A couple of "pro-family" groups are currently trying to gin up a crusade against comic book and science-fiction conventions as hotbeds of "pornography."
I put those two terms in quotes since those are their terms, and I don't consider them accurate. "Pro-family" is one of those labels you adopt to put a noble, responsible face on what is generally a reactionary, restrictive view of what families are or should be. An awful lot of soft bigotry is marketed under the brand name of "pro-family," much of it doing more damage to the concept of family than good. At the same time, most of those groups have a definition of "pornography" that is hysterical, utterly out of touch with mainstream America, and often indicative of a pretty ugly attitude towards sex.
The American Family Association is one such crusading organization, and their current campaign against comic conventions (exemplified by this report on a recent con in Pittsburgh) is pretty silly. A lot of it has to do with the fact that Playboy magazine and some of the women who've appeared in it can be seen at cons. You wonder if these people have been out in public lately. Playboy is pretty mild, given some of the forms of titillation that their kids can't help but see in stores, airports, on commercial TV, etc. Recently on some website, I saw someone say — and I'll bet this is true — that in spite of products that claim to restrict access, any kid who's smart enough to navigate the Internet is smart enough to locate hardcore porn and to hide that from their folks.
One gets the feeling that the current attention paid to comic conventions and the Playmates therein is merely a matter of someone looking for an easy target. Like Harold Hill getting the people of River City needlessly worried about the presence of a pool table in their community, the con-man needs his alarmist cause. Certainly, groups like the A.F.A. need to constantly broadcast alerts to keep their name in the newspapers and the donations rolling in. (One of my big complaints about anti-porn crusaders is that they favor the defenseless, easy target. They'll go after the corner newsstand for selling one magazine but not after Time-Warner for distributing it. And when was the last time you saw an anti-violence crusader mention the name of Rupert Murdoch?)
One also gets the feeling that the campaign against comic conventions will not amount to much. If any parents are prompted to keep their kids away from them as a result, the drop in attendance will more than be offset by those who will show up in the hope that the cons are as decadent as advertised. I am reminded of back in the late sixties and the science-fiction convention scene in Southern California. The cons were at hotels where the pool would occasionally be the scene of some very brief skinny-dipping by people you really didn't want to see naked. Nevertheless, reporters sometimes mentioned it so at every con, you could spot a few attendees who'd showed up just to be around when and if that happened.
The one way in which campaigns like the one the A.F.A. is mounting might hurt comic conventions is if they manage to intimidate facilities into not renting to the cons. This will probably not occur with conventions held in private hotels. I mean, the Marriott chain makes a lot of bucks off the hardcore "X" movies people watch in their rooms, so they're not about to go kicking cons out just because there's a Playmate on the premises. But a lot of conventions are held in "civic" or city-owned convention centers. Unless the convention is extremely lucrative for local businesses, as the big one in San Diego is, it's possible that pressure can successfully be brought on such venues to oust the comic conventions — or, more likely, get them to become stricter about what can and cannot be displayed.
It would not be the dumbest thing in the world for convention organizers to become a little more sensitized to this issue. Buried somewhere beneath the hysteria and myopia of the A.F.A., there's probably a legitimate parental concern. Sometimes, the X-rated magazines and starlets at conventions are uncomfortably close to where they're selling the Archie Comics. There are comic book shops that want to have it both ways: To be the family-friendly place where parents feel it's safe to let the kids browse for Scooby Doo funnybooks, but also to have porn stars in to sign their wares. It would not be censorship if these conventions and stores remembered that some patrons might not want to see, or want their children to see the lady with her breasts sticking out of her Vampirella costume. Respecting such feelings might just be a matter of courtesy, but it could also be good business. And a way of not inviting needless trouble.
