Pornography

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture

For over a century there has been great debate about the role of pornography in American society. Despite years of social crusades and legal and political wrangling, America remains in the late twentieth century deeply conflicted about how to handle the "problem" posed by the existence of pornography, which Webster's International Dictionary defines as "writing, pictures, etc. intended to arouse sexual desire." To some, any mention or depiction of human sexuality is pornographic and should be censored; to others, no depiction of human sexuality, no matter how "perverse," should be forbidden to adults (with the exception of child pornography, which no one defends). Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's enigmatic 1964 statement on pornography perhaps best captured the opinion of most Americans concerning pornography; in his comment regarding Jacobellis v. Ohio, Stewart acknowledged that while he couldn't define pornography precisely, "I know it when I see it."

Pornography has always been present in American culture, though the "problem" of pornography has certainly been exacerbated by the ubiquity of media representations of pornography in the late twentieth century. Up until the middle part of the nineteenth century, widely shared social, religious, and cultural prohibitions against pornographic materials kept such materials largely hidden. Because what little existing early pornography was either literary or artistic, and such materials tended to circulate among the literate and well-to-do, who tended not to worry about their corrupting effects. But all that changed with the social and economic convulsions that began in the late nineteenth century. Several factors combined to put pornography into the hands of the growing working and lower classes who, according to their social "betters," were unable to fend off pornography's corrupting influence.

The vastly increased immigration of non-Protestant peoples and the concentration of the working class in urban centers, combined with the expansion of printing operations and the rise in sex trades in cities, all helped to alarm those middle-class Protestant Americans concerned with their lack of control over the direction of American culture. By the turn of the century, a number of forms of pornography became widely available, including French postcards featuring pictures of nude women, flip books (small, multi-paged booklets which revealed an "animated" sex act as the pages flipped by), and, by 1904, the first calendar featuring scantily clad women. As such materials became available to an emerging urban "underclass" no longer willing to subscribe to the moral dictates of a moralizing middle-and upper-class Protestant establishment, pornography emerged as a problem that required the attention of reformers, and the arbitration of lawyers.

The last half of the nineteenth century saw the growth of numerous reform movements in the United States (as in other industrializing nations). Reform groups, typically led by middle-class Protestant women, worked hard to improve the quality of life for urban workers swarming in their crowded warrens. Especially during the Progressive Era, reform-minded activists sought safe work places and humane work hours, especially for children, improved educational opportunity, and the suppression of "dissipating" pastimes such as gaming, festive drinking, and what was called at the time "whoring." The reformers sought to change notions of women's clothing, duties, and rights, and lobbied for womens' suffrage. Through the good agency of these reformers, school attendance was mandated, parks were established, and drinking hours, human sexual interaction, and hunting seasons were routinized.

While social reformers sought to remove or criminalize the forums in which pornography might circulate, prosecutors and lawyers struggled to define what exactly was meant by terms like obscenity and pornography. For years, U.S. obscenity law (which covered pornography) relied on the English case Regina v. Hicklin (1868), which overtly supported class, race, and sex divisions. It stated that obscenity be determined by "whether ... [its] tendency ... [was] to deprave and corrupt those whose minds [were] open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall." This benchmark thus assumed that a small group of morally superior people were capable of setting the standards of what was obscene for their social inferiors. Such a standard may have made sense within a rigidly defined social and class structure, but it ran counter to the very freedoms on which the American democracy was based, savaged the First Amendment, and abridged both the letter and spirit of the Constitution as a whole. Technically, it was so unnecessarily broad that even academic or scientific discussion about almost any sexual topic could be suppressed. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once opined that the case tended to "reduce the adult population ... to reading what is fit for children."

The first major case that aimed to clarify the legal standing of pornography was the now famous Roth v. United States. The 1957 ruling attempted to establish a uniform and constant standard for determining obscenity. As the result of the case, a three part test was developed to determine whether what was under examination did, in fact, have a realistic tendency to excite lust or lustful thought and thus should be censored. According to Roth, the key to dissemination was "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest." Despite the best efforts of the Court, the ambiguity concerning the terms "dominant theme," "community standards," and "prurient interest" meant that the issue was far from being resolved.