I know it when I see it

Potter Stewart served as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for nearly 23 years (1958-1981) and participated in a number of landmark decisions, including Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. (1968) and Roe v. Wade (1973).  Yet, for his legacy, he is remembered primarily because of a truncated fragment of his concurrence to the opinion in the obscenity case of Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964). 

Stewart wrote that “hard-core pornography” is hard to define, but “I know it when I see it.”  That simple statement is probably the most famous quote from the annals of the Supreme Court.

I’ve never been a justice or judge in any court, though I am admitted and qualified as an attorney and counselor of the Supreme Court of the United States.  Unlike Stewart, I do not find it at all difficult to define pornography / obscenity.  I, also, “know it when I see it.”  To me, these are some of the elements that comprise obscenity:

War

Genocide

Bigotry

Discrimination

Hypocrisy

Imposing one’s religious beliefs or moral code on others

Domestic violence

Child abuse

Please note that I did not include in the above list adult acts of a sexual nature.  I do not find any of the myriad forms of lovemaking to be obscene. 

It is my firm belief that anything adults (who have the capacity to consent) choose to do behind closed doors is their business, and their business alone.

On a similar note, Stewart’s less-familiar dissent in Ginsburg v. United States (1966) is perhaps more lucid than the statement he’d made on obscenity two years earlier.  In Ginsburg he wrote  “Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself.  It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.”

From 1930 to 1968, blatant censorship rode rampant throughout Hollywood, due to the “guidelines” for motion pictures laid down by the Hays Office.  This censorship resulted in unrealistic restrictions for films.  Among them, the Motion Picture Production Code’s moral censorship guidelines required married couples to sleep in separate beds and prohibited open-mouth kisses.  Homosexuality and miscegenation were not allowed to be depicted at all, nor portrayal of clergy as comic characters or villains.  These are but a few examples from a long list of proscriptions and thetic demands.

For the most part, films today are considerably more realistic than they were during the days of the Hays Office.  Yet, many novels are still written as if the Hays Office guidelines apply to them—which, of course, they never did.

John Grisham is fond of bragging that his novels are so clean even his grandmother can read them.  Perhaps Polyannaish sanitation is one of the secrets of Grisham’s success—he’s certainly had more than his quota of best-sellers—but that approach to writing isn’t for me.

I make every effort to maintain the sexual level in my novels on a par with today’s mainstream motion pictures—that is, I want my novels to reasonably portray life.  I do not hesitate, when it’s appropriate to the story, to write (for example) about adultery, oral sex, or same-gender sex.  These are a part of real life, why should they not be included in fictional representations?

On the other hand, I never fill my novels with unnecessary curse words just to shock my readers, or with gratuitous sexual episodes designed expressly to pander to lewd, lascivious, and prurient interests.  If you want to read such things, you’ll have to look elsewhere.