I recently finished reading Girls lean back everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the assault on genius, which is a history of American literary and artistic censorship by a lawyer who argued some of the seminal cases before the supreme court, Edward de Grazia. It’s hard to imagine today how delicately sex had to be treated in early 20th century American writing, lest the author and publisher land before a court. This book documents the long legal shift to the freedom that authors enjoy today, where every Borders has a well-stocked “erotica” section. And it really was a long shift — the protagonists in this story fought over decades, one incremental advance at a time, and knew they were doing so. That is, for me, the biggest lesson.

In 1921 James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned in the US, and its publisher criminally prosecuted, for writing that now seems tame. There aren’t even any dirty words in the passage that caused the most uproar; it’s just a girl leaning back to watch the fireworks, leaning back to show more and more of her stockings and garters and underthings to a man she fancies, and it’s poetic as hell.

A few decades later Allen Ginsburg’s Howl landed the poet before a judge. Books by D. H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, and — my personal favorite — Henry Miller were also banned as obscene at one point or another. All of these works are free today, but it took decades of legal battles.

At first, there were many subjects that simply could not be talked about at all. One of the very first novels to deal frankly with lesbianism, Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness, contained no sex at all other than the sentence “and that night, they were not divided” but was ruled obscene because it depicted “inverts” in a positive light. But even heterosexual sex was illegal to depict, if the writing was sufficiently explicit.

All of this gradually changed. By the mid 50s, American judges had ruled that discussion of sex in itself was not obscene. In 1964, de Grazia defended Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and the Supreme Court ruled that any work “not totally without social value” could not be held obscene. This decision effectively freed the written word entirely, and in subsequent decades, plays and photographs and films would be freed to.

But it took 80 years.

And that’s what struck me most: deep social change takes a long time. The book is a legal history, so it is full of the arcana of American obscenity legislation and long-forgotten legal tactics. But these excruciating details show that the players took a deliberately long view in many cases. Their game was played out over decades. Also, the conflict wasn’t anything so simple as authors versus cops; this is not an underdogs vs. establishment story. Judges played a pivotal role in the freeing of artistic speech, particularly supreme court Justice Brennan who patiently transformed the law, piece by piece as the appropriate cases arose, over almost 20 years. The opposing villains, if they can be called that, included conservative politicians, state prosecutors, and citizen pressure groups.

I think of this now as I ask the question: how do societies change?

In Indonesia, my friend Rachel lived in a house with other girls, Indonesian and foreign students. Every guy in the neighborhood tried to get in their collective pants. Rachel could and once did allow this. The Indonesian girls would have been shunned by their mothers, and these same men.

In Thailand, there are no gay men. There are plenty of lady-boys, who are more or less accepted and known as kathoey. The kathoey are sometimes also transexual. The straight tourists are shocked by this; the gay tourists offend the locals. 

Our differences expose us.

By comparison, a recent French campaign talks about sex as if it were a good thing, with their “Explore — just protect yourself” series:

This poster is really quite an exceptional piece of art, and well worth examining at full size (just click.) Additional information can be found here.

I had a long conversation with a young man on the train from Chennai to Calcutta. He’s a college student, studying for his BCom like so many others, so that he can start a business. We, two young men with 40 hours to kill, got to talking about women. He told me with a lopsided grin that he’d had a number of girlfriends. But he wouldn’t marry any of them. They weren’t the marrying type. His wife would be a virgin.

To this man, and many others I spoke to, women basically fell into two categories: sexual and reputable. It’s the old dichotomy: Madonna/whore, wife/slut, good girl, bad girl. Of course, the bad girls are more sexually desirable. And I’ve just discovered some careful research that confirms my perception of their perceptions.

First, researchers reviewed the “sex books” available for sale in Bangalore:

A study in Bangalore on 60 college-going young men revealed that nearly all of them used these books as their first exposure to sex and their main source of information on it … The contents of 11 different Kannada sex books were reviewed, and the quality of information and key messages in them assessed. The 25-60-page booklets cost between Rs 10 and Rs 50 each. The quality of paper was poor, the photographs and printing smudged. Except for the covers, they were in black-and-white. They carried no information about the publishers. … The staple fare in all the books was sexually explicit photographs, mostly copied from Western magazines. There were also stories, not linked to the photographs. … Most of the stories seemed to suggest that women were intrinsically dangerous and needed a man’s control to keep them in check.

Then they interviewed the students themselves, who had presumably learned about sex through this material, and found that

[the students] seemed to subscribe to the classic Madonna/Whore dichotomy, which the sex books also seemed to reinforce. They believed that a girl/woman was either “good” or “bad”. Good girls/women were those who were like “sisters”, who did not wear revealing clothes, were “innocent” and did not overtly interact with men. Bad girls/women, on the other hand, tried to attract men by wearing revealing clothes and being “free” with men, and they were cunning and scheming. Those from rural areas were more likely to be “good”, while those from the “city” were more likely to be “bad”. While “good” girls/women deserved one’s respect and “protection”, “bad” girls had to be taught a lesson.

It’s hard for me not to see this as sort of sick, not to mention a lot less fun than having a girlfriend who is both empowered and sexual. But then, these are cultures where it’s difficult to talk about sex openly. In a word, if sex is bad, how could a sexual woman be good?

In light of my experiences overseas, the Western World seems to me like an awfully sexually liberated place. At least among my peers – all the way from high school up to the present moment – it was just expected that women would have, and want, sex. And that was fine, and my male friends and I all hoped that we would marry extremely hot women a have lots and lots of post-marital sex with them. Although we all sniggered at the idea of sleeping with a virgin, no one I knew seemed to think that she would make a better wife.

Granted, these attitudes are not universal; in America, the Christian Right comes to mind. Still, it’s worth remembering a fundamental point: the American sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s simply never happened in most of the world.

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