The Porn revolution: America's thriving pornography industry uses the marketplace to advance an agenda of subversion and social control. (Culture War).

[T]he foremost of the laws Nature decrees to me is to enjoy myself no matter at whose expense.

-- The Marquis de Sade from his political novel Juliette

"For more than five centuries," writes Atlantic Monthly investigative reporter Eric Schiosser in his new book Reefer Madness, "radical social movements [have] embraced pornography." From Renaissanceera humanists, to the leaders of the 18th-century "Enlightenment" (including the notorious Marquis de Sade), to the exponents of the San Francisco-based 1960s counterculture, pornography has been used to bring about "a profound shift in public attitudes toward sex, as religious influences gave way to secular ones. That shift has been accomplished with astonishing speed.

"Sexually explicit material has become so commonplace that one can easily forget how strictly it was prohibited not long ago," comments Schlosser. According to sociologist Charles Winick, the sexual content of American culture has changed more over the past two decades than it had during the previous two centuries.

Receipts from pornographic video rentals offer one useful--and sobering--illustration of this social revolution. In 1985, rental of "hardcore smut videos generated an estimated $79 million; by 2001, that figure had increased nearly tenfold, to $759 million. "Many mom-and-pop video stores now derive a third of their income from porn," reports Schlosser. "According to one industry expert, approximately 25,000 video stores in the United States now rent and sell hard-core films."

Porn retailed via videocassettes and DVDs represents but a small fraction of the market. The entire smut trade--mail-order sales of porn and related products, live sex shows, pay-per-view cable television, and paid-subscription Internet sites--generates an estimated annual income of $10 billion, an amount roughly equivalent to Hollywood's annual profits from mainstream films. Of course, mainstream films are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from their overtly obscene counterparts--produced, quite literally, right next door.

"In the San Fernando Valley of Southern California," continues Schlosser, "right beside the Hollywood movie industry, a thriving X-rated movie industry has emerged, with its own studios, talent agencies, and stars, its own fan clubs and film critics. America's porn has become one more of its cultural exports, dominating overseas markets.... [T]he United States is now by far the world's leading producer of porn, churning out hardcore videos at the astonishing rate of about two hundred and eleven new titles every week." The cultural undertow left in the porn market's wake has predictably pulled down standards for the entire entertainment industry.

Spokesmen for the skin trade, and more than a few cultural observers (Schlosser among them), insist that the porn industry's radical expansion is simply the market at work. But in a significant sense, the ever-increasing demand for porn reflects an organized, deliberate effort to re-engineer our cultural mores in a fashion compatible with political collectivism.

While many might consider it implausible to couple sexual emancipation with political regimentation, this approach was used quite successfully by the architects of Sweden's all-encompassing socialist welfare state. "'Freedom' in Swedish is a word that appears to be taboo," observed British journalist Roland Huntford in his 1971 book The New Totalitarians, a critical study of Sweden's version of cradle-to-grave collectivism. "There is one exception, however, and that is in sexual matters. In the same way that 'security' is the creed of [Swedish socialist] politics, so is 'liberty' that of sex."

In his preface to the 1948 edition of his masterpiece Brave New World, Aldous Huxley also took note of that relationship:

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope, the movies and the radio, [sexual emancipation] will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

The emergence of a huge and ever-expanding American porn industry potently illustrates that America is following the course outlined by Huxley and pioneered by Sweden. The reigning "godfather" of America's porn industry is a figure who bridges the worlds of hard-core smut and collectivist social engineering.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

That godfather is Philip Harvey, a Harvard-educated resident of Hillsborough, North Carolina, where he operates PHE, Inc.--the nation's largest distributor of hard-core porn videos and other sex-related products. "The leading producers of hard-core films trek regularly to North Carolina, to visit Harvey and his staff, promote their latest releases, and seek financing for new productions," reports Schlosser.

Harvey himself regularly treks to Washington, D.C., to supervise Population Services International, a nonprofit corporation that works closely with the federal government and international organizations to promote population control overseas. To Harvey, peddling porn and promoting an anti-natal agenda are part of the same mission, which he describes as "social marketing"--applying "the power and creativity of the private sector to family planning." In 1969, as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Harvey received a grant from the Ford Foundation (a major underwriter of cultural subversion) to do graduate work on "family planning." His graduate thesis was a proposal for mail-order marketing of condoms--a revolutionary idea that essentially served as a business proposal for PHE, Inc.

For its first few years, Harvey's mail-order business floundered. His fortunes turned around, however, when he began to include erotic photographs in his catalog. In 1975, Harvey introduced the "Adam & Eve" catalog, which marketed sex aids and hard-core pornography along with "socially responsible" contraceptives. Most importantly, Harvey's mail-order business (which Supreme Court rulings made possible by overturning laws against interstate commerce in pornography) gave porn consumers anonymity and privacy. They no longer had to skulk about in dingy neighborhoods, casting around furtive glances in fear of being recognized. Thirty million copies of the "Adam & Eve" catalog are distributed each year, attracting more than two million paying customers. All of PHE's products are vetted by a group of consultants from an august-sounding group called the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists.

Harvey's fortune, built one "plain brown wrapper" at a time, put him in the interesting position of being simultaneously pursued and courted by the federal government. "During the late 1980s, while officials at the Justice Department were doing all they could to put Harvey in prison for obscenity violations, officials at the State Department's Agency for International Development were working closely with him to make contraceptives widely available in the Third World," observes Schlosser.

The federal crackdown on the porn industry during the Reagan and Bush I administrations "wiped out many of [Harvey's] mail-order competitors and dissuaded others from entering the business"--thereby giving the Ford-funded Establishment pornographer what amounts to a federally protected concession. And while Harvey continues to rake in money from his mail-order skin trade, he "still travels regularly to developing nations to meet with the administrators of his family planning projects," notes Schlosser.

Porn and the Total State

Harvey's "social marketing" succeeds greatly in adapting the strategy outlined by cultural Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who emphasized that the Total State must be built by revolutionaries who seize control of a society's cultural institutions. The teachings and tactics devised by Viennese cultural Marxist Wilhelm Reich, a contemporary and comrade of Gramsci, provided the game plan for many of the academic subversives who brought about the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, one major legacy of which is our contemporary porn industry.

Social historian E. Michael Jones points out that in Vienna, Reich and his subversive colleagues chiefly targeted the Catholic Church. "Reich noticed a simple fact' observes Jones. "If you changed the sexual behavior of idealistic young Catholics in the direction of social liberation ... then the idea of God simply evaporated from their minds and they defected from the Catholic Church, and the way to successful revolution was clear." The same tactic was used to sunder the bonds of loyalty and shared principles between youth and their parents.

In proselytizing on behalf of Marxist revolution, Reich explained: "We do not discuss the existence or nonexistence of God--we merely eliminate the sexual repressions and dissolve the infantile ties to the parents.... The inescapable conclusion of all this is that a clear sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life [that is, abandonment of biblical restraints on sexual self-indulgence] must foredoom every form of mystical religion."

Of course, the revolutionary strategy prescribed by Reich merely reiterates that developed in the 1700s by the Marquis de Sade, whom historian Erik von Kuhneldt-Leddihn designates the "grandfather of modem democracy." "Modesty is an illusion," insisted Sade in his political manifesto Juliette, "the result of nought but our cultural manners and our upbringing.... Conscience, according to Sade, is--likewise nothing but a reflection of "prejudices inculcated by training and upbringing.... Veritable wisdom consists not in repressing one's vices.... The true and approved way is to surrender oneself to them, to practice them to the utmost.... [I]t consists simply in reiterating the deeds that have made us remorseful, in repeating them so often that the habit either of committing these deeds or of getting away scot free with them completely undermines the possibility of feeling badly about them. This habit topples the prejudice, destroys it.... [T]his habit at length makes [the vice] wholly bearable and even delicio us to the soul."

The evil Marquis understood that people thus carefully tutored in the cultivation of the sexual libido will eventually remove all restraints on the libido dominandi --that is, the lust for power over others, the impulse described by the term "sadism." "Were Ito discover that my only possibility of happiness lay in excessive perpetration of the most atrocious crimes, without a qualm I'd enact every last one of them this very instant, certain ... that the foremost of the laws Nature decrees to me is to enjoy myself, no matter at whose expense," he wrote.

Contemporary America--awash in pornographic depictions of both illicit sex and sadistic violence--is perilously close to realizing Sade's vision of a society addicted to power and self-indulgence, rather than cherishing freedom and practicing necessary self-restraint.