The Traffic in Pornography

Reprinted from the Manchester Guardian, March 19, 1959

Sir,

There seems to be some confusion of issues among your correspondents on literary censorship. Pornography is easily definable by observation-it is the name given to sexual literature which someone wishes to suppress. As such it is not a priori normal or abnormal in content: the main reason that deviations figure so much in our sexual literature, lawful and unlawful, is that they are far less likely to be attacked by moralists than explicit references to normal sexual behaviour. Indeed, sadistic or similar topics which have no explicit genital reference are not likely to be attacked at all.

The supreme insult to public morality is the depiction of normal coition, especially in terms which suggest that it is free from physical, mental, or moral danger-other subjects are objectionable in descending order as their genital reference declines, and fully rationalised paraphilias like disciplinary sadism are subjects for the enthusiasm of conference delegates whom any reproductive allusion would outrage.

This convention has produced a literature in Britain and America which must be anthropologically unique, and which is based on very accurate knowledge of the natural history of censorship. In fact, the history of obscenity laws seems to be that of a struggle between public demand

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for an explicit literature of normal sexuality and the determination of a minority to frustrate it, while the art (if one can call it that) of the pornographer lies in the skillful addition to tolerated, patriotic, or even devout, abnormality of enough normal sexual reference to make it sell.

Most cultures have had a specifically sexual literature, and the wish for it in our own is probably not confined to people seeking substitutes. Such literature is both ideo-motor (especially in males) and a source of information; apart from the greater intensity of the drive involved it may well be desired for the same reason that there is a literature of football or of ballroom dancing-it is enjoyed and may improve our game. We have a racket in pornography, much of it shoddy and some of it psychologically undesirable, because it is prohibitedthough, even so, few pornographic works can have done as much psychiatric mischief as the works of edification which were formerly distributed to schoolboys in the interests of moral hygiene. The drive behind the prohibition is directed selectively against its normal, not its neurotic, side"sex and violence" literature is attacked in proportion to its content, not of violence, but of sex.

From what we now know of its causes, the state of mind which makes people clamour for suppression of sex-