 2007 -- why, abortion was legal then!"

There may be social evils that are a "seamless garment" but I don't think most of 1960s' ills were particularly connected to its lack of public porn.

Posted by the marquis of carabas | May 9, 2007 12:02 PM

marquis -- If the notion that pornography necessarily causes harm rather than pleasure is as self-evident as you suggest, the question arises as to why anyone chooses to consume it, or for that matter to participate in it, not only for money but for free. They must be motivated by something. Thoughts?

Posted by jason | May 9, 2007 1:59 PM

Jason: people do all kinds of reprehensible things, and "self evidence" is overrated by philosophers since Socrates. No Christian (or realist of any type) has ever sensibly believed that to know the good is to do the good.

The harm adheres to the soul, which in general people are quite willing to sell out (I include myself) for momentary pleasure or gain.

I mean, this is like asking why people have affairs in marriage -- one reason is that people often will choose harmful sexual pleasure over the difficulty of loyalty, love, and integrity.

Posted by the marquis of carabas | May 9, 2007 2:25 PM

marquis -- Momentary pleasure has a legitimate place in life, and the damage of pornography to more lasting pleasures needs to be demonstrated. Adultery, by contrast, entails more concrete harm -- the violation of a contract. Even there, however, its wisdom or effect on character cannot sensibly be judged without knowledge of context. Someone who finally cheats on an abusive or even a "selfish" and neglectful spouse may be expanding her vision of the meaning that can inhere in relationships, opening the way to a richer life.

Posted by jason | May 9, 2007 3:15 PM

opening the way to a richer life.

Thus speak those who the rest of us would be well advised NEVER to trust with our hearts.

In other words, that the defenders of adultery would also like pornography is not surprising -- interesting how people who use the word "contract" so readily have no idea their system in the end makes all trust, affection, and reliance on contracts without harsh coercion impossible.

Posted by the marquis of carabas | May 10, 2007 11:44 AM

marquis -- Your resort to ad hominem argument in the first sentence of your last reply is unfortunate and unpersuasive. Your second sentence simply makes a drastic, unsupported claim: my "system," as you call my disagreement with you, "makes all trust, affection, and reliance on contracts without harsh coercion impossible." Why do you think so?

Further, you have misrepresented my position by suggesting I am a "defender" of adultery, whereas what I said is that blanket, a priori judgments about it are likely to misconstrue the moral meaning of the act in some cases.

Finally, you italicized my phrase "opening the way to a richer life," implying that you had a problem with it. I think it's safe to say that the pursuit of happiness is both a very traditional (indeed, canonical) American concern and, as the phrasing suggests, a complex enough goal that it can rarely be lastingly obtained by mere adherence to formulas. It often requires effort, including the rethinking of past decisions and values. We learn through experience, and sometimes this means reevaluating what we had hoped would be lifelong relationships.

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