Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (51 page)

Despite the society’s boasts, its efforts did little to suppress the flow of pornography. British law was expensive and moved slowly. The one-by-one process of obtaining warrants and then arresting and imprisoning smut peddlers guaranteed the continued supply of sexy material on the streets. In 1845, the society managed to nab a London dealer with 12,346 obscene prints, 393 books, 351 copper plates, 188 lithographic stones, and bundles of letterpress—a good bust, to be sure, but with such volume being traded by just one man (and this was
before
the easy reproduction of photographs became possible), it stands to reason that many others were pursuing the same line of work with equal success.

The society decided that changes in the law were required, so it began to lobby Parliament. In 1857, it pushed through the Obscene Publications Act, a landmark statute that empowered magistrates to confiscate and eradicate obscene material on the spot. In effect, the law turned magistrates into all-purpose censors, fully able to declare any literary or artistic work obscene and order it destroyed. The law had teeth: Hundreds of shops were shut down, as were the “low class, cheap [and] obscene papers hawked by boys” on the streets. As pornographic photography and three-dimensional stereoscopes came into vogue in the 1870s, the society worked with the police to confiscate hundreds of thousands of photos and viewing devices. (One photographer, Henry Hayler, escaped to Berlin in 1874 just as he was about to be arrested. In his studio were thousands of photos, including images depicting Hayler having sex with his wife and sons.)

The law never strikes with surgical precision, especially when sex is involved. Despite the society’s pledge to target only hard-core material, zealous authorities went after anything that smelled of sex, regardless of whether or not it was a serious work of art or scholarship. Ironically, one of the key early prosecutions under the Obscene Publications Act, in 1868, targeted a quasi-religious work published by a militant Protestant society that “exposed” the corruption of Catholic confessionals. It was called
The Confessional Unmasked: Showing the Depravity of the Romish Priesthood, the Iniquity of the Confessional and the Questions Put to Females in Confession.
This anonymously authored pamphlet was sold on street corners by an anti-Catholic zealot named Henry Scott, who seemed to be acting on genuinely religious motives. After a series of appeals, Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn affirmed that
The Confessional Unmasked
should never see the light of day. More importantly for pornography law, his written opinion laid out the method for determining what was obscene:

I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.

This decision, known as
Queen v. Hicklin
, set the standard for British and, later, American pornography law well into the twentieth century. Under
Hicklin
, an entire book could be banned so long as a judge was convinced that one isolated passage could “deprave and corrupt” even one group of readers.
Hicklin
was a censor’s dream. Not only did it cover hard-core pornography, it also allowed the government to ban books by such literary luminaries as Rabelais, Zola, Joyce, and Lawrence.
¹⁴

The year 1857 was also a watershed in French pornography law. Gustave Flaubert was put on trial for his novel
Madame Bovary
, and Charles Baudelaire was hauled into court for his collection of poems,
Les Fleurs du Mal
(
The Flowers of Evil
). While Flaubert got off with a stern warning, the court ordered some poems from Baudelaire’s collection excised. The two trials provide interesting glimpses into France’s market-based definition of indecency.

The key issue in the
Madame Bovary
trial was not explicit descriptions of sex in the book—there were none—but the presumed moral frailty of Flaubert’s female readership. “Who,” asked the prosecutor, rhetorically, “are the readers of M. Flaubert’s novel? Are they men interested in political and social economy? No! The light pages of
Madame Bovary
fall into even lighter hands, into the hands of girls, and sometimes married women.” For that reason, the prosecutor argued that it was Flaubert’s responsibility to use his literary gifts to raise, rather than debase, women’s morals. When confronted with a fictional adulteress such as Emma Bovary, the fear was that women would be steered toward sinful behavior, especially as there were no characters in the novel who forcibly argued that adultery was wrong. As
Madame Bovary
did not elevate the morals of its female readers, the prosecution argued, it degraded them.

Flaubert’s defense attorney agreed with the premise that literature should be uplifting, but he also claimed that the author depicted vice only to show how wrong it was. The argument worked to the extent that Flaubert was acquitted and publication of the book permitted, but the court still had this to say:

The work in question merits severe blame, since the mission of literature should be to beautify and enhance the spirit by elevating the intelligence and purifying morals rather than to inspire disgust for vice by offering a portrait of the disorder that may exist in society.

Flaubert’s first published masterpiece may have been too “real” for respectable French tastes, but the controversy was a winning formula for launching his literary career. The trial made him famous, and the book a hit.

Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du Mal
was seized soon after it was released, in June 1857. The poet went to trial on the same morals charges as those leveled a few months earlier against Flaubert, with the same prosecutor in charge, but the two cases went in different directions. Unlike the new literary form of the novel, which was associated with female readers, poetry in mid-nineteenth-century France was thought to be read by men, who were thought to be less easily corrupted. Baudelaire agreed: “This book was not written for my wives, my daughters or sisters; nor for my neighbor’s wives, daughters or sisters. I leave that task to those interested in confusing virtuous acts with beautiful language.” Because Baudelaire’s market was presumed to be masculine, the prosecution could not argue that he threatened delicate female souls. At the same time,
Les Fleurs du Mal
was far sexier stuff than
Madame Bovary
, and the prosecutor still had a lot to work with.

In the end, six of Baudelaire’s most explicitly erotic poems were suppressed. Given the moral climate of the times, it is impossible to see how a poem describing the sucking of hemlock from a woman’s “sharp breast” (
La Léthé
), or one in which the poet threatens to drip venom into a woman’s labia (
Á celle qui est trop gaie
), or poems depicting lesbianism (
Delphine et Hippolyte
and
Lesbos
) could have escaped the censor’s knife. It would take nearly a century before Baudelaire was officially exonerated and the six forbidden poems allowed back into French editions of the book. In the meantime, his poems have become, like
Madame Bovary
, part of that select group of canonical works that few educated people in Europe or the United States would admit to not having read.
¹⁵

THE CRUSADE AGAINST pornography in the United States was dominated by one outsized character: the Brooklyn dry-goods salesman and Olympian busybody Anthony Comstock. The United States’ most intrusive antiobscenity law was named after him, and for decades he held a powerful position with the government in order to enforce it. His strict and often bullying methods also earned him a place in the English lexicon with the word “Comstockery.” During his forty-year career as an antismut crusader and protector of American youth, Comstock proudly claimed to have confiscated sixteen tons of “vampire literature,” organized more than four thousand arrests, and caused the conviction of enough people to fill sixty train coaches. He also caused the suicide of about fifteen people.

As a young Union soldier during the Civil War, Comstock quickly earned the enmity of his peers for pouring his whiskey rations onto the ground and needling officers to sanitize soldier entertainments. “Seems to be a feeling of hatred by some of the boys,” he wrote in his diary, “constantly falsifying, persecuting, and trying to do me harm.” The hostility of his fellow soldiers only fanned Comstock’s desire to do God’s work. When he returned from the war, he set himself up in the dry-goods business, but that never went very well. His true métier was prying into the lives of others and getting them put in jail. At this he excelled more than just about anyone. As soon as he moved to Brooklyn, he went to work on closing saloons that were doing business on Sunday. He also developed a lifelong obsession with pornography, and set it as his personal mission to end the trade by any means necessary.

SEAL OF SHAME

Building on “scientific” theories about the harmfulness of masturbation, New York’s Society for the Suppression of Vice was responsible for the confiscation of sixteen tons of “vampire literature” and the conviction of obscenity of “enough persons to fill a passenger train of sixty-one coaches.” The society, which had its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, also targeted purveyors of birth control information and medical handbooks.
©TOPFOTO

Comstock did reasonably well and bagged several convictions, but two things were holding him back: money and the law. Bringing down an entire industry was not cheap. Purchases had to be made, raids organized, and lawsuits pursued. He needed an underwriter. He also needed to surmount the pesky civil rights of citizens. Federal obscenity law was already restrictive, but it excluded newspapers and, to Comstock and his fellow moralists’ horror, did not ban traffic in “rubber goods,” contraceptive information, or advertisements by abortionists. Even worse, federal law did not mention search and seizure. As described, British law had already been changed to allow authorities to nab and burn obscene materials almost at will. Comstock wanted the U.S. government to adopt similar laws. In 1872, he found the perfect partner in the New York YMCA, which had money and was no less driven to purge society of immorality.

The match could not have been better. The YMCA had long been in the smut-bashing business. While Comstock was irritating his fellow Union soldiers with his moralizing, the YMCA was pushing for a ban on the use of the U.S. mail to send “vulgar” or “indecent” materials to military camps. In 1868, it had also lobbied for a stiff New York state law against trading in pornography. Comstock went on the YMCA payroll, taking in twice what he had earned in his day job, plus expenses. They also worked together to charter the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1873, with Comstock as its secretary and public face. Comstock was only twenty-eight years old when the society was formed, but he had already found his place in life. He would remain there for forty-three years and would soon become a nationally known—if often reviled—figure.

The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and Comstock put their efforts in terms of saving the nation’s youth from the devil. In his monumentally tedious manifesto,
Traps for the Young
, Comstock declares:

Satan is more interested in the child than many parents are. Parents do not stop to think or look for their children in these matters while the arch-enemy is thinking, watching, and plotting continually to effect their ruin. Thoughtless parents, heedless guardians, negligent teachers, you are each of you just the kind that old Satan delights to see placed over the child. He sets his base traps right in your very presence, captures and ruins your children, and you are all criminally responsible.

Comstock’s ideas did not come out of the clear blue sky. The fear of pornography was closely related to the ongoing mania against masturbation. Comstock himself had masturbated so furiously in his youth that he believed he might be driven to suicide. His own experiences seem to have strongly influenced his later work. In his book
Frauds Exposed
, he wrote that obscenity is like a cancer: It “fastens itself upon the imagination . . . defiling the mind, corrupting the thoughts, leading to secret practices of most foul and revolting character, until the victim tires of life and existence is scarcely endurable.” He warned: “Every new generation of youth is sent into the world as sheep in the midst of wolves. Traps are laid for them in every direction . . . [O]nce in the trap, the victim will love it and press greedily forward.”