I was not previously aware that the late-1970s group Women Against Pornography (WAP) conducted its fundraising by maintaining an office in Times Square and running guided safari tours of the local fleshpots for outraged female tourists. But that’s what I learned while reading this profile of Richard Basciano’s Show World flesh palace in The Rialto Report, which reproduced this 1979 newspaper story about the WAP tours:
Pornographic Tours
Woman’s Group Tries to Combat Sexual Degradation
NEW YORK (AP) – Behind the liquor bottles lining the dimly lit bar, two bare-breasted young women danced slowly, touching the mirrored wall, twisting to the pulsating disco beat.
At small tables, a dozen well-dressed women huddled over drinks and stared — but not with the leering interest the dancers may have been used to.
“That’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen,” said Irene Agnelli), one of the first-timers at the Mardi Gras “topless” bar, the lafct stop on an unusual tour.
The twice-weekly tour of peep shows, “adult” bookstores, and other sex emporiums is run by a group called Women Against Pornography and is intended to raise consciousness as to the effect of pornography on society’s view of women.
“Pornography is psychologically destructive to women’s self-image and endangers our welfare in real life,” says group organizer Barbara Mehrhof.
“The essence of pornography is about the degradation and brutalization of women … in the name of entertainment, in the name ol tree speech, in the name of profits.”
The group, founded several months ago by feminists Gloria Steinem, Lynn Campbell, Dolores Alexander and author Susan Brownmiller, wants to establish pornography as a national feminist issue.
“We’re starting here because it’s the porn capital of the country,” says Ms. Alexander.
The activities of the group, which plans a two-day pornography conference here next month and 20,000-person march on Times Square in October, are applauded but not officially endorsed by the National Organization for Women.
Women Against Pornography believes “women have to be encouraged to look at this stuff and have the support of other women, says Ms. Mehrhof.
So, armed with maps, quarters for peep show movies and a wealth of curiosity, bands of women of all ages and backgrounds gather at the group’s Times Square storefront and proceed toward the blinking signs offering “Girls! Girls! Girls!” and “Topless and Bottomless.”
On a recent night, a guard tried to block one tour group from entering Show World, a sex supermarket featuring pornographic films and “live entertainment.” “No women allowed without escorts,” he said.
“It’s illegal to keep us out,” shouted the women, who eventually were permitted to go inside after they produced identification proving they were over 21.
At Peepland, a similar establishment some of the women giggled and hesitated before crowding together into booths to glimpse films entitled “Leather Porno,” and “The Perverted Professors.” Some of the films featured children, animals, and gang rape.
Other narrow booths contained windows to a live show in which nude women stretched on a carousel and pressed their bodies to the glass.
“I am sick to my stomach,” said one of the touring women, a 54-year-old mother of four daughters. “I find it extraordinarily demeaning.”
“Maybe the courts will begin to see it as a crime against women,” added Ms. Alexander.
The U.S. Supreme Court has held that material cannot be judged obscene unless it meets three criteria: that it depict patently offensive, hardcore sexual conduct; lack literary, artistic, political or scientific, value and go beyond contemporary community standards.
The “contemporary community standards” are what WAP is trying to change.
“You can change the climate of opinion so pornography is no longer acceptable,” Ms. Mehrhof says. “If we can change peoples’ attitudes, they won’t want to see it.”
At Pussycat, where men may make $1 phone calls to scantily clad young women in glass booths, the tour group gathered in the center of the floor and eyed the women as they waited for customers.
“Tell them not to take pictures!” shouted one woman employee from her booth. “We’ll break their cameras!”
They look down on us women,” she said. “They think we’re illiterate — but their husbands are supporting us.”
The tour women gathered on the teeming street outside. “Our looking at them was worse than the men,” said Irene Agnello. “I really felt we were looking at them with a kind of judgment, and not giving anything.”
Did you notice that the Associated Press flatly reported the unsourced claim that there was child pornography freely on display in a Times Square peep show booth? In 1979, in Manhattan? If that had been true, the operators would have been led off in handcuffs in no time flat. Possession of child porn was just as big a federal felony then as it is today, no need to worry about getting a community-standards obscenity judgment in order to obtain a conviction. Even the mob did not fuck around with kiddie porn. Much more likely: the reporter bought into some bullshit from one of the anti-porn interviewees, and passed it along uncritically. In 1979 or 2017, any reporter dumb or lazy enough to give a one-sided uncritical profile to an anti-porn activist is too dumb and lazy to be trusted to do basic journalism when they write up the story.
