JAKE BAKER DOESN'T look like the kind of guy who would tie a woman by her hair to a ceiling fan. The slight (5 ft. 6 in., 125 lbs.), quiet, bespectacled sophomore at the University of Michigan is described by classmates as gentle, conscientious and introverted. His high school librarian, his 4-H adviser, the mother of the children for whom he baby-sat in Boardman, Ohio, all stand ready to attest to his moral fitness. At the university, where he majors in linguistics, he maintained a 3.2 average. Until two weeks ago, he'd never been accused of harming anyone. "I don't like stepping on insects," he says.
But Baker has been doing a little creative writing lately, and his words have landed him in the middle of the latest Internet set-to, one that pits a writer's First Amendment guarantees of free speech against a reader's right to privacy. Now Baker is facing expulsion and a possible sentence of five years on federal charges of sending threats over state lines.
It started in early December, when Baker composed three sexual fantasies and posted them on alt.sex.stories, a newsgroup on the Usenet computer network that is distributed via the Internet. Even by the standards of alt.sex.stories, which is infamous for explicit depictions of all sorts of sex acts, Baker's material is strong stuff. Women (and young girls) in his stories are kidnapped, sodomized, mutilated and left to die by men who exhibit no remorse. Baker even seemed to take pleasure in the behavior of his protagonists and the suffering of their victims. "Torture is foreplay," he wrote in the introduction to one of his pieces. "Rape is romance, snuff is climax."
The story that got Baker in trouble featured, in addition to the ceiling fan, acts performed with superglue, a steel-wire whisk, a metal clamp, a spreader bar, a hot curling iron and, finally, a match. Ordinarily, the story might never have drawn attention outside the voyeuristic world of Usenet sex groups. But Baker gave his fictional victim the name of a real female student in one of his classes. When university officials were alerted (by an alumnus who spotted the story on a computer in, of all places, Moscow), they gave Baker a psychological evaluation and had him escorted off campus, apparently out of concern that he might be a danger to the community-not to mention the female student.
Unfortunately for Baker, the Michigan campus is well versed in the latest academic debate over where sexual fantasy turns into sexual abuse. Catharine MacKinnon, author of Only Words and a professor at the law school, is the nation's foremost proponent of the theory that writing and reading pornography are in themselves acts of violence; that consumers of it end up, depending on their "chosen sphere of operation," raping, abusing or discriminating against women. MacKinnon immediately seized on Baker's case. "What he wrote constitutes libel, sexual harassment and is a violation of privacy," she says. "We need a law that addresses what is done to women through pornography."
Some members of Congress apparently agree. Democratic Senator James Exon of Nebraska introduced legislation earlier this month calling for two-year prison terms for anyone who sends-or knowingly makes available-obscene material over an electronic medium. "I want to keep the information superhighway from resembling a red-light district," Exon says.