tion of children and adolescents. But con sider this issue in terms of an accepted commonplace of contemporary pedagogy, that we must provide the child a “structured permissiveness" to grow in: permissiveness so that he can act without fear, shame, and resentment, and learn by his mistakes; and a structure of firm parental morals and culture, how "we" behave, with which he can identify when he needs security and guidance in his anxiety and confusion. A good parent rarely sees a clear and present danger of the sort of being hit by a car or swallowing poison). Most dubious associations and behaviors) of a child outgrow themselves in his ongoing career in a moral and cultural environment. And indeed, this ongoing career is the only real solution for him; whereas a "protective" parental attitudé will almost surely communicate the parents' anxieties and complicate things further.

If this is a correct analysis, then the recent liberal" decision on Lady Chatterley's Lover is inadequate. It is not permissive in the right way and it does not provide a firm moral and cultural support. I am urging the court to re-examine its own anxieties and ask if the pornographic is in fact, in our times, obscene.

UDGE BRYAN'S exoneration of Lady Chatterley takes its dọctrine from Woolsey on Ulysses (1933) and Brennan in Roth vs. United States (1957). Let us consider these in turn.

Judge Woolsey's method in clearing Ulysses is as follows: he defines the obscene as the pornographic, as "tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts," and he proceeds to show that the book does neither but "is a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of 'mankind." Let us postpone the literary criticism till the next section, but here stop short at the definition of obscenity;

The notion that sexual impulse or stirring sexual impulse is a bad thing comes from an emotional climate in which it was generally agreed that it would be better if sexuality did not overtly exist, when people bathed and slept fully clothed, and a bull was called a he-cow. Then anything which was sexual in public, as by publication of "detailed representation in words or pictures," violated society's self-image and was certainly obscene. In our times such a notion cannot define obscenity. The pornographic is not ipso facto the obscene. As Judge Jerome Frank pointed out in 1949, "No sane man thinks that the arousing of normal sexual desires is socially dangerous." We live in a culture where all High Thought insists on the. beauty and indeed hygienic indispensability of sexual desires, and where a vast part of commerce is busy in their stimulation. Nevertheless, Judge Bryan on Chatterley repeats the doctrine in 1960! This leaves us in utter confusion. For consider: Bryan goes on to define the "prurient ... that is to say, shameful or morbid interest in sex"; but, if the stirring of desire is defined, and therefore treated, as obscene, how can a normal person's interest in sex be anything else but shameful? This is what shame is, the blush at finding one's impulse to be unacceptable. Only a brazen person would not be ashamed. So the court corrupts. It is a miserable social policy. I would rather have Lawrence condemned than defended by such reasoning.

But it is Woolsey's second clause, "leading to lustful thoughts," that is the more interesting, for this is, the likely and immediate effect of literary or pictorial stimulation. Bluntly, "lustful thoughts" means incitement to masturbate; and I guess that in the overwhelming majority of cases, this is the chief use of pornography. Let us again look to history. In the 19th century, all sexual facts were suspect, but masturbation was a mortal sin and the prelude to insanity. Let me quote from a great, goodhumored, and liberal man, the prince of the Enlightenment: "Nothing weakens

the mind as well as the body so much as the kind of lust directed toward oneself. It is entirely at variance with the nature of man. We must place it before the youth in all its horribleness," etc., etc. (Immanuel Kant, On Education). Contrast with this a philosopher of our own day: "Left to itself, infantile masturbation has, apparently, no bad effect upon health and no discoverable bad effect upon character; the bad effects which have been observed in both respects are, it seems, wholly attributable to attempts to stop it" (Bertrand Russell, Education and the Good Life). But this is pretty nearly the identical opinion of Benjamin Spock, M.D., in his pocket, book of Child Care which is, I suppose, in every middle-class home in America (more than 12,000,000 copies of the paperback have been sold). And since the connection between pornography and juvenile delinquency is much touted, let me quote the identical opinion of a revered criminologist: "Masturbation is a habit without deleterious effects in itself, yet a source of behavior difficulties because of strong social disapproval" (Donald Taft).*

My point is not that the habit is good; it is morally otiose. But when the court says that stirring to masturbate is obscene, certainly the court corrupts. It is claimed that the court must judge according to public sentiment; but there is plenty of better public sentiment. Why must the police and the courts follow the worst part of the population instead of leading with the best? A more enlightened court would not solve these problems any more than it has created integration in the South; but, by the same example, a good decision is not irrelevant.

HIS BRINGS us to the doctrine of Roth vs. United States. The standards to be applied in determining obscenity, Bryan quotes Judge Brennan, are "whether to the average person, applying contemporary standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to 'pru-

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rient interest." Part of this sentence, "the dominant theme taken as a whole," is used by Bryan to prove that Lady Chatterley is a "serious" work, following the tactics of Woolsey, and again let us defer the literary criticism. Here let us stop at "applying contemporary standards," which is an attempt on the part of the court to

cope with the changes in emotional climate that we have just been discussing. As Judge Bryan puts it, "Much of what is now accepted would have shocked the community to the core a generation ago." core-a I don't think that this is a sufficient account. What is the history?

As one reviews the many cases in James 1 Kilpatrick's The Smut Peddlerst (which, despite its outrageous title and a vulgar first chapter, has many good pages), one is struck by how, year after year, this theme of changing standards recurs in the decisions: "What was regarded as indecent in the days of the Floradora Sextette, is decent in the days of the fan dance." But what is most striking is that in the long / chain of decisions over two generations, the standard becomes increasingly broader, in almost every respect: the bathing suits more scanty, the four-letter words more tolerable, the descriptions of the sexual act more realistic, the "unnatural" themes more mentionable. It is just this tendency through time that the courts fail to take into account as they judge each case. Therefore they are always behind, they miss the essential nature of the phenomena they are judging, and this has consequences.

The fact is that our generations are living through a general breakdown of repressive defenses, increasingly accelerating; and therefore a deepening social

*Let me spell out the damage. According to sexologists the dangers in this act come from (a). inhibited performance, (b) guilt and shame of the act, (c) guilt about accompanying images. Our public policy obviously enhances the first two conditions, but it is also importantly responsible for the guilt-inducing images, for it associates lust with punishment and degradation and so creates sado-masochistic thoughts.

† Doubleday, 312 pp., $3.95.

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