posted by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cathyr19355 at 10:34pm on 05/06/2013 under book review
cathyr19355 at 10:34pm on 05/06/2013 under book reviewI just finished reading an odd book.
It's called Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. The author, Edward de Grazia, was a lawyer who specialized in First Amendment cases involving obscenity challenges; he died earlier this year.
I had received the book as a Christmas present from my sister-in-law a good 15 years ago. Put off by the title (which sounded propagandistic to me) and its size (688 pages before you get to the endnotes and bibliography, which consume another 150 pages), I shied away from reading it. It sat on the pile of unread books on my nightstand (as opposed to the other piles of unread books I have elsewhere) untouched. A few weeks ago, moved by curiosity, the desire to read something different without having to pay money to buy a book, and the need to read something that would activate the lawyer parts of my brain, I finally picked it up and started reading it.
"Girls" was a much better read than I had expected. De Grazia was not just interested in the legal arguments for and against the government's entitlement to regulate or ban "obscenity"; he was interested in the stories of the artists and publishers who were broken by the struggle to publish, write or perform as they wished, and he writes about them compellingly and well. He does so by the interesting technique of stitching together their stories by joining large quotations from many sources--legal rulings, news articles, accounts of the artists and publishers of their law battles, and the "obscene" works themselves--with bits of explanatory narrative. The history of obscenity law thus provided spans the US and Great Britain, commences at the beginning of the 20th century with the story of the publication battles over James Joyce's novel Ulysses and concludes with the suits to prevent NEA funding of Karen Finley and similar "performance" artists in the early 1990s. This unusual structure is only one of the odd things about the book.
Indirectly, but powerfully, De Grazia presents two main conclusions. One is that the concept "obscenity" is, and has always been, too vague and subjective to be a suitable legal basis for refusing to apply the First Amendment to art. The other is that the artists who have been able to publish and present art that is shocking, sacreligious, and disturbing to certain elements of the American public owe their fortune primarily to Justice William Brennan, who invented a legal test that makes the poverty of the obscenity concept obvious. He required proof that a work was "utterly" without redeeming social value of any kind in order to ban it. Justice Brennan's test was sometimes ignored, but ultimately eroded older obscenity tests based upon "community standards".
The second odd thing about the book is that, in a sense, it also contains a history of the rise of the book publishing industry. The obscenity trials involved large publishers as well as small ones, and de Grazia also tells the story of how the large publishers managed to use the favorable results many of them obtained in court to build their houses into the foundations of financial empires. It is odd to read this account now, 100 years after the legal challenges to works of the 1910s and 1920s such as Ulysses and Sister Carrie, at a time when the Internet is slowly strangling the print publishing empires.
Finally, I learned from de Grazia's book that Andrea Dworkin, a feminist who was one of the leaders of the anti-pornography movement back in the 1980s, herself published novels that were not only arguably pornographic, but that contained BSDM and lesbian themes. Their publication does not seem to have been challenged on obscenity grounds, though they are not significantly different from other novels that were challenged. The implications of that fact are worth pondering.
"Girls" is an interesting read, though not the easiest read, for an intelligent and educated person. Lawyers may have a slightly easier time with it, because most lawyers get a bit of the history of obscenity in law school. However, my law school (admittedly, a Catholic-run law school) presented the obscenity cases as a fait accompli and as though that law was written in stone. In fact the opposite was true. Courts struggled to apply the "obscenity" concept for as long as it remained a live legal principle, because jurists found some artistic material too sexual, too disgusting, for public discourse.
De Grazia's book thus is a stunning exposition of how emotional prejudices can and do warp judgments, and that's a point we all need to keep in mind. It provides interesting perspectives, not only on the obscenity debate but on the roles of authors, performers, publishers, legislators, lawyers, judges, and police in the course of that debate. "Girls" provides a lot of food for thought, and in my opinion that's the best reason for reading it now, even though in many ways its subject matter, like its author, is now history.
It's called Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. The author, Edward de Grazia, was a lawyer who specialized in First Amendment cases involving obscenity challenges; he died earlier this year.
I had received the book as a Christmas present from my sister-in-law a good 15 years ago. Put off by the title (which sounded propagandistic to me) and its size (688 pages before you get to the endnotes and bibliography, which consume another 150 pages), I shied away from reading it. It sat on the pile of unread books on my nightstand (as opposed to the other piles of unread books I have elsewhere) untouched. A few weeks ago, moved by curiosity, the desire to read something different without having to pay money to buy a book, and the need to read something that would activate the lawyer parts of my brain, I finally picked it up and started reading it.
"Girls" was a much better read than I had expected. De Grazia was not just interested in the legal arguments for and against the government's entitlement to regulate or ban "obscenity"; he was interested in the stories of the artists and publishers who were broken by the struggle to publish, write or perform as they wished, and he writes about them compellingly and well. He does so by the interesting technique of stitching together their stories by joining large quotations from many sources--legal rulings, news articles, accounts of the artists and publishers of their law battles, and the "obscene" works themselves--with bits of explanatory narrative. The history of obscenity law thus provided spans the US and Great Britain, commences at the beginning of the 20th century with the story of the publication battles over James Joyce's novel Ulysses and concludes with the suits to prevent NEA funding of Karen Finley and similar "performance" artists in the early 1990s. This unusual structure is only one of the odd things about the book.
Indirectly, but powerfully, De Grazia presents two main conclusions. One is that the concept "obscenity" is, and has always been, too vague and subjective to be a suitable legal basis for refusing to apply the First Amendment to art. The other is that the artists who have been able to publish and present art that is shocking, sacreligious, and disturbing to certain elements of the American public owe their fortune primarily to Justice William Brennan, who invented a legal test that makes the poverty of the obscenity concept obvious. He required proof that a work was "utterly" without redeeming social value of any kind in order to ban it. Justice Brennan's test was sometimes ignored, but ultimately eroded older obscenity tests based upon "community standards".
The second odd thing about the book is that, in a sense, it also contains a history of the rise of the book publishing industry. The obscenity trials involved large publishers as well as small ones, and de Grazia also tells the story of how the large publishers managed to use the favorable results many of them obtained in court to build their houses into the foundations of financial empires. It is odd to read this account now, 100 years after the legal challenges to works of the 1910s and 1920s such as Ulysses and Sister Carrie, at a time when the Internet is slowly strangling the print publishing empires.
Finally, I learned from de Grazia's book that Andrea Dworkin, a feminist who was one of the leaders of the anti-pornography movement back in the 1980s, herself published novels that were not only arguably pornographic, but that contained BSDM and lesbian themes. Their publication does not seem to have been challenged on obscenity grounds, though they are not significantly different from other novels that were challenged. The implications of that fact are worth pondering.
"Girls" is an interesting read, though not the easiest read, for an intelligent and educated person. Lawyers may have a slightly easier time with it, because most lawyers get a bit of the history of obscenity in law school. However, my law school (admittedly, a Catholic-run law school) presented the obscenity cases as a fait accompli and as though that law was written in stone. In fact the opposite was true. Courts struggled to apply the "obscenity" concept for as long as it remained a live legal principle, because jurists found some artistic material too sexual, too disgusting, for public discourse.
De Grazia's book thus is a stunning exposition of how emotional prejudices can and do warp judgments, and that's a point we all need to keep in mind. It provides interesting perspectives, not only on the obscenity debate but on the roles of authors, performers, publishers, legislators, lawyers, judges, and police in the course of that debate. "Girls" provides a lot of food for thought, and in my opinion that's the best reason for reading it now, even though in many ways its subject matter, like its author, is now history.
thoughtful
There are no comments on this entry. (Reply.)
amused
impressed