Dr. Karl Bowman

on pornography

by JOHN LOGAN

Some astonishing targets of the censor bent on sniffing out pornography and legislating morals were cited for the closing session of the California Medical Association's annual meeting in Los Angeles on May 3rd. by Dr. Karl M. Bowman, emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco.

Elsie the Borden cow now wears an apron to conceal her udder. The cherubs in the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, unadorned until a few years ago as they flitted across the ceiling, are decorously covered now. A picture of a Spanish postage stamp bearing a Goya nude is banned by the Post Office Department.

The trend toward censorship is quickening today, and it is dangerous indeed. It seems to be based on the highly questionable thesis that "obscenity" and pornography actually cause an increase in sex crimes—a thesis for which there is no scientific evidence.

There is no way to define obscenity in all cultures, Dr. Bowman said. A Chinese finds the stirring strains of Sousa's march, "The Stars and Stripes Forever," almost unbearably lascivious and suggestive of coitus. An American in Nanking is shocked to hear "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" being played in a funeral procession. In some contemporary cultures a woman customarily bares her breasts in public, but would consider it indecent to reveal her face. And closer to home, John Steinbeck's "Tortilla Flat" is outlawed in some American states and assigned as school reading in others.

Dr. Bowman used these examples to point up the variety of moral stand

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ards that exist among various cultures-and even among different groups in the United States; and to indicate the difficulties inherent in attempts to set rules of censorship for all against the obscene and pornographic.

"The horrors and dangers of censorship are so great that it is far better to let a few dirty books and movies get into circulation than to risk having our liberties destroyed."

"The degree of censorship which is steadily put upon us today is unwholesome; the concept of legislating morals is dangerous." Dr. Bowman expressed the fear that a new wave of censorship is in prospect, based on two recent United States Supreme Court decisions.

In one, the court has held that the constitutional guarantees of freedom of press and speech do not cover literature which, under current community standards, has as its dominant theme material which deliberately appeals to the arousal of sexual excitement.

The other permits the censorship of movies before distribution, rather than after they have been viewed by the public.

Despite widespread opinion to the contrary, he said, there is no real evidence that dirty books-even badly written "hard-core" obscenity-have done any one the slightest bit of harm.

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Nor is there evidence that they havn't. He conceded that some children who are predisposed to mental illness or anti-social activity might be stimulated harmfully by pornography or violent literature.

On the one hand, some so-called experts insist that dirty books and pictures are a cause of juvenile delinquency. On the other, there is some evidence that marriages have been helped by the husband's reading pornography to stimulate his fading sexual interest.

"The effects of various exposures to the obscene are not known," Dr. Bowman said. "In some instances, do many of these exposures of adoles cents and adults to the obscene provide acceptable releases of tension and thereby help to prevent delinquent sex acts and violence?"

Dr. Bowman agreed that hard-core pornography should not be circulated; but he urged that all censorship efforts be left to the courts for decision and not placed in the hands of policemen, or allowed to be pursued by self-appointed morals guardians.

"Adults have self-responsibility for censorship," he said. They can stay away from books or films they find objectionable, but "have no right to interfere with the rights of other people."

He called for a well-financed series of long-range research studies to explore scientifically the psychological effects of sensual stimulation and the role of culture, intelligence, sex and age in exposure to obscenity.

"We really don't know the effects of obscenity in our own culture," he said. "It's time we tried to find out."

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