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Mass media: sex and violence
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Mass media: sex and violence
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The question of censorship of sex and violence in the media continues to be hotly debated. If you would like to take a look at more general discussion of the question, please click here: 
As you can see from the table on the right, televised sex is of less concern to British viewers than televised violence. The figures need to be treated with caution, though. It seems likely to me that many respondents may have interpreted the question as meaning 'Which areas do you think should be subject to more censorship?' It seems unlikely that 23% of the great British public would be willing to tolerate snuff movies all day long and that fully 40% would put up with unrestricted porn.
There is, of course, a battery of restrictions on broadcast output in Britain. Though there are fewer restrictions on the print media, they too are subject to the Obscene Publications Act. If you would like to know more about such censorship please look at the section on regulation of the media.
Some while ago I was rummaging through a box of old postcards in a junk shop. One of them showed a line drawing of an Edwardian lady in a long dress descending from a country stile. Next to the stile stood a rather dishevelled little man reaching out his hand to help her. The caption ran: "She: 'Avert your gaze, you rude fellow' He: 'It's all right ma'am, I'm a bus conductor, I've seen it all before.'" This presumably was one of the precursors of the modern saucy seaside postcard, but it was so unsaucy that it took me quite a while to find the sauce - the lady's uncovered ankle. It seems amazing today to think that such an innocent picture might once have been considered a little salacious.
Take a look at the remake of The Postman Always Ring Twice (directed by Bob Rafelson 1981) in which Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange make passionate love on the kitchen table. The scene is not 'explicit', but there is much close-up groping of thighs, tearing off of knickers and passionate sighing and moaning. Compare that with the original 1946 version directed by Tay Garnett, in which the powerful sexual attraction between the two protagonists has to be suggested by a lipstick dropped by Lana Turner rolling across the floor to John Garfield's feet. Consider also the same scene as written in the original novel by James M Cain:
I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers... 'Bite me! Bite me!'
I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs. [end of sex scene]
Compare that with the language and the detail in the average modern bodice-ripper. I happen to consider that the Turner/Garfield film is a better film than the Lange/Nicholson remake and that Cain's understatement has far more impact than much modern explicitness, but that's not the point here. The point is that if Cain's novel had attempted the explicitness we are used to today, it would have been banned and if the film had attempted to show any of the overt sexuality of the 1981 version, it would immediately have fallen foul of the Hays Office Code, which insisted even that, when a man and a woman were pictured on a couch, each should have one foot on the floor. It is hard to imagine that Hays' heart would have survived the infamous shot of Sharon Stone's pubic hair in Basic Instinct
What constitutes an offensive portrayal of sexuality, then, clearly varies over time. It's not always a linear progress towards greater liberalism, though. I can clearly remember being astonished when I first saw the highly erotic harem scenes in DW Griffith's 1916 film Intolerance. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that, from the sexual revolution of the sixties until today, there has ever been a time when there has been freer access to erotic and pornographic material and when there has been more openness about sex. It is impossible to imagine what Lord Reith would have made of The Good Sex Guide with its discussion of the merits of 'doing it doggy fashion', Eurotrash's investigation of Japanese masturbatory aids or Channel 4's network TV screening of an ejaculation (minus the penis). I doubt he would have survived.
As the notion of what is acceptable varies over time, so clearly it varies from one person to another. I can think of little in any portrayal of sex which offends me or disturbs me, except sexual violence and the portrayal of bestiality (sex with animals). I'm sure, though, that some would be prepared to describe the shot of Stone's pubic hair as pornographic.
It might perhaps be possible to draw a distinction between erotica and pornography. No doubt the Adorno/Horkheimer approach of 'critical theory' would see erotica as being the use of sexual imagery to arouse, certainly, but also to make us think, whereas pornography would be the debased output of the mass 'culture industries'. In some of the early debates amongst feminists who were at the time trying to define pornography, some attempt was made to separate off erotica. Gloria Steinem (1978) claims that erotica is 'rooted in passionate love, and thus in the idea of positive choice, free will, the yearning for a particular person' whereas in pornography 'the subject is not love at all, but domination and violence against women'. There is an implication here that erotica must be located within some kind of narrative structure. If we then take photos from a porn mag and use them as illustrations accompanying an erotic story, are they then erotica rather than porn? If pornography necessarily involves violence against women, then, apparently, I have only ever seen erotica - unless, of course, I include all the slasher movies from Psycho onwards which have all involved plentiful violence against women, but are not normally classified as pornography. It does not seem to me that this is a particularly fruitful line of enquiry and in any case the line between 'high' and 'low' culture is not as clearly drawn as it once was, if it is drawn at all. The Obscene Publications Act
The British Obscene Publications Act defines as obscene those publications which are 'likely to deprave or corrupt'. This immediately raises problems, of course. What is depravity? What is corruption? Who might be depraved or corrupted? Note that this is a definition of obscenity, not of pornography. It is presumably possible for a work to be pornographic but not obscene. The Miller Test
In the United States, the battle over the issue of pornography and censorship has been hard and bitterly fought for years. The debate is perhaps particularly intense in the US because on the one side are those who are totally committed to freedom of speech, a fundamental right guaranteed in the First Amendment (there is no such constitutional protection in Britain), and are implacably opposed to censorship (on this, see the new Milos Forman film The People versus Larry Flint); ranged against them is a formidable alliance of vocal, highly articulate and persuasive anti-porn feminists (notably Andrea Dworkin and Professor Catharine McKinnon of the University of Michigan Law School) and the moral right (notably Senator Jesse Helms), an alliance which has achieved a number of signal successes in recent years. Not surprisingly, then it is in the US that we find a significant attempt by a judge to define obscenity (note: obscenity, not pornography). This is the so-called Miller Test, after the case of Miller v California, 1973, in which Justice Warren Burger defined as pornographic a work, which, when taken as a whole,
If a work conforms to this definition, then it may, according to prevailing community standards, be condemned as obscene. If it does not meet this definition, then it is not obscene and even pornography which does not meet this definition enjoys the protection of the First Amendment
Similarly to Justice Burger, Black's Law Dictionary describes pornography as material that "the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest." Random House College Dictionary defines prurient in part as "causing lasciviousness or lust," and lascivious as "arousing or inciting sexual desire."
Even then, once we have a definition which more or less makes sense, the question still remains of whether material which meets the definition should be subject to censorship. In the next section, we'll be considering some of the arguments for and against.
So far, then, we have seen that in the USA, obscenity is defined, but pornography is undefined and protected by the First Amendment if it passes the Miller test. There is a third category, namely indecency, which until the passing of the Communications Decency Act could not be banned, though it could be regulated, for example by being limited by the FCC to, say, evening programming only. The Communications Decency Act would have marked a significant new departure, had it not been struck down by the Supreme Court. There will, however, certainly be more attempts to introduce something very similar into legislation.
Regulation of the media in the UK
Bulletin Board on Film
Censorship - bulletin boards on a variety of film censorship topics; mailing
lists; numerous articles on film and other censorship in the UK
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