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Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right

2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jar363

1945-2314

David T. Courtwright,

Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology

The postwar battles over pornography occurred in two distinct phases. From the late 1950s through the early 1970s social behavior and legal opinion tended toward greater permissiveness. During the ensuing culture war, New Right activists politicized pornography yet failed to check its spread—damning it without damming it, as Whitney Strub puts it. Even so, moral crusaders such as Charles Keating and Republican politicians such as Richard M. Nixon turned pornography into a base-mobilizing national issue. Libertarians found scant evidence for pornography's alleged harms. They dismissed religious objections as constitutionally irrelevant and favored legal adult access. Moral conservatives, who thought pornography degraded the culture as well as individuals, demanded its suppression. Strub reminds the reader, rather too frequently, which side he is on. He depicts antipornography activists as bigoted, homophobic demagogues titillated by their own scantily redacted propaganda. More subtly, he shows how mainstream liberals and second-wave feminists struggled with the issue. Disliking both censorship and hardcore pornography, liberals tried to duck the controversy. They wound up taking the permissiveness rap anyway, thanks in part to their association with the Earl Warren court, whose decisions made obscenity prosecution more difficult. As on many questions of sexuality, feminists divided among themselves. Was pornography a mere sexist annoyance or a root cause of women's oppression? Could it be recast as feminist—or lesbian—“erotica”? If not, was its suppression wise? Those who said yes had their arguments selectively appropriated by conservative moral crusaders. Antipornography feminists such as Andrea Dworkin, who made nice with the Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell, credited conservative women with greater insight into sexism than liberal feminists. In moral politics, the enemy of my enemy was a rhetorically exploitable friend.