Date: Fri, 16 Dec 1994 16:22:54 -0500 (EST) From: Martin Rimm X-Andrew-Message-Size: 1949+0 Content-Type: X-BE2; 12 If-Type-Unsupported: alter To: Bulletin Board Administration Subject: Re: Clitoral Hoods #10 Cc: In-Reply-To: \begindata{text, 2067628264} \textdsversion{12} \template{messages} Excerpts from cmu.cs.discussion: 15-Dec-94 Clitoral Hoods #10 by Lin Chase@A.GP.CS.CMU.ED > Very small print to make it fit: > Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures, Alison Assiter and Avedon Carol, > Pluto Press, 1993. With reference to: Krafka, C.L., > "Sexually Explicit, Sexually Violent, and Violent Media: > Effects of Multiple Naturalistic Exposures and Debriefing > on Female Viewers", unpub. doc. diss., Wisconsin, 1985; Cash, > T.F. et al.,"Mirror, mirror, on the Wall...?": Contrasts > Effects and Self-evaluations of Physical ATtractiveness", > Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 9, 1983; > and Donnerstein, E. et al., The Question of Pronography, > New York, 1987. You have obviously done your homework. I also read these and other books last year, before I began my project. Let me gently suggest that you will be more effective politically if you separate law from psychology. For instance, the Supreme Court (in essence) has declared an image of a 17 7/8 year old girl to be "child pornography." (Traci Lords was a famous case, only slightly younger). However, the proper term in psychology is not pedophilia, but hebephilia, which pertains to adolescents. The courts often differentiate by adjusting the severity of the sentence, rather than the definition of the "crime." According to MacKinnon, pornography is seen as causing and perpetuating patriarchal domination and anti-women violence. See _Not a Moral Issue_, Yale L. Policy Rev. 321 1984. However, her efforts were rejected. Thus, you are trying to refute the viewpoint of MacKinnon, when MacKinnon herself was rejected by the courts. MacKinnon unsuccessfully focused on human rights, in particular the 14th amendment, and you appear to be attacking on the same thing, albeit from the opposite point of view. Instead, you might be more effective if you focused on how the courts define obscenity, child pornography, and community standards in cyberspace. Martin --- Message-ID: Date: Sat, 10 Dec 1994 17:19:27 -0500 (EST) From: Martin Rimm To: "Daniel C. Wang" Subject: Re: PROVE YOUR GENIUS Cc: In-Reply-To: <4iuW2W200aw_QDlBFF@andrew.cmu.edu> Excerpts from graffiti.bboard-censorship: 10-Dec-94 Re: PROVE YOUR GENIUS by Daniel C. Wang > Being able to correctly identify, the poster of any random piece of news is > not as simple as you think... since forging mail is amazingly easy... but > this does suggest a solution... require all posts to contain some sort of > digital signature, which without a doubt idetifies the sender. Posts that > do not contain a digital signature get filtered out of news stream... if > someone posts something illegal the perpetrator can be identified and > prosocuted to the full extent of the law. This marks at least the beginning of a constructive solution. I have not thought through all the ramifications (and snags) of a digital signature, but I'd like to include it in a footnote, and welcome others to comment further on this idea. Nice job, Dan. Martin ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Just a comment, the credit should go to the designers of AMS... I stole the idea from one of design or evaluation papers about AMS... --- Excerpts from netnews.comp.org.eff.talk: 5-Nov-94 CMU bans alt.sex: Intellect.. by Carl M Kadie@hal.cs.uiuc > If CMU makes policy based on unrefereed reports written by nonlawyers, > I suggest they make it based on *my* unrefereed report. :-) You're a good guy, Carl. I'm the principle investigator of the study, "Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway." It is being refereed and had the assistance of a lawyer who has argued obscenity cases before the Supreme Court. The only catch is, the CMU administration never even saw the report. In fact, they don't even know the name of the report. Go ask them, they won't have an answer. They are connecting themselves and their actions to our study as an excuse to do what they did. They did not commission the study nor did they have any involvement in it. What we did was inform [a member of the administration] that we discovered imagery on the Usenet which had been declared obscene by several courts of law. We gave him the names and descriptions of these specific images. We had no involvement in any policy decisions. In fact, our report is empirical, and does not advocate or endorse such a policy. We merely report the availability and demand of various classifications of imagery on BBS and the Usenet. Lots of hard work, lots of fascinating findings. Sex is fascinating. We informed them of the obscene imagery as a courtesy because we were concerned that when the study is published the media would have a circus with headlines such as "CMU Students High on Cybersex." The scandal would be, CMU students spend half their time on the sex boards. We conducted a serious study and did not want that, and felt it would be unfair to implicate CMU merely because we had statistics about CMU bboards. Martin Rimm