Every major U.S. city has its Santa Monica Boulevard. In Chicago, it is called Wells Street. In Minneapolis, it is Hennepin Avenue. San Francisco has its Broadway, and New York City its Times Square. Santa Monica Boulevard is neither the busiest nor the worst. It is only typical.

As it knifes through Los Angeles’ West Hollywood residential district, Santa Monica becomes a garish, grubby, milelong gauntlet of sex-book stalls, theaters and 8-mm. peep shows for voyeurs, and massage parlors and sexual encounter centers for those who want direct action. The Boulevard is a flexible ribbon of smut that expands or contracts according to the apathy or indignation of the surrounding stucco-house neighborhoods. It is, in a way, a bit of the Old West, a semilawless, laissez-faire street of chance, a zone of temptation and humiliation, harshly lit by neon signs that crackle their messages: ADULT, ENTER and OVER 18. Here only stereotypes live: carnival barkers with army-ant tenacity who pounce on passersby; cellulite-scarred ladies with bad teeth who strut, pose and eventually curse their embarrassed admirers; and bemused, disdainful deputy sheriffs who randomly cruise the area in black-and-white AMC Matadors.

The profit motive reigns unchecked along Santa Monica Boulevard. The markup on dildos is 600%, and the nudie magazines that retailers buy at $3 each sell for $6 to $8. Not everything, however, is what it seems. The Institute of Oral Love mainly dispenses talk, and Wild Mary’s Massage provides local stimulation only if the customer pays extra. On the north side of the street is the “Beefcake Zone” where male hustlers loiter outside the homosexual theaters. The south side belongs to the straights, 70% of whom seem to be Japanese tourists. And from the open doors waft odors of cigarette smoke and Lysol.

But porn is scarcely confined to such strips. In Houston, the Bellaire News, which is a combination of a newsstand and a smut shop, is taking applications for the job of topless chauffeur who will whisk tourists in a black Cadillac from downtown hotels to its back room porno parlor. Ex-Prostitute Xaviera Hollander has sold 9 million copies of her paperbacks. Some 780 American theaters, including many elegant first-run houses, routinely show X-rated movies 52 weeks a year.

Playboy and a corps of far crasser imitators, all publicly exploring once private depths of sex and occasionally coming out with cover shots of women masturbating, are at supermarket chains on the racks and on view for millions of customers of all ages. Mason City, Iowa (pop. 32,000), has five bars featuring all-nude dancers to titillate customers (see box page 60). Boston lures the licentious—or the curious—to an anything-goes “combat zone,” and other cities are rushing to find out how to emulate the zone, a device to quarantine the porno plague.

America is deep into its Age of Porn. The old narrow Puritanism is passing, and few mourn it. But the feeling of relief is mixed with growing unease and doubt: How will the current avalanche of porn change America? Many who oppose censorship now wonder if the mounting taste for porn is a symptom of decay, of corrosive boredom, of withdrawal from social concern for obsessive personal pleasures. Even those who argue that it is not harmful to the user, and that people ought to be free to do what they please in private, have begun to fear that the porn plague is in fact invading the privacy of those who want no part of it.

What pornography is can endlessly be debated. One rough definition: explicit books, films and other materials (including, by extension, performances) designed chiefly for sexual arousal. By any definition, porn has mushroomed in the past decade, from a marginal underground cottage industry into an open, aggressive $2 billion-a-year, crime-ridden growth enterprise. Its once powerful foes—the churches and their antivice allies—are now in retreat if not totally routed. Despite flurries of police busts, sporadic prosecutions and a growing sense of unease among many Americans about the gross new world in which they find themselves, most of the traditional barriers to porn are now down. The laws against pornography are uncertain, full of loopholes; harassed law-enforcement officials usually have neither the will, the funds nor the community backing to wage an effective war on pornography; juries will often not convict. Pornography, says Raunch King Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw magazine, is becoming “part of the mainstream of American life.”

One startling aspect of porn is its new social acceptability. Prodigious Linda (Deep Throat) Lovelace is an ordinary topic of surburban conversation and a cover subject for Esquire. Superstud Harry Reems, at 28 a veteran of 400 porn movies, has had to dodge his fans on the street. Porn Star Johnny Holmes has 37 fan clubs, and Writer Gay Talese says an esoteric cult has grown up around Leather Princess Bettie Page, whose photos “are collected and traded across the country like you and I did with baseball cards.” Prestigious Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., honored Penthouse Publisher Bob Guccione at one of its fund-raising dinners after he made a pledge to the school’s scholarship fund.

American anxiety over porn is little more than a century old. Early America had few obscenity laws. The new nation’s first recorded court decision did not come until 1815, when six hapless Philadelphians were convicted of showing for profit an indecent painting. The first federal restriction came in 1842 with the passage of a law that forbade importing obscene pictures. In 1865, in response to fears that smut had been corrupting the Union’s soldiers, such things were barred from the mails.

After the Civil War young men flocked to the cities, and a porn business grew up to provide for this new market. Shocked by what he saw around him, a New York City clerk, Anthony Comstock, launched a national crusade. The results: stiffer laws, more prosecutions and a firm antiporn stance became the official American posture for nearly a century.

In the 1920s, when not only classics but such modern books as James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover were banned, an anticensorship movement arose to defend frankness in works of art. Ulysses was declared nonpornographic by District Court Judge John Woolsey in 1933. Another major barrier fell when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was allowed to circulate in the U.S. in 1959. But the key constitutional case had come two years before in the Roth decision of 1957.

The Supreme Court upheld the conviction of New Yorker Samuel Roth, a purveyor of soft-core magazines and books, but drew a distinction between sexual and obscene material. What was sexual, the court ruled, was not necessarily obscene. The standard it laid down: “whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interests.”

The liberal Warren Court went still further in 1966, restricting the definition of obscenity to material judged to be “utterly without redeeming social value.” The “utterly” standard opened the floodgates of porn as an army of literary critics, psychologists, First Amendment libertarians and even clergymen testified at obscenity trials that they could detect a trace of social value in almost any erotica.

In 1973 the more conservative Burger Court tried to reverse the tide and at the same time take the Justices out of the business of personally reviewing every allegedly objectionable work.

In its 5-to-4 Miller ruling, the court declared that local juries would have to decide what offended standards of taste and convict if they found that a work, “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value”—a much easier standard, so it seemed, for prosecutors.

The day after the decision, the office walls of Penthouse magazine were covered with x-ed out galleys of hastily killed articles, including one that explored a then new frontier of slick-paper porn: how to make love to your dog. The rest of the spectator-sex industry pulled back too, fearing simultaneous prosecutions in hundreds of different localities with varying “community standards.”

But that worry soon faded for a number of reasons. Most important was the general revolution in sexual attitudes that had altered many of the traditional American views of sex. So at the very time the court was remanding to communities the right to judge pornography, “community standards” on such delicate matters were in more disarray than ever before. Few localities were in the mood or of the single mind required to take on the porn lords. Another factor was the growing tendency of police and prosecutors to argue that campaigns against “victimless crime” represented a misuse of limited resources that should be devoted to coping with the ever rising rates of murder, rape, robbery and mugging.

Raids on porn establishments and arrests continue, but they are increasingly taking on the look of ragtag rear-guard actions against an onrushing horde. Says Seattle’s King County prosecutor Christopher Bayley: “We filed case after case, but unfortunately, the juries’ reactions were so disparate we were unable to come up with anything to guide police and law-enforcement agencies.”

In New York City, the situation is no better despite sporadic forays by the embattled Beame administration, which is more concerned with default than depravity. Last month police raided eleven midtown Manhattan bookstores, confiscating material on bestiality and sex with children. The next day the stores were open for business as usual, though the offending material had disappeared—temporarily. Hobbled by cumbersome legal procedures, picayune fines for offenders and a lack of popular support, New York’s antiporn effort so far has had little effect. Says Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau: “Prosecutions are lengthy, expensive and often pointless.”

In San Francisco, which just may be the porn capital of America, prosecutors have simply given up. Three years ago, local judges pressured the district attorney into dropping hundreds of obscenity cases in a single day because they were cluttering court calendars and impeding more important cases. Observers cannot recall a single obscenity conviction since 1971. Attorney Peter Keane, whose once flourishing business in obscenity defenses has now dried up, believes not even as foul a film as Animal Lover would nowadays be judged obscene by a San Francisco jury.

Atlanta police have been unable to padlock a single porn palace in years. Recently they raided a downtown theater, seized the film and arrested the projectionist, who before he was led away proceeded to give angry customers tickets to another showing scheduled for later that day. He was released on bond and back at work for the screening. His arrest was a study in double futility, for in Atlanta, as in other cities, the police find it impossible to penetrate the maze of legal fronts and find the identity of the true owners.

Boston’s officially approved “combat zone” in the Washington Street area is designed to contain the spread of “adult” entertainment, but the city also has a conservative district attorney and an activist vice squad. In the past several months police raided every porn moviehouse and bookstore within the combat zone. In one shop they ripped out the minimovie machines, carting them off as evidence. “The cops want to show they’re there,” said Attorney Morris Goldings, Boston’s leading obscenity lawyer, who acquired some 15 new clients in the crackdown. “Every guy knows that one day he is going to be hit.” But once busted, few ever suffer conviction. So they thrive.

Currently, the Federal Government is bringing some 85 obscenity cases. They include a series of showcase trials in Memphis, in the heart of the anti-porn Bible Belt. Leading the fight is Assistant U.S. Attorney Larry Parrish, 32, father of three and an elder in the First Evangelical Church. Last October Parrish won the conviction of a Memphis distributor and a Los Angeles producer of hard-core films. Since then, Parrish’s score has been five obscenity convictions and two acquittals. Now he has the producers, distributors and local exhibitors of Deep Throat on trial, along with Harry Reems. Seven other cases are pending, including one involving the movie The Devil in Miss Jones and its horizontal heroine Georgina Spelvin. The Justice Department says it is carefully watching the trials in order to gauge community reaction.

So is the porn industry, a loose, sprawling congeries of businesses, roughly divisible into the old porn (peepshow films, sleazy photo magazines and porn paperbacks, mostly produced and distributed by organized crime) and the new porn (theater films, glossy men’s and women’s magazines and sex newspapers, most of which grew out of the youth culture of the ’60s, and are still independent of organized crime). The industry’s products are generally separated into what the trade and its public consider hardcore or soft-core porn. The distinction is not always easy to draw, but in hardcore, sex acts are explicitly shown.

The new porn entrepreneurs offer case studies in the spread of the sex business:

> In 1967, Jim Mitchell, then 24, first tried his hand at making black-and-white porn films, using a borrowed 8-mm. camera and young men and women willing to copulate on screen for a few dollars a day. In due course he and his younger brother Artie made it big with Behind the Green Door (cost: $45,000; their gross: about $1 million), starring the ex-Ivory Soapbox Girl Marilyn Chambers. Now incorporated as the Mitchell Brothers Film Group, they are potentates of porn, operators of ten theaters in California and producers of the most expensive porn film ever, the $500,000 Sodom and Gomorrah.

> Former Ventriloquist Ted Marche, 53, a decade ago opened a small dildo factory in North Hollywood, convinced that another kind of profit might be extracted from the sexual enthusiasms of the young. Since then, he and his son Steven, 27, have sold 4,975,000 dildos. Today Marche Manufacturing turns out 350 different sexual products, and sales have risen an average 28% each year since 1970. Claims Dildodynast Steven Marche: “These toys have saved more marriages than all the preachers in the world.”

> San Franciscan Nick O’Demus, 53, who declines to give his real name, drifted into the sexual leather-goods market nine years ago. A sandal maker, O’Demus was asked by a few customers if he could turn out sexual harnesses. “Pretty soon,” he says, “word got around about what I could do, and I found myself with a new product line.” Now O’Demus and his partner, Frank Morris, 25, employ 18 people at their Trading Post Enterprises, which grosses $500,000 a year from making bondage materials, whips, chains and other devices, mostly for the homosexual trade, and selling them on the premises in a cluster of “boutiques.” Says Morris: “We’re trying to be the world’s first and only gay department store—a gay Macy’s.”

> In 1968 ex-Insurance Salesman Al Goldstein, then 33, started Screw magazine with a friend, Jim Buckley (whom he has since bought out for $500,000). Just as Hugh Hefner merchandised himself as the dapper self-assured playboy, Goldstein sold himself as the anti-hero of raw sex—a fat, articulate, self-deprecating perennial juvenile (“I am the furthest thing from a mature person”) who overstuffed his plain newsprint magazine with tales of his sexual obsessions, failures with women and humiliating need to buy sex from prostitutes because of his overwhelming unattractiveness. Screw (circulation: 125,000) features raunchy humor, gross sex, porn-movie reviews and endless columns of ads for prostitutes and willing amateurs. The formula, imitated by several other sheets, tapped an astonishing market of the sexually hungry, lonely and perverse, who, Goldstein says, have a right to their pleasures, just like the rest of humanity. His latest effort is Midnight Blue, a thrice-weekly, hour-long soft-core cable-TV program that now takes ads for massage parlors ($350 per one-minute commercial).*

> One of the nation’s richest porn merchandisers of the ’60s now spends his time in federal prison. In the 1950s Michael G. Thevis was part owner of a busy Atlanta newsstand. When he noticed that “90% of the sales came from 10% of the displays”—sex books—Thevis threw himself into porn. By 1970 he claimed control of 90% of the adult bookstores in the nation, plus some 30 porn theaters. Then his luck turned bad: he was convicted three times in federal courts (after more than 100 successful defenses) for interstate distribution of pornographic materials. Sentenced to 8½ years in prison on those charges, Thevis last month was hit with a concurrent 45 months after pleading no contest to the charge of conspiring to burn the movie theater of a porn competitor in Louisville. Thevis claims he sold his porn empire for $5.7 million in 1973. His feifdom, a maze of 200 corporations extending from California to New York, is still functioning, and police are trying to find out if Thevis continues to control it. Some officials believe he may be connected with organized crime, but they have not been able to prove it.

Organized crime, says a Washington official, dominates the traditional porn industry, as well as massage parlors, topless bars and strip joints. Now it is a growing presence in porn films as well. Ironically, the Supreme Court’s community-standards ruling in 1973 gave the mob its first foothold. Fearful of prosecution for interstate activities, many independent producers turned the risky business of distribution over to the Mafia. The mob also began pirating prints, then going to film producers and offering to take over future distribution and call off further piracy. The Mafia is in the business for the same reason as the new pornographers: voyeur sex is enormously profitable. Hardcore 8-mm. home-movie reels, which cost a dollar or two to produce, retail for $16. A peep show minimovie machine, which shows a customer about two minutes of porn for 25¢ or the full twelve-minute reel for $1.50, can gross more than $10,000 per year; most sex shops have several machines. A hard-core porno movie for theatrical showing can be made for $15,000 to $50,000 and return millions.

Whether made by the old or new pornographers, most hardcore movies have kept close to the single proven formula: endless scenes of copulation, strung along in an unnoticeable plot. But now porn-film makers are breaking away from the standard formula. One way consists of cutting out some of the crasser scenes and trying for the lyrical, romantic porn presumably favored by women. Example: the 1974 French import Emmanuelle, with welling music and tugging at heartstrings, started a newly profitable trend toward sleeker soft-core scenes. Another approach provides new jolts for jaded fans. One current porn film, Sweet Movie, features a striptease for children, intercourse plus murder on a bed of sugar, grisly exhumations and a band of rollicking adults who vomit, defecate and urinate on one another to the strains of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The director, Dusan MakavÄ“jev, professes to see the film as socially beneficial. Says he: “It is meant to have a lasting aphrodisiac effect and generally tone up the orgasm.”

The taboo currently under the heaviest assault is sadomasochism—sexual pleasure derived from dominating and inflicting pain on a partner or from being hurt. Porn-film makers long avoided “S-M,” as it is known in the trade, because they were convinced that it would drive away customers. Now even that is changing. In X-rated movies and throughout the world of voyeur sex, sadomasochism is in. Two current hits, the soft-core Story of O and hard-core Story of Joanna, feature the torture of submissive females. A new crop of hard-core films, including one about Patty Hearst, plays heavily to S-M tastes.

In recent months Oui and Hustler have run pictorial spreads on bondage, and February’s Penthouse featured 13 pages of S-M pictures, including one of a female sadist stabbing a spiked heel into the eye of a bound woman. “Bondage is where the action is,” a Playboy editor admits, “but we’ve been slow to pick up on it.”

In diluted form, the bondage and S-M themes show up in the popular culture, from Alex Comfort’s Joy of Sex, which recommends lighthearted bondage and spanking, to rock lyrics, ads and recent fashion magazine illustrations. Last December Vogue magazine featured a 12-page fashion spread showing a man alternately nuzzling and beating the model. One sequence pictures the woman being battered off her feet in her $140 John Anthony jumpsuit. Says the porn paper San Francisco Ball of the trend: ” ‘Flog you!’ may become the mating call of the ’70s.”

Even Al Goldstein claims he is concerned about the S-M trend: “I’m uncomfortable with it, but you can’t deny it exists.” Sex Researcher John Money of Johns Hopkins University predicts it will soon subside, with little lasting effect. Edgar Gregersen, an anthropologist at New York City’s Queens College who has been studying sadomasochists, is more concerned. He sees S-M “increasing everywhere. I think there’s a certain experimentation going on—a ‘deviant chic.’ ”

S-M themes are traditional in print pornography, and the emphasis appears to be growing. Since 1968 Florida State University Sociologist Don Smith has been collecting and analyzing sex novels that are freely available on newsstands and drugstore racks in small-town America. Smith calls the current crop “basically a literature of power and domination, a literature of machismo.” Rape scenes, he reports, now occur twice as often as they did in the 1968 books, but the woman almost always enjoys it. “The subtheme,” he says, “is that the female really does want to be subjugated: no matter how much she says no, go ahead and do it anyway, because she’ll be grateful to you afterward.”

Some who have defended porn are now queasy about the new sex-cum-violence trend. Boston Psychiatrist Otto Marx, who has testified in court in defense of Deep Throat and other hardcore films, draws the line at S-M films like The Story of O. Says he: “It is where this kind of mental and physical violence is being done in the context of sex that I begin to worry.” Many are drawing the line at Snuff, a wretched soft-core movie in which a woman is eviscerated and sawed to pieces by a sadistic gang leader apparently modeled on Charles Manson. (Though the advertising implies the woman was actually murdered, it is a hoax.) “If anything should be censored,” says Psychologist Wardell Pomeroy, co-author with Alfred Kinsey of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, “Snuff would head the list.” The movie was banned in Baltimore, Wilmington, Del., and Orange County, Calif. In New York City, protesters picketed the theater showing Snuff. Such fledgling porn fighters as Critic Susan Sontag, Historian Martin Duberman and Author Grace Paley demanded censorship and prosecution.

Says Feminist Author Susan Brownmiller, who considers Snuff and all pornography strongly antifemale: “If the porno houses were devoted to the lynching of blacks or the gassing of Jews, you would not find so many civil libertarians rushing to their defense.” To Writer Nat Hentoff, whose Village Voice column keeps a full-time watch on First Amendment violations, Snuff should not be censored, even if a real woman had been murdered in the making of the film. Says he: “I don’t believe anything should ever be shut down.”

Hentoff, however, is a First Amendment absolutist. Many would consider censoring a movie if harm could be proved, either to the user, or to the larger society. Though the two main concerns about pornography—its effect on the user, its impingement on the rest of society—often merge, they need to be considered separately.

On the first issue, porn’s impact on the user, students divide. To many, porn is innocent escapism, a healthy device for fantasizing, a safety valve for dangerous impulses, a useful antidote to Puritan attitudes. Alan Dundes, professor of folklore at Berkeley, argues that it is an informal part of the nation’s sex-education program, “the way American culture prepares people for sexuality.” To Social Psychologist Douglas Wallace of the University of California Medical Center, porn is needed to bring sexual pleasure to the losers in the sexual game—the shy, the unattractive, the crippled. “Are you,” he asks, “to deny these victims of our socialization process the satisfaction they might enjoy from looking at these kinds of stimuli?”

Sex researchers and therapists routinely use porn films to prod troubled couples into overcoming their sexual inhibitions. Says Dr. Zev Wanderer of the Center for Behavior Therapy in Beverly Hills: “Watching explicit sex makes the patient willing to try in his own life what he has seen on film.”

To opponents of porn, that is one of the problems. Will porn’s power to lessen inhibitions, which has perhaps already won some acceptance for practices long regarded as aberrant, do the same for rape and sadomasochism, both now part of the usual repertoire of film and printed porn? Writer Irving Kristol complains porn is considered harmless “by the very same people who seem convinced that advertisements in magazines or displays of violence on television do indeed have the power to corrupt.”

Manhattan Psychoanalyst Natalie Shainess fears the new acceptability of pornography has convinced many of her young male patients that their perverse compulsions are not really problems at all. Result: they do nothing to deal with their compulsions. Claims Shainess: “That is happening everywhere today.” Anthropologist Edgar Gregersen makes a similar point about sadomasochists: “A great many people with S-M tendencies now conceptualize themselves as S-M people. This has a very great consequence. They are not so willing to change.”

U.C.L.A. Psychiatrist Robert J. Stoller, author of Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred, argues that hostility is the essential dynamic of all pornography. In his eyes, even the mildest porn is tinged with aggressive voyeurism and the sadomasochistic search for a sexual victim. Says he: “Societies fear pornography as they fear sexuality, but perhaps there is a less sick reason: they respond intuitively to the hostile fantasies disguised but still active in pornography.” In Stoller’s view, porn is two-edged; it “disperses rage” that might tear society apart, but it also threatens society by serving as propaganda for the unleashing of sexual hostility.

Such allegations of harm were laboriously investigated by the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. After two years of study and ten volumes of research, in 1970 it reported “no substantial basis” for the belief that exposure to erotica causes sex crimes or bad moral character. Yet the commission’s ten volumes hardly settled the matter. Says Herbert Abelson, president of the Response Analysis Corporation in Princeton: “You can use studies to demonstrate whatever you want.” Harvard Political Scientist James Q. Wilson argues that the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence decided television violence was dangerous, with as little real proof at hand as the obscenity commission had when it decided pornography was harmless. Says Wilson: “In the cases of violence and obscenity, it is unlikely that social science can either show harmful effects or prove there are no harmful effects.”

If social science has no reliable answers, neither does history. Many are convinced that there is a correlation between the advance of pornography and the decline of a society. But the historical evidence for making such a connection is thin.

Thus, for example, compared with what went on in ancient Greece, says Chairman Glen Bowersock of Harvard’s classics department, “the U.S. hasn’t seen anything.” Classical pornography was largely created, he says, “by the most intelligent, erudite and cultured people in the society” and was a source of pleasure and lively delight. Unlike American porn, it was not “cheaply and badly done, solely to make a buck.” And, argues Bowersock, contrary to popular legend, pornography did no harm whatever to the culture of ancient Greece. The most that can be said of ancient Rome, according to Jeffrey Henderson, Yale assistant professor of classics, is that pornography was clearly associated with the empire’s decline, but as a consequence and not a cause.

Yet it is difficult to escape the suspicion, especially in societies with more or less Judeo-Christian moral standards, that pornography, so often not really erotic but merely dehumanizing, can be a symptom of social disorder. Sex has often been used as a political weapon for rebellion (and is therefore suspect in totalitarian societies). Open sexuality can be seen as a sign of freedom, yet it can also run riot to the point where it becomes both destructive and compulsive and thus ultimately unfree.

What is unique about the modern West and particularly the U.S. is that porn cuts against the grain of so many traditional beliefs, and the explosion is taking place in a highly literate society with the technological means and marketing talent to disseminate it. It is that collision of culture and commerce that creates concern.

That raises the second critical question beyond porn’s possible harm to users: the right to privacy of nonusers. To what extent can residents protect a community by zoning porn shops into one district or forbidding sex ads, leafleting and store-window displays? The First Amendment may safeguard the rights of pornographers and their audience, but surely the majority of Americans who find porn objectionable have rights as well. Must they and their children be under constant assault by the hucksters of porn?

Containment, which aims to protect the community and the individual’s right not to be assaulted by offensive material, was the idea behind the combat zone of Boston, and many other communities now want the same thing—in effect, red light districts for porn. In Seattle’s blue-collar Greenwood section, residents are picketing a new porn theater, the neighborhood’s second. Says a spokesman: “We aren’t interested in censorship but in zoning to keep pornographic films to a certain area.”

As porn shops and massage parlors invade Manhattan’s expensive East Side, dismayed residents are campaigning to keep them clustered in the Times Square area. Midtown businessmen are pushing just as hard to get the porn out of Times Square. The League of New York Theaters and Producers is pleading with first-run moviehouses not to show porn films, on the grounds that the spreading porn blight is hurting business at legitimate Broadway theaters. W. Barry McCarthy, corporate communications director of the New York Times, located just off Times Square, argues that porn shops and massage parlors are “an enormous developer of crime,” a magnet for the blight that is choking midtown.

Last week the Supreme Court heard arguments on the right of the city of Detroit to use another kind of regulation. Though Detroit’s policy is to disperse rather than cluster its porn shops, the court’s decision, due in June, will presumably settle a community’s right to use zoning against porn.

Citizens now have some measure of protection against unsolicited sex mail. Anyone who does not want such mail can notify postal authorities. Other kinds of restraint may be possible. Says University of Pennsylvania Sociologist Marvin E. Wolfgang: “There ought to be a way to limit pornography to those who want it.” Still, Wolfgang, a member of the obscenity and pornography commission, opposes all obscenity laws, including those limiting public display of erotica. Others think such laws are reasonable. Father Morton Hill, a New York City Jesuit and veteran porn fighter, wants newsstands and drugstores to stop carrying porn. “There should be better control over what children can see or hear, and we should keep porn out of public view,” he says. Adds University of California Psychologist Jay Mann, who generally sees no harm in porn: “Privacy is just as important as the right to such materials.”

Many in the spectator-sex industry believe only a few temporary excesses are keeping the porn controversy alive. They expect porn to crest and ebb and a largely benign boredom to set in. Says the newly mellowed Hugh Hefner (who denounces his fast-rising competitors, Penthouse and Hustler, as “gynecological gazettes”): “We are very much in a stage of transition sexually, and there is bound to be some exploitation.”

Some doubt that the drive toward more crass, kinky and violent porn will soon abate. English Professor Joseph W. Slade believes film makers are desperately searching for new taboos to break. It is a paradoxical and intriguing view. Says he: “They are attempting to restore a sense of transgression, to sharpen guilt. Taboos hold out the promise of resonance and tension, of eroticism itself.”

If he is right, porn may eventually exhaust itself, having run out of new taboos to conquer. Yet in his 1966 study of Victorian pornography, Columbia Professor Steven Marcus described the porn impulse as “insatiable.” Slade and Marcus may be making the same point: it was precisely the repressive nature of prudery that created a taboo-rich culture in which Victorian porn fantasies could take exotic shape. But if the porn industry finds no limits, it could perhaps reawaken the American taste for censorship. The very thought is anathema to most Americans. The danger is that it may be found more supportable than the worst conceivable outcome of the porno plague: a brutalizing of the American psyche that turns U.S. society into the world portrayed in A Clockwork Orange.

* Midnight Blue is aired in the New York City area on a public-access channel of Manhattan Cable TV, a subsidiary of Time Inc. As a condition of their franchises, cable-TV companies must turn over time on their channels for public access: free or nominal-charge use by individuals and community groups. Manhattan Cable is unhappy about Midnight Blue, but federal, state and city regulations require cable-TV franchise holders to make these public channels available on a first-come, first-served, nondiscriminatory basis. The limits on what is shown are, in what is still a new field, not clearly defined; one government guideline forbids a cable company to censor public-access program content, while another makes the company potentially liable for program content.

ncG1vNJzZmismaKyb6%2FOpmaaqpOdtrexjm9vbW9naIZwwMeeZKmnoqO8brzLmp6unV8%3D