The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Max Hardcore Guilty on All Counts

If you’re familiar with the bleeding edge of sleaze in this country, you’ll assuredly know about Paul Little, aka Max Hardcore. Quite possibly the most controversial producer in porn today, Hardcore is known for pushing the envelope of what porn is acceptable and legal. Apparently he’s pushed that envelope until it ripped: last week he was found guilty in Tampa, Florida on either ten or twenty federal counts of obscenity, depending on how you count them.

The confusion over the number of counts is understandable, really — I know I, for one, have trouble counting that high. In fact, the associated AVN article states that the jury foreman in the case, fearing the jury deadlocked, asked the judge at one point: “Say if we make a decision on 10 of the 20 counts but are unable to reach a decision on the other 10, will the 10 counts we decide on stand?” — which seems to imply not only that were there 20 counts, but that the jury itself started to lose count after a certain point.

The confusion probably stems from the fact that both Hardcore and his company, Max Word Entertainment (MWE) were charged on ten counts each — 10 x 2 = 20 — and will be fined separately; the total fines amount to a quarter-mil for each of Hardcore’s counts, plus another quarter-mil for the company, which doubtless has to do with corporate vs. personal liability in federal court — ironic, no? The government had sought additional penalties because Hardcore’s house and domain names were used in distribution of obscene material. While they did opt to make Hardcore forfeit his domain names, the jury declined to take away Hardcore’s house which, writer Gram Ponante points out, the feds already shot a hole through a few years back. Oh, and then there’s the fifty years in prison that Hardcore is facing — five for each count.

It’s not the first time Hardcore has run afoul of the law. In 1998 the City of Angels charged him with child pornography because of the fact that an over-18 actress in one of his films claimed on camera to be 12. Freaked out yet? Feel free; you would be far from the first person to get wigged out by Max Hardcore.

While the Los Angeles case was being tried, the US Supreme Court decided that child pornography charges did not apply to material where actors over 18 “appeared” to be underage, thus ending years of hysterical speculation over whether any JPG of a grown woman in a plaid skirt could be illegal under child porn statutes. It was far from an academic question, and applied to far more than Max Hardcore, but in many ways he was the lynchpin of the controversy since he so explicitly flouted the porn convention of having 23-year-old women pose in schoolgirl uniforms and proclaim that today was their 18th birthday, a convention that would have been technologically impossible before Dermablend and is really not all that convincing today to anybody but the DOJ and conservative Christians, who have apparently as a group never actually met an 18-year-old.

In the Los Angeles case, while the child pornography charges against Hardcore were dropped, an obscenity charge continued, and resulted in a hung jury. In the current case Hardcore was prosecuted for obscenity, in federal court in Florida, which is a whole lot different than child porn charges and different than prosecution under California law. There were five titles in question: Golden Guzzlers 7, Planet Max 16, Fists of Fury 4, Pure Max 19 and Max Extreme 20, a title in the same series that earned Hardcore the 1998 attentions of the LAPD.

This time, it was not the age claims of the actresses that were in question, but the actual acts engaged in. The details on what exactly was objectionable are dicey; the Department of Justice Press Release says only that “the Tampa jury found Little . . . guilty of all charged counts of transporting obscene matter by use of an interactive computer service and mailing obscene matter” and then goes on to say that “Little, a/k/a ‘Max Hardcore’  . . .is a nationally-known producer, director and star of pornographic DVDs and video clips. In his films, he is shown engaging in violent and extreme sexual acts with female performers, including urination, ‘fisting’ and vomiting,” none of which establishes that those things were actually found illegal, though their verbiage certainly strongly implies that they pissed the DOJ off — not a crime, last I checked.

At least one source was circulating the comments that the objectionable material in this case was “explicit depictions of gagging, coughing, the expulsion of fluid from the mouth, crying, forceful face-fucking by grabbing a female’s hair, anal intromission of tubes, vaginal intromission of straws, use of straw to suck vaginal fluid contents, auto-felching, continuing sexually after a performer’s request to ‘please stop,’ and pig-tailed performers dressed in a preadolescent fashion being picked up at a playground and used sexually” — but according to DefendOurPorn.org, actually that’s the DOJ’s objection to the material in the Movies By Mail case in Salt Lake City, which, to be fair, did include a Max Hardcore title.

Why is that so disturbing to me? Not just because it’s creepy as hell to make porn featuring faux-underage performers, or to continue after a performer requests to “please stop” — yeah, that’s disturbing, but no obscenity prosecution has or accomplishes the goal of improving the lot of women in the porn industry. No, I’m more disturbed by the mix-up between Max Hardcore-related indictments because the industry can’t even keep its own cases straight. The only thing that avoided a similar information clusterfuck in the recent Stagliano indictment is probably that Evil Angel has a more organized website.

Worse, vague guidelines and murky legal processes are a tool of tool of artistic oppression, and kind of a proactive violation of due process — if I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, how the fuck am I supposed to do it?

In my opinion, this has become a huge flaw in the US legal system — its complexity, its vagueness and the impossibility of even-handed enforcement serves as both an encouragement to disregard the law and a paralyzing force for evil. Justice Potter Stewart said that hardcore porn was difficult to define but “I know it when I see it,” which means you can only find out you did something wrong by getting arrested. A society that values free speech, but not too free, is in the position of going after people who cross some invisible line nobody — producer, consumer or designator of the “community standard” — knows about until it’s been crossed and you’ve been slapped in the pokey.

This is symptomatic of a problem Max Hardcore presents for the rest of the adult industry. On the commercial side, in the AVN’s and the XBiz’s of the world, he’s just another producer putting out content and deserves the same consideration given to someone generating touchy-feely couples’ porn. To single Hardcore out for judgment, the argument goes, is to criticize a specific kink, and doing that is supposedly something the industry doesn’t do.

To an extent that’s accurate; one of the advantages of the commercial porn industry is that it sort of aspires to being kink-neutral, not judging one turn-on vs. another. But the reality is that the porn industry is that way because most people just want to make a buttload of money. They don’t give a fuck if you like big boobs, a milk enema to the face, or a combination thereof; if there are enough of you, your money’s green — as long as you fall into an established niche, or one that can be established with a minimum of financial investment.

On the other hand, talk privately to producers in the last week about Max Hardcore and they range between Libertarian outrage that the DOJ is trying to abridge free speech, and something on the scale from relief to denial to vague concern to outright terror that they might have crossed, aren’t going to cross, or probably won’t get caught for crossing the same wavering sexual line Max Hardcore crossed. I guarantee you that more than a few porn producers out there who last week or last year were thinking about “pushing the envelope” in their next film are thinking maybe now might be a good time to let someone else do that.

This “wavering line” effect is, to a large extent, the unwritten agenda of the DOJ — to herd the porn world into the center and hammer off the rough edges by prosecuting “extreme content,” thus ensuring that the otherwise unchecked gallop of society into sexual perversion will be checked. It’s far from the prosecution of “mainstream obscenity” that was called for during the confirmation hearings of Attorney General Michael Mukasey — but it’s probably the best the DOJ is going to get before Bush and his cronies leave office. But don’t let that make you too comfortable — there are conservative forces that want to see your porn, all of it, taken away, and the DOJ is their bitch — it’s just not a very effective one. Their naivete is almost laughable. But remember, they’re the ones with the M-16s.

It’s tempting to let them have their sacrificial Hardcore lamb and move on. Surely if the Max Hardcores of the world are put in jail or at least hounded out of business, the rest of the industry will fall in line and we’ll all start watching Pirates and Abby Winters, and society’s unchecked gallop toward perversion will be ceased.

Yeah, maybe. And maybe the DOJ’s next step would be to prosecute those titles, and next thing you know we’re back to watching Dick Van Dyke reruns and jacking off to Victoria’s Secret, on a bright cold day in April, when the cocks are striking thirteen.

Thomas Roche blogs about porn stars, space aliens and komodo dragons at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 10 June 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.