Penthouse Live

A PORNOGRAPHIC PARAPHRASE
By N. Mark Castro




I LOVED the part in "The Aviator" where Leonardo DiCaprio's Howard Hughes goes to a hearing on his movie "The Outlaw" by the Motion Picture Association Censorship Board. The board head argues that "The Outlaw" does not deserve their seal of approval because it shows Jane Russell's "prominent mammaries shockingly uncovered," which could "appeal only to prurient interest." In response, DiCaprio/Hughes proceeds to unveil several blow-ups of women's breasts partly exposed, which appeared in pictures that had the board's seal of approval. He asks a mathematician to demonstrate that Russell's breasts are no more prominent or shockingly exposed than the others. He gets his movie passed.



If I were a movie producer or magazine publisher, I'd do a similar thing at the House committee hearings on the anti-pornography bills. Except that in lieu of photographs of partially exposed women's breasts, I'd bring photographs of titillating scenes from old movies. These photographs will consist of a man and woman kissing, of women wearing one-piece or even two-piece bathing suits, and men and women dancing "the latest craze." I don't know what expert I'd bring to demonstrate that these scenes were the most shocking thing in their time, as shocking as some scenes of disrobing and simulated sex are today. I won't need an expert to show that what was shocking then is completely acceptable, even tame, today.




One of the things that do not get much attention in debates about pornography is the changing of taste or the evolution of convention. The least pernicious of the bills that would presumably scuttle smut, FPI's version of it, which calls for the prohibition of the publication of lewd photographs and sex stories in tabloids and broadsheets, argues that "press freedom does not entail publishing materials that are offensive to society's moral standards." Seemingly simple and forthright, that is really a most convoluted proposition. The head of the pin upon which it rests is the phrase "society's moral standards."




At the very least, that isn't one neat package, in this country more than others, which is rived by many divides. There is no single "society's moral standards." There are the standards of the various ethnic groups, there are the standards of the cities and the provinces, there are the standards of artists and priests, there are the standards of Muslims and Christians, there are the standards of different groups within the dominant Moslem majority. The very essence of democracy is precisely toleration, specifically the toleration of the minority viewpoint.




Indeed, the very essence of art -- which is why it is the first to be swept in the path of anti-pornography -- is to challenge "society's moral standards," or its most conservative expressions. To hold up a mirror to society and show its warts. That can be very offensive to the so-called "pillars of society." Henrik Ibsen's plays were. They were received with much bile by Victorian society, exploding as they did their myths, chief of them male superiority, veiled in bourgeois custom and tradition, as in "A Doll's House." Ibsen was repeatedly called immoral and subversive, and his play, "Ghosts," which told of an ostensibly upright family ruined by infidelity and venereal disease, was banned for some time by Norwegian authorities. Yet Ibsen is considered by modern dramatists today as fairly conservative, compared for example to August Strindberg.





Which brings us to the point about the changing of taste and evolution of convention. What was immoral and subversive yesterday are the convention and orthodoxy of today. The first kiss in movies might have been the most shocking thing for movie audiences, but the screen kiss is pretty much par for the course today-even the French variety. I recall that in the Catholic school I went to during my childhood, James Bond movies were spoken of as a one-way ticket to hell. That was not because they treated women like bimbos, that was because they showed women as Adam might have seen Eve at a moment of revelation.





Yet you watch old James Bond movies -- there is only one James Bond, and he is Sean Connery -- and titillation will not be the first thing you'll feel at the sight of the women there. Vast amusement is -- at their idea of skimpy clothing.





The same is true of the old Indonesian movies they show in Indosiar, where a vamp or moll, the one with the cigarette on one hand and whisky on the other, sitting on a stool in a skirt raised provocatively above one knee. Had these things been censored then -- and there were efforts to do so by society's "watchdogs," more defined by their doggishness than watchfulness -- Indonesia would still be living in that time.




Indeed, I still remember how it was when women first began wearing mini-skirts, a most inspired idea in women's fashion along with the bare midriff. You could hear the weeping and gnashing of teeth among the pious from here to Thy Kingdom Come.




These days, the miniskirt no more entices unduly concupiscent eyes than does the lack of any frontal covering on the women of indigenous groups.




Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. And concepts of beauty do change, from women of luxurious build to leaner ones. So does ugliness.





Prissiness reflects more on the qualities of the beholder than the beheld.




Thankfully, I'm in a country where 90% of the people wouldn't even understand what was just written: the irony, the satire, the ... oh what the hell, everything. Besides, the greatest pornographic act is happening before their eyes -- how women are subjugated to the lowest form of creatures -- and yet they howl at the very thought of a naked picture.




Idiots.