Absolute Porn Corrupts Absolutely

...and read down for a debate (i will make the mass debate 'joke' before anyone else can) about porn.

Am I right? Does porn 'damage the social environment'? Or is that idea 'ridiculous' as Calum says? How omnipresent is porn, anyway? There were complaints on the other thread that we were interrupting the ILXors right to look at hott indie chix so I'm moving it here...

Then why not walk into a shop that doesn't stock three shelves of porn and buy your groceries elsewhere?

Sorry, I just can't be bothered arguing this. I consider myself pretty liberal and very well informed about what sort of material is out there (I'm involved in the cult film genre firsthand for a start and you meet some admitedly dodgy characters on web sites) but I have to say: 'Each to their own'

I draw the line when people or animals are injured or hurt in a film for real, and anything that features women or men in a position whereupon they seem to be not enjoying the sex (whether acted out or not)... yup, I'd draw the line there. But if it's consentual shagging between two people, or a woman or man nude in front of a camera I could really care less.

sadly, i think i'm too "normalized" to full appreciate this

(It's not really about individual preferences, anyway.)

i flucuate between what fritz/george are saying and worrying about the way pron may surreptiously impact my attitudes towards women

too tall.

(ie. it would require throwing up.)

It is precisely bcz porn leads to such extremes that I object to it.

Well, yeah, wouldn't it be? Doesn't the fact that we have (as a society, I guess you could say) labelled fatty foods as "damanging" and "destructive" mean something even though we haven't outright banned them?

And yeah it is fruitful - disagreement with cultural content is always potentially fruitful. I mean if you have a radio spectrum of right-wing talk show hosts and you say "this stuff is really destructive" you're not implying it should be banned, you're just trying to find an audience of your own who might say "well yeah actually it might be", and if that opinion gains enough force or credibility then the station owners are more likely to change.

(Or what Chris said in one sentence, doh.)

By non-consensual sex I mean stuff like Max Hardcore and the notorious seventies film 'Forced Entry' which is notorious enough to have been referenced in 'Boogie Nights'. You cannot possibly object to all porn Julio, that's preposterous. Associating, say, Playboy or even 'Men Only' with the extremes I've mentioned is something that only a Tory MP would attempt.

Besides, you wipe out porn you create a massive blackmarket (c.f. Singapore).

Actually it has happened to me with porn to an extent - the first time I saw 3-way sex in a mag it really shocked me and last week I was relatively unfazed by tubgirl.com :(

I am on a massive "take responsibility for yourself and stop whining" kick today.

(I'm pretty sure I know what "relative porn" would be.)

Dan the problem with porn is that it's somewhere between fatty foods which everyone agrees only harm the consumer and smoking which everyone agrees doesn't. It's much nearer the former, I think but not identical to it. The idea used to be that i) porn was bad and should be banned and following that ii) public spaces should basically be smut-free. And now people think the first half of that is wrong (and I do too) but the upshot is the second half is sliding too.

yeah, I've consumed music like that too but yeah thanks for tom for articulating this the way I'd like to.

but music doesn't damage other individuals (unless it's a noise gig that can damage yr hearing heh). can't compare to porn really.

but as calum sez, a ban would lead to black market stuff.

''The mainstream porn studios and performers are 100% against anything that, for instance, a fuckwitt like Max Hardcore (notorious abuser of women featured on a very disturbing Channel 4 documentary called 'Hardcore') produces''

yeah I was thinking of this when i wrote my first comment on the thread since i saw that doc (which is the only porn related thing i've evah seen).

That documentary would give you the notion the business is full of potential rapists. Porn of that kind should be burnt to a cinder and put in the bin. It's for real sick minds. But that's not representative of all porn at all.

anyway. porn is a gap between basic pre-evoltionary impulse and how things work now. porn is for the runt of the litter. though is still quite appealing to others besides, cos it's got fucking in it.

incidentally, i don't think many men really like the approach of most porn. too badly acted, too glossy. most men won't get off on the less pleasant aspects, but there's a thread running through. people get used to things which they barely notice, cos they like to watch the fucking.

sex doesn't satisfy the desire for sex.

If you put a sign on a bridge that says "Jump off here" and walk 100 people past it, and 10 out of those 100 jump, is it the fault of the sign or the fault of the people?

where do you draw the line really? and then there is a diff line for each person so how does that translate into laws and regulation?

''But Julio the links between music harming people (i.e. The Columbine Massacre etc) are no more or less believable than the links between porn and hurting people.''

I think args will rage on until actual experiments that are reliable are somehow drawn up and you can get conclusive proof to such questions.

The more I think about it the more I think that the public spaces and invasion of privacy thing (Kim's inbox) is the issue that bothers me.

(plz keep in mind that the "specialist" porn nancy - not me - pays for is "indie porn"...which barely even features any exposed vaginas. "specialist" doesn't always have to mean hardcore.)

It says that the people behind the site are trying to attract an increasingly-jaded audience by repackaging the same old in-out-in-out in increasingly hyperbolic terms. I'm not going to be concerned about that rhetoric until I see a groundswell of disgruntled porn consumers who are mad that they aren't seeing torn vaginas when they click through on their spam.

I've seen quite a few porn videos. Nowadays, if you go into a porn shop and pick a film at random, you're 90% certain to choose something from the many gonzo lines.

Your randomly chosen video will probably begin with a short interview with the first actress up. She won't be in character. She's supposed to be herself, albeit with a different name. She'll be asked about where she comes from. Maybe what her parents think about her doing porn. It's cute stuff. There's no scenario. No bored housewife sucking the plumber for kicks. It's a young girl (who will often show ID to the viewer to prove that she's only 18) getting fucked for money. That's fine, I guess.

When the action begins, the emphasis will always be on pushing the girl as far as you can, but not too far that she's gonna bail out. She's gotta labour. She's gotta get uncomfortable. The ideal blowjob is one where she gags. No, that's not true. The ideal blowjob is one where she's made to vomit all over the shop. But you get all kinds of hassle from people for that kind of stuff, so let's just stick to the gagging. Some girls won't even let you do that. That's okay. You can try to ease her into it. It could still be a good scene. Maybe she'll do it next time. Maybe she looks so good that she'll get to the point where she can dictate the limits. Maybe she won't, and she'll do what you say or get no work after this.

The repertoire of porn comprises acts that few people, I believe, perform outside of porn. Anal sex is a common enough fantasy, a common enough pastime. But what about double anal? Triple (with a cock deep in the throat at the same time)? What is the point of this stuff, if not to try to reach the point where you get the girl hurting?

It could be argued that the kind of soft porn you get in WH Smith's is harmless naked ladies. I probably agree. But it's not soft because that's what porn or its buyers wants. It's soft because that's how it needs to be to get in WH Smith's. The magazines have to show the soft stuff. The rest of the shoot, with the ubiquitous pissing and dildoes, will get used in the American magazines. Again, what's the point of the pissing? I don't think so many people are into urine. Some are, but not enough to justify its ubiquity. The point of porn is to try to convince girls who'll do something mildly degrading to do things more degrading. It's boring to see them open their legs. They don't even mind anymore! Come on, piss for me while you're at it, bitch! You will? Can you shit, too, for an extra $100? Great! Now, maybe you could eat it up...

"Is 'abusive' role-play in the bedroom bad or dangerous? Or is it a healthy way of processing unprocessable thoughts?"

Well, I see your point Tom, but if you look back for example at feminist discourse of the sixties and earlier, it had a very middle class, white perspective because it was being written by middle class whites to respond to the dilemmas of middle class white women. Eventually other perspectives -- those of black women, lesbians -- forced themselves into the debate. In my opinion, this broadened feminist theory, made it more realistic, more politically useful because it had adapted to the times. So, in my opinion, theory struggles to make itself relevant to the times at hand. And your right, *facets* of the current theory do become outmoded, like anything else, as time passes. Other facets remane relevant. But to barge into an innocous thread spouting anti-porn arguments that had been rejected by many contemporary feminists strikes me as damaging to contemporary feminism.

I see your point about feminist theory Paula. I haven't read much of it, so I didn't mention feminism in my posts (also I would hope there are ways to talk about porn and its impacts and content which don't require feminist theory of any kind). My broad impression - which might be completely wrong - is that most cultural-political theories have moved from interventionist and proscriptive leanings to more libertarian positions over the course of the 80s and 90s, for all sorts of reasons.

(Honesty time - I didn't actually read Calum OR Pashmina's subsequent posts very carefully cos I was only on the thread having been summoned as a moderator to put a not-safe-for-work flag on it.)

When I was a kid these feminists were trying to rally support outside WH Smith in Edinburgh because they had been arrested for going in the shop and scribbling with marker pens over the porn. From what I recall, and yes this is a stereotype, they WERE really fat and ugly. Which is fair enough if they were happy like that - but obviously they weren't and their anger was being taken out on 'Claire, Age 19 from Colchester, likes puppy dogs and men with big willies'.

Calum makes a lot of assumptions about what i want, and what I don't want, what i like and don't like to do, my sexuality and even my sex, based i think more on his prejudices & lock-brain thinking than actually reading what I said. Time and again he has put words into my mouth, opinions that i do not hold in order to bolster his own feeble case. I would discuss this (the thread), but not with a fuckwit like that leading the discussion. Sorry.

I worry that it's basically impossible to cherry pick the elements that you WANT from porn (ie. the fucking, the visuals) without having some of that other detritus seep in to your subconscious. I swear to God sometimes it's impossible to negotiate the fine line between allowing yourself to be sexually healthy and unrepressed and being complicit in something you think is really ugly and isolating.

This is pretty much the crux of why I started the thread. I think it might not be a line, more of a crossover-zone, unfortunately.

(But on the other hand we have been marketed "lack of repression" as surely as we have been marketed everything else.)

Welcome to the human experience in general.

It's a violent misogynistic world, as is the collective unconscious. I submit that it was no less so in demure Victorian times. The email spam I get about Make your cock ten feet long with this one pill, Prime young virgins raped with extreme prejudice, etc., are exhibits A through Infinity for the prosecution. The current state of porn is an *effect* of an unequal society.

So accepting and participating in the type of porn that reinforces this inequality helps *how* exactly?

Likewise, you have ASSUMED that viewers of pornographic material are LAMERS and those that participate in porn are in fact subject to male abuse. So, really, I concluded that you were an ignorant buffoon and probably knew little about porn or film in general (as seen by your rubbishing of 'The Driller Killer' - Ferrarra's admitedly flawed debut skidrow flick). I have no problem with you calling me a 'fuckwitt' but this 'fuckwitt' stated, WITH EXAMPLES, why you were wrong in your points. I sympathise that you do not enjoy porn, as I have stated in many cases I don't either. BUT as I live in a democratic country I excercise my right not to purchase or watch it.

I can leave it at that. Obviously you cannot and need to come on here and excercise some sort of inner demon.

Personally, I could care less. You remind me of a bad itch that you can't rid off. By the way - the women outside WH Smith in my example WERE fat and DID say they were feminists. I'd like to ask why, therefore, describing them as 'fat feminists' is wrong?

Anyhow... I think most people against porn are against it due to, perhaps, strict religous beliefs. This is something that DOES piss me off. I bet Jesus had a wank once in a while...

I meant Krishna

Oh come on, don't you know anything about writing and the use of inflammatory language? You used those terms together in order to be provocative, knowing full well that they *were* provocative. I've defended you to some extent here, but to plead ignorance of your own obvious rhetorical strategy is indefensible. Imagine someone writing, "but they *were* African Americans...they *did* have thick lips...one of them *was* eating watermelon." If you want to use stereotypes for effect, fine, but don't pretend you're just objectively reporting.

I'll go and hide under my shell now.

So. Of course spam is extreme! That's its point. That we've gotten used to it, as a society, says more about our attitudes towards spam than about our attitudes towards sex or porn or women.

This is the post that was at the forefront of my mind when I wrote my original post and the above paraphrase. I haven't seen anyone defend any of these things; I started to but deleted the post because I couldn't say exactly what I wanted to, but now it looks like I should:

IMO, the "dangerous rhetoric" quoted by Kim is not dangerous if you aren't an idiot. In my mind, labelling that type of logic as "dangerous" is a step away from saying that the people who follow the link to the porn are Neanderthal morons, and as low as my opinion of humanity is, I don't think EVERYONE who looks at porn is a Neanderthal moron.

Removing the delusional fantasy element from pornography turns it into pictures of anonymous people having sex with no attempt at building a narrative. That's fine for those "500 CUM SHOTS!" compilations, but there's a reason that no one ever sits down and watches those things straight through (and why erotic fiction is just extended descriptions of orgasms). Furthermore, mixing the line "the girl needs a good f*ck" in with the "dangerous rhetoric" argument automatically casts most porn as a rape fantasy, which I don't think is the aim of most porn producers. Are we to believe that women NEVER want a good f*ck?

Casting group sex as "lopsided power relations" and focusing only on the multiple guys/one girl angle shows more of a hang-up about the idea of sex being between more than one person than it does about the actual scenario. Furthermore, it monolithically lumps together the people in the scene based on their sex and ignores the fact that the actors/participants are individual people.

(Related thing: My title bar now permanently says "Absolute Porn Corrupts Absolutely".)

Which is precisely why censorship of porn is self-defeating. If you don't like the subtext of the porn that other people have made, go make your own. Yes porn may be associated (most of the time) with lopsided distributions of power and the whole lot of it. But it is also associated with sex and pleasure and freedom. There is no reason to give up on those ideals and end the debate right there.

(I want to make an "Absolut Porn" JPEG now.)

Paula, I've seen nothing in my life that would dissuade me from believing that conditioning exists. I disagree that porn is only a reflection of society - which parts of society are the "real" ones then?

If *ONLY* that spam were in any way an extreme example - it's a mundane one. That was the point.

2/ at no point did i state that those who participate in p0rn are subject to male abuse.

3/ you seem to have a bug up yer ass about "driller killer". I only mentioned it because you mentioned video nasties in thee 1st place. it was the 1st video nasty i thought of off the top of my head. While you are correct that it is better that ferrara's later films, i have actually seen it, and i didn't think it had much merit.

4/ i am not a christian

Kim, good point. But I really believe that the murky realms of *desire* are exceedingly difficult to legislate. I admit I'm a fan of Nadine Strossen's arguments in the book "Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights". She claims, and backs up her claims with in my opinion convincing evidence, that the alliance between anti-porn feminists (MacKinnon, Dworkin, et al.) and anti-feminist Christian right wingers like Meese would result, if allowed to proceed unchecked, in the "patriarchal state" being invested with more and more legal authority over women's bodies and sexuality. This specter frightens me much more than the idea that certain ugly desires are being fed by certain types of distasteful porn.

I think this is a deeply fascinating question. My first instinct is to say "None of them" but I don't think that's a defensible position.

I think pornography exploits all humans - some for a basic lust weakness and others bcz they need money and don't know how else to get it (just like a drug) and the answer in the end is that you can't ban it, you just have to realize what it is and not get swept up by it.

Here is a story involving J*L0, sc#t, watersp000rtz and lesbi@nißm

hold on, are you saying we are supposed to ignore the gender of the participants as if it doesn't mean anything? this is just silly. OF COURSE the gender of the participants is meaningful. if it weren't, het people would consume gay porn as much as they consume het porn, and then boring old het porn wouldn't be so well overexposed *cough*.

My position is therefore to oppose (not try to ban, just speak against and not buy) anything I find misogynist, whether it's the Daily Mail or rape-fantasy porn, while supporting with voice and money things I approve of and enjoy, which includes some hardcore porn. I've not found it hard to avoid the stuff I consider thoroughly nasty.

yay for thoughtful porn consumers!

:-(

Is a pornographic scene where multiple men are having sex with one woman inherently degrading to the woman?

Also, why are you cheering Martin as if he's doing something that the rest of us aren't doing?

I agree completely that it depends entirely on what is involved in the scene, which is why I thought it was odd that Mark painted all such scenes as power imbalances.

I'm an ethical porn consumer in that I won't seek out or financially support anything I don't feel comfortable about. I'm a freeloading swine in that I won't financially support any of the other stuff either, though.

(First off: Dan, I'm going to assume that you didn't intend to furtively imply that I'm an idiot simply because I don't happen to share your views.)

In my mind, labelling that type of logic as "dangerous" is a step away from saying that the people who follow the link to the porn are Neanderthal morons, and as low as my opinion of humanity is, I don't think EVERYONE who looks at porn is a Neanderthal moron.

It's not logic - it's rhetoric; you don't have to see a lot of porn to pick up on the fact that there's a preferred set of language used throughout. It's a trend that you yourself identified upthread by (presumably) fabricating the title of an average spam e-mail: "NAKED HORNY SLUTS". That ugly word is right there -> 'sluts'. That you chose it out of thin air for your example illustrates how bound those nasty words (and by extension, IDEAS) are to pornography. That's what I was saying.

As for those words being dangerous, I think we're operating on different assessments of 'danger' here. You argue that any intelligent person should be able to see this stuff at face value and make value judgements accordingly. Agreed - nobody here is suggesting that merely being exposed to naked horny sluts is going to instantly alter the way that one views women. But I AM wondering how much of the damage done by the marriage of these ideas to these images can surreptitiously seep through into the subconscious even after one has actively chosen NOT to receive them.

The obvious analogy here is advertising, which is similar insofar as that it also involves a steady barrage of ideas existing within a certain value set. Just because you consciously choose NOT to receive them doesn't mean you still won't. Or at least fragments of them.

Removing the delusional fantasy element from pornography turns it into pictures of anonymous people having sex with no attempt at building a narrative.

Dan, I dare suggest there are ways to build a narrative that DON'T make the female character seem like a hapless fuck toy. Surprise: porn directed by females is typically much better at accomplishing this. A lot of porn directed by males tends to tow a misogynic line in this regard. To wit: the girls (never 'women') are hyper-compressed into one-dimensional "sluts" who "need c*ck".

Granted, I think some of this psychology is enacted in the interest of alleviating male anxiety (the easier or needier a women is, the likelier she will fuck you), but I do get uncomfortable when the rhetoric crosses over into words like "bitches" or "sluts". Those aren't picked out of thin air - to argue that they're just there and you should ignore them if you can is to reject an awful lot of subtext.

Casting group sex as "lopsided power relations" and focusing only on the multiple guys/one girl angle shows more of a hang-up about the idea of sex being between more than one person than it does about the actual scenario.

To assume that I've got some sort of hang-up about group sex because I'm typically uncomfortable watching four guys and one girl is to make a gross assumption about all sorts of things that you're neither qualified nor informed enough to assume anything about. See Oops' post for the best example of the scenario I was referring to here.

Obviously there's going to be exceptions to every rule: I've seen the odd female porn star talk about feeling empowered when they're the only female in the bunch, and I get that. But too often the context of these scenes is that of a bread line, the men paid customers (with their gender as their currency) and the woman as duty-bound receptacles.

Full exposure (haha): I don't look at that much porn. I would never even have known about the B*ngb*s phenom has it not been for ILX. It doesn't make a huge impact upon my life and I have no conception of it being the main mode of modern pornography.

Also, I didn't choose "NAKED HORNY SLUTS" out of thin air; that's an actual email I've received. My point isn't that "slut" isn't a nice word as much as it is that it gets flung about willy-nilly in this context to the point where I think it's lost potency in that context (see also the use of the word "nigga" in hip-hop).

There are certainly ways of building narrative that don't make the woman seem like a hapless fucktoy. There are also ways of expressing that the woman DOES really, really want to get fucked without it meaning that she must be a hapless fucktoy, which is the implication I got from your original post.

Everything I've written about in this thread I have based on posts in this thread. I don't see Oops describing any group scenarios in this thread and you gave no wider context than "four guys and one girl". I freely admit that you aren't going to find a tender, emotionally-charged love scene with four guys and one girl in most pornography, but I think it's equally demeaning to everyone in the scene to automatically cast it as four men oppressing a woman; it's demeaning to the men because it goes right back to the "brutish Neanderthal" thing and it's demeaning to the woman because it projects the assumption that there is no way any woman could ever derive pleasure from being in that situation.

(Speaking of power imablances, where does BDSM fit into all of this?)

if a word is flung about willy-nilly, i don't think that means it has lost its potency at all. often its potency is in the fact that its barely noticed. and the n-word in hiphop is different, unless theres some culture i'm unaware of where pornchicks CONSTANTLY AND ROUTINELY refer to themselves and other women as sluts.

The obvious problem with this comparison = women aren't the ones re-appropriating "slut" in the porn industry.

And - major apologies to Oops - I actually meant to refer you to Eyeball Kicks' post.

I think perhaps we're butting heads because I don't see the types of you're talking about EVER and I've watched so many episodes of Real Sex that I have no problem believing that many people (men AND women) doing the more twisted things actually do get off on it, taking it out of the realm where I feel comfortable passing judgement.

Also, my perspective is warped because WAY BACK in high school I knew a group of girls who called themselves "The Nubby Crew" and had a running competition to see who could fuck the most guys in a school year. These girls affectionately called themselves and each other sluts. That is not the porn industry, but having seen that certainly shades how I view women who work in adult entertainment in situations/scenes where they are referred to as "sluts"; namely, it is not outside the realm of possibility that they don't find that offensive.

tee-hee.

The most I did was put up a pic of Belinda Carlisle in the nude.

P.S. By the way - just to make this point... I'm not infringing on anyone's right to WATCH five guys take one woman up the butt. Presuming she agreed to the act in question and all that of course (Calum now hears some ILM postees saying: 'But what if she was only doing it for the money' to which I reply: 'I'm tired and I'm going to bed').

(a) The ILM thread appeared to be mostly harmless who-do-you-fancy stuff.
(b) Talk of legislative "banning" is sort of irrelevant in that no one here has suggested any changes on that level.
(c) There is such a thing as a "social environment" and some contributions to it are positive while others are not.
(d) Saying "each to his own" is fine on a legal level but it's important to take personal stands on what you think contributes positively or negatively to the social environment -- which is why we don't say "each to his own" about neo-Nazis, we say "that's awful."
(e) Porn, as a whole, as it currently exists, makes certain contributions to the social environment that are negative. Not all porn, but significant portions of it.
(f) This doesn't make it demonically wrong to get off on these negative things -- people get off on the "negative" all the time. But if we honestly feel they offer something negative, we should do our best to avoid them and register our disapproval when appropriate. Again, this means not porn in general but the bits we believe are making truly negative contributions to our social environment.

I find it interesting that Calum, despite his "each to his own" and his emphasis on consent, suddenly drew a massive line and was willing to openly condemn someone like Max Hardcore. I mean, Calum, I don't know a lot of details about this guy, but I imagine that the women in his films are there consensually and are compensated: what you're making is a moral judgment about the content and whether it contributes to a positive environment or a negative one. This is all other people are trying to do about other portions of porn. (And if I had to make a call from what I know of this stuff, I'd say that the material coming from people like M.H. and others who "everybody agrees" has crossed the line is really only an extreme exaggeration of content that's already latent in a great deal of "mainstream" porn.)

I also said I think pornography where the woman is raped as part of a screenplay (although she is consenting) bothers me and that I would not argue against the censorship of such material.

Wow, I stumble on to this thread, and it reads like a first semester ethics class! We've got some pseudo-theory, lots of descriptions of graphic acts that my lilly-ass had never even though possible, and then lill-Nick's nit-picking reply to controversial CR.

I think what CR was talking about was the intent of the material in question. Our hypothetical, dysfunctional porn aficionado, who is used to watching films like "just turned eighteen years old pussy-life-support-machine slag with a huge dirt-bag takes on Dad, Grandad, and nineteen hillbilly half-brothers with a huge gang-rape finale" isn't exactly going to get off on "The Accused" is he (or she?) I mean, if they are used to beating their meat over this shit, then the profoundly anti-rape film isn't exactly going to play into their mental power (or fill in whatever cod-philosophy/pop-psychology reading here) games.

Or maybe I'm totally wrong.

Anyway, if I was a total sadist, than I may even be getting turned on by the conversation here, and some of the more explicit discussions, and I might even, I don't know, go and stab the dog or something.

But, before my feminist friends club me to death, I do agree that Loaded, FHM, GQ and the like should go on the top shelf. I mean, Front magazine is basically out and out porn.

And I have met some very attractive feminists, although none of them wanted to shag me. But I suppose the attractiveness or uglyness is besides the point.

Alright, I digress... I can't see any positive purpose in someone beating off to this (which IS its purpose, hence the hardcore nature of it). I do consider myself a liberal, but when rape is portrayed with the primary intent of someone wanking off to it, I do draw a line.

I've made my line. Now make yours.

Randy cinemagoers in India were given a punishment of public humiliation after being caught with their pants down watching a porn movie.

The 200 or so culprits, some of whom were teenagers younger than 17, were forced to do ten sit ups outside the cinema, some in front of their parents, reports the Hindustan Times.

They also had to vow never to watch a pornographic film again, an activity that is outlawed in India.

Sanjeev Panda, police chief in the Balasore district, said: "Earlier we acted against the [cinema] hall owners and their staff but it failed to effectively check screening of obscene movies, so we decided to crack down on the audience."

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