Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

een leaked from the publishing company and reached the mainstream media, and the
book was quickly labeled as “sadistic,” “pornographic,” misogynistic” and “loathsome”
(Murphet 65-9, Young 86), creating a stir equivalent to the release of Vladimir
Nabokov’s Lolita almost half a century earlier (Murphet 15).
148
Throughout this study, I have often referred to works that depict scenes of sexual
behavior, from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria to Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, Lewis’ The
Monk, and Joyce’s Ulysses, reinforcing the fact that there is an entire legacy of literary
works where accounts of sexual acts are described in varying degrees of explicitness. As
I outlined in chapter 2, the fundamental difference between pornography and sexual
content is based on the assumption that while the latter presents the sexual act in a
manner that promotes intellectual contemplation and discussion, the former typically
aims merely to provide some type of physical or sensual pleasure. Works that were
perceived to be too explicit—or “pornographic”—according to contextual conventions,
were legally persecuted under the label of “obscenity” 19 and/or “immorality” by the
regulating authorities. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the boundaries that
distinguish pornography and sexually explicit material are constantly redefined as society
changes and supposedly becomes more permissive. While many may recall the infamous
case of The People vs. Larry Flint where one of the Supreme Court judges argued, “I
know pornography when I see it,” The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and
Literary Theory notes that ultimately, “judgment [on what constitutes pornography] must
19
Note that since “pornography” is a relatively new word, “obscene” was a more common categorization
until the late twentieth century.