ABSTRACT
The rhetoric of antiporn crusaders describes an iceberg whose visible tip is made up of such mild stuff as Playboy centerfolds, but whose lowest depths include such horrors as the infamous Snuff, an Argentine film that purported to show a woman being killed and dismembered on camera. In the world of mainstream mass media, the conceptual text has an important role and constitutes real and often valuable property. Ideas, concepts, treatments, even titles, can be created, copyrighted, marketed, negotiated and sold. Once embarked upon the long voyage from concept to consumption, a mass media text will undergo numerous, often radical transformations, beginning with the emergence of a script that may bear little resemblance to the concept from which it derives. Contemporary popular media programs and performers are surrounded by a penumbra of discussion, evaluation, and gossip. The real story is probably a lot less extreme or dramatic, though possibly even more worrisome to the opponents of pornography.
