Girls Lean Back Everywhere, Edward de Grazia's treatise on artistic persecution, begins with the suicide of Ida Craddock in 1902 after the destruction of her livelihood and reputation by the infamous Anthony Comstock. Ida had written a series of "marriage manuals" containing gentle euphemisms to describe practices which have been more graphically depicted in contemporary works such as The Joy of Sex. Anthony Comstock was the "special agent" of the United States Post Office designated to catch those using the mail to send obscene or indecent materials. He was also the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice from 1872 to 1915. In 1874 he said that he had seized "194,000 obscene pictures and lithographs, 134,000 pounds of books, 14,200 stereo plates, and 60,300 rubber articles." Comstock also seized a percentage of the fines procured from those convicted as a result of his meticulous study of the lewd and lascivious, which may have helped to motivate him to such extraordinary success.
De Grazia says in his introduction to Girls Lean Back Everywhere that his intention in writing this book is to "describe how the persons who were most immediately affected by literary censorship--authors and publishers--responded to and felt about it...." He seems to be saying that in Ida's case, literary censorship drove her to her death. This makes de Grazia's perspective on the issue of literary censorship very clear: it is persecution of the artist, if not of the pornographer. The author's objective is not to protect the tender ignorance of childhood but to protect the First Amendment rights of adults--which may be considered reasonable when one realizes that most people are adults for far longer than they are children.
De Grazia's book is a scholarly work, packed with meticulous and detailed footnotes and endnotes. Quotes from trials and interviews conducted by the author are interspersed with commentary by de Grazia, suggesting a script for a documentary with de Grazia providing the narration. With 688 pages of text, 81 pages of endnotes, and a nine-page bibliography, it would be tedious reading if not for de Grazia's lively writing style and passion for his subject. It is by no means a casual read, but it is consistently fascinating and abundantly informative.
The book covers the issue of obscenity in other media besides literature. Included in de Grazia's book are a photographer (Robert Mapplethorpe), a comedian (Lenny Bruce), a band (2 Live Crew), and even a performance artist (Karen Finley). Any reader with an interest in the arts will find something which concerns his or her personal preference.
Edward de Grazia, in his legal career, has participated in defending works as varied in context as Aristophanes' Lysistrata, William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, and the film I Am Curious--Yellow. He is part of the history of obscenity law, and he describes much of that history throughout the past 140 years, which begins with the famous Hicklin rule established by the Queen's Bench of England in 1868.
The Hicklin rule, resulting from the case Regina v. Hicklin, was based on the same principle which occupies much of the current debate about obscenity: the moral sanctity of childhood. By this rule a work was adjudged to be obscene, and therefore illegal, if it might corrupt the morals of young children, "those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall." This rule held when, in 1920, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap (from whose defense of James Joyce's Ulysses comes the title of the book) were arrested and charged with publishing obscenity for serializing parts of Joyce's masterpiece in their literary magazine, The Little Review. It was John Sumner, Anthony Comstock's successor, who had them charged. The publishers paid a fine of $100 and were prevented from publishing further installments of the book. Jane Heap's response after the trial was to ask, "So the mind of the young girl rules this country?" --questioning whether adults ought to be allowed to publish and to read only that material which has been deemed safe for children to read.
The Hicklin rule was finally overturned in an American court during another trial which concerned Joyce's Ulysses. In 1933 Judge John M. Woolsey stated in his opinion that "reading Ulysses in its entirety...did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts...its net effect...was only that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women." The book, once it was legally determined not to be obscene, gained a singular position in modernist fiction and in literature in general.
Over the next 60 years, the legal standards for obscenity changed repeatedly. In 1957 the Supreme Court determined that although literature is protected by the First Amendment, obscenity is not. In 1964 Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., to whom de Grazia dedicated this book, ruled that "only expression 'utterly without literary, scientific, artistic, or other social importance' might be branded 'obscene.'" In 1973 Supreme Court Justice Warren L. Burger ruled that "local community standards" should be the measure--with Justice Brennan repeatedly dissenting. Of course, the willingness of the members of the community to buy pornography is not considered to be proof of local community standards--one never knows if it might be just one pervert in the neighborhood buying all those copies of Playboy.
De Grazia's perspective on obscenity is clear not only from the subtitle of Girls Lean Back Everywhere, but from the choices he describes making as legal counsel to William Burroughs in the 1964 case Attorney General v. The Book Named Naked Lunch. He decided not to bring Burroughs into the trial as a witness so that Burroughs would not have to answer the following questions: "Have you ever taken illegal drugs? Been a heroin addict? Sodomized young boys? Killed your wife?" This was surely a wise decision on de Grazia's part, as Burroughs's answer to any of those questions, precluding perjury, would have been "yes." De Grazia wanted not to defend the writer's character but only to prove that Burroughs's Naked Lunch had "serious artistic and social motives."
De Grazia is wholly concerned with defending the First Amendment rights of artistic expression. He admits that by freeing Naked Lunch for publication he "left the door ajar for hard-core pornography...this raises the question of whether the right to be sexually aroused is guaranteed by the First Amendment...." It seems that girls not only lean back--they also bend over, stark naked.
De Grazia addresses the subject of hard-core pornography beginning with Penthouse magazine and its policy of graphically depicting female genitalia. The perceived damage then becomes the exploitation of adult women rather than the possible corruption of young girls. This issue was taken up by feminist and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, who said, "The hostile, even contemptuous, response of the courts to the first round of women's attempt to gain civil rights should suggest that this theory [that pornography is protected expression] of the state is wrong."
The current wave of concern over obscenity on the Internet shows the state of the issue since the publication of Girls Lean Back Everywhere in 1992. Robert Corn-Revere, a communications lawyer and First Amendment scholar, used Girls... throughout his analysis of the Exon Amendment. Corn-Revere echoed the fears of First Amendment supporters everywhere when he called it "Comstockery in Cyberspace." He referred to the Communications Decency Act of 1995, which the Senate approved 84-16 on June 14, 1995. "The bill proposes to outlaw the use of computers and telephone lines to transmit 'indecent' material," he stated, "a category of speech that the Supreme Court has held to be protected by the First Amendment."
Further attempts to control the Internet include the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was passed by Congress on February 1 of this year (1996). Among the provisions of this legislation, the largest change in communications regulation since the Federal Communications Act of 1934, are limits to the content of material on television and cable. Fines for obscenity are increased from $10,000 to $100,000. The bill also requires that every television set sold in the United States must now contain the "V-chip," a technology which allows the user of the set to automatically block transmissions which are rated violent or indecent. Some civil rights activists are prepared to contest these provisions. Many are concerned primarily with the restrictions of content on the Internet, which may violate the First Amendment. No one should be surprised if they find Edward de Grazia involved in those legal proceedings.
The subject of censorship is an important concern. Obscenity continues to be a critical issue as sociologists and psychologists study its effects not only on children but on society as a whole. As communications change too rapidly for legislation to keep up with the technology, hysterical attempts are made to pass legislation that is redundant, poorly researched, or ineffective. Many people are responding to the idea of obscenity on the Internet before having had any experience on-line. Some question whether children will ever have any business going onto the Internet without parental supervision. As Lenny Bruce said in his autobiography, "When you're eight years old, nothing is any of your business."
De Grazia's place in the legal profession establishes his faultless credentials. It is unlikely that anyone else could have covered this material in the way he has. He lives up to the intention he describes in his introduction. Reading this spectacularly well-researched book is a step into the world of those persecuted, properly or not, for their passion for unrestricted freedom in the arts.
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