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The Triumph of the Visual: Stages and Cycles in the Pornography Controversy from the McCarthy Era to the Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Extract

Since Reconstruction there has always been an antipornography movement in the United States. From the heyday of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in the 1880s, to the debates over the Hays code in Hollywood in the 1930s, to the founding of Women Against Pornography in 1979, our society has consistently struggled to resolve two crucial and interrelated questions: First, does pornography incite people to behave in “antisocial” ways or to commit crimes against individuals and society? Second, should the state regulate or censor materials it regards as obscene or pornographic? These debates have always been compelling, drawing authorities from just about everywhere in our culture. Many participants in this running controversy have devoted their lives to its resolution. None has come even remotely close to settling the matter. Today the courts and legislatures continue to argue the pornography question much as they did in the 1860s, when jurists first established that the test of obscenity lay in whether a book has depraved and corrupted the minds of the vulnerable.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1995

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References

Notes

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