The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] John Stagliano, Evil Angel Under Indictment

It’s fairly hard to miss this story if you read the adult entertainment news sources, but it’s still amazing to me how many sex-positive, porn-positive people in my social circle have no idea it’s happening — and how many more than that just don’t seem to care. On April 9, adult industry website XBiz reported that John Stagliano and his company Evil Angel had been charged by a federal grand jury in Washington, DC with a host of offenses, to wit:

Seven counts of “operating an obscenity distribution business and related offenses” not to mention “three counts of using a facility of interstate commerce to sell and distribute DVDs containing obscene films together with a movie trailer in violation; two counts of using a common carrier for the conveyance or delivery of DVDs containing obscene films in interstate commerce; one count of engaging in the business of selling or transferring an obscene film and a movie trailer; one count of using an interactive computer service to display an obscene movie trailer in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age; and one count seeking forfeiture of certain assets of the defendants.”

Damn, that’s a lot of obscenity. Stagliano, in case you don’t know him, is the eponymous “Buttman” of the influential Buttman series of porn movies. His Evil Angel video is known for pushing the envelope and releasing movies with decidedly taboo themes. In the case of this indictment, there are two movies named: “Milk Nymphos,” which appears to feature milk enemas, and “Storm Squirters 2,” which features female ejaculation. Also named is a trailer for Belladonna’s “Fetish Fanatic 5.”

Stagliano’s attorney Al Gelbard addressed some of the constitutional issues surrounding this case, and XBiz reported that Stagliano would hold a press conference following his April 21 arraignment. Evil Angel responded by launching DefendOurPorn.org, a clearinghouse for information about the case and a place for fans and free-speech advocates to donate to Stagliano’s defense fund. They also said that DefendOurPorn will remain live after the charges are (inevitably) beaten, and left over funds will be donated to other free speech causes.

Though the paragraph’s worth of charges quoted in the XBiz article is enough to make one’s eyes cross, the case hinges on the idea that the material in “Milk Nymphos,” “Storm Squirters 2,” and the “Fetish Fanatic 5″ trailer is obscene.

Calling it that relies on the Miller test, the US Supreme Court’s standard, and therefore the US legal standard, for obscenity. In determining whether a work is obscene, the Miller test asks:

1. Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
2. Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
3. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The government thinks that a work depicting female ejaculation is without literary, artistic, political or scientific value. In an industry of money shots, this is one of two titles selected for prosecution?

But ultimately, why should you care? Certainly a lot of people, even porn people, don’t seem to, except as it relates directly to them. They see Evil Angel as one of the “big dogs” who “asked for it” by being too big, being too successful, being too extreme. I’ve heard it in recent days from the lips of otherwise right-thinking supposed sex-positives.

On the other hand, antiporn groups are bloody pissed off that Stagliano has been indicted. Robert Peters, president of Morality in Media, said that the government does nothing to stop the mainstreaming of porn by prosecuting Evil Angel. He also asserted that Americans do not like pornography, despite its rampant popularity: “Just because there’s a lot of pornography around doesn’t mean the American people accept it,” Peters has been quoted as saying.

Morality in Media is one of those antiporn groups that opposes pornography and other forms of “obscenity” in the media. Their founder, the late Fr. Morton Hill, sat on Lyndon B. Johnson’s Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. In 2006 and 2006, Morality in Media received Department of Justice grants in the amount of $150,000 to fund ObscenityCrimes.org, a website that solicits citizen obscenity complaints. As of August, 2007, it had resulted in a whopping zero obscenity prosecutions. High five, Fr. Hill. Morality in Media also led a campaign to get Cosmopolitan banned from supermarket checkout lines, and their response to the white ribbon campaign against violence against women was to lead a sort of counter-white ribbon campaign against pornography.

But I digress — Morality in Media is hardly the problem, since they could give a rat’s ass about “Milk Nymphos” specifically; they oppose the fact of porn, not its execution. The government has the burden of proving that individual works are obscene, and that’s going to be tough, even with something called “Milk Nymphos.”

The reason you should care is not — or at least isn’t just — because the government’s going to be coming for your porn; maybe it will, maybe it won’t.

But one thing’s guaranteed: the dollars spent on having federal agents watch zillions of hours of porn, pick two titles to prosecute, and build a case they’re almost certainly going to lose — those are real dollars; if you pay US taxes, they’re your dollars, and they’re going down the drain even as we speak.

Thomas Roche is the PR Manager at Kink.com, an educator at San Francisco Sex Information and has written or edited ten books. He can be found at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 22 April 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.