Read You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos Online
Authors: Robert Arthur
Buoyed by the scientific backing of Kinsey’s publications and the softening of popular attitudes, and seeking relief from the obscenity cases clogging the courts, judges began critiquing the extremely broad obscenity test—obscenity was anything that could arouse anybody.
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In 1949 a spirited Philadelphia judge, Curtis Bok, wrote a scathing critique arguing that this test was ridiculous because some “moron” could be aroused by a “seed catalogue.” Regarding inadvertently harming children, he wrote that by the time his own young daughter would be interested in reading adult books she would have learned the “biologic facts of life.” As Bok put it, there is:
. . . something seriously wrong at home if those facts have not been met and faced and sorted by then . . . . I should prefer that my
own three daughters meet the facts of life and the literature of the world in my library than behind a neighbor’s barn, for I can face the adversary there directly.
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In 1959 the Supreme Court first responded to the lower judges’ complaints by refining the test for obscenity. The high court would continue its modifications in later cases and by the mid-1960s it was clear that literature could no longer be censored by local police departments.
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Just as the Great Depression put the pettiness of criminalizing personal vices into perspective in the 1930s, the Vietnam War’s military draft had the same effect in the 1960s. It was difficult to fathom how the government could force Americans to risk their lives “for freedom” in Vietnam, while simultaneously denying them the freedom to read, view, and have sex however they pleased.
In 1965 the Supreme Court declared Connecticut’s ban on contraception unconstitutional,
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and in so doing announced that implicit in the Bill of Rights was a right to privacy. This reasoning would play a part in blocking government interference in such notable cases as
Roe v. Wade
in 1973, which protected a woman’s right to an abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy, and
Lawrence v. Texas
in 2003, which protected consensual adult sexual contact such as male-on-male anal sex.
Although the battle over censorship still continues over pornography and live adult entertainment,
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the wall had been broken. The words and images released by the courts would continuously chip away at Victorian prudishness and the sexist double standard.
This battle over censorship was integral to the “hippie” youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The hippies’ roots were in 1950s San Francisco, where avant-garde writers collected around the City Lights paperback bookshop in North Beach. They called themselves Beats, and would meet to discuss philosophy and experiment with literary forms and non-conventional sex.
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They were disillusioned with mainstream
values and were inspired by the black hipster of Northern ghettoes who, excluded by white society, listened to jazz and had liberal views on sex and drugs.
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In 1957 City Lights owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti published a book titled
Howl and Other Poems
, by the Beat Allen Ginsberg. The local police captain arrested a City Lights clerk for selling it and issued a warrant for Ferlinghetti.
Howl
opened with the famous lines, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,” and went on to celebrate homosexual desire. Among Ginsberg’s generation were those:
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks
and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may . . .
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The presiding judge, Clayton Horn, found Ginsberg’s book had some redeeming social importance, and therefore was not obscene, adding “life is not encased in one formula where everybody acts the same or conforms to a particular pattern.”
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The failed
Howl
prosecution backfired immensely by drawing national media attention to the Beats. By the early 1960s, San Francisco was teeming with would-be writers sporting the Beat look of black turtleneck, goatee, and berets.
In August 1965, the young Beat Jefferson Poland staged a nude “wade-in” with two women at a San Francisco beach.
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Poland was a founder of the Sexual Freedom League, and believed that anti-nudity ordinances were a denial of basic civil liberties and contributed to sexual repression. With a cheering crowd and several press cameramen as witnesses, Poland waded into the icy water with only a flower behind his ear. The crowd held a banner that read, “Why be ashamed of your body?” and chanted, “Sex is clean! Law’s obscene!” Upon returning to shore Poland and his cohorts were arrested and the story made the national news, as he had hoped.
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Poland was arguably the first hippie.
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His natural look with the long hair, flower, and brazen nudity was a contrast to the prevailing sophisticated look of the Beats and the jackets and ties of ordinary college males. Poland’s sex movement would never be supported by mainstream youth, however, his style and his method of peaceful demonstration would become characteristic of the hippie movement and its protest of the Vietnam War.
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Contrary to popular perception, hippies were not promiscuous. Although the term free love was bastardized to mean having sex with anybody at anytime, most hippies were followers of Victoria Woodhull’s free love, that is, sex was legitimated by love, not marital vows.
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Hippies believed sex was innocent and not to be hidden, but still believed it was best when in a relationship.
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One woman who identified herself as a hippie at Yale in 1971 explained the unwritten rule of the counterculture: “You were supposed to be in a monogamous relationship—serial monogamy, maybe— but monogamy nonetheless. There’s only one woman I ever met who really felt like ‘anyone at anytime.’ I considered her a rogue.”
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In fact, the vision of the liberated woman as someone who would have sex with all comers was likely fostered by males desiring easy sex. This male ideal was manifest in the sexually voracious science fiction heroine Barbarella of the 1960s, who would subdue foes by disrobing. Many women found Barbarella insulting, as well as hippie slogans like “Free Land, Free Dope, Free Women,” and “Peace, Pussy, Pot.”
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Sexist attitudes were prolific in the counterculture of the late 1960s. Women who proposed to add women’s rights to the more popular causes of racial equality and ending the Vietnam War faced catcalls such as “she just needs a good screw,” “take it off!” and “take her off the stage and fuck her!”
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The cartoonist Robert Crumb said about San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, ground zero of the hippie movement, “Guys were running around saying, ‘I’m you and you are me and everything is beautiful so get down and suck my dick.’”
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In 1967 a resident gave an even more sinister view. In addition to claiming that rape was as common as “bullshit” on Haight Street, he wrote:
Pretty little sixteen-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about and gets picked up by a seventeen-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed
again and again, then feeds her three thousand [micrograms of acid] and raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the night before last.
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The crux of the sexual “revolution” was that the double standard was greatly weakened and premarital sex (independent of marital expectations) was acceptable behavior for middle-class women,
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so it’s not surprising that one historian credits its launch to the 1962 publishing of
Sex and the Single Girl
by Helen Gurley Brown.
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,
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In
Sex and the Single Girl
, Brown brazenly admitted to having a long history of casual sex before finally marrying at the age of thirty-seven. Not only did she admit to it, but she proudly reveled in it. She described her first attempt at intercourse with a male relative at age eleven,
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and the more successful episodes that occurred frequently through her schooling years and eighteen different secretarial jobs. Perhaps the most provocative aspect of her book was not that she had premarital sex, but that she did and there were no negative ramifications.
The previous format for presenting casual sex was demonstrated by the 1956 novel
Peyton Place
, by Grace Metalious. It used sexual intrigue and foul play to become a best-selling sensation.
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Metalious detailed the physically mature seventh-grade character, Betty Anderson, pleading for rough sex from her wealthy boyfriend, Rodney Harrington:
“Come on, honey,” she whimpered. “Come on, honey,” and his mouth and hands covered her. “Hard,” she whispered. “Do it hard, honey. Bite me a little. Hurt me a little.”
“Please,” murmured Rodney against her skin. “Please. Please.”
His hand found the V of her crotch and pressed against it.
“Please,” he said, “please.”
It was at this point that Betty usually stopped him. She would put both her hands in his hair and yank him away from her, but she did not stop him now. Her tight shorts slipped off as easily as if they
had been several sizes too large, and her body did not stop its wild twisting while Rodney took off his trousers.
“Hurry,” she moaned. “Hurry. Hurry.”
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THE FILTHY SPEECH MOVEMENT:
Fuck You
Poland’s disrobement was inspired by the publicity garnered by the short-lived filthy-speech movement, which had just occurred on the nearby campus of the University of California at Berkeley.
The filthy-speech movement began when a Beat was arrested for holding up a paper that read “fuck.” (The Beats’ artistic appreciation of the word “fuck” can be seen in the title of the 1962 Beat journal
Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts
.)
Four students were then arrested for setting up a “Fuck Fund” table to raise money for the arrested Beat, and reading aloud the final passage from D.H. Lawrence’s respected
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(1928), with lines such as:
My soul softly flaps in the little pentecost flame with you, like the peace of fucking. We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being between the sun and the earth. But it’s a delicate thing, and takes patience and the long pause.
A fraternity was also harassed for passing out “I Like Pussy” buttons, as was a campus magazine that wrote an article on the controversy called, “To Kill a Fuckingword.”
—David Allyn,
Make Love, Not War
(2000), pp. 48–49.
This passage proves that 1950s entertainment was not limited to sexless utopias, however, it also reflects the 1950s in that on the very same page Anderson learns that she is pregnant. Lust was appropriately rewarded by fate.
Unlike Anderson, Brown was not fictional, and by happily and proudly announcing that she had an active sex life she lessened the guilt of countless similar women who had negatively viewed themselves as “sluts.”
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Brown would become editor of
Cosmopolitan
, and during her thirty-two-year
helm the magazine was transformed into a successful publication that trumpeted female sexuality in articles like “Career-Proof an On-the-Job Affair” and “Phone Sex and the Single Girl.”
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Despite being the most common sexual activity, masturbation’s approval in the public sphere has been slow in coming. Even though the myth of its harmfulness has largely withered, it is still a source of guilt and embarrassment for millions.
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The extent that it has become accepted is due in large part to two pioneering artists who vividly exposed the marvel of masturbation.
One of the first public admissions of masturbation was made by the fictional character Alexander Portnoy in Philip Roth’s 1969 novel
Portnoy’s Complaint
. In describing his life to his psychoanalyst, Portnoy revealed:
Then came adolescence—half my waking life spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet bowl, or into the soiled clothes in the laundry hamper, or splat, up against the medicine-chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers so I could see how it looked coming out. Or else I was doubled over my flying fist, eyes pressed closed but mouth wide open, to take that sticky sauce of buttermilk and Clorox on my tongue and teeth—though not infrequently, in my blindness and ecstasy, I got it all in the pompadour, like a blast of Wildroot Cream Oil. Through a world of matted handkerchiefs and crumpled Kleenex and stained pajamas, I moved my raw and swollen penis, perpetually in dread that my loathsomeness would be discovered by someone stealing upon me just as I was in the frenzy of dropping my load. Nevertheless, I was wholly incapable of keeping my paws from my dong once it started the climb up my belly. In the middle
of class I would raise a hand to be excused, rush down the corridor to the lavatory, and with ten or fifteen savage strokes, beat off standing up into a urinal. At the Saturday afternoon movie I would leave my friends to go off to the candy machine—and wind up in a distant balcony seat, squirting my seed into the empty wrapper from a Mounds bar. On an outing of our family association, I once cored an apple, saw to my astonishment (and with the aid of my obsession) what it looked like, and ran off into the woods to fall upon the orifice of the fruit, pretending that the cool and mealy hole was actually between the legs of that mythical being who always called me Big Boy when she pleaded for what no girl in all recorded history had ever had. “Oh shove it in me, Big Boy,” cried the cored apple that I banged silly on that picnic. “Big Boy, Big Boy, oh give me all you’ve got,” begged the empty milk bottle that I kept hidden in our storage bin in the basement, to drive wild after school with my vaselined upright. “Come, Big Boy, come,” screamed the maddened piece of liver that, in my own insanity, I bought one afternoon at a butcher shop and, believe it or not, violated behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson.
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