Offending the Community

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

Jimmy notes:
"It's easy to make fun of this definition, but in practice it has meant that
most of us can go into our local "adult" bookstore and buy videos and
magazines depicting everything sexual except fisting, pederasty, toilet
tricks and necrophilia. Is this a great country or what?"


I'm not in the habit of seeking after such stuff, but I wonder even about
that.  For a while (I don't know if it's still done), it was not uncommon
to for porn writers to include a preface that analyzed how the work in
question portrays the existential anguish of those who are sexually fixated
on dead bodies--and the like.  (Nabokov parodies this sort of thing in
the preface to LOLITA.)

But my impression is that the 3-part porn definition wasn't invalidated but
was made quite problematic by the Court's later "community standards" doctrine,
which tried to take the easy way out by suggesting that what is OK in NYC might
not be applicable in Peoria (or Mankato).

This has raised great problems for some periodical publishers (note the cases
in THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT, where he's being hauled up to court in Ohio,
Florida, et al.) and it's even more problematic for the Net.  Thus, I have
heard of cases where some Yahoo (and I don't mean the search engine) DA in
Tennessee can indict a BB operator in California and the like.

Porn law seems even more tangled than it's been for the last fifty years--which
is pretty tangled indeed.

We shall see . . . 

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)