From: reka@uclink.berkeley.edu (Reka Gabriella Morvay)
Newsgroups: alt.sex.wizards,alt.sex.stories,alt.sex,alt.current-events.usa
Subject: Some more hard facts about Jake Baker
Date: 14 Feb 1995 07:57:56 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 65
Message-ID: <3hpnq4$535@agate.berkeley.edu>


	I stumbled upon this article in TIME magazine today and more than 
one thing about it disturbs me. I am absolutely -offended- by the 
allusion to alt.sex.* readers as "voyeurs," and frightened by the 
government's proposed efforts to prevent the information superhighway 
from becoming "a red-light district." But read for yourselves.

			*********************

			SNUFF PORN ON THE NET 
	(by Philip Elmer-Dewitt, Time magazine, Feb. 20, 
			     1995. p 69.)

A student's sex fantasies raise disturbing questions about the limit of 
free speech in cyberspace.

	[...]
	It started in early December, when Baker composed three sexual 
fantasies and posted them on _alt.sex.stories_, a newsgroup on the Usenet 
computer network that is distributed via the Internet. Even by the 
standards of _alt.sex.stories_, which is infamous for explicit depictions 
of all sorts of sex acts, Baker's material is strong stuff. Women (and 
young girls) in his stories are kidnapped, sodomized, mutilated and left 
to die by men who exhibit no remorse. Baker even seemed to take pleasure 
in the behavior of his protagonists and the suffering of their victims. 
"Torture is foreplay," he wrote in the introduction to one of his pieces. 
"Rape is romance, snuff is climax."
	The story that got Baker in trouble featured, in addition to the 
ceiling fan, acts performed with superglue, a steel-wire whisk, a metal 
clamp, a spreader bar, a hot curling iron and, finally, a match. 
Ordinarily, the story might never have drawn attention outside the 
voyeuristic world of Usenet sex groups. But Baker gave his fictional 
victim the name of a real female student in one of his classes. When 
university officials were alerted (by an alumnus who spotted the story on 
a computer in, of all places, Moscow), they gave Baker a psychological 
evaluation and had him escorted off campus, apparently out of concern 
that he might be a danger to the community -- not to mention the female 
student.
	Unfortunately for Baker, the Michigan campus is well versed in 
the latest academic debate over where sexual fantasy turns into sexual 
abuse. Catherine MacKinnon, author of _Only Words_ and a professor at the 
law school, is the nation's foremost proponent of the theory that writing 
and reading pornography are in themselves acts of violence; that 
consumers of it end up, depending on their "chosen sphere of operation," 
raping, abusing or discriminating against women. MacKinnon immediately 
seized on Baker's case. "What he wrote constitutes libel, sexual 
harrassment and is a violation of privacy," she says. "We need a law that 
addresses what is done to women through pornography."
	Some members of Congress apparently agree. Democratic Senator 
James Exon of Nebraska introduced legislation earlier this month calling 
for two-year prison terms for anyone who sends -- or knowlingly makes 
available -- obscene material over an electronic medium. "I want to keep 
the information superhighway from resembling a red-light district," Exon 
says. 
	[...]
			*********************

	For the full article, see credits below title. 

					Reka
-- 
The heavens call to you, and circle |I have been and still am a seeker, but 
around you, displaying to you       |I have ceased to question stars and books;
their eternal splendors, and your   |I have begun to listen to the teachings
eye gazes only to earth. -Dante     |my blood whispers to me. -H. Hesse