Public Pornography
Orlans, Harold
THE POSTWAR FLOOD of pornography shows no sign of abating and, for once, it seems, the dim congressmen, stern churchmen, and stiff-laced ladies are complaining about something real and...
...In part, as a consequence of the war, with its legion of sex-starved women at home and GIs abroad who took what they could get and wanted more of the same when they returned...
...How, then, is the spread of public pornography to be explained...
...On with the circus...
...And there is the horror of our time— not merely that a false ideology can lead people to support the government that destroys them, but that any ideology, true or false, should seem to sanction the liquidation of one's own father...
...When do our children die...
...The subject matter is not clinching—lesbianism, prostitution, abortion, adultery have been themes of great literature—but the treatment is...
...Certainly there is Farrell, Faulkner, Moravia— even Cain...
...We're at peace—or are we...
...Curiosity has long characterized the fe male, but only since the war has it carried her this far...
...The document offers details of midnight ar rests, and adds that some people were rounded up by the government simply because they were "wives or brothers of Trotskyists...
...And, finally, as a symptom of social malaise...
...Things are going too well...
...It is not faintly Nice or Latin...
...Today they will be found on 106 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 all the newsstands in a quiet Quaker town—or they were there until a mother, the local editor, and several ministers pounced upon the hapless police chief...
...Then comes the truly appalling section which makes clear that the appeal is be ing written by "official" Trotskyists who support the Mao regime...
...His explanation is not very explanatory...
...and that, while it doubtless has an ineradicable place in the scheme of things entire, that place tends, in polite society, to be private...
...Then, of course, there are the pulp books...
...If only this were always true...
...The magazines are all the same: bosoms and butts, high heels, opera hose, leopard skins, manacles, whips and wrestling ladies...
...The most obvious sign is that the two-bit monthlies "glorifying the American girl" which used to be confined to the newsstands around the tracks now overiow the back shelves of the racks in neighborhood drug and candy stores...
...THE POSTWAR FLOOD of pornography shows no sign of abating and, for once, it seems, the dim congressmen, stern churchmen, and stiff-laced ladies are complaining about something real and reckonable...
...Its recent invasion of the public domain is unmistakable...
...In the back pages, ads for "art photos" sent in plain envelopes via railway express...
...today the audiences may include a more equal number of females...
...In part, no doubt, as a continued liberalization of sexual standards that have been loosen ing since the Victorians tried to impound them...
...Eisenhower will look after things...
...Why doesn't Joe McCarthy relax with his wife...
...They will be back again the day after tomorrow...
...Our emphasis...
...There is money around—but for how long...
...But the most significent change is the audience, formerly male, now often mixed—an observation the new Kinsey confirms: "A decade or two ago the burlesque audiences were almost exclusively male...
...It is difficult...
...It is not my intent to oppose Vice, from which I derive as much pleasure as most people, but to point out that it is not Virtue...
...We have bread...
...Did the Gallup poll find x% of Americans, as against x+y%a of the English, reading books...
...HAROLD ORLANS The Horror of Our Time An appeal has recently been smuggled out of China, signed by five Chinese Trotskyists, asking the civilized world to protest against wholesale arrests of their comrades by the Mao government...
...But there is also smut beside which the Tropics are prim and their author a little girl in a starched white petticoat...
...Was it for this that Peter Zenger stood trial...
...The covers are worse than the innards...
...Don't take my word...
...borrow a copy from your teenaged son and judge for yourself...
...That was before the days of M. Spillane...
...Six years ago they could not be bought in a dry southern village, although they were imported from the nearby city to the barber shop, poolroom, and bar...
...Apparently most females attend burlesque shows because they are social functions about which they are curious, and which they may share with their male companions...
...We still stand firmly at our posts in the effort for na tional reconstruction...
...Spillane is highbrow compared to some of his competitors in the new market of culture...
...to explain this attendance by females in view of the fact that so few of them are aroused erotically by such shows...
...The Bomb is not getting smaller...
...Some even came out openly in favor of liquidating their own fathers...
...The victimized Trotskyists, say the authors, supported the Mao regime in the Korean war, "tak ing part in all sorts of `Against American Aid to Korea' propaganda campaigns .. . they supported the government in purg ing the bourgeois corrosion of state pro perties...
...Finally, burlesque may be mentioned, an old institution that is flourishing again...
...Winter 1954 • DISSENT • 107...
...The shows are packed—a second house has opened in Philadelphia—and, unless fading memories fail me, have hotted up in recent years (and American burlesque has always been dirtier than its English or French equivalent...
Vol. 1 • January 1954 • No. 1
