University of Virginia Library

A Question Of Smut

History is indeed cyclical. Less than three
weeks ago, the Supreme Court managed to
turn back the hands of time almost a decade.
And if that wasn't enough for our poor
psyches, suffering from the ill-effects of the
reverse of future shock, the Albemarle
county authorities pushed us back nearly a
hundred years, in what we can only surmise
to be an attempt to re-establish the reign of
Queen Victoria.

What prompted this vogue for nostalgia
was the Court's ruling June 21 that effectively
reversed its permissive stand on pornography
and censorship Washing its hands of the role
of a national censorship review board, the
Court abandoned the 1966 ruling that a
national standard must govern judgments of
what is obscene. Local community standards,
rather than a national one, the Court said,
should determine what is
obscene in each community.

The Court did require that
the community standards
conform to certain general
rules, and offered new
guidelines, much harsher ones
though, by which local
communities may judge
obscenity and pornography.
Questionable books,
magazines, films, pictures, and
the like may be deemed
pornographic if "taken as a
whole," they "appeal to the
prurient interest in sex," or if

they "portray sexual conduct in a patently
offensive way," or if,"taken as a whole," they
"do not have serious literary, artistic,
political, or scientific value." The last
stricture replaces the Court's long-held
permissive attitude that a work must be
"utterly without redeeming social value" in
order to be defined as obscenity.

Such a change of stance was not totally
surprising. A groundswell of protest has been
growing against the "permissiveness" which
encourages this country's burgeoning porno
industry. The Supreme Court had been of
late inundated with cases dealing with
obscenity; in fact, the June 21 decision was in
response to several appeals then before the
Court at one time.

The Court quite rightfully pointed out
that it could not and should not serve as a
national censor; not only is it not the proper
tribunal, but the Court lacks the sheer time
required to judge each individual case that
came before it.

Yet by throwing in the towel and passing
the censor's scissors to localities, the Court's
ruling has opened up a Pandora's box of
confusion, inconsistency, and outright
repression. Not only were the guidelines set
down by the Court to determine porno vague
enough to cause genuine confusion among
even those who were calmly attempting to
erect some reasonable standards based on a
determination of local sentiment, but the
Court failed to explain exactly how local
sentiment would be evaluated and who would
interpret it.

Even worse, though, the ruling gave
enough leeway to all the misguided moralists
in public office who wish to inflict their own
personal pruderies on a confused populace the
signal to begin a revival of the Victorian age.

Local officials were not long in realizing
the political mileage to be made out of the
situation either. Cleaning up crime and wiping
out smut peddlers have always been rallying
cries at the ballot box for ambitious law
enforcement officials, and so it
wasn't long before one- and
two-man censorship boards
began popping up all over the
place. The race was on to be
the first community in the
nation to capture the headlines
with the good news that their
town, by God, was safe now
from the torrent of filth which
was literally oozing in under
the doorsills of respectable
citizens and turning them into
crazed sex criminals.

Charlottesville placed well
in the race. Within the week, police had swept
down on two newsstands without warning
and caught them in the very act of displaying
and selling material which a scat seven days
before had been legal. Not to be outdone, the
county managed to grab the national
television news spotlight by imposing one of
the most sweeping bans in the country,
forbidding sale of not only the hard-core porn
that the Court's ruling was designed to attack,
but also the highly popular and soft core
Playboy and Penthouse and other similar
magazines.

While we would be among the last to
suggest that pornography represents such a
positive force in society that the populace
should be taxed to subsidize its proliferation,
we must stop far short of applauding the
purges of bookstores and newsstands and
movie theaters launched by crusading officials
and made possible by the Supreme Court's
decision. In fact, our blood literally boils at
the   presumption   of Messrs. Bailey,
Haugh, Camblos, Bowen and all the other
smut hounds who have taken it upon
themselves to dictate quite arbitrarily what
we may and may not read, see, or hear,
duo of Haugh and Bailey, and Camblos and
Bowen have made the worst of a bad court
ruling.

Unfortunately their audacity and that of
other morality watchdogs around the country
appears to be working. In Albemarle County,
at least, Mr. Haugh has managed to cow the
University into compliance with his
outrageous ban. And with a University, a
powerful institution founded to promote a
free flow of ideas and information, ducking
this challenge, how can we expect the owners
of small bookstores and newsstands to have
any more courage of their convictions?

Certainly some sort of restrictions need to
be placed on the availability of pornography
to children, if only to quell the fears of
worried parents,and most certainly one
should not be forced to view or purchase
obscene literature. But to go beyond that
represents a serious and unjust restriction of
the right of individuals to pursue their own
happiness, whatever form it may take.