Obscenity, Freedom, and Responsibility

Abstract

FIRST PARAGRAPH(S)|Western civilization has known both obscenity and pornography at every stage of its development. There is an abundance of material in the Old Testament on the subject of pornography in its original sense of writings about prostitutes and their patrons,and there are many references which are certainly obscene if not pornographic in the wider sense as the term is generally understood today. Erotic songs and poems were in a very real sense part of the fabric of early Greek culture. One need not look far for pornographic references in the works of the classical Greek writers. Euripides in his Electra and Sophocles in Oedipus Rex, for example, are much concerned with the subject of incest, while Aristophanes introduces many obscenities into his plays. Lysistrata, first produced in Athens toward the end of the long war with Sparta, is frankly sexual and abounds with pornographic illusions. In passing it may be noted that the unexpurgated book of the play was liable to seizure by the United States Customs during the first thirty years of the present century, and as late as 1955 post office lawyers advised that the work was plainly obscene and calculated to deprave the morals of the reading public...