In Defense of Pornography

...Cleland uses no vulgar words, preferring glamorous euphemisms: sex organs are "his mighty machine" and "that luscious mouth of nature...

...Despite the forces of censorship, sexual intercourse is not a depraved and shameful vice...

...Its revelation, says Albert Ellis in his introduction, is "that sex can actually be fun...

...I think that they discourage the former by assuaging Oedipal guilts, and make the latter less likely through cathartic release...

...he read a piercingly lovely poem to me" (it is by Irwin Edman...

...Anthony says she chose herself, and despite the possibility that the book is a fake...

...The Handbook's true revelation is that sex can often be a pain and a mess...

...The same ludicrous point is reached in Jou Pu Tuan (The Prayer Mat of Flesh), a Chinese 17th-century pornographic classic by Li Yii (Grove Press, 376 pp., $6.50), at the moment when the hero progresses from going to bed with three women to going to bed with four...

...The argument for the censorship of pornography and obscenity is the harmful consequences, to the reader and to society, that are alleged to follow from such reading: masturbation, loss of chastity, fornication, perversion and homosexuality, rape and child violation...

...a rear view of a naked girl "gave somewhat the idea of a pink slash in the glossiest white satin...

...This is surely of some interest, but any adult reader sexually excited by it must get his kicks oddly...

...While John Cleland is not legally allowed to stimulate sexual desire, whole industries—fashion and advertising, perfume and cosmetics—work at it full time...

...Mrs...

...I cannot imagine a wilder misstatement...

...If there were bad consequences of the abolition of censorship, they might be outweighed by the good consequences...

...As for loss of chastity, I share Jimmy Walker's doubt that anyone ever got seduced by a book, but if two pure young people were to read a book and pop into bed as a consequence, 1 would answer with D. H. Lawrence, "One up to them...

...The real corrupter of our youth is sadism, not sex, as that pioneer G. Legman argued in Love & Death in 1949, but even here censorship seems inadvisable...

...The tone of the sexual descriptions is usually rapturous, particularly in regard to orgasm...

...The book has set pieces appealing to various deviant impulses: female and male homosexuality (the latter probably added by a later hand), sadism and masochism, necrophilia, voyeurism, and so forth...

...All this is hypothetical, since no one knows the effects of such reading on behavior...

...The open distribution of pornography and obscenity would thus encourage heterosexuality and discourage impotence and frigidity...

...Experience and taste will save us, those of us who want to be saved...

...The greatest single advantage of the abolition of censorship, it seems to me, would be to make our culture more continuous, helping to free child and adult from fear, inhibition and guilt...

...If nothing else, a review gives me a chance to congratulate Walter J. Minton, the president of Putnam's, on his courage in publishing Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and fighting in the courts for his right to do so...

...Then, judicial appointment being what it is, let them not be enforced...

...I italicize: "Clint had found the tips of my breasts anew...

...Anthony's main trouble is that she discovered clitoral masturbation at nine and has been fixated on it ever since...

...The occasion was serious, but the book was not...

...Since the embraces are of the most decorous sort, on the order of studying together, I can only conclude that integrated education is the issue, which makes it the responsibility of other pages in this magazine...

...simultaneous orgasm proved impractical because "it left no one at the helm, so to speak...

...In regard to sex, we require a sexless child and a sexually uninhibited adult...

...As Memoirs is a good example of pornography, The Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity seems a good example of obscenity, indecent material without salacious intent...

...I think this despite the offensive title, which Mrs...

...In regard to censorship, the argument from literary merit is absurd and irrelevant...

...The bald sex scenes are alternated with similarly bald accounts of the author's whitish vaginal discharge when she had a venereal disease, her dropped and protruding uterus in pregnancy, her self-disgust at not knowing whether any given child was husband's or lover's, her constant money trouble and inability to get up the payments for a daughter at the Plucky Poodle School (that Plucky Poodle School is one of the details that lead me to think the book authentic...

...I am, then, not a very good witness for the defense, since I believe that both books are suppressible under the law...

...It is a normal body function, habitual to the judge's parents, George Washington, and many leaders of the Girl Scouts...

...Glenn V Ramsey published a list in the American Journal of Psychology of what actually had proven sexually exciting to 291 younger boys...

...I realize that this is the quixotic position of Justice Black, who finds censorship of any kind unconstitutional according to the first amendment's clear statement: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...

...I believe it to be honest and authentic, for reasons soon to be given...

...In 1943, Dr...

...Benedict shows, many of our adults cannot "unlearn the wickedness or the dangerousness of sex...

...The Housewife's Handbook, however, like the Cleland book, raises important questions about censorship...

...and should be welcomed if they do...

...Putnam's venture, I should add, would have been unlikely without the prior heroism of Barney Rosset and Grove Press in publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer and defending them in the courts...

...What makes me think the book authentic is that the language takes sad little stabs at gentility, unduplicatable by any hack or ghost writer...

...Otherwise, unlike that of later pornography, the book's style is attractive, with an 18th-century distinction of language...

...In contemporary pornography, the absurdity of posture and numbers increases alarmingly...

...Of course no work of serious literature should ever be banned, but Anthony Lewis, in his article "Sex—and the Supreme Court" in Esquire, June 1963, is probably right in saying that after the Supreme Court's Roth decision "no serious literary work can now be termed constitutionally obscene...

...What the book is most like is those dreary monologues about their troubles that one gets from hotel chambermaids as the penalty for being in the room when they come to clean it...

...It is not surprising," she adds, "that in such a society many individuals fear to use behavior which has up to that time been under a ban and trust instead, though at great psychic cost, to attitudes that have been exercised with approval during their formative years...

...With him I believe that this means exactly what it says, not the more reasonable and limited thing that we have taken it to mean (as we have similarly corrected those Gospel absolutes about turning the other cheek and loving our enemies...

...The book's lengthy recital of the author's opinions about sex in its emotional, institutional and legal aspects is as inauthentic as her slightly prissy language is authentic...

...Leave them to the strangler's hands of the critic...

...I am aware that, the conditions of legislative re-election being what they are, obscenity laws are effectively unalterable at present...

...It is his responsibility to say that Rechy's City of Night is illiterate trash or Burroughs' Naked Lunch sadistic slop...

...Cleland's people might be squirting hot fudge sundaes into one another...

...Anthony is not allowed to tell our youngsters what it feels like when a woman is sexually satisfied, but a whole literature tells them with impunity what it feels like when a woman is beaten, kicked, burned, stabbed or shot...

...It is the frank sexual autobiography or case history of a woman in her late 30s...

...In July, when the New York State Supreme Court declared Cleland's book to be obscene and forbade its sale and distribution in the state, I changed my mind about reviewing it...

...Despite such temporary setbacks as the recent ruling by the New York State Court of Appeals that Tropic of Cancer is obscene, that battle appears to be won...

...Eros seems to have been banned for a series of color photographs of embraces between a naked Negro man and a naked white girl...

...the titillating inspersion of balsamic sweets" is a typical description...

...None of these seem bannable, except perhaps the national anthem...

...But the law is wrong...

...she has taught her various husbands and lovers to "massage" (her word) her clitoris to bring her to orgasm, and, since she is not much of a lubricator either, they massage her with Vaseline (I wonder how much the Chesebrough Manufacturing Company will appreciate the plug...

...The true defense of pornography and obscenity, as they encourage sexuality, is that they are harmless or beneficial...

...When Fanny copulates standing on her head, Memoirs becomes ludicrous...

...In June, the fourth number of Ralph Ginzburg's hardbound quarterly Eros was declared obscene by the United States District Court in Philadelphia, along with another of Ginzburg's publications, The Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity, by "Rey Anthony" (Documentary Books, 240 pp., $4.95...

...I do not believe that they encourage homosexuality or crimes of sexual violence...

...I support him unequivocally in those actions...

...As such it is life-giving, a stimulus to joy and a source of socially-harmless pleasure...

...WRITERS&WRITING In Defense of Pornography By Stanley Edgar Hyman When John Cleland's Fanny Hill was openly published in June, as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Putnam, 319 pp., $6.00), I decided not to review it...

...Ruth Benedict's classic study, "Continuities and Discontinuities in Cultural Conditioning," in Psychiatry in 1938, shows that adolescence is so great a crisis in our culture because our culture is discontinuous, and the adolescent must painfully unlearn one set of standards and learn their opposite...

...These books may teach and encourage a wider range of heterosexual activity, oral and anal as well as genital...

...in fact no publication should be banned...

...But let them be published, and let those who want them buy them and read them...

...Written in 1749, it tells of the sexual adventures of Fanny Hill, which increase in imaginative variety from page to page...

...In regard to masturbation, I do not believe that it requires any such stimulus...

...I agree with the bawd in Memoirs, who "considered pleasure, of one sort or another, as the universal port of destination, and every wind that blew thither a good one, provided it blew nobody any harm...

...Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure seems a good example of pornography according to Judge Woolsey's distinction in the Ulysses case: the exploitation of obscenity with salacious intent...

...It will become habitual to our innocent daughters, or we should hope that it will...

...It is the works "without the slightest redeeming social importance" that must be freed from censorship, or, rather, that sexual stimulation by symbol and image be recognized, in our time of bad marriages and worse non-marriages, as of redeeming social importance...

...Ultimately, I think, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure becomes boring to adults because of the limited possibilities of variation in these events (a fact for which Cleland several times apologizes in the book...

...Although written as a first-person memoir by a courtesan, it makes little effort to be convincing as female sexual psychology (as, say, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook is...

...1 assume that she got the opinions from the pile of marriage manuals that one of her lovers presented to her...

...As Mrs...

...It included sitting in class, taking a shower, sitting in church, urinating, taking tests, finding money, and hearing the national anthem...

...Neither book should be banned...

...As for the fact that so much pornography and obscenity is dreadful, that the Memoirs and the Handbook are not the worst of it but more nearly the best of it, that is a problem for literary criticism, not for jurisprudence...