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• For sooth. Dines and her ilk mistreat sex workers at every opportunity. They couldn't care less about the welfare of porn performers. Their agenda is to make the world into a child-safe day nursery in which only their own crackpot ideas prevail.

  Here's a little something interesting about what the attendees at the conference actually saw. Dines shleps with her a copy of "The Stop Porn Culture Slide Show" she inflicts on every audience. You can buy it yourself as an ordinary citizen (without providing proof of age) from the SPC website.

  Much of it consists of the least appealing and most alarmist pornographic images, shown in fully explicit living color, that the fanatics who assembled it could find by combing the most remote corners of the Internet.

  What the SPC slide show does not contain is a disclaimer page as required by 2257, a designated keeper of records, as required by 2257 or any statement whatsoever warranting that all those depicted in said images are of the age of consent. I personally counted 44 images in the SPC slide show that would definitely have been covered under 2257 out of a total of about a hundred images shown.

  While I recognize that the U.K. has no 2257 regulations per se, this same presentation is shown all around the U.S. as Ms. Dines and her jack-booters stomp from campus to campus stirring up anti-sex panic and in doing so violate federal law with each showing. I have confronted Dines and Jensen about this and about the equally cavalier attitude toward 2257 demonstrated by another of their pet projects, the execrable "documentary" The Price of Pleasure" credited to their colleague Chyng Sun of NYU film school.

  The closest I got to an answer was from Bob Jensen, who sneeringly declared that porn producers have "an economic incentive" to maintain the necessary records and comply with the laws regarding use of minors in sexually explicit production (which contradicts the frequent claims made by these fools that mainstream porn does, in fact, use trafficked minors as talent). In short, Dines and Co. cynically count on the people from whom they steal content to provide the necessary documentation in the unlikely event SPC and it's allies are ever called to account for multiple violations of federal law in the U.S.

  Yeah, right. I'm sure those producers will be waiting in line to help save these people's asses from going to jail. What they're really counting on is the unwillingness of law enforcement officials to enforce the law uniformly and without prejudice. Because SPC is anti-porn they'll get a free pass on stomping all over 2257, right? And, cynical as those calculations are, I think they're probably accurate.

  There's just one little problem that might come back to bite them in the ass good and hard. I recognize much of the material in both the SPC slide show and TPoP as originating with American producers who do comply with the requirements of 2257. However there's a fair sampling of images in both I don't recognize. Some appear to have been created outside the U.S. and by no means is it certain that the same restrictions governing age and consent we go by here were in force where these images originated.

  In other words, we have only Dines' word that the SPC circus isn't showing kiddie porn and I wouldn't bet a tin dime on the reliability of those assurances. I'm sorry I wasn't the plaintiffs' counsel on the last round of 2257 challenge hearings, for which the government employed Dines (I'm sure at a substantial fee) as an "expert witness" testifying to the need for 2257's meat-ax regulations. I'd have asked the judge to Mirandize her from the bench and then introduced both the SPC slide show and TPoP into evidence before asking her if she was aware these productions violated 2257 and more importantly if she and her cronies could have created them legally under 2257 requirements. After all, how is it possible to make an effective piece of anti-porn agit-prop without showing any porn?

  And in what way does that question not go to the prior restraint issues raised by 2257? After all, we're talking political speech here, the very thing The First Amendment defends most zealously.

  Of course, little things like federal laws don't trouble the Dines gang. They're on a mission from ... I'm not exactly sure who.