Perversion for Profit : the Politics of Pornography And

STRUB Praise for ALTHOUGH AMERICA IS NOT ALONE IN ITS ambivalence toward sex and its depictions, the prefer - ences of the nation swing sharply between toleration and censure. This pattern has grown even more pronounced PERVERSION WHITNEY STRUB since the 1960s, with the emergence of the New Right and its attack on the “floodtide of filth” that was supposedly PERVERSION PERVERSION FOR sweeping the nation. Antipornography campaigns became the New Right’s political capital in the 1960s, laying the groundwork for the “family values” agenda that shifted the country to the right. PROFIT Perversion for Profit traces the anatomy of this trend and PERVERSION the crucial function of pornography in constructing the New Right’s agenda, which has emphasized social issues. “This study of the politics of pornography in postwar America is marvelous. Paying close attention to both visual FOR Whitney Strub vividly re-creates the debates over obscen- and textual sources, Whitney Strub brings them alive for the reader. His genealogy of outrage from comic books ity that consumed members of the ACLU in the 1950s and to pornography is utterly original. The book is convincingly and responsibly opinionated and full of life. The revisits the deployment of obscenity charges against pur - chapter on feminism and pornography is a masterpiece. It is a landmark chapter, one of the few historical veyors of gay erotica during the cold war, revealing the essays that might achieve that rare accomplishment of actually ending a sterile debate.” differing standards applied to heterosexual and homo- FOR rick perlstein, author of nixonland: the rise of a president and sexual pornography. He follows the rise of the influential the fracturing of america and before the storm: barry goldwater and PROFIT Citizens for Decent Literature during the 1960s and the the unmaking of the american consensus PROFIT pivotal events that followed: the sexual revolution, femi - nist activism, the rise of the gay rights movement, the “This is a very impressive book. It is extraordinarily comprehensive, offering excellent discussions of both The Politics of “porno chic” moment of the early 1970s, and resurgent national political debates and outcomes and local manifestations. Ranging from Los Angeles and Memphis to La Christian conservatism, which now shapes public policy Crosse, Wisconsin, and numerous small towns, Whitney Strub has done an admirable job of situating his analysis far beyond the issue of sexual decency. in the local arenas where obscenity and pornography battles frequently take place. My impression is that Strub Pornography Strub also examines the ways in which the left failed to consulted every imaginable archive while completing this project, and his main argument is persuasive and mount a serious or sustained counterattack to the New WHITNEY STRUB is an assistant professor of very important. It fills an important gap in the literature and will make an original and significant contribution Right’s use of pornography as a political tool. As he dem - history at Rutgers University, Newark. His writing has and the Rise of the to the histories of pornography, obscenity, sexuality, postwar politics, and postwar culture.” onstrates, this failure put the Democratic Party at the appeared in American Quarterly, Journal of the History of andrea friedman, washington university in st. louis, author of prurient mercy of Republican rhetoric. In placing debates about Sexuality, Journal of Social History, PopMatters, and Bad interests: gender, democracy, and obscenity in new york city, 1909–1945 New Right pornography at the forefront of American postwar his - Subjects. He lives in Center City, Philadelphia. tory, Strub revolutionizes our understanding of sex and American politics. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK ISBN: 978-0-231-14886-3 cover design: martin hinze www.cup.columbia.edu 9 780231 148863 cover image: ap images/ dave pickoff Printed in the U.S.A. COLUMBIA PERVERSION FOR PROFIT C5318.indb i 8/19/10 10:09 AM C5318.indb ii 8/19/10 10:09 AM WHITNEY STRUB PERVERSION FOR PROFIT The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right Columbia University Press C5318.indb iii 8/19/10 10:09 AM A portion of chapter 1 was published in American Quarterly (2008), and sections of chapters 3 and 4 appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality (2006). columbia university press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2010 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Strub, Whitney. Perversion for profi t : the politics of pornography and the rise of the New Right / Whitney Strub. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-231-14886-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-231-52015-7 (ebook) 1. Pornography—United States—History—20th century. 2. Pornography—Political aspects—United States. 3. Conservatism—United States I. Title. hq472.u6s77 2010 363.4′70973—dc22 2010025009 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Th is book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. C5318.indb iv 8/19/10 10:09 AM Contents Introduction 1 1. The Rediscovery of Pornography Emergence of a Cold War Moral Panic 11 2. Ambivalent Liberals Th eorizing Obscenity Under Consensus Constraints 43 3. Arousing the Public Citizens for Decent Literature and the Emergence of the Modern Antiporn Movement 80 4. Damning the Floodtide of Filth Th e Rise of the New Right and the Political Capital of Moralism 116 5. The Permissive Society Porno Chic and the Cultural Aftermath of the Sexual Revolution 146 6. Resurrecting Moralism Th e Christian Right and the Porn Debate 179 7. Pornography Is the Practice, Where Is the Theory? Second-Wave Feminist Encounters with Porn 213 8. Vanilla Hegemony Policing Sexual Boundaries in the Permanent Culture-War Economy 256 Notes 299 Acknowledgments 363 Index 367 C5318.indb v 8/19/10 10:09 AM C5318.indb vi 8/19/10 10:09 AM PERVERSION FOR PROFIT C5318.indb vii 8/19/10 10:09 AM C5318.indb viii 8/19/10 10:09 AM INTRODUCTION pornography has generated at least as many words as it has orgasms, and the words have arguably been more intense. From the breath- less denunciations of Anthony Comstock and Andrea Dworkin to the equally spirited defenses of Annie Sprinkle and Patrick Califi a, pornography is a topic guaranteed to inspire heated passions. Th ose passions have aff ected American politics in profound ways in the past half-century, helping shape the public face of the conservative as- cendance that constitutes the most important national political movement of the era. Yet for all that has been written on matters of porn and its legal complement, obscenity, the full history of the social, cultural, and sexual contestations that have structured the modern politics of pornography and obscenity remains unwritten. Nothing comparable to Andrea Fried- man’s excellent Prurient Interests , which situates obscenity battles of early- twentieth-century New York City in local gender and political confl icts, has been undertaken for the postwar United States. Many of the most important works on recent porn-related struggles have been polemical rather than scholarly in nature, and outstanding scholarly eff orts often hone in on highly specifi c topics, such as Donald Alexander Downs’s Th e New Politics of Pornography , which examines 1980s battles in Minneapolis and Indianapolis. 1 In Perversion for Profi t I seek to write the larger national history of postwar American struggles over pornography and obscenity. Particular emphasis falls on the discovery and deployment of the political capital of moralism by the burgeoning New Right in the late 1960s. While the postwar liberal consensus that shaped the American mainstream in the 1950s popularized opposition to censorship, liberals hesitated to follow their free- speech convictions to their logical corollaries and instead allowed a First Amendment exception to be made for “obscenity,” a class of material de- fi ned as “utterly without redeeming social value.” Th ough the fundamental intellectual incoherence of the liberal position remained successfully ob- C5318.indb 1 8/19/10 10:09 AM 2 • introduction scured for several years, new rhetorical strategies allowing conservatives to frame repressive policies as secular and reasonable put liberals in an unten- able position regarding pornography by the 1960s. Unwillingly, they ceded social authority on the matter to the nascent New Right. Th e Right’s commitment to suppressing porn began as a nominal one. Conservative politicians displayed more interest in attracting voters with pronouncements of their piety than in following through with substantive policy, damning rather than damming the “fl oodtide of fi lth” allegedly en- gulfi ng the nation, and eagerly adopting moralism as a discursive displace- ment of the increasingly obsolete conservative tropes of racism and anti- communism. But as the 1970s witnessed the surprising political awakening of evangelical Christians, sexual politics quickly became a key conservative platform item in assuring that those new voters fl ocked en masse to the Re- publican Party. Th e result was a startling new level of government obeisance to normative evangelical sexuality, seen in the Reagan administration’s Meese Commission and, most recently, in the overtly religious rhetoric and policies of the George W. Bush years. Pornography played dual roles in this trajectory from liberal to conservative national politics, both as an indicator of social and political trends in the treatment it received and as a causal agent in alerting the New Right to the tremendous political capital of moralism and sanctimony.

Load more