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In addition, the report contains 37 pages of suggestions that are, in effect, a how-to guide for citizen action against pornography. The text includes suggestions on how to conduct a "court watch" program ("Citizens . . . will write to the prosecutor, judge or police officer and relay their opinions of the investigation, prosecution and disposition of the case") and how to monitor the lyrics of rock music ("Many popular idols of the young commonly sing about rape, masturbation, incest, drug usage, bondage, violence, homosexuality and intercourse").
- The social significance of the report goes beyond its specific findings. It serves to document the evolving attitudes toward sexual morality that have gained acceptance during the Reagan era. In many ways it reflects society's ambivalence, mixing some moderate views about the rights of individuals with some visceral moralizing about pornography and promiscuity. Says the commission: "There are undoubtedly many causes for what used to be called the 'sexual revolution,' but it is absurd to suppose that depictions or descriptions of uncommitted sexuality were not among them." At times the report hesitantly departs from an examination of pornography and discusses the need for a moral compass in society. "We all agree that some degree of individual choice is necessary in any free society, and we all agree that a society with no shared values, including moral values, is no society at all." While they refrain from seeking to impose their view by legislation, the commissioners make clear what they feel about sex outside the framework of love and marriage: "Although there are many members of this society who can and have made affirmative cases for uncommitted sexuality, none of us believes it to be a good thing."
The $35 report could prove to be a best seller partly because of a straight- faced 300-page section that provides graphic descriptions of sex scenes and no-expletives-deleted excerpts of steamy dialogue from such movies as Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas. In addition, it gives a clinical accounting of pictures in magazines like Tri-Sexual Lust, along with a list of 2,370 film titles and 725 book titles ranging from Horny Holy Roller Family to Thoroughly Amorous Amy.
During its intermittent, yearlong investigation, there were times when the commission seemed to be on a kind of surrealist mystery tour of sexual perversity, peeping at the most recondite forms of sexual behavior known -- though mostly unknown -- to society. The report details testimony about practices involving human excretions, asphyxiation and anilingus, along with even more arcane fetishes, such as collecting toenail clippings and sniffing sweat. The panel heard from a Houston police officer whose vice squad had confiscated and was storing some 27,000 "rubber goods." Many of the so- called victims described the harm that had befallen them after being lured into the world of pornography. In Miami, for example, Larry Madigan, 38, told the commission he had been "a typically normal, healthy boy," whose subsequent life of solitary masturbation, bestiality and drug addiction could all be traced to the finding of a deck of pornographic playing cards when he was twelve.