File Under ‘Quaint’: Anti-Porn Group in MN Targets… A Newspaper?

MINNEAPOLIS – If you live in a town with an “alternative” weekly newspaper, you’re probably familiar with the ads found in such rags, which often include advertising for businesses which are commonly shunned by the weekly’s mainstream competitors – things like massage parlors, adult stores and escort services.

Because of such ads (and the typically left-leaning politics of alternative weeklies), publications like the Minneapolis-based City Pages are occasional targets of boycotts and letter-writing campaigns from socially conservative and “pro-decency” groups.

In just such campaign, the Christian Action League of Minnesota (“CALM”) has begun targeting City Page advertisers who offer more ‘reputable’ services in the newspaper, urging them to drop their ads to avoid “blindly support(ing) sexual exploitation.”

Leigh Frost, a family law attorney, received a postcard from CALM President Ann Redding, in March. As reported by City Pages, the front of the card “displayed a photograph of what appeared to be a young man with a scarf tied around his head” along with the text “Don’t Blindly Support Sexual Exploitation.” On the back, a typed note from a “concerned citizen” asked Frost to “please stop advertising in City Pages” and asked whether she realized her fellow advertisers were “strip clubs, porn store, and phone sex ads.”

A handwritten note added “Porn tears families apart. City Pages promotes strip clubs and porn. As a woman, are you ok with that?”

Rather than being chastised or persuaded by the note, Frost was pissed. As it turns out, this wasn’t the first time she’d been lobbied to stop advertising in City Pages; someone sent her a similar message back in 2013, asking if she realized she had been advertising in a “pornographic magazine.”

In response to the initial message, which had also come from CALM, Frost asked them to cease contacting her – which CALM did, until the postcard came in March. This time, in response to Redding’s postcard, Frost fired off a letter of her own.

“The postcard is misinformed and offensive,” Frost wrote to Redding. “Do not contact me again by any means, whether via so-called Christian Action League of Minnesota, U.S. Mail, email, text, social media, phone, or via third parties.”

Despite being told further communication would be construed by Frost as harassment, the postcards didn’t stop. Frost received several more in March, then filed for and received a restraining order against the group.

Last month, Frost and CALM mutually agreed to dismiss the temporary restraining order Frost had obtained. Under the settlement agreement, Frost dropped the request for a longer-term restraining order, and CALM is required to refrain from contacting Frost, her law firm and any potential employers for a period of two years.

At the time the settlement was announced, Redding said that CALM had indefinitely suspended its campaign against City Pages because of Frost’s restraining order, saying “it’s too dangerous.” Evidently, that indefinite period wasn’t very long (or the danger that great), because CALM was reportedly back at it, just a couple weeks later. This time, Redding’s complaint about City Pages zeroed in on the fact the newspaper carries Dan Savage’s syndicated “Savage Love” column.

“Not only does City Pages carry ads for porn stores, strip clubs, and ‘phone sex’ but they promote and condone all kinds of sexual perversions,” Redding wrote in the letter, adding that Savage’s column is “filled with explicit descriptions of homosexual, adulterous, and promiscuous sex.”

Redding isn’t wrong about the content of Savage’s column, of course – but Savage pointed out something which may have escaped Redding in her zeal to take a bite out of City Page’s advertising revenue.

“There’s a new kid on the block, that maybe this lady hasn’t heard of, called the internet,” Savage said. “The idea that kids out there are looking to the newspaper to find their smut is quaint.”

Savage is right – and he may not even know how right he is. Speaking of quaint, one of CALM’s other ongoing campaigns targets the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

“Retailers should take the higher ground and reject SI’s Swim Suit Issue’s focus on women as one-dimensional,” Redding said in an April press release. “Young women who are scantily clad in sexually suggestive poses do nothing to promote women’s athletic skills or advance their careers. Haven’t we matured from the Bob Barker Beauty Pageant mentality?”

Seeing as how the current Republican President of the United States is the former owner of the Miss Universe contest, I’m guessing Redding’s concern about “the Bob Barker pageant mentality” isn’t shared particularly widely among her conservative peers.

As people who work in the porn industry, what are we to make of groups like CALM and people like Redding, who would like nothing more than to put us out of a job? Should we feel threatened by their efforts, misguided and ineffective as they may be? How should we respond? What can we even say about an anti-porn group that appears to think a fucking local newspaper is the hub of porn culture?

Savage, attuned to providing advice on sexual subjects, has some advice on that front, too.

“You should make fun of her,” Savage told Mike Mullen of City Pages. “They’re ridiculous, and that ridicule can help people. When people ask, how did LGBT rights take such huge strides so quickly, I always say it’s because we have a sense of humor. If you look at gay rights marches, even going back to the ’60s, you had people wearing buttons, and holding signs and flags that had snark and humor and jokes.”

So, mockery is prescribed here, eh? That works for me.

Newspaper stock photo by Adam Ciesielski