Poland's parliament has passed a sweeping ban on all porn in that still-young democracy. But the porn industry for now is playing wait and see, while grappling with potential implications for both their business and broader civil liberties.
"It's a bad idea, it won't work," says Los Angeles attorney Jeffrey Douglas, whose adult industry clients have included Wicked Pictures and Vivid Video. "Many people's lives will be destroyed in pursuit of this suppression of a fundamental human quality" if the Polish bill becomes law. "The repression of sexuality goes hand in hand with suppression of other forms of liberty."
But making it law isn't a done deal quite yet. The bill may have been pushed by the church in this staunchly Roman Catholic country as well as the ruling Solidarity Party's conservative wing. But leftist Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski is considered most likely to veto the bill.
It calls for penalties of fines and prison terms up to two years for violators, with five-year terms in child porn cases, but it makes no attempt to construct a meaning of what is or is not porn. And the latter will likely present enforcement and civil libertarian questions, if the bill does become law. "I guess…it boils down to how the individual interprets porn," says Private Entertainment marketing director Lance Michaels. "We are not doing and will never do what some…do, teen sex, animal sex. That kind of porn I think they should ban. (But) a naked statue of a lady in the middle of a courtyard somewhere, is that porn? Or some artist who's doing nude artistry, is that considered porn?"
Kat Sunlove of the Free Speech Coalition says the bill illustrates Poland's growing pains as a still-young democracy, just over ten years removed from Communist rule. "Consider the source," she says. "(T)hey are young to democracy and young to concepts of freedom, and (they don't) have a First Amendment. From that point of view, it's a curiosity more than a cause of concern."
But Sunlove warns it speaks to the "underlying role" which religion and "extremely conservative mentalities" play in "wanting to dictate lifestyles and decisions for individuals. "That permeates our society as well as others," she says. "So from that point of view, we need to be alert. We must stay vigilant to see that we don't face something like that. Because just as (Poland has) come to an era of more freedom, this kind of cap could be put on one of the most basic kinds of freedoms around" - sexuality and sexual expression.
Douglas and Sunlove say that if the Polish bill becomes law it could inspire a thriving black market that cuts into the profits of above-ground porn producers and sellers. "Censorship is always a failed effort - the more restrictive a government is on people's abilities to communicate what they're thinking about, the more urgent it becomes to communicate about it," Douglas says. "When you're dealing with something as fundamental as sexuality, rest assured people will find ways of expressing their sexuality visually. And you have to consider current technology, the likelihood of (a black market) occurring is much greater than it's been before."
"It's absolutely certain a black market will arrive," says Sunlove. "People want adult products. There's no doubt about it worldwide. What it means to (the U.S.), I'm not sure, not sure how much is exported, there's some filming done in Europe, and there'd be some restrictions, we wouldn't go over there to shoot, but that'll fall more on Polish citizens than the rest of the world."
Private Entertainment does negligible overseas selling, if any, Michaels says, but if the Polish ban survives it could affect some of Private's future plans. He says they're reconfiguring their Internet site into a larger site, and "once the new site is done," he continues, "the overseas shipping could be a problem. I'm planning on doing it, but I won't be doing it to, say, Islamic countries, we have too much to lose - once they (or Poland, if the ban survives) confiscate materials we're sending, we lose the money."
If the Polish porn ban survives into law, could it cause a domino effect? Sunlove says it's possible in what she calls the "marginal democracies," those which are "new to the concept that people should be able to make their own decisions…our industry in this country shouldn't be affected in that way."
But she says if enough countries followed suit it could pose trouble for the U.S. porn industry's public relations aspect as well as having some financial effects. "I would think that the European market contributes to us," she says. "It's a significant portion of our (overall) sales. It wouldn't do us in if we lost it but it would have an effect."
Douglas thinks that if the Polish ban survives, the most far-reaching effect would be psychological, however short-term. "Whatever their underlying philosophy, governments want to maintain control over their populations," he says. "It may be a benign form, or it may be a malicious form. But no matter how liberal or conservative you are, what you don't want is chaos. And the easiest way to control the population is to control how they think and what the media brings them. And it never works. The results are generally catastrophic."
Sunlove agrees. Those pushing for the Polish porn ban would get a boost of enthusiasm, she says, "and those of us who fight for freedom all the time get a little bit of a knockdown by the whole thing…At this point, it's a psychological more than a political ballgame for us and the rest of the world…so far."
