Let’s Talk About Sex

What’s in that brown envelope?!?!?

Most of the time when you see a box or envelope without much on the outside it is assumed that the contents inside are pornography or something related to pornography, even though when it’s sent to you the sender claims that it will be “discretely” delivered.  In lecture 33 it was discussed how although adult direct mailings are difficult to send, due to legal issues, they are sometimes sent in brown envelops which contain more envelopes inside of them, each with a warning of what will be contained within the final envelope, in order to prevent people whom don’t want to view the information from seeing it.  Although I think that this is a good approach to protecting people from not viewing pornographic material, I question how effective it can possibly be, and I also wonder how these adult distributors get their mailing lists.

If a child were to receive an envelope with warnings on it of what was contained within the last envelope I believe that they would be more apt to open the envelope, because they would want to see what was really inside of it.  Therefore this approach is probably not protecting children.  But then again, children shouldn’t be on these mailing lists.  And even if it were sent to an adult, they would potentially open it because they wouldn’t want their neighbors or mail carrier to see the brown unlabeled envelopes and assume that they were receiving pornography.  Therefore, who do these envelopes really protect?

I believe that they simply protect the companies that are sending the advertisements, because the fact that there were a couple of warnings about what was inside would almost always dismiss any lawsuit that a person would try to bring against them.  Therefore spending the extra money on more envelopes would be a worthwhile cause.  However, could a lawsuit be filed on the company for sending them unwanted information?  Which brings me to my next question, where do these mailing lists come from?  Can an adult distributor pick names out of phone books? Do they have to find people who have previously bought adult material online?  Do they get names from somewhere else?