ordinary decency

Recent news reports told of the arrest in New York of a photographic concern having a mailing list of many thousands of names and a comparable list of photographs in stock on the ostensible charge of violating the standards of ordinary decency. Discounting the enormous numbers as an example of reportorial enthusiasm, one can see that the extent of the business is large and doubtless it can be matched in California and other places. Complaints seem to have come mainly from parents who fear for the morals of their children and who call upon the police in considerable numbers for protection from the nefarious influences. It seems to me that much confusion is due to the overlooking of certain points. The first is the failure to distinguish between the nude and that which is sexually exciting. I have seen laborers. in the fields of certain foreign countries working entirely nude and without the slightest attention being paid to them. Nudist magazines and moving pictures with no suggestion of sex go practically unnoticed in the cities of this country until "moral crusades" call attention to them, while moving picture magazines unnoticed by the same "crusades" having the bodies of the actors and actresses decently (?) covered just reek with sex stimulation. I once saw a Spanish vaudeville show wherein a comedian sang a song describing circles with his arm beginning with the hair of his

beloved and descending one step each time he sang a verse. He had the audience convulsed to an ever higher pitch until he made the mistake of including the genital region when he lost the audience in one instant like a balloon with a pin stuck in it. Half hidden and suggestive devices are always more exciting than a frank and open treatment of a subject. The open acceptance of nudity in our society would do much to solve the present confusion. To the nudist the striptease with its vulgarity makes no appeal. Fortunately nudity may no longer be defined legally as obscene according to a recent authority. The second point to which I would call attention lies in the expectation of parents that the government protect their children from contacts which they consider harmful. I have heard teachers discuss the advisability of presenting to their classes portions of classical literature which are vivid in their sexual meanings. How soon parents and teachers forget their own childhood and youth when secluded groups of men and boys from their earliest years engage in conversations besides which classical literature is pale indeed. I do not know about the female contingent in this respect, but I suspect they are not far behind the males. Attitudes of mind and points of view in children are established basically in the home and the only real and effective protection against evil in any form is that of

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