Tuesday, Nov 3, 2009    Text size: 

In a 1,700-word article, the website Reason.com offered an energetic defense of extreme styles of adult entertainment and its practictioners.

Specifically, columnist Great Beato leaps to the defense of Rob Zicari, aka Rob Rotten, and Janet Romano, aka Lizzy Borden, both of whom are serving a federal prison sentence for what the government deems to be "obscene": their movies.

Beato draws a direct line between the silence from the mainstream entertainment community and its hypocrisy in defending the director Roman Polanski.

"Maybe Janet Romano should have drugged and sodomized a 13-year-old," Beato said, later adding, "[Y]ou’d think many of the creative types rallying around Polanski would be equally sympathetic to Romano’s plight. Essentially, she’s in prison for rape, too, as is her husband, Rob Zicari. But as Whoopi Goldberg might have put it, the rape that landed them in the slammer wasn’t actually rape-rape. It wasn’t even 70s-style libertine rape. Instead, it was movie rape, a scene enacted by consenting adults."

Beato also points out the contradiction inherent in most obscenity laws.

"Had Zicari and Romano stuck to just rape and murder, with some R-rated nudity to complement artful scenes of mutilation and dismemberment, as Hollywood does in movies like 'Hostel' and 'House of 1000 Corpses,' they could’ve avoided a lot of trouble," he said. "Likewise, had they focused on hardcore sex and kept the violence and puke out of it. By mixing these various elements, however, they earned a 10-count indictment on obscenity charges in 2003."

This isn't the first time that Rotten and Reason.com have crossed paths. In an earlier interview, Rotten teed off on federal prosecutors.

“This is the World Series, and they're the Boston Red Sox,” he exclaimed. “They're getting a chance that they haven't had in 9 billion years, and if they blow this, they can never come back. Because where can you go after a jury says there's nothing wrong with these movies? How do you go after a movie involving a husband and wife and the guy's wearing a condom? How do you get someone to go after that, when you couldn't even prosecute a tape where the guy comes in the girl's mouth, and then he fucking stabs her? This is their one shot, and they fucking know it.”

Beato drives home the point that Rotten and his colleagues were sent to jail for simply having bad taste.

"Ultimately, however, two American citizens are currently spending a year in prison for making movies that involved adult actors participating in fictional scenarios with their full consent," he said. "The rapes and murders they staged were no less imaginary than the rapes and murders Hollywood stages with far greater verisimilitude every day. The gross-out stunts they engaged in were no grosser than the bug-eating contests of reality TV or the bodily fluids gags that can be found in countless Hollywood comedies."

Reason.com describes itself as the monthly print magazine of "free minds and free markets." Its topics include politics, culture and freewheeling analysis that focuses on individual liberty and freedom of choice.