Obscenity and the Law in Practice

Abstract

“Obscenity, Ladies and Gentlemen, is like an elephant. Difficult to define exactly, but you know it when you see it.” With that despairing aphorism, juries are sent away to consider their verdicts at Old Bailey obscenity trials. In an age when one person’s obscenity is another’s bedtime reading, one must be thankful that our symposiasts are a little more discerning. Professor Woozley can, I am sure, recognize an elephant at 40 paces, but he very convincingly demonstrates how defective are the sights on the legislative weapons that we train on obscene publications. He urges us to hunt for different game — pornography — more easily recognisable by the insult it offers to womankind and its tendency to poison the water supply should it happen to fall in the reservoir. Professor Simpson, however, has some reservations about the nature of the beast, and he of all people should be able to know it when he sees it. As a member of the Williams Committee, he has been studying its habits for two years. He reports that different strains of pornography tend to do different things to different people, and suggests that we should make legal distinctions on the relative strength of its core — hard core, soft core — of course, for Professor Woozley it is all rotten to the core. After reading both papers, one yearns for the simplicity of the test propounded by Kurt Vonnegut’s Senator Rosewater, who introduced his obscenity bill with the magisterial pronouncement, “The difference between pornography and art, gentlemen, is bodily hair.”