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Today's Topic: Video Shipping Restrictions On a few of our videos, the following admonition appears: "Note: It pains us beyond words to do this, but this item cannot be shipped to: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, or West Virginia."
Frequently, customers in those delightful states ask us, reasonably, "What's up with *that*?" Fair question, and there is more than one answer.
The first answer is the time-honored tradition called, "Passing the buck." We don't actually impose these restrictions ourselves. The producer or manufacturer of the video tells us which states they are willing to have their products ship to, and we honor their request, since we'd prefer that they keep selling their stuff to us and not go away in a huff.
To which you might reply, "Nice try, fishface, but that doesn't answer the question of why the producer is uptight about those states." Right you are, and the enlightenment of our customers is always our first priority. First, though, a small digression into the state of the law in the United States about sexually explicit material.
Setting aside anything which might or could or is potentially thought of as having someone under 18 in it (which is an entirely different kettle of, well, fish), the law in the US is that something is obscene if a court somewhere has said it is. End of story. You will sometimes hear statements of the form, "Showing fisting is illegal," or "showing S&M with sex is illegal," or "showing someone wearing plaid with stripes while having sex is illegal" (and if isn't, it should be), and all of those well-meaning statements are false. There's only one test, which is that a court decides that a particular thing (tape, book, picture, topiary bush, whatever) is, taking into account the "standards of the community," obscene.
(Digression-within-digression: The word "pornographic" has no legal meaning, although its other meanings will make a good topic for another column. Something is either obscene or it isn't.)
Thus, until you receive a cheerful little document called an "indictment" (and oh my doesn't that focus the mind) and attend a little social event called a "trial" followed by a "conviction," you don't know if what you are doing is illegal or not. This absurd situation is not an oversight; the US Supreme Court is quite aware that the only way that you can really be sure you won't be prosecuted for selling obscene material is to steer well clear of anything that could possibly be interpreted as obscene *anywhere*. Not only are they aware of this, they seem rather pleased with their cleverness in finding a way of making everyone who sells erotica sweat a bit while not actually making smut categorically illegal. Thus, I do not suspect that we'll see a change in the law anytime soon.
So, selling erotica is entirely a matter of hedging one's bets. In the case of certain tapes (usually those that show, yes, fisting or sex and SM together), the manufacturers have decided to avoid states that have a history of being fast on the obscenity-prosecution trigger. In other cases, the producers have edited their products down considerably, sometimes to the point that certain videos simply no longer make sense (and, thus, we don't carry them).
Would that it were a different world, but that's the world we're in right now. Anyone up for "I watch smut and I vote" bumper stickers?
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Posted - Jul 9 2001 : 11:58AM