Pornography is not objectionable simply because it arouses sexual desire or lust or prurience in the mind of the reader or spectat...or; this is a silly Victorian notion. A great many nonpornographic works--including some parts of the Bible--excite sexual desire very successfully. What is distinctive about pornography is that, in the words of D.H. Lawrence, it attempts "to do dirt on [sex].... [It is an] insult to a vital human relationship." In other words, pornography differs from erotic art in that its whole purpose is to treat human beings obscenely, to deprive human beings of their specifically human dimension. That is what obscenity is all about. It is light years removed from any kind of carefree sensuality--there is no continuum between Fielding's Tom Jones and the Marquis de Sade's Justine. These works have quite opposite intentions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo...neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The daily lesson of slum life, visualised, reiterated, of low standards, vile living, obscenity, profanity, impurity, is bound to ...be dwarfing and debasing to the children who are in the midst of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: th...is is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Obscenity" is a legal term for a category of sexually explicit art and entertainment that the Supreme Court has said is without F...irst Amendment protection. According to those nine wise jurists, obscenity is sexually explicit material that lacks any serious artistic or other value, is patently offensive, and appeals to "shameful or morbid" sexual appetites, as judged by the standards of a particular community. Because pornographic works may arouse only healthy sexual urges, may have serious artistic value, and may not be considered patently offensive in a particular community, most pornography is not legally obscene.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the Establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions ...of its own morality, but to those of another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of our major professional sports, golf alone retains the lyrical innocence with which it began centuries ago among Scottish herdsm...en slapping the gutta-percha ball around the bonny banks. Golf alone, despite huge purses, has remained immune to the violence and vulgarity that have turned other sports into spectacles of sanctioned mayhem. The game, as Andrew Carnegie believed, is an "indispensable adjunct of high civilization." No other group of professionals is self-ruled by an honor code in which players call penalties on themselves. Golf etiquette prevails. Can football etiquette or hockey etiquette be imagined? Golf has no Charles Barkley, who has spit at fans. It has no John McEnroe, the obscenity-shouter, nor does it have enforcers, late-hitters, or self-absorbed clods who moan that they aren't paid enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although every organized patriarchal religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of mysogyny to the myth of woman-hate, wo...man-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic Church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity--an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »