Pleasure, Danger, Playboy, and Porn

In 2005, Hugh Hefner and his live-in female companions became the stars of a reality television show, The Girls Next Door, on the E! television network. Set in the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, the show portrayed the pampered lifestyles of super-rich young women, each of whom displayed evidence of surgical enhancement, as they shopped, planned parties, pursued their career goals, and discussed Hugh. Debuting at the end of the period covered by four recent books about the modern American erotica industry, The Girls Next Door captures several themes explored, with varying degrees of success, by Carolyn Bronstein, Carrie Pitzulo, Elizabeth Fraterrigo, and Whitney Strub in their new books: the centrality of representations of women’s sexuality and gender to the modern consumer revolution; the history of women’s and men’s efforts to stem the circulation of “obscenity”; and the awkward tension for liberals and conservatives between “pleasure and danger” in the production and consumption of erotica.¹

Two intersecting historical developments—the creation of a proudly sexualized mass consumer culture at the turn of the twentieth century and the attenuation of obscenity statutes that had limited speech about sex—loom especially large in these narratives. The centrality of sexuality to the consumer and mass culture revolutions of the early twentieth century set the stage for the success of the obsessively consumerist magazine Playboy after its debut in 1953, and for the commercialized violence and sexuality that motivated conservatives and, by the late 1970s, some feminists to mobilize against the pornography industry. The second development, the expansion of legal protections for free speech, captured the modern American ambivalence about sexuality and the tendency to protect heterosexual norms at the expense of “deviant” expressions of erotic desire. Restrictions on “obscene” speech had begun to lift by the end of World War II, but, as Whitney Strub shows in Perversion for Profit, the American Civil Liberties Unions (ACLU) and the Supreme Court of the 1950s and 1960s stopped short of finding anything meritorious in sexual speech itself. The court instead perseverated about how much “redeeming social value” a work must have in order to qualify for free speech protections (48, 170). Throughout this process, the publications and artistic productions of gay men and lesbians, even those that contained no explicit sexual content, remained prime targets of government repression. Strub argues that when the government protected sexual speech, it most often defended the right to display heterosexual desire.

These books together mark a significant intervention in U.S. historiography. They move the scholarship on anti-obscenity campaigns and erotica past the mid-twentieth century, where prior works by such historians as Alison Parker, Leigh Ann Wheeler, Paul Boyer, Nicola Beisel, and Andrea Friedman have tended to conclude.² They also illuminate the enduring permutations of the idea that exposure to “obscenity,” however defined, could induce otherwise moral, sane men to harm women and children; books and images were not just reflections of morality but agents in reproducing it. In the 1880s and 1890s, women of the WCTU argued that obscene literature harmed children; middle-class reformers in the 1930s warned that burlesque corrupted young minds; in the 1960s, the conservative Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL) warned that pornography could lead to juvenile delinquency and homosexuality; and, in the 1980s, anti-porn feminists blamed pornography for men’s violence against women. Yet as the...