Offending the Community

[doktor at primenet.com]

Don Larsson recalls 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.)

My understanding is that before the _Miller_ test I quoted, the third part
of the obscenity test was "uttlerly without reeming social importance."
Cf. Tom Leherer:

        "As the judge remarked the day that he
        acquitted my Aunt Hortense,
        To be smut
        it must be ut-
        terly without redeeming social importance."

Wily publishers began putting those pseudo-psychological prefaces into
their books so that it could not be claimed that their books were "utterly"
without redeeming social importance.  _Miller_ refined this part of the
test in two ways, first by noting that the work had to be taken as a whole,
and second by dropping the formulation "utterly without redeeming social
importance" and substituting "lacks serious literary, artistic, political,
or scientific value."  That's why you probably haven't seen such prefaces
recently.

Bob Orlowsky is right on when he says that government prosecution of
contentious Pyn-heads is unlikely, to say the least.  My fear is that even
if the CDA is struck down (which I think is probable), the court will do so
in such a way that further erodes the notion that meritorious but offensive
works are covered by the First Amendment just as surely as non-offensive
works.

--Jimmy

http://www.angelfire.com/oh/Insouciance/index.html