Modern Living: Sex as a Spectator Sport

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Such classic examples illustrate the classic dilemma: What is pornography and what is outspoken art? Innumerable erotic works, from Ovid's Ars amatoria to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, in time assumed the stature of classics. Innumerable others were denounced as wicked when they first appeared. Yet almost everyone agrees that there is such a thing as pornography and that it is bad. No less an authority than Henry Miller recently denounced pornography as "a leering or lecherous disguise" that has helped make sexuality joyless. On any level of creative intent, it is hard to defend the bulk of salacious literature being churned out today. Most of it is perverse, narcissistic, brutal, irrational. And boring. As George Steiner observed: "The number of ways in which orgasm can be achieved or arrested, the total modes of intercourse, are fundamentally finite . . . Once all possible positions of the body have been tried—the law of gravity does interfere —once the maximum number of erogenous zones of the maximum number of participants have been brought into contact, abrasive, frictional, or intrusive, there is not much left to do or imagine."

Beholder's Groin

Even D. H. Lawrence favored rigorous censorship of smut. "You can recognize it," he wrote, "by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit . . . The insult to the human body, the insult to a vital human relationship!" On that point, both the author of Lady Chatterley and Evangelist Billy Graham would be in wholehearted agreement.

Where they would disagree would be on the question of just what constitutes pornography. For years the U.S. Supreme Court has struggled with the issue, as writers and publishers, pressing home the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and expression, spearheaded the battle for freedom in the arts. After a series of test cases, the Supreme Court formulated a somewhat vague but consistent philosophy that no material could be banned by local authorities unless it was "utterly without redeeming social value." Charles Rembar, the Manhattan attorney who successfully defended Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill before the Supreme Court, has offered what may be a classic definition: "Pornography is in the groin of the beholder." Though, as Rembar notes, there is virtually no such thing as obscenity in the literary legal lexicon today, the courts have insisted that minors should be protected from exposure to prurient material. And by federal law an individual may take action to prevent receipt of unsolicited pornography through the mail.

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