On Pornography
They tell us now that pornography leads to incest and child abuse and all manner of degradation of women. They say that pornographers have taken their insidious filth to new extremes, and, though they don't believe in censorship any more than the rest of us, the time has come to institute some sensible guidelines. Western civilization is in imminent danger of collapse.
And it is true, of course, there is more lewd language and nudity available on the newsstands and in the theaters today than we could ever have imagined when I was growing up in the fifties. Before Playboy appeared in 1953, there wasn't a great deal to excite your average adolescent lecher. Argosy had an annual article on cheesecake featuring a double page of miniature black and white photos of girls clad only in shorts and halter tops or one-piece leopard skin bathing suits. Tame as that may sound today, it was heady stuff in the early fifties. I might add that, just overleaf, they ran an ad for the new Nash automobile, whose standard equipment included seats that folded down into a double bed. You can imagine how that innocent juxtaposition stirred the indecent imaginings of a thirteen year old.
But the Sears Roebuck Catalogue was the pornography of choice for my generation. A boy could thumb through the wish book, ostensibly to fantasize over pictures of Daisy air rifles and cream separators, and turn instead to drool over photos of ladies in long underwear and girdles. Adults, of course, were properly outraged, "That's what caused all this juvenile delinquency you know. That and comic books." There were many who believed that this sort of smut was a communist plot. "Sears Roebuck, isn't that a commie name?" And National Geographic was fronting for a satanic cult.
We are not so easily shocked today. Nonetheless, there are those among us who insist upon shocking, and others who glory in having been shocked.
Each culture will define its own pornography. The more tightly a society restricts its citizenry in matters of dress, the more vulnerable it will be to a simple breach of custom. But society does have the power to choose whether it shall have pornography at all. While certain Moslem peoples insist that women drape their bodies in dark robes and veil their faces from the eyes of strangers, untutored tribes dwelling deep in the untraveled jungle may go about with no clothing whatever and consider it quite proper.
Try to sell a French post card there.
The irony of the situation is that pornography was created by our moral betters seeking to enforce a strict propriety, and, by passing laws against their own creation, they have made the business lucrative.
