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The long legal fight over sex in print and film: from the Hicklin test and the Comstock Act through Ulysses, Roth, Lady Chatterley, Denmark's legalization, Deep Throat and Miller v. California, to the Meese Commission and the internet.
The long legal fight over sex in print and film: from the Hicklin test and the Comstock Act through Ulysses, Roth, Lady Chatterley, Denmark's legalization, Deep Throat and Miller v. California, to the Meese Commission and the internet.
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An English court in Regina v. Hicklin defined obscenity as anything tending to deprave and corrupt those open to immoral influences. The Hicklin test let a single passage condemn a whole work and shaped obscenity law across the English-speaking world for decades.
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The Comstock Act bans sending obscene material through the mail, a category stretched to cover birth-control information and medical texts. Obscenity law becomes a durable tool for suppressing disfavored speech.
In United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, a federal judge ruled James Joyce's novel not obscene, judging a work as a whole and by its literary intent rather than by isolated passages. It began the retreat of the Hicklin test in America.
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Hollywood's Motion Picture Production Code, written in 1930, gained real enforcement in July 1934 through the Production Code Administration. For decades it set moral limits on what American films could show.
The Supreme Court held that obscenity was not protected speech but narrowed it to material whose dominant theme appeals to prurient interest and is utterly without redeeming social value. Roth opened the modern line of obscenity cases.
Penguin Books was prosecuted under Britain's Obscene Publications Act for publishing D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. The jury acquitted, a landmark for the liberalisation of publishing and a symbol of the coming permissive era.
Denmark lifted its remaining bans on pornography, becoming the first country to legalise it fully, after freeing written material in 1967. The predicted wave of crime did not follow, and other countries watched the experiment closely.
The hardcore film Deep Throat became a mainstream event, drawing ordinary audiences and celebrity attention in what the press called porno chic. It also drew prosecutions, sharpening the obscenity fight that Miller v. California would rule on the next year.
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Investigations reveal that the Metropolitan Police's Obscene Publications Squad, nicknamed the "dirty squad," had for years taken bribes from Soho pornographers in exchange for protection, under the leadership of Detective Superintendent William Moody. The scandal becomes one of the defining Met corruption cases of the decade.
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The Supreme Court set a new three-part test for obscenity, turning partly on contemporary community standards and whether a work has serious value. It gave local prosecutors more room to act and shaped American obscenity law for decades.
The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, the Meese Commission, concluded that some pornography caused harm and urged tougher enforcement, reversing a 1970 commission that had found little. Critics attacked its methods and its conclusions as politically driven.
The Supreme Court struck down the anti-indecency parts of the Communications Decency Act, ruling that the internet deserves the highest free-speech protection. It set the terms for how online speech and pornography would be regulated.