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前言 Introduction
在1960年代之前,性教育是由性改革者提出来的，旨在弥补整个教育改革中的不足之处，拯救因为教育不足而堕落的社会青年。对这些改革者来说,性的问题,在大众社会中与两件典型事例紧密结合:首先,推广和普及审美的情色化,这是1945年前后由许多知识分子提出来的，主要概括了流行文化的刺激性和压抑性。第二,色情和其他淫秽材料。
尽管性教育仍然没有被列入教育改革中，但是如果能够对性这个术语进行严谨的处理，以顺应条件的千变万化，就可以对淫秽和色情文学下特定的精准的定义。1994年，色情文学作家埃尔默-德威特提出，色情文学是一个空洞的类别，通常受到法律和文化的影响，包括任何东西,不一定是定义性的内容。
Before the 1960s, sex education was conceived by sex reformers to be problematic business of 'reforming' an inadequate and possibly perverse public. For these reformers, the problem of sexuality in mass society was typified by the conjunction of two things: first, by ? generalized and pervasive sexualized aesthetic, which was held by many intellectuals before and after 1945 to epitomize the incitements and repressions of popular culture; and second, by pornography and other obscene material.
Although it has been attempted, defining obscenity and pornography is impossible unless the protean nature of the terms is addressed. (Elmer-Dewitt 1994, p102) As ? number of writers have demonstrated, the obscene is an empty category, usually legal and cultural, which can include anything and is not necessarily defined by its sexual content. (Potter 1996) Discussion
Cultural battles to secure the meaning of pornography and obscenity are therefore inherent in the very formation of the terms as legal and cultural categories, and are best seen as varied attempts to establish ? particular brand of artistic or moral authority. As Walter Kendrick has pointed out, the obscene is always deemed to be in the process of threatening the health and welfare of an imagined reader. For the Victorians this reader was of either sex, young and probably working class. (Rimm 1995, p184) Protecting the consciousness of the consumer, ostensibly preventing social pathologies and properly dividing aesthetic categories of art from pornography are the aims of those who seek to define precisely what is meant by the obscene and the pornographic.
Since the 1970s and the rise of ? feminist critique of pornography, the imagined reader, prey to psycho-sexual neuroses of all kinds, has been the adult, heterosexual man. In the worldview of early twentieth-century sex reformers, the object of concern was an undifferentiated mass of new working-class readers and consumers with sufficient leisure and disposable income to place themselves in peril and multiply their misconceptions. Battles over the meaning of pornography were, then, not only used to establish the authority of modernism, but also featured strongly in the formation of ? new breed of expert who defined sexual health and education as his or her field of action, and who sought to reach out to this mass readership and revolutionize its knowledge. (Rimm 1995, p184)
Arguments over what was properly obscene had to encounter the fact that the legal meaning of obscenity and the nature of the pornographic changed in important ways in the early twentieth century. These changes can be mapped in legislative and cultural terms, and can be traced in ? legal sense to the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. (Potter 1996) The interpretation of that Act in the case of R v. Hicklin in 1868 described the obscene in famous terms, as that which has the capacity to 'deprave and corrupt'. Walter Kendrick and Lynda Nead have pointed out that the Hicklin judgement made the obscene ? question of access. While nudity or sexual imagery were confined to high art, or restricted to those assumed to practise moral selfpossession, it was not necessarily considered problematic. However, if mass print culture made such material accessible to ? wide audience, including vulnerable groups like women or the young, then it could be judged obscene. (Elmer-Dewitt 1994, p102) Analysis
Nead suggests that the category of the obscene in Victorian London contained not only postcards depicting sexual acts, but also ? huge variety of borderline material ranging from pictures of actresses and nude 'art studies' to French novels. From its legal beginning in 1857 obscenity was ? performative category, dependent on specific judgements about production, sale and distribution, and on police practice. Its definition depended on an enormous range of variables. (Potter 1996) However, one way for magistrates and juries to judge whether an article had the required capacity to 'deprave and corrupt', and to decide what the audience was for any obscene material, was to judge the 'circumstances of publication' - how and where ? book was advertised, sold or displayed. (Rimm 1995, p184)
Therefore, if artistic or medical works about sex were sold, advertised or distributed next to hard-core or even mildly indecent material, then they too could be judged obscene on the grounds that they would reach ? 'corruptible' audience. Moreover, the police practice of raiding bookshops and confiscating indiscriminately ? vast volume of different material for examination by ? magistrate made the situation even worse. In those circumstances serious works of instruction or of sexology could be bracketed with indecent magazines, cheap postcards or erotic literature at subsequent court hearings. (Elmer-Dewitt 1995, p38-45) The result of the way the law and the police worked was ? series of trials in Britain which revolved around the question of 'circumstances'. In addition to the founding imprecision of the Obscene Publications Act, other legislation worked to expand the category of the obscene. In ? 1907 case brought against the illustrated magazine Judy, the proprietor, Alphonse de Marney, was held to be responsible for the advertisements of pornography dealers which his magazine contained. (Rimm 1995, p184)
Papers like Judy, which were collectively known to the Home Office as the 'illustrated press', were part of ? racy genre which grew up after about 1910, and which included titles like Fun, Photo-Bits and Brighter London. These papers dealt in fiction on 'advanced' topics, celebrity gossip and pictures of bathing beauties. In addition, most of them carried advertisements for art studies, sexual instruction books and, most damagingly, continental book traders who were known to the police as dealers in pornography. (Harmon and Boeringer 1997) The action against de Marney had been brought specifically as ? test case in order to establish the possibility of controlling the pornographers who operated through the illustrated press, and as ? way of reining in the obscenity of these papers by making them liable to prosecution. Conclusion
Not only was obscenity ? performative category, dependent on the implementation of the law, it also differed depending on where you were. This situation reflected the notorious imprecision of the Obscene Publications Act, and the necessary estimation by the courts of any potentially 'corruptible' audience for obscene material. In London, the frequent assumption of courts was that metropolitan consumers were capable of reading works of sexual instruction which included detailed and explicit description. (Finkelhor et al 2000) Outside the capital, however, the same material often received very different treatment on the grounds that it was sold to an entirely different audience. Magistrates in the north of England were particularly zealous in their defence of provincial sensibilities. (Ogilvie 2000) References Elmer-Dewitt, P. (1994). Censoring Cyberspace: Carnegie Mellon's attempt to ban sex from its campus computer network sends ? chill along the info highway. Time, November 21: 102. Elmer-Dewitt, P. (1995). On ? screen near you: Cyberporn. Time, July 3: 38- 45. Finkelhor, D., K. J. Mitchell & J. Wolak (2000). Online Victimization: ? Report on the Nation's Youth. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Harmon, D. & W. S. Boeringer (1997). ? content analysis of internet-accessible written pornographic depications (sic). Electronic Journal of Sociology 3(1) [iuicode: http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?100.3.1.1]. Ogilvie, E. (2000). Cyberstalking. Trends and Issues, No. 166. Canberra: The Australian Institute of Cri minology. Potter, H. (1996). Pornography: Group Pressures and Individual Rights. Sydney: The Federation Press. Rimm, M. (1995). Marketing pornography on the information superhighway. Georgetown Law Journal, 83, 184-1934. Rimmer, S. (1995). Planet Internet. New York: Windcrest/McGraw-Hill. |
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