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The Illogic of All Sex Laws
A new book traces a century of legislative prudery.
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When the proprietor of a Florida-based pornographic website was put on trial in 2008, he was accused of violating community standards. To prove that the operator had done nothing of the kind, his lawyer exhibited Google search data for the region, showing that residents were more likely to go online looking for “sex” than for “apple pie.” Pornography, this lawyer implied, was central to community standards, whether or not the community members were willing to admit it. In the process, he suggested that the pleasures we deny ourselves—like those that we would refuse to others—can reveal a great deal about the forces that move us. Maybe that’s why the easiest way to tell a story about sex is to tell a story about repression.
This, at any rate, is the premise of author and attorney Eric Berkowitz’s new book, The Boundaries of Desire. Over the course of seven chapters, Berkowitz sets out to explore the last century of sex law, focusing most of all on the ways that our civilization restrains the needs of some while punishing the passions of others. Attentive to changing norms but rarely content with present pieties, he surveys attitudes toward prostitution, homosexuality, pornography, and more. Throughout, he treats desire as a force that has “always carried outsize significance” because it “burns at the intersection of existence, identity, and power.”
Indeed, sex is the most personal of passions, but it is also the one in which the personal becomes interpersonal. Intercourse, as philosophers of sex have known for years, is never far from discourse, and pillow talk may be just as important as everything that precedes it. Speaking about sex by narrating the many attempts to silence it is therefore an almost deliberately paradoxical project. Alas, stories about repression are rarely the most engaging or—and this is the important thing where sex is concerned—the most satisfying. But Berkowitz is in the best of bad company. As he shows over and over again, censors and scolds have always found a cheap pleasure in the very things they seek to forbid.
No one knew this better than the notoriously moralistic 19th-century postal inspector Anthony Comstock. While promoting the law that would eventually bear his name, Comstock invited lawmakers to peruse an exhibition of the worst pornography the Victorian era had to offer, referring to it as his “chamber of horrors.” Displaying these pamphlets and pictures as objects that had to be forbidden, he gave his allies permission to look. Perversely, it was their very enjoyment of these obscenities, Berkowitz suggests, that convinced them Comstock was in the right. “Fully sated,” Berkowitz writes, “the lawmakers approved Comstock’s bill.”
[center]
[/center]
When the proprietor of a Florida-based pornographic website was put on trial in 2008, he was accused of violating community standards. To prove that the operator had done nothing of the kind, his lawyer exhibited Google search data for the region, showing that residents were more likely to go online looking for “sex” than for “apple pie.” Pornography, this lawyer implied, was central to community standards, whether or not the community members were willing to admit it. In the process, he suggested that the pleasures we deny ourselves—like those that we would refuse to others—can reveal a great deal about the forces that move us. Maybe that’s why the easiest way to tell a story about sex is to tell a story about repression.
This, at any rate, is the premise of author and attorney Eric Berkowitz’s new book, The Boundaries of Desire. Over the course of seven chapters, Berkowitz sets out to explore the last century of sex law, focusing most of all on the ways that our civilization restrains the needs of some while punishing the passions of others. Attentive to changing norms but rarely content with present pieties, he surveys attitudes toward prostitution, homosexuality, pornography, and more. Throughout, he treats desire as a force that has “always carried outsize significance” because it “burns at the intersection of existence, identity, and power.”
Censors and scolds have
always found a cheap
pleasure in the very
things they seek to forbid.
Indeed, sex is the most personal of passions, but it is also the one in which the personal becomes interpersonal. Intercourse, as philosophers of sex have known for years, is never far from discourse, and pillow talk may be just as important as everything that precedes it. Speaking about sex by narrating the many attempts to silence it is therefore an almost deliberately paradoxical project. Alas, stories about repression are rarely the most engaging or—and this is the important thing where sex is concerned—the most satisfying. But Berkowitz is in the best of bad company. As he shows over and over again, censors and scolds have always found a cheap pleasure in the very things they seek to forbid.
No one knew this better than the notoriously moralistic 19th-century postal inspector Anthony Comstock. While promoting the law that would eventually bear his name, Comstock invited lawmakers to peruse an exhibition of the worst pornography the Victorian era had to offer, referring to it as his “chamber of horrors.” Displaying these pamphlets and pictures as objects that had to be forbidden, he gave his allies permission to look. Perversely, it was their very enjoyment of these obscenities, Berkowitz suggests, that convinced them Comstock was in the right. “Fully sated,” Berkowitz writes, “the lawmakers approved Comstock’s bill.”
Source.
16 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
It just irritated me for some reason 
To be clear, I'm not supporting such a prosecution. It's just my opinion that there are far better ways to make the point. I realize I'm probably being a bit too technical with this. Like I said earlier, nitpicky The fact it is such an arbitrary term is the reason why getting into details like that is the wrong way to go. Maybe it worked in that instance but it could backfire. It misses the point.
