Perversity: 1965!
In 1965, the US “Citizens for Decent Literature” produced an anti-pornography ‘dreadful warning’ documentary. Today, it serves as a source of unintentional hilarity to contemporary video vault viewers. Welcome to “Perversion for Profit”
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Was this documentary responsible for a certain infamous Wellington-based ex-nun’s public career as a smut fighter? Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to leaf through SPCS newsletter back issues, so I don’t know whether “Perversion for Profit” stimulated (…) public debate over sexuality and erotic media distribution, avalability and access in New Zealand.
That said, what was the film about? One George Putnam was the narrator of this little effort. Putnam (1914- ) was a right-wing radio host, and is still alive now, still working as a news columnist, albeit in the low-rent populist tabloid NewsMax outlet. Embarrassingly for these icons of moral rectitude, one Charles Kennedy, a conservative Republican Congressman, was later implicated in a financial scandal, but that need not concern us here.
Putnam engaged in unsubstantiated claims about alleged ‘media effects’ of exposure to erotic media, and didn’t cite any social scientists except conservative Havard sociologist Pitrim Sorokin. Sorokin believed that societies regularly underwent rises, falls and declines during cyclical periods, and blamed ‘excessive’ sensory stimulation for the latter phases of cultural development. As far as I can deduce, there seems to be an implicit crude behaviouralist theory of response to stimuli here, similar to Pavlov and his dogs. That is, if someone is exposed to a sexual stimuli, they immediately decide to act on the stimuli, without any intervening cognitive processes or prior developed responses to other stimuli.
However, what were the ’stimuli’ in this case? Putnam darkly warned of communist subversion and argued that sexual overstimulation through erotic media had contributed to the collapse of Egypt, Greece and Rome, and repeatedly used religious phraseology and pseudo-psychological terms like ‘pervert.’ This definition covered gay male-oriented ‘physique’ magazines, a purported group of ‘lesbians’ awkwardly posed standing and sitting, and a puzzled looking pen-drawn woman in fetishwear. In the case of the live figures, there were multicoloured strips pasted over their eyes and their naughty bits.
Forty years later, what has changed? Well, Putnam might be pleased to learn that people are still watching “Perversion for Profit” at video vault websites across the Internet. However, it has dated rather badly, although “Perversion” is the second most popular classic archival feature retrieved from such websites, second only to the hilarious “Duck and Cover,” an inept would-be World War III nuclear civil defence video which advises completely inadequate ‘precautions’ against the bomb.
However, let us also reflect that the crude behaviouralist model is alive and well in anti-porn scare tactics. Discredited US ’social scientist’ Judith Reisman was given a million dollars to try to find ‘erototoxins’, alleged neurohormones that turn anyone into raving sex maniacs after watching the barest hint of smut. Certainly, the Society for Promotion of Community Standards continues to use fringe ’social scientific’ “research” for their ridiculous claims about the “media effects” of exposure to erotic media.
Recommended:
http://jonhs.net/freemovies/perversion_for_profit.htm
Perversion for Profit: The Documentary (Video Vault)
http://en.wikipedia/wiki/George_Putnam
http://en.wikipedia/wiki/Perversion_for_Profit
Appendix: Quotes from “Perversion for Profit:”
More wisdom from the Putmeister…
George Putnam: Hello there. I’m George Putnam. I’d like to begin with a fact, a simple yet shocking fact. It is this - a floodtide of filth is engulfing our country in the form of newsstand obscenity and is threatening to pervert an entire generation of our American children.
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George Putnam: We know that once a person is perverted, it is practically impossible for that person to adjust to normal attitudes in regards sex.
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George Putnam: Through this material, today’s youth can be stimulated to sexual activity to which he has no legitimate outlet. He is even enticed to enter the world of homosexuals, lesbians, sadists, machinists and other sex deviants.
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George Putnam: Think then of the consequences to the inexperienced youth who, in purchasing and studying this material, becomes a pawn for these misfits, these homosexuals.
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George Putnam: This moral decay weakens our resistance to the onslaught of the Communist masters of deceit.
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George Putnam: The United States Supreme Court has described it as ‘dirt for dirt’s sake.’
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George Putnam: Group exposure is a hallmark of these cultists. However, it’s been well-stated that very few blind people join the nudist colonies.
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George Putnam: These magazines not only display complete nudity, but they do so in a perverted manner.
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George Putnam: Sexual sadism, Strange fladgulation cults, Erotic confessions of a sadist, What is fetishism?, The pleasure of pain, The worshiping of the whip, Sexual problems of a masichist, How to buy a whipping, Famous transvestites, Are cross dressers afraid of sex?,
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George Putnam: See the tender age at which homosexuals prefer their conquests. Look here at the young face.
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George Putnam: The significance of the spiked heal and the tight boot.
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George Putnam: Outlusting the lustiest of animals.
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George Putnam: The so called physique group of publications, these magazines with a homosexual viewpoint and poses are often not understood by many youngsters who take them as instructions of body development. But psychiatrists believe that prolonged exposure of even the normal male adult to this type of publication, though he not be aware of its true nature, will never-the-less pervert.
1 response so far ↓
1 Craig Young // Sep 17, 2008 at 5:29 pm
It is with sadness, given the above, that I must record the death of Mr Putnam (1914-2008), from liver and kidney problems. Oddly, given the somewhat right-wing sentiments expressed in the prior blog, Putnam was actually a life-long Democrat and anti-racist- albeit a conservative Democrat. He finally ended his media career in May 2008, and died on September 12, 2008.
C.
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