greatest curse of censorship is that it produces too many and too trivial art works, all of them inhibitedly pornographic.

The aim is to establish a principled general policy. The states and localities could continue to enforce whatever censorship they please, so long as they do not risk a national suit and are content to do without some of the national culture. The situation, as I envisage it, is somewhat the opposite of the school-integration decision; for the federal court is not intervening in any region, but is insisting that national policy must provide intellectual and his torical leadership unhampered by local prejudices; yet as far as possible it will keep hands off to allow for 'various regional experimentation. This is not the effect of the court's present policy-e.g. in opening Lady Chatterley to the mailsfor that does do violence to local sensibilities, necessarily, in order to give some scope for mature experience. But if there were a more principled general policy, and the courts were not continually obliged to fight, a generation too late, a rear-guard action against morons, the nation could allow the localities to be much more restrictive and self-defensive; in order to protect local option, they could even uphold the postmaster. It is possible in a federal system to decentralize the cultural climate. This allows for experiment and for citizens to have a freer choice of the life that suits their needs; but there must be freedom to experiment. Now we have the worst of the contrary situation: a degenerate centralism, a conformist mass made of the lowest common denominator of the narrow provincial multiplied by the venality of Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

EGALIZED PORNOGRAPHY would, naturally, deplete the criminal market. (As Morris Ernst has speculated, the price on dirty postcards would drop from three for a dollar to three for a nickel.) In my cynical opinion, a first effect would be that the great publishers, networks, and film producers that now righteously keep their

skirts clean and censor 'the prose and poetry of their moral and intellectual-betters, would eagerly cash in. But a fairly quick effect, it is to be hoped, would be that such isolated pornography as a genre would simply become boring and diminish, just as women's short skirts today create not a flurry.

Finally, there would be immense cultural advantages. Less embarrassment, a franker language, and a more sensual feeling would magnify and ennoble all qur art and perhaps bring some life to the popular culture; and conversely, the exposure to such art would help to humanize sexuality and break down the neurotic compartment of "mere lust." In the difficulties of our modern sexual transitionwhere we do not know the best form of the family, the proper attitude toward pre-marital and extra-marital sex, nor even what physical behavior is "normal" -we certainly can profit from the warm fantasy of these subjects in lyric and tragic art. And not least, any social change in the direction of permissiveness and practical approval, which integrates sexual expression with other ordinary or esteemed activities of life, must diminish the need to combine sex with punishment and degradation. To increase the possibility of satisfaction in real situations is to make unnecessary the hipster struggle for violent and apocalyptic experiences.

My argument. is a simple one: a more principled high-level policy on obscenity, which realistically takes into account the tendency of our mores, would facilitate the moral and cultural structuring that can alone solve the problems of hard-core pornography; and it would also have beautiful cultural advantages. Whereas the present attempted repression by the police, administrators, and lower courts not only must continue to fail but keeps creating. the evil it combats. Certainly many earnest people would consider the remedy I suggest to be worse than the disease, and they would prefer to muddle along. I am

not sure that we can.

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