Reason Magazine - Topics > Sex

Gay Sex is Now Legal in New Delhi

bill.flanigen@reason.com (Bill Flanigen) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:15:00 EDT

Eight years after a petition to decriminalize gay sex was originally filed by sexual health advocates, India's Delhi High Court has acquiesced. Their ruling applies only to the city of New Delhi and it may be appealed to the Indian Supreme Court, but sexual liberty (and public health) advocates on the subcontinent hope that the decision will stick and influence other parts of the country to follow suit. In a nation where intimate homosexual relations can net you a 10-year prison sentence, this is no small victory.

Meanwhile, advocates and opponents of gay sex bans are busy playing hot-potato with the legacy of colonialism and western influence in India:

Some religious leaders quickly criticized the ruling. "This Western culture cannot be permitted in our country," said Maulana Khalid Rashid Farangi Mahali, a leading Muslim cleric in the northern city of Lucknow....
"This legal remnant of British colonialism has been used to deprive people of their basic rights for too long," Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Rights Program at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "This long-awaited decision testifies to the reach of democracy and rights in India.

I'm not exactly sure what sort of permissive "Western culture" Mr. Maulana Khaldi Rashid Farangi Mahali is imagining, but gay sex only became legal in my home state of Virginia in 2003, and "carnally know[ing] any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth" remains a felony (by dint of a probably unconstitutional law) in the Old Dominion.

Reason's Managing Editor Jesse Walker covered the Lawrence case here, and contributor Cathy Young considered it here and here.

Contributors

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:52:00 EDT

Anthony Randazzo, 23, is a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine. In “Turning Japanese?” (page 20), he and two colleagues, Michael Flynn and Adam B. Summers, find troubling parallels between Japan’s financial situation in the 1990s and the current American crisis. The U.S. economy, they warn, may soon be overrun by the inflexible “zombie businesses” that plague Japan. While writing the article, Randazzo polled the reason staff for tips on the most effective way to kill a zombie. The consensus: “a stake to the head,” Randazzo reports, relishing “one of the few times that zombie research will overlap with financial research.”

The Oregon-based freelancer Nancy Rommelmann, 46, has written for publications ranging from The New York Times Magazine to the L.A. Weekly. In “Anatomy of a Child Pornographer” (page 30), she chronicles some of the fallout from the hysteria over “sexting,” in which teenagers send naked photos of themselves over their mobile phones. The kids can be brought up on child porn charges, ruining their lives. “The people who are in the toughest position here are the D.A.s,” says Rommelmann. “I believe that so far they are remembering what it was like to have been a teenager. But that law is tough to get around.”

Katie Hooks, a communications specialist for the Reason Foundation, is also the self-described “den mother” for this magazine’s Washington, D.C., office. Hooks, a 22-year-old native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, keeps reason on the forefront of social media, promoting reason.tv videos, maintaining reason’s Facebook page, and attracting more than 100 new subscribers a week to reason’s Twitter feed. Her job, she says, is to keep reason “in tune with the new technologies, and what the kids these days are into.”

Why Adultery is Political Suicide

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:00:00 EDT

By now, it's clear that Mark Sanford has about as much of a future in politics as he does in sumo wrestling. His confession of adultery was all it took to demolish any hopes he had of running for president—and perhaps even to force him to step down as governor of South Carolina. But why?

After all, we've had presidents who are revered by posterity despite being unreliable husbands. Hardly anyone even remembers now that Franklin Roosevelt had a mistress, that Dwight Eisenhower may have had one, or that John Kennedy had several.

In the intervening decades, we've also become far more aware of just how common such behavior is among officeholders—not only Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and Rudy Giuliani but lesser-known mayors, governors, congressmen, and water commissioners. Nowadays, finding that a politician breached his marital vows is about as surprising as learning that a professional athlete failed a drug test. If Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi can overcome their guilt, why not Sanford?

Other politicians have survived—most conspicuously our 42nd president. In fact, you'd think the Monica Lewinsky scandal would have settled the issue once and for all. Democrats found themselves excusing Clinton's conduct, and Republicans who condemned it wound up on the losing side in both public opinion and the impeachment battle.

When it was over, Clinton left office with a 65 percent approval rating. Trust him with your daughter? Not a chance. But your economy? Sure.

George W. Bush, by contrast, finished his term with an approval rating of 22 percent. Trust him with your daughter? Sure. But keep him away from the economy! Both parties could have drawn the same conclusion: Voters have more important things to worry about than their leaders' sex lives.

Yet here we are again, disqualifying a possible White House aspirant because he couldn't keep his pants on. After two decades of high-level political sex scandals, we seem to have reached a consensus that marital fidelity is actually pretty important in a leader. Given the choice, we would prefer peace and prosperity to presidential rectitude. But we really want all three, and we think we can have them.

Call it residual puritanism or an overdose of religion if you want, but most Americans think wedding vows are not to be disdained. In recent decades, sexual mores have gotten considerably more relaxed, with one major exception: extramarital affairs. A 2009 Gallup poll found that 92 percent of us think adultery is "morally wrong"—which presumably means there are a lot more people who commit it than defend it. Only 40 percent of Americans think premarital sex is morally wrong, and only 47 percent say that of homosexual relations.

So Barney Frank's career survived his romp with a male prostitute, while John Edwards' fling with a campaign aide made him politically radioactive. Sex without marriage is OK. Sex in violation of marriage is not.

Why not? Because adultery, unlike a frisky bachelor lifestyle, connotes a reckless dishonesty at odds with our basic notions of integrity. Because it shows a lack of respect for the most important commitment that most of us will ever make. Because it indicates that the adulterer will always place his selfish desires above those who depend on him.

There is a cost to this approach, obviously. It disqualifies some smart, dedicated, and able people merely because they suffer a single flaw—and one that apparently is pretty common among the politically ambitious.

But so what? A talented executive can expect to lose her position for a single act of embezzlement. An outstanding journalist may be banished from his profession for one incident of plagiarism.

Of course, those lapses bear directly on how the offenders do their jobs, which is not the case with a governor who strays. But we don't vote for CEOs or newspaper reporters, which means they don't embody our higher aspirations. Americans think those elected to positions of public trust should have enough regard for the public to conduct themselves in an honest, upright way even in matters unrelated to their official duties.

Is it naive of us to believe that a politician who keeps his commitments to his wife will also keep his commitments to us? Probably. But not as naive as thinking that if he betrays her, he'll treat us any better.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Stripping Away Free Expression

info@reason.com (Shawn Macomber) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:00:00 EDT

Crime Fighters vs. the Constitution

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:00:00 EDT

In a 1995 decision that overturned a federal ban on possessing guns near schools, the U.S. Supreme Court noted that "the Constitution creates a Federal Government of enumerated powers," which do not include a general authority to fight crime. Five years later, when it overturned a statutory provision that created a federal cause of action for victims of gender-motivated violence, the Court warned that congressional attempts to usurp the states' police power threatened to erase the "distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local."

Since then a chastened Congress has consistently rejected anti-crime legislation that lacks a firm constitutional basis. Just kidding. Two pieces of legislation in the news, both named after murder victims, show that posing as a crime fighter is still more popular on Capitol Hill than obeying the Constitution.

The Matthew Shepard Act, which the House approved in April and the Senate is considering this week, adds offenses committed "because of" a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability to the list of hate crimes that can be prosecuted under federal law. As the U.S. Civil Rights Commission notes in a letter opposing the bill, that language could cover many crimes traditionally prosecuted under state law, potentially including rapes targeting women (selected because of their gender) and muggings of disabled people (selected because they are less able to resist).

The bill also would remove a condition limiting hate crime prosecutions to cases where the victim was participating in a federally protected activity such as education or voting. Instead it would cover crimes with just about any connection, no matter how tangential, to interstate commerce, which the Constitution authorizes the federal government to regulate. If the weapon used in an assault was manufactured outside the state where the assault occurred, for instance, that fact would be enough to assert federal jurisdiction.

The Matthew Shepard Act has the same basic problem as state hate crime laws, which punish people for their beliefs by enhancing the penalties for existing offenses when they are motivated by bigotry. The bill adds another layer of injustice by making it easier for federal prosecutors who are displeased by acquittals in state courts to try the defendants again, as they did in the cases stemming from the 1991 Crown Heights riot and the 1991 police beating of Rodney King.

The Supreme Court has said such repeated prosecutions do not violate the constitutional prohibition of double jeopardy because they involve two different governments. But the reality of these cases indicates otherwise: People who were acquitted in state court were tried again, based on the same underlying actions, and convicted. The fact that the Matthew Shepard Act reserves such treatment for defendants with unpopular opinions hardly mitigates the problem.

Unlike the legislators who wrote the Matthew Shepard Act, the authors of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act did not even pretend they were exercising powers granted by the Constitution. This week the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether they were, focusing on a provision of the 2006 law that permits civil commitment of federal prisoners deemed to be "sexually dangerous."

Such preventive detention is bad enough when states do it, since it keeps people locked up indefinitely after they have completed their sentences, based not on crimes they have committed but on crimes they might commit. The federal version is even worse. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit noted in a January decision, the law gives the federal government "unprecedented authority over civil commitment—an area long controlled by the states."

The 4th Circuit concluded that the provision is not a valid exercise of the federal power to regulate interstate commerce, since it targets activity that is neither interstate nor commercial. Whatever one thinks of the law's goals, the court said, "policy justifications do not create congressional authority." That statement should be tattooed on every congressman's voting hand.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist.

Richard Nixon's Views on Abortion

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:18:00 EDT

According to newly released White House tapes, he was generally opposed to the procedure but was willing to make exceptions for rape or ... miscegenation.

Elsewhere in Reason: Nixon's views on Archie Bunker.

A Never-Ending Sentence for the Sex Crime You Have Yet to Commit

bill.flanigen@reason.com (Bill Flanigen) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:40:00 EDT

The Supreme Court has announced that it will hear arguments over a federal law that allows the government to confine "sexually dangerous" prisoners in mental hospitals after they've served out their sentences. According to the Department of Justice, 95 federal prisoners have been "identified as possible candidates for post-sentence detention." Back in January, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law as unconstitutional. The 4th Circuit's justification:

The Constitution does not empower the federal government to confine a person solely because of asserted "sexual dangerousness" when the Government need not allege (let alone prove) that this "dangerousness" violates any federal law.

A commenter at Sentencing Law and Policy (linked above) points out probably the strangest element of the law in question (18 USC 4248): It allows the government to detain "sexually dangerous" persons regardless of their crime:

Section 4248 does not require that the potential committee has ever been convicted of a federal sex offense, or indeed ANY sex offense. All it requires (on this issue) is that the govt prove, by clear and convincing evidence, that the person has at some time in his or her life engaged in child molestation or sexually violent conduct (both as defined by BOP regs).

Reason's Kerry Howley and Jacob Sullum took on the post-incarceration abuse of sex offenders here and here.

DC Pols Have Forgotten More Sex Than You'll Ever Have in Your Whole Lifetime!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:08:00 EDT

Via the excellent FishBowl DC comes a pointer to this cheeky reminder from FamousDC about a decade's worth of sex scandals (including former-future Washington Mayor Marion Berry's "bitch set me up" tryst, which technically happened in the Pleistocene Era).

Future-former Sen. John Ensign's recent revelation of an-on-the-clock affair clocks in at number 10. Read deep the gathering gloom, which includes a number of scandals I am happy to say that I either never heard of at all or have successfully repressed (e.g., the Rep. Vito Fossella love child bit, Rep. Tim Mahoney [?], Rep. Don Sherwood [??]).

A snippet:

... 4. Sen. John Edwards + Cici from Poison
Ok, so the woman just looked like Cici from Poison but the former Presidential candidate was caught leaving their love nest by the National Enquirer.
Considering the fact that his wife has cancer and his family is generally adorable, it's no real surprised that we have not heard from the boy wonder since.
3. Former Governor Elliot Spitzer + $$$$$ Hooker
The plate on the door of the Mayflower Hotel where Spitizer and his lady friend would rendezvous has been stolen several times.
This scandal had everything ... hookers, hypocrisy and weird, weird sex....

Whole list here.

Why do we care about the sex lives of the powerful? Mostly, we don't, because it's bad enough looking at these guys (and with the rare exception of someone like former Sen. Helen Chenoweth, it always seems to be guys) with their clothes on, much less imagining forming the beast with two, three, or more backs. But in the cases of folks such as Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) and New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the rampant hypocrisy brings home the point that most of these people can't run their own lives, much less yours and mine. So there's a lesson to be learned here: Don't do this at home, kids. Or, if you do, then don't run for office. And if you do run for office and manage to get elected, don't moralize in a way that is grossly at odds with your lifestyle.

Michael Kinsley Slags Sotomayor's Evasions, Defends Double Standards

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:50:00 EDT

In his Washington Post column today, Michael Kinsley skewers Sonia Sotomayor for her response to the question of whether her membership in the all-female Belizean Grove violates the Judicial Code of Conduct:

If Obama had nominated a man who was a member of the Bohemian Grove, that would be a big issue and probably a fatal one. So how is it different if Sotomayor is a member of a club set up specifically to be the female equivalent? Rather than try to answer this question honestly, Sotomayor chose to make the preposterous argument that the Belizean Grove isn't a women's club. It's just that no men have ever applied for membership, you see. White clubs used to explain the absence of black members the same way. It's a laughable argument—a brazen whopper—and an insult to the citizenry and the Senate that must confirm her.

Kinsley surely is right that Sotomayor's position is evasive and dishonest. He's also right that there's double standard. Two years before he was nominated to the Supreme Court, Robert Bork, at the time a federal appeals court judge, took the precaution of quitting the all-male Century Association. By his account, he did so when he "became aware that there was a dispute as to whether a club with an all-male membership was engaged in invidious discrimination." It's not hard to imagine what Bork's opponents would have made of his continued affiliation with the group. A few years ago, Democrats criticized Samuel Alito for once belonging to an alumni organization that had resisted the admission of women to Princeton. (After it emerged that Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), one of Alito's chief antagonists, still belonged to the all-male Owl Club, which he had joined at Harvard, he immediately cut his ties to the group.) And as Jeffrey Lord notes in The American Spectator, in 2002 Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) opposed 2nd Circuit nominee D. Brooks Smith based on his former membership in a Pennsylvania fishing club that excluded women. Leahy, now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is not likely to make an issue of Sotomayor's continuing membership in the Belizean Grove.

But Kinsley goes on to argue that this is as it should be:

The true answer is that we tolerate discrimination in favor of traditionally oppressed groups more than we tolerate discrimination against them. It's not symmetrical. And, if you believe in affirmative action—as Sotomayor proudly does, as I do—it can't be. An all-women's club is okay even though an all-men's club is not. A corporation's minority recruitment program or a university's minority scholarships are considered admirable, while similar programs reserved for white people would be regarded as horrific.

Kinsley forthrightly admits that there is no difference between affirmative action and reverse discrimination (a distinction the Supreme Court pretends to perceive) but still supports it. I can't go along with him there, at least as far as state action is concerned. But what about guidelines for the private behavior of public officials such as judges? Should they be scrapped, or is there a way to distinguish between forms of discrimination that are no big deal (to my mind, all-male and all-female clubs fall into that category) and forms of discrimination that tend to create a perception of bias (say, all-white or all-Christian country clubs)? I'm not talking about whether private associations should be free to set their own admission criteria (they should). I'm talking about whether it makes sense to tell judges they may not join groups that practice certain kinds of discrimination.

[Thanks to Dan Friedman for the Bork link.]

'To the Best of My Knowledge, a Man Has Never Asked'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:11:00 EDT

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor explains why her membership in the Belizean Grove, a female version of the Bohemian Grove, does not violate the Judicial Code of Conduct, which says judges should avoid "membership in any organization that practices invidious discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion or national origin":

I am a member of the Belizean Grove, a private organization of female professionals from the profit, nonprofit and social sectors. The organization does not invidiously discriminate on the basis of sex. Men are involved in its activities—they participate in trips, host events and speak at functions—but to the best of my knowledge, a man has never asked to be considered for membership.
It is also my understanding that all interested individuals are duly considered by the membership committee. For these reasons, I do not believe that my membership in the Belizean Grove violates the Code of Judicial Conduct.

Since the code defines invidious discrimination as excluding otherwise qualified people based on their race, sex, religion, or national origin, I guess Sotomayor feels she has to maintain this pose. But her lawyerly evasiveness reflects worse on her than her decision to whoop it up like Henry Kissinger and David Gergen.

The Prehistory of Porn Prosecution

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EDT

The Blurry Boundaries of Child Porn

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EDT

There are several reasons why child pornography isn’t governed by the laxer rules that regulate adult porn, but one rationale lies at the core of the law: Child porn is a record of a crime. It is illegal for a grown man to have sex with, say, a 4-year-old boy, and he doesn’t get to claim the protection of the First Amendment just because someone was photographing him while he committed the act. When jihadists behead their captives on video, the tape doesn’t change the fact that they’re murderers. It demonstrates and advertises it. And the photographer is an accessory to the crime.

Unfortunately, people have been arraigned for images that are a far cry from a man raping a toddler. Besides the “sexting” incidents, in which teenagers are charged with producing porn after flirtatiously emailing photos of themselves to each other, there are cases like the one involving 28-year-old Todd Senters, who videotaped himself having sex with his 17-year-old girlfriend. This happened in Nebraska, where the age of consent is 16, so the intercourse itself was legal. But under the federal Child Protection Act of 1984, a person in a pornographic performance is considered a child if he or she is under 18. So the tape was illicit even though the act was not—not a record of a crime, but still a crime itself. The Nebraska Supreme Court upheld Senters’ conviction in 2005.

If the definition of child porn is broader than it needs to be, the great bulk of enforcement, at the federal level at least, is aimed at material most liberal-minded Americans would consider criminal. That represents a profound legal and social shift. It’s hard to believe, but the law didn’t distinguish child pornography from other sorts of porn until the 1970s, when greater tolerance for sexually explicit material made the seediest stuff more visible, prompting a backlash. Even then, the sole federal law on the subject—the Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation Act, passed in 1978—merely stiffened the penalties for material that would already be illegal under the obscenity statutes. And no item was obscene if it had “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” It wasn’t until New York v. Ferber in 1982 that the U.S. Supreme Court allowed legislators to outlaw images of children that didn’t fit the strict legal definition of obscenity. Child abuse is child abuse, the unanimous court declared, even if the pictures of that abuse have artistic merit.

Since then, police have mostly aimed enforcement not at the producers of the porn but at the distributors and, more controversially, the consumers. There are three central reasons why the law pursues people who possess child porn as well as those who make and sell it:

1. To eliminate the market. In Ferber, the Court noted that while “the production of pornographic materials is a low-profile, clandestine industry,” distribution networks must be “visible” to be effective; therefore “the most expeditious if not the only practical method of law enforcement may be to dry up the market for this material.” If the market is disrupted, that reduces the incentives to create the images in the first place.

This is the most understandable rationale for the restriction. If you pay for a kiddie porn tape, you’re not just looking at images. You’re creating an incentive to make more of them and therefore to abuse more children.

In the Web era, you might be doing more than that. In 2006 The New York Times described PlayToy, a website that offers “scores of original photographs of scantily clad under-age children...often posed in ways requested by subscribers.” That isn’t the only online community that solicits such input from its users, and it surely isn’t the worst of them; at least the PlayToy models weren’t being molested onscreen. Media scholars have described an “active audience” that reframes, reinterprets, and even rewrites its favorite texts. This is the active audience on steroids, the ugly underside of the user-driven Web. In the worst-case scenario, such consumers are co-conspirators, morally if not legally, in the rape and abuse of children.

2. To police people’s thoughts. The Child Pornography Protection Act of 1996 banned even computer-generated “virtual” porn that was produced without any actual kids. Such material, the law declared, “encourages a societal perception of children as sexual objects.” In other words, the measure targeted not the acts performed in front of a camera but the acts performed within people’s minds.

The Supreme Court struck down that law as overbroad in 2002, but the rationale behind it has been a constant companion to the crackdown on child porn. An argument that most researchers roundly reject when the topic is adult pornography—that viewing it incites people to commit sexual violence—is frequently cited uncritically where porn featuring children is concerned. The Supreme Court may be wary of laws that invoke a “paternalistic interest in regulating [the] mind,” as Justice Byron White once put it, but it’s clear that many activists and legislators do not share those qualms.

If that were all there was to the issue, the civil libertarian position would be fairly clear. Restrictions on purchasing child porn might be justifiable, but restrictions on merely possessing it—acquiring it for free via Kazaa, say—would not. (If the idea is to cut into child pornographers’ profits, peer-to-peer sharing might be more ally than enemy.) But there are other arguments, including one in particular that’s worth some thought:

3. To protect the privacy of the victims. “Because the child’s actions are reduced to a recording,” the attorney David P. Shouvlin wrote in the Wake Forest Law Review in 1981, “the pornography may haunt him in future years, long after the original misdeed took place. A child who has posed for a camera must go through life knowing that the recording is circulating within the mass distribution system for child pornography.” Those words evidently impressed the Supreme Court, which quoted them a year later in Ferber. The viewing, in this analysis, is itself a perpetuation of the abuse.

Such arguments undergird Masha’s Law, named for Masha Allen, a Russian orphan who was held prisoner, raped repeatedly on camera, and advertised in the kiddie porn world as “Disney World Girl.” The measure, which became law in 2006, allows adults who were victimized by pornographers as minors to sue people who download the resulting images.

Emotionally, it’s a compelling concept. And where invasion of privacy is the concern, civil remedies certainly make more sense than criminal prosecutions. But the idea opens a can of worms. If the issue is privacy, shame, and being haunted by ineradicable images, wouldn’t the same argument apply to the abused prisoners photographed at Abu Ghraib? To hostages filmed by their captors and aired on the news? To anyone humiliated in front of a camera? Should an inadvertent Internet celebrity, deeply embarrassed that people are chuckling at a clip of his light-saber dance, have standing to sue the viewers?

That last example might seem absurd, but it actually veers close to the pornography debate. Because the child porn laws set the age of maturity so high, they cover not just the victims of coercion but exhibitionists who voluntarily put photographs of themselves online. There also are people who post pictures that are salacious but don’t include the “lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area” invoked by the law. They do not necessarily intend for anyone but their friends to see the photos. But the Internet doesn’t always work that way.

Consider Amanda Wenk, a teenager who became an online celebrity in 2005 after she posted pictures of herself in bikinis, tight T-shirts, and low-cut dresses on her Webshots site. She took down the photos after they attracted outside attention, but by that time they had escaped to Fark and other forums for people who like to swap online ephemera.

She wasn’t really a child at the time, but the law says she was; the images aren’t much more pornographic than a high school yearbook, but some people clearly use them as though they were Playboy centerfolds. She is presumably embarrassed by the attention, given that she tried to remove the pictures from the Web. She may well be haunted by it. Is it the role of the government to preserve her peace of mind?

The difference between what happened to Amanda Wenk and what happened to Masha Allen should be obvious. But both must, to borrow the phrase the Supreme Court quoted in Ferber, “go through life knowing that the recording is circulating within the mass distribution system for child pornography.” I’m not convinced that’s reason enough to punish the people who merely see those recordings, as opposed to the people who actively participate in the abuse of prisoners like Allen—or the inmates at Abu Ghraib.

Jesse Walker (jwalker@reason.com) is managing editor of reason.

Arsonists Against Topless Coffee

bill.flanigen@reason.com (Bill Flanigen) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:22:00 EDT

The Grandview Coffee Shop seemed like a welcome addition to the local economy of Vassalboro, Maine, when it opened in February. Owner Donald Crabtree interviewed 150 applicants for only ten server positions.

Yesterday, though, the shop was destroyed in a fire. The Boston Globe reports that the fire marshal's office is calling it arson. Who would be so heartless as to burn down an independent, small-town coffee shop? It might have something to do with owner Donald Crabtree's unique business model:

The shop brought a wave of publicity to the town of 4,400 people when Crabtree announced plans to have topless waitresses serve coffee and doughnuts between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Nothing in local ordinances barred such an establishment.

No one knows for sure, but the Globe article seems to imply that the arsonist disapproved of Grandview's loose employee attire policies. Before the uninsured building was destroyed, Crabtree—ever the innovative entrepreneur—was announcing plans to turn his shop into what sounds like a dry gentlemen's club:

Crabtree had proposed extending the shop hours until 1 a.m., adding music, and expanding parking. No alcohol would be served, Crabtree told the [Vassalboro] Planning Board.

The semi-nude baristas would also be allowed to dance.

Before anyone gets happy about averting moral armageddon in Vassalboro, Crabtree plans to reopen his shop. Next Monday, a Vassalboro Town Meeting—planned before the arson—will consider "regulating sexually oriented businesses," according to the Globe. Which raises the question: What's the sexual orientation of a business?

In the January 2003 print edition of Reason, Jackson Kuhl served up some useful coffee commentary. Also read Kerry Howley's 2005 article on why coffee is good for you—no matter what your waitress isn't wearing.

Anatomy of a Child Pornographer

info@reason.com (Nancy Rommelmann) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EDT

On a chilly Tuesday morning in November 2007, 16-year-old Alex Davis was taking a shower before school when his mother, Betty, knocked on the bathroom door. There was someone downstairs, she said, a New York state trooper who had come at 7 a.m. to the family’s farm outside Rochester.

“She said, ‘I think it’s about Laurie,’ ” Alex recalls. “My stomach kind of dropped, and I thought, ‘This is not going to be good.’ ”

The previous Friday, after coming home from football practice with a few teammates, Alex had exchanged text messages with Laurie, a 14-year-old freshman (whose name has been changed in this story, as has Alex’s and his family’s). While his friends played Guitar Hero on his PS2, Alex, captain of the football, basketball, and tennis teams, read a message from Laurie saying she wanted to be a cheerleader.

“I said, well, I needed a cute cheerleader this year,” recalls Alex, a deep-voiced kid with an open face, dark eyes, and the synaptic quickness of a natural athlete. “And she said, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, is this cute?’ And then…”

And then Alex made what he now calls “that little two-second decision to mess up my whole life.” He opened photos Laurie took of herself with her cell-phone, in her bra and panties, and then just her panties. Alex texted back, asking for more and noting that the reception on his Verizon LG phone was crap. No problem, Laurie replied. She would send the photos to his email address. They soon arrived along with a bonus attachment: a video clip of Laurie performing a striptease. Alex was happy to receive the images and says Laurie seemed happy to send them, “like she was willing and she wanted to show more, I guess.” That might have been the end of it, had the files not, as digital files will, leaked onto the Internet. Within a day after Alex saw them, so did Laurie’s mother, who phoned Betty to say, “You need to talk to your son.”

So Betty and her husband Bill sat Alex on the stump that serves as a stool before the hearth of the home where three generations of Betty’s family have lived and asked Alex, a leader of their church youth group and recipient of several good citizen awards, what had happened. Alex told them. He said he was sorry and wanted to apologize. Betty called Laurie’s mother, who told her that an apology would be insufficient. Alex texted Laurie to ask what was going on. She answered that her father really wanted “to lay down the law.”

And now the law stood at Alex’s front door, asking on behalf of the Genesee County Sheriff ’s Department how the pictures came to be distributed. Alex explained that he had left the email inbox open on his Dell desktop. His buddy had forwarded the images to his own address. (According to Alex, he hadn’t shown the photos to anyone or posted them to his MySpace or Facebook pages, so he assumed this was how they made their way onto the Net. Later he would learn he was one of four boys who had received snapshots from Laurie and from whose computers the images had, like mononucleosis, spread exponentially.)

The trooper printed Alex’s statement on a printer he’d brought with him and watched while Alex signed it. Charges, he said, were pending.

Peer-to-Peer Flashing

Not far from the Davis farm stands the George Eastman House, a Versailles-size mansion in downtown Rochester that includes displays of the Eastman Kodak Company’s myriad photographic inventions, including the Brownie camera. Released in 1900, Brownies were designed for youngsters and marketed with the slogan, “So simple, they can easily be operated by any school boy or girl.” Pictorial ads of the time show young folks preserving memories of outdoor games and train rides.

Eastman likely never imagined that young people, empowered not only with cameras but mobile wireless network nodes, would instead shoot naked pictures of themselves and send them to friends, who often return the favor. We’re not talking about a few exhibitionistic teens, but millions of kids. In a 2008 TRU survey of 1,280 teenagers and young adults (all of whom had volunteered to participate), 20 percent of the teenagers and 33 percent of the young adults said they had transmitted nude or semi-nude photos or videos of themselves, a phenomenon the media have dubbed “peer-to-peer porn” or “sexting.”

This practice might be considered relatively harmless, the 21st-century version of “you show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” if it weren’t for federal and state laws that deal harshly with those who traffic in child pornography. The federal statute criminalizes the production, distribution, and possession of images depicting underage subjects engaged in sexually explicit conduct; depending on the charges, it mandates sentences of five to 30 years in prison. Because the technology that allows sexting is new, age-appropriate punishments have yet to be hammered out. Instead, laws designed to thwart middle-aged people who prey on children are being applied to the children themselves.

Sexting cases are piling up in courtrooms across the United States. Three Pennsylvania girls, ages 14 and 15, who took semi-nude pictures of themselves with their phones and sent them to their boyfriends are awaiting trial on charges of distributing child porn. (The boyfriends are charged with possession.) Last October a 15-year-old Ohio girl was taken in handcuffs to a juvenile detention facility after sending nude photos of herself to classmates. “I wasn’t really thinking when I did it,” she told the court, which threatened felony charges that would require her to register as a sex offender, charges that were dropped when she agreed to have her cell phone and Internet use monitored. Two teenagers in Florida were not as fortunate: In 2007 a state appeals court upheld their convictions for producing child porn. Although the pair didn’t pass around the snapshots, which showed them engaged in an “unspecified sex act,” the judges found a “reasonable expectation that the material will ultimately be disseminated.” Were that to happen, they observed, “future damage may be done to these minors’ careers or personal lives.” They did not say anything about the potential impact on their lives from a child pornography conviction.

Alex’s case isn’t even the first to arise in his part of the country. Genesee County, with a population of about 60,000, has seen “a dozen, 15 maybe” in the last two years, according to Assistant District Attorney Will Zickl. “I’m glad they didn’t have this technology when I was in high school,” he says. “Once you put your image out there, it’s out there. God knows where it can go. As computer-savvy and Net-savvy as kids are, they don’t think about that.”

Or maybe they do, and they just don’t care. While it’s hard to argue that it’s an awesome idea for teenagers to launch pictures of their genitals into cyberspace, the sheer number who do so suggests that they don’t share the concern for privacy that held sway over previous generations. When they close their bedroom doors, it is not necessarily to be alone. It might be to hook up with the whole world.

Better Than We Thought

The call that Tom Splain took from Betty and Bill Davis was not the first the attorney had received about a kid caught looking at dirty pictures. “At least in this case, the fricking sheriff didn’t send out a press release,” says Splain, a big man in a dress shirt and tie. Between answering calls from several clients and a judge, he relates an earlier incident in which an overzealous police chief acted as though he had a big cyber-crime on his hands. The official alerted a Rochester TV station, which splashed a mug shot of the boy—bangs in his eyes, cheeks spackled with acne—all over the 6 p.m. news.

If there’s culpability on Alex’s part, Splain says, it’s that he did what might be expected of a kid his age: He looked at the photos and asked for more. “The thing to bear in mind,” Splain adds, “is she sent him these pictures unsolicited. He’s [got] hormones galore—hey, yeah, holy cow! It’s Christmas morning!”

Alex deleted the files as soon he realized his and Laurie’s virtual encounter was about to have very real consequences, consequences Splain knew could be extremely serious. “We’re talking about C, D, and E-level felonies,” he says. “A C-level is a mandatory minimum three and a half years in state prison and up to 15. In our system, Alex wasn’t a juvenile. He was a youthful offender. If you’re 16 or older, you’re treated as an adult.” The Davises could have agitated for a charge against Laurie of disseminating indecent materials to minors in the second degree—a class E felony—but they declined, and they have had no further communications with her family.

(Contacted for this article, Laurie’s father would only say on the record, “This country has laws in place to protect children. Those laws need to be enforced, and parents need to pursue those laws to the fullest extent to protect their children.”)

Adults who have been drawn into the drama of kids and their cell phones tend to be caught between the desire to punish and the reality that kids can flout conventional standards of decency, morality, or what-have-you and still grow up to be productive members of society. “Schools are really struggling at the policy level, as are the courts, to establish a body of case law and guiding legal principles for what is acceptable,” says Samuel McQuade, graduate program coordinator at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center for Multidisciplinary Studies. His 2008 Survey of Internet and At-Risk Behaviors, which polled about 40,000 upstate New York students, charts the online intersections between kids and sex, which are seemingly infinite. “The last thing we want to do for youth is to clog up our juvenile justice systems with the massive amounts of computer-enabled crime,” he says. “It’s not possible to do it, nor would you want to do it. The answer is through education.”

So far, that line of thinking has led to efforts of dubious value—McGruff the Crime Dog for the digital set. McQuade’s own organization, the Cyber Safety and Ethics Initiative, puts its energy into hanging posters promoting “good digital citizenship,” embedding ethical messages in school websites, and publishing a pamphlet called It’s Worse Than We Thought. Actually, it’s probably better. A recent study by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society suggests that the threats children face online, in particular from sexual predators, are no worse than those they encounter offline. This is in sync with other research, including the 2007 Pew Internet and American Life Project, which shows that when social networking, kids can tell a pervert from a potential friend.

Meanwhile, law enforcement officials are learning that the tough-guy approach can do more harm than good. Splain describes how one local D.A. is handling cases. “He’s like, ‘I get a call almost every day from the school resource counselor in Genesee [County], saying they’ve intercepted another phone with these pictures,’ ” Splain says. “They’ve taken the tack, we don’t want to hurt anybody. We want the school resource officer to intercede and put the fear of God in these kids. If there are further problems, let us know, but word is going out to the parents that the school is handling it internally.”

That isn’t what happened in Alex’s case. Three months after receiving the pictures, Alex was arrested. Splain called Bill Davis and asked him to bring his son to the station. There, the trooper who had taken the initial report at the Davis house joined the father and the attorney as Alex was being led away for fingerprinting. Splain recalls: “The trooper said to me, ‘Tom, when we were that age, we snuck a look at our dad’s Playboy and passed it around. What do they expect?’ ”

The Death of Common Sense

It’s 4 p.m. on a Friday in January, and the Davis home is a thoroughfare. Every five minutes, someone walks through the front door: a young Chinese woman who lives with the Davises while she spends the year teaching, several employees of the Davises’ large farms. Betty pours a cola in the kitchen beneath a plaque on the stove hood that reads, “Be still, and know that I am God,” before joining her husband at the dining table.

“The reason we’re sitting here is we’re hoping we can help somebody else through this,” says Bill, his overalls filled by a stout belly. “The girl moved to our school that year; she had been homeschooled up until then. Obviously, she was trying to fit in somehow, and she sent a picture to my son, and he asked for more.” He looks to Betty. “In our eyes, that’s fairly normal.”

Not that they were sanguine about it. “The last thing Alex wants to do is disappoint us, and he knew at that point, he had,” Betty says. “And the parents wanted some type of a punishment for the embarrassment.”

“If I were in their shoes, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have done the same thing,” Bill says, adding that, while he and Betty had never met Laurie or her folks, “I’m sure they’re a great family.”

What might have been settled quickly between the families—with apologies, or confiscation of cell phones, or a smack upside the head and the words, “What’s wrong with you?”—instead became a prolonged and anxiety-ridden ordeal. Bill and Betty worked assiduously to contain the damage and did everything Splain, their attorney, told them to do. They agreed to pay if Laurie needed counseling, for instance, a recollection that causes Betty to widen her eyes in incredulity. They took Alex to a sex counselor, a $350 meeting that ended with the counselor telling Betty what she already knew: “There’s no sex problem with your son.”

Then there were the things they could not control, such as the confiscation by police of the computer belonging to the dean of students at Alex’s school. The dean had requested the images in an effort to sort things out—but that made him a suspect, a turn of events that enrages Bill to the point that he appears to levitate in his chair. “They don’t make better people than this man,” he says. “I was worried he’d lose his damn job! There’s the death of common sense, is how I refer to it.”

And there was the ongoing specter of prosecution. The D.A. had yet to press charges, but the worst-case scenario was three felonies, including passing child pornography, which would require Alex to register as a sex offender. “How can you go to college?” asks Betty, the pitch of her voice rising as she recalls her fear and umbrage. “How can you do anything with this on your record?”

For several months, it looked as though it might all go away. Then, in February, Splain called to say that Alex would be charged. “The officer said I could bring [Alex] down at a time convenient for both of us,” says Bill, his voice thickening with tears. “So I waited for him after basketball practice, and we went there. We walked in the door, and when I tried to go in with [my son], an officer said, ‘No, you have to stay here.’ ”

Betty pats his hand. “Dad was scared,” she says.

“Yeah, Dad was scared,” he says. “Because Dad has common sense.”

Betty says she put her faith in God and knew it was going to be OK. Which, as these things go, it was: Alex was charged with endangering the welfare of a child, a Class A misdemeanor that doesn’t require serving time. If he stayed out of trouble for six months, the record would be sealed.

Aftermath

The walls of Alex’s room are covered with posters: former Dodgers pitcher Greg Maddux, eight-time NBA All Star Paul Pierce, and a lone shot of Britney Spears. Alex is willing, in the bashful way of a 17-year-old boy talking to a lady he doesn’t know, to discuss what happened.

“I didn’t pressure her into it or anything,” he says. Not that he didn’t appreciate the gesture or didn’t like the photos. “It was all right,” he admits. “It was good.” As for the images themselves, they were not shocking or unusual. His friends frequently show him sexy pictures sent by female friends of theirs. Now, though, he has a policy about looking. “I always ask my friends, how old is she?” he says. “My rule is, 18.”

Around Alex, the supposition that kids who swap naked photos shred social decency while laying waste to their own futures falls apart. If there’s blame to be assigned, he’s ready to take it. “It’s kind of like that for everything,” he says. “Like when I play basketball. If we lose, it feels like I did what I had to do but I still have most of the blame on me. I’ve learned to deal with it.”

And he would have dealt with it, whether it meant going to jail or delaying college (where he plans to study business administration, with the goal of helping run his family’s farms) or apologizing to Laurie’s parents. The latter doesn’t seem to be in the cards. When they see him, it seems to Alex they avoid eye contact, and he hasn’t been sure they want to hear anything from him, including that he’s sorry. “But I think one of these days I will apologize, just for how everything went down,” he says. “I don’t want her family to think I’m that type of kid.”

Alex pauses, broad-shouldered and loose-limbed, wearing sweats on a Saturday morning after winning the big game. While the photos may have been a big deal to the grown-ups, to him and Laurie they weren’t. “I mean, this is my senior year, and I just want to have fun with it,” he says. “I see her. She’s a star cheerleader. We don’t let it faze us.”

From his point of view, the problem wasn’t the pictures but the aftermath. “This is a 16-year-old boy and an almost 15-year-old girl going through their young adult lives here,” Alex says.

“I just wish the families could have handled it better. I mean, I would have been glad to mow their lawn all summer.”

After which, maybe, she could have mowed the lawn at his house.

Alex grins. “Exactly.”

Nancy Rommelmann (nancyrommelmann@yahoo.com) writes for the L.A. Weekly and other publications. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Sex Shop Scandal

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 29 May 2009 09:41:00 EDT

Old Town Alexandria in Virginia is a historic neighborhood of red brick homes and townhouses, shops and restaurants, parks and cobblestone streets, and a waterfront with a view of Washington, D.C. George Washington frequented the neighborhood’s taverns, and Robert E. Lee grew up there. Unfortunately, the neighborhood’s stringent zoning rules are killing some of its charm. Small businesses often can’t afford to navigate the bureaucratic morass, which means chain franchises with deeper pockets are becoming more common.

Michael Zarlenga knows this as well as anyone. In March The Washington Post reported that Zarlenga spent two years and $350,000 drawing up plans to expand his hunting and fishing supply shop just off King Street, Old Town’s main strip. To be sure he was in compliance with the neighborhood’s strict zoning and historic preservation guidelines, Zarlenga consulted a member of the city’s Board of Architectural Review through each step in the process. But when it came time for a final board decision in 2007, Zarlenga was rejected. Among those who voted no was the board member with whom Zarlenga had been working for months. When the board suggested he start from scratch and come back with new plans, an emotional Zarlenga replied, “The simple fact is there’s no money left, OK?”

But Zarlenga got his revenge. Instead of renovating his building, he rented the space—to a sex shop. The racy store, Le Tache, now sits in the heart of Alexandria’s tourist district, just off the waterfront. Scantily clad mannequins beckon tourists into the historically preserved building, where displays featuring lingerie, vibrators, and dildos sit atop 200-year-old hardwood floors. City leaders are furious, but the shop is in full compliance with the law. Even if the city were to pass a new ordinance banning sex shops from the neighborhood, Le Tache would be grandfathered in. The shop’s owner says business is booming, even in a down economy.

Now the city is exploring ways to close down the business through obscenity laws. Though Zarlenga seems to have won the short-term battle, he dreamed of an even more delicious victory. “I was hoping for a fast-food chain,” he confessed to the Post, “because I thought that would be more annoying to the city.”

Craigslist: Making Prostitutes and Cops Safer and More Successful

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:28:00 EDT

A great piece from Slate on how attorney general grandstanding has made life worse for cops and prostitutes:

Leading the campaign against Craigslist prostitution is Richard Blumenthal. The Connecticut attorney general, hot off a war on Facebook and MySpace for their alleged exposure of young people to sexual predation, started a crusade against Craigslist last March. (He was joined by 39 more attorneys general in November.) Sure enough, when Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster announced the company's decision to kill the site's sex ads, Blumenthal and his supporters declared victory. What exactly has Blumenthal won, though? By organizing and consolidating a sector of the informal economy, Craigslist was certainly helpful for sexual-service providers. But it also was a major boon for law enforcement, which could centralize its sting operations—thanks to Craigslist, a bust was only a mouse-click away. While the death of the erotic-services section is a PR win for Blumenthal—and for Craigslist, which can claim that it's cleaned up its act—it's terrible news for sex workers, who will lose a measure of safety, and for beat cops, who will now find it harder to crack down on the sex trade that Blumenthal supposedly wants to end.

Not sure the folks at Craigslist consider this a win, though. They're calling this a "witch-hunt" and suing the attorney general of South Carolina for similar P.R. stunts.

More me on prostitutes here. Me on online predators here. And me on Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, here.

New at Reason: Nick Gillespie on Paying With Our Sins—It's time to legalize (and tax) drugs, prostitution, and gambling

Wed, 20 May 2009 18:00:00 EDT

Writing in Sunday's New York Times, Reason's Nick Gillespie lays out the economic case for turning America into a Sin City on a Hill:

Here's [an idea] that will help the federal and state governments fill their coffers: Legalize drugs and then tax sales of them. And while we're at it, welcome all forms of gambling (rather than just the few currently and arbitrarily allowed) and let prostitution go legit too. All of these vices, involving billions of dollars and consenting adults, already take place. They just take place beyond the taxman's reach.
Legalizing the world's oldest profession probably wasn't what Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, meant when he said that we should never allow a crisis to go to waste. But turning America into a Sin City on a Hill could help President Obama pay for his ambitious plans to overhaul health care, invest in green energy, and create gee-whiz trains that whisk "through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour." More taxed vices would certainly lead to significant new revenue streams at every level. That's one of the reasons 52 percent of voters in a recent Zogby poll said they support legalizing, taxing and regulating the growth and sale of marijuana. Similar cases could be made for prostitution and all forms of gambling.

Read the whole article here.

For an earlier discussion of this, go here.

Paying With Our Sins

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:00:00 EDT

The Obama administration's drug czar made news recently by saying he wanted to end all loose talk about a "war on drugs." "We're not at war with people in this country," said the czar, Gil Kerlikowske, who favors forcing people into treatment programs rather than jail cells.

Here's a better idea—and one that will help the federal and state governments fill their coffers: Legalize drugs and then tax sales of them. And while we're at it, welcome all forms of gambling (rather than just the few currently and arbitrarily allowed) and let prostitution go legit too. All of these vices, involving billions of dollars and consenting adults, already take place. They just take place beyond the taxman's reach.

Legalizing the world's oldest profession probably wasn't what Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, meant when he said that we should never allow a crisis to go to waste. But turning America into a Sin City on a Hill could help President Obama pay for his ambitious plans to overhaul health care, invest in green energy, and create gee-whiz trains that whisk "through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour." More taxed vices would certainly lead to significant new revenue streams at every level. That's one of the reasons 52 percent of voters in a recent Zogby poll said they support legalizing, taxing and regulating the growth and sale of marijuana. Similar cases could be made for prostitution and all forms of gambling.

In terms of economic stimulation and growth, legalization would end black markets that generate huge amounts of what economists call "deadweight losses," or activity that doesn't contribute to increased productivity. Rather than spending precious time and resources avoiding the law (or, same thing, paying the law off), producers and consumers could more easily get on with business and the huge benefits of working and playing in plain sight.

Consider prostitution. No reliable estimates exist on the number of prostitutes in the United States or aggregate demand for their services. However, Nevada, one of the two states that currently allows paid sex acts, is considering a tax of $5 for each transaction. State Senator Bob Coffin argues further that imposing state taxes on existing brothels could raise $2 million a year (at present, brothels are allowed only in rural counties, which get all the tax revenue), and legalizing prostitution in cities like Las Vegas could swell state coffers by $200 million annually.

A conservative extrapolation from Nevada to the rest of the country would easily mean billions of dollars annually in new tax revenues. Rhode Island, which has never explicitly banned prostitution, is on the verge of finally doing so—but with the state facing a $661 million budget shortfall, perhaps fully legalizing the vice (and then taking a cut) would be the smarter play.

Every state except Hawaii and Utah already permits various types of gambling, from state lotteries to racetracks to casinos. In 2007, such activity generated more than $92 billion in receipts, much of which was earmarked for the elderly and education. Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, has introduced legislation to repeal the federal ban on online gambling; and a 2008 study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers estimates that legalizing cyberspace betting alone could yield as much as $5 billion a year in new tax revenues. Add to that expanded opportunities for less exotic forms of wagering at, say, the local watering hole and the tax figure would be vastly larger.

Based on estimates from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Americans spend at least $64 billion a year on illegal drugs. And according to a 2006 study by the former president of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, Jon Gettman, marijuana is already the top cash crop in a dozen states and among the top five crops in 39 states, with a total annual value of $36 billion.

A 2005 cost-benefit analysis of marijuana prohibition by Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, calculated that ending marijuana prohibition would save $7.7 billion in direct state and federal law enforcement costs while generating more than $6 billion a year if it were taxed at the same rate as alcohol and tobacco. The drug czar's office says that a gram of pure cocaine costs between $100 and $150; a gram of heroin almost $400; and a bulk gram of marijuana between $15 and $20. Those transactions are now occurring off the books of business and government alike.

As the history of alcohol prohibition underscores, there are also many non-economic reasons to favor legalization of vices: Prohibition rarely achieves its desired goals and instead increases violence (when was the last time a tobacco kingpin was killed in a deal gone wrong?) and destructive behavior (it's hard enough to get help if you're a substance abuser and that much harder if you're a criminal too). And by policing vice, law enforcement is too often distracted at best or corrupted at worst, as familiar headlines about cops pocketing bribes and seized drugs attest. There's a lot to be said for treating consenting adults like, well, adults.

But there is an economic argument as well, one that Franklin Roosevelt understood when he promised to end Prohibition during the 1932 presidential campaign. "Our tax burden would not be so heavy nor the forms that it takes so objectionable," thundered Roosevelt, "if some reasonable proportion of the unaccountable millions now paid to those whose business had been reared upon this stupendous blunder could be made available for the expense of government."

Roosevelt could also have talked about how legitimate fortunes can be made out of goods and services associated with vice. Part of his family fortune came from the opium trade, after all, and he and other leaders during the Depression oversaw a generally orderly re-legalization of the nation's breweries and distilleries.

There's every reason to believe that today's drug lords could go legit as quickly and easily as, say, Ernest and Julio Gallo, the venerable winemakers who once sold their product to Al Capone. Indeed, here's a (I hope soon-to-be-legal) bet worth making: If marijuana is legalized, look for the scion of a marijuana plantation operation to be president within 50 years.

Legalizing vice will not balance government deficits by itself—that will largely depend on spending cuts, which seem beyond the reach of all politicians. But in a time when every penny counts and the economy needs stimulation, allowing prostitution, gambling and drugs could give us all a real lift.

Nick Gillespie is the editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason.tv. A version of this article appeared in the May 16, 2009 edition of The New York Times.

The Feminist Makeover

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 19 May 2009 12:00:00 EDT

This article first appeared on the newly launched Slate women's site, Double X, as part of a group of answers to the following prompt: "In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that American women suffered from a malaise she called "the problem that had no name." Her critique of domestic ennui helped launch the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, leading to many of the advances women now take for granted. But not everything has changed. So we asked women to answer this question: If you had to pinpoint today's problem that had no name, what would it be?" Read the other responses here.

In 2006, at 25, I left a position as a researcher at the New York Times. As my boss and I boarded the elevator for my goodbye lunch, a successful middle-aged newspaperwoman joined us. When small talk revealed that we were headed to a meal in my honor, she politely inquired if it was Secretary’s Day. Mortified, I rushed to explain that I was no secretary, but a Working Journalist, and we were heading to lunch because I was leaving the Times to follow my then-boyfriend (now-husband) to Boston, where he’d be starting business school in the fall. What would I be doing in Boston? she asked. I told her the truth: I didn’t have a job lined up yet. She shook her head, the corners of her mouth curling downward, and snapped that the next relocation had better be for my career. Then she stepped briskly off the elevator.

Here was a woman who had fought the good fight, broken glass ceilings, made tough calls about work-life balance, and made a great success of herself. Yet somehow, when she looked at me, she didn’t see a happy beneficiary of her labors, a young woman free to make professional and romantic choices in a far better world than when she herself had started out. She saw, first, a secretary, and second, an ungrateful wretch. I think she honestly believed that she was speaking a hard truth to me, one I might not hear anywhere else.

I was born in 1980. The ideas in The Feminine Mystique were conventional wisdom before I was a twinkle in my mother’s contraceptive compact. We’ve had a revolution, a backlash, a rinse, and a repeat since Friedan wrote her zeitgeist-altering book. The choking, claustrophobic silence about the compromises women make, which Friedan documents so movingly, is long since eradicated. In fact, women pretty much won’t shut up about this stuff.

Friedan’s “problem with no name” now has more names than Eskimos have for snow, each one capturing a slightly different aspect of a single phenomenon. There hasn’t been such a frenzy of naming since Genesis 2:20 (perhaps not coincidentally, the same passage where woman-as-helpmeet makes her debut). We endlessly discuss how to have it all, plus personal fulfillment, work-life balance, helicopter parenting, not knowing how she does it, freezing eggs, opting out, and yummy mummys. We will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

So if we’re living in a post-post-Friedan utopia, why aren’t women happier? Well, women make a lot of bad choices. But you know who else makes terrible choices? Men. Virtually all of my late-20s male friends are currently having career and/or life crises. They’re depressed. They feel out-of-joint, disconnected from the life they wish they were leading in ways that are difficult to express, just like Friedan’s housewives. Their crises aren’t the same as my women friends’—men don’t fret about the health of their gonads, for instance. But the New York Times 1963 review of The Feminine Mystique gets this about right for both sexes: “To paraphrase a famous line, ‘The fault, dear Mrs. Friedan, is not in our culture, but in ourselves.’”

The same woman at the Times who snagged me in the elevator that day had done the same thing on an earlier occasion, to ask about a semi-spurious trend story published in the paper that day. It described Yale students and recent graduates (I’m one) who were planning to “opt out” for a year or two or five when they spawned. She was aghast to hear that I didn’t have strong feelings either way, and warned me against dropping out of the workforce. God help my shallow self, as I stood there looking at her rumpled suit and dated hair and frown lines, I was overwhelmed with pity. Perhaps watching me breeze into the life she had so laboriously carved out for herself—or worse, stray from the hard line in a way that she and other feminists couldn’t allow themselves to—felt to her like a bitter betrayal.

But it felt great to me.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor at Reason magazine.

Prostitutes Get Screwed (and a Happy Ending)

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 13 May 2009 15:02:00 EDT

Craigslist is removing ads for "erotic services" from the site. This isn't totally shocking in the wake of the Craigslist Killer panic and the resulting pressure from state attorneys general to do something. Also, founder Craig Newmark was never as tickled as he should have been by the idea that he was the world's most successful pimp (for instance, he didn't like the question when I asked him in this interview).

The fact is that booking clients online and controlling the circumstances of the rendezvous probably made prostitutes and other users of the site much safer than they would otherwise have been—it's a little tougher to google a guy you just picked up on a side street by leaning into the window of his car. So this is probably a net loss for the safety of the sexually adventurous and/or those who like their sex with a little capitalism mixed in.

However, it's not all doom and gloom for the world's oldest profession. Overseas, U.S. taxpayer dollars are going to an excellent cause: Getting Chinese prostitutes drunk. Seriously:

The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAA), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will pay $2.6 million in U.S. tax dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly on the job....
“The purpose of the project is to try and develop an intervention program targeting HIV risk and alcohol use,” [Dr. Xiaoming] Li told CNSNews.com....“Alcohol has been a part of the commerce of sex for many, many years. Unfortunately, both global-wise (and) in the United States, very few researchers are looking at the complex issue of the inter play between alcohol and the commerce of sex,” he told CNSNews.com.

Plus, a happy ending to a tale of sex commerce in the U.K.'s Daily News today. Alina Percea, a Romanian 18-year-old auctioned off the right to take her virginity online for £8,800. She reports "I was attracted to him, so I enjoyed it":

Although her first concern was to raise money for her education, Alina was open to finding more from the transaction, saying that if she should meet her 'happiness and future, then that would be great too'....
'I hope to see the man again,' she says. 'And next time I won't make him pay!'

More on sex, including lots of sex workers, here.

Disturbing the Peace

Brendan.ONeill@spiked-online.com (Brendan O'Neill) — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:30:00 EDT

"Unlike Winston, [Julia] had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship."

So wrote George Orwell in 1984, his dystopian vision of a future world where mankind's every thought, desire, and bodily tingle would be policed by the powers-that-be. Orwell imagined a Junior Anti-Sex League that spied on kissing and cavorting adults, and a ruling Party that sought to squash the "sex impulse." The heroes of his nightmarish tale—Winston and Julia—had to sneak off to a wood in order to explore each other bodies in a bit of peace and quiet.

It turns out that Orwell was suffering from premature speculation. It was not in 1984 that a major Western government made the "sex impulse"—the grunting, groaning sex instinct—into a police matter; it was in 2009. Here in the U.K., to add to our already-existing panoply of Orwellian measures—5 million CCTV cameras that watch our every move; "speaking cameras" that warn us to pick up litter or stop loitering; the government's attempt to recruit child spies to re-educate anti-social adults—we now have the bizarre and terrifying situation where a woman has been arrested for having sex too loudly.

Yes, in modern-day Britain even the decibels of our sexual moaning can become the subject of a police investigation.

At the end of April, Caroline Cartwright, a 48-year-old housewife from Wearside in the north east of England, was remanded in custody for having "excessively noisy sex." The cops took her in after neighbors complained of hearing her "shouting and groaning" and her "bed banging against the wall of her home." Cartwright has, quite reasonably, defended her inalienable right to be a howler: "I can't stop making noise during sex. It's unnatural to not make any noises and I don't think that I am particularly loud."

Pleasurable groaning and bed-banging are common noises in crowded towns and cities across the civilized world. Most of us deal with them by sticking a CD in the stereo. Those who complain are normally told to stop being prudish or to have a discreet chat with the creators of the offending sex sounds. So how did Cartwright's expressions of noisy joy become a police case, which later this month will be ruled on at Newcastle Crown Court, one of the biggest courts in the north of England?

Because, unbelievably, Cartwright had previously been served with an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO)—a civil order that is used to control the minutiae of British people's behaviour—that forbade her from making "excessive noise during sex" anywhere in England.

That's right, going even further than Orwell's imagined authoritarian hellhole, where at least there was a wood or two where people could indulge their sexual impulses, the local authorities in Wearside made all of England a no-go zone for Cartwright's noisy shenanigans. If she wanted to howl with abandon, she would have to nip over the border to Scotland or maybe catch a ferry to France. It was because she breached the conditions of her Anti-Social Behaviour Order, the civil ruling about how much noise she can make while making love in England, that Cartwright was arrested.

This case sheds harsh light not only on the Victorian-style petty prudishness of our rulers, who seriously believe they can make sexually expressive women timid again by dragging them to court, but on the tyranny of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders themselves. Introduced by our authoritarian Labour government in 1998, anyone can apply for an ASBO to stop anyone else from doing something that they find irritating, "alarming," or "threatening."

Local magistrates' courts issue the orders, sometimes on the basis of hearsay evidence (which is permissible in "ASBO cases"). In short, the applicant for an ASBO does not have to go through the normal rigors of the criminal justice system in order to get a civil ruling preventing someone he doesn't like from doing something that he finds "alarming" or "dangerous." Once you have been branded with an ASBO, if you break its conditions—by having noisy sex in your own home, for example—you are potentially guilty of a crime and can be imprisoned.

The ASBO system has turned much of Britain into a curtain-twitching, neighbor-watching, noise-policing gang of spies. The relative ease with which one can apply to the authorities for an ASBO positively invites people to use the system to punish their foes or the irritants who live in their neighborhoods. ASBOs have been used to prevent young people in certain areas from wearing hoods or hats (they look "threatening"), to ban a middle-aged couple from playing gangsta rap (the expletives offended workers and children at a nearby kindergarten), and to prevent a 10-year-old boy from having contact with matches until he turns 16, after he was found to have started a fire.

And now, prudish people who previously would have been told to "put up or shut up" over their neighbors' noisy sex have been empowered to turn one woman's private affairs into a very public trial. This, too, is Orwellian: the creation of new layers of spies and inter-communal suspicion.

In Orwell's dystopia, "the sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion." So it is in Wearside in 2009, where the excessively noisy exploits of Cartwright and her possibly very talented partner are a form of rebellion against the arbitrary and interventionist nature of the ASBO-wielding powers-that-be. They are screwing for liberty.

Brendan O'Neill is editor of spiked in London.

Reason Morning Links: Floods, Guns, Antitrust, and an Indecisive Orangutan

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 11 May 2009 08:14:00 EDT

• West Virginia floods.

• Iraq: the everlasting withdrawal.

• Montana and the feds face off over gun control.

• Obama will keep Bush's military tribunals in operation, albeit with more protections for defendants.

• The Justice Department promises more antitrust enforcement.

• Republican senators water down a bill to audit the Federal Reserve.

• With Marilyn Chambers in the grave, Warren Hinckle remembers Dianne Feinstein's battles with the directors of Behind the Green Door.

• Aid officials live well in Afghanistan.

• Ape attains freedom, then thinks better of it.

Iowa Reconsiders Residence Restrictions for Sex Offenders

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:25:00 EDT

Last week the Iowa legislature mixed a little sanity into the state's residence restrictions for sex offenders. Under a bill the governor has indicated he will sign, the state will no longer tell "lower-risk" sex offenders, heretofore prohibited from owning or renting homes within 2,000 feet of a school or child care facility, where they may live. Instead it will let schools, child care facilities, and libraries establish "exclusion zones" where sex offenders can be nabbed for loitering. The residence restrictions will remain in place for more-serious offenders, which does not make much sense: Unlike the "exclusion zones," they do nothing to prevent potential child molesters from traveling to other neighborhoods to commit new crimes. Still, this reform counts as a move in the right direction, away from counterproductive, hysteria-driven restrictions that impede reintegration, in some cases making it almost impossible for sex offenders to find a place where they can legally live, and fail to distinguish between sex offenders who pose a real threat to children and those who don't, who nowadays include not only young men who have consensual sex with somewhat younger girlfriends but teenagers who transmit nude pictures of themselves on their cell phones. It's also encouraging that the legal changes had strong support from Iowa police and prosecutors, who for years have been complaining that the residence restrictions made their jobs harder.

I mentioned those complaints in two columns about residence restrictions, here and here.

[Thanks to Mark Lambert for the tip.]

'Sexting' Scare

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:19:00 EDT

One-fifth of the teenagers surveyed last year by CosmoGirl.com said they had transmitted or posted nude or semi-nude pictures of themselves online. Since the sample was drawn from teenagers who had volunteered to participate in surveys, it may have been biased toward exhibitionists. But the results suggest that high schools across America are rife with child pornographers.

At least, that’s the way these teenagers would be treated in some jurisdictions. In January, police in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, announced that they had filed child pornography charges against six students at Greensburg Salem High School: three girls who had taken naughty photos of themselves and sent them to boys by cell phone, plus three boys who had received them. Lisa Rullo, the school’s former principal and now the school district’s director of student services, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, “We inform the students that it still is child pornography” even if the images are voluntarily transmitted self-portraits and no adults are involved.

The Pennsylvania arrests followed similar cases involving a 16-year-old Florida girl and her 17-year-old boyfriend, whose child pornography convictions were upheld by a state appeals court in 2007, and a 15-year-old Ohio girl who was arrested last fall. Upholding the prosecution of teenagers like these, the Florida appeals court said it’s for their own good. “The statute was intended to protect minors like appellant and her co-defendant from their own lack of judgment,” the court said. “Appellant was simply too young to make an intelligent decision about engaging in sexual conduct and memorializing it.” But not too young to be branded a child pornographer.

The Unresisted Sex Urges of Celebrities

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:00:00 EDT

"The more I study it," writes JFK biographer Jed Mercurio in the London Times, "the more sceptical I have become that sex addiction is a genuine condition." That's a confusing way to put it. Mercurio is probably right that many people, especially sex-obsessed celebrities such as David Duchovny, Russell Brand, and Michael Douglas, use the addiction label as a way of medicalizing their behavior and escaping responsibility for it. But to the extent that they succeed, it's because people misunderstand addiction, not because people fail to distinguish between "real" addictions like alcoholism and "fake" addictions like excessive copulation. There is such a thing as too much sex, just as there is such a thing as too much drinking, and in either case people may be so strongly attached to the experience that they have trouble stopping or moderating their behavior. That is the essence of addiction, not the physical withdrawal symptoms Mercurio calls "a cardinal sign of addiction" (while dismissing Kennedy's claim that he'd get headaches after three days without sex). Even the American Psychiatric Association does not consider withdrawal symptoms a necessary or sufficient condition for a diagnosis of "substance dependence."

Phillip Hodson, a fellow of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, tells Mercurio "you cannot really be 'addicted' to normal drives," such as sex and hunger. Really? As scholars such as Andrew Weil and Ronald Siegel have shown, there is considerable evidence that the desire to achieve altered states of consciousness is a basic human drive, one that can go awry in cases such as alcoholism or heroin addiction. And is it really so absurd to note the similarities between continuing to overeat even while expressing a desire to be thinner and continuing to smoke cigarettes even while expressing a desire to quit? In both cases, there is a conflict between pleasure and health, between short-term and long-term interests, that results in a hard-to-break habit.

Mercurio sympathetically quotes a psychiatrist who says:

In the past psychiatrists attempted to differentiate between irresistible and unresisted impulses. Irresistible impulses have historically been accepted as mental illness. But unresisted impulses that led to misconduct were ascribed to depravity.

If psychiatrists have given up on distinguishing between "irresistible and unresisted impulses" (I'm not sure they have), it's because the task is hopeless. Observers can confidently say that an alcoholic did not resist an impulse to have a drink, or that a celebrity did not resist an impulse to have sex with a groupie. But there is no way to prove that they could not have acted otherwise.

"The likes of Duchovny and Brand are just reaching for a convenient excuse when they claim that their urges are irresistible," Mercurio writes. "Irresistible isn't the same as hard to resist." Fair enough. But the existence of reformed alcoholics, ex-junkies, and former smokers demonstrates that the urges felt by people Mercurio would recognize as "true" addicts are not irresistible either. Unless he wants to say that quitting (or cutting back) proves they were never really addicted to begin with.