Reason Writers Around Town: Nick Gillespie on 19th Century Porn Prosecutions

March 9, 2009

In Sunday's New York Post, Reason.tv Editor in Chief Nick Gillespie revewed Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in 19th-Century New York. A snippet:

"Licentious Gotham," a new history by Rutgers law professor Donna Dennis, covers [the wide variety of erotica] and much more in riveting and good-natured detail. It's not just her descriptions and reproductions of old-fashioned dirty pictures that hold the reader's attention. Her discussion and analysis of legal and social responses to the growth of erotica is as compelling as it is comprehensive. Civic leaders fretted that passion-inducing material "posed a special risk of harm because it represented the antithesis of rational, ordered liberty," writes Dennis. As the makers of contemporary porn—and video games, movies, and music—could tell you, such fears are alive and well in contemporary America.

Whole thing here.

Comments

Hambone|3.9.09 @ 9:56AM|#

Pictures please?

Phineas Q Barnwhistle|3.9.09 @ 10:01AM|#

Silas, this woman is showing her privates! I can see her entire ankle!

Waterboy|3.9.09 @ 10:23AM|#

She showed me her boobies and I like dem, too!

|3.9.09 @ 11:07AM|#

Seriously. 19th Century porn and only three posts after three hours? Y'all should be ashamed. Poor thread.

I will say that the past, much like Japan, needs a shitload of disposable razors.

DannyK|3.9.09 @ 5:21PM|#

That image is a portrait of the eminent French neurologist Charcot with one of his hysteria patients. It's a detail from a much larger painting that can be seen in B&W here:
http://www.freud.org.uk/wwork.htm

Either the person who picked this illustration is a complete bonehead, or this is a brilliant in-joke that I can't understand.