7 - Offensiveness

Summary

7.1 The deprave and corrupt test of obscenity, the history of which we have already referred to, defines a concept of obscenity which is of course exactly suited to fit in with the harm condition: it is a causal notion of obscenity, based on the idea that the rationale of suppressing obscenity is the harm that it causes. But, as we noted, the actual use of the test in the past seems often to have had little to do with proving that there had been any harms at all. It has almost been as if people, accepting the harm condition, agreed that pornography should be suppressed only if it did harm; were quite clear that it should be suppressed; and concluded that somehow it must do harm.

7.2 One idea that may confuse the issue here is the assumption, which we touched on in discussing law and morality, that if something does no identifiable harm, then any objection to it must be (merely) a matter of taste. As we have said, some of those who have written to us do regard reactions to pornography as a matter of taste. Others go a little further, in saying that it is a matter of taste not just in the sense that some people have a taste for it and others do not, but that a taste for it is bad taste. This would make it, at any rate, a matter of aesthetic judgement.

7.3 Certainly most pornography is also trash: ugly, shallow, and obvious. (We will consider in Chapter 8 why this is so, and whether it is necessarily so—whether, that is to say, there could be a pornographic, or again obscene, work of art, a question which has constantly recurred to plague the Obscene Publications Act.) But this fact is not enough to explain its offensiveness; we are surrounded by shallow trash of all kinds but few people, however sensitive their taste, find it as upsetting and disagreeable as many people certainly find pornography. For many people, pornography is not only offensive, but deeply offensive.