Scrambled porn

If it weren't for a few right-minded justices on the Supreme Court, we might have lost the gift of scrambled porn forever. Last year, in a landmark decision for late-night voyeurs, the court fought off the morality watchdogs in "United States vs. Playboy Entertainment Group." The case emerged from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed into law by President Clinton, which called for an end to scrambled porn. When Sen. Dianne Feinstein pushed an amendment through the Senate that would force cable companies to either scramble their adult programming completely or banish it to the wee hours, the companies waved the First Amendment flag. The court ruled 5-4 that scrambled porn should not be removed from the airwaves, triggering a collective sigh of relief from Picasso porn connoisseurs everywhere.

What's bizarre is that, despite its obvious inferiority to scrambled porn, unscrambled porn still carries more cash value in the marketplace. In a world of properly assigned values -- a world where elementary school teachers pulled down high six-figure salaries while Britney Spears sang for nickels on the street -- in a world like that, cable companies would feed their unscrambled smut over the airwaves for free and charge a premium for access to scrambled porn.

Maybe we're already headed in that direction. In small ways, scrambled porn is starting to receive its due attention. In the opening scene of "American Pie," last year's cinematic paean to teen libido, Jason Biggs' character enacts one of the all-time sacred rituals of male adolescence -- masturbating to scrambled porn. The magazine Nerve recently featured an artfully packaged photo gallery of scrambled porn on its site, and pundits are starting to weigh in on the Constitutional ramifications of restricting scrambled porn.

In my fantasy, it won't be long before cultural critics in the humanities departments of Northeastern universities are devoting entire courses of study to the deconstruction of Picasso porn. Art film houses will put on scrambled porn festivals in sold-out theaters, and bespectacled grad students will slump in their seats tugging at their goatees, trying to mentally fix Picasso porn's place in the storied history of cinematic art.

In the meantime, though, aficionados of scrambled porn like me remain consigned to late-night surfing, squinting into the screen at those disembodied images tumbling like stray clothes in a dryer.

Of course the reason that these fragments of sliced-and-diced sex slip through the scramblers onto my TV screen in the first place is that the scrambling systems used by cable companies are far from perfect. Porn peddlers could funnel some of their profits into developing better scramblers, but why would they do that? They're hoping that those teasing glimpses of flesh will compel us to fork over the extra cash for the full smorgasbord of unscrambled smut.

But I say no thanks. I'll take my sex scrambled.

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