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In the view of a great many people, of course, that protection is not enough. Critic Pierce Hannah complained in the London Times: "We, no less than the Victorians, have our current cant. Ours is to protest that books and plays with only the most tenuous claims to be taken seriously must be fought for because they contain once-taboo words and situations. We make martyrs out of third-rate writers in no danger of going to the stake." A compelling answer to this argument is that third-rate or even tenth-rate writers must be protected if first-rate writers are to be free. Banning books and prosecuting theater owners can actually be self-defeating, since they lend false glamour to the forbidden and the illicit. I Am Curious (Yellow) would in all likelihood not have become a vastly profitable movie if it had not first been the subject of a well-publicized prosecution by the U.S. Court of Appeals. In Sweden, where movies are almost never censored for eroticism, I Am Curious (Blue), Yellow's sexier successor, has fared dismally at the box office. Booksellers in San Francisco, one of the nation's most permissive cities, report that sales of pornography have dipped 70% in the past six months.
The Impact on Society
Such evidence is scarcely conclusive. Erotica has flourished in every society and under every kind of regime from the Pharaohs to the Maos. "Legalizing pornography," reasons Author Wilfrid Sheed, "will not destroy its appeal any more than ending Prohibition stopped people from drinking. Liberal cliche to the contrary, lust was not invented by the censors." But lust can indeed be helped along by the censor. The outwardly prudish Victorian era produced pornographic literature of unsurpassed richness and ingenuity. In the first five decades of this century, U.S. art and entertainment either were censored or practiced self-censorship. Yet those were decades of titillating sexuality, heavily reinforced by advertising; technically the decencies were observed, but the atmosphere was charged with eroticism from every screen and billboard. It was those teasing decades that prepared the way for the erotic explosion. The current situation in the arts is at least more honest.