Personally, I don't condone crucifixes in urine, but I don't condemn them, either. I ignore them. Ultimately, it is meaningless to me, because my values simply won't put it on my radar, except as an opportunity to skewer a couple of politicians who should look to their last, rather than criticize another cobbler.

It's a fine line, though, one that has made more than one High Court twist and turn and shuffle poles to remain atop of. Take the case of "Piss Christ", a crucifix with the icon of Jesus on the cross affixed, dropped into a beaker of urine. What is this trying to say to us?

The artist is commenting on the decline in our values? The artist is poking fun at the nature of the righteous Christian brethren who would impose moral values on science and medicine, particularly as it applies to "evil" things, like abortion and AIDS (this one is my guess)?

Hard to say. All I know is that it is most assuredly not pornography. An awful lot of ramparts are breached in the name of wiping out smut, aren't they? An awful lot of perspectives and opinions are crushed in the name of morality. Why? Because the artist is too "out there"? Too extreme?

The large part of this crusade is carried out by the Republican Right, particularly the wing held in thrall by the Christian Coalition. Maybe you remember them. One of them was a precinct captain in South Carolina who repeated raped his underage daughter, and continued this incestuous relationship right up to when she drove her kids into a lake. Her name was Susan Smith. If we filmed that story honestly, including a graphic representation of the first, second, third, one hundredth, up to and including the last penetration by the father in the daughter, and made people really feel what was going through her mind, heart and soul, would that be pornography or art?

The key phrase is "redeeming social value". If we showed her father's dick piercing her unfucked hymen, ripping it in two, then at each subsequent ingress, how he shredded her virginity, would we have an understanding of how this woman was betrayed by her own lineage? If we showed her simultaneous humiliation and arousal by a man exercising his power over her for his own selfish needs?

Or would we merely have a film starring Ron Jeremy and Nikki Cox?

The squeamish among you have probably already flipped to Lynn's article, so let's continue. Would it be porn to really...not realistically, like some Jack-Nicholson-Jessica-Lange-simulated tryst or a badly-faked snuff film, but raw graphic sex depicting the brutal use of power...portray the god awful inhumanity that happens in the world?

In other words, no matter how graphic, is it ever porn to portray a legitimate POV?

Tough question, but as my good buddy, Craig Kilborn says, "That's my job, to ask the tough questions."

The key that we will all have to struggle with in the future (and this is something I'm going to raise in a future article, how this affects all of us right now) is our own personal definitions of "legitimate".

For the record, let me say this: I am a regular browser of many of the porn newsgroups on the Net. While my tastes are not far out exotic by any stretch of the imagination, I can assure you that I am not a missionary man. Therefore, for me porn has a far more narrow definition than it does for many other people, most people, I am tempted to say.

In the example above, this film would pass my litmus test of legitimate a, (assuming other things being equal, like the actors are not being exploited) (or at least, what we can presume she felt, given her lengthy list of interviews on the subject). Since we are not at a point where any medium can engage more than two of our senses at any time (sight and hearing, mostly), these stimuli have to be presented to us in an exaggerated fashion via these senses in order to impact us more fully, overwhelming our normal censoring circuits in our sensory circuits in order to make it to our subconscious.

Now, you could make the case that, because Smith was underage, this would be kiddie porn at some point (again, for the sake of argument, the actress playing Smith looks young, but is of consent), and certainly I'm not condoning kiddie porn, am I?

(No, this isn't in my display case. I draw the line for myself there, but I can comprehend the psychology that drives the passion.)

I dunno. While I don't condone kiddie porn per se, in this case I might make the exception for illusion's sake. I think there are things we should not be protected from, and an honest appraisal of people's aberrant and destructive behavior is one of these. By understanding Smith's dilemma, we can peel back the layer of callous covering her father's image, and maybe by exposing him to our scrutiny, we can understand what makes him tick, and gain some insight in our (meaning society's) character in the process. See, perspective is a two-way street, and if we expect people to tolerate us, we have to tolerate them, no matter how disgusting or repulsive we may find them.

That statement can be taken to an extreme, of course, so let me add the caveat that disgusting behavior is very different than behavior that is clearly against society's best interests, both as a whole and as how it affects us as individuals.

Mike Tyson bites an ear. Gross, repellent, cowardly behavior, but ultimately, Holyfield got in the ring with this thug, so he had to know something like this was in his repertoire. The man is an ex-con, after all. We don't have to like him. We can definitely avoid him, if we so choose. But he is a human being, as repulsive as that thought is. We have to tolerate him, because where do we draw the line? *I* know repulsive when I see it, but maybe where I stop seeing repulsive is light years short of where you stop seeing repulsive. The only fair place to draw the line is at his humanity.

Again, that's not to say he doesn't deserve condemnation, but the flip side, compassion, has to be there as well.

Back to porn.

OK, so the Susan Smith docudrama (appropriately rated as NC-17) is probably OK in my book, but maybe not in yours.

(I'll get to ratings later in this cycle, but more appropriately in a later article)

What if we made up the entire story? What if Susan Smith never existed, and we still told the tale of a woman who, so cowed by life, unable to form lasting relationships with men because of the damage done to her by her father's repeated raping, in desperation kills her kids, whom she sees as her obstacle to happiness?

Now are we justified in "showing it all"?

And what if we made it less extreme a situation? What if we examined a marriage breaking up, and pinpointed one spouse's affair as the triggering event? Would we be justified in that event in meticulously and graphically depicting sex on screen?