PORNOGRAPHY

The representation in books, magazines, photographs, films, and other media of scenes of sexual behavior that are erotic or lewd and are designed to arouse sexual interest.

Pornography is the depiction of sexual behavior that is intended to arouse sexual excitement in its audience. During the twentieth century, Americans debated whether pornographic material should be legally protected or banned. Those who believe pornography must be protected argue that the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of expression, including sexual expression. Traditional opponents of pornography raise moral concerns, arguing that the First Amendment does not protect expression that corrupts people's behavior. Toward the end of the century, some feminists advocated suppressing pornography because it perpetuates gender stereotypes and promotes violence against women.

Pornography has been regulated by the legal standards that govern the concept of obscenity, which refers to things society may consider disgusting, foul, or immoral, and may include material that is blasphemous. Pornography is limited to depictions of sexual behavior and may not be obscene.

The U.S. Supreme Court has established that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. The more troublesome question has been defining what is and is not obscene. In 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court, in roth v. united states, 354 U.S. 476, 77 S. Ct. 1304, 1 L. Ed. 2d 1498, stated that obscenity is "utterly without redeeming social importance" and therefore is not protected by the First Amendment. The Roth test for obscenity is "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient [lewd or lustful] interest." The Roth test proved difficult to use because every term in it eluded a conclusive definition.

The Supreme Court added requirements to the definition of obscenity in a 1966 case involving the English novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, more commonly known as Fanny Hill. In A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney General, 383 U.S. 413, 86 S. Ct. 975, 16 L. Ed. 2d 1, the Court concluded that to establish obscenity, the material must, aside from appealing to the prurient interest, be "utterly without redeeming social value" and "patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description of sexual matters." The phrase "utterly without redeeming social value" allowed a loophole for pornographers. Expert witnesses

testified that there was at least a shred of social value in the novel's depiction of sexual behavior and social relations.

The Supreme Court established the basic legal standard for pornography in miller v. california, 413 U.S. 15, 93 S. Ct. 2607, 37 L. Ed. 2d 419 (1973). Chief Justice warren e. burger stated in Miller that pornographic material would be classified as obscene if it met three criteria: (1) the work, taken as a whole by an average person applying contemporary community standards, appeals to the prurient interest; (2) the work depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; and (3) the work, when taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Burger emphasized in Miller that only hardcore pornography could be designated as patently offensive. He listed examples of patently offensive descriptions or representations, including representations of "ultimate sex acts" and "masturbation, excretory functions, and lewd exhibition of the genitals."

Based on Miller, the law distinguishes between hard-core pornography and soft-core pornography, which involves depictions of nudity and limited and simulated sexual conduct. Because it is not as graphic or explicit as hard-core pornography, soft-core pornography is protected under the First Amendment.

child pornography, whether hard-core or soft-core, is treated severely under the law. In 1982, the Supreme Court, in New York v. Ferber, 458 U.S. 747, 102 S. Ct. 3348, 73 L. Ed. 2d 1113, held that child pornography is not a form of expression protected under the Constitution. It found that the state of New York had a compelling interest in protecting children from sexual abuse and found a close connection between such abuse and the use of children in the production of pornographic materials. In 1990, the Court went even further in upholding a state law prohibiting the possession and viewing of child pornography (Osborne v. Ohio, 495 U.S. 103, 110 S. Ct. 1691, 109 L. Ed. 2d 98).

In the 1980s, some feminists began an attack on pornography and the way the Supreme Court had structured the legal debate using the First Amendment. Led by law professor catharine a. mackinnon and writer andrea dworkin, they proposed that women be permitted to sue pornographers for damages under civil rights laws. In 1982, in an alliance with political conservatives opposed to pornography, MacKinnon and Dworkin convinced Indianapolis officials to pass a municipal ordinance based on their civil rights approach. The ordinance described pornography as "a discriminatory practice based on sex which denies women equal opportunity in society" and defined it as "the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or words," especially in a violent or degrading context. The ordinance made unlawful the production, sale, exhibition, and distribution of pornography and gave anyone injured by a person who has seen or read pornography the right to bring a civil suit against the maker or seller.

Supporters of the ordinance argued that the legislation was a civil rights measure whose purpose was to fight sex discrimination. In their view, the ordinance regulated conduct rather than free speech and thus did not violate the First Amendment. They argued that even if pornography was viewed as speech, it should be treated as a low-value form of speech that was not entitled to First Amendment protection.

All of these arguments were rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Hudnut v. American Booksellers Association, Inc., 771 F.2d 323 (7th Cir. 1985). The court agreed that pornography affected how people view the world and their social relations but observed that the same could be said of other speech, including expressions of racial bigotry. Yet these kinds of expression are protected as speech because to do otherwise would give the government control of "all institutions of culture" and allow it to be the "great censor and director of which thoughts are good for us." The court, adhering to the definition of obscenity first articulated in Miller, ruled that the ordinance's definition of pornography would cover many works that are not obscene because it would not take the value of the work as a whole into account or consider the work as a whole. The court of appeals' decision effectively ended this approach to the regulation of pornography.

In the 1990s, attention was paid to the new ways technology could supply pornography. The use of computer bulletin boards and the internet to distribute pornography nationally and internationally led to the enactment of the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) (47 U.S.C.A. § 223). CDA was designed to outlaw obscene and indecent sexual material in cyberspace, including the Internet. In Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844, 117 S. Ct. 2329, 138 L. Ed. 2d 874 (1997), the Supreme Court overturned provisions of the CDA prohibiting transmission of obscene or indecent material by means of a telecommunications device. The Court held that the provisions represented a content-based restriction, in violation of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.

Feminist Perspectives ON Pornography

Pornography is a battlefield in U.S. law. For decades, courts have struggled to find a middle ground between opponents of obscenity and defenders of free speech. This debate began to shift in the 1970s as feminists introduced new theories. Obscenity and free speech were no longer the central issues, these critics argued. Their paramount concern was violence. They claimed a causal link between pornographic depictions of women, and crimes ranging from harassment to rape. Beginning in the 1980s, some feminists proposed legislation that sought to control pornography in new and dramatic ways. They met strong opposition, and none of their legislation survived vetoes or court challenges.

Inspired by the women's liberation movement in the 1960s, many feminists began to decry pornography as sexist. In later years, a sharper critique began to emerge. Some feminists believed that pornography was a deliberate means of subordinating women to men, thereby maintaining inequality. One leading feminist critic, andrea dworkin, took this theory even further. In books such as Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1979), Dworkin interpreted pornographic publications and films as training guides for committing sexual violence.

Dworkin's writings have divided feminists. Her detractors argue that she stands outside the mainstream of feminism. Her supporters cite high rates of sexual violence as proof that Dworkin is right. Both sides frequently debate this point. The causal link between pornography and violence rests on anecdotal evidence. Dworkin finds this evidence sufficient, and she contends that women are not believed when they report an experience of being sexually assaulted by men who view pornography. While not denying these personal accounts, critics reply that a definite link can never be scientifically established.

One prominent feminist colleague of Dworkin's is catharine a. mackinnon. An author and professor of law, MacKinnon is regarded as a pioneer in providing legal recourse for victims of sexual harassment and rape. She and Dworkin created the intellectual framework for viewing pornography in a novel light: not merely as a form of speech but instead as active discrimination and violence against women. Their argument brushed aside traditional first amendment considerations. If pornography harmed women, they claimed, then it was not deserving of legal protection as speech. This view had its first legal expression in a case they considered bringing to stop showings of the film Deep Throat, whose star, Linda Lovelace, contended that she was raped throughout the making of the film. Ultimately, no suit could be brought because the statute of limitations had expired, but the case served as their first step toward a practical attack on pornography.

MacKinnon and Dworkin tried a legislative solution in Minneapolis in 1983. As coteachers of a course at the University of Minnesota Law School, they were invited to draft a law aimed at keeping adult bookstores out of residential neighborhoods. zoning ordinances had failed in this end. MacKinnon and Dworkin proposed amending the city's civil rights ordinance to include a new legal claim: a woman who proved that she had been harmed by pornographic material could sue its makers and distributors.

This groundbreaking approach avoided traditional definitions of obscenity. It defined pornography as the sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures or words. In the language of the proposed ordinance, subordination included images of women who "experience sexual pleasure in being raped" or in being "penetrated by objects or animals." Two provisions outlined the conditions under which a woman could bring suit: a plaintiff would have to prove that a pornographic work had harmed her in a specific way, or that it had harmed women in general. The hearings before the Minneapolis City Council galvanized debate and demonstrations. In one incident, a woman protesting pornography and its degrading aspects toward women, set herself on fire by a downtown news-stand.

The ordinance drew attacks from traditional free speech advocates, including the American Booksellers Association and the american civil liberties union (ACLU). Opponents argued that the ordinance was vague, allowing too much subjectivity in deciding what material constituted subordination. Any material, they claimed, could be deemed offensive in this way. One group making this argument called itself the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT). Among FACT's 50 prominent members were the authors betty n. friedan, kate millett, and Adrienne Rich. They filed a legal brief attacking the ordinance on the ground that it reinforced sexist stereotypes. In a strongly worded rebuttal, MacKinnon denounced the group as being apologists for male supremacists.

The Minneapolis antipornography ordinance twice failed to pass. Mayor Donald M. Fraser vetoed it in December 1983 and in July 1984. But the ordinance served as a model for others and in 1984, MacKinnon and Dworkin met with greater success in Indianapolis. Again, they proposed modifying existing ordinances with amendments that would allow any woman the means to seek an order prohibiting offensive pornography, as well as to seek damages. On April 23 and June 11, 1984, the Indianapolis– Marian County City Council passed General Ordinances 24 and 35, which amended chapter 16 of the Human Relations and Equal Opportunity Code. Indianapolis Mayor William H. Hudnut III signed the ordinances into law.

The law was challenged in American Booksellers Ass'n v. Hudnut, 598 F. Supp. 1316 (S.D. Ind. 1984). In 1985, it was declared unconstitutional (Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323 [7th Cir. 1985]). Judge Frank Easterbrook based his ruling on a longstanding tradition of First Amendment protection for "opinions that the government finds wrong or even hateful." However, he accepted the ordinance's central argument about pornography. He agreed that "depictions of subordination" tend to perpetuate subordination in other areas of life, causing sexual discrimination, harassment, rape, and domestic abuse. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Easterbrook's decision in 1986 (Hudnut, 475 U.S. 1001, 106 S. Ct. 1172, 89 L. Ed. 2d 291, aff'd without comment, reh'g denied, 475 U.S. 1132, 106 S. Ct. 1664, 90 L. Ed. 2d 206).

Following the Court's ruling, MacKinnon and Dworkin refined their approach in a proposed 1992 bill for the Massachusetts state legislature titled An Act to Protect the Civil Rights of Women and Children (H. 5194). Sponsored by Representative Barbara Hildt (D-Mass.), the bill focused on individuals who could prove that they were assaulted as a result of pornography. The bill allowed victims to collect damages in civil court from publishers, filmmakers, and distributors. In testimony before the Massachusetts Legislature, MacKinnon argued that pornography enjoyed better legal protection than did women. This time, opposition came from civil rights groups as well as the New York State chapter of the national organization for women (NOW). NOW condemned the bill for taking the onus off criminals and placing it instead on publishers. Although considered in committee, the bill was never voted on.

MacKinnon and Dworkin's views on pornography are certainly not shared by all feminists. nadine strossen, professor of law at New York Law School, has written, lectured, and practiced widely in the areas of constitutional law, civil liberties, and international human rights. Since 1991, she has served as president of the ACLU, the first woman to head the nation's largest and oldest civil liberties organization. Strossen believes that censorship, and not pornography, is the true enemy of women's rights. For too long, she argues, censorship has been used to repress information relevant to women. Strossen lays out her feminist perspective in Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights (1995). By arguing for "procensorship," Strossen asserts, feminists such as Dworkin and Mackinnon are ultimately doing more harm than good since any restriction of free speech is detrimental to all people.

further readings

Chancer, Lynn S. 1998. Reconcilable Differences: Confronting Beauty, Pornography, and the Future of Feminism. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Dines, Gail. 1998. Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality. New York: Routledge.

Elias, James, et al. 1999. Porn 101: Eroticism, Pornography, and the First Amendment. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

Strossen, Nadine. 1995. Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights. New York: Scribner.

cross-references

Feminist Jurisprudence; Sex Discrimination.

Congress quickly responded by passing the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which sought to limit restrictions on pornographic material to communications made for commercial purposes. The law also incorporated the three-part obscenity test that the Supreme Court formulated in Miller v. California. The american civil liberties union (ACLU) and a group of online Web site operators challenged the constitutionality of COPA, arguing that it was overbroad. In addition, the plaintiffs contended that the use of the community standards test would give any community in the United States the ability to file civil and criminal lawsuits under COPA. This meant that the most conservative community in the country could dictate the content of the Internet.

The Supreme Court, in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, 535 U.S. 564, 122 S.Ct. 1700, 152 L.Ed.2d 771 (2002), issued an ambiguous decision. The use of community standards did not by itself make the statute overbroad and unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Apart from that conclusion, the Court could not agree, with five of the justices producing separate opinions. Despite this situation, a majority expressed numerous reservations about the COPA, including the concern that, absent a national standard, it would be difficult for operators of Internet services to know when they had crossed a line and had subjected themselves to liability. The case was remanded to the lower courts for a full examination of the law on all issues.

Congressional efforts to curb the spread of child pornography also ran into judicial roadblocks based on First Amendment concerns. The Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 (CPPA) was dealt a fatal blow when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234, 122 S.Ct. 1389, 152 L.Ed.2d 403 (2002), ruled that two of its three major provisions were unconstitutional. The Court found that some of the prohibitions contained in the act were written in a manner that resulted in the censorship of legally protected speech as well as unprotected speech. It also could be said that the language in the act had a "chilling effect" on the exercise of free speech because it tended to inhibit not only proscribed forms of expression, but also those forms of expression that were not proscribed.

The problem with the CPPA was not that it prohibited child pornography but that its language also attempted to prohibit other pornographic material that "appear[ed] to be" or that "convey[ed] the impression" that it depicted "a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct." This prohibition extended to "any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image or picture." Pornographic material that appears to depict minors but is actually produced through creative computer imaging or through the use of youthful-looking adults is often referred to as "virtual child pornography." Thus, the CPPA prohibited not only actual child pornography, but also pornographic material pandered as child photography, even though real children were not used.

The Supreme Court concluded that the CPPA failed to meet the Miller criteria because there was no requirement to prove that the material was "offensive" or that it "appealed to prurient interests." In other words, all material depicting sexual conduct of persons under 18 years of age would be prohibited, despite any underlying merit or value. Therefore, such prohibitions contained in the language of the CPPA were overbroad and, accordingly, must be rendered invalid as abridging First Amendment rights.

The House of Representatives, with the support of the President george w. bush's administration, passed the Child Obscenity and Pornography Prevention Act of 2002, in response to the Supreme Court decision. The Senate passed a bill in November 2002 that sought to tailor the definition of virtual child pornography to meet the Miller criteria set out in the Supreme Court decision. Despite this apparent agreement, the two houses disagreed over the definition of virtual child porn. The House bill presented a narrow definition, stating that computer-generated images must be "indistinguishable" from actual child pornography. The Senate bill was broader, but it included provisions that would make it hard to obtain a guilty verdict. The House rejected the Senate version, and the bill died. However, the law was finally enacted in April 2003 using the Senate definition. As with all prior congressional attacks on pornography, this law was likely to be challenged in court.

further readings

Cornell, Drucilla, ed. 2000. Feminism and Pornography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Easton, Susan. 1994. The Problem of Pornography: Regulation and the Right to Free Speech. New York: Routledge.

Specht, Tom. 2001. "Untangling the World Wide Web: Restricting Children's Access to Adult Materials While Preserving the Freedoms of Adults." Northern Illinois University Law Review 21 (summer–fall).

Williams, Linda, ed. 2004. Porn Studies. Durham: Duke Univ. Press.

cross-references

Censorship; Freedom of Speech; Movie Rating; Telecommunications; Theaters and Shows.

PORNOGRAPHY

PORNOGRAPHY. The definition of pornography, loosely understood as written or visual images intended to excite sexually, has been notoriously slippery, and Americans have never all agreed on the boundaries of what is pornography, and on the extent to which it should be regulated. In the 1990s, hard-core pornography was widely accessible and often depicted nonconsensual sexual intercourse

in violent graphic images, whereas at the beginning of the twentieth century that which was merely "immoral" or "sensational," such as a hazy drawing of a seminude woman, was viewed as pornographic. Thus, historically a far broader range of literature and visual images was subject to legal governmental regulation, from erotic photographs to literary classics. A provision of the 1842 Tariff Act restricted "obscene" pictures and prints from entering the United States. The government became more interested in pornography during the Civil War, when soldiers began trading and collecting French postcards of pictures of nude and seminude women. The U.S. postmaster general in 1865 received a limited right to confiscate "obscene" materials in the mail. The Comstock laws of 1873 went further by making it illegal to sell or distribute through the mail a multitude of images in literature and art, as well as information on birth control or abortion.

From the 1870s through the mid-1930s, legal regulation of printed material and motion pictures was at its most restrictive. During this era the Supreme Court did not use arguments based on free speech and the First Amendment to challenge or modify obscenity laws and postal restrictions on literature or visual images. Until 1957 the Court accepted with only slight modification the British 1867 definition of "obscenity," which based censorship rulings on whether the written or spoken word (or visual representation) was intended to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands such a publication might fall." In effect, the Supreme Court upheld a definition of obscenity that created a standard for culture based on the lowest common denominator of acceptability—one that would not impair the moral development of children.

Before 1933 some novels that are now regarded as classics could not be distributed in the United States. The situation changed dramatically for literature in that year when federal judge John M. Woolsey, ruled that Irish author James Joyce's Ulysses was not obscene, arguing that the work should be taken as a whole, and prosecutors could not quote passages out of context as proof a book was obscene. On its first case against motion pictures in 1915, the Supreme Court ruled that the movie industry was a profit-inspired business, not an art form, and therefore subject to regulation. This allowed censorship by review boards before distribution of movies to the public by any state or local government that deemed it necessary or desirable. Beginning in 1934 the movie industry practiced rigorous self-regulation, through the Motion Picture Association of America and its Production Code, trying to avoid federal censorship.

At the turn of the century, censorship was popularly viewed as a device for social change. Groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union joined vice societies to advocate censorship of literature and art. The American public has continued to support laws restricting the access of youth to pornographic films, as well as harsh action against anyone who creates or distributes child pornography. Like earlier reformers, Americans in the 1990s argued that censorship was necessary to protect children and family values. With Miller v. California, however, which was decided by the Supreme Court in 1973, the only adult pornography subject to governmental regulation became that which an "average person" deemed was without literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The so-called LAPS test was weakened in 1987 when the Court in Pope v. Illinois ruled that because community views varied, "reasonable person" should be substituted for "average person." Combinations of sex and violence soon began permeating not only low-budget pornographic films but mass-distributed movies, videos, and magazines, making violent portraits of adult sex readily available. By the 1990s pornographic materials were a $10 billion operation in the United States alone.

Late-twentieth-century adherents of the women's movement had divided opinions about pornography. Because of increasing violence against women, some feminists believed that pornography, especially images depicting violence against women or nonconsensual sex, are often harmful to female actors and, more broadly, to all women. This belief in the danger of pornography is based on the assumption that male viewers watch and read pornography as if it were a manual or an instruction guide to behavior, including relations between the sexes. Although the most extreme antipornography activists asserted that men learn to rape by watching and reading pornography, no study has proven a direct link; however, many researchers have indicated that pornography diminishes male sensitivity to women's legal rights including the right to withhold consent to sex. Feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin oppose pornography both as "injurious speech," because it condones and encourages violence against women, and as a violation of women's civil rights. In the 1980s they successfully lobbied for ordinances in Minneapolis, Bellingham (Washington State), and Indianapolis. All were subsequently ruled unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.

Anticensorship feminists who focus on the First Amendment argue that pornography should remain a protected form of speech. Rejecting the idea that people respond to pornographic movies or books by trying to emulate the characters, they argue that pornography may serve as a safety valve, preventing violence against women by serving as a form of fantasy and as "safe sex." Some anticensorship feminists also doubt the efficacy of censorship and dislike its tendency to be used against such political minorities as homosexuals. They suggest that pornography's most objectionable images could be counteracted if feminist women and men produced their own pornography that challenged patriarchal and/or heterosexual notions about women's place in society. Anticensorship feminists point out that violence against women was a problem before pornography became as available and graphic as it has since the 1960s and conclude that

banning pornography would probably not solve the physical abuse of women.

In the early twenty-first century, advances in computer technology raised new challenges regarding the definition and control of pornography. Pornography proliferated on the internet, and computer imaging technology sometimes made it difficult to distinguish which images depicted acts between real people, and which were simply computer-generated. Whereas anticensorship laws generally protected people who wished to post or download sexually graphic images, using or creating child pornography was generally not protected, because it depicted illegal acts between legal minors. But debate arose over computer-generated images of children engaged in sexual acts: some argued that because no actual children were involved in making the images, they should be legal; others argued that the difficulty in distinguishing between "real" and computer-generated images made this course of action dangerous. Continuing advances in computer and communication technology are likely to prompt further debates over the definition and distribution of pornography.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Assiter, Alison, and Avedon Carol, eds. Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism. Boulder, Colo.: Pluto Press, 1993.

Baird, Robert M., and Stuart E. Rosenbaum, eds. Pornography: Private Right or Public Menace? Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1998.

Cate, Fred H. The Internet and the First Amendment: Schools and Sexually Explicit Expression. Bloomington, Ind.: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1998.

Cornell, Drucilla, ed. Feminism and Pornography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Stan, Adele M., ed. Debating Sexual Correctness: Pornography, Sexual Harassment, Date Rape, and the Politics of Sexual Equality. New York: Delta, 1995.

Alison M.Parker/d. b.

See alsoCensorship, Press and Artistic ; Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women ; Internet ; Music Television ; Violence Against Women Act ; Women's Rights Movement: The Twentieth Century .

pornography is notoriously hard to define. The word comes from the ancient Greek porne (whore) and graphien (write), so pornography is ‘writings by/or about whores’. Contemporary dictionaries give a very different definition: today pornography is considered ‘obscene material whose intention is to provoke sexual arousal’. Problems remain: how are we to define ‘obscene’? Are both James Joyce's Ulysses and Larry Flynt's Hustler ‘obscene’? The US government has thought so. At what point does explicit sex become ‘pornography’? One is tempted to agree with US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who concluded: ‘I know it when I see it.’

The category ‘pornography’ is relatively recent and postdates modern European obscenity by at least two hundred years. The first obscene book, The Raggionamenti, was composed by Renaissance Humanist, Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) between 1534 and 1536. The Raggionamenti is both a bawdy dialogue between two whores and a biting satire of Renaissance church and state. For the next three hundred years, obscene texts usually included anti-clericalism, religious skepticism, and political satire. During the eighteenth century, pornography played a particularly important role in intellectual life: dirty books were among the century's best-sellers and obscene pamphlets spread the spirit of criticism from the intelligentsia to a small, literate public. Late in the century, Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) perfected the themes of eighteenth-century pornography in a series of violent and explicit novels that advocated a thorough rejection of all norms, be they political, moral, or religious.

The content of pornography changed in the early nineteenth century: political obscenity vanished to be replaced by a fantasy world or what Steven Marcus calls, in The Other Victorians (1966), ‘pornotopia’. The audience for obscenity, however, remained the rich: a paper-wrapped, unillustrated book cost a Victorian reader twenty guineas. The leather-bound, illustrated, limited editions printed for rich bibliophiles were even more expensive. Because it was limited to the elite, pornography had a kind of back-door respectability. Obscene texts could be found on the shelves of the British Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale, but only in special, locked cases — the British Museum's Private Case and the Bibliothèque Nationale's Enfer — which were off-limits to working-class men, women, and children.

Rising literacy rates and the advent of national education made European elites anxious lest pornography made its way into the hands of the masses. To forestall such a possibility, governments in Europe and the US enacted the first anti-obscenity laws: the French laws of 1819, the US Customs Act of 1847, and the British Obscene Publications Act of 1857. All these acts were directed against materials cheap enough to reach ‘persons of all classes, young and old’. In the US and Europe, private crusaders like New York's Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) and France's anti-obscenity leagues railed against the evils of ‘smut’. Still, pornography proliferated: in France the number of obscene texts multiplied thirteen-fold in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, and new pornographic media — newspapers, brochures, and naughty postcards — brought obscene images to the masses.

1910 constituted a turning point. In 1913, British and US courts admitted defeat and created a new obscenity standard. Price no longer mattered; only the ‘harm’ done by pornography. Because they sought to improve society or elevate the human spirit, ‘science’ and ‘art’ escaped the charge of obscenity. Only ‘smut for smut's sake’ (to paraphrase US Judge Curtis Bok) constituted pornography. Legal tolerance (especially of written materials) continued to grow in Britain and the US. In 1967, American courts finally lifted the ban on John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Fanny Hill (1749). An American attorney observed that ‘there is no longer any obscenity law as far as writing is concerned.’

However, writing was no longer the principal form of obscenity. The image replaced the word, and obscene magazines, video strips, and films were sold in bookstores, specialized cinemas, and arcades. Even the local convenience store stocked explicit magazines, making pornography available to more consumers than ever before. In response, British, Canadian, and American governments formed special commissions in the 1970s and 80s to deal with the ‘pornography issue’. In 1968, US President Lyndon Johnson established the Commission on Pornography and Obscenity, which was followed shortly thereafter by the British Home Office Departmental Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (better known as the Williams Committee) and the Canadian Special Committee on Pornography and Prostitution. In 1985, distressed by the liberal recommendations of the Johnson Commission, President Richard Nixon established a second anti-pornography commission, the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, commonly known as the Meese Commission.

The Commissions introduced two new voices into the pornography debate: feminism and social science. In the US, author Andrea Dworkin and lawyer Catherine MacKinnon argued that pornography hurt women by condoning the objectification of women, and rape. In 1975, Women Against Pornography, or WAP, was formed and a few feminists served on the 1985 Meese Commission. Meanwhile, social scientists brought laboratory studies to bear on the question of ‘harm’. Psychologists concluded that extended exposure to violent pornography produces a ‘desensitization effect’, or an appetite for increasingly violent sexual media. The social scientists also concluded that only males already predisposed to antisocial behaviour were likely to commit rape after viewing pornographic films.

What is the future of pornography? Pornography continued to move from the margins to the mainstream of twentieth-century life. Home videos and the Internet have made seedy bookstore and sordid ‘porn’ theatres obsolete. Now consumers can experience ‘hardcore’ films in the safety and discretion of their own homes. Pornography can be acquired more easily and discreetly than ever before, which argues that pornography will stay with us in the twenty-first century.

Kathryn Norberg

Bibliography

Hunt, L. (1993). The invention of pornography: obscenity and the origins of modernity, 1500–1800. Zone, New York.
Kendrick, W. M. (1987). The secret museum: the history of pornography in literature. Viking, New York.

Pornography

Any printed or pictorial material containing representations of sexually obscene behavior, intended to sexually arouse its audience.

There is an obvious and necessary imprecision in this definition of the term pornography, in the sense that what is considered to be sexually obscene behavior, and, for that matter, what might sexually arouse an audience, vary quite widely from time to time, from place to place, and from individual to individual. Nearly all modern societies have laws that prohibit the possession or distribution of at least some forms of pornography, although the statutory suppression and criminalization of sexually obscene material is a relatively recent phenomenon, and is significantly predated by the legal censorship of material that was judged to be sacrilegious or antireligious (religiously obscene) or seditious or treasonous (politically obscene). Generally, laws against pornography have been based on the controversial assumption that exposure to pornography morally corrupts individuals and is a cause of sexual crimes. In the United States, legislation concerning pornography dates from the middle of the 19th century. Since that time, the admittedly elusive legal definition of what constitutes pornography and can be regulated by law has evolved into material that portrays sexual conduct in a patently offensive way and appeals to prurient interest in sex, as judged by an average person applying contemporary community standards, and which, on the whole, does not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. When necessary, the judgment of whether or not material is pornographic is usually made by a jury. Many authorities have concluded that, because of the constantly shifting moral connotations of the concept of sexual obscenity, it is not possible to completely and objectively define the term pornography, and that, in the final analysis, pornography is in the eye of the beholder.

Further Reading

Hunter, Ian. On Pornography. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.

por·nog·ra·phy / pôrˈnägrəfē/ • n. printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings. DERIVATIVES: por·nog·ra·pher / -fər/ n. por·no·graph·ic / ˌpôrnəˈgrafik/ adj. por·no·graph·i·cal·ly / ˌpôrnəˈgrafik(ə)lē/ adv.

pornography Visual or aural material presenting erotic behaviour that is intended to be sexually stimulating, and is lacking in artistic or other forms of merit. It is often considered to be demeaning to both sexuality and to the body. Although legal censorship in most countries bans forms of pornography, the interpretation of the law is subjective.

Pornography See Obscenity and Pornography.

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