After a series of holidays, we will resume our class on Saturday, August 28, 2004 at F513 Viewing Room. I enjoin you to come on time so that we will not go beyond four o'clock.
ON QUIZ AND EARLY BIRDS
I would like also to remind you that starting this week, I will implement a regular quiz schedule to encourage early arrival of students. I will conduct the quiz on the first ten minutes of the class, i.e. 1:00 - 1:10 PM every Saturday. Coverage of the quiz will be the previous week movie and lectures.
MOVIE REFLECTIONS AND REVIEWS
I notice that some reviews do not discuss at all the theme and motif of the movies we have watched. Please do discuss them in your next review to recoup lost points from your previous papers. Just a note, do not wait till a week before you make your movie reviews. I advise you to make your movie critique or review right after we have watched the movies. And most of all, please put your reference footnotes if you have quoted a phrase or two from the internet. Some may have inadvertently forgotten to put the references due to some circumstances. I will not hesitate to file a plagiarism case against you next time. I have WARNED you already.
Thursday, August 26, 2004
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Further Readings
# Feminism & Pornography, by Drucilla Cornell (Oxford University Press, 2000). This edited volume provides excellent information about the pornography debate among feminists. Includes articles from many different perspectives: those who use pornography, who fight against it, those who are trying to change its meaning. Examines the role of law in regulating pornography, how the meaning & definition of pornography has changed over time, the unionization question, whether pornography is art, the free speech question, and so forth.
Also by Cornell: The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, Sexual Harassment (Routledge, 1995) and At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex and Equality (Princeton UP, 1998)
# Only Words, by Catharine MacKinnon (Harvard UP, 1993). About the philosophical and legal basis of efforts to make pornography illegal (ordinances passed in passed in Minneapolis & Indianapolis.
# Female Sexual Slavery, by Kathleen Barry (New York UP, 1979). Classic cross-cultural study and analysis. Deals with the relationship between the pornography industry in the US and Europe and its relationship to the worldwide institutionalized sexual slavery of women and children. Barry argues that pornography is a form of prostitution, and therefore there can be no separation of pornography from the institution of prostitution more generally.
# Making Violence Sexy, by Diana E. H. Russell (NY: Teacher’s College Press, 1993). Presents anti-pornography feminist view.
# Pornography: Woman, Violence, and Civil Liberties, edited by Diana Itzin. Collection of essays that explore civil rights/liberties dimension of pornography.
# The Invention of Pornography, edited by Lynn Hunt (Zone Books, 1993). Essays that explore the historical development of pornography, changes in laws & definitions, etc.
# Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights, by Nadine Strossen (Scribners, 1995).
# Women and Prostitution: A Social History, by Bonnie Bullogh (Promethius Books, 1987).
Also by Cornell: The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, Sexual Harassment (Routledge, 1995) and At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex and Equality (Princeton UP, 1998)
# Only Words, by Catharine MacKinnon (Harvard UP, 1993). About the philosophical and legal basis of efforts to make pornography illegal (ordinances passed in passed in Minneapolis & Indianapolis.
# Female Sexual Slavery, by Kathleen Barry (New York UP, 1979). Classic cross-cultural study and analysis. Deals with the relationship between the pornography industry in the US and Europe and its relationship to the worldwide institutionalized sexual slavery of women and children. Barry argues that pornography is a form of prostitution, and therefore there can be no separation of pornography from the institution of prostitution more generally.
# Making Violence Sexy, by Diana E. H. Russell (NY: Teacher’s College Press, 1993). Presents anti-pornography feminist view.
# Pornography: Woman, Violence, and Civil Liberties, edited by Diana Itzin. Collection of essays that explore civil rights/liberties dimension of pornography.
# The Invention of Pornography, edited by Lynn Hunt (Zone Books, 1993). Essays that explore the historical development of pornography, changes in laws & definitions, etc.
# Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights, by Nadine Strossen (Scribners, 1995).
# Women and Prostitution: A Social History, by Bonnie Bullogh (Promethius Books, 1987).
On Censorship and Pornography in Films
WHY THE ACLU OPPOSES CENSORSHIP OF "PORNOGRAPHY"
Sexually explicit material, in literature, art, film, photography and music, has always been controversial in the United States, from James Joyce's Ulysses -- which was banned in the 1930s -- to rap music performed by 2 Live Crew, a target of prosecution in the 1990s. Traditionally, political conservatives and religious fundamentalists have been the primary advocates of tight legal restrictions on sexual expression, based on their view that such expression undermines public morality. In the late 1970s, however, those traditional voices were joined by a small but extremely vocal segment of the feminist movement. These women, who do not by any means speak for all feminists, charge that "pornography" is a major cause of discrimination and violence against women and should, therefore, be suppressed.
Although unsupported by any reliable evidence, this theory has been especially influential on college and law school campuses, leading to several incidents in which speech and works of art -- including works by women artists -- have been labeled pornographic" and censored. Even classics like Francisco de Goya's painting, The Nude Maja, have been targeted.
The American Civil Liberties Union has fought censorship from the time of its founding in 1920. In our early days, we defended sex educator/activists Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett against criminal obscenity charges. Today, we continue to defend the free speech rights of all expression, including sexual expression. We believe that the suppression of "pornography" is not only damaging to the First Amendment, but also impedes the struggle for women's rights.
Here are some answers to questions often asked by the public about the ACLU's opposition to the suppression of pornography.
IS PORNOGRAPHY PROTECTED BY THE FIRST AMENDMENT?
œ Yes. The First Amendment absolutely forbids the suppression of ideas or images based on their content alone. Moreover, a basic tenet of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence is that laws must be "viewpoint" neutral. And even though the Court has carved out a narrow exception to the First Amendment for a category of sexually explicit material deemed "legally obscene," the term "pornography" has no legal significance at all.
The dictionary defines pornography simply as writing or visual images that are "intended to arouse sexual desire." Pro-censorship feminists have greatly expanded the common meaning of pornography, redefining it as "the sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words." They then define "subordination" as the depiction of women "in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display." These extraordinarily subjective interpretations would apply to everything from religious imagery to news accounts of mass rape in Bosnia. Because the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the government may not make content-based rules limiting free speech, material that depicts "the subordination of women" enjoys the same First Amendment protection afforded material that depicts women in other ways. Were that not so, the government could suppress any ideas it didn't like, rendering the First Amendment meaningless.
IS PORNOGRAPHY A FORM OF DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WOMEN?
Sexually explicit words and images aimed at arousing sexual desire -- pornography -- constitute a form of expression. Pro-censorship feminists seek legal recognition of their counter-claim that such images are a form of sex discrimination because they reinforce stereotypes of women as inferior. The architects of the latter concept are law professor Catharine MacKinnon and writer Andrea Dworkin, who drafted a model law
that would permit any woman claiming to have been harmed by pornography to bring a civil lawsuit for monetary damages, and to halt the production, distribution and sale of pornographic works.
The model law has been considered in numerous locales around the country, but when it was adopted by the Indianapolis City Council in 1984 it collapsed under a legal challenge brought by a coalition of booksellers and publishers and supported by the ACLU as a friend-of-the-court. Leaving no doubt that the law targeted expression, federal Judge Sara Barker wrote: "To deny free speech in order to engineer social change in the name of accomplishing a greater good for one sector of our society
erodes the freedoms of all and... threatens tyranny and injustice for those subjected to the rule of such laws."
The ACLU's fears about the censorious effects of the MacKinnon/Dworkin law have been borne out in Canada, where the Canadian Supreme Court incorporated that law's definition of pornography into a 1992 obscenity ruling. Since then, more than half of all feminist bookstores in Canada have had materials confiscated or the sales of some
materials suspended by the government. The most susceptible to repression have been stores that specialize in lesbian and gay writings.
WOULDN'T RIDDING SOCIETY OF PORNOGRAPHY REDUCE SEXISM AND VIOLENCE AGAINST
WOMEN?
Although pro-censorship feminists base their efforts on the assumption that pornography causes violence against women, such a causal relationship has never been established. The National Research Council's Panel on Understanding and Preventing Violence concluded, in a 1993 survey of laboratory studies, that "demonstrated empirical links between pornography and sex crimes in general are weak or absent."
Correlational studies are similarly inconclusive, revealing no consistent correlations between the availability of pornography in various communities or countries and sexual offense rates. If anything, studies suggest that a greater availability of pornography seems to correlate with higher indices of sexual equality. Women in Sweden, with its highly permissive attitudes toward sexual expression, are much safer and have more civil rights than women in Singapore, where restrictions on
pornography are very tight.
DOESN'T PORNOGRAPHY EXPLOIT THE WOMEN WHO PARTICIPATE IN ITS PRODUCTION?
The ACLU supports the aggressive enforcement of already existing civil and criminal laws to protect women from sexual violence and coercion in the process of making sexually oriented material. At the same time, we oppose the notion, advanced by anti-pornography feminists, that women can never make free, voluntary choices to participate in the production of pornography, and that they are always coerced, whether they realize it or not. This infantilization of women denies them the freedom of choice to engage in otherwise legal activities.
There are cases of women who say they were coerced into working in the pornography industry, the most well known being "Linda Lovelace," who starred in the movie "Deep Throat." But the majority of women who pose for sexually explicit material or act in pornographic films do so voluntarily. Indeed, these women resent attempts to outlaw their chosen occupation. As one actress exclaimed, "For them to tell me I can't make films about naked men and women making love is a grotesque violation of my civil rights."
WHY DOES THE ACLU SAY THAT ANTI-PORNOGRAPHY LAWS HARM WOMEN'S STRUGGLE FOR
FULL LEGAL EQUALITY?
A core idea of the anti-pornography movement is the proposition that sex per se degrades women (although not men). Even consensual, nonviolent sex, according to MacKinnon and Dworkin, is an evil from which women -- like children -- must be protected. Such thinking is a throwback to the archaic stereotypes of the 19th century that formed the basis for enacting laws to "protect" women from vulgar language (and from practicing law or sitting on juries lest they be subjected to such language). Paternalistic legislation such as that advocated by MacKinnon and Dworkin has always functioned to prevent women from achieving full legal equality.
Furthermore, history teaches that censorship is a dangerous weapon in the hands of government. Inevitably, it is used against those who want to change society, be they feminists, civil rights demonstrators or gay liberationists. Obscenity laws, especially, have been used to suppress information and art dealing with female sexuality and reproduction. Thus, the growing influence of anti-pornography feminism threatens to undermine long- established principles of free speech.
Finally, the focus on sexual imagery and symbols diverts attention from the real causes of discrimination and violence against women, as well as from problems such as unequal pay, lack of affordable childcare and sexual harassment in the workplace.
ACLU Department of Public Education December 11, 1994
=============================================================
ACLU Free Reading Room | A publications and information resource of the
gopher://aclu.org:6601 | American Civil Liberties Union National Office
ftp://aclu.org |
mailto:infoaclu@aclu.org | "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty"
Sexually explicit material, in literature, art, film, photography and music, has always been controversial in the United States, from James Joyce's Ulysses -- which was banned in the 1930s -- to rap music performed by 2 Live Crew, a target of prosecution in the 1990s. Traditionally, political conservatives and religious fundamentalists have been the primary advocates of tight legal restrictions on sexual expression, based on their view that such expression undermines public morality. In the late 1970s, however, those traditional voices were joined by a small but extremely vocal segment of the feminist movement. These women, who do not by any means speak for all feminists, charge that "pornography" is a major cause of discrimination and violence against women and should, therefore, be suppressed.
Although unsupported by any reliable evidence, this theory has been especially influential on college and law school campuses, leading to several incidents in which speech and works of art -- including works by women artists -- have been labeled pornographic" and censored. Even classics like Francisco de Goya's painting, The Nude Maja, have been targeted.
The American Civil Liberties Union has fought censorship from the time of its founding in 1920. In our early days, we defended sex educator/activists Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett against criminal obscenity charges. Today, we continue to defend the free speech rights of all expression, including sexual expression. We believe that the suppression of "pornography" is not only damaging to the First Amendment, but also impedes the struggle for women's rights.
Here are some answers to questions often asked by the public about the ACLU's opposition to the suppression of pornography.
IS PORNOGRAPHY PROTECTED BY THE FIRST AMENDMENT?
œ Yes. The First Amendment absolutely forbids the suppression of ideas or images based on their content alone. Moreover, a basic tenet of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence is that laws must be "viewpoint" neutral. And even though the Court has carved out a narrow exception to the First Amendment for a category of sexually explicit material deemed "legally obscene," the term "pornography" has no legal significance at all.
The dictionary defines pornography simply as writing or visual images that are "intended to arouse sexual desire." Pro-censorship feminists have greatly expanded the common meaning of pornography, redefining it as "the sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words." They then define "subordination" as the depiction of women "in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display." These extraordinarily subjective interpretations would apply to everything from religious imagery to news accounts of mass rape in Bosnia. Because the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the government may not make content-based rules limiting free speech, material that depicts "the subordination of women" enjoys the same First Amendment protection afforded material that depicts women in other ways. Were that not so, the government could suppress any ideas it didn't like, rendering the First Amendment meaningless.
IS PORNOGRAPHY A FORM OF DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WOMEN?
Sexually explicit words and images aimed at arousing sexual desire -- pornography -- constitute a form of expression. Pro-censorship feminists seek legal recognition of their counter-claim that such images are a form of sex discrimination because they reinforce stereotypes of women as inferior. The architects of the latter concept are law professor Catharine MacKinnon and writer Andrea Dworkin, who drafted a model law
that would permit any woman claiming to have been harmed by pornography to bring a civil lawsuit for monetary damages, and to halt the production, distribution and sale of pornographic works.
The model law has been considered in numerous locales around the country, but when it was adopted by the Indianapolis City Council in 1984 it collapsed under a legal challenge brought by a coalition of booksellers and publishers and supported by the ACLU as a friend-of-the-court. Leaving no doubt that the law targeted expression, federal Judge Sara Barker wrote: "To deny free speech in order to engineer social change in the name of accomplishing a greater good for one sector of our society
erodes the freedoms of all and... threatens tyranny and injustice for those subjected to the rule of such laws."
The ACLU's fears about the censorious effects of the MacKinnon/Dworkin law have been borne out in Canada, where the Canadian Supreme Court incorporated that law's definition of pornography into a 1992 obscenity ruling. Since then, more than half of all feminist bookstores in Canada have had materials confiscated or the sales of some
materials suspended by the government. The most susceptible to repression have been stores that specialize in lesbian and gay writings.
WOULDN'T RIDDING SOCIETY OF PORNOGRAPHY REDUCE SEXISM AND VIOLENCE AGAINST
WOMEN?
Although pro-censorship feminists base their efforts on the assumption that pornography causes violence against women, such a causal relationship has never been established. The National Research Council's Panel on Understanding and Preventing Violence concluded, in a 1993 survey of laboratory studies, that "demonstrated empirical links between pornography and sex crimes in general are weak or absent."
Correlational studies are similarly inconclusive, revealing no consistent correlations between the availability of pornography in various communities or countries and sexual offense rates. If anything, studies suggest that a greater availability of pornography seems to correlate with higher indices of sexual equality. Women in Sweden, with its highly permissive attitudes toward sexual expression, are much safer and have more civil rights than women in Singapore, where restrictions on
pornography are very tight.
DOESN'T PORNOGRAPHY EXPLOIT THE WOMEN WHO PARTICIPATE IN ITS PRODUCTION?
The ACLU supports the aggressive enforcement of already existing civil and criminal laws to protect women from sexual violence and coercion in the process of making sexually oriented material. At the same time, we oppose the notion, advanced by anti-pornography feminists, that women can never make free, voluntary choices to participate in the production of pornography, and that they are always coerced, whether they realize it or not. This infantilization of women denies them the freedom of choice to engage in otherwise legal activities.
There are cases of women who say they were coerced into working in the pornography industry, the most well known being "Linda Lovelace," who starred in the movie "Deep Throat." But the majority of women who pose for sexually explicit material or act in pornographic films do so voluntarily. Indeed, these women resent attempts to outlaw their chosen occupation. As one actress exclaimed, "For them to tell me I can't make films about naked men and women making love is a grotesque violation of my civil rights."
WHY DOES THE ACLU SAY THAT ANTI-PORNOGRAPHY LAWS HARM WOMEN'S STRUGGLE FOR
FULL LEGAL EQUALITY?
A core idea of the anti-pornography movement is the proposition that sex per se degrades women (although not men). Even consensual, nonviolent sex, according to MacKinnon and Dworkin, is an evil from which women -- like children -- must be protected. Such thinking is a throwback to the archaic stereotypes of the 19th century that formed the basis for enacting laws to "protect" women from vulgar language (and from practicing law or sitting on juries lest they be subjected to such language). Paternalistic legislation such as that advocated by MacKinnon and Dworkin has always functioned to prevent women from achieving full legal equality.
Furthermore, history teaches that censorship is a dangerous weapon in the hands of government. Inevitably, it is used against those who want to change society, be they feminists, civil rights demonstrators or gay liberationists. Obscenity laws, especially, have been used to suppress information and art dealing with female sexuality and reproduction. Thus, the growing influence of anti-pornography feminism threatens to undermine long- established principles of free speech.
Finally, the focus on sexual imagery and symbols diverts attention from the real causes of discrimination and violence against women, as well as from problems such as unequal pay, lack of affordable childcare and sexual harassment in the workplace.
ACLU Department of Public Education December 11, 1994
=============================================================
ACLU Free Reading Room | A publications and information resource of the
gopher://aclu.org:6601 | American Civil Liberties Union National Office
ftp://aclu.org |
mailto:infoaclu@aclu.org | "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty"
PORNOGRAPHY, OBSCENITY, AND THE CASE FOR CENSORSHIP
Since the government declared Saturday, August 21, 2004 as a holiday, I will take this opportunity to assign readings for the class. Please read the following articles:
PORNOGRAPHY, OBSCENITY, AND THE CASE FOR CENSORSHIP
Irving Kristol
[http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wbutler/kristol.html]
New York University Professor Irving Kristol argues that a liberal today 'ought to favor a liberal form of censorship. " Basing his arguments on the moral relevance of art, Kristol says bluntly: "If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship."
Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life begin when you get what you want. For almost a century now, a great many intelligent, well-meaning and articulate people have argued eloquently against any kind of censorship of art and entertainment. Within the past ten years, courts and legislatures have found these arguments so persuasive that censorship is now a relative rarity in most states.
Is there triumphant exhilaration in the land? Hardly. Somehow, things have not worked out as they were supposed to, and many civil-libertarians have said this was not what they meant. They wanted a world in which Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms could be produced, or James Joyce's Ulysses published, without interference. They got that, of course; but they also got a world in which homosexual rape is simulated on the stage, in which the public flocks to witness professional fornication, in which New York's Times Square has become a hideous marketplace for printed filth. But does this really matter? Might not our disquiet be merely a cultural hangover? Was anyone ever corrupted by a book?
This last question, oddly enough, is asked by the same people who seem convinced that advertisements in magazines or displays of violence on televi- sion do have the power to corrupt. It is also asked, incredibly enough and in all sincerity, by university professors and teachers whose very lives provide the answer. After all, if you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you have also to believe that no one was ever improved by a book. You have to believe, in other words, that art is morally trivial and that education is morally irrelevant.
To be sure, it is extremely difficult to trace the effects of any single book (or play or movie) on any reader. But we all know that the ways in which we use our minds and imaginations do shape our characters and help define us as persons. That those who certainly know this are moved to deny it merely indicates how a dogmatic resistance to the idea of censorship can result in a mindless insistence on the absurd.
For the plain fact is that we all believe that there is a point at which the public authorities ought to step in to limit the "self-expression" of an individual or a group. A theatrical director might find someone willing to commit suicide on the stage. We would not allow that. And I know of no one who argues that we ought to permit public gladiatorial contests, even between consenting adults.
No society can be utterly indifferent to the ways its citizens publicly entertain themselves. Bearbaiting and cockfighting are prohibited only in part out of compassion for the animals; the main reason is that such spectacles, were felt to debase and brutalize the citizenry who flocked to witness them. The question with regard to pornography and obscenity is whether they will brutalize and debase our citizenry. We are, after all, not dealing with one book or one movie. We are dealing with a general tendency that is suffusing our entire culture.
Pornography's whole purpose, it seems to me, is to treat human beings obscenely, to deprive them of their specifically human dimension. Imagine a well-known man in a hospital ward, dying an agonizing death. His bladder and bowels empty themselves of their own accord. His consciousness is overwhelmed by pain, so that he cannot communicate with us, nor we with him. Now, it would be technically easy to put a television camera in his room and let the whole world witness this spectacle. We don't do itÑ-at least not yetÑ-because we regard this as an obscene invasion of privacy. And what would make the spectacle obscene is that we would be witnessing the extin- guishing of humanity in a human animal.
SexÑ-like death-Ñis an activity that is both animal and human. There are human sentiments and human ideals involved in this animal activity. But when sex is public, I do not believe the viewer can see the sentiments and the ideals, but sees only the animal coupling. And that is why when most men and women make love, they prefer to be aloneÑbecause it is only when you are alone that you can make love, as distinct from merely copulating. When sex is a public spectacle, a human relationship has been debased into a mere animal connection.
But even if all this is granted, it doubtless will be said that we ought not to be unduly concerned. Free competition in the cultural marketplace, it is argued by those who have never otherwise had a kind word to say for laissez-faire, will dispose of the problem; in the course of time, people will get bored with pornography and obscenity.
I would like to be able to go along with this reasoning, but I think it is false, and for two reasons. The first reason is psychological, the second, political.
In my opinion, pornography and obscenity appeal to and provoke a kind of sexual regression. The pleasure one gets from pornography and obscenity is infantile and autoerotic; put bluntly, it is a masturbatory exercise of the imagination. Now, people who masturbate do not get bored with masturba- tion, just as sadists don't get bored with sadism, and voyeurs don't get bored with voyeurism. In other words, like all infantile sexuality, it can quite easily become a permanent self-reinforcing neurosis. And such a neurosis, on a mass scale, is a threat to our civilization and humanity, nothing less.
I am already touching upon a political aspect of pornography when I suggest that it is inherently subversive of civilization. But there is another political aspect, which has to do with the relationship of pornography and obscenity to democracy, and especially to the quality of public life on which democratic government ultimately rests.
Today a "managerial" conception of democracy prevailsÑwherein de- mocracy is seen as a set of rules and procedures, and nothing but a set of rules and procedures, by which majority rule and minority rights are recon- ciled into a state of equilibrium. Thus, the political system can be fully reduced to its mechanical arrangements.
There is, however, an older idea of democracy "fairly common until about the beginning of this century" for which the conception of the quality of public life is absolutely crucial. This idea starts from the proposition that democracy is a form of self-government, and that you are entitled to it only if that "self" is worthy of governing. Because the desirability of self-government depends on the character of the people who govern, the older idea of democracy was very solicitous of the condition of this character. This older democracy had no problem in principle with pornography and obscenity; it censored them; it was not about to permit people to corrupt themselves. But can a liberal-today-be for censorship? Yes, but he ought to favor liberal form of censorship.
I don't think this is a contradiction terms. We have no problem contrasting repressive laws governing alcohol, drugs and tobacco with laws regulating (that is, discouraging the sale of ) alcohol, drugs and tobacco. We have not made smoking a criminal offense. We have, however, and with good liberal conscience, prohibited cigarette advertising on television. The idea of restricting individual freedom, in a liberal way, is not at all unfamiliar to us.
I therefore see no reason why we should not be able to distinguish repressive censorship from liberal censorship of the written and spoken word. In Britain, until a few years ago, you could perform almost any play you wishedÑbut certain plays, judged to be obscene, had to be performed in private theatrical clubs. In the United States, all of us who grew up using, public libraries are familiar with the circumstances under which certain books could be circulated only to adults, while still other books had to be read in the library. In both cases, a small minority that was willing to make a serious effort to see an obscene play or book could do so. But the impact of obscenity was circumscribed, and the quality of public life was only marginally affected.
It is a distressing fact that any system of censorship is bound, upon occasion, to treat unjustly a particular work of art to find pornography where there is only gentle eroticism, to find obscenity where none really exists, or to find both where the work's existence ought to be tolerated because it serves a larger moral purpose. That is the price one has to be prepared to pay for censorshipÑeven liberal censorship.
But if you look at the history of American or English literature, there is precious little damage you can point to as a consequence of the censorship that prevailed throughout most of that history. I doubt that many works of real literary merit ever were suppressed. Nor did I notice that hitherto suppressed masterpieces flooded the market when censorship was eased. I should say, to the contrary, that literature has lost quite a bit now that so much is permitted. It seems to me that the cultural market in the United States today is awash in dirty books, dirty movies, dirty theater. Our cultural condition has not improved as a result of the new freedom.
I'll put it bluntly: if you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.
PORNOGRAPHY, OBSCENITY, AND THE CASE FOR CENSORSHIP
Irving Kristol
[http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wbutler/kristol.html]
New York University Professor Irving Kristol argues that a liberal today 'ought to favor a liberal form of censorship. " Basing his arguments on the moral relevance of art, Kristol says bluntly: "If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship."
Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life begin when you get what you want. For almost a century now, a great many intelligent, well-meaning and articulate people have argued eloquently against any kind of censorship of art and entertainment. Within the past ten years, courts and legislatures have found these arguments so persuasive that censorship is now a relative rarity in most states.
Is there triumphant exhilaration in the land? Hardly. Somehow, things have not worked out as they were supposed to, and many civil-libertarians have said this was not what they meant. They wanted a world in which Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms could be produced, or James Joyce's Ulysses published, without interference. They got that, of course; but they also got a world in which homosexual rape is simulated on the stage, in which the public flocks to witness professional fornication, in which New York's Times Square has become a hideous marketplace for printed filth. But does this really matter? Might not our disquiet be merely a cultural hangover? Was anyone ever corrupted by a book?
This last question, oddly enough, is asked by the same people who seem convinced that advertisements in magazines or displays of violence on televi- sion do have the power to corrupt. It is also asked, incredibly enough and in all sincerity, by university professors and teachers whose very lives provide the answer. After all, if you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you have also to believe that no one was ever improved by a book. You have to believe, in other words, that art is morally trivial and that education is morally irrelevant.
To be sure, it is extremely difficult to trace the effects of any single book (or play or movie) on any reader. But we all know that the ways in which we use our minds and imaginations do shape our characters and help define us as persons. That those who certainly know this are moved to deny it merely indicates how a dogmatic resistance to the idea of censorship can result in a mindless insistence on the absurd.
For the plain fact is that we all believe that there is a point at which the public authorities ought to step in to limit the "self-expression" of an individual or a group. A theatrical director might find someone willing to commit suicide on the stage. We would not allow that. And I know of no one who argues that we ought to permit public gladiatorial contests, even between consenting adults.
No society can be utterly indifferent to the ways its citizens publicly entertain themselves. Bearbaiting and cockfighting are prohibited only in part out of compassion for the animals; the main reason is that such spectacles, were felt to debase and brutalize the citizenry who flocked to witness them. The question with regard to pornography and obscenity is whether they will brutalize and debase our citizenry. We are, after all, not dealing with one book or one movie. We are dealing with a general tendency that is suffusing our entire culture.
Pornography's whole purpose, it seems to me, is to treat human beings obscenely, to deprive them of their specifically human dimension. Imagine a well-known man in a hospital ward, dying an agonizing death. His bladder and bowels empty themselves of their own accord. His consciousness is overwhelmed by pain, so that he cannot communicate with us, nor we with him. Now, it would be technically easy to put a television camera in his room and let the whole world witness this spectacle. We don't do itÑ-at least not yetÑ-because we regard this as an obscene invasion of privacy. And what would make the spectacle obscene is that we would be witnessing the extin- guishing of humanity in a human animal.
SexÑ-like death-Ñis an activity that is both animal and human. There are human sentiments and human ideals involved in this animal activity. But when sex is public, I do not believe the viewer can see the sentiments and the ideals, but sees only the animal coupling. And that is why when most men and women make love, they prefer to be aloneÑbecause it is only when you are alone that you can make love, as distinct from merely copulating. When sex is a public spectacle, a human relationship has been debased into a mere animal connection.
But even if all this is granted, it doubtless will be said that we ought not to be unduly concerned. Free competition in the cultural marketplace, it is argued by those who have never otherwise had a kind word to say for laissez-faire, will dispose of the problem; in the course of time, people will get bored with pornography and obscenity.
I would like to be able to go along with this reasoning, but I think it is false, and for two reasons. The first reason is psychological, the second, political.
In my opinion, pornography and obscenity appeal to and provoke a kind of sexual regression. The pleasure one gets from pornography and obscenity is infantile and autoerotic; put bluntly, it is a masturbatory exercise of the imagination. Now, people who masturbate do not get bored with masturba- tion, just as sadists don't get bored with sadism, and voyeurs don't get bored with voyeurism. In other words, like all infantile sexuality, it can quite easily become a permanent self-reinforcing neurosis. And such a neurosis, on a mass scale, is a threat to our civilization and humanity, nothing less.
I am already touching upon a political aspect of pornography when I suggest that it is inherently subversive of civilization. But there is another political aspect, which has to do with the relationship of pornography and obscenity to democracy, and especially to the quality of public life on which democratic government ultimately rests.
Today a "managerial" conception of democracy prevailsÑwherein de- mocracy is seen as a set of rules and procedures, and nothing but a set of rules and procedures, by which majority rule and minority rights are recon- ciled into a state of equilibrium. Thus, the political system can be fully reduced to its mechanical arrangements.
There is, however, an older idea of democracy "fairly common until about the beginning of this century" for which the conception of the quality of public life is absolutely crucial. This idea starts from the proposition that democracy is a form of self-government, and that you are entitled to it only if that "self" is worthy of governing. Because the desirability of self-government depends on the character of the people who govern, the older idea of democracy was very solicitous of the condition of this character. This older democracy had no problem in principle with pornography and obscenity; it censored them; it was not about to permit people to corrupt themselves. But can a liberal-today-be for censorship? Yes, but he ought to favor liberal form of censorship.
I don't think this is a contradiction terms. We have no problem contrasting repressive laws governing alcohol, drugs and tobacco with laws regulating (that is, discouraging the sale of ) alcohol, drugs and tobacco. We have not made smoking a criminal offense. We have, however, and with good liberal conscience, prohibited cigarette advertising on television. The idea of restricting individual freedom, in a liberal way, is not at all unfamiliar to us.
I therefore see no reason why we should not be able to distinguish repressive censorship from liberal censorship of the written and spoken word. In Britain, until a few years ago, you could perform almost any play you wishedÑbut certain plays, judged to be obscene, had to be performed in private theatrical clubs. In the United States, all of us who grew up using, public libraries are familiar with the circumstances under which certain books could be circulated only to adults, while still other books had to be read in the library. In both cases, a small minority that was willing to make a serious effort to see an obscene play or book could do so. But the impact of obscenity was circumscribed, and the quality of public life was only marginally affected.
It is a distressing fact that any system of censorship is bound, upon occasion, to treat unjustly a particular work of art to find pornography where there is only gentle eroticism, to find obscenity where none really exists, or to find both where the work's existence ought to be tolerated because it serves a larger moral purpose. That is the price one has to be prepared to pay for censorshipÑeven liberal censorship.
But if you look at the history of American or English literature, there is precious little damage you can point to as a consequence of the censorship that prevailed throughout most of that history. I doubt that many works of real literary merit ever were suppressed. Nor did I notice that hitherto suppressed masterpieces flooded the market when censorship was eased. I should say, to the contrary, that literature has lost quite a bit now that so much is permitted. It seems to me that the cultural market in the United States today is awash in dirty books, dirty movies, dirty theater. Our cultural condition has not improved as a result of the new freedom.
I'll put it bluntly: if you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.
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