Pornography

Pornography can be defined as material whose primary purpose is to sexually arouse its consumer. It should be distinguished from material that is sexually explicit but does not have as its intention the arousal of the consumer (e.g., a medical textbook on human reproduction) and material that is not sexually explicit but may unintentionally arouse a consumer (e.g., an ad for shoes that appeals to a foot fetishist).

Because the term pornography is almost always used in the pejorative, the term erotica is often employed as an alternative for sexually suggestive material that is not degrading or dehumanizing. For instance, in an attempt to cast pornography in terms of harm rather than content for the purposes of legislation, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin define pornography specifically as graphic sexually explicit work that subordinates women through pictures and words. However, attempts to distinguish between “good” pornography and “bad” pornography often crash on the rocks of subjective taste; one person may find Rodin's The Kiss pornographic, and another may feel that Reage's The Story of O is a nice piece of erotica. The distinction between “hardcore” and “soft-core” pornography is likewise slippery, though the latter often indicates simulated sex and no images of genitalia.

Pornography is not a legal term. Instead, the courts use the term obscenity to refer to material that falls outside the protection of the First Amendment. What qualifies as obscenity is determined by a three-part test: An average citizen applying community standards would find that the work appeals to prurient interest; the work depicts, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct as specifically defined by the applicable state law; and the work taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Despite this test, it is easy to sympathize with Justice Potter Stewart's famous comment that despite his own doubt that he could succeed in intelligibly defining pornography, he knows it when he sees it. Definitions that depend on community standards encounter a problem when public proclamations and private behavior do not coincide. When, for instance, the percentage of homes that order payper-view pornography greatly outweighs the percentage of those who claim to favor a total ban on pornography, a decision must be made whether a community standard is defined by what people profess to believe or by their actual behavior.

Another issue in the definition of pornography is its medium of presentation. Photographic and filmic images are generally considered of a different order than written pornography, because of the mass extent of their distribution and exhibition, because of the profilmic reality of actual bodies and activities, and finally because the sense of reality that photography-based images convey makes them more likely to be accepted as reality and thus to influence social behavior. The advent of computer technology has greatly eased and expanded the transmission of pornography. The use of company computers by employees to find and view pornographic material has become one of the primary arguments for monitoring computer activity in the [Page 1632]workplace in recent privacy disputes. Computers have also introduced a new class of images—namely, digital illustrations that have the appearance of photographs. Such “virtual pornography” has been at the center of recent court cases that hinge on photorealistic, sexually explicit images of children that were not created using actual children.

...