Pornography in the United States - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, there have been several notable court decisions relating to the definition of pornography

Pornography

Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...

and obscenity

Obscenity

An obscenity is any statement or act which strongly offends the prevalent morality of the time, is a profanity, or is otherwise taboo, indecent, abhorrent, or disgusting, or is especially inauspicious...

, personal possession, and its relation to prostitution

Prostitution

Prostitution is the act or practice of providing sexual services to another person in return for payment. The person who receives payment for sexual services is called a prostitute and the person who receives such services is known by a multitude of terms, including a "john". Prostitution is one of...

. The total market value of pornography in the U.S. is estimated between $2-$13 billion per year. Pornography has been the subject of the anti-pornography movement in the United States

Anti-pornography movement in the United States

The anti-pornography movement in the United States has existed ever since a 1969 Supreme Court decision which held that people could view whatever they wished in the privacy of their own homes. This caused President Lyndon B...

Economics

In 1975 the total retail value of all the hardcore pornography

Hardcore pornography

Hardcore pornography is a form of pornography that features explicit sexual acts. The term was coined in the second half of the 20th century to distinguish it from softcore pornography. It usually takes the form of photographs, often displayed in magazines or on the Internet, or films. It can also...

in the U.S. was estimated at $5-10 million. The 1979 Revision of the Federal Criminal Code stated that "in Los Angeles

Los Ángeles

Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

alone, the pornography business does $100 million a year in gross retail volume" while "the average pornography magazine sells for between $6 and $10 each". According to the 1986 Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, American adult entertainment industry has grown considerably over the past thirty years by continually changing and expanding to appeal to new markets, though the production is considered to be low-profile and clandestine. The total income of modern country's adult entertainment is often rated at $10–13 billion, of which $4–6 billion are legal. The figure is often credited to a study by Forrester Research

Forrester Research

Forrester Research is an independent technology and market research company that provides its clients with advice about technology's impact on business and consumers. Forrester Research has five research centers in the US: Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York, New York; San Francisco, California;...

and was lowered in 1998. In 2007 The Observer

The Observer

The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...

newspaper also gave a figure of $13 billion. Other sources, quoted by Forbes

Forbes

Forbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, the Forbes magazine, is published biweekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published biweekly, and Business Week...

(Adams Media Research, Veronis Suhler Communications Industry Report, and IVD), even taking into consideration all possible means (video networks and pay-per-view movies on cable and satellite, web sites, in-room hotel movies, phone sex, sex toys, and magazines) mention the $2.6–3.9 billion figure (without the cellphone component). USA Today claimed in 2003 that websites such as Danni's Hard Drive and Cybererotica.com generated $2 billion in revenue in that year, which was allegedly about 10% of the overall domestic porn market at the time. The adult movies income (from sale and rent) was once estimated by AVN Publications

AVN (magazine)

Adult Video News is an American trade journal that covers the adult video industry. The New York Times notes that AVN is to pornographic films what Billboard is to records...

at $4.3 billion but the figure obtaining is unclear. According to the 2001 Forbes data the annual income distribution is like this:

Adult Video	$500 million to $1.8 billion
Internet	$1 billion
Magazines	$1 billion
Pay-per-view	$128 million
Cellphones	$30 million

The Online Journalism Review, published by the Annenberg School of Communication

USC Annenberg School for Communication

The USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism comprises a School ofCommunication and a School of Journalism at the University of Southern California . It is led by Dean Ernest J. Wilson III, Ph.D....

at the University of Southern California

University of Southern California

The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...

, weighed in with an analysis that favored Forbes number. The financial extent of adult films, distributed in hotels, is hard to estimate—hotels keep statistics to themselves or do not keep them at all. A CBS News

CBS News

CBS News is the news division of American television and radio network CBS. The current chairman is Jeff Fager who is also the executive producer of 60 Minutes, while the current president of CBS News is David Rhodes. CBS News' flagship program is the CBS Evening News, hosted by the network's main...

investigation in November 2003 claimed that 50% of guests at the Hilton

Hilton Hotels

Hilton Hotels & Resorts is an international chain of full-service hotels and resorts founded by Conrad Hilton and now owned by Hilton Worldwide. Hilton hotels are either owned by, managed by, or franchised to independent operators by Hilton Worldwide. Hilton Hotels became the first coast-to-coast...

, Marriott

Marriott International

Marriott International, Inc. is a worldwide operator and franchisor of a broad portfolio of hotels and related lodging facilities. Founded by J. Willard Marriott, the company is now led by son J.W. Marriott, Jr...

, Hyatt

Hyatt

Hyatt Hotels Corporation , is an international operator of hotels.Hyatt Center is the headquarters for Hyatt corporation...

, Sheraton

Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

Sheraton Hotels and Resorts is Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide's largest and second oldest brand . Starwood's headquarters are in White Plains, New York.-Sheraton history:...

, and Holiday Inn

Holiday Inn

Holiday Inn is a brand of hotels, formally a economy motel chain, forming part of the British InterContinental Hotels Group . It is one of the world's largest hotel chains with 238,440 bedrooms and 1,301 hotels globally. There are currently 5 hotels in the pipeline...

hotel chains purchased adult movies, contributing to 70% of in-room profits. The income of cellphone porn

Mobile porn

Mobile porn also known as mobile adult content, mobile erotica or cellphone adult content, is pornography distributed over mobile telecommunications networks for consumption on mobile devices; mainly mobile phones and smartphones....

is low, when compared with other countries. The absence of V-chip

V-chip

V-chip is a generic term for technology used in television set receivers in the USA, Canada, and Brazil which allows the blocking of programs based on their ratings category. It is intended for use by parents to manage their children's television viewing...

-style parental controls largely has kept American consumers from using cellphones to access explicit content. Porn star Ron Jeremy

Ron Jeremy

Ronald Jeremy Hyatt , usually called Ron Jeremy, is an American pornographic actor. Nicknamed "The Hedgehog", he was ranked by AVN at number one in their "The 50 Top Porn Stars of All Time" list...

licensed his name to "RJ Mobile", which offers adult content in Britain

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

and the Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

Legality

Further information: United States pornography censorship, U.S. Government Commissions on pornography

The lawful definition of pornography in the U.S. evolved through decades, from the 1960s. In this period, recognizing ambiguities, it was chosen to use the term "sexually

Human sexuality

Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...

explicit content" as one of the pornography's euphemism

Euphemism

A euphemism is the substitution of a mild, inoffensive, relatively uncontroversial phrase for another more frank expression that might offend or otherwise suggest something unpleasant to the audience...

s, but later it was determined that a distinction between pornographic and sexually explicit content is completely artificial. In Miller v. California the Supreme Court used the definition of pornography made by Webster's Third New International Dictionary of 1969 ("a depiction (as in a writing or painting) of licentiousness or lewdness: a portrayal of erotic behavior designed to cause sexual excitement"). Black's Law Dictionary

Black's Law Dictionary

Black's Law Dictionary is the most widely used law dictionary in the United States. It was founded by Henry Campbell Black. It is the reference of choice for definitions in legal briefs and court opinions and has been cited as a secondary legal authority in many U.S...

followed the Miller test and defined pornography as material that taken as a whole the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find appealing to the prurient interest. The definition "graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or in words", worded by feminists in Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance

Antipornography civil rights ordinance

The Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance is a name for several proposed local ordinances, closely associated with the anti-pornography radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, that proposed to treat pornography as a violation of women's civil rights,...

has been twice struck down, in 1983 and 1985 (in the Minneapolis City Council

Minneapolis City Council

The Minneapolis City Council is the governing body of the City of Minneapolis. The City Council is composed of 13 single member districts, called wards. Barbara Johnson is president of the council. The council is dominated by members of the DFL Party with 12 members. The Green Party has one member...

by the mayor and in Indianapolis

Indianapolis

Indianapolis is the capital of the U.S. state of Indiana, and the county seat of Marion County, Indiana. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city's population is 839,489. It is by far Indiana's largest city and, as of the 2010 U.S...

by a federal appeals court in American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut, respectively). Currently California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

and New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

are the only states with case laws (People v. Freeman (1988) and People v. Paulino (2005) respectively) that tend to support pornographic movies not being subject to the mostly illegal prostitution

Prostitution in the United States

Prostitution in the United States is illegal except in some small rural communities in Nevada. In the United States, each state has the power to regulate prostitution in that state. Only in parts of Nevada is prostitution legal. In all other states prostitution is usually classified as a...

-related charges, such as pandering, against the producer. Heinle's Newbury House Dictionary of American English

American English

American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....

(2003) defined pornography as "obscene writings, pictures, or films intended to arouse sexual desire".

Pornography is a legal term at the federal

Federal government of the United States

The federal government of the United States is the national government of the constitutional republic of fifty states that is the United States of America. The federal government comprises three distinct branches of government: a legislative, an executive and a judiciary. These branches and...

level, except the generic terms "hardcore pornography

Hardcore pornography

" and "child pornography", do not exist after the 1973 Miller v. California

Miller v. California

Miller v. California, was an important United States Supreme Court case involving what constitutes unprotected obscenity for First Amendment purposes...

case. The case, despite demonstrating that hardcore pornography enjoys no First Constitutional Amendment

First Amendment to the United States Constitution

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...

protection, recognized that individual communities had different values and opinions on pornography. Since then the states

U.S. state

A U.S. state is any one of the 50 federated states of the United States of America that share sovereignty with the federal government. Because of this shared sovereignty, an American is a citizen both of the federal entity and of his or her state of domicile. Four states use the official title of...

can pass their own laws on it. The United States Supreme Court added a legal significance to the term "obscenity

Obscenity

" which is defined by the Miller test

Miller test

The Miller test , is the United States Supreme Court's test for determining whether speech or expression can be labeled obscene, in which case it is not protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and can be prohibited.-History and details:The Miller test was developed in the...

. As in the case, "pornographic material which is obscene forms a sub-group of all 'obscene' expression, but not the whole, at least as the word 'obscene' is now used in our language". Relying on the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act

Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act

The Tariff Act of 1930, otherwise known as the Smoot–Hawley Tariff was an act, sponsored by United States Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis C. Hawley, and signed into law on June 17, 1930, that raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to record levels.The overall level tariffs...

and under the terms "obscene" and "immoral", the U.S. Customs and Border Protection

U.S. Customs and Border Protection

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is a federal law enforcement agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security charged with regulating and facilitating international trade, collecting import duties, and enforcing U.S. regulations, including trade, customs and immigration. CBP is the...

prohibits the importation of any pornographic material ( "Immoral articles; importation prohibited").

The term "pornography" (from Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

πόρνη (pórnē), a prostitute) first comes from an 1857 British medical dictionary

Medical dictionary

A medical dictionary is a lexicon for words used in medicine. The three major English language medical dictionaries are Stedman's, Taber's, and Dorland's Pocket Medical Dictionary. Other significant medical dictionaries are distributed by Elsevier, the world's largest publisher of medical and...

, which defined it as "a description of prostitutes or of prostitution, as a matter of public hygiene", therefore pornography by itself was not a widely used term in nineteenth-century America and the term did not appear in any version of American Dictionary of the English Language in its early editions. The dictionary introduced the entry in 1864, defining it primarily as a "treatment of, or a treatise on, the subject of prostitutes or prostitution". Early charges used the term "obscenity" as well as after Miller v. California, though the term "pornography" remained as a reference entry:

Source	Definition
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law	"Material that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement"
The People's Law Dictionary	"Pictures and/or writings of sexual activity intended solely to excite lascivious feelings of a particularly blatant and aberrational kind, such as acts involving children, animals, orgies, and all types of sexual intercourse"
West's Encyclopedia of American Law	"The representation in books, magazines, photographs, films, and other media of scenes of sexual behavior that are erotic or lewd and are designed to arouse sexual interest"; "the depiction of sexual behavior that is intended to arouse sexual excitement in its audience"

The upcoming censorship of pornographic materials in the United States became based on the First and partially Ninth

Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, addresses rights of the people that are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution.-Text:-Adoption:When the U.S...

and Fourteenth

Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments.Its Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship that overruled the Dred Scott v...

Amendments to Constitution

United States Constitution

The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It is the framework for the organization of the United States government and for the relationship of the federal government with the states, citizens, and all people within the United States.The first three...

. It also includes the so-called harm principle

Harm principle

The harm principle holds that the actions of individuals should only be limited to prevent harm to other individuals. John Stuart Mill first articulated this principle in On Liberty, where he argued that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized...

, as well as in Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

and the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

. The absolutist

Moral absolutism

Moral absolutism is an ethical view that certain actions are absolutely right or wrong, regardless of other contexts such as their consequences or the intentions behind them. Thus stealing, for instance, might be considered to be always immoral, even if done to promote some other good , and even if...

interpretation of the First Amendment as applied to pornography has never been sustained by the Supreme Court. In the Investigation of Literature Allegedly Containing Objectionable Material, issued by the U.S. Congress Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in 1953, it was noted that "perhaps the greatest impediments to the prompt and effective enforcement of existing laws intended to control pornographic materials are the difficulties of establishing a precise interpretation of the word". During the Warren Court (1953-1969), the first notable court to face the cases of such kind, justices Potter Stewart, Byron White

Byron White

Byron Raymond "Whizzer" White won fame both as a football halfback and as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Appointed to the court by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, he served until his retirement in 1993...

, and Arthur Goldberg

Arthur Goldberg

Arthur Joseph Goldberg was an American statesman and jurist who served as the U.S. Secretary of Labor, Supreme Court Justice and Ambassador to the United Nations.-Early life:...

shared the opinion that only hardcore pornography was not protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. This position was contested notably by U.S. Solicitor General

United States Solicitor General

The United States Solicitor General is the person appointed to represent the federal government of the United States before the Supreme Court of the United States. The current Solicitor General, Donald B. Verrilli, Jr. was confirmed by the United States Senate on June 6, 2011 and sworn in on June...

James Lee Rankin (in office 1956-1961), but in Jacobellis v. Ohio Stewart concluded that criminal obscenity laws are constitutionally limited under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to hardcore pornography. Concurring in the 1957 Roth v. United States

Roth v. United States

Roth v. United States, , along with its companion case, Alberts v. California, was a landmark case before the United States Supreme Court which redefined the Constitutional test for determining what constitutes obscene material unprotected by the First Amendment.- Prior history :Under the common...

Justice John Marshall Harlan II

John Marshall Harlan II

John Marshall Harlan was an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from 1955 to 1971. His namesake was his grandfather John Marshall Harlan, another associate justice who served from 1877 to 1911.Harlan was a student at Upper Canada College and Appleby College and...

wrote that "even assuming that pornography cannot be deemed ever to cause, in an immediate sense, criminal sexual conduct, other interests within the proper cognizance of the States may be protected by the prohibition placed on such materials."

The 1967 Public Law

Public law

Public law is a theory of law governing the relationship between individuals and the state. Under this theory, constitutional law, administrative law and criminal law are sub-divisions of public law...

90-100 found the traffic in pornography to be "a matter of national concern", as well as in obscenity. In this period the Court considered pornography to have two major dimensions. The first can be defined as dealing with sexual representations that are offensive to public morality or taste, which concerned the Court notably in the 1966 Ginzburg v. United States case. The second centers on the effect of pornography on specific individuals or classes, which is the focus of most public discussions and prior Court pornography decisions. This dimension was mentioned only twice in the array of decisions made in 1966. A frustration was expressed notably by Justice Hugo Black

Hugo Black

Hugo Lafayette Black was an American politician and jurist. A member of the Democratic Party, Black represented Alabama in the United States Senate from 1927 to 1937, and served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1937 to 1971. Black was nominated to the Supreme...

in the 1966 Mishkin v. New York: "I wish once more to express my objections to saddling this Court with the irksome and inevitably unpopular and unwholesome task of finally deciding by a case-by-case, sight-by-sight personal judgment of the members of this Court what pornography (whatever that means) is too hard core for people to see or read." In the 1974 Hamling v. United States decision the Supreme Court said that just because pornographic materials are for sale and purchased around the country, "Mere availability of similar materials by itself means nothing more than that other persons are engaged in similar activities." The 1976 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defined that pornography consists of "written, graphic, or other forms of communication intended to excite lascivious feelings". Since determining what is pornography and what is "soft core" and "hard core" are subjective questions to judges, juries, and law enforcement officials, it is difficult to define, since the law cases cannot print examples for the courts to follow. The Rehnquist Court further enhanced the power of community controls on pornography. Current Chief Justice John Roberts told at the confirmation hearing on his nomination: "Well, Senator, it's my understanding under the Supreme Court's doctrine that pornographic expression is not protected to the same extent at least as political and core speech, and the difficulty that the Court has addressed in these different areas of course is always defining what is or is not pornography and what is entitled to protection under the First Amendment and what is not"

The famous Indianapolis definition of pornography

Antipornography civil rights ordinance

by Dworkin and MacKinnon paralleled their Minneapolis ordinance. The first was rejected by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit is a federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the courts in the following districts:* Central District of Illinois* Northern District of Illinois...

for several reasons. The ordinance did not use any of the accepted terms that the Supreme Court had developed over time for determining when material is obscene, including "prurient interest", "offensiveness", or "local community standards". Another concern was the way the women were depicted in the work. If women were referred to in the approved fashion stressing equality, the activity involved would be regardless of how sexually explicit it was. The Court also indicated that if women were referred to in a disapproving way depicting them as subversive or as enjoying humiliation, the activity would be unlawful regardless of the "literary, artistic or political qualities of the work taken as a whole". Judge Frank Easterbrook said: "We accept the premises of this legislation. Depictions of subordination tend to perpetuate subordination. The subordinate status of women in turn leads to affront and lower pay at work, insult and injury at home, battery and rape

Rape

Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...

on the streets.... Yet this simply demonstrates the power of pornography as speech." Conceptions of Democracy in American Constitutional Argument: The Case of Pornography Regulation by Frank Michelman

Frank Michelman

Frank Isaac Michelman is an American legal scholar and Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School.Michelman wrote the influential law review article, Property, Utility and Fairness, on the economic reasons for just compensation in the 5th Amendment Takings Clause in the United...

, issued by Tennessee Law Review (vol. 56, no. 291, 1989) partially consented that "pornography is political expression in that it promulgates a certain view of women's natures and thus of women's appropriate relations and treatment in society", but also concluded that the Indianopolis ordinance was precisely designed to suppress that particular view by censoring pornography. Minneapolis ordinance was struck down on the grounds that it was ambiguous and vague, however despite of its failure the proposal influenced other communities across America.

In May 2005 U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales

Alberto Gonzales

Alberto R. Gonzales was the 80th Attorney General of the United States. Gonzales was appointed to the post in February 2005 by President George W. Bush. Gonzales was the first Hispanic Attorney General in U.S. history and the highest-ranking Hispanic government official ever...

established an Obscenity Prosecution Task Force. The task force, according to a Department of Justice news release on May 5, was "dedicated to the investigation and prosecution of the distributors of hard-core pornography that meets the test for obscenity, as defined by the United States Supreme Court." Under President Bush

George W. Bush

George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....

's and Gonzales' rationales the FBI Adult Obscenity Squad was recruited in August 2005 to gather evidence against "manufacturers and purveyors" of adult pornography.

Child pornography

The 1970 Lockhart Commission recommended eliminating all criminal penalties for pornography except for pornographic depictions of minors, or sale of pornography to minors. However prior to 1977, only two states had laws which prohibited the use of children in the production or distribution of pornographic materials or performances. In 1977, the Department of Justice strongly endorsed legislation which banned the production and dissemination of child pornography. These efforts have been successfully challenged in the 1982 New York v. Ferber

New York v. Ferber

New York v. Ferber, , was a United States Supreme Court decision. The Court ruled unanimously that the First Amendment right to free speech did not forbid states from banning the sale of material depicting children engaged in sexual activity....

case ("Recognizing and classifying child pornography as a category of material outside the protection of the First Amendment is not incompatible with our earlier decisions"). Although the states have a different age of consent

Age of consent

While the phrase age of consent typically does not appear in legal statutes, when used in relation to sexual activity, the age of consent is the minimum age at which a person is considered to be legally competent to consent to sexual acts. The European Union calls it the legal age for sexual...

, in accordance with the Federal Labeling and Record-Keeping Law all models featured in pornographic content should be 18 years of age. This kind of material is often labeled as "adult" and the appropriate disclaimers are common. They are based on what "depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs".

Anti-pornography movement

The so-called "Sex Wars

Feminist Sex Wars

The Feminist Sex Wars and Lesbian Sex Wars, or simply the Sex Wars or Porn Wars, were the acrimonious debates within the feminist movement and lesbian community in the late 1970s through the 1980s around the issues of feminist strategies regarding sexuality, sexual representation, pornography,...

" of the late 1970s challenged the traditional understanding of the gender role. Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women....

and Catharine MacKinnon

Catharine MacKinnon

Catharine Alice MacKinnon is an American feminist, scholar, lawyer, teacher and activist.- Biography :MacKinnon was born in Minnesota. Her mother is Elizabeth Valentine Davis; her father, George E. MacKinnon was a lawyer, congressman , and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit...

became well-known often-cited anti-pornography authors. Many debates have attended their political intervention into the law by way of their advocacy of anti-pornography ordinances in several midwestern cities. Other notable American anti-pornography activists to belong to this camp are Robin Morgan

Robin Morgan

Robin Morgan is a former child actor turned American radical feminist activist, writer, poet, and editor of Sisterhood is Powerful and Ms. Magazine....

and Susan Griffin

Susan Griffin

Susan Griffin is an eco-feminist author. She describes her work as "draw[ing] connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and trac[ing] the causes of war to denial in both private and public life." She received a MacArthur grant for Peace and International...

. Ordinary libertarians

Libertarianism

Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...

, who separate sex and violence, take MacKinnon and Dworkin to task for their refusal to leave sexual expression alone. This was done particularly by Gillian Rodgerson and Elizabeth Wilson

Elizabeth Wilson

Elizabeth Welter Wilson is an American actress. She was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2007.-Life and career:Wilson was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the daughter of Marie Ethel and Henry Dunning Wilson, who was an insurance agent...

in Pornography and Feminism: The Case Against Censorship: "Yet this theoretical cocktail of biologism and behaviorism

Behaviorism

Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...

is lethal. To see men as naturally programmed for violence is to endorse the most conservative views on human nature, and to see it as unchanging and unchangeable". Rodgerson and Wilson argue that pornography plays a relatively minor role in the wider regime of sexist practices pervading women's lives.

Another matter, which frequently circulates in American anti-pornography movement is a close bond of pornography with rape. According to a 2006 paper, Porn Up, Rape Down, by Northwestern University

Northwestern University

Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....

Law Professor Anthony D’amato, "the incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85 per cent in the past 25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults". Recognizing that the Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence, D'amato concludes that "the reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence". D'amato suggests there are two predominant reasons why an increase in the availability of pornography has led to a reduction in rape. First, using pornographic material provides an easy avenue for the sexually desirous to "get it out of their system". Second, D'amato points to the so-called "Victorian effect". It dates back to the British Victorian era

Victorian era

The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...

where people covered up their bodies with an immense amount of clothing, generating a greater mystery as to what they looked like naked. D'amato suggests that the free availability of pornography since the 1970s, and the recent bombardment of internet pornography, has de-mystified sex, thus satisfying the sexually curious.

Internet

The Internet maintains a significant part of American adult entertainment, also because the 1997 Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union

Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union

Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, , is a United States Supreme Court case, in which all nine Justices of the Court voted to strike down anti-indecency provisions of the Communications Decency Act , finding they violated the freedom of speech provisions of the First Amendment. Two Justices...

case specified that the term "indecent" also has no specific legal meaning in the context of the internet. More recent federal efforts, such as the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 , signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 16, 2003, establishes the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail and requires the Federal Trade Commission to enforce its provisions...

expressly addressed the internet. On May 1, 2000 American Express

American Express

American Express Company or AmEx, is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Three World Financial Center, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States. Founded in 1850, it is one of the 30 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is best...

announced it no longer covers transactions from adult sites. According to Committee to Study Tools and Strategies for Protecting Kids from Pornography and Their Applicability to Other Inappropriate Internet Content, subscription sites with adult content exceed 100,000 in the United States, with each site having multiple web pages underneath it. On average, a paid subscription generates $20 to $40 per month in revenue, however an in-depth analysis is complicated. If a visitor site connects to a pay site and signs up for content, it receives a conversion fee from the larger site. A successful large operation like Cybererotica is an umbrella company serving many markets with pay sites. Around this core and its affiliates is a system of ad-supported service sites, such as California-based YNOT.com, a portal

Web portal

A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....

for porn webmaster

Webmaster

A webmaster , also called a web architect, web developer, site author, or website administrator is a person responsible for maintaining one or many websites...

s. The so-called portable porn market is in its initial stage in the U.S. Cellphone companies are reluctant to become partners with the adult entertainment for fear of being stigmatized by community standards.

Seattle-based Flying Crocodile, Inc. has a stable of more than 280,000 adult sites. Another famous leader is XPics Publishing, which launched more than 600 adult sites, like Xpics.net and Xpics.cc. Among several marginal sites are SexBizLaw.com, a legal resource for the adult-entertainment industry, Seattle internet traffic monitor SexTracker.com and PornValleyNews.com. There is also a vast amount of e-zines, including all mainstream. Playboy was quick to jump on the Web and made its content differed from the print version. Fleshbot

Fleshbot

Fleshbot is a sex-oriented weblog, published by Gawker Media. It was launched in November 2003 as the third online title from Gawker. The range of subject matter includes everything from amateur sex blogs and thumbnail gallery posts to news about sex in popular culture and advertising...

online magazine features sex-related digital technologies and their distribution.

As any other pornographic branch in the world, American web segment faces different trials and debates, notably on the .xxx

.xxx

.xxx is a sponsored top-level domain intended as a voluntary option for pornographic sites on the Internet. The sponsoring organization is the International Foundation for Online Responsibility . The registry is operated by ICM Registry LLC. The ICANN Board voted to approve the sTLD on March 18,...

domain. In 2000 the owners and operators of Playgirl.com and scores of other adult sites have been charged by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission with illegally billing thousands of consumers for services that were advertised as free, and for billing other consumers who never visited the web sites at all. Nevada

Nevada

Nevada is a state in the western, mountain west, and southwestern regions of the United States. With an area of and a population of about 2.7 million, it is the 7th-largest and 35th-most populous state. Over two-thirds of Nevada's people live in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which contains its...

n Voice Media Incorporated, which runs several adult sites such as Cybererotica, Clubpix.com, XXXpassword.com, ff5.com, and Boobtropolis.com, later was also charged by the Commission. Namely Cybererotica by itself suffers from unauthorized, non-paying surfers who use the stolen passwords. This kind of attack could easily use an entire month’s worth of bandwidth

Bandwidth (computing)

In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...

in a day, with the site operator paying hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of additional bandwidth fees, all for traffic that returns no money at all. The 2002 Paragon Electric Co., Inc. v. Buy This Domain case ruled that linking domain names to pornographic sites is not per se conclusive of bad-faith registration and use, although it does raise that presumption. A web address remained a common occurrence in this sense. Notably the Whitehouse.com domain, which now hosts a people finder, for some period featured the explicit content (while the proper domain is Whitehouse.gov). The obsolete TSTV.com was registered with Network Solutions, Inc. on September 22, 1998 but when accessed it currently goes to a porn page (initially Slut.com). For a brief period of time in October 2000, when a user typed in www.tstv.com into the locator line, he or she was taken immediately to a site entitled "The Ultimate Adult Site Locator". These cases usually occur due to buying an expired domains and according to Secure Computing Corporation already happened to sites belonging particularly to Nebraska

Nebraska

Nebraska is a state on the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States. The state's capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha, on the Missouri River....

Department of Education, the Ohio State Senate, and the Ballet Theatre of Annapolis, Maryland

Annapolis, Maryland

Annapolis is the capital of the U.S. state of Maryland, as well as the county seat of Anne Arundel County. It had a population of 38,394 at the 2010 census and is situated on the Chesapeake Bay at the mouth of the Severn River, south of Baltimore and about east of Washington, D.C. Annapolis is...

. Another typical spoofing attack

Spoofing attack

In the context of network security, a spoofing attack is a situation in which one person or program successfully masquerades as another by falsifying data and thereby gaining an illegitimate advantage.- Spoofing and TCP/IP :...

occurred when Sno-Isle Regional Library in Snohomish County, Washington

Snohomish County, Washington

Snohomish County is a county located in the U.S. state of Washington. It is named after the Snohomish tribe. Since 2000, the county's population has grown from 606,024 to 713,335 residents , making it one of the fastest-growing in the state, ranking third in overall population after King and...

set up a site for bibliophiles to reserve books. If the hyphen

Hyphen

The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen should not be confused with dashes , which are longer and have different uses, or with the minus sign which is also longer...

was not typed in the address, the user was taken to the adult site.

Movies and pay-per-view

Much of the pornography produced in the United States is in the form of movies and the branch acutely competes with the internet. The market is very diverse and ranges from the mainstream heterosexual content to the rarefied S/M, BDSM

BDSM

BDSM is an erotic preference and a form of sexual expression involving the consensual use of restraint, intense sensory stimulation, and fantasy power role-play. The compound acronym BDSM is derived from the terms bondage and discipline , dominance and submission , and sadism and masochism...

, interracial sex, ethnic, etc. through enduringly popular gay porn.

Early American stag films included Wonders of the Unseen World (1927), An Author's True Story (1933), Goodyear (1950s), Smart Alec

Smart Alec (1951 film)

Smart Alec, aka Smart Aleck, is a 1951 pornographic film. The X-rated silent short, which is no more than 20 minutes in length and was filmed in black-and-white, was one of the most famous and widely circulated of the early underground pornographic era...

(1951), and Playmates (1956-58). The breakthrough films such as 1972 Deep Throat

Deep Throat (film)

Deep Throat is a 1972 American pornographic film written and directed by Gerard Damiano and produced by Louis Peraino and starring Linda Lovelace ....

and 1978 Debbie Does Dallas

Debbie Does Dallas

Debbie Does Dallas is a 1978 pornographic film starring Bambi Woods. The plot of the film focuses on a team of cheerleaders attempting to earn enough money to send the title character to Dallas, Texas, to try out for the famous “Texas Cowgirls” cheerleading squad. The fictional name "Texas...

, that launched the so-called porno chic, put the adult movies production onto the commercialization. In this period America's most notorious pornographer was Reuben Sturman

Reuben Sturman

Reuben Sturman was an American pornographer and businessman from Ohio. He was featured as a subject in Eric Schlosser's 2003 book on underground economies Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market....

. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, throughout the 1970s Sturman controlled most of the pornography circulating in the country.

The country now houses over 40 adult movies studios featuring heterosexual scenes, more than any other country. The branch, according to founder and president of Adult Video News Paul Fishbein involves the manufacturers of adult products, distributors, suppliers, retail store owners, wholesalers, distributors, cable TV buyers, and foreign buyers. The production is concentrated in San Fernando Valley

San Fernando Valley

The San Fernando Valley is an urbanized valley located in the Los Angeles metropolitan area of southern California, United States, defined by the dramatic mountains of the Transverse Ranges circling it...

(mainly in Chatsworth

Chatsworth, Los Angeles, California

Chatsworth is a district of Los Angeles, California, United States; in the northwestern San Fernando Valley. The district is bordered by the Santa Susana Mountains and unincorporated Los Angeles County lands to the north, Porter Ranch to the northeast, Northridge to the east, West Hills, Canoga...

, Reseda

Reseda, Los Angeles, California

Reseda is a San Fernando Valley district in the city of Los Angeles, California.-History:The area now known as Reseda was originally inhabited by Native Americans of the Tongva tribe that lived close to the Los Angeles River....

and Van Nuys) and Las Vegas

Las Vegas, Nevada

Las Vegas is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and is also the county seat of Clark County, Nevada. Las Vegas is an internationally renowned major resort city for gambling, shopping, and fine dining. The city bills itself as The Entertainment Capital of the World, and is famous...

, where more than 200 adult entertainment companies gather to network and show off their latest wares. The world's largest adult movies studio, Vivid Entertainment

Vivid Entertainment

Vivid Entertainment Group is an adult video producer, featuring a catalog of VHS and DVD titles and internet content. In 2006 it was described by Reuters as one of the handful of studios that dominate the U.S. porn industry....

generates an estimated $100 million a year in revenue, distributing 60 films annually and selling them in video stores, hotel rooms, on cable systems, and on the internet. Vivid's two largest regional competitors are Wicked Pictures

Wicked Pictures

Wicked Pictures is an American pornographic movie studio headquartered in Canoga Park, California. In 2006 it was described by Reuters as one of the handful of studios that dominate the U.S. porn industry...

and Digital Playground

Digital Playground

thumb|right|250px|Digital Playground's 2010 Contract Girls at the [[AVN Adult Entertainment Expo]] at the [[Sands Expo]], [[Las Vegas, Nevada|Las Vegas]] on January 7, 2010...

. Colorado

Colorado

Colorado is a U.S. state that encompasses much of the Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains...

-based New Frontier Media, a leading distributor of adult movies (at NASDAQ

NASDAQ

The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...

since November 2000) is one of the two adult video companies traded publicly, the another one being Spanish Private Media Group

Private Media Group

Private Media Group, Inc. is a production and distribution company that distributes adult entertainment via print publications, DVDs, the internet, and mobile....

.

The industry's decision to embrace VHS

VHS

The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....

in the early 1980s, for example, helped to do away with Sony Betamax, despite the latter format's superior quality. Video rentals soared from just under 80 million in 1985 to half-billion by 1993. Suffering at the hands of video warez

Warez

Warez refers primarily to copyrighted works distributed without fees or royalties, and may be traded, in general violation of copyright law. The term generally refers to unauthorized releases by organized groups, as opposed to file sharing between friends or large groups of people with similar...

tended not be publicly stressed by country's film industry. In 1999 there were 711 million rentals of hardcore films. 11,300 hardcore films were released in 2002.

In the recent years, according to Fishbein, there are well over 800 million rentals of adult videotapes and DVDs in video stores across the country. Digital Playground said it is choosing the Blu-ray Disc for all of its "interactive" films because of its greater capacity.

The female demographic is considered to be the biggest catalyst for pornographic cultural crossover. According to Adella O'Neal, a Digital Playground publicist, in 2000 roughly 9% of the company's consumers were women while four years later that figure has bloomed to 53%.

American adult pay-per-view television is presently unregulated since it is not technically "broadcasting" as defined in the Federal Communications Act. Cable and satellite television networks host about six main adult-related channels. Most of them (particularly Playboy TV

Playboy TV

Playboy TV is a premium monthly subscription television channel. Since its launch in 1982 in partnership with Cablevision which eventually sold their share back to Playboy, Playboy TV has become a leading entertainment channel for adult entertainment...

, Penthouse TV

Penthouse TV

Penthouse TV is an American premium adult entertainment television channel consisting of explicit adult material, primarily hardcore pornographic films. The channel's name is licensed from the men's magazine Penthouse. The channel is owned by Penthouse Media and distributed by New Frontier Media's...

, and Hustler TV (there is also a "Hustler Video", a line of raunchy films created by Larry Flynt

Larry Flynt

Larry Claxton Flynt, Jr. is an American publisher and the president of Larry Flynt Publications . In 2003, Arena magazine listed him as the number one on the "50 Powerful People in Porn" list....

)) are maintained by three mainstream porn magazines. In 1999 Playboy Enterprises sold to Vivid Entertainment a small channel which was renamed to Hot Network. Since that Vivid launched two more channels—the Hot Zone and Vivid TV. The viewers paid close to $400 million a year to tune in to Vivid's hardcore content and the company soon overtook Playboy as operator of the world's largest adult-TV network. However, after passing the 2000 United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group

United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group

United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group, 529 U.S. 803 , is a case in which the United States Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Communications Decency Act which required that cable television operators who offered channels "primarily dedicated to sexually-oriented programming" must...

case Playboy bought all three networks from Vivid in 2001 and folded them into "Playboy's Spice" brand. Operators then shunned "Playboy's Spice Platinum", a new group of channels with graphic hardcore fare.

Some subsidiaries

Subsidiary

A subsidiary company, subsidiary, or daughter company is a company that is completely or partly owned and wholly controlled by another company that owns more than half of the subsidiary's stock. The subsidiary can be a company, corporation, or limited liability company. In some cases it is a...

of major corporations are the largest pornography sellers, like News Corporation

News Corporation

News Corporation or News Corp. is an American multinational media conglomerate. It is the world's second-largest media conglomerate as of 2011 in terms of revenue, and the world's third largest in entertainment as of 2009, although the BBC remains the world's largest broadcaster...

's DirecTV

DirecTV

DirecTV is an American direct broadcast satellite service provider and broadcaster based in El Segundo, California. Its satellite service, launched on June 17, 1994, transmits digital satellite television and audio to households in the United States, Latin America, and the Anglophone Caribbean. ...

. Comcast

Comcast

Comcast Corporation is the largest cable operator, home Internet service provider, and fourth largest home telephone service provider in the United States, providing cable television, broadband Internet, and telephone service to both residential and commercial customers in 39 states and the...

, the nation's largest cable company, once pulled in $50 million from adult programming. Revenues of companies such as Playboy and Hustler were small by comparison.

Print

American adult magazines which have the widest distribution do not violate the Miller test and can be legally distributed. Adult magazines have been largely put into mainstream by the pioneer Playboy. However during the so-called Pubic Wars

Pubic Wars

Pubic Wars, a pun on the Punic Wars, is the name given to the rivalry between the pornographic magazines Playboy and Penthouse during the 1960s and 1970s. Each magazine strove to show just a little bit more than the other, without getting too crude. The term was coined by Playboy owner Hugh Hefner...

in 1960s and 1970s Penthouse established itself as a more explicit magazine. Screw magazine

Screw magazine

Screw is a weekly pornographic magazine published in the United States aimed at heterosexual men. It was first published in 1968 by Al Goldstein and was printed weekly in tabloid form...

moved the bar towards Hard-Core when it first came out in 1968 and with Hustler

Hustler

Hustler is a monthly pornographic magazine aimed at men and published in the United States. It was first published in 1974 by Larry Flynt. It was a step forward from the Hustler Newsletter which was cheap advertising for his strip club businesses at the time. The magazine grew from a shaky start to...

appearing in 1974 the move to Hard Care was complete. By the mid-'90s magazines like Playboy had become noncompetitive and even hardcore publications like Penthouse and Hustler struggled. According to Laura Kipnis

Laura Kipnis

Laura Kipnis is a professor of media studies at Northwestern University. She is also a cultural and media critic who focuses especially on gender issues, sexual politics, popular culture, and pornography...

, a cultural theorist and critic, "the Hustler body is an unromanticized body—no vaseline

Vaseline

Vaseline is a brand of petroleum jelly based products owned by Anglo-Dutch company Unilever. Products include plain petroleum jelly and a selection of skin creams, soaps, lotions, cleansers, deodorants and personal lubricants....

d lens or soft focus: this is neither the airbrush

Airbrush

An airbrush is a small, air-operated tool that sprays various media including ink and dye, but most often paint by a process of nebulization. Spray guns developed from the airbrush and are still considered a type of airbrush.-History:...

ed top-heavy fantasy body of Playboy, nor the ersatz opulence, the lingeried and sensitive crotch shots of Penthouse, transforming female genitals into objets d'art. It's a body, not a surface or a suntan: insistently material, defiantly vulgar, corporeal".

Many adult magazines in the United States are now highlighted by special features and are usually sold wrapped to avoid their look-see by the under-age persons. A primarily softcore

Softcore

Softcore pornography is a form of filmic or photographic pornography or erotica that is less sexually explicit than hardcore pornography. It is intended to tickle and arouse men and women. Softcore pornography depicts nude and semi-nude performers engaging in casual social nudity or non-graphic...

Barely Legal

Barely Legal (magazine)

Barely Legal is the name of an adult magazine targeted primarily at heterosexual men.-Overview:The magazine features explicit photos of naked young women, all of whom are at least 18 years old. The models are selected and photographed to emphasize their youth...

focuses on models between 18 and 23 years. Hustler's Leg World is focused on the female legs and feet. Perfect 10

Perfect 10

Perfect 10 was a quarterly men's magazine featuring high resolution photographs of topless or nude women who have not had cosmetic surgery in pensive or artistic poses...

publishes the images of women, untouched by plastic surgery

Plastic surgery

Plastic surgery is a medical specialty concerned with the correction or restoration of form and function. Though cosmetic or aesthetic surgery is the best-known kind of plastic surgery, most plastic surgery is not cosmetic: plastic surgery includes many types of reconstructive surgery, hand...

or airbrushing.

Pornographic bookstores have been subject to zoning laws in the US.

Video games and comics

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

has long declined to license development software to game makers whose titles include sexual content. Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. , branded as Walmart since 2008 and Wal-Mart before then, is an American public multinational corporation that runs chains of large discount department stores and warehouse stores. The company is the world's 18th largest public corporation, according to the Forbes Global 2000...

, America's largest distributor of video games, maintains the policy of selling no games with an AO rating. However in recent years the pornographic content in video games has been promoted particularly by Playboy. Playboy: The Mansion

Playboy: The Mansion

Playboy: The Mansion is a business simulation video game for the PlayStation 2, Microsoft Windows and Xbox consoles, developed by Cyberlore Studios, published by Groove Games and ARUSH Entertainment and licensed by Playboy Enterprises....

became the first game built around the "Playboy" license.

A downloadable mod

Mod (computer gaming)

Mod or modification is a term generally applied to personal computer games , especially first-person shooters, role-playing games and real-time strategy games. Mods are made by the general public or a developer, and can be entirely new games in themselves, but mods are not standalone software and...

—"Hot Coffee

Hot Coffee mod

The Hot Coffee mod is a normally inaccessible minigame in the 2004 video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, developed by Rockstar North. Public awareness of the existence of the minigame arrived with the release of the Hot Coffee mod, created for the version released in 2005 for Microsoft Windows...

"—developed by Dutch hacker Patrick Wildenborg in 2004, according to Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association

International Game Developers Association

International Game Developers Association is the professional society for over 10,000 video and computer game developers worldwide.It is incorporated in the United States as a non-profit organization....

, accelerated the need to discuss the challenges faced in creating games with pornographic content. The two-day San Francisco gathering was held in June 2006 to delve into the design, development, and technology of sex in video games, also in the United States.

Meanwhile Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a 2004 open world action video game developed by British games developer Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It is the third 3D game in the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise, the fifth original console release and eighth game overall...

was pulled from shelves by Rockstar Games

Rockstar Games

Rockstar Games is a major video game developer and publisher based in New York City, owned by Take-Two Interactive following its purchase of UK video game publisher BMG Interactive. The brand is mostly known for Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, L.A...

after it became public knowledge that, with the use of a Gameshark

GameShark

GameShark is the brand name of a line of video game cheat cartridges and other products for a variety of console video game systems and Windows based computers. Currently, the brand name is owned by Mad Catz, who actively markets GameShark products for the PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, and Sega game...

cheating device, a scene can be unlocked portraying the protagonist having sex with another character. In the scene both characters have their clothes on. The game was later sold without the unlockable scene.

Playstation 2

PlayStation 2

The PlayStation 2 is a sixth-generation video game console manufactured by Sony as part of the PlayStation series. Its development was announced in March 1999 and it was first released on March 4, 2000, in Japan...

video game God of War

God of War (video game)

God of War is an action adventure video game for the PlayStation 2 first released by Sony Computer Entertainment's Santa Monica division in March 2005...

features an event in the first part of the game where protagonist Kratos

Kratos (God of War)

Kratos is a video game character from Sony Computer Entertainment'sGod of War series, which is loosely based on Greek mythology. Kratos first appeared in the highly successful video game God of War , which led to the development of five additional games featuring the character as the protagonist...

can have sex with two topless prostitutes

Prostitution

, who reside in a bedroom on his boat. Although no sexual acts are depicted (they occur off-screen and are indicated by sound effects), the women are shown topless. The player interacts by performing button and joystick commands that appear on screen which results in an experience reward for the player.

The adult sections of American comic book

Comic book

A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...

stores carry a large number of translations of Japanese hardcore comics, as well as an increasing number of home imitations.

One of the anime

Anime

is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....

porn movies, which started the American adult video market, was Urotsukidoji

Urotsukidoji

is a Japanese manga and an Original Video Animation releases.-History:Urotsukidōji was created by Toshio Maeda, in 1986, and was a huge departure from his earlier works in that it mixed erotica with humor, and the supernatural...

. The adult anime market exists primarily through direct sales: mail-order to customers, and wholesale to specialty shops which cater to anime and to comic-book fans. The legal framework in both countries regarding the regulation of obscene and pornographic material is overall rather similar.

External links

Pornography: Encyclopedia of Everyday Law
Attorney General's Commission on Pornography Final Report, July 1986, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington D.C.
Might Pornography Cause Harm? by Anne W. Eaton, The University of Chicago
White House Protection From Pornography Week, 2003
American Porn. Report by Frontline (PBS TV series) (first aired in 2002, updated in 2004), watchable online.

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.