The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Red Rose Confronts Her Demons

In the Bush Administration’s ongoing war on porn, one of the strangest legal cases reached a strange milestone last week. It’s the case of Karen Fletcher, aka Red Rose, webmaster of the now defunct red-rose-stories.com.

In October 2005, Fletcher’s house was raided by the FBI. She was arrested for six obscenity counts despite the fact that her subscription site, which charged 29 subscribers $10 a month, distributed only text stories. After a protracted legal battle, according to XBiz.com.Fletcher has decided to plead guilty to obscenity charges in order to avoid incarceration. YNOT.com’s Darklady reports that the reason is that the 56-year-old woman is incapacitated by agoraphobia and social anxiety, and while her attorneys would prefer to continue the legal case and settle the matter of whether text can be considered obscene, it’s not possible given Fletcher’s condition.

According to the XBiz story, Fletcher told the publication in 2006: “I never thought I’d be in trouble for the written word. I had no pictures of a sexual nature on my site, adult or otherwise. [It seems] the only legal sex stories are those that involve a man and a woman consenting to missionary position sex in a dark room.”

Fletcher’s stories, to be sure, push the boundaries of what most people would find it comfortable to read porn about, and A does not equal B — prosecution of Red Rose Stories does not mean that the only allowable sex is vanilla sex. That kind of argument is utterly fallacious and the mark of an hysteric, which is pretty understandable since Fletcher had just been arrested and was looking at prison time. In Red Rose Stories, the characters were neither consenting nor of age, and the scenes written about were in no frickin’ way anything close to safe, sane, or consensual. But even so, many lawyers and industry pundits thought it impossible that a text-only prosecution could be successful in today’s United States, even in the notoriously anti-porn Western District of Pennsylvania, where the recent Extreme Associates case occurred.

The Red Rose Stories prosecution is the first major obscenity trial based on text since the case of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in the early 1960s. Naked Lunch was targeted for obscenity prosecution, like Red Rose Stories, because in places it involved pedophilia and child murder. In the case of Naked Lunch, it’s easier to recognize — in retrospect — that the book has “literary, artistic, political or scientific value,” which is an element of the Miller Test used in the U.S. courts to determine whether a work is obscene.

It takes a little more work to see the redeeming social value in Red Rose Stories, but Fletcher saw it, and she needed it. According to the YNOT.com story, “Fletcher says she remembers nothing about her life prior to the age of 14, when she ran away from home . . .she began writing her fictional stories of hideous child abuse as a form of cathartic release to deal with likely sexual abuse she suffered as a minor . . .’I would capture a particular feeling of dread and try to weave it into a scenario that explained the feeling . . .I may still be afraid of the monsters, but at least in the stories, they prey on someone else, not me.”

Clearly the redeeming social value in the creation itself was in banishing her fear and dread by giving it form. One might argue that it may not have been the healthiest way to fight that battle — but I’m not sure Baudelaire or Jack Kerouac were exactly healthy people, either. Plus, it’s probably worth mentioning that psychotherapy costs money, and Fletcher depends on disability payments to live — not someone who can afford $165 an hour to confront her demons with a psychiatrist, or even sliding scale at the local mental health clinic — and in her case I’m betting ten sessions wasn’t going to cut it.

But another assertion of pro-censorship forces is that by sharing the stories (and incidentally charging money for them), she might have been encouraging criminal behavior. Ultimately that argument is about sex more than violence, since virtually any level of violence is acceptable in Hollywood movies and some pretty awful shit goes down on 24. But the concern that Red Rose Stories might drive readers out of control comes from the sexual offenses are described in those stories. The violence is incidental — hence the term “obscenity.” That term does not get applied, in a legal context, to violence. Maybe it should — maybe the term “obscenity” should be applied to war, to corruption-driven famine, to torture and yes, to child abuse. But should it be applied to depictions of violence? Where, exactly, does that path lead?

Confronting one’s demons through writing them out is something with which I am intimately familiar. If my demons don’t draw the same reprehension as Red Rose’s, then maybe that’s just my damned good luck. I breathe a selfish sigh of relief, and I hope she finds some peace.

Thomas Roche is a widely published fiction writer, essayist, anthologist and blogger. He can be found at thomasroche.com and Share This

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 27 May 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.