The Jeff Booth Show

Internet Radio with Pictures

Show Transcripts

June 15th , 2008

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Jeff@eroticuniversity.com

(818) 613-9248

This is the Jeff Booth Show for June 15th, 2008, brought to you by the Center for Sexual Expression and Education, and Erotic University. I’m Jeff Booth. We have a very lengthy Sexvestigation this week dealing with the absolute folly of  obscenity prosecutions, their bizarre twists and turns, and the absolute ineptitude of the mainstream media in covering such sexual issues. The L.A. Time broke a story that turned an obscenity case upside down, and if you read the L.A. Times story, you would have been seriously misinformed, as you would have been from reading the story in most mainstream sources. We give you the actual facts the mainstream media simply glossed over and distorted. We have our usual round-up of sex in the news dealing with politics, with antipsex shenanigans in the House, anti-sex shenanigans at the FCC, and anti-sex shenanigans dealing with gay marriage in California and in Rhode Island. Oh, and one heart-warming positive story. Sorry, it was all we could find. Finally, our entertainment round-up is a little more upbeat, with the latest in sex in both mainstream and porn, and much more.  Just click on the topic to the left you want to listen to, and thanks for clicking in.

Sexvestigation

Porn prosecutions are always bizarre- strange twisted Lewis Carroll mirror worlds of what law should be. The latest in Los Angeles is more bizarre than usual- and if you read about the latest twist in the Los Angeles Times, which broke the story, or in other mainstream media- you would not really understand the story. In fact, you would wind up being misinformed. This Sexvestigation will try and clear things up a little..

Motivated by a desire to show the far right that they are actually doing something about porn, the Justice Department  used their obscenity task force to go after what they thought would be an easy win- A porn distributor with bestiality and defecation videos. Some of the most extreme stuff ever to go on trial- according to the defendants own attorney. The feds were sure this was a slam dunk. Even in Los Angeles, where it is almost impossible to get a porn conviction.

And then things got really strange. The feds wound up with Alex Kozinski as their judge, a Reagan appointee. Despite being a noted conservative, he is also a strong advocate of free speech and a highly respected jurist. In fact, he is the Chief Justice of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, but in this case he was randomly selected to handle this obscenity trial.

And then the fireworks hit when it was reported that Judge Kozinki’s  personal Web site had porn on it. And as usual, the media misreported the story. There were headlines such as “Judge Hearing Obscenity Trial Hosted Porn Site”. This headline has two main errors.

The first is the use of the term porn. I have actually seen the images described in the L.A. Times. I would not call what was on the site porn. What I saw was not specifically hardcore pornographic intended to arouse, but more images intended to amuse. The kind of stuff people email to each other all of the time. I can’t show you the images, since I have no idea who owns the copyright to them, but I can give you more first hand information than what the L.A. Times reported.

The transsexual slideshow described in the press was actually a quiz to see if you could guess whether an image was of a man or a woman, with a genital revealing image to confirm whether your guess was correct or not. Two women expose their pubic hair in front of a sign that reads Bush for President, which is amusing, but hardly all that arousing and certainly not porn. Political parody, maybe. But not porn. Two naked women painted as cows. Sexist? Degrading? Maybe, but again, simple nudity intended to amuse, not porn. The Los Angeles Times described a video of a man cavorting with an aroused animal. This is actually pretty significant since he is overseeing a trial dealing with bestiality. I took a look at this. It is not erotic or bestiality. It is a humorous video of a guy being chased by an aroused donkey, and you hear laughter in the background from the crowd watching him. He is running away, not sexually cavorting. And the image of auto-fellatio described in the Times. It is actually part of a parody of an American Express ad. Oh, and the image supposedly of a young boy apparently fellating a priest. It’s a Halloween costume, with a rag doll of a boy attached to the costume’s waist and feet, so that we only see it from behind. Few people would think of this stuff as porn- and it arrives in people’s email in boxes from friends all the time. 

When I first read the reported claims by the judge that the pictures were simply humorous, I was a little skeptical. Now I have seen many of them, and they are exactly what he describes. Humorous. Definitely not obscene.

The case has been suspended, and of course, there is now a huge cry for the judge to recuse himself.

The second part of the headline that was in error was the part about it being a “porn site’ That makes it sound like something generally available to the public. His site was not open to the public as several stories I read claimed. In fact, the main page said go away. Literally. The main page was blank except for the text: Ain't nothin' here. Y'all best be movin' on, compadre. You had to know the specific directory to find his materials. Although the site is down, I can tell you that the directory name was stuff. Cyrus Sanai, the guy who revealed to the press that this stuff was on the Kozinski site turns out to have had a personal grudge against the judge. You’d find that out on law sites, not the L.A. Times. I am not sure how Cyrus found this hidden directory.  And I checked this out by using the wayback machine, which archives websites so that you can see previous versions of them even after they have been taken down, as the Kozinski site now has been. It’s a little thing called doing research, something a lot of folks in the media skipped the class on.

It was a private site, a place where he could share things with friends that he found amusing. And yes, there may be copyright issues with some of the things he may have been sharing. But Kozinsky is a conservative, so any link with sex makes him look bad. Now he wants an investigation of the site, and is claiming that perhaps his son uploaded some of the pictures. His story seems to change and its not all that clear, but who gives a fuck. It’s a private Web site. I have also read in the media that what is on his site is not all that different from what he is prosecuting, which is ridiculously far from the truth. The porn they are prosecuting is some pretty extreme stuff. Defecation videos. Sex with animals.  It is not stuff you could pay me to watch. But in order to put a man in prison for 20 years and taking all his stuff for distributing such things, an entire courtroom will be forced to watch hours of this stuff. 

The defendant, Ira Isaacs, claims that what he is producing is art. I am no expert on art, but I know that governments throughout history have wanted the right to determine for themselves what art was. And historically, they have almost always come down on the wrong side, and put a lot of great artists in prison. Not just for obscenity, but for issues relating to politics, religion, and sometimes even more trivial reasons.

On the Justice Department Web site, they claim that the obscenity task force is dedicated exclusively to the protection of America's children and families through the enforcement of our Nation's obscenity laws. I doubt that any children were ordering these videos, or that any adults were ordering them for family movie night, but even if they were, that would be a criminal action on the part of the person doing the buying, not the selling. So how is this protecting children and families? Sure, I have real doubts about the ability of dogs or other animals to consent to sex with people, and maybe they do need protection, but maybe that is something the PETA folks should jump on instead of the Feds. They could do those ads with naked celebrities with the slogan “I’d rather go naked than fuck a horse.”

I am personally uncomfortable with the stuff in Isaacs videos. I honestly don’t know how we should deal with them. I doubt that you could prove they cause any specific harm, as disgusting as I might find them. I think forcing an entire courtroom to watch hours and hours of this stuff against their will probably does cause harm. Even the people who want to watch this stuff don’t generally sit down and watch hours and hours of it. It would give me bad dreams. It seems to me that the only real harm you could probably prove in court is the harm it causes by forcing this stuff on people against their will. I suspect it would make me nauseous. And everyone who makes adult content agrees that no on should be forced to watch their stuff. The only entity that disagrees is the justice system. And that’s more fucked up than Isaacs twisted vids. 

And while this means that the odds go up that the feds will get a prosecution in California,  Max Hardcore in Florida has crapped out.

Only one actress took the stand in the obscenity trial against Max Hardcore in Florida. While things look a little rough in front of the camera, the retired porn performer who worked under the name Summer Luv gave a very different picture of behind the scenes. She testified that she chose to work with Max because his company was better organized and she liked the way things were run. She stated that she acted in the movies because the scenes sounded interesting to her, she enjoyed filming them, and she voluntarily signed up for more work with the producer. She explained that she was paid good money for her work, that Max took more than an hour going over what was going to happen in each scene and made sure she was okay with it, and that she is a little extreme so she enjoyed doing the work. She even said that when she backed out of one scene at the last minute that Max paid her anyway. She presented a very different persona than what you see of Max on screen, and I have talked with a number of girls that really like working with him. I still find his stuff repellent, though. Afterwards, she told reporters that she didn’t understand why Max was being prosecuted. "I don't see what the whole crime is," she said. "It seems like kind of a waste of time to me." Oh, and Summer, don’t forget it being a huge waste of money.  And despite the extreme nature of Max Hardcore’s tapes, they feds actually had a pretty lousy case, since he never even shipped any of the tapes that he was prosecuted for shipping. The company that actually shipped them was not even charged. It didn’t matter. Jury shopping in a conservative district won out, and Max Hardcore, whose real name is Paul Little, was convicted on 20 counts of distributing obscenity to Florida, even though, technically, he didn’t distribute obscenity to Florida- Jaded Video did. And the only other connection to Florida was that his sites were hosted on a server there, information he probably did not even know since he was using a hosting company.

And that is not even the worst of it. A conviction is big news, and for the jurors, it also means big money. They already have a book deal in place. A book deal they probably would not have gotten if they had found him not guilty. But was there any discussion of the book deal before the verdict? Could this book deal or its possibility have affected the jury’s judgment? You have to wonder. But this is just part and parcel of a prosecution more disgusting than anything in a Max hardcore movie.

Ad while the conviction is disturbing to the Adult industry, it is also not setting precedent to go after more mainstream adult fare, and least not in the legal sense.. That’s because the stuff that max hardcore puts out is so extreme. But the lack of concern amongst the adult industry is, I believe, misguided. While the Department of Justice knows that this is an unusual case, the pro-censorship yahoos won’t appreciate the difference. Expect to see a lot of descriptions of the stuff Max does as being part of the norm. It will become a huge propaganda campaign for the pro-censorship right to use to bash the adult industry. It may not set precedent, but it will be a useful tool for pro-censorship forces.   And I have little doubt that this will embolden the Justice Department, which has every intention of using these prosecutions e as a political marketing tool to help keep Republicans in power. The Justice Department, as has been well-documneted, has been converted into a political arm of the Republican party, and I expect to see even more prosecutions as we move closer to the election.  

Max now  faces 100 years in prison and $5 million in fines, along with asset forfeitures. For making porn. And as much as you and I might dislike his porn, and as much as he made himself a target, the penalties so far outstrip the so-called crime as to make a mockery of our justice system. Especially when the definitions of porn are so unbelievably murky, and when the government can shop for a conservative jury pool on an issue that is primarily political. The next thing you know, we’ll be torturing people and holding them in prison for years without a trial or even an attorney. Oh, yeah.

News

We can all agree that Human Trafficking is bad. And most of us would agree with what Human Trafficking is- the abuse of people forced to do things against their will- whether it is working in a garment factory of being forced to work in prostitution. Most of us would agree anyway. But the the U.S. House of Representatives. They passed a buill to renew the  Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 with one critical difference. Both the earlier version and the current Senate version defines human trafficking to include labor or commercial sex performed under force, fraud or coercion and minors engaged in commercial sex. The definition of trafficking approved by the House, however, removes the requirement that force, fraud, or coercion be present in instances of commercial sex. Under the House version, any commercial sex could be considered Human Trafficking. Prostitution would be Human Trafficking, even when it is legal and voluntary. Even performing in a porn film could be considered Human Trafficking. Victim’s rights advocates fear that the law would be subverted to use limited enforcement dollars to go after consensual prostitution and pornography, and leave the real victims of actual human trafficking behind.

As we have reported many times here before, Kevin Martin, current head of the FCC, is a sleazebag who wants to be given the power to censor all media. Right now he can only give the broadcast media headaches with his moralizing insanity. The FCC has no power over the internet or cable or satellite. He wants that power desperately, and has made his intentions clear to Congress, but so far no dice and it probably would not even be constitutional. But he has proposed a clever way to censor the Internet for a lot of people. And as has been the case throughout the history of censorship, the people they really want to censor are the lower classes. The rich always have access, but it is the poor and lower classes who can not be trusted with porn. Martin’s proposal is to do what many have suggested. Who ever buys up a block of recently opened up bandwidth will have to use part of it for free wireless Internet access. Under Martin’s proposal, this would be really really slow wireless Internet. But it is much worse than that. The winning company would be required to put a pornography filter on all content. I have no problem with filters on kid’s computers. Parent’s can always override the blockage when it is overly strict or stupidly applied, which happens often. But adults should not be filtered. If you thought defining obscenity was tough, defining pornography is even tougher. It can be anything. And under filters, pornography could be birth control or abortion information, or information on homosexuality, women’s magazines like Cosmo, and words that sound dirty but aren’t. It’s a brute force and highly inaccurate technology and is only appropriate when there is someone, like a librarian or adult, who can override the bad decisions that filters will inevitably make. And since this filtering would be a legal mandate, the FCC would get to decide what was blocked. Considering Martin’s actions in the past, that would be almost anything having to do with sex, pornographic or not.  

Sometimes, getting only half of your rights sucks. That’s the case for a gay couple in Rhode Island. They want a divorce. And they can’t have one. They were legally married in Massachusetts. A Rhode Island Superior Court Judge has refused to hear the case. Not because she wanted to, but because the law says that she has no jurisdiction. And the state Supreme Court has already ruled that family court, where divorces are usually handled, could not grant them a divorce because state law defines marriage as between a man and a woman. Even though they are legally married. The judge wondered aloud if that was really constitutional. It sure sounds like it shouldn’t be. For now, the only option was for one of the women to rent an apartment in Massachusetts to start the year long process to establish residency there in order to qualify for a divorce in their family court. What is shocking is that actual adults, in this case Rhode Islands Supreme Court and legislators, think that this makes the slightest bit of sense.    

An anti-gay Christian group has asked a lower court to overturn the California Supreme Courts decision not to issue a stay on gay marriage beginning on June 16th. Unfortunately for them, lower courts do not get to override a higher court’s decision. According to San Francisco City Atty. Dennis Herrera, whose office helped litigate the marriage case, the petition is "beyond frivolous . . . absurd. I am not aware of a process that enables parties to effectively appeal a higher court ruling to a lower court." The Christian group Liberty Counsel thinks otherwise. According to their petition to the court:  "This court should stay the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples to prevent a violation of federal and state law by opening the door to de facto polygamy and polyamory.," Polygamy means that you are a man married to multiple  wives, and polyamory means having a loving relationship with more than one person.  In other words, they understand homosexuality just as much as they understand the law.

So gay marriages will begin on June 16th, that is, everywhere but Kern County. The County Clerk there tried to keep the office from solemnizing gay marriages, and when that failed, she shut down all marriages in the county clerk’s office.  She claimed it was for budgetary reasons. The Bakersfield Californian proved that to be a lie when they published email messages showing that county clerk Ann K. Barnett was getting legal advice from conservative religious legal group Alliance Defense Fund in Arizona, a group that had argued the case before the state Supreme Court. What she should be getting is advice on how to find a new job.  

Speaking of gay marriage, the daughter of Massachussets governor Deval Patrick has come out. She didn’t tell her father until after the legislature last year voted to kill a measure to outlaw gay marriage. Patrick says that he is proud of his daughter, and they marched together in Boston’s Gay Pride Parade yesterday. 

Entertainment

Is Rip Torn a sexual predator? You’d think so if you lived in Cincinnati. Torn was arrested on drunk driving charges in New York State in 2006. He took a really bad mug shot at the time. Cincinnati city councilman Christopher Monzel, for reasons that are not at all clear, decided that this mug shot would be perfect for their ad campaign about getting sexual predators off the streets. And the black bar over his eyes did not disguise his identity as many people recognized him. The councilman has apologized to Rip Torn, and yes, he is not only brilliantly funny, but he is also safe with your children.

There has been a lot of speculation about where Americans will spend their stimulus checks. You are supposed to go out and buy consumer goods to boost the economy, but almost everyone I have talked will use them to pay overdue bills and buy gas. But that has not stopped Dennis Hof, proprietor of the Bunny Ranch brothel, from encouraging people to invest in the economy by investing in his girls. The first 100 customers who bring their stimulus checks to the Bunny Ranch will get an equal amount credited for spending at the ranch. That may not be how the president imagined the stimulus checks being used, but since he has screwed us on almost everything else, this is one of the few ways we can get screwed through an action of Bush that will actually be pleasant. 

The big money at painting auction houses has been going lately to nude paintings. The 1995 Lucien Freud painting called Benefits Supervisor Sleeping of an obese nude recently sold for just under $34 million dollars at Christies, setting records for a living artist. Tom Wesselmann's 1963 ''Great American Nude No. 48, sold for over $10 million. Francis Bacons 1968 Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, combining drugs and nudity, went for $15 million. Edward Weston’s 1925 Nude set records for that artist with a $1.6 million price. Picasso’s Nude in a Black Armchair sold for $45 million. At rates like this, it is getting very difficult for the rest of us to hang a little tasteful nudity on our walls.  But I still love nudes and erotic art, which is why I have been working for a long time on a massive art project- the digital restoration of 10,000 erotic and nude paintings and drawings in high definition that will look amazing on your high-def TV. I am now over a third of the way through, and we hope to have it ready by January of next year. It will be part of Erotic University’s  epic Art, Sex, and Censorship class. And pretty much all of the art is sexier than Lucien’s work, and will be available for much less than $34 million.

Currently running on the Women’s Entertainment Network’s show the Secret Lives of Women is a profile of three adult entertainers-  Tera Patrick, Gina Lynn and Nicki Hunter. We got to spend time with Nicki at the last AVN awards show, and got to like her a lot. A very bright classy lady who battled her way back from leukemia to return to the adult industry. The segment will be repeating through June 18th, so set your DVR.

I just don’t see Jenna Jameson as a mainstream actress, but she is sure trying. After her Zombie flick landed with a thud, she is now working on a new indie romantic comedy called How to Make Love to a Woman. Josh Meyers from mad TV plays an ad executive having trouble satisfying his girlfriend. She may have better luck in this one, as she plays herself, a porn star that Josh turns to for advice. And for co-star Ian Somerhalder, he gets off the strange island in ABC’s  Lost only to find himself in the strange world of Jenna Jameson.

In Who is Getting Naked Now, its Megan Fox, of Transformers Fame. She was voted the woman’s sexiest readers by the readers of that magazine, and apparently as a thank you, she lets them see what they were voting for in the latest issue.

In mainstream film, the Canadian Film Young People Fucking opened Friday, although probably not in a theatre near you. Despite the title, it is not a hardcore film, but as Roger Ebert describes it, “a good-humored, thoughtful, observant film”.  It is about five couples who meet, talk, and have sex. Well, four couples, actually, and one threesome.

And out on DVD, Georgia Smith and Matilda Salaisi enjoy a little sun in the Evil Woods. Five obnoxious college students go off for a camping trip into the woods, and get offer by an axe murderer. It manages to be both unsexy and gets us to root for the homicidal maniac.

Shall We Kiss has Viginie Ledoyen answering in the affirmative. It’s a French film by Emmanuel Mouret in which the writer director plays a doofus lead who picks up a hitchhiker played by Julie Gayet, who relates a tale about how kissing can be life changing that takes up much of the rest of the movie.

Puffball has a good dose of Kelly Reilly naked and in the sack. She plays an architect restoring an old house in the woods. The sex is hardly erotic- more brutal and cruel, which may be why it got past the censors.

Kate Luyben gets both topless and wears pasties in Will Farrells sports parody Semi-pro. She flashes a busload of players, wears pasties while stripping in a locker room, and rides a mechanical bull in a transparent top. Of course, you’ll want to get the unrated version.

 It would be easy to develop a crush on the sexy Nicole Marie Lenz, who gets quite naked in Kush, about a group of stoner drug dealers who mess up a deal and then decide to do a kidnapping. Lets just say they made some bad career moves.

Vivid Entertainment released the latest Paul Thomas directed vid this week, Cry Wolf. It’s a psychosexual melodrama starring Monique Alexander, who plays a woman caught up in a drug fueled subculture with Mr. Marcus, Marcos Leon, and Steve St. Croix. It is also the last Vivid feature to be shot on film. Paul Thomas’ next project will be shot in high definition, the much anticipated update of Deep Throat starring Sash Grey. It’s a much darker reimagining of the concept of a woman with a clitoris in her throat, which is quite a departure from its light comedic roots.

You wouldn’t expect New Sensations Ashlynn Goes to College 4 to be a porn vid filled with the supernatural and special effects, but it is. It also concludes this popular series starring Ashlynn Brooke. It also stars Sabrina Rose, Lexi Belle, Sammi Rhodes and Scarlett Faye, and is directed by Andre Madness. Its part road trip, part spring break movie, but with lots of sex. Well, more explicit sex anyway. And there’s ghosts. And comedy. A little bit of something for everyone.

Lexington Steele adds a new genre series with Lexington Steele: MILF Magnet from Mercenary Pictures.  I personally appreciate older women, and apparently so does Lex. He noted “"I've always enjoyed working with women who know what they want sexually and that kind of maturity comes with age," Steele said. "They know how to enjoy themselves and they deliver a truly great performance. It stars Wicked contract girl Julia Ann along with Sheila Marie, Misty Vonage, Kayla Quinn and Kelly Leigh.