The standard tales of buggery, adultery, incest and promiscuity...
became a kind of metaphor for a diseased constitution.
- Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution ¹

We cannot rely on rigid rules and regulations to structure everything in our lives....
We are sexual beings, and ... eroticism pervades every aspect of our consciousness.
- Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture ²

Each society gets the pornography it deserves.
- Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions ³

America forever flirts with the pornographic. This tendency toward the graphic ­­ the harlot­graphic ⁴ ­­is a state of mind and a political state. Yet it is an uneasy state of affairs, for America both celebrates and condemns its love of the carnal. This janus­like view of erotic life animates our conceptions of free speech. Ultimately, America's ambivalent love affair with pornography gives rise to a new image of the state­­a republic of images.

Imagine a nation in which there is little or no discord about pornography because there is little or no meaningful discourse about it. Imagine a nation in which people gladly trade the reality of human beings for images of that reality, a "virtual reality." Imagine a nation in which there is erotic self­expression but little or no communal expression. Imagine a nation in which sexual war and sexual pleasure are synonymous and unending. Imagine, again, a nation in which rubber speaks and people know it. Imagine a nation in which deliberative democracy is a deliberate lie and sexual harm is a necessary lie. Imagine, if you can, the death of discourse. As you will see, you have just imagined the pornographic state.

The state that we invite you to imagine­­a state we call "pornotopia" ⁵ ­­ is not quite America as Americans now experience it. Yet in significant ways, ⁶ it is the state that liberal America aspires to be. Pornotopia emerges as the forces of self­gratification, mass consumerism, and advanced technology merge. The greater this synergy, the greater is the tendency toward a culture in which self­gratification replaces self­realization, in which the irrational consumes the rational, and in which images dominate discourse. Pornotopia is a hormone­happy state. And pornography is the lodestar in this culture of images.

When the old utopian First Amendment becomes the new pornotopian First Amendment, James Madison's reasoned discourse bends to pornotopia's raw intercourse. Indeed, the commercial entertainment culture has left much of the old First Amendment utopia far behind but has yet to reach the apex of the new First Amendment pornotopia. As today's culture is situated, America faces a conundrum. On the one hand, government regulation to keep pornotopia at bay is likely to become increasingly futile. If the current synergy of forces either remains constant or accelerates, constitutional attempts to constrain pornographic expression will collide with and eventually succumb to the popular culture. On the other hand, government indifference to the lure of pornotopia will reinscribe the First Amendment beyond all recognition. Deliberative discourse dies and is reincarnated as image­driven onanism. In what follows, consider how America's quest for pornotopia will alter our culture and our traditional understanding of the First Amendment.