Porn Squad, Female Chauvinist Pigs, and Other Names for Nonexistent Rock Bands

There's an old slam-poem by a married couple from Brooklyn that says something like "we'll keep our money in between the pages of a homosexual erotica coffee table book/and call it a savings account/and that's as patriotic as this family gets."

So it is in a lot of houses, the Dodd-Sorbeck house not excluded. But erotica, porn, hardcore -whatever you call it- is having a bad week. The Washington FBI field office is now recruiting for a Porn Squad, a ridiculous new initiative aimed at eliminating "obscenity", a nebulous idea that has historically failed definition. We're not talking about protecting kids here: the WP reported that the FBI "must devote 10 agents to adult pornography" (emphasis mine). Obscenity, as it turns out, is an offshoot of public corruption, and as such falls fourth on the FBI's list of priorities (just behind terrorism, cyber attacks, and international espionage, but before civil rights and violent crime. I am not kidding). Rest well tonight, children of America, in the knowledge that you could inherit a porn-free United States. It may be violent, discriminatory, and grossly unprepared for natural disaster, but it will be porn-free.

Additionally, two new books have landed blaming porn for a variety of ills: Pornified and Female Chauvinist Pigs. The former is a sad account of a dismal society in which women want men, men want sex, and the porn industry wants to make a buck off them all. Ultimately, warns author Pamela Paul, men will become so engaged with the airbrushed, instant-gratification world of porn, that men won't want real, live women at all. She shares alarmist vignettes from men who find live women frustrating for their smells, shapes, or individual needs, and stops short of claiming that this is the beginning of the end of live male-female relationships. Female Chauvinist Pigs focuses on what Pornified ignores completely: the sharp rise in female consumption of porn. Porn has always had fans, but FCP argues that it's modern women who have pushed it into the mainstream. Echoing Pamela Paul, author Ariel Levy provides anecdotes outlining women's actual, secret dislike of porn, while they outwardly embrace and promote it. Women don't watch porn because they like it, Levy writes, but because they want to be the porn stars that men appreciate.

So what? If a handful of women are silly enough to pretend to love something they hate so that they'll attract a certain man, then this is the stuff of individual therapy visits, not national policy. And if two people have a disagreement about whether porn is appropriate within the context of their relationship, then that's something for them to work out, not call in the FBI. Whether Paul or Levy had any sense of the possibility of a Porn Squad when they wrote their books isn't important; their books and the Porn Squad come from a fundamentally similar position: that people can't be trusted to make their own decisions and must be protected from themselves.