A few correspondents suggested that prosecuting producers of obscenity will send the message that pornography is bad, and will therefore influence some people not to get it, even if it’s easily available. I think such “normative effects” of the law are sometimes important in some contexts, but I just don’t see it happening here. Would a potential porn consumer really be turned off from porn, either at a visceral level or at an intellectualized moral level, by knowing that some (or even many) porn producers are being prosecuted? I highly doubt it. I imagine there’s no scientific evidence on this either way, but my sense of human nature is that people just don’t think this way.
It’s conceivable that some people might become more attracted to it; porn is already seen as somewhat dirty, and I take it that to many it’s part of the people — making it extra dirty might just make it extra appealing. But I’m not confident of that; I just think that the natural appeal of the product, coupled with its easy availability, will make the message sent by the prosecutions virtually irrelevant. And it’ll be quite an expensive message for the government to send.
Another correspondent pointed to my argument that “the respectability of the channel is not, I think, high on many porn consumers’ lists of desired characteristics,” and replied that the confidentiality of the channel is pretty high on the list of characteristics. And so it is, which is why the availability of cable porn might have increased people’s consumption of porn in some measure, back when the alternative was going to the store or a theater. But now, with the Internet, eliminating cable porn would have very little marginal effect on the confidential availability of pornography.
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