Obscenity and pornography, << uhb SEHN uh tee or uhb SEE nuh tee, pawr NOG ruh fee, >> are words or images that people consider indecent and shocking. Different things shock different cultures. As a result, there is no single definition for what is obscene or pornographic. The laws concerning obscenity and pornography differ from country to country. This article discusses the laws about obscenity and pornography in the United States.
In the United States, obscenity is considered to be written or spoken words or images that violate community standards of decency. Pornography means sexually explicit materials. Such materials include writings that clearly describe sexual activities. They also include images that show sexual activities in detail. Pornography is aimed primarily at sexual stimulation. Although the words pornography and obscenity are sometimes used in the place of each other, they do not have the same meaning.
Obscenity.
In the United States, there are state and local laws against making, distributing, and selling obscene materials. There are also federal laws against selling obscenity, moving it across state lines, or presenting it on radio or television. These laws are rarely used in the United States today because the legal standard for obscenity has come to apply to fewer and fewer things over time.
The narrowing of obscenity has resulted, at least in part, from the broadening of the limits of what is considered decent. Another important reason for the narrowing of obscenity stems from the desire of the courts to protect freedom of speech.
Legal history for obscenity.
The first federal law in the United States concerning obscenity was the Tariff Act of 1842. This act made it illegal to bring “indecent and obscene” materials into the country. Determining what was indecent was difficult. Sometimes, serious literary works that were published in other countries were banned in the United States. For example, Ulysses, a novel by the Irish author James Joyce, was first published in Paris in 1922. Because of the novel’s explicit sexual content, however, government censors banned the work in the United States until 1933.
In 1957, in the case Roth v. the United States, the Supreme Court of the United States narrowed the definition of obscenity. The court determined obscenity to be material that the average person, when applying contemporary community standards, would find as a whole appealed to prurient (sexually arousing) interests.
The court further clarified the definition of legal obscenity in 1973 in the case of Miller v. California. In the Miller decision, the Supreme Court added more tests besides community standards. For the second test, a work had to show, in a clearly offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined in state law. The third test was that the work, taken as a whole, lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. A work that meets all three of these conditions is considered legally obscene. By this standard, the majority of pornography does not currently qualify as legally obscene. Instead, it counts as a form of expression. It is thus protected as free speech.
Regulating pornography.
Despite the court’s decision in Miller that pornography is protected free speech, there are some regulations on pornography in the United States. For example, there are age requirements for buying pornography. Some extreme forms of pornography, often called hard-core pornography, are considered legally obscene. Finally, it is illegal to make, possess, or try to purchase child pornography.
Some people believe that more pornography should be regulated because pornography shows immoral sexual acts. Others focus on how some pornography shows violence against women—and the degradation of women—as appropriate behavior. For the people in the second example, the main issue is not in showing sex. The problem instead is in showing women as _sex objects—_that is, existing only for the sexual satisfaction of men.
Some people believe that more pornography should be regulated because people who consume it are more likely to commit crimes like rape. Experts have done a number of studies on pornography since the 1970’s. But there is still no general agreement about whether pornography is harmful to individuals or to society.
The Internet has changed the business of pornography. The Internet has made it easier to make and distribute pornography. This ease, especially for distribution, has made enforcing regulations for pornography even more difficult. Today, the legal and moral status of pornography remains controversial.
