Erotica runs rampant

"The feminine is commercialized and commodified," he says. "This undermines the spiritual dimension of being a human being."

One network, NBC, has been frank and unapologetic about its need to compete with the more explicit world of cable TV. It recently decided to be the only big broadcast network to air ads for hard liquor. As for the choice to put Playmates in prime time, Jeff Zucker, president of NBC Entertainment, responds, "It's been a difficult year; we're just having fun."

Over the years, American courts have grappled less than definitively with the issue of pornography versus First Amendment freedoms. Former federal prosecutor Bruce Taylor says the absence of prosecutions has sped the spread of erotica.

"Over time, if you don't prosecute a store or a website, families and kids grow up not seeing any cases, and they think, 'This must be OK, because if it was illegal, the police would be busting them,' " Mr. Taylor says. "That attitude has affected prosecutors, who are afraid to go to jury trial, and the industry is growing less afraid of being busted."

The result, he says, is the increasing availability of hard-core material, including rape, bestiality, child porn, and sado-masochism themes. This acceptance of material that used to be considered extreme affects the entire culture, he says.

In a recent episode of TV's No. 1-rated show, NBC's "Friends," the entire cast becomes obsessed with watching a pornography channel.

"Hollywood has [even] the good guys [in its shows] looking at porn and using sex toys," he says. It's "the movies that are targeting the largest consumers of films, which is teens ... [and] it can't help but affect them.

"This is what I call the heroin effect of porn," says Taylor, who handled more pornography cases during his 20-year tenure than any other federal prosecutor.

"This rape and incest porn that's being consumed, kids being introduced to group sex, none of us know the effect for certain," he says. But he points to an FBI profile of serial murderers and sex offenders conducted over a period of 20 years. Nearly all of them, he says, were addicted to adult and child pornography.

"Pornography is awful for guys: It affects their attitudes toward sex. It makes them sexually insensitive and jerks toward women, at least. At most, when it becomes an addiction, it becomes an element of psychosis."

One voice saying it's possible to resist this slide toward a sexualized environment comes from Robert Halmi, one of television's most prolific producers of family-oriented entertainment ("The Odyssey," "Merlin," "Gulliver's Travels"). "This trend towards explicit sexuality exists because there's a creative void," says the entertainment magnate, whose shows - nearly 200 and counting - air on all the major networks as well as on the new Hallmark Channel on cable.

"It reflects the taste of the executives, Mr. Halmi says, "but it's also pressure from the corporate heads who want networks to perform like stock portfolios, with a 26 percent growth rate."

His movies, which tell classic tales from literature, are "about morals and values," he says. "They have something to say."

But perhaps the culture will reclaim its soul the same way, youth expert Buckingham says: through the marketplace. Once a trend has been around long enough, consumers, especially teens, need something new. She says the spring fashions already show some reaction to the extremes of recent years.

"The new [fashion] shows are full of modest, form-covering peasant blouses and full skirts. Maybe," she says, "people will become bored with erotica and move away on their own."

• See page 17 for a review of the coming TV documentary 'American Porn' on PBS.

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