Obscenity Is a Mote in the Eye of the Beholder

Sacchi Green

"Obscene: offensive or outrageous to accepted standards of decency or modesty.”

I don’t believe in obscenity. I mean, I don’t believe it actually exists. How can you take seriously a concept that can only be defined by using other nebulous terms? “Offensive,” “outrageous,” “decency,” “modesty”—even “accepted standards”—are all imprecise concepts dependent on the fluctuating perceptions of individuals and groups. What’s considered obscene changes over time and differs with different cultures. We might as well say that obscenity is whatever we happen to think is “icky,” especially as it pertains to sex or, interestingly, to wealth. Once in a while the term is applied to unusually violent and bloody crime as well, but sex has by far the highest ‘ick” rating, with money a distant though substantial second. Food, in unusual abundance, merits the term occasionally, as an indulgence that like sex and wealth can be perceived as being greatly overdone.

Imprecise as it is, the term “obscene” has its uses. The legal use, in penalizing sexual art, literature, performance, etc., faces the difficulty of determining just what the “accepted” standards are at any given time in any given community, but that doesn’t stop the practice, which boils down to citing the standards of the most assertive and influential members of a community, or at least the standards they claim to support. The term is also useful for those who consider some levels of wealth to be obscene, but oddly enough there doesn’t seem to be any legal objection to obscene wealth.

For we erotica writers, the concept of obscenity is both a burden and a benefit. The burden is that our work may be denounced and suppressed if it’s judged to be obscene. The benefit is that there is, of course, always a fascination with over-the-top indulgence, and our fictional portrayals of what the stodgier elements of the population consider “icky” and even evil are relatively safe ways to indulge in sexual overindulgence. This fascination seems to extend to obscene levels of wealth, too, so much so that sex plus wealth seems to be a genre of its own these days, the most popular form of erotica, which makes sense since both sex (often) and wealth (always) are associated with power differentials. This is too bad for those of us who find immense wealth somewhat on the icky side, bit it’s certainly understandable.

There’s another side to this. Obscenity in both the legal sense and the seductively transgressive sense tends to focus on the lower levels of society which erotica writers are assumed to inhabit. Henry Miller wrote Tropic of Cancer based on his experiences in the struggling Bohemian culture of 1920s-1930s Paris, the book that brought the question of obscenity to the Supreme Court of the US in 1964, where it was eventually ruled not to be obscene. Literary worth aside, many readers prefer erotica to portray sex as earthy, crude, rough, down-and-dirty or however they imagine it to be in the lower reaches of society. If it’s called obscene, so much the better.

We middle-ground erotica writers may be at a disadvantage, but we take up the challenge of finding different ways to make sex as intense and fantasy-fulfilling as anything that might be called obscene. I wouldn’t mind having my writing called obscene, except, of course, if that would limit readers’ access to it, which does happen to far too many writers in spite of that 1964 Supreme Court decision. Of course few of us have Henry Miller’s talent, but the legality of erotic or pornographic writing doesn’t seem to obsess the courts these days. Suppressing it is now the pursuit of booksellers, chiefly Amazon, who do it so randomly that  there’s just no telling which works they’ll come down on, or why.

In fact, randomness has always been involved in classifying books or anything else as obscene, which makes sense, in a way, since how can there be any consistency in a concept  so subjective that it can’t even be defined without using terms just as imprecise? There is no “there” there, which is why I don’t believe that obscenity really exists, except in the eye of the beholder, and even then it can change with a blink of that eye.

(I tried to think of some excerpt from my own work that might come close to what most people would think of as obscenity, but I suspect that the only shock value my writing has is when I do public readings. I love it when I get to a particularly, shall we say, earthy passage, and there’s a collective gasp at hearing someone of my age and mundane appearance delivering words and images like that.)    

O Pioneers!

By Lisabet Sarai

I've been publishing books about sex, including sexual activities that many people consider profoundly deviant, for more than ten years. So far, no one has given me any trouble. No jackbooted feet kicking in my door. No placard-waving fanatics protesting in front of my house. It's true that I carefully guard my anonymity, maintaining as strict a separation as I can between my writerly personna and my more prosaic day-to-day identity. Still, if someone wanted to unmask me, I don't doubt that it would be possible.

Maybe if I were more popular, I'd be more of a target. As it is, I feel moderately confident that I can continue to quietly pen my dirty stories (storing them on an encrypted drive, just to be on the safe side) and sell them to publishers without being ostracized by my neighbors, losing my job, or being hauled off to jail.

It wasn't always like this.


Helen's introduction to her topic this week, "Opening the Closed Door", asked us to consider whether we were in some sense pioneers by writing openly about sex. Hell, no! The true pioneers were the authors who fought to publish sexually-explicit work in the first half of the twentieth century, giants like D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Pauline Réage, and James Joyce. All of them faced legal battles against forces who wanted to ban their work because of its sexual content. Avant-garde publishers like Barney Rosset and Maurice Girodias circled the wagons and defended their authors against charges of obscenity (though perhaps with as much of an eye toward notoriety-inspired sales as for moral principle). Gradually, these trials led to a grudging acceptance of sexually-oriented fiction as a legitimate form of literary expression, at least in most Western countries.

Perhaps, however, I am being overly complacent, believing that these battles are in the past. Certainly, individuals continue to be harassed and discriminated against if they engage in sexual practices that are considered "abnormal". The Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 2003 reports that more than 38% of the U.S.population favors the existence of laws forbidding the distribution of pornography to adults and that this percentage has fallen only slightly between 1987 and 2002. Calls for censorship of the Internet are raised with increasing frequency and ferocity. I spent several hours on-line searching for authoritative data about societal attitudes regarding pornography but found only emotional diatribes and pseudo-statistics from both sides of the issue.

I did find an interesting scientific report on a survey taken in a mid-American city. The majority of respondents in this study thought that pornography was acceptable and should be legally available to adults. However, the people who voiced this pro-porn opinion believed that they were in the minority. Likewise, the minority who thought that porn should be banned were convinced that they held the majority opinion.

In short, you may support sexually-explicit entertainment, but you feel like an outlaw.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this argument. I personally don't feel that I'm taking risks or pushing boundaries in my work. Lately I've been writing more M/M erotica and erotic romance. It takes a deliberate effort for me to remember that many individuals regard homosexual relationships as an abomination. For me, men fucking men is more or less natural--maybe even more natural than being bound or spanked. Sex is sex, and variety is the spice of life. Very little of what I write feels particularly daring or transgressive.

I don't write for political reasons. I write to entertain my readers and myself. I would love to believe that my work is striking a blow for freedom of expression, striking down barriers, opening doors, but I strongly suspect that it is not. Those who read my work already appreciate erotic literature. I'm preaching to the converted. Embedded in a community of authors whose work is as sexually charged as my own, I find it difficult to comprehend that I may be engaged in activities that some view as immoral or illegal.

On the other hand, if the unthinkable occurred--if my website were shut down because of its prurient content or my books were banned, if I started to receive hate letters or the police seized my computer--I'd fight back. I don't know if my writing provides any societal benefits beyond recreation, but I am certain that it does no harm. And it is my right--perhaps even my responsibility--to express myself, to share with the world (or whatever segment is interested) my vivid, visceral, polymorphously perverse visions.