The adult industry has certainly peppered the American landscape with come-hither billboards, as they know well in Hartford, but apparently the other side has put up a few as well, a tiny step to balance a badly distorted national discourse. Here’s a quick tour: Anti-Porn Billboards Pop Up Around Jacksonville on Valentine’s DayBillboards around the […]
Media Ethics
King and Queen of MoPornNorthampton Savagery Do Freelance Work for Republican, MassLive (explicit language)
[Updated on June 11, 2007] As those who have visited opposition blog MoPornNorthampton are aware, Jeff Hobbs, Jennifer Ruggieri and their associates have engaged in savage personal attacks on Northampton anti-porn citizens for months. These self-styled heroes of free speech actually suppress it by fostering an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, inducing many citizens to […]
Visitors to NoPornNorthampton Website Outnumber Those of Local Newspaper Website
[Revised and updated on May 30, 2007] For the first time, an independent web measurement service estimates that NoPornNorthampton.org receives more monthly unique US visitors than GazetteNet.com, a website of Northampton’s local newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette. (The Gazette also serves some visitors as DailyHampshireGazette.com.) Quantcast estimates that NoPornNorthampton is now receiving 12,629 monthly unique […]
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 […]
American Psychological Association: Media and marketers drive girls to be sexy early; sexualization linked to eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression
The American Psychological Association finds that media and marketing have a big impact on girls, reports the Washington Post (2/20/07): American girls, say experts, are increasingly being fed a cultural catnip of products and images that promote looking and acting sexy. “Throughout U.S. culture, and particularly in mainstream media, women and girls are depicted in […]
A Review of Can’t Buy My Love
NPN’s Jendi Reiter reviews Jean Kilbourne, Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. This book was published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, New York City (1999). Ms. Kilbourne’s documentaries are distributed by Northampton’s own Media Education Foundation. Activist filmmaker and educator Jean Kilbourne has been internationally recognized for such documentaries […]
Testimony in Minneapolis: Role of Porn in Child Sexual Abuse; Pornographers Perpetuate, Profit from Dysfunction
Minneapolis city officials received testimony about peoples’ encounters with porn, those who consume porn and those who produce it at a hearing of the Minneapolis Government Operations Committee in December 1983. These letters are published in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.238-248). Letter of d.c., VOICE, Inc., December 5, 1983 …VOICE is […]
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 […]
Testimony in Minneapolis: Prostitutes and Porn (explicit language)
Citizens gave testimony about their encounters with porn and those who consume porn to the Minneapolis Government Operations Committee on December 12, 1983. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.114-120). Portions of it have appeared in earlier posts.Testimony of T. S. I am speaking for a group of women. […]
On-screen Violence and Porn: Critical Priorities
Gender studies professor Hugo Schwyzer revisits the porn issue on his blog this week with a response to critics who wonder why Christian activists are more concerned about porn than graphic violence in movies: “Porn is just about sex”, folks say; “violence is so much worse.” Surely it’s misplaced puritanism to get so worked up […]