Feminists are exhausted by fighting a sexist economy and sexual violence, and most Americans are at a loss in the face of a difficult economy and rapid changes in gender roles, family, and race relations. Censorship is a boon to those who want to feel they control their lives in complex times. In that respect, censorship has the same appeal as the fantasies that it assails. As long as life is insecure, that promise will have a market. Like monster movies and pornography, blaming images is a fantasy that sells.
Censorship has another appeal, which pertains particularly to today's topic of cyberspace.
Each generation is sure that it is unique and that the inventions of its day have the power to alter life in ways no other gadgets have. The first congressional hearing on television violence was convened in 1952, when fewer than 25 percent of households in America had a television and when the violence rates in this country were among the lowest in this century. So eager were people to blame the new-fangled thing called television for something, that they blamed it for a problem they didn't have. And before television was thought to be the cause of violence, detective magazines and comic books were held, irrefutably, to cause juvenile delinquency. Before the comics, the nickelodeon surely gave the unwashed foreigners restive ideas.