Free Thy Neighbor's Wife by Gay Talese Page B

to be almost as intrigued with other people’s sex lives as he was with his own. He continued to read books about sex laws and censorship, about the social mores and rituals of the ancient past, the attempts by kings, popes, and theocrats like Calvin to control the masses by declaring certain private acts of pleasure to be forbidden and punishable. He read the scurrilous classic tales of such writers as Boccaccio and the banned books of Henry Miller that many G.I.s discovered in Europe during World War II and smuggled into the United States. Hefner examined in art books the reproductions of nude paintings by the masters, the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, Titian, Ingres and Renoir, Rubens, Manet, Courbet, and many others who often portrayed the body with the genitals uncovered, the breasts grandly revealed, the eyes focused more directly on the observer than Von Rosen would have permitted in his photographic art magazine. It was doubtful that Von Rosen’s magazine had yet presented anything as suggestive as Manet’s painting in 1865 of an almost leering young nude woman, or Courbet’s two voluptuous naked ladies embracing in bed, or Goya’s naked maja reclining on pillows with her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes staring at the spectator, her dark pubic hair exposed.
    Of course the difference between this and what appeared in men’s magazines was characterized by one word—art; and yet what was defined as art, and what was condemned as pornography, often changed from one generation to the next, depending on the audience for which a work was intended. The nude art that hung in the great museums was created for the nobility and upper classes that commissioned it, while the photographs that appeared in the magazines were printed for the common man in the street, whose museum was the corner newsstand.
    And it was this latter group that the censors wished to protect from indecency, and to control as well, when in 1896 the United States Supreme Court sustained a conviction against a publisher named Lew Rosen, whose periodical Broadway contained photographs of women defined as lewd. This was the first federal conviction under the Comstock Act, named in honor of the most awesome censor in the history of America, Anthony Comstock.

FOUR
    A NTHONY COMSTOCK was a vengeful, evangelical man born in 1844 on a farm in New Canaan, Connecticut. The death of his mother when he was ten left him extremely morose, and throughout his life he idolized her and later dedicated his purification campaigns to her memory.
    As one who had masturbated so obsessively during his teens that he admitted in his diary that he felt it might drive him to suicide, Comstock was terrifyingly convinced of the dangers inherent in sexual pictures and literature, and was aware that legal authorities were very lax in dealing with the problem. Though a federal law had been passed in 1842 banning the importation of French postcards, Comstock had often seen these small erotic pictures circulated among soldiers while serving with a Connecticut regiment in the Civil War. And he was equally appalled in New York after the war by the prevalence of prostitutes on lower Broadway and the sight of sidewalk vendors selling obscene magazines and books.
    There were no federal laws at this time against obscene publications, although in the state of Massachusetts there had been antiobscenity statutes as early as the 1600s. These statutes, however, denned obscenity not in sexual terms but rather as words written or spoken against the established religion—for example, in the Puritan colony of Massachusetts until 1697, the penaltiesagainst blasphemy included death, and even later the statute stated that offenders could be tortured by such methods as boring through the tongue with a hot iron. The laws in Puritan-dominated Massachusetts also opposed the distribution and possession of religious literature expressing Quaker opinions, and in 1711 there were additional