NPN has been corresponding with a former employee of a porn shop with viewing booths. Considering that semen is routinely found on viewing booth surfaces, this person suspected and confirmed that the porn shop was not in full compliance with OSHA regulations on working with bodily fluids. Responding to a recent inquiry, OSHA wrote: Your […]
Legal Strategies
Capital Video Springfield: Secondary Effects Extend to Prostitution; Actions the City Can Take
On March 7, we relayed a report from Urban Compass that Capital Video’s Springfield porn shop was inhibiting revitalization in its neighborhood, most notably by discouraging countless grocery store prospects.Urban Compass followed up yesterday with more details of the secondary effects of this porn shop…Developer Leon Charkoudian, real estate broker Fred Rowe, and property manager […]
Penn State Law Professors Trot Out ‘Female Porn Leaders’ to Whitewash Realities of Adult Industry (explicit language)
NPN’s Jendi Reiter critiques Clay Calvert and Robert D. Richards, “Porn in Their Words: Female Leaders in the Adult Entertainment Industry Address Free Speech, Censorship, Feminism, Culture and the Mainstreaming of Adult Content” (PDF), published last year in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law [9 Vand. J. Ent. & Tech. L. 255 (2006)].This article […]
A Review of Catharine MacKinnon’s Only Words
Only Words, a slim volume by University of Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon, published in 1993, might be considered the Bible of the radical feminist anti-pornography movement, providing a theoretical and legal framework to complement the more personal evidence presented in Andrea Dworkin‘s impassioned memoirs. MacKinnon’s intelligence and thirst for justice are undeniable, but some […]
Gazette: “Couple appeals porn shop’s building permit”
As reported in today’s Gazette, Adam Cohen and Jendi Reiter from NoPornNorthampton recently wrote to Northampton Building Commissioner Anthony Patillo, asking him to revoke the building permit issued to Capital Video for their proposed porn shop at 135 King Street. We wrote: Section 1.3 of the [Northampton zoning] ordinance includes these criteria for site plan […]
US Fifth Circuit Appeals Court Affirms that Evidence of Secondary Effects of “Off-Site Consumption” Adult Enterprises Is Sufficient To Justify Zoning
Some porn merchants claim that adult bookstores (as opposed to adult theaters) only have off-site consumption of porn, that they generate no signficant secondary effects, and that they should be exempt from adult-use zoning. The US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals disagrees (PDF), and just found that the City of Kennedale, TX has sufficiently demonstrated […]
Harvard Law Professor Frederick Schauer’s “The Boundaries of the First Amendment”; Government Regulates Many Kinds of Speech
Anti-porn activists have typically had to defend themselves against charges that they are carving out partisan exceptions to a constitutional principle whose effectiveness, maybe even sacredness, derives from its neutrality. Justice, it seems, is never more blind than when she is reading Hustler. However, one might argue that the application of the First Amendment to […]
Connecticut: State, City and Citizens Cooperate to Combat Porn Shop Sited Next to Berlin Homes
Very Intimate Pleasures is trying to open up a large porn shop within 250 feet of a residential area in Berlin, CT. Citizens have protested, and the state has now joined city officials in efforts to get V.I.P. to comply with Berlin ordinances that forbid such a site to adult enterprises. Today’s Hartford Courant reports: […]
Victim’s “Precocious Knowledge of Sexuality” Blocks Child Rape Conviction
Northampton’s Daily Hampshire Gazette reports today that a Hampshire Superior Court jury has acquitted Hubert Jaundoo, a local man accused of raping his then-girlfriend’s seven-year-old daughter in 2001, after Jaundoo’s lawyer attacked the child’s credibility on the grounds that she was too sexually experienced: His defense lawyer, David Hoose, argued the girl’s precocious knowledge of sexuality created […]
Activist Strategies: Indiana Feminists Block “Girls Gone Wild”; Berlin Resident Fights Strip Club Liquor License with Remonstrance Petition
Amanda Marcotte reports on the feminist blog Pandagon how activists in Bloomington, IN successfully pressured a local bar to cancel a taping of the amateur-porn phenomenon “Girls Gone Wild”. This video series produced by Joe Francis follows a camera crew to party spots in various cities as they persuade attractive, usually drunk young women to strip […]