Sublime

When Woman’s Home Companion ran an article titled “The Smut Peddler Is After Your Child” in 1951, author Albert Maisel noted that the “smut racket” had grown into a multimillion-dollar endeavor whose effects were widespread. For instance, “mass outbreaks of sexual promiscuity” were discovered among students at “the exclusive suburban Evanston High

my overall case is that pornography and its neglected relationship to free speech provided a fatal flaw in the ideology of the postwar liberal consensus, an Achilles’ heel the New Right has stabbed at to great effect since the late 1960s. Social, political, and juridical constructions of “obscenity” and “pornography” have also reinforced normative

I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.

To censor pictures that are too strong, indecent or obscene was to make decisions for the reader that were not theirs to make.

allure, while the existence of smut helped sustain entire bureaucracies dedicated to the preservation of decency.