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Fundamental disagreement occurs on the issue of what erotica does to the consumer. Critics of the new permissiveness assume as obvious that it is damaging to people, particularly the young, and that it leads to sexual license. But in the age of the in-depth survey and the microscopic sexual study, there is a remarkable dearth of information about the psychological impact of erotica on the normal—or more significant, ab normal—individual. A possible clue was offered by a commission of the Danish government appointed to study the incidence of sexual crimes; the commission found that such crimes had declined by 25% in the year in which antiobscenity laws on books had been abolished. After an intensive investigation of the relationship between eroticism on the screen and individual behavior, Sweden's censorship office reported unequivocally that no normal adult is harmed by seeing intercourse and nude bodies in a motion picture. Psychologists and sociologists in the U.S. have no concrete evidence that erotic material directly stimulates sexual activity. They maintain that the young in particular —and movie audiences today consist mostly of people under 25—are more sophisticated about sex than the previous generation, and in consequence may tend to be less excited or shocked by nudity or scenes that show copulation. The strongest evidence suggests that total permissiveness in the arts is a result, not a cause, of relaxed standards of conduct. The majority of psychologists and behaviorists in effect reassert the familiar dictum that no girl was ever ruined by reading a book—and no boy was ever seduced by a girl appearing onstage without her clothes on.
That is not the only issue, however. A number of experts are agreed on one point: erotic art often unduly celebrates sexual prowess to the exclusion of such qualities as tenderness, patience, courage, humor or honesty. If sex is universally regarded as the ultimate status symbol, as Playboy and the pornocrats suggest, many responsible adults will wind up feeling cheated, and alienated; at the same time, and ironically, the aim of sex will become mental rather than sensory.
Hardly anyone can quarrel with the ideal of a healthy sexuality, free of false shame and guilt. Yet to judge from the nation's mood, a great number of Americans feel that the surfeit of sex must somehow be contained. Unless some restraints are imposed—or self-imposed—history suggests that the reaction to permissiveness may be strong. The ribald, rollicking Elizabethan age was succeeded by the severity of King James I and the censorious society of Oliver Cromwell. The excesses of the Restoration were sobered by Victorian propriety. The licentiousness of Weimar Germany ended in the austere and brutal anthill of Nazism. Constitutionally and temperamentally, the U.S. is probably immune to such violent reversals of law and mood. Nonetheless, as in any other democracy, change in the U.S. tends to be uneven: two steps forward, one step back. Whatever the disposition of the new Supreme Court, there is real danger of repressive action at the local level—in all likelihood by policemen and prosecutors not intellectually equipped to judge the artistic or social merits of a book or film.