Obscenity

Obscenity, act, utterances, or items (primarily publications and films) deemed contrary to public standards of sexual morality. Obscene items are often called pornography. Because public standards vary, any definition of obscenity is relative to the time and place in which it is formulated. Obscenity has not, in fact, always been considered a public concern. In England, for example, until the early 1700s publishing sexually indecent material was not an offense.

The U.S. has had obscenity laws since 1842. These laws have at times been stringent and their enforcement vigorous. To liberal thinkers, such laws were controversial and even misguided (by contemporary standards), as in the suppression of the Irish novelist James Joyce's literary masterpiece Ulysses until 1933. In the 1950s the U.S. Supreme Court relaxed prohibitions on the sale, distribution, and possession of obscene materials. In 1973, however, it reversed its more liberal direction, and assigned the determination of what was obscene to the states, making “contemporary community standards” the key. These standards vary widely from place to place. In 1987 a deeply divided Court ruled that the social value of sexually explicit material must be judged from the standpoint of a “reasonable person,” rather than from community standards.