Wednesday night I was looking through the junk mail folder of my Inbox, searching for mystery employers from Monster.com to write back to me to tell me they loved my three-word emails, and that they wanted to interview me.
   As I was scrolling down the twenty XXX TEENAGE WHORES DOING EVERYTHING sites, my mouse stopped on a message labeled "Rape!!" The Web site it advertised used a black and white photo of a woman gagged and crying as the background, surrounded by a black border. As five or six pictures from surveillance cameras and shaky home videos downloaded, these words appeared on the monitor:
   • Inside we have the most perverted stories on the net
   • A mega collection of brutal rape pics is also waiting for you
   • And did we mention our large and exclusive collection of rape movies?
   • The biggest and best rape pay site on Earth Guan teed [sic]!
   • All the victims get their pussies full of sperm in the end!!!
   • Over 1000 of all rape pics net [sic] has to offer are already in our pics archive
   • Members Only—Join Now—Free Tour
By now, the pictures were done downloading. One picture was a person being held at knifepoint by someone in a ski mask. I couldn't tell if the person being held was a man or a woman—I only saw the side of its face. Another was of two men grabbing a woman, one on each arm. Her shirt was off. Another was of a woman sitting down, bound and gagged with two men beside her. One had his pants down; the other was kneeling beside her.
   As I went through the free tour, I saw many pictures of women being accosted in streets and alleys. One picture had three men and two women in the woods: One woman was giving a man head while another man was taking her from behind. The third man was dragging a second woman into the picture. Both women were crying. The man getting the blowjob was grinning. The man taking the woman from behind looked like he was trying to bust a door open. In another picture, a woman stood naked, tied and gagged. She had blue and purple bruises all over her, and there were tearstains from her eyes to the nape of her neck.
   I wondered what kind of zoom lenses these cameras had. I also hoped that maybe the tearstains weren't real. Maybe all these pictures were fake; maybe they had a make-up artist for the bruises and used saline solution for the watery eyes. Maybe these women were being paid a ton of money, and maybe they got great benefits, including dental, for being in these pictures.
   If the whole site was just a convincingly realistic fetish site, then the most disturbing picture was of a woman who was, hopefully, just upset over artistic differences with the photographer. It was a close up picture from the neck up. She looked somewhere between 35 and 40 with shoulder-length dyed red permed hair with brown roots. She had brown eyes, and reddish, tanned skin. Someone stood beside her face with his jeans unzipped and his dick hanging out. She was staring at it with her mouth open, teeth showing. She looked like she was in pain. There was snot coming out of her nose, dripping on her upper lip. A vein stuck out of her neck. Her face was blotchy and her mascara was running.
   Five days later the Web site format changed to hardcore bondage pictures.

Besides acknowledging the obvious argument that these women might not have actually been raped, I wondered how this site could be legal. The pictures seemed to be abnormally violent for Spam porn. The heaviest stuff I'd seen before this was an interactive picture of a girl sticking a cigarette in her crotch, and even those pictures were blurry and far away. Before last week, the thing I found most offensive about online porn was the cookies it left on my computer. Maybe I was being too sensitive, but there was just something about that middle-aged woman that hit me—she looked too real to be a porn star and too upset to just want to make quick money. So I looked at the Cambria List.
   Because of recent lawsuits facing the porn industry and new crackdowns by the Bush administration, attorney Paul Cambria made a guideline list in 2001 of what is and isn't legal in the porn industry. It's a great idea, except that restrictions on the list are vaguely labeled as "Guidelines for Box Covers and Movie Productions." There's nothing about distribution, selling, or Web sites. Also, most of the restrictions apply to unsafe sex and homosexual sex. Because these two themes are side-by-side in one list, activists, attorneys, and porn industry leaders show more interest in what the Cambria List does include, instead of what it leaves out, like child pornography Web sites. Pain is only mentioned once, briefly:
   • No shots with appearance of pain or degradation.
   • No facials (body shots are OK if shot isn't nasty)
   • No bukkake (Japanese term for a group of men ejaculating on one woman)
   • No spitting or saliva mouth to mouth
   • No food used as a sex object
   • No urination unless in a natural setting, e.g. field, roadside
   • No coffins
   • No blindfolds
   • No wax dripping
   • Not more than one penis in/near one mouth
   • No vaginal stretching
   • No fisting
   • No squirting
   • No bondage type toys (unless light)
   • No girls sharing same dildo
   • Toys are OK if shots are not nasty
   • No hands from two different people fingering the same girl
   • No male/male penetration
   • No transsexuals
   • No bisexuals
   • No degrading dialogue
   • No menstruation topics
   • No forced sex, rape themes
   • No black men/white women themes

Besides its narrow focus, the Cambria list also raises the question of what is and is not obscene. One has to wonder if menstruation topics and urination warrant the same level of obscenity as bukkake, or if black men sleeping with white women have anything in common with coffins and blindfolds.
   Even so, the list has brought more cases to court. One of the bigger cases being tried since the Cambria list was published is the People vs. Adam Glasser, Los Angeles's first obscenity case to go before a jury since 1993. Glasser's film, Tampa Tushy Fest, was deemed obscene because it featured women fisting each other. Glasser's main argument is that fisting is a big part of the gay and lesbian community, which the list already discriminates against.
   Fisting is not fun to look at, but it can be an act that two people mutually agree to take part in. What's even more puzzling about this case is that Deborah Sanchez, the deputy city attorney prosecuting the case, only takes on "very extreme" cases and not "borderline extreme" ones. Apparently fisting is "very extreme."
   "We prosecute bestiality, women being murdered during sex. Things like that. We don't prosecute people having sex with each other, even if it's a situation where there's a lot of people. It doesn't matter if it's vaginal, anal intercourse. We don't prosecute things if it's just that, but say urination and defecation in conjunction with sex acts; also maybe scenes where there's rape involved, involved with the sex act, and that's the focus of the video." Mostly she goes by gut feelings and prosecutes things that involve children, pain, homicide, rape, fisting, or defecation. But even a simple list like this can be argued and sieved through until it has lost most of the original meaning.

It's not that I think the court cases or the list are irrelevant—I just feel like they missed the point. When I read the interview with Deborah Sanchez, I wondered how she could say that "maybe" rape-themed videos would be prosecuted. And rape is the second to last guideline on the Cambria list and not in the top five. One of my friends was more worried about the people who get off on this kind of porn than the actual women in the pictures and what was really going on with them. He didn't think I was a sicko for looking at the sight. Nor did he judge the photographers for the Web site or the people in the pictures with knives and guns. For him, those were just pictures of something that probably wasn't real. For me, they were images of people suffering.
   Everyone has their own set of rules and guidelines for obscenity; the guidelines revolve around two or three major themes: who is exposed to the pornography, who is distributing the pornography, and who will be sued if these guidelines are not followed. The item that isn't on enough lists is the safety and treatment of the people in the films, pictures, and Web sites. Perhaps that's the greatest obscenity.

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