TV TALK SHOWS
Studio interview resumes
David Susskind
Yes, sir, your question,
Audience Question
Mr. Susskind the problem of pornography if there is one is a very vast one. I don't think we can cover it here tonight. But I'd like to ask a two pointed question to both of our speakers here. Mr. Vidal. First of all, do you have a definition of pornography?
Gore Vidal
I can only go by what the courts tell us? Well, I would
Audience Question
No, I want your own opinion, the way you well.
Gore Vidal
Is it to be used in a pejorative sense? Or is it to be used just as a term? I would say that there is certain kinds of writing which is written more or less with the intention of creating sexual stimulation?
Audience Question
Is it bad stimulation or good?
Gore Vidal
I find it absolutely indifferent people are stimulated a great deal of the time anyway. Yeah. And if this affects them one way or the other, I don't see anything bad in it. No,
Audience Question
well, Mr. Vidal, you stated before that you see no evidence, there is no evidence, I think you said that pornography is bad or deleterious to human growth.I'm a behavioral scientist. I'm not interested in a lot of your humor and your flippancy here tonight, you're very gifted with words. And you're making an ad hominem argument. You keep bringing religion in, I don't see where this
Gore Vidal
The whole basis,
Audience Question
can I stop you?This is not what this is not what I what a scientist should do. Now, I feel that you should address yourself to the problem without bringing in religion, be it?
Gore Vidal
One minute, I appreciate you. Do you mind it before you continue one second, then you can you can continue your gravity?
Audience Question
Wait a minute hold it?
Gore Vidal
I bring in religion because our sexual codes come from the law of Moses and from St. Paul, do you know you are not going to make any sense about what is the correct sexual behavior until you examine the religious origin of it? And and don't pretend you're behaviorism as any sort of science use did you stay to Christian Heresy.
Audience Question
Well, you're tearing a lot of things down tonight. You might as well do that, too. I'm a scientist. And I'm trying to be very objective, you say that there is no evidence for the fact that pornography, whatever that is, you can't define it. We just can't define it that which causes like you have evidence to show that this is deleterious to human growth. Now, where is the evidence?
Gore Vidal
There was no evidence, you're just saying what I've said.
Audience Question
Are there studies to show that this is not deleterious?
Gore Vidal
There are there have been studies going on? Oh, my lifetime on the subject.
Audience Question
Would you quote me one?
Gore Vidal
Oh, there's a marvelous one of Warfield about 1948.
Audience Question
Who is Warfield,
Gore Vidal
William M. Warfield, you should check up on him if you're a behaviorist.
Audience Question
Well, who is he?
Gore Vidal
Well, he is. He is a professor who is I think he is dead now. master's violence is discipline was psychology using? Yes. And he has now dead and I suggest you read it very carefully. But I don't know. First of all, don't proudly say you're an objective scientist. When you've come on with so many emotion charged world,
Audience Question
you've done a bit of that yourself
Gore Vidal
And so I don't claim to be a scientist. I'm an artist.
Audience Question
Well, you're an artist. But maybe I'm just as human as you are. Oh, what I'd like to know is
Gore Vidal
welcome to The Club.
Audience Question
you're very good at this. This is a red herring. There are studies to show that children pre school children exposed to violence on television will repeat this type of behavior to people around them. These studies have been shown at Stanford I'd like to ask you for equal evidence. Now you're going back I don't know how many decades to this study, which I, Warfield it sounds like a singer to me. I don't know who you're referring to do you have anything else that you can refer to?
Gore Vidal
Well, I keep reading about the subject, as do you through the popular press and Time Magazine, which keeps us all up to date on every discipline. You are quietly muddling the issue and most of the illogical way we started first on sex, then you move to violence now, not quite right. And we have agreed earlier, the good father and I that that that much of what's in the air now does create an atmosphere of violence, which is extremely deleterious to the growth of young children and to their attitudes towards one another.
Audience Question
can I ask for the hill? What do you feel, sir, can be done by way of a scientific study, which would examine the content, the distribution and the outcome of these materials you call pornographic?
Father Morton Hill
That's a good question, Doctor. Course The study would take a lot of money. If I had $250,000 to spend on a study, the way I would spend, it would be this I spent $50,000. To investigate the fourfold incitement of pornography, to drugs to violence, to prevention, to promiscuity, I designed for researchers, four separate persons, each one to take the production of pornography over one calendar month, and study the incitement, just the incitement to drugs in this month, just the incitement to violence so that we could present this graphically, graphically to an audience as this, that would be project number 1 $50,000. Number two, I would use $100,000 to take several cities in the United States like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and perhaps Dallas, for large cities and for different areas, and examine the production and distribution of obscene material and ask one question, to whom is this directed? How many children does this reach what reaches them and how many are reached by this material that is material in all media? This would be a study that would go say about six months. Now, the third study that I would make would be into effects, I would go to the youth of the United States and ask them how media is affecting them, the entertainment media, what are the outstanding films that they have seen that have helped them with good effects? And what all those good effects? Also? What are the things that have hurt them? What magazine has hurt them what the movie has hurtthem? And ask them for these effects, then I would collate that data. Now I'd have that study done by, say six or eight behavioral scientists over a period of six months. The three studies together I think we present presentation,
Audience Question
He's doing it again,
Audience Question
Mr. Vidal this research design where you are proposing, Mr. Vidal, do you have anything objective in the form of a scientific reseach project that we can work with? Do you have anything that you can work with?
Gore Vidal
I would like he wants to raise $250,000 to give you boys some employment, I'd like to raise 500,000 to examine the psyche of sensors. And I would start with behaviors in Greece.
David Susskind
Mr. Well, you've had ample time. Really, please. Father, I want to ask you a question. If the first section for which you've allocated $50,000 And the good men of science have finished their work. And it turns out that 95% of the young people studied the immediate after effect, in 95% of the cases of pornography was sexual stimulation, which immediate result was masturbation. Would you say well, that's not too bad considering overall statistics. 95% just went somewhere privately and please themselves, would you continue to be disturbed? I mean, do you think you're a little bit better is still necessary?
Father Morton Hill
well this is a gratuitous assumption
David Susskind
It is not a gratuitous assumption,
Father Morton Hill
I suppose. Now we do a study and 95% of the youngsters who read this particular confession magazine say that there was a bad effect and that this bad effect was simply and only exclusively masturbation.
David Susskind
Because this is what happened to me. Yeah. Okay. Now, how would you feel about that?
Father Morton Hill
Would I feel that this should
David Susskind
would your vigilante committee still be a
Father Morton Hill
What do you mean by vigilante committee
Gore Vidal
read your modest committee but I do answer
David Susskind
to the graduate you know, the kind of thing I mean, when I say vigilante committee that brings pressure on on various units of our society, yeah, to withdraw things or to prohibit things.
Gore Vidal
Would you prohibit something which led into a solidarity action which does not anti social.
Father Morton Hill
Well, as I said before you and I differ in this respect that you are a secularist, and I am a theist, you don't believe in divine law? And I do all right now Divine Law is involved here am I? Am I to countenance something which stimulates youngsters to violate that the law of God? Of course not. How could I? Alright, now you're asking me as a person, what our organization to this viewpoint? I don't know, I'd have to propose it to him.
Gore Vidal
It's an interesting area, because by and large reading is a solitary act, and any consequence of it is apt to be fairly immediate. And that's that well, so if you cannot prove that people make anti social acts, then I think you are in a very peculiar ground wanting to censor other secularists because there's many of us, perhaps more than they are of you theiests
Father Morton Hill
this hypothesis is purely an hypothesis because I am certain that there would be other effects because I know these teenagers are sex publications, and I know what they inclined to they there is a fourfold incitement not simply to sex, but to drugs, to violence and to perversion.
Gore Vidal
Well, I think it's a good writer who can get all four in.
David Susskind
We're running out of time. Can I ask you a final question? If in my day, there was spicy detective, and there were French postcards, and there were some dirty books. And there was true confessions that we had a variety of iterations. And we have goofed in civilization badly as all eternity will discover, but not on the level of having been oversexed or driven to violence because we read to confessions, isn't the business of the parent as it was my parents business to take care of the household and not the business of your institution and similar ones? Aren't they invariably, when not ridiculous, quite evil?
Father Morton Hill
Well, as I explained before, on this program, from talking to parents, David, they are the last to know that they youngsters are involved either with pornography or with narcotics
David Susskind
I know, Father, I know what's being read in my house. I don't approve of it all
Father Morton Hill
in your house. What about outside your house?
Gore Vidal
How much reading all those children doing, David? It's my impression, they don't read anything.
David Susskind
No, they do some reading. And what they read outside the house, of course, I'm not totally familiar and other I can gather from the exposure of their individual psyches around the table and in the house, that they are not afflicted with a terrible pornographic virus.
Gore Vidal
Anyway, I think the father has made the good point that the parents don't know and we should probably hand this over to the police. Because they'll know.
David Susskind
Father, do you have a final thing?
Father Morton Hill
No, except that I don't understand this last. This last comment of yours.
Gore Vidal
Any pressure group which tries to get the secular arm to respond to its own private views of morality, sooner or later invokes the police invoke censorship limits freedom of speech, and you have a handsome country like Franco Spain, or a good 12th century society which I'm not about to see recreated here and are beautiful west
Father Morton Hill
Well my only answer to that Mr. Vidal was that apparently you don't believe in law. Obscenity law is law just as much as any other area
Gore Vidal
we have both got finished saying that the Supreme Court is extremely ambiguous on this subject. Nobody knows what the law of obscenity is. So don't say that I'm against law just before the just before the program ends. We all just a critical tactic. I do indeed. Believe in law. Careful on that one.
David Susskind
Gentlemen, I'm sorry. We have reached the end of our time father Hill Gore Vidal Thank you. Stick around. There's more show