Word: dial
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Other questions don't place us out of this world, but in a distant city. "What's your zipcode? Air mail? Do we have to dial '9' to call you? How much is a taxi there? Is it in Cambridge?" Or best of all, "the Quad, not far from one of America's most prestigious institutions of higher learning...
...says the recorded female voice on the telephone. "Come and join us nasty sluts in 6,900 kinky taboos." This is dial-a-porn, sex over the phone wires, now as available in many states as the correct time. For a cost that can range from 20 cents to several dollars, callers can listen to recorded fantasies, some of them merely purple, some filled with the darker colors of sadomasochism, rape and bestiality. Since they first appeared in 1983, the dial-a-porn services have grown quickly. So has the frustration of parents who discover that their children have become...
That frustration is leading to angry action. One day last June in Hayward, Calif., Brian Thompson, 12, spent more than two hours listening to dial-a-porn recitals. Two weeks later he sexually assaulted a four-year-old girl. The parents of both children joined in suing the Pacific Bell telephone company for $10 million, charging that dial-a-porn was responsible. "The phone company and the pornographers took away from us our rights as parents to train our child in what is right and wrong," says Brian's father Ronald Thompson. "You can't police your kids 24 hours...
Another assault on phone porn came last week from the Federal Communications Commission. In its first such action, the FCC began moving against two California companies it believes are violating its regulations limiting the access of minors to dial-a-porn messages. Those rules, which many porn services ignore, seek to make it necessary for callers to use a credit card or a special access code. The targeted California companies could eventually face fines of up to $50,000 a day and criminal prosecution. Critics charge that antiregulatory zeal has hitherto led the FCC to take a laissez-faire approach...
...prevent them from censoring messages carried over their wires, and many courts have agreed, striking down various efforts to restrict the services. But there have been two rulings that give hope to the antiporn forces. In Arizona and Florida cases, federal appeals courts drew a distinction: government action against dial-a-porn might violate the First Amendment, they said, but as a matter of private policy, phone companies could turn away purveyors of such services...