OBSCENITY

in general, that which offends the public sense of decency. Its social importance lies in the history of censorship and legislation for the suppression of obscene acts, especially the publication of sexually explicit or indecent matter. That obscenity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder is evidenced by the elusiveness of a satisfactory definition. In most modern nations the criminality of producing or disseminating obscene materials of a sexual nature is a relatively late phenomenon. In England, for example, except for the Puritan suppression of theatres in the first half of the 17th century, restrictions were applied almost exclusively to antireligious or seditious acts or publications. In 1727, however, there was a successful prosecution in a temporal court for the publication of indecent matter, and thereafter it became recognized as an indictable misdemeanour by common law. The prohibition of purely sexual material became statutory in Great Britain for the first time with the Obscene Publications Act (q.v.) of 1857. This act, however, did not contain a definition of obscenity. Such a definition was forthcoming in 1868, in Regina v. Hicklin, in which the test of what was obscene was its tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and it was understood that this test need apply only to isolated passages of a work. This view was a precedent for antiobscenity legislation in the United States, beginning with the Comstock Law of 1873, which broadened the 1865 Mail Act essentially to its present form by providing fine and imprisonment of any person mailing or receiving obscene, lewd, or lascivious publications. The variability of definitions is well illustrated by cases in the United States. Until the middle of the 20th century, the British Regina v. Hicklin definition of obscenity was used. In 1934 in U.S. v. One Book Entitled Ulysses, a New York circuit court of appeals held that the criterion for obscenity was not the content of isolated obscene passages but rather whether a publication taken as a whole has a libidinous effect. In 1957, in Roth v. U.S., the U.S. Supreme Court tendered a basic redefinition of obscenity: whether, to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest. In 1966, however, the Supreme Court, in a ruling on the book Fanny Hill, declared a work pornographic only if it was utterly without redeeming social value. In Miller v. California (1973) the court abandoned the 1966 ruling and declared that it would be no defense for a work to have some redeeming social value and that the states might therefore prohibit the printing or sale of works which portray sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and which, taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Many nations have adopted legislation banning obscene materials. Thus, the basic legal control has been through the criminal law, but many countries also provide for administrative regulation by the customs, postal service, and national or local boards for the licensing of motion-picture or stage performances. Also, more than 50 nations are parties to an international agreement for the control of obscene publications. Interestingly, this convention operates without any definition of obscenity because it was agreed that this would vary from country to country.