Over the coming months we will be adding numerous and exclusive feature articles, so please check back often!

The Playboy Philosophy Part 16

ONE OF THE MOST pleasant aspects in the writing of this series of editorials on the social and sexual ills of society has been the response it has elicited from readers. Several hundred letters on The Playboy Philosophy come in each month from every part of the United States, and a number of foreign countries as well. We try to personally read just as much of this correspondence as possible, and the most interesting comments are published regularly in The Playboy Forum.

Whatever else they have to say, most of the correspondents are enthusiastic about the existence of these articles and the fact that a great many problems previously treated only superficially in the popular press are here, at last, being given full and open consideration.

Many who write enclose books, articles and clippings on subjects related to those we have been discussing, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank them for this, for much of it has been quite useful as an additional source of research — giving us new facts and sometimes suggesting new areas that deserve attention.

A few weeks ago we received a volume in this way that is of such pertinence and interest that we’ve decided to devote this installment to a consideration of its contents. The book was sent to us by James Brooks of Homestead, Florida, who states that he found it in the hayloft of a barn. The binding is broken and worn, but it was obviously an impressive volume when first published, with a cloth cover and more than 500 pages.

The book is titled Plain Facts for Old and Young. It was written by J.H. Kellogg, M.D., and originally published by Segner and Condit of Burlington, Iowa, in 1879. It is a guide to sane sex life, as it was viewed in the United States in that period of extreme puritanism at the end of the last century. No amount of editorial comment by us can establish the excessive antisexuality that is our American heritage nearly so well as the statements to be found in this manual of love and marriage.

In the last two installments of the Philosophy (February and April), we discussed the irrational and suppressive sex laws of the United States, and a great many readers found it difficult to understand how such preposterous legislation could ever have been established in this supposedly free society. This book supplies the answer, for it documents the sexual sickness from which we suffered less than a century ago — many symptoms of which are still to be found in the supposedly enlightened society of today.

Before exploring the book, a few words about its author. John Harvey Kellogg, M.D., LL.D., F.A.C.S., was no hysterical, moralistic screwball, of the sort to be found in every age, but a highly respected, internationally renowned man of science, and the opinions on sex expressed in Plain Facts are representative of those held by a significant portion of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.

Dr. Kellogg resided in Battle Creek, Michigan. He was a member of the Michigan State Board of Health from 1878 to 1890 and from 1912 to 1916. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American College of Surgeons, Royal Society of Medicine in England, and the National Geographic Society. He was a member of the American Public Health Association, the superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and the founder and president emeritus of Battle Creek College. On his death in December 1943, at the age of 91, he received tributes from Herbert Hoover, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Senator Vandenberg and Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy.

Dr. Kellogg was a prolific writer, producing more than 50 books in his lifetime, two of which had a circulation of over a million copies each; Plain Facts is listed in his obituary as one of the more important works. He wrote physiology texts that were used in public schools and founded and edited Good Health magazine. The good doctor was a health evangelist and a vegetarian, who was strongly opposed to the use of tobacco and alcohol. As we shall see, he was also strongly opposed to the use of sex.

With Dr. Kellogg’s avowed avoidance of so many earthly pleasures, even if he had not lived for nearly a century, it probably would have seemed that long. In abstaining from meat, tobacco, whiskey and women, the doctor must have had a lot of spare time on his hands and he apparently spent it in research. He is credited with the invention of corn flakes and peanut butter.

In a preface to Plain Facts for Old and Young, the author indicates that the purpose of the book is “to dispel the gross ignorance which almost universally prevails” regarding sex. Which, after a perusal of the volume’s contents, might seem intended as a bit of wry humor. In simple fact, the entire book would be outrageously funny if we gave no thought to the countless thousands who, in their search for some thoughtful, authoritative, helpful and humane words on the problems of sex, turned to this tome of ignorant gobbledygook and, believing what they read, suffered for a lifetime from the misunderstanding, guilt and shame of their own natural sexuality.

The copy of the book in our possession is not the first edition, and the author comments in the preface on the “warm reception” it had already received from both public and press: “The cordial reception which the work has met from the press everywhere has undoubtedly contributed in great measure to its popularity. The demand for the work has exhausted several editions in rapid succession, and has seemed to require its preparation in greatly enlarged and in every way improved form in which it now appears. The addition of two whole chapters for the purpose of bringing the subject directly before the minds of boys and girls in a proper manner, adds greatly to the interest and value of the work, as there seemed to be a slight deficiency in this particular in the former editions.”

Index to Sexual Enlightenment

Having been reassured in the introduction that the slight deficiency in former editions had been corrected in this one, we turned to the index. For a book devoted to the development of a happier, healthier sex life, authored by an eminent man of science, the subject headings are something less than reassuring. They include: Abortion…Afterbirth…Amaurosis…Amenorrhea…Antediluvian wickedness…Bad books…Bad company…Bad language…Balls, demoralizing influence of…Beer, evil effects of…Birth, changes at…Bladder, irritation of…Boarding-schools, danger of…Brain, male and female…Breasts, atrophy of the…Breath, causes of foul…Castration…Cider, evil effects of…Clitoris…Coitus…Colds, how to prevent…Cunjugal onanism…Constipation… Consumption…Continence…Copulation…Courtship…Criminality, hereditary…Dancing… Daydreams…Diet, influence on chastity…Divorce, loose laws on…Dozing, danger of…Dreams, how to control…Dress and sensuality…Dress reform…Drinks, stimulating…Drugs…Dwarfs… Dypepsia…Egypt a hot-bed of vice…Electricity…Epilepsy…Eyes, weakness of…Female organs…Fetus, respiration of…Filthy dreams…Filthy talkers…Flirtation, evils of…Flowers, polygamous…Foods, stimulating…Girls, how ruined…Gluttony…Heart disease… Hermaphrodism…Hymen…Hysteria…Idiocy, cause of…Idleness…Ignorance…Imbecility… Impotence…Infantcide…Insanity…Internal emissions…Intestinal worms…Labia, the…Labor… Libidinous blood…Licentiousness, results of…Literature, poisonous…Male organs…Mammary glands…Marital excesses…Marriage…Marriage, of cousins, of criminals, of paupers… Masturbation, prevention of, effects on females, effects on offspring…Menopause, the… Menstruation…Moderation…Modesty…Monsters…Mormonism…Navel, the…Nervous diseases…Nocturnal emissions…Novel-reading…Nursing…Nympomania…Obscene books… Obscenity…Ovary…Ovum…Paralysis…Passion, inherited…Penis, the…Pernicious books, influence of…Pictures, vile…Piles…Pimples…Poisonous literature…Polyandry…Polygamy… Precocity, sexual…Pregnancy…Prostate gland…Prostitution…Puberty…Quacks…Race degeneration, cause of…Religion, help of…Religious novels…Reproduction…Reproduction in the honey bee…Satyriasis…Scrotum, the…Secret Vice, evidences of, prevalence of, terrible effects of…Self-abuse, causes of, effects of, the signs of, results of, treatment of…Self-pollution…Seminal fluid, the…Senility…Sentimental literature, influence of…Sentimental young women…Sexual activity, the limit of…Social lepers, evil of, causes of, cure of…Solitary vice, alarming prevalence of, unsuspected cause of…Sterility…Suicide, cause of…Tea and coffee…Testicles…Thoughts, evil…Throat disease, cause of…Tobacco…Twins…Urinary disease…Vagina, the…Vision, dimness of…Waltz, the, its sensuality…Weak backs…Wine, evil effects of…Woman, servitude of… and, concluding the index on an upbeat note, Womb, cancer of the.

The Prevention of Puberty

In the very first chapter of his book, Dr. Kellogg establishes that he knew a good deal more about corn flakes than sex. After a brief description about the sex lives of plants and animals, with disappointingly little moralizing on the promiscuous behavior of the bees and flowers, he concludes that people are really grown-up plants: “In short, men and women are blossoms in a strictly scientific sense.” (Though he offers no explanation as to why some of us turn out to be snapdragons and others pansies.) There follows a scientifically accurate description of the structure and function of the human reproductive organs, and an explanation of fecundation, gestation and parturition, with the natural pain of childbirth caused, according to this eminent physician, by Original Sin in the Garden of Eden and the degeneracy of modern civilization: “Although the curse pronounced upon the feminine part of the race, in consequence of the sin of Eve, involves suffering in the parturient act, yet there is no doubt that the greater share of the daughters of Eve are, through the perverting and degenerating influences of wrong habits and especially of modern civilization, compelled to suffer many times more than their maternal ancestor.”

The arrival of puberty is viewed with something other than pleasure by Dr. Kellogg and he advises avoiding it as long as possible: “Habits of vigorous physical exercise tend to delay the access of puberty. For this reason, together with others, country boys and girls generally mature later than those living in the city by several months, and even a year or two. Anything that tends to excite the emotions hastens puberty. The excitements of city life, parties, balls, theaters, even the competition of students in school, and the various causes of excitement to the nervous system which occur in city life, have a tendency to hasten the occurrence of the change which awakens the sexual activities of the system into life. Hence, these influences cannot but be considered prejudicial to the best interests of the individual, mentally, morally, and physically, since it in every way desirable that a change which arouses the passions and gives to them greater intensity should be delayed rather than hastened.” (We must grudgingly admit that that is the most original argument we’ve ever heard for keeping ‘em down on the farm.) In addition to getting the hell out of the city, Dr. Kellogg indicates that diet can play an important part in delaying puberty and he advises against “stimulating food, such as pepper, vinegar, mustard, spices, and the condiments generally, together with tea and coffee, and an excess of animal food [meat].”

The doctor states that “in girls the occurrence of puberty is earlier in brunettes than in blondes” — a fact that the Clairol people have obviously failed to take into account, with their presumptuous advertising claim that blondes have more fun. The doctor adds: “In Jews the change is commonly a year or two in advance of other nationalities in this country. It also occurs somewhat sooner in Negroes and Creoles than in white persons….”

Dr. Kellogg dramatizes the importance of putting off puberty just as long as possible with this topper: “A fact which is of too great importance to allow to pass unnoticed is that whatever occasions early or premature sexual development also occasions premature decay. Females in whom puberty occurs at the age of ten or 12, by the time the age is doubled, are shriveled and wrinkled with age. At the time when they should be in their prime of health and beauty, they are prematurely old and broken. Those women who mature late retain their beauty and their strength many years after their precocious sister have become old, decrepit and broken down.” How’s that to scare the bejesus out of a youngster just entering into adolescence — a little item to make any boy or girl fear the arrival of the first signs of sexual maturity?!

And just where did kindly Doc Kellogg get this fascinating hypothesis, that he offers to “old and young” as statement of undisputed fact? Why, he made it up, of course. In actual fact, whatever correlation there may be between sexual precocity and the aging process operates as just the reverse of what Kellogg suggests. And in its extensive study of the sexual patterns of American males and females, the Institute for Sex Research of Indiana University found that those who are sexually precocious are also more inclined than the average to remain sexually active in the latter years of life. There is a considerable difference in the innate sex drives of various individuals, and it is the person with the weakest drive who is apt to reach sexual maturity latest and become sexually impotent earliest, as well as being less inclined to overall physical vigor and, therefore, more likely to succumb to the ravages of old age and senility.

Dr. Kellogg says, regarding sexual interests prior to puberty: “If raised strictly in accordance with natural law, children would have no sexual notions or feelings before the occurrence of puberty. No prurient speculation about sexual matters would enter their heads. Until that period, the reproductive system would lie dormant in its undeveloped state. No other feeling should be exhibited between the sexes than that brotherly and sisterly affection which is so admirable and becoming.” When sexual interests were observed in the young, Kellogg explained them as unnatural perversions caused by improper upbringing.

At the very same time that the doctor of Battle Creek, Michigan, was expounding these views, another doctor in Vienna named Sigmund Freud was beginning his study of human behavior that established the existence of natural sexuality in the youngest infants.

Chastity and Continence

Dr. Kellogg devotes a chapter apiece to chastity and continence and makes clear his conviction that all manner of ills will befall those of either sex, whose surrender to the desires of the flesh, who even think about surrendering.

“Mental unchastity” is, according to Kellogg, as serious as the act itself: “Though [a man] may never have committed an overt act of unchastity, if he cannot pass a handsome female in the street without, in imagination, approaching the secrets of her person, he is but one grade above the open libertine, and is truly unchaste as the veriest debauchee.

“Man may not see these mental adulteries, he may not perceive these filthy imaginings; but One sees and notes them. They leave their hideous scars upon the soul. They soil and mar the mind; and as the record of each day of life is photographed upon the books in Heaven, they each appear in bold relief, in all their innate hideousness.

“O purity! How rare a virtue! How rare to find a face which shows no trace of sensuality!

“Foul thoughts, once allowed to enter the mind, stick like the leprosy. They corrode, contaminate, and infect like the pestilence; naught but Almighty power can deliver from the bondage of concupiscence a soul once infected by this foul blight, this moral contagium.”

Kellogg warns his readers of the outcome of improper daydreams: “Those lascivious daydreams and amorous reveries, in which young people — and especially the voluptuous, and the sedentary and the nervous — are exceedingly apt to indulge, are often the sources of general debility, effeminacy, disordered functions, premature disease, and even premature death, without the actual exercise of the genital organs!”

The author discusses, in some detail, the causes of unchastity in modern civilization, which include:

Hereditary Predisposition — “A child conceived in lust can no more be chaste by nature than a Negro can be a Caucasian.”

Improper Upbringing — “The sexes should be carefully separated from each other at least as early as four or five years of age, under all circumstances which could afford opportunity for observing the physical differences of the sexes, or in any way to serve to excite those passions which at this tender age should be wholly dormant.”

Improper Diet — “Flesh, condiments, eggs, tea, coffee, chocolate, and all stimulants have a powerful influence directly upon the reproductive organs. They increase the local supply of blood, and through nervous sympathy with the brain, the passions are aroused. Overeating, eating between meals, hasty eating, eating indigestible articles of food, late suppers, react upon the sexual organs with the utmost certainty.”

Clerical Impropriety — “Our most profound disgust is justly excited when we hear of laxity of morals in a clergyman…. But when we consider how these ministers are fed, we cannot suppress a momentary disposition to excuse, in some degree, their fault. When the minister goes out to tea, he is served with the richest cake, the choicest jellies, the most pungent sauces, and the finest of fine-flour bread-stuffs. Little does the indulgent hostess dream that she is ministering to the inflammation of passions which may peril the virtue of her daughter, or even her own. Salacity once aroused, even in a minister, allows no room for reason or for conscience.”

Tobacco — “Few are aware of the influence upon morals exerted by that filthy habit, tobacco-using. When acquired early, it excites the underdeveloped organs, arouses the passions, and in a few years converts the once chaste and pure youth into a veritable volcano of lust, belching out from its inner fires of passion torrents of obscenity and the sulphurous fumes of lasciviousness. If long-continued, the final effect of tobacco is emasculine; but this is only the necessary consequence of previous super-excitation.”

Bad Books — “Another potent enemy of virtue is the obscene literature which has flooded the land for many years. Circulated by secret agencies, these books have found their way into the most secluded districts. Nearly every large school contains one of these emissaries of evil men and their Satanic master. Largely through the influence of Mr. [Anthony] Comstock, laws have been enacted which promise to do much toward checking this extensive evil, or at least causing it to make itself less prominent…. It is a painful fact however, that the total annihilation of every foul book which the law can reach will not affect the cure of this evil, for our modern literature is full of the same virus. It is necessarily presented in less grossly revolting forms, half concealed by beautiful imagery, or embellished by wit; but yet, there it is, and no law can reach it. The works of our standard authors in literature abound in lubricity. Popular novels have doubtless done more to arouse a prurient curiosity in the young, and to excite and foster passion and immorality, than even the obscene literature for the suppression of which such active measures have recently been taken. The more exquisitely painted the scenes of vice, the more dangerously enticing. Novel-reading has led thousands to lives of dissoluteness.”

Idleness — “To maintain purity, the mind must be occupied. If left without occupation, the vacuity is quickly filled with unchaste thoughts.”

Fashion — The fashionable dress of the women of the day leads to unchastity in two ways, according to Dr. Kellogg: “1. By its extravagance; 2. By its abuse of the body.” The latter, he notes, may “produce permanent local congestions, with ovarian and uterine derangements. These affections have long been recognized as the chief pathological condition in hysteria, and especially in that peculiar form of disease known as nymphomania, under the excitement of which a young woman, naturally chaste and modest, may be impelled to the commission of the most wanton acts. The pernicious influence of fashionable dress in occasioning this disorder cannot be doubted.”

Dancing – “In addition to the associated dissipation, late hours, fashionable dressing, midnight feasting, exposure through excessive exertions and improper dress, etc., it can be shown most clearly that dancing has a direct influence in stimulating the passions and provoking unchaste acts, and are in themselves violations of the requirements of strict morality, and productive of injury to both mind and body.”

Modern Modes of Life — “Superheated rooms, sedentary employments, the development of the mental and nervous organizations at the expense of the muscular, the cramming system in schools, too long confinement of schoolchildren in a sitting position, the allowance of too great freedom between the sexes in the young, the demoralizing influence of most varieties of public amusement, balls, church fairs, and other like influences too numerous to mention, all tend to lead in one direction, that of abnormal excitation and precocious development of sexual functions.”

Constipation — “In males, one of the most general physical causes of sexual excitement is constipation…. When this condition is chronic, as in habitual constipation, the unnatural excitement often leads to the most serious results. One of these is the production of a horrible disease, satyriasis [the male equivalent of nymphomania]…. Constipation in females has the same tendency, though the dangers are not quite so great. The irritation is sufficient, however, to lead to excitement of the passions.”

Intestinal Worms — “often produce the same result in children.”

The author lists, as Helps to Continence: The Will, Diet, Exercise, Cold Baths and Religion. Since he advises against early marriage, young men and women of normal sexual inclination are apt to need all of these, and then some, to remain as chaste in thought and deed as Kellogg asserts they should.

Courtship and Flirtation

Dr. Kellogg is hesitant about openly endorsing any of the social customs of foreign countries over those of America, lest this be taken as un-American by the 19th century equivalent of the John Birch Society, but he suggests that the “distinctly American custom” of courting can be a dangerous thing, leading to all manner of sexual excesses, and that perhaps the Old World tradition of keeping the sexes apart until they are ready for marriage is not such a bad idea.

He abhors the acceptance of flirtation, on the part of both sexes: “We cannot find language sufficiently emphatic to express proper condemnation of one of the most popular forms of amusement indulged in at the present day in this country, under the guise of innocent association of sexes…. We have not the slightest hesitation in pronouncing flirtation as pernicious in the extreme. It exerts a malign influence alike upon the mental, the moral, and the physical constitution of those who indulge it. The young lady who has become infatuated with a passion for flirting, courting the society of young men simply for the pleasure derived from their attentions, is educating herself in a school which will totally unfit her for the enjoyment of domestic peace and happiness…. More than this, she is very likely laying the foundation for lifelong disease by the dissipation, late hours, late suppers, evening exposures, fashionable dressing, etc., the almost certain accompaniments of the vice we are considering….

“It may be true, and undoubtedly is the case, that the greater share of the guilt of flirtation lies at the door of the female sex; but there do exist such detestable creatures as male flirts. In general, the male flirt is a much less worthy character than the young lady who makes a pastime of flirtation. He is something more than a flirt. In nine cases out of ten, he is a rake as well. His object in flirting is to gratify a mean propensity at the expense of those who are pure and unsophisticated. He is skilled in the arts of fascination and intrigue. Slowly he winds his coils about his victim, and before she is aware of his own real character, she has lost her own.

“Such wretches ought to be punished in a purgatory by themselves, made seven times hotter than for ordinary criminals. Society is full of these lecherous villains. They insinuate themselves into the drawing-rooms of the most respectable families; they are always on hand at social gatherings of every sort. They haunt the ballroom, the theater, and the church, when they can forward their infamous plans by seeming to be pious…. They are the sharks of society, and often seize in their voracious maws the fairest and brightest ornaments of a community. The male flirt is a monster. Every man ought to despise him; and every woman ought to spurn him as a loathsome social leper.”

Illicit Sex

Kellogg condemns all forms of sex outside of marriage, and says of it: “A vice that has become so great an evil, even in these enlightened times, as to defy the most skillful legislation, which openly displays its gaudy filthiness and mocks at virtue with a lecherous stare, must have its origin in causes too powerful to be ignored.”

Chief among these causes are: Libidinous Blood (“In no other direction are the effects of heredity to be more distinctly traced than in the transmission of sensual propensities. The children of libertines are almost certain to be rakes and prostitutes.”); Gluttony (“It is an observed fact that ‘all liberties are great eaters or famous gastronomists.’”); Precocious Sexuality (any interest in sex whatever, prior to puberty); Fashion; Lack of Early Training and Sentimental Literature (“City and school libraries, circulating libraries, and even Sunday-school libraries, are full of books which, though they may contain good moral teaching, contain, as well, an element as incompatible with purity of morals as is light with midnight darkness. Writers for children and youth seem to think a tale of ‘courtship, love, and matrimony’ entirely indispensable as a medium of conveying their moral instruction. Some of these ‘religious novels’ are actually more pernicious than the fictions of well-known novelists who make no pretense to having religious instruction a particular object in view….”).

The doctor indicates that anyone who takes the trouble to examine the books of such a library will be able to select the most pernicious ones by their external appearance: “The covers will be well worn and the edges begrimed with dirt from much handling. Children soon tire of the shallow sameness which characterizes the ‘moral’ parts of most of these books, and skim lightly over them, selecting and devouring with eagerness those portions which relate the silly narrative of some love adventure. This kind of literature arouses the children premature fancies and queries, and fosters a sentimentalism which too often occasions most unhappy results. Through their influence, young girls are often led to begin a life of shame long before their parents are aware that a thought of evil has ever entered their minds.”

Our friendly physician finds a direct correlation between “ignorance,” by which he apparently means lack of either intellect or knowledge, and sensuality. “As a general rule,” he says, “as the intellect is developed, the animal passions are brought into subjection.” He notes that “prostitutes come almost entirely from the more ignorant classes,” but fails to point out that the motivations of the prostitute are usually monetary rather than sexual.

The doctor offers this example of “ignorance” and sensuality from his personal experience: “… An idiot was brought before our medical class in a clinic at Bellevue Hospital, New York [where Dr. Kellogg received his medical degree]. The patient had been an idiot from birth, and presented the most revolting appearance, seemingly possessing scarcely the intelligence of the average dog; but his animal propensities were so great as to be almost uncontrollable. Indeed, he showed evidences of having been a gross debauchee, having contracted venereal disease of the worst form. The general prevalence of extravagant sexual excitement among the insane is a well-known fact.”

The results of licentiousness are, according to Dr. Kellogg, almost too horrible to relate, but he relates them — in glowing detail — just the same. The most fearsome result of sexual transgression is, of course, venereal disease — gonorrhea, chancroid and syphilis — which the doctor seems to view as a penalty properly befitting the crime of immorality: “Apparently as a safeguard to virtue, nature has appended to the sin of illicit sexual indulgence, as penalties, the most loathsome, deadly, and incurable diseases known to man.” It must have shook the doctor up a bit when modern medical science removed this “safeguard to virtue” by discovering simple cures for these diseases. The needless spread of venereal disease is now clearly caused by lack of public sex education, and those of Dr. Kellogg’s moral persuasion will have to search out other loathsome “penalties” to keep the sexual nature of man in check.

Apparently as naive on the subject of sex in animals as in humans, Kellogg erroneously reports: “Man is the only animal that abuses his sexual organization by making it subservient to other ends than reproduction; hence he is the only sufferer from this foul disease, which is one of the penalties of such abuse.”

Nonprocreative sex play of every sort, heterosexual and homosexual, is common among the higher forms of infrahuman animal life; it is only the lower animals in whom sexual desire coincides with ovulation in the female. A fact which prompted Dr. N. Papania to observe, in a letter in last month’s Playboy Forum: “One must therefore conclude that having sexual relations for reproduction alone is bestial, not vice versa.”

Kellogg’s second conclusion — that venereal disease is somehow related to man’s subverting sex to ends other than reproduction — is an example of deductive reasoning that completely escapes us. For these diseases are transmitted equally, whether the sex act is engaged in for purposes of reproduction or solely for pleasure. The tiny microorganisms involved display, in truth, a distressing lack of interest in the moral intent of the individuals engaged in sexual congress.

Dr. Kellogg seems determined to compound his scientific error on this subject, for the next he discusses the “Origin of the Foul Disease,” wherein he makes the most incredible medical misstatement of all: “Where or when the disease originated is a mystery. It is said to have been introduced into France from Naples by French soldiers. That it originated spontaneously [emphasis ours] at some time can scarcely say be doubted, and that it might originate under circumstances of excessive violation of the laws of chastity is rendered probable by the fact that gonorrhea, or an infectious disease exactly resembling it, is often caused by excessive indulgence, from which cause it not infrequently occurs in the newly married, giving rise to unjust suspicion of infidelity on both sides.”

In Kellogg’s simple view of sensuality, “Prevention is the Only Cure.” He writes, “Those who have once entered upon a career of sensuality are generally so completely lost to all sense of purity and right that there is little chance of reforming them. They have no principle to which to appeal. The gratification of lust so degrades the soul and benumbs the higher sensibilities that a votary of voluptuousness is a most unpromising subject for reformatory efforts.”

In this, the doctor is essentially correct, though his explanation as to why it is so reveals more personal prejudice than scientific objectivity. What he is really saying, beneath the intemperate tirade, is that most individuals who engage in sex prior to marriage do not, as has often been assumed, regret the experience. He’s right, they like it; and, in the majority of cases, if they had it to do over again, they would do the same as before — probably quicker.

Modern sex research confirms this fact: Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his associates report that relatively few of those persons, of either sex, who have premarital intercourse express any unhappiness about the experience afterward.

A person’s chastity may seem quite important until the decision is made to give it up; after which, it seems much ado about nothing.

When to Wed

The overly optimistic reader of Plain Facts might have anticipated an end to all this sexual negation with the taking of a spouse. Not a bit of it! Dr. J.H. Kellogg’s approach to sex is just as severe and joyless within the bounds of matrimony as without. And this general truth about Puritan antisexualism is something the casual observer of American sex mores fails to realize: that in restrictive sexual attitudes that persist in our present-day society have their origins in a puritanical period of a few decades ago in which all sexual interest and desires were considered depravity inspired by the Devil.

Kellogg counsels against early marriage — not for the sound social or psychological reasons that might be advanced for such an idea — but as another means of putting off the ugly business of sex just as long as possible.

Since he precludes the possibility of premarital sex in the morally upright, the postponement of marriage means the postponement of sex, and he underscores this point by offering a fascinating physiological explanation of why women should never contemplate marriage before the age of 24. “Physiology,” he says, “fixes with accuracy the earliest period of which marriage is admissible. This period is that at which the body attains complete development, which is not before 20 for the female, and 24 in the male. Even though the growth may be completed before these ages, ossification of the bones is not fully effected, so the development is incomplete.”

This prominent American medical authority then proceeds to explain why it is hazardous and foolhardy to contemplate marriage before your bones are fully ossified. Under the heading, “Application of the Law of Heredity,” the doctor states, “A moment’s consideration of the physiology of heredity will disclose a sufficient reason why marriage should be deferred until the development of the body is wholly complete. The matrimonial relation implies reproduction…. The perfection of the new being [offspring], then must be largely dependent on the integrity and perfection of the sexual elements [of the parents]. If the body [of either parent] is still incomplete, the reproductive elements must also be incomplete; and, in consequence, the progeny must be equally immature.”

Since Dr. Kellogg devotes several pages elsewhere in this guide to sexual happiness to describing in some detail the assorted monsters, cretins, dwarfs and Mongolian idiots that are sometimes sired by seemingly normal parents, the reader is not forced to depend upon his own meager imaginings in contemplating what the immature, incomplete, or not fully developed child of too-young parents might be like.

Premature sex is equally harmful to the participating couple, the doctor goes on to explain, and he enumerates:

“1. During the development of the body, all its energies are required in perfecting the various tissues and organs. There is no material to be spared for any foreign purpose. [And it must be clear now that for Dr. J.H. Kellogg, nothing is so "foreign" as sex.]

“2. The reproductive act is the most exhaustive of all vital acts. Its effect upon an undeveloped person is to retard growth, weaken the constitution, and dwarf the intellect.

“3. The effects upon the female are even worse than those upon the male; for, in addition to the exhaustion of nervous energy, she is compelled to endure the burdens and pains of child-bearing when utterly unprepared for such a task, to say nothing of her unfitness for the other duties of a mother. With so many girl-mothers in the land, is it any wonder that there are so many thousands of unfortunate individuals who never seem to get beyond childhood in their development? Many a man at 40 years is as childish in mind, and as immature in judgment, as a well-developed lad of 18 would be. They are like withered fruit plucked before it was ripe; they can never become like the mellow and luscious fruit allowed to mature properly. They are unalterably molded; and the saddest fact of all is that they will give their children the same imperfections; and the children will transmit them to another generation, and so the evil will go on increasing, unless check by extinction.”

At this point the thoroughly shaken young man and maid, yet contemplating matrimony in granddad’s day, might have set aside their copies of Plain Facts and wondered, half aloud (to themselves, of course, for one would never have considered reading a book on such a subject in the presence of the opposite sex), whether the early 20s was really long enough to delay — perhaps it would be wiser to wait, well, with the picture Dr. Kellogg has been painting, perhaps indefinitely….

Kellogg offers no reassuring word to offset such fears in the innocent. The best he can manage additionally on the subject of premature marriage is: “It is probable that even the ages of 20 and 24 are too early for those persons whose development is uncommonly slow.” After digesting this book, the development of a great many was slowed appreciably. It takes far less than this to instill in the impressionable the seeds that will one day produce the bitter fruits of impotence and frigidity.

Marital Excesses

The chapter devoted to wedded bliss is titled, in Kellogg’s customary upbeat fashion, “Marital Excesses.” The author commences this section with the declaration: “It seems to be a generally prevalent opinion that the marriage ceremony removes all restraint from the exercise of the sexual functions.” He devotes the rest of the chapter to tearing this supposition to shreds.

Dr. Kellogg gives us this cheery appraisal of humankind: “Man, in whatever condition we find him, is more or less depraved. This is true as well of the most cultivated and refined ladies and gentlemen of the great centers of civilization, as of the misshapen denizens of African jungles, or the scarcely human natives of Australia and Tierra del Fuego. His appetites, his tastes, his habits, even his bodily functions are perverted.” In many respects, the doctor concludes, civilized man is the most perverted of all.

Man demonstrates his depravity, according to the author, whenever he engages in sex for anything but reproduction. Reproduction is normally possible at only one time of the month — in the middle of the female menstrual cycle — and that, proclaims Dr. J.H. Kellogg, M.D., L.L.D., F.A.C.S., is the only time in which sexual intercourse between husband and wife is proper, natural and moral.

He then proceeds to “prove” this statement — not, he assures us, on the basis of morality or “theory,” but by relying solely on “established physiological facts by quotations from standard medical authors….” To do this, he incorrectly presupposes that what is natural in the lower animals must also be natural in man, relying upon “standard medical authors” as misinformed on animal behavior as he; or, as in the example below, basing erroneous conclusions on accurate data.

Kellogg quotes John C. Dalton, whom he describes as “one of the most distinguished and reliable of modern physiologists,” adding, “the facts which he states being confirmed by all other physiologists.” Dalton says: “‘It is a remarkable fact that the female of these animals will allow the approaches of the male only during and immediately after the oestrual period; that is, just when the egg is recently discharged, and ready for impregnation. At other times, when sexual intercourse would be necessarily fruitless, the instinct of the animal leads her to avoid it; and the concourse of the sexes is accordingly made to correspond in time with the maturity of the egg and its aptitude for fecundation.’”

What Dalton states is true; what Kellogg concludes from the statement is entirely false. The phenomenon described by Dalton is true only in the lower forms of animal life, where the sex act is dependent almost entirely upon instinct. It is not true if any of the primates, including man. But Kellogg proceeds as though it were.

He is thus able to reach the following faulty conclusions:

“1. The fact that in all animals but the human species the act can be performed only when reproduction is possible, proves that in the animal kingdom in general the sole object of the function is reproduction.

“2. The fact that the males of other animals besides man in which the sexual organs are in a state of constant development do not exercise those organs except for the purpose of reproduction is proof of the position that the constant development in man is not a warrant for their constant use.

“3. The general law that the reproductive act is performed only when desired by the female is sufficient ground for supposing that such should be the case with the human species also.”

And having concluded that it is the woman alone who properly establishes the time for coitus, Kellogg adds to this comedy of errors the statement: “This desire for sexual congress naturally exists in the female only at or immediately after the time of periodical development.”

Kellogg knew full well that a great many women desire sex at other times besides the middle of their menstrual cycle, when impregnation is most likely to occur (on or about the 14th day, in an average 28-day cycle, beginning from the first day of menstruation). But he was careful to insert the word “naturally” in his statement, and any examples of feminine sexual appetite at other times of the month were damned as unnatural, immoral, and a further evidence of human depravity.

Sex is for procreation, not for pleasure, concludes the doctor, evidencing a most unpleasant bedside manner; and modesty and chastity are just as important within the marriage bower as elsewhere. It becomes clear in this chapter that Dr. Kellogg actually considers all sex evil; marital sex, rigidly restrained, is a necessary evil for the reproduction of the race, but an evil nevertheless.

He quotes approvingly another writer whom he does not name, who states: “It is a common belief that a man and woman, because they are legally united in marriage, are privileged to the unbridled exercises of amativeness. This is wrong. Nature, in the exercise of her laws, recognizes no human enactments, and is as prompt to punish any infringement of her laws in those who are legally married, as in those out of the bonds. Excessive indulgence between the married produces as great and lasting evil effects as in the single man or woman, and is nothing more or less than legalized prostitution.’ “

Results of Excess on Husbands

Kellogg next sets down some of the hair-raising results of “marital excess” (too frequent sexual intercourse) — upon husbands, wives, and their unborn children.

He observes that “the principal blame in this matter properly falls upon the husband; but it cannot be said that he is the greatest sufferer; however, his punishment is severe enough to clearly indicate the enormity of the transgression, and to warn him to a reformation of his habits.”

The author then quotes “an eminent medical authority,” whom he also fails to identify. (Through the reference to “life-giving fluid” in the quotation brought to mind a character in the film Dr. Strangelove, we dismissed the association as meaningless.) The anonymous authority states: “‘Any warning against sexual dangers would be very incomplete if it did not extend to the excesses often committed by married persons in ignorance of their ill effects. Too frequent emissions of the life-giving fluid, and too frequent excitement of the nervous system are, in themselves, most destructive. The result is the same within the marriage bond as without it. The married man who thinks he can commit no excess, however often the act of sexual congress is repeated, will suffer as certainly and as seriously as the unmarried debauchee who acts on the same principles in his indulgences….

” ‘The shock on the system each time connection is indulged in is very powerful.’” according to this “eminent medical authority,” and “the expenditure of seminal fluid must be particularly injurious….’” He credits these as the causes of “‘premature old age, many forms of indigestion, general ill health, hypochondriasis, etc., so often met with adults….’”

Kellogg quotes Dr. William Acton, a Victorian antisex crusader and prominent English surgeon, whose statements appear frequently throughout the book. Dr. Acton adds to the already dismal domestic scene, as follows: “‘It is not the body alone which suffers from excesses committed in married life. Experience every day convinces me that much of the languor of mind, confusion of ideas, and inability to control the thoughts, of which some married men complain, arise from this cause.’”

Kellogg has already established, as we have noted, that undue sensuality may cause spontaneous venereal disease in husband and wife; sexual abuse in marriage is also “a very potent cause of throat disease,” says the doctor; and a major cause of consumption — “this fatal disease finds a large share of its victims among those addicted to sexual excesses….”

Dr. Kellogg adds this postscript from his personal medical experience: “A case came under our observation in which the patient, a man, confessed to having indulged every night for 20 years. We did not wonder that at 40 he was a complete physical wreck.”

Results of Excess on Wives

The doctor’s descriptions of depraved domesticity become more extravagant as he expounds on the evil effects of sexual excess upon wives, and he here seems to be truly warming to his subject: “If husbands are great sufferers, as we have seen, wives suffer still more terribly, being of feebler constitution, and hence less able to bear the frequent shock which is suffered by the nervous system.”

Dr. Kellogg describes a female patient who came to him for treatment suffering from “the serious effects of the evil named.” In the author’s words, “She presented a great variety of nervous symptoms, prominent among which were those of mild hysteria and nervous exhaustion, together with impaired digestion and violent palpitation of the heart.”

Under the heading “Legalized Murder,” Kellogg relates the following story, “the counterpart of which,” he says, “almost anyone can recall having occurred within the circle of acquaintance; perhaps numerous cases will be recalled by one who has been especially observing.”

Dr. Kellogg then tells his tale: “A man of great vital force is united to a woman of evenly balanced organization. The husband, in exercise of what he is pleased to term his ‘marital rights,’ places his wife, in a short time, on the nervous, delicate, sickly list. In the blindness and ignorance of his animal nature, he requires prompt obedience to his desires; and, ignorant of the law of right in this direction, thinking that it is her duty to accede to his wishes, she allows him passively, never lovingly, to exercise daily and weekly, month in and month out, the low and beastly habit of his nature, and eventually, slowly but surely, to kill her. And this man, who has as surely committed murder as had the convicted assassin, lures to his net and takes unto him another wife, to repeat the same program of legalized prostitution on his part, and sickness and premature death on her part.”

Having shed a tear or two for the victims in this sexual soap opera, while privately admiring the prowess of the husband, we attempted to recall a counterpart of the incident within our own circle of acquaintances, as Dr. Kellogg suggested, but without success; the wives of our friends are apparently made of sterner stuff. We must confess, in fact, that when we really concentrated on the matter, we couldn’t even come up with a similar occurrence from outside our circle of acquaintances. In simple truth, we were hard put to name a single female of our acquaintance who couldn’t take on any male of our acquaintance, if she had a mind to, and turn him into a hospital case in less than a year.

A certain amount of the pain and suffering that the author attributes to “sexual excesses” was probably real enough, for in such a Puritan period, with so much guilt and shame associated with the normal sexual appetite and the act of sex itself, we would expect to find numerous cases of impotence and frigidity, and the emotional hysteria and hypochondria that can produce all the symptoms of a variety of physical disorders. The symptoms were caused by sexual repression, however, and not by sexual excess.

Results of Excess on Offspring

Scientific insight disappears almost completely when Dr. Kellogg describes the effects of marital licentiousness upon the hereditary makeup of offspring. The doctor states, “That those guilty of the transgression should suffer, seems only just; but that an innocent being who had no part in the sin — no voice in the time or manner of its advent into the world — that such a one should suffer equally, if not more bitterly, with the transgressors themselves, seems anything but just. But such is nature’s inexorable law, and the inequities of the parents shall be visited upon the children; and this fact should be a most powerful influence to prevent parental transgression, especially in this direction, in which the dire consequences fall so heavily and so immediately upon an innocent being.”

Too frequent indulgence in sexual intercourse results in an inferior grade of egg and sperm, according to Kellogg, which in turn produces an inferior offspring when impregnation occurs. The doctor writes, “Breeders of stock who wish to secure sound progeny will not allow the most robust stallion to associate with mares as many times during the whole season as some of these salacious human males perform a similar act within a month. One reason why the offspring suffer is that the seminal fluid deteriorates very rapidly by repeated indulgence. The spermatozoa do not have time to become maturely developed. Progeny resulting from such immature elements will possess the same deficiency. Hence the hosts of deformed, scrofulous, weazened and idiotic children which curse the race, and testify to the sensuality of their progenitors. Another reason is the physical and nervous exhaustion which the parents bring upon themselves, and which totally unfits them to beget sound, healthy offspring.”

The doctor also does his best to discourage a couple from taking any pleasure in the act, since a child conceived in lust is certain to have an abnormally sensual nature — “its lower passions will as certainly be abnormally developed as peas will produce peas, or potatoes produce potatoes. If a child does not become a rake or a prostitute, it will be because of uncommonly fortunate surroundings, or a miracle of divine grace.”

A single immoral thought on the part of either parent “at the critical moment when life is imparted, may fix for eternity a foul blot upon a character yet unformed.”

Sex During Pregnancy

Sexual intercourse during pregnancy is especially dangerous, the doctor insists. “Transgressions of this sort are followed by the worst results of any form of marital excess. The mother suffers doubly, because laden with the burden of supporting two lives instead of one. But the results upon the child are especially disastrous. During the time when it receiving its stock of vitality, while its plastic form is being molded, and its various organs acquiring that integrity of structure which makes up what is called constitutional vigor — during the most critical of all periods in the life of the new being, its resources are exhausted and its structure depraved — and thus constitutional tendencies to disease produced — by the unnatural demands made upon the mother.”

Sex during pregnancy also results in an abnormally sex-inclined infant: “One of the most certain effects of sexual indulgence at this time is to develop abnormally the sexual instinct of the child. Here is the key to much of the origin of much of the sexual precocity and depravity which curse humanity. Sensuality is born in the souls of a large share of the rising generation. What wonder that prostitution flourishes in spite of Christianity and civil law?”

For good measure, Kellogg adds this quote from Dr. J.R. Black: “‘Coition during pregnancy is one of the ways in which the predisposition is laid for that terrible disease in children, epilepsy.”

Sex During Menstruation

Sex during menstruation is, for the most author, unthinkably loathsome, and a “heinous violation of nature’s laws. He states, “Reason and experience both show that sexual relations at the menstrual period are very dangerous to both man and woman, and perhaps also for the offspring, should there chance to be conception. The woman suffers from the congestion and nervous excitement which occur at the most inopportune moment possible. Man may suffer physical injury, though,” Kellogg adds reassuringly, “there are no grounds for the assertions of Pliny that the menstrual blood is so potent for evil that it will, by mere touch, rust iron, render a tree sterile, make dogs mad, etc., or that of Paracelsus that ‘of it the Devil makes spiders, fleas, caterpillars, and all the other insects that people the air.’”

Senile Sexuality

Sexual intercourse is as unnatural in the old as in the young, according to Kellogg; he writes, “As with childhood, old age is a period which the reproductive functions are quiescent unless unnaturally stimulated. Sexual life begins with puberty, and in the female, ends at about the age of 45 years, the period known as menopause, or turn of life. At this period, according to the plainest indications of nature, all functional activity should cease. If this law is disregarded, disease, premature decay, possibly local degenerations, will be sure to result. Nature cannot be abused with impunity.”

“The proper limit of man’s functional activity” is, according to Kellogg, 50; and it is exceedingly dangerous for man to extend his sex life longer, for it may result in early senility and death. In addition, states the author, “When the passions have been indulged, and their diminishing vigor stimulated, a horrid disease, satyriasis, not infrequently seizes upon the imprudent individual, and drives him to the perpetration of the most loathsome crimes and excesses. Passions cultivated and encouraged by gratification through life will thus sometimes assert a total supremacy in old age.”

Abnormal Sex, Birth Control & Abortion

All forms of nonprocreative sex play are considered, by the doctor, to be heinous crimes against nature, too abominable to deserve space in his book. He states, “We have at our disposition numerous facts which rigorously prove the disastrous influence of abnormal coitus to the woman, but we think it is useless to publish them. All practitioners have more or less observed them, and it will only be necessary for them to call upon their memories to supply what our silence leaves.”

The doctor observes, however, that the use of various popular pharmaceutical and mechanical methods of birth control are as much a crime against nature as any act of sexual perversion. He states, “We hear a good deal about certain crimes against nature, such as pederastry and sodomy, and they meet with the indignant condemnation of all the right-minded persons. The statutes are especially severe on offenders of this class, the penalty being imprisonment between one and ten years, whereas fornication is punished by imprisonment for not more than 60 days and a fine less than $100. But the query very pertinently arises just here as to whether the use of the condom and defertilizing injections is not equally a crime against nature, and quite as worthy of our detestation and contempt.”

Dr. Kellogg considers the use of such contraceptive measures as a form of abortion and deems all abortion to be murder. He is most emotionally emphatic on this point, stating: “Is it immoral to take a human life? Is it a sin to kill a child? Is it a crime to strangle an infant at birth? Is it a murderous act to destroy a half-formed human being in its mother’s womb? Who will dare to answer ‘No’ to one of these questions? Then who can refuse assent to the plain truth that it is equally a murder to deprive of life the most recent product of the generative act?

Thus does Dr. Kellogg complete his full-rounded of sexual abstinence in marriage. The chaste are pure, for the sexual inclinations of man are surely the inspiration of Satan himself, introduced on this earth to tempt the weak and the unwary, and leading to an indescribable assortment of diseases and deaths in this world, and to eternal damnation in the next.

We know nothing of the life of Mrs. J.H. Kellogg, but it could not have been a very satisfying physical union. We can only hope that she developed a taste for the peanut butter sandwiches that were the inspiration of one of her husband’s more inventive moments, since he displays such an aversion to assuaging any other sort of bodily appetite. If this personal aside seems unjustly snide, please consider the countless thousands of young couples whose chances for marital happiness were diminished or actually destroyed, because one or both of them read and believed Dr. Kellogg’s book of Puritan perversion. What naive maid could consider the act of love with anything but repugnance and fear after digesting the contents of this volume; how many wives found frigidity in its pages and how many husbands derived a lifetime of sexual guilt and even impotence there? The number is incalculable. And since this book is but a single, all too typical example of the antisexual thinking of the time, it is only to be wondered that our present society is not more severely sexually suppressed than it is.

The Solitary Vice

It will come as no surprise to the student of psychosexual pathology that Dr. J.H. Kellogg saves for his last and most damning condemnation, the act of masturbation. As we have already discussed in previous installments of this editorial series, the sexually disturbed individual first fixes his fears and guilt on his own earliest sexual inclinations. Taboos against masturbation invariably play an important part in the moral dogma of the person or the society that is suffering from serious sexual repression.

We commented upon the disproportionate emphasis given to masturbation in the restrictive “penitential books” of the medieval Church (The Playboy Philosophy, August 1963). Dr. Kellogg devotes almost half his Plain Facts for Old and Young to the subject. The chapter titled “Solitary Vice” is the longest in the book.

The doctor states: “If illicit commerce of the sexes is a heinous sin, self-pollution, or masturbation, is a crime doubly abominable. As a sin against nature, it has no parallel except in sodomy (see Genesis 19:5, Judges 19:22).”

Both of these Biblical references are to sodomy and not, as might be assumed by the reader, to masturbation. The Bible contains no prohibition regarding masturbation; although, as we have previously discussed, the story of Onan (Genesis 38:9) has frequently been misinterpreted as a condemnation of this act, adding to our language the word onanism, as a synonym for masturbation. The story of Onan actually concerns the breaking of an ancient Judaic law of property, that required a man to impregnate the widow of deceased brother, so that there would be a heir, and the property of the family would remain the family; according to the story related in Genesis, Onan failed to do this, so the Lord slew him. The medieval Church misinterpreted this and several other portions of the Scriptures, including Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, to support the antisexual attitude of the Church in the Middle Ages.

“This vice is the most dangerous of all sexual abuses,” Dr. Kellogg observes, “because it is the most extensively practiced. The vice consists in any excitement of the genital organs produced otherwise than in the natural way [by which the doctor means, of course, sexual intercourse for the purpose of reproduction]. It is known by the terms self-pollution, self-abuse, masturbation, onanism, manustupration, voluntary pollution, solitary or secret vice, and other names sufficiently explanatory.”

The doctor is convinced that any person performing the act senses, without ever having been told, that it is immoral. He states, “Even though no warning may have been given, the transgressor seems to know, instinctively, that he is committing a great wrong, for he carefully hides his practice from observation. In solitude he pollutes himself, and with his own hand blights all his prospects for both this world and the next. Even after being solemnly warned, he will often continue this worse than beastly practice, deliberately forfeiting his right to health and happiness for a moment’s mad sensuality.”

Actually, the association of sex with guilt and shame begins for the infant when he is first chastised by his parent for the natural exploration and manipulation of his genitals, which he early discovers to be the source of physical pleasure; this negative association then spreads, with his later development, to other areas of sex and pleasure. There is, of course, no harm in masturbation whatsoever — physical, mental, or emotional, and it is practiced by almost everyone, at one time or another; the harm lies in associating the act with ideas of perversion or sin.

Dr. Kellogg offers a helpful guide to those interested in recognizing the evil in others. Under the heading “Suspicious Signs,” he states, “The following symptoms, occurring in the mental and physical character and habits of a child or young person, may well give rise to grave suspicions of evil, and should cause parents or guardians to be on the alert to root it out if possible: General debility, coming upon a previously healthy child, marked by emaciation, weakness, an unnatural paleness, colorless lips and gums, and the general symptoms of exhaustion…; Early symptoms of consumption; Premature and defective development; Sudden change in disposition; Lassitude; Sleeplessness; Failure of mental capacity; Fickleness; Untrustworthiness; Love of solitude; Bashfulness; Unnatural boldness; Mock piety; Easily frightened; Confusion of ideas; Round shoulders; Weak backs; pain in the limbs, and stiffness of the joints; Paralysis; Lack of development of the breasts in females after puberty…: Capricious appetite; Eating clay, slate-pencils, plaster, chalk, and other indigestible articles is a practice to which girls who abuse themselves are especially addicted; The use of tobacco; Acne or pimples; Biting the fingernails; Lack of luster and natural brilliancy in the eyes; Habitually moist, cold hands; Palpitation of the heart; Hysteria; Epileptic fits; Wetting the bed; [and] Unchastity of speech….”

Having done his best, in the previous chapter, to destroy the loving relationship between the husband and wife, Dr. Kellogg now sets about tearing down the mutual respect, trust and admiration that should exist between parent and child. Here is the doctor’s warmhearted plan for parental detection of self-abuse in their children: “If a child is noticed to seek a secluded spot with considerable regularity, he should be carefully followed and secretly watched, for several days in succession if need be. Many children pursue the practice at night after retiring. If the suspected one is observed to become very quickly quiet after retiring, and when looked at appears to be asleep, the bedclothes should be quickly thrown off under some pretense. If, in case of a boy, the penis is found in a state of erection, with the hands near the genitals, he may certainly be treated as a masturbator without any error. If he is found in a state of excitement, in connection with other evidences, with a quickened circulation as indicated by the pulse, or in a state of perspiration, his guilt is certain, even though he may pretend to be asleep; no doubt he has been addicted to the vice for a considerable time to have acquired so much cunning. If the same course is pursued with girls, under the same circumstances, the clitoris will be found congested, with the other genital organs moist from increased secretion.”

For the parent or guardian turned inquisitional investigator, the author offers another clue: “Stains upon the night-shirt or sheets, occurring before puberty, are certain evidences of the vice in boys….”

The doctor adds, “If any attempt is made to watch the child, he should be so carefully surrounded by vigilance that he cannot possibly transgress without detection. If he is only partially watched, he soon learns to elude observation, and thus the effect is only to make him cunning in his vice.”

The habit may be cured in children “by admonishing them of its sinfulness, and portraying in vivid colors its terrible results….” In addition, “he should not be left alone at anytime, lest he yield to temptation. Work is an excellent remedy; work that will really make him very tired, so that when he goes to bed he will have no disposition to defile himself. It is best to place such a child under the care of a faithful person of older years, whose special duty it shall be to watch him night and day until the habit is thoroughly overcome.”

In younger children, with whom moral considerations will have no particular weight, Kellogg suggests “tying the hands,” or “bandaging the parts,” or “covering the organs with a cage.” He also suggests circumcision, as “a remedy that is almost always successful in small boys…. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment….”

In adults, or youths, a different plan must be pursued, according to the doctor. “In these cases, moral considerations, and the inevitable consequences to health of body and mind, are the chief influences by which a reform is to be effected, if at all. These considerations may be urged with all possible eloquence and earnestness, but should not be exaggerated.” [Emphasis ours.] “The truth,” says the doctor, “is terrible enough.”

If there are any special influences which may be brought to bear upon a particular individual — and there always will be something of this sort owing to peculiarities of temperament or circumstances — these should be promptly employed and applied in such a manner as to secure them their full bearing.”

The results of masturbation include, according to Dr. Kellogg, impotency in the male, sterility in the female, urinary diseases, dyspepsia, throat affections, heart disease, diseases of the nervous system, epilepsy, cancer, idiocy, suicide, insanity and piles.

What Dr. Kellogg chooses to describe as “the truth” is, as he puts it, “terrible enough!”

Nocturnal Emissions

Since every sign of man’s sexual nature may become repugnant to one sufficiently perverted and negatively obsessed with his subject, it should come as no surprise to find that this learned man of medicine is ever concerned with involuntary nocturnal emissions.

“That an individual may suffer for years an involuntary seminal loss as frequently as once a month without apparently suffering very great injury,” says Dr. Kellogg, “seems to be a settled fact with physicians of extensive experience and is well confirmed by observation; yet there are those who suffer severely from losses no more frequent than this. But when seminal losses occur more frequently than once a month, they will certainly ultimate in great injury, even though immediate ill effects are not noticed….”

As Kellogg correctly states, for a change, “The masturbator knows nothing of this disease, so long as he continues his vile practice. But,” he adds, “when he resolves to reform, and ceases to defile himself voluntarily, he is astonished and disgusted to find that the same filthy pollutions occur during his sleep without his voluntary participation.”

Nocturnal emissions have two primary causes, according to Kellogg, “local irritation and lewd thoughts.” Sexual thoughts are just as harmful to a person when he is sleeping as when he is awake, the doctor explains. But, curiously enough, the doctor considers emissions unaccompanied by dreaming as the most serious sort. “At first,” he says, “the emissions are always accompanied by dreams, the patient usually awakening immediately afterward; but after a time they take place without dreams and without awaking him, and are unaccompanied by sensation. This denotes a greatly increased gravity of the complaint.”

Students of Freud will be interested in Kellogg’s comments under the heading: “Can Dreams Be Controlled?” The doctor answers his own query: “Facts prove that they can be to a remarkable extent.”

Kellogg offers the case history of “an Italian gentleman of great respectability,” as an illustration of what can be accomplished in the dream department with “strong resolution.” The Italian gentleman had, it seems, “been inconvenienced five years before with frequent emissions, which totally unnerved him. He determined resolutely that the very instant the image of a woman or any libidinous idea presented itself to his imagination, he would wake; and to ensure his doing so, dwelt in his thoughts on his resolution for a long time before going to sleep. The remedy, applied by a vigorous will, had the most happy results. The idea, the remembrance of its being a danger, and the determination to wake, closely united the evening before, were never dissociated even in sleep, and he awoke in time; and this reiterated precaution, repeated during some evenings, absolutely cured of the complaint.”

Since Freud has established that dreams actually provide a necessary and healthful “escape-hatch” for many ideas that might otherwise play havoc in our subconscious minds, this little game of dream-control, wholeheartedly recommended by the author, might be expected to produce all manner of psychic ills. If the thought, which we do not care to consciously accept, is not permitted to escape — either directly, or in some disguised form — in a dream, it will be repressed. And then the psychopathological fun begins!

Dr. Kellogg offers a number of suggestions for “curing” nocturnal emissions, including the avoidance of stimulating food and drink; sleeping on one’s side, rather than on the back or abdomen (as an aide to this, he suggests fastening “a piece of wood upon the back” or “tying one hand to the bedpost”); avoiding soft beds and pillows; and arising immediately upon waking in the morning “if it is after four o’clock.”

This concern over nocturnal emissions again reminds us of the penitentials of the Dark Ages, which prescribed the penance for an involuntary nocturnal emission as rising promptly, and reciting seven penitential psalms, with an additional 30 in the morning.

Dr. Kellogg states that the eventual outcome of nocturnal emissions is impotence.

There is a certain pathetic irony in the fact that the last few pages of his chapter on self-abuse and nocturnal emissions are devoted to a warning against soliciting advice in this subject from “quacks.” Under a section with that title, Dr. Kellogg says, “Never consult a quack. The newspapers abound with lying advertisements of remedies for diseases of this character. Do not waste time and money in corresponding with the ignorant, unprincipled charlatans who make such false pretensions…. Consult only some well-known and reliable physician in whom you have confidence. If your physician treats the matter lightly, and advises marriage as a means of cure, you will not judge him harshly if you decide that although he may be thoroughly competent to treat other diseases, he is ignorant of the nature and proper treatment of this….

Do not despair of ever recovering from the effects of past transgression, and plunge into greater depths of sin. Persevering, skillful treatment will cure almost every case…. Every sufferer from sexual disease must make up his mind to live, during the remainder of his life, as closely in accord with the laws of life and health as circumstances under his control will allow him to do.”

A Final Word for Boys & Girls

Dr. Kellogg concludes Plain Facts for Old and Young with a final “Chapter for Boys” and a “Chapter for Girls.” It comes as no surprise to find that these are devoted, almost in their entirety, to additional warnings against the evils of masturbation.

Under the heading “Self-Murderers,” the author states, “Of all the vices to which human beings are addicted, no other so rapidly undermines the constitution and so certainly makes a complete wreck of an individual as this, especially when the habit is begun at an early age. It wastes the most precious part of the blood, uses up the vital forces, and finally leaves the poor victim a most utterly ruined and loathsome object. If a boy should be deprived of both hands and feet and should lose his eyesight, he would still be infinitely better off than the boy who for years gives himself up to the gratification of lust in secret vice….”

The doctor offers an illustrative case history especially written for his younger reader, under the title “Two Young Wrecks”: “Charles and Oscar B_______ were the sons of a farmer in a Western state, aged respectively ten and 12 years. They possessed well-informed heads, and once had beautiful faces, and were as bright and sprightly as any little boys of their age to be found anywhere. Their father was proud of them, and their fond mother took great pleasure in building bright prospects for her darling sons when they should attain maturity and become competent to fill useful and honorable positions in the world….

“But suddenly certain manifestations appeared which gave rise to grave apprehensions on the part of the parents. It was observed that the elder of the little boys no longer played about with that nimbleness which he had formerly shown, but seemed slow and stiff in his movements. Sometimes, indeed, he would stagger a little when he walked. Soon, also, his speech became in some degree; he mumbled his words and could not speak distinctly. In spite of all that could be done, the disease continued, increasing in all its symptoms from week to week. Soon the hands, also, became affected, so that the little boy could not feed himself. The mind now began to fail. The bright eyes became vacant and expressionless. Instead of the merry light which used to shine in them, there was a blank, idiotic stare.

“Imagine the grief and anguish of the poor mother! No one but a mother who has been called to pass through a similar trial could know how to sympathize with such a one. Her darling son she saw daily becoming a prey to a strange, incurable malady, with no power even to stay the progress of the terrible disease.

“But there was still greater grief in store for her. Within a year or two the younger son began to show symptoms of the same character, and in spite of all that was done, rapidly sank into the same helpless state as his brother. As a last resort, the mother took her boys and came a long journey to place her sons under our care. At the time they were both nearly helpless. Neither could walk but a few steps. They reeled and staggered about like drunken men, falling down upon each other and going through the most agonizing contortions in attempts to work their way from one chair to another and thus about the room. Their heads were no longer erect, but drooped like wilted flowers. On their faces was a blank, imbecile expression, with a few traces of former intelligence still left. The mouths were still open, from the drooping of the lower jaws, and the saliva dribbled upon the clothing. Altogether, it was a spectacle which one does not care to meet every day; the impression made was too harrowing to be pleasant even for its interest from a scientific point of view.

“We at once set to work to discover the cause of this dreadful condition, saying to ourselves that such an awful punishment should certainly be the result of some gross violation of nature’s laws somewhere. The most careful scrutiny of the history of the parents of the unfortunate lads gave no clue to anything of an hereditary character, both parents having come of good families, and having been always of sober, temperate habits. The father had used neither liquor nor tobacco in any form. The mother could give no light on the matter, and we were obliged to rest for the time being upon the conviction which fastened itself upon us that the pair were most marked illustrations of the results of self-abuse begun at a very early age. The mother thought it impossible that our suspicions could be correct, saying that she had watched her sons with jealous care from the earliest infancy and had seen no indications of any error of the sort. But we had not long to wait for confirmation of our view of the case, as they were soon caught in the act, to which it was found that they were greatly addicted, and the mystery was wholly solved.”

Although for Dr. Kellogg, “the mystery was wholly solved,” he was unable to follow his remarkable diagnosis with any sort of cure, and the boys eventually returned home with their mother, where they lived out their remaining years thus afflicted, and eventually died.

The author devotes a considerable portion of these last two chapters to similar case histories. A young man, referred to as M.M., was the son of a mechanic and of humble circumstances. “Good school advantages were given him, and at a proper age he was put to learn a trade. He succeeded fairly, and his parents’ hopes of his becoming all that they could desire were great, when he suddenly began to manifest peculiar symptoms. He had attended a religious revival and seemed much affected, professing religion and becoming a member of the church. To the exercises of his mind on the subject of religion his friends attributed his peculiar actions, which soon became so strange as to excite grave fears that his mind was seriously affected. At times he was wild, showing such unmistakable evidences of insanity that even his poor mother, who was loth to believe the sad truth, was forced to admit that he was deranged…

“In this condition was the young man when he came under our care. We felt strongly impressed from our first examination of the case that it was one of sexual abuse [which prompts us to observe that this immediate diagnostic insight seems remarkably like what a psychiatrist might consider as a case of projection, on the part of Dr. Kellogg] but we were assured by his friends in the most emphatic manner that such was an impossibility. It was claimed that the most scrupulous care had been bestowed upon him, and that he had been so closely watched that it was impossible that he should have been guilty of so gross of a vice. His friends were disposed to attribute his sad condition to excessive exercise of [his] mind upon religious subjects. [Which prompts us to observe that the patient's friends display more psychiatric acumen than the sanitarium's chief physician.]

“Not satisfied with this view of the case, we set a close watch upon him, and within a week his nurse reported that he had detected him in the act of self-pollution, when he confessed the truth, not yet being so utterly devoid of sense as to have lost his appreciation of the sinfulness of the act. [Which prompts us to observe that this is one of the most incredible examples of diagnostic technique we have ever read.]

“When discovered in the act of self-abuse, the patient exclaimed, ‘I know I have made myself a fool,’ which was the exact truth.”

Dr. Kellogg wasn’t able to do anything to help this patient either, which appears to be something of a recurring theme, where the cases of “excessive sexual abuse” are concerned. The doctor reports, “At our suggestion the young man was removed to an institution devoted to the care of the imbeciles and lunatics. The last we heard of the poor fellow, he was still sinking in the lower depths of physical and mental degradation — a soul utterly lost and ruined. How many thousands of young men who might have been useful members of society — lawyers, clergymen, statesmen, scientists — have thus sunk into the foul depths of the quagmire of vice, to rise no more forever! Oh, awful fate! The human eye never rests upon a sadder sight than a ruined soul, a mind shattered and debased by vice.”

Oh, physician, heal thyself!

A last case history, and we are done with Dr. J.H. Kellogg forevermore. “A case came to our knowledge through a gentleman who brought his daughter to us for treatment for the effects of self-abuse,” Kellogg reports, “of a father who adopted a summary method of curing his son of the evil practice. Having discovered that the lad was a victim of the vile habit, and having done all in his power by punishment, threats, and representations of its terrible effects, but without inducing him to reform, the father, in a fit of desperation, seized the sinful boy and with his own hand performed upon him the operation of castration as he would have done upon a colt. The boy recovered from the operation, and was, of course, effectively cured from his vile habit. The remedy was efficient, though scarcely justifiable. Even a father has no right thus to mutilate his own son, though we must confess that the lad’s chances for becoming a useful man are fully as good as they would have been had he continued his course of sin.”

Our Antisexual Heritage

We haven’t devoted an entire installment of this editorial to Dr. J.H. Kellogg and his book simply to describe the twisted antisexuality of a single individual, or a single volume of his writings. We have given the space to thus extended consideration of Plain Facts for Old and Young because it serves as a classic case study of Puritan America at the end of the last century.

As we stated at the beginning of this article, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was not an insignificant crackpot, whose irrational sexual rantings can be dismissed as of little consequence. Dr. Kellogg was a highly respected member of the medical profession, who held a number of important positions in his lifetime, who was affiliated with a number of influential medical associations, and whose words on any aspect of medical science carried considerable authority and import.

Under the circumstances, the pathological aversion to sex evidenced throughout the more than 500 pages of Plain Facts might be viewed as ample proof of the disturbed psyche of its author. In actual fact, however, the book is an accurate reflection of the guilt-and-shame-infested culture in which it was produced. If there is sickness in this sexual treatise, it is less the sickness of a single individual than a symptom of an entire sick society.

But this book was not written in the Old World during the Dark Ages; it was written here in the United States less than 100 years ago. The antisexual attitude expressed in this worn volume are typical of that severe puritanical period; the irrational intermixing of science, Scripture and superstition is typical, too.

It may be argued, with validity, that the fact most dramatically demonstrated by the naive nature of Dr. Kellogg’s book is how much we have learned from Darwin, Freud, Kinsey, and others, regarding both the physical and psychological makeup of man, since the 19th century. But though our scientific insights have increased a thousandfold, our society’s mores and laws are still rooted in the sterile soil of puritanism.

We still suffer, in this supposedly enlightened time, from taboos and guilts regarding sexual behavior that are directly derived from the almost total antisexuality of the late 1800s, so enthusiastically depicted in Kellogg’s chronicle. It is hardly significant that the taboos have been somewhat tempered and the guilts become less grave, in the fourscore years between; the irrational restrictions and repressions still exist, and the difference in his world and ours is only a matter of degree — not reason replacing superstition.

We devoted the two previous installments of The Playboy Philosophy to current U.S. sex laws, and can only conclude that these statutes, in all 50 states, are as unreasoned and unreasonable today as when Dr. Kellogg first put pen to paper. The American Law Institute proposed a Model Penal Code for sex offenses almost a decade ago, but no state has yet adopted this recommendation for more lenient legislation; our sex statutes are still based more on puritanism than psychiatry, more on religious morality than scientific insight.

Many Americans do not realize that censorship in this country commenced in the 19th century — mostly in its last three puritanical decades — and was previously all but unknown here. Thomas Jefferson wrote, in 1814, “I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a cook can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offense against religion; that a question like this can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion?”

With our Puritan heritage, it is no surprise that when censorship came to our supposedly free society, it centered upon the literature and art that dealt with sex. In a memorable debate in the U.S. Senate in 1835, Clay, Calhoun and Webster declared that the government of the United States should never be involved in an act of censorship; and in the same year a visitor from France, Alexis de Tocqueville, reported “Attempts have been made by some governments to protect the morality of nations by prohibiting licentious books. In the United States no one is punished for this sort of work.”

But in 1842 Congress passed a Tariff Act that forbade the importation of “obscene books or pictures into the United States”; and in 1865 another federal law was passed prohibiting the transmission of objectionable materials through the mails. “But there was one saving grace in these laws,” wrote Ernest Sutherland Bates. “It never occurred to anyone apparently that they should be enforced. And then around 1870 the lid was clamped down. Censorship spread over the land like a prairie fire.”

Anthony Comstock, the most infamous and influential censor in American history, was at his bluenosed, book-burning peak when Dr. J.H. Kellogg wrote Plain Facts, and the doctor commends Comstock for his censorship activities, and quotes him in several places, in his own remarkable volume of antisex. Comstock founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1873, and the same year secured the passage of the so-called Comstock Laws from the U.S. Congress that made the interstate dissemination of “immoral” art and literature a serious federal offense; Comstock also managed to get himself appointed as a special, nonsalaried investigator for the post office, and in that position caused the conviction of countless persons, reportedly destroyed 160 tons of allegedly obscene literature and nearly 4 million pictures.

H.L. Mencken, noted American editor, author and social critic, wrote: “The story of the passage of the Act of Congress of March 3, 1873, is a classical tale of Puritan impudence and chicanery. Ostensibly…the new laws were designed to put down traffic [in obscenity] which, of course, found no defenders — but Comstock had so drawn them that their actual sweep was vastly wider, and once he was firmly in the saddle, his enterprises scarcely knew limits….

“In carrying on this war of extermination upon all ideas that violated their own private notions of virtue and decorum, Comstock and his followers were very greatly aided by the vagueness of the law. It prohibited the use of the mails for transporting all matter of ‘obscene, lewd, lascivious…or filthy’ character, but conveniently failed to define these adjectives. As a result…it was possible to bring an accusation against practically any publication that aroused the Comstockian blood-lust.”

Publisher Bernarr MacFadden wrote, shortly after Comstock’s death: “I propose to add to a dictionary that is already too long the word comstock; its meaning will be apparent to everyone. If you associate dirt, filth and obscenity with an idea, a picture, a statue, or anything, why — you simply comstock it.”

The U.S. censorship laws and their vigorous enforcement, established by Anthony Comstock in that Puritan period, are still very much with us today. And it has only been within the past decade that American literature and art have made any serious attempt to throw off the shackles of censorship placed upon them by Comstock and his followers at the end of the last century.

Puritanism was still so dominant a force in America less than 50 years ago that, from 1919 to 1933, the entire nation suffered under the enforced Prohibition established by Congress with the 18th Amendment; and several states still suffer under various forms of Prohibition today. National Prohibition, known as the “Noble Experiment,” was almost certainly the most corrupting legislation ever established in the United States; it made criminals out of honest men, and drunkards out of sober ones. It stands as a monument to the evil that can result when man attempts to establish by governmental edict what should rightfully be a matter of personal choice.

Abraham Lincoln said prophetically, in a speech before the Illinois House of Representatives, in 1840: “Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”

And H.L. Mencken responded to the “Noble Experiment” with a quotation from the Bible: “There is crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone.”– Isaiah 24:11.

In the mid-Twenties, the Puritan concept of theocratic control of the state became a national issue with the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee. A young biology teacher was put on trial for introducing Darwin’s theory of evolution to his classes, because a state law specifically prohibited the teaching of any theory of the origin of man that was not in strict accordance with a literal interpretation of the Bible. The case caused a sensation because Christian fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan went to Dayton, Tennessee, to assist the local prosecutor; and the American Civil Liberties Union persuaded Clarence Darrow, the most famous trial lawyer of his generation, to appear for the defense.

The judge’s rulings made it impossible for Darrow to plead the real issues in the case and teacher Scopes was found guilty on a technicality; but Darrow managed to get Bryan on the stand as an expert witness on the Scriptures, and subjected him to a devastating cross-examination on his Puritan beliefs, regarding the conflict between science and the Bible, that made Bryan, and the Tennessee court, the laughingstocks of the nation. It was an experience from which Bryan never recovered; he died of a stroke five days after the trial ended.

If the “Monkey Trial” appears to be little more than a piece of quaint Americana from out of the past, we must inform our readers that there exists — at this very moment in the state of Arizona — a serious Puritan attempt to petition the legislature to pass an antievolution law, just like the one they had in Tennessee in the Twenties.

And how really different are the church-state considerations in the case of the biology teacher Scopes in 1925 and those of biology teacher Koch in 1960? Professor Leo F. Koch (pronounced “Cook”) was dismissed from the faculty of the University of Illinois four years ago for responding to an editorial on student sex habits in the Daily Illini with a letter in which he stated: “With modern contraceptives and medical advice readily available at the nearest drugstore, or at least from a family physician, there is no valid reason why sexual intercourse should not be condoned among those sufficiently mature to engage in it without social consequences and without violating their own codes of morality and ethics.” The campus paper published his letter and the university promptly fired him.

A few months ago another professor at the University of Illinois, Revilo P. Oliver, whose first name is his last name spelled backward because, according to some of his colleagues, “he doesn’t know if he is coming or going,” gained national attention with an article he authored for American Opinion, the magazine of the John Birch Society, in which he referred to the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy as “a valuable agent of the international Communist conspiracy.”

The powers that be at the university, which happens to be our own alma mater, simply clucked disapprovingly at Professor Oliver’s intemperate and ill-timed remarks, but concluded that his rather extreme political views did not hamper his ability as a teacher. Not so with Professor Koch; he got the boot!

Oliver was accorded his right to free expression, because all he did was call President Kennedy a traitor; Koch lost his right, because he did something far worse — he questioned our Puritan concept of sexual morality. That is obviously the one excess that lies outside the protections given to free expression in our free society.

Professor Koch touched the heart of the matter himself, with an all-too-prophetic passage in his letter that none of the major newspapers or wire services bothered to include in their stories on his dismissal: “The…important hazard is that a public discussion of sex will offend the religious feelings of the leaders of our religious institutions. These people feel that youngsters should remain ignorant of sex for fear that knowledge of it will lead to temptation and sin.”

And that is precisely what happened. Several churchmen voiced vigorous protests, and biology professor Koch got the old heave ho! He might have faired better at the University of Chicago, where, we understand, the Student Health Service hands out prescriptions for oral contraceptives to undergraduate coeds, married or unmarried, on request — on the not altogether irrational premise that if a girl is sufficiently interested to come in and ask for the prescription, she is probably going to engage in sex, with or without it.

The Puritan would argue that it is immoral to give such a prescription to a single girl — presumably in the severe and inhumane belief that the girl should be made to pay for her sin with pregnancy. The true moralist, we believe, would take a more considered and considerate view — recognizing that giving the prescriptions to the girls who request them is in the best interests of the girls themselves, and that this, after all, should be the deciding factor.

A Cleveland court decision recently projected the puritanical viewpoint in a similar situation: A mother was found guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor for giving her underage daughter instructions in birth control, after the daughter had given birth to three illegitimate children in as many years.

And here we have the crystallization of his moral dilemma — as real, as important, and as controversial today, as it was in the time of Dr. J.H. Kellogg.

The puritanical believe that their concept of sexual morality should be forced upon the rest of society through strict social taboos and governmental legislation. Those of us who believe in a free society — whatever our personal religious and moral convictions — believe that each individual in a democracy has a right to worship God in his own way, and follow the moral dictates of his own particular religion, or those that lie within his own heart, just as long as they do not encroach upon the personal rights of others.

By offering, in this installment of The Playboy Philosophy, a dissection of the extreme Puritan antisexuality that has existed in America over the past century, it should be easier to understand whence come the severe sexual restrictions still to be found in the society of the Sixties.

No related posts.

Over the coming months we will be adding numerous and exclusive feature articles, so please check back often!

The Playboy Philosophy Part 15

IN OUR CONTINUING consideration of the rights of the individual in a free society, we discussed in the last installment of this editorial series (February) the extent to which a person’s private sexual behavior is the subject of governmental control in America.

This nation was founded on the premise that each one of us is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; our democratic government was established to protect these rights and our Constitution guarantees them. Yet every state has statutes specifically designed to control the most personal, intimate acts of its citizens.

America is presumably the land of the free and the home of the brave. But our legislators, our judges and our officers of law enforcement are allowed to enter our most private inner sanctuaries — our bedrooms — and dictate the activity that takes place there.

We are free in a voting booth, in a stockholder’s meeting, a union hall, or a house of worship, but we are not free in bed. Our democracy, which prides itself on its permissiveness in almost every area of individual endeavor, has proven intolerably restrictive in matters of sex.

Our society’s repressive and suppressive antisexualism is derived from twisted theological concepts that became firmly imbedded in Christianity during the Dark Ages, several hundred years after the crucifixion of Christ, and spread and became more severe with Calvinist Puritanism after the Reformation. In the Old World, the people suffered under totalitarian church-state controls of both Catholic and Protestant origin and many of the early colonists in America came here in search of the religious freedom denied them in Europe. Our own founding fathers, well aware of the history of religious tyranny in other countries, established with the Constitution of the United States the concept of a separate church and state as the best means of assuring that both our religion and government would remain free, thus guaranteeing the freedom of the people.

Unfortunately, the seeds of religious antisexualism were already planted in the people themselves, however; in addition, through the centuries, a certain amount of ecclesiastical law had found its way into common law of Europe, and then into American law as well. As a result, not even the guarantees of the Constitution itself were enough to keep our religion and government apart.

19th Century Antisexualism

Puritan antisexualism increasingly infected both England and America and reached its climax in the 19th century. We are not suggesting that the period was noted for its purity or sexual abstinence — quite the contrary; as always occurs, the repression merely produced an uncommon amount of perversion and sexual aberration.

We have commented previously on the extent to which Victorian England was obsessed with sex, with an excessive modesty in speech, manners and dress that only accented matters sexual (The Playboy Philosophy — Part X, September 1963). The pre-Christian Celts and Saxons were a virile, vigorous, outgoing people; Britain had paid a heavy price for its religious heritage, for the traditional reserve and lack of spontaneity of the Englishman are as much a result of his Puritan past as is his taste for the sadomasochistic pleasures of the whip (flagellation is such a common accommodation of the English prostitute that revelations on the price paid for such services — one pound per stroke — during the Dr. Stephen Ward–Christine Keeler–Mandy Rice-Davies trial raised hardly an eyebrow among blasé Britishers).

In America the antisexual bent of the 1800s was mixed with excessive sentimentality and romanticism; women were placed upon pedestals, virginity and chastity were prized most highly, and the notion that a “nice girl” might experience anything akin to sexual yearning, or take pleasure in the sex act, was unthinkable. Morton M. Hunt, author of The Natural History of Love, comments in his chapter for Julian Huxley’s The Humanist Frame: “…The 19th century — that high-water mark of romantic and sentimental feeling — was a time when many men were made impotent or masochistic by the prevailing love mores and many women were warped by frigidity and frustration.”

It was also early in the last century that the censor first raised his ugly blue snout in America. Our founding fathers had spoken out most forcefully on the subject: In 1814 Thomas Jefferson stated that he was “mortified” to learn that the sale of a book should ever become a subject of inquiry in these United States. “Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold and what we may buy?” Jefferson demanded. “Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?”

“For the first hundred years,” reports Morris L. Ernst in The Best Is Yet, “the United States was unafraid of sex. It was free of literary taboos, except for a remnant of blasphemy…. These men who drafted our federal Constitution and signed our Declaration of Independence bulged their cheeks with naughty giggles when reading the works of Fielding and Smollet. The plays of Congreve were presented without expurgation. And there was no substantial demand in this land for the importation of a Master of Revels who, since the days of Fielding’s attack on Walpole, had been using his shears on the drama of Great Britain….”

But in the beginning of the 19th century we have what is generally accepted as the first recorded suppression of a literary work in the U.S. on the grounds of obscenity. The book was John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known by the name of its heroine, Fanny Hill. Cleland’s delightful classic of ribaldry had been around for more than half a century and no one had thought to censor; Ben Franklin is reputed to have had a copy in his library. But the book was suppressed in the early 1800s, and it did not appear again in legal publication in this country for a century and a half until, in 1963, G.P. Putnam’s Sons — emboldened by the recent victories over censorship in the courts — brought forth a new addition. Fanny’s reappearance resulted in several obscenity suits which the publisher successfully defended; in the most significant, late in the year, a New York court first held the book to be obscene, then — in as refreshing a bit of jurisprudence as we have witnessed in the Empire State in a very long while — reversed itself, without the need for appeal to a higher court.

After the unhappy fate of Fanny at the start of the previous century, the censors went back — for a time — to whatever censors do when they’re not censoring; in a memorable debate in the U.S. Senate in 1835, Clay, Calhoun and Webster declared that the federal government should never have anything to do with censorship: and in that same year a visitor from France. Alexis de Tocqueville, reported: “Attempts have been made by some governments to protect the morality of nations by prohibiting licentious books. In the United States no one is punished for this sort of work.”

Yet in 1842 Congress passed a Tariff Act that forbade the importation of “obscene books or pictures into the United States”; and in 1865 another law passed prohibiting the transmission of objectionable materials through the mail. “But there was one saving grace in these laws,” wrote Ernest Sutherland Bates. “It never occurred to anyone apparently that they should be enforced.

“And then around 1870 the lid was clamped down. Censorship was spread over the land like a prairie fire.” It was imported, like the Puritans themselves, from England. As Andrew Lang expressed it; “English literature had been at least free-spoken as any other to the death of Smollett. Then in 20 years, at most, English literature became…the most respectful of the young person’s blush that the world had ever known.”

The growing sexual repression of a century erupted in an orgy of censorship — led by the infamous Anthony Comstock and others of his ilk — continuing to the end of the 1800s and into the beginning of a new century.

Comstock toiled for a number of years as an unpaid postal inspector, ferreting out the indecent, the lewd, the lascivious and the obscene in the U.S. mails in what was clearly a labor of love, before graduating to the post of secretary of, and primary spokesman for, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. He was responsible for the passage of the Comstock Act, upon which H.L. Mencken reported bitterly: “The story of the passage of the Act of Congress of March 3, 1873, is a classical tale of Puritan impudence and chicanery. Ostensibly…the new laws were designed to put down traffic [in obscenity] which, of course, found no defenders — but Comstock had so drawn them that their actual sweep was vastly wider, and once he was firmly in the saddle, his enterprises scarcely knew limits. Having disposed of The Confessions of Maria Monk and Night Life in Paris, he turned to Rabelais and the Decameron, and having driven these agents under the book counters, he pounced upon Zola, Balzac and Daudet, and having disposed of these, too, he began a pogrom which, in other hands, eventually brought down such astounding victims as Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

“In carrying on this war of extermination upon all ideas that violated their private notions of virtue and decorum, Comstock and his followers were very greatly aided by the vagueness of the law. It prohibited the use of the mails for transporting all matter of ‘obscene, lewd, lascivious…or filthy’ character, but conveniently failed to define these adjectives. As a result…it was possible to bring an accusation against practically any publication that aroused the Comstockian blood-lust.”

Heywood Broun remarked, “Anthony Comstock may have been entirely correct in his assumption that the division of living creatures into male and female was a vulgar mistake, but a conspiracy of silence about the matter will hardly alter the facts.”

Not until the Twenties was there any noticeable tendency toward a thaw in this chilling climate of censorship, and it was not until the most recent years that American maturity and the U.S. courts reached the point where we can once again contemplate the possibility of the free press assured us by our founding fathers.

Contemporary Antisexualism

Our fear of sex has been sufficient, as we have illustrated in considerable detail in early installments of the Philosophy, to rationalize the abridgement of our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of both speech and press. Sex has also served as a justification for curtailing academic freedom — and the mere expression of an unpopular opinion on the subject can still cause the dismissal of a college professor (as it did at the University of Illinois in 1960); or a too realistic, though award-laden, drama by Eugene O’Neill may bring down the wrath of a university president and prompt the registration of the head and staff of an entire drama department (as occurred at Baylor in 1963).

Discussing, describing or graphically depicting sex too explicitly, or with an improper moral point of view, is still prohibited throughout much of these supposedly free United States. Why? Because it may lead to like behavior. And that it is the greatest fear of all: that sex may be indulged in freely, without the burden of guilt and shame placed upon it by our ignorant, superstitious, fear-ridden ancestors in the Middle Ages.

Never mind that the contemporary psychiatrist knows, and will gladly tell any who care to listen, that books, and pictures, and pamphlets and papers that deal openly and honestly with sex have little or no effect upon human behavior and whatever effect they do have is healthful, rather than injurious, to society; never mind that the science of psychiatry has revealed that it is the repression of the natural sex instinct, and the association of sex with guilt and shame, that cause the hurt to humankind — producing frigidity, impotence, masochism, sadism, homosexuality and all manner of sexual perversions, social and psychological ills, neuroses and psychoses; never mind that all of history documents the utter impossibility of curbing the normal sex drive, of keeping the male and female free from this sin on the flesh; never mind that modern research into sex behavior has revealed that America’s own Puritan attempts at sexual suppression have failed to halt or seriously hinder the “immoral” sex conduct on the majority of our adult population and resulted in nought but frustration, aberration, agony and heartache; never mind that any effort to regulate or control the private sexual morality of the adult citizens of the United States is contrary to the principle of individual freedom that is the very foundation of our democracy, and is in conflict with the most basic guarantees of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Never mind — for such arguments are based upon reason. And there is nothing reasoned or rational about our society’s attitude toward sex. It is based, instead, upon irrational conglomeration of prejudice, superstition, fear, faith, mysticism and marlarkey.

Sex, Religion and the State

The contemporary Judaeo-Christian concept of sexual morality stems — as we have indicated in some detail in the previous issues (The Playboy Philosophy, August and September, 1963) — less from original Judaic law or the teaching of Christ than from the extreme antisexualism of the medieval Church, which viewed all sex, both in and out of marriage, and even marriage itself, with extreme distaste; and Calvinist Puritanism, which extended the antagonism toward sexual pleasure to include all pleasure in general.

Both the medieval Church and Calvin’s Puritanism ruled their respective European societies with an iron hand, through the ecclesiastical courts and control over the secular governments as well; both demanded obedience of church law — both tortured, imprisoned and executed heretics.

The Church of the Middle Ages established penitential laws regulating every aspect of sexual life, including not only fornication and adultery, but masturbation and even involuntary nocturnal emissions; the Church also decreed the days of the week and the weeks of the year in which it was permissible for the market to indulge in coitus, as well as delineating the sexual techniques to be used between man and wife in order to remain free from sin; the sexual act was permissible within marriage only and for the single purpose of begetting children — the pleasures of sex were supposed to be kept to a minimum by the pious and it was the pleasure attendant with the act, even more than the act itself, that was thought to be sinful; women were held in extremely low esteem and a number of religious leaders of the period denounced them as the principle source of sin and the cause of mark fell from the grace of God (it was in this time that the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was given its sexual interpretation, with Eve cast in the role of the temptress — although Christian authorities of every denomination agree that the “Original Sin” was pride, and there is no evidence in either the Bible or in any respected theological interpretation of the Scriptures to justify the idea, still held by many, that the sin was sexual).

John Calvin and his Puritan followers accepted sex within marriage as essentially good and opposed the celibacy of the priesthood, but Calvin warned against any “indelicacy” in sexual relations and exhorted the married to “restrain themselves from all immodest lasciviousness and impropriety.”

He considered it an “inexcusable effrontery” for a wife to touch that part of her husband’s body “from the sight and touch of which all chaste women naturally recoil.” Puritanism was an essentially joyless religion — in sex and in all other aspects of daily life. And sex outside the bonds of marriage was damned as the worst of all possible sins. William Graham Cole, Ph.D. and noted member of the ministry of the Presbyterian Church, previously assistant professor of religion of Smith College and presently President of Lake Forest (Illinois) College, states in his book, Sex in Christianity and Psychoanalysis, “Calvin…could not believe that God would under any circumstances fail to vent His anger against fornication, and he extended the sense of the Seventh Commandment to cover that as well as the other forms of sexual vice….

“Sodomy Calvin regarded as a particularly heinous crime, since not even the beasts, he said [quite incorrectly], are guilty of such a perversion of nature. Calvin had clearly no experience with the sexual behavior of animals. Bestiality, sexual relations with a member of another species, is another sin repugnant to the modesty of nature itself, and the law very properly [in Calvin's view] prescribes the death penalty….” Dr. Cole states that Calvin also “spoke with approval of the severe punishment meted out by Hebrew Law [for] sexual intercourse during menstruation.

The person was punished by exile, and Calvin felt the punishment fit the crime, for he regarded any guilty of this as downright degenerate….” In Geneva, Calvin attempted, unsuccessfully, to impose the death penalty for adultery, but later, in England, under Puritan rule, adultery was made a capital offense punishable by hanging, and some citizens actually were hung for the crime.

It is not our intention to dwell upon the irrational aspects of such religious doctrine; in a free society, each religion should be free to teach whatever it pleases, rational or not, and each individual free to either accept or reject the belief. What concerns us here is the extent to which this antisexualism has been projected into secular society and has even found its way into the laws that govern our land.

In the last installment of this editorial series we examined the extent to which religious beliefs on sex are reflected in our laws governing marriage and divorce. Marriage, in our society, is a church-state license to engage in sex and almost all sexual activity outside of marriage is prohibited by statutes on fornication, adultery and cohabitation in most of the 50 states.

We oppose these laws — not as an endorsement of either premarital or extramarital sex — but in the firm belief that such personal conduct should be left to the private determination of the individual and is not rightly the business of government in our democracy. This belief is shared by a great many legal and religious leaders in America, who have been among the most outspoken in the current criticism of our archaic sex statutes.

The legal view was expressed by the American Law Institute, when it authorized a Model Penal Code for sex in 1955 recommending that all consensual relations between adults in private should be excluded from the criminal law, since “no harm to the secular interests of the community is involved in atypical sex practice in private between consenting adult partners and there is a fundamental question of the protection to which every individual is entitled against state interference in his personal affairs when he is not hurting others.”

The religious view is expressed by Father James Jones of the Episcopal Church, who has observed that when personal sexual behavior is governed by the state, it is less likely to effectively change the behavior than to make it hidden or secretive, thereby making more difficult the task of religion in dealing with the moral issues involved.

The religious view is confirmed by the facts: Although 37 of the 50 states have laws against fornication and 45 have statutes prohibiting adultery, Dr. Alfred Kinsey and associates, in their monumental study of U.S. sex behavior, published in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, found that the majority of adult men and women in America admitted to having sexual intercourse outside of marriage. Kinsey’s studies established that the sexual experience of adult Americans varies widely — depending upon social and educational background, with 67 percent of the males with some college education, 84 percent of those who attended high school but did not go on to college, and 98 percent of men with only a grade-school education, having engaged in premarital sexual intercourse; approximately 50 percent of all females have coitus prior to marriage and, unlike the statistics for males, this figure increases for women of higher education, with some 60 percent of the females with a college education having had intercourse before marriage.

Although both the social taboos and the statutes are far stricter regarding adultery. Kinsey estimates — taking into account the high degree of cover-up he found among men in this portion of his study — approximately 50 percent of all married males have sexual intercourse with women other than their wives at some time during their marriage. In Kinsey’s study of U.S. females, 26 percent of all married women admitted having engaged in extramarital intercourse; the females with a higher educational background showed a slightly higher incidence, with 29 percent of the wives with some college education admitting to extramarital sex. Here again, as with the married males, Kinsey found a considerable hesitancy on the part of the wives to divulge the facts related to marital infidelity — a problem not experienced by the researchers in those portions of the survey dealing with premarital sex, suggesting that the true percentages for extramarital sex among women are somewhat higher.

Using only the minimal estimates supplied by Kinsey and his staff, however, it is safe to say that one out of every two U.S. husbands, and something more than one out of every four wives, will engage in extramarital intercourse at some time during their marriages; in addition, nearly all of the males and one half of the females have premarital intercourse. Quite obviously the U.S. laws prohibiting fornication and adultery are having little effect upon the behavior of a sizable portion of our society.

Crimes Against Nature

It is in our laws against sodomy, or what some states refer to as “the abominable and detestable crime against nature,” that our religiously generated aversion to sex proves most pronounced. Sodomy historically and medically refers to anal intercourse, or buggery, but the statutes on sodomy include all manner of sexual activity conceived by someone, somewhere, at one time or another, to be “unnatural”; and this means, of course, in this sexually repressed society, almost every variety of sexual activity other than “natural” coitus. Sodomy laws thus cover, in one state or another, not only buggery, but fellatio (oral-genital contact with the male), cunnilingus (oral-genital contact with the female), homosexual behavior, bestiality (sex contact with animals), necrophilia (sexual contact with the dead), and in two states, even mutual masturbation. The very concept of “natural” and “unnatural” sex is, of course, a religious-moral one. Among all of these “crimes against nature”, only necrophilia is relatively rare and a certain symptom of a serious psychosexual disorder. We will offer no personal moral judgments on the rest of this behavior now — reserving the expression of our own concept of a rational sexual morality for a later installment of this editorial series — but the psychiatrist, without making any moral determination on the subject would consider almost all of this activity normal (and, therefore, “natural”); and Kinsey found a far greater frequency for most of it than was previously assumed.

Forty-nine of the fifty states and the District of Columbia have sodomy statutes and they include some of the most emotion-tinged language to be found anywhere in the law. The Michigan statute, which states, “Any person who shall commit the abominable and detestable crime against nature, either with mankind or with any animal, shall be guilty of a felony,” is typical; the phrase “abominable and detestable crime against nature” appears with such regularity in the sodomy statutes that it has the effect of being an alternate title for the offense, and Rhode Island actually lists the crime under that heading; in Utah, Arizona and Nevada, it is also referred to as the “infamous crime against nature.”

The “abominable and detestable” phrase also becomes, in some instances, the sole description of the offenses prohibited under the law. Some of the legislators responsible for initiating and passing the statutes were apparently so embarrassed by the whole business that they offered no further clue to the nature of the crime, except to state that it was illegal if perpetrated “with mankind or animal.”

The noted 18th century jurist Sir William Blackstone author of Commentaries, which are still fundamental in any study of English or U.S. law, reflects the irrational emotionalism associated with these statutes when he writes: “I will not act so disagreeable a part, to my readers as well as to myself, is to dwell any longer upon a subject, the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature. It will be more eligible to imitate in this respect the delicacy of our English law which treats it, in its very indictments, as a crime not fit to be named…. Which leads us to add a word concerning it punishment. This the voice of nature and of reason, and the express law of God determined to be capital, of which we have a signal instance, long before the Jewish dispensation, by the destruction of two cities by fire from Heaven; so that this is a universal, not merely a provincial precept; and our ancient law in some degree imitated this punishment, by commanding such miscreants to be burned to death; though Fleta says they should be buried alive; either of which punishments was indifferently used for this crime against the ancient Goths. But now the general punishment of all felonies is the same, namely, by hanging; and this offense (being in time of popery only subject to ecclesiastical censures) was made a felony without benefit of clergy….”

The U.S. courts have displayed a similar distaste in dealing with the subject. Thus the judge, in State vs. Whitmarsh, commented, “We regret that the importance of this question [whether or not oral-genital contact should be considered a crime against nature] renders it necessary to soil the pages of our reports with a discussion of a subject so loathsome and disgusting as the one confronting us.”

Former Judge Morris Ploscowe, of the New York Magistrate’s Court, now Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at New York University, states in Sex and the Law: “Ever since Lord Coke’s time, the attitude of judges has been that sodomy is ‘a detestable and abominable sin among Christians not to be named.’ The result of this attitude is a sharp departure from the usual rules of criminal pleading. It is one of the basic canons of criminal procedure that a defendant is entitled to know the particulars of a crime charged against him, so that he can adequately prepare his defense. If the indictment is not sufficiently specific, the defendant has a right to demand a bill of particulars. But when a man is charged with sodomy or a crime against nature, a indictment in the language of the statute is enough. It is enough that the indictment alleges that a particular time and place the defendant committed a ‘crime against nature’ with a specific person. The defendant need not be informed of the particular sexual perversion which is charged against him. As the Court put in the case of Honselman vs. People:

“‘It was never the practice to describe the particular manner of the details of the commission of the crime, but the offense was treated in the indictment as the abominable crime not fit to be named among Christians. The existence of such an offense is a disgrace to human nature. The legislature has not seen fit to define it further than by the general term, and the records of the courts need not to be defiled with the details of different acts which may go to constitute it. A statement of the offense in the language of the statute is all that is required.’”

Heterosexual Sodomy

Although English common law, from which our own statutes on the subject are derived, defined and prohibited only buggery with mankind or beast as “the crime against nature,” carrying the penalty of death, a majority of the present-day U.S. statutes include both oral and anal intercourse under sodomy.

Moreover, none of the statutes in any of the 49 states make any distinction between heterosexual and homosexual sodomy — both are prohibited under the law; and what is even less clearly recognized is that none of the U.S. statutes make any distinction between the married and the unmarried. Our government thus specifies, quite literally, where a husband and wife may, or may not, kiss one another; and the manner in which the sex act may be initiated and carried out in the marriage bed without becoming illegal.

Modern insights into human behavior have radically changed society’s views on the subject of perversion, of course, and what was considered “unnatural” in sex is now recognized as perfectly normal, and in many instances, desirable. A majority of our contemporary marriage manuals, courses in sex education, and counselors on the problems of sex and family, stress a natural freedom in the love play that accompanies marital coitus; both husband and wife are informed that the intimate preliminaries of sex can be important in achieving the full satisfaction of both partners; every part of the loved one should be dear, and free from shame, and the sexual foreplay may quite properly include kisses and caresses wherever desired; no act of intimacy that brings pleasure to members of the mating should be considered improper or taboo.

This quote from Sexual Harmony in Marriage by Oliver M. Butterfield, Ph.D., a book reportedly given by some members of the Presbyterian clergy to young couples about to be married, is typical: “Any position is proper which permits full satisfaction for both parties. All parts of the body are proper for use if they can be made to contribute to the general goal without giving offense to the taste or feelings of either partner, and if either partner is harmed thereby.”

Dr. Albert Ellis states, in an article published in Marriage and Family Living: “The only sexual ‘perversion’ is a fetish or rigidity which convinces an individual that he or she can only have satisfactory sex relations in one method or position. The great majority of sexual perverts in this country are not sadists, homosexuals, exhibitionists, or similar deviates, but ‘normal’ married individuals who only enjoy one method of coitus…because they are afraid or ashamed to try the dozens of other sexual variations that are easily available to them.”

In offering such psychologically sound advice, the marriage manuals, educators and counselors of America are actually inviting husbands and wives to commit criminal acts in their bedrooms — acts that are prohibited by law almost everywhere in the United States, with lengthy prison sentences prescribed to the guilty.

Since the relations between a man and his wife are most often kept private, relatively few instances of such behavior come to public attention. Kinsey reports, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, however, “While the laws are more commonly enforced in regard to such relations outside of marriage, there are instances of spouses whose oral activities became known to their children, and through them to the neighborhood, and ultimately led to prosecution and penal sentences for both husband and wife….”

More often this behavior comes to light as the result of a divorce action, although Ploscowe comments that it has been customary for the courts to view such charges with skepticism when they are a part of a suit for divorce, since they are inherently unprovable and rest solely upon the assertion of the party seeking to end the marriage. Sometimes the behavior comes to light through charges lodged by an unwilling partner in oral or anal sex, because the act was allegedly performed under duress.

Kinsey states in his second volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, “We have cases of persons who were convicted because one of the spouses objected, or because some other person became aware that oral and anal play had been included in the marital activities.” Kinsey observes that there have been relatively few actual convictions of husbands or wives under U.S. sodomy laws, but adds, “As long as they remain on the books, they are subject to capricious enforcement and become tools for blackmailers. In those states where the definition of cruelty as one of the grounds for divorce includes ‘personal indignities’ or ‘mental cruelty,’ divorce cases involving either the husband’s or the wife’s desires or demands for the use of oral techniques are not infrequent.”

For the unmarried, the chances of discovery and possible prosecution are obviously greater. Completion of the act to orgasm, with either the male or female, is not required to be guilty of the offense — the act itself is sufficient; in some states, a conviction may be based upon circumstantial evidence, or simply upon an attempt to commit the act: Alabama’s statute on the “crime against nature” states, “An offense may be proven under this section…by circumstantial evidence, when positive proof is wanting…. A conviction may be had for an attempt to commit an offense denounced by this section.” In some states the mere suggestion of solicitation to engage in such behavior is a crime. Kinsey reports, “One case even goes so far as to uphold the conviction of a man for soliciting his wife to commit sodomy.”

Considering the obvious abhorrence with which both the legislative and the judicial branches of our government have dealt with the subject, and the prohibitive penalties prescribed for the assorted nonprocreative acts collected together under the sodomy and “crime-against-nature” statutes (the most severe of any of our laws dealing with sexual activity between consenting adults), it is especially interesting — and significant — to consider how prevalent at least some of this behavior is in our society.

Dr. Kinsey and his researchers found relatively little evidence of heterosexual anal intercourse, either within or outside of marriage, and neither of their first books include any statistics on this behavior. Kinsey did find marked differences in the anal eroticism reported by his subjects, however, and some of the females described sexual responses to anal intercourse that were closely akin to those achieved through vaginal coitus. More current research prompts the Sex Institute to estimate that approximately four percent of the adult male population has attempted, and three percent successfully accomplished, anal heterosexual intercourse; these statistics are a preliminary study, however, and no educational breakdown is presently available; consistent with Kinsey’s previous findings, it is to be assumed that the percentage among upper-level, college-educated males will be somewhat higher than this overall average. A number of experts in sexual behavior, including Dr. Lawrence Z. Freedman, of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, consider these percentages to be low; Dr. Freedman states, “My impression is that both female homosexual experience and male anality are probably underestimated in these [Kinsey's and his Sex Institute's] figures.”

In contrast to anal intercourse, however, Kinsey found oral-genital sex — also a considered a “crime against nature” in most states — quite common among males and females, married and unmarried.

Kinsey reports, “Mouth-genital contacts of some sort, with the subject as either the active or the passive member in the relationship, occur at some time in the histories of nearly 60 percent of all males”; in an Accumulative Incidence table for Oral Contacts in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by which is meant the sexual experience of the subject up to the time of the interview, Kinsey found that 18.4 percent of the male had premarital heterosexual oral-genital relations of an “active” nature (cunnilingus, performed by the male on the female) and 38.6 percent had “passive” mouth-genital relations prior to marriage (fellatio, performed on the male by the female); however, the American husband apparently believes it is better to give than to receive, or is less sexually repressed than his spouse, as approximately 45.3 percent of the married males engage in cunnilingus with their wives, while 42.7 percent experience fellatio.

As with most sexual activity, educational background plays an important role in determining the extent of oral-genital activity that accompanies the sex act, with cunnilingus and fellatio far more common among upper-educated males than among their less-educated brothers. Among those males who have never gone beyond eighth grade in school, the accumulative incidence for mouth-genital contacts of any kind is 40 percent; for those males with an education limited to high school, the incidence is 65 percent; and for those with some college, the percentages rise to 72.

Fifteen percent of all U.S. females have some mouth-genital contact prior to marriage and, as might be expected, Kinsey found a high correlation between such activity prior to marriage and the extent of premarital intercourse engaged in by his female subjects: Among the younger women in the study who had not engaged in premarital coitus, “only three percent had allowed the male to touch their genitalia orally…. But among those females who had had some, even though not extensive coital experience, 46 percent had accepted such contacts….”

Oral stimulation of the male by the female follows the same general pattern, though the incidence is slightly lower. On this Kinsey comments, “Often the female makes such contacts only because she is urged to do so by the male, but there are a few females who initiate such activity and some who may be much aroused by it. A few may even reach orgasm as they stimulate the male orally. This greater inclination of the human male toward oral activity is duplicated among other species of mammals. Contrary to our earlier thinking, we now understand that there are basic psychologic differences between the sexes; and although cultural traditions may also be involved, the differences in oral behavior may depend primarily on the greater capacity of the male to be stimulated psychologically.”

Among married women, approximately 50 percent have some mouth-genital contact, either active or passive, with their husbands; Kinsey’s report on the Female does not include any classification by educational background, but it is to be assumed that the pattern already established would hold true and that females with a higher education would also display a markedly higher incidence of both premarital and marital activity of an oral-genital nature.

One of Kinsey’s most interesting findings related to oral eroticism has to do with the date of birth of his subjects — a comparison of the incidence of this activity among both the males and females of the present and previous generations. Quite clearly the public attitude toward such behavior has changed radically during the past 50 years and what was once considered “perversion” is now recognized and accepted throughout much of our society as both natural and good; such a lessening of the taboos connected with this sexual activity might be expected to produce a noticeable increase in the activity itself.

In addition, the antisexual might argue that the prevalence of such “sophisticated” nonreproductive variations on the sexual theme offers evidence of a sexually jaded society that requires such “abnormal” psychosexual stimulation, because the unnatural contemporary obsession with the subject has dulled our capacity to appreciate sex and be aroused by it in its simpler forms.

It is significant to note, therefore, that in the accumulative-incidence tables in both the Male and Female studies, the oral-genital activity is relatively the same for the past and present generations. Society’s publicly proclaimed attitude on the subject has undergone a dramatic change, but the actual private behavior of the individual has remained almost constant. There were, as we have pointed out, significant variations based upon educational background, but for both male and females of similar education in this and the previous generations, born in each decade back to 1900, Kinsey comments, “There were surprisingly few differences….”

This fact is important, we feel, both in establishing the essential naturalness of the behavior itself and in pointing out how relatively ineffective social and legal taboos are in suppressing natural sexuality.

Homosexual Sodomy

The same oral and anal techniques may be used to introduce variety and additional pleasure into a heterosexual relationship are the primary means of sexual gratification in homosexual associations.

As we have already stated, none of the U.S. statutes dealing with sodomy and/or “the abominable and detestable crime against nature” make any distinction between the heterosexual or homosexual practice of such activities. In the enforcement of laws, however, a disproportionately high percent of sodomy arrests and convictions involve homosexual contacts — presumably because a heterosexual cop and a heterosexual judge find a homosexual crime against nature a good deal more “abominable and detestable” than a heterosexual one.

We confess to a strong personal prejudice in favor of the boy-girl variety of sex, but our belief in a free, rational and humane society demands a tolerance of those whose sexual inclinations are different from our own — so long as their activity is limited to consenting adults in private and does not involve either minors or the use of any kind of coercion. Lenny Bruce expressed our viewpoint with typical satiric bite and insight when he said: “I’m not prejudiced against homosexuals, but I wouldn’t want my brother to marry one.”

Actually, we Americans are — as a nation — more intolerant of homosexuality than almost any other country in the world; Dr. Alfred Kinsey states, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female: “There appears to be no other major culture in the world in which public opinion and the statute law so severely penalize homosexual relationships as they do in the United States today.” You can call an American male a scoundrel and a thief with less chance of eliciting an emotional response than if you simply question his manhood.

The American male’s concern over his masculinity amounts to an obsession. And as we have observed on our consideration of the history of antisex in our culture, such an obsession usually represents a repressed fear. We will explore a bit later, in some detail, the degree to which this fear for our manhood is justified in contemporary U.S. society: We will attempt to trace the trends in our society that are responsible for this drift toward the asexual; and we will point out the extent to which the censor and the prude concentrate their most vigorous attacks on the heterosexual aspects of our culture, leaving the asexual, homosexual, sadomasochistic and fetishtic to flourish.

Quite obviously, however, any attempts society may make to legislate homosexuality out of existence are doomed to certain failure and are actually more inclined to perpetuate and encourage sexual deviation than diminish it.

To whatever extent homosexuality — an erotic attraction to members of the same sex rather than the opposite sex — represents an emotional disorder, it must be dealt with psychiatrically; you do not successfully treat a neurosis by passing a law against its symptoms. In addition, homosexual behavior is not necessarily symptomatic of any emotional aberration; far too great a percentage of our adult population have engaged in some form of homosexual activity at some time in their lives to permit it to be scientifically defined as abnormal.

Kinsey points out that homosexual contacts occur frequently in all other species of animal life and except for the strong cultural taboos affixed to such behavior, the incidence would presumably be equally high among human beings. Kinsey states that a perfectly normal man or woman may be erotically attracted to, or aroused by, a member of the same sex; and prolonged separation from the opposite sex (as in prison or some assignments in the armed services) may significantly increase these homosexual responses. Judge Morris Ploscowe states, in Sex and the Law: “Whenever men are isolated from women, or women from men, from any length of time, homosexual relationships and activity inevitably develop.”

The individual whose homosexual activity becomes known is apt to find himself an outcast in much of our heterosexual society and he is forced into a nether world inhabited almost exclusively by homosexuals; it thus becomes increasingly unlikely that he will find his way back to a predominantly heterosexual life. In this way, we unwittingly support a system calculated to maximize the spread of homosexuality rather than reduce its incidence, at the same time linking the behavior with feelings of guilt and shame conducive to emotional conflict, anxiety and perhaps serious psychological disorientation.

Kinsey makes this further appeal to reason regarding our attitude on the subject: “Condemnations of homosexual as well as some other types of sexual activity are based on the argument that they do not serve the prime function of sex, which is interpreted to be procreation, and in that sense represent a perversion of what is taken to be ‘normal’ sexual behavior. It is contended that the general spread of homosexuality would threaten the existence of the human species, and that the integrity of the home and of the social organization could not be maintained if homosexual activity were not condemned by moral codes and public opinion and made punishable under the statute law. The argument ignores the fact that the existent mammalian species have managed to survive in spite of their widespread homosexual activity, and that sexual relations between males seem to be widespread in certain cultures (for instance, Moslem and Buddhist cultures) which are more seriously concerned with problems of overpopulation than they are with any threat of underpopulation. Interestingly enough, these are also cultures in which the institution of the family is very strong.”

The general condemnation of homosexual relationships originated in Jewish history in about the Seventh century B.C., as a part of the extensive antisexualism that permeated Judaism after the Babylonian exile. Kinsey comments, “Both mouth-genital contacts and homosexual activities had previously been associated with the Jewish religious service, as they had been with the religious services of most of the other peoples of that part of Asia, and just as they have been in other cultures elsewhere in the world. In the wave of nationalism which was then developing among the Jewish people, there was an attempt to disidentify themselves with their neighbors by breaking with many of the customs which they had previously shared with them. Many of the Talmudic condemnations were based on the fact that such activities represented the way of the Canaanite, the way of Chaldean, the way of the pagan, and they were originally condemned as a form of idolatry rather than a sexual crime. Throughout the Middle Ages homosexuality was associated with heresy. The reform in the custom (the mores) soon, however, became a matter of morals, and finally a question for action under criminal law.

“Jewish sex codes were brought over into Christian codes by the early adherents of the Church, including St. Paul, who had been raised in the Jewish tradition on matters of sex. The Catholic sex code is an almost precise continuation of the more ancient Jewish code. For centuries in medieval Europe, the ecclesiastical law dominated on all questions of morals and subsequently became the basis for the English common law, the statute laws of England, and the laws of the various states of the United States. This accounts for the considerable conformity between the Talmudic and Catholic codes and the present-day statute law on sex, including the laws on homosexual activity.”

We share a common Judaeo-Christian heritage with Europe, but American Puritanism has carried this country well beyond the antisexualism still to be found in the Old World. In much of the U.S., the legal penalties for sodomy are surpassed only by those for kidnapping, murder, and rape.

And yet, despite the severest sort of social and statutory prohibitions, Dr. Kinsey and his research associates of Indiana University found a remarkably high percentage of both American men and women who admitted to have had some homosexual contacts. On the opening page of the chapter titled “Homosexual Outlet,” in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey states: “A considerable portion of the population, perhaps the major portion of the male population, has at least some homosexual experience between adolescence and old age. In addition, about 60 percent of the preadolescent boys engage in homosexual activities, and there is an additional group of adult males who avoid overt contacts but who are quite aware of their potentialities for reacting to other males.”

The data in this study indicate that a minimum of 37 percent of the total male population have had overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm after puberty and prior to the age of 45. Among the males, approximately 30 percent have been brought to climax at least once through mouth-genital contact with other males; and 14 percent have brought other males to climax in the same manner.

When the sampling is limited to those men who remain single until the age of 35, half (50 percent) have had overt homosexual contact resulting in orgasm since puberty; when educational level is taken into consideration for this same group of single males, 58 percent of those who went to high school but not beyond, 50 percent of grade-school level, and 47 percent of the college level have had homosexual experience to the point of orgasm after the onset of adolescence.

Specific statistics on anal intercourse in homosexual experiences are not available, although Kinsey does indicate that anal intercourse is reported by 17 percent of the preadolescent boy who had engaged in homosexual activity of any sort. In general Kinsey tends to minimize anal eroticism in homosexual relationships, just as he has in heterosexual ones, and it does appear that oral-genital techniques are far more common in both.

The erotic techniques initially utilized by females in homosexual relations may often include a little more than “simple lip kissing and generalized body contacts.” Ultimately, however, with females of increased homosexual experience, a more intimate fondling of the partner, with manual manipulation of the breasts and genitalia becomes almost universal (95 to 98 percent); and more specific oral stimulation of the breasts (in 85 percent) and genitalia (in 78 percent) becomes a common technique.

The male and female differ markedly in the number of homosexual partners with whom they are typically involved: In Kinsey’s sample of single women, a high proportion (51 percent) of those with any homosexual experience had had their relations with but a single partner, up to the time at which they contributed their histories to the study; another 20 percent had had relations with two partners; only 29 percent had had homosexual relations with three or more partners; and only 3 percent had had between ten and 20. In contrast, a high proportion of the males with homosexual experience had had relations with several different partners; 22 percent had had more than ten partners, including 8 percent with over 100. Kinsey originally believed that these differences in promiscuity were due primarily to environmental considerations, but by the time he was ready to publish his second volume his research had led him to the conclusion that the differences in male and female promiscuity — whether homosexual or heterosexual — are primarily the product of varying degrees of psychosexual responsiveness in the two sexes.

For any oldsters who may find these statistics shocking evidence of the immorality of the modern generation, it must be reported that — as with the data on similar heterosexual nonreproductive techniques — males and females born before 1900 (and in each decade since) evidence almost identical percentages for homosexual activity. Grandma and grandpa would have been shocked beyond words by any open discussion of the subject, but their actual sexual behavior was little different from our own today.

Quite obviously, Kinsey’s statistics do not represent the number of “homosexuals” in society, as we usually understand and use the term, but the amount of “homosexual experience.” The great majority of the men and women who have had such experiences are primarily heterosexual in their behavior and the most significant point to be understood from this data is that almost all us have, within ourselves, the capacity to respond to both heterosexual and homosexual stimuli.

On this point, Kinsey states, “It would encourage clearer thinking on these matters if persons were not characterized as heterosexual or homosexual, but as individuals who have had certain amounts of heterosexual experience and certain amounts of homosexual experience. Instead of using these terms as substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may be better used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or of the stimuli to which an individual erotically responds.”

This point is best illustrated by the following facts: While 37 percent of the total male population — or nearly two males out of every five — have at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old age, only 25 percent of the male population have had more than incidental homosexual experience or reactions over at least a three-year period between the ages of 16 and 55; only 18 percent have at least as much homosexual as heterosexual experience in their histories for at least a three-year period between the same ages; 10 percent are more or less exclusively homosexual for at least a three-year period; 8 percent are exclusively homosexual for three years; and only 4 percent are exclusively homosexual throughout their lives.

But related to the subject presently under discussion, we remember that it is not being “homosexual” that is illegal in almost all of the 50 states, it is the single “homosexual experience” — of the sort engaged in, at one time or another, by nearly two out of every five adult males in society — that is a crime. In most states, it is a crime punishable by a lengthy prison sentence.

Our moral and legal condemnations of homosexual activity do not apply equally to both men and women, being uncommon severe in dealing with male homosexuality and generally ignoring like behavior in the female. This is consistent with our religious tradition, which was historically placed much emphasis on male homosexual activity and had little to say about female homosexuality. The ancient Hittite code condemned men for homosexual behavior, but only under certain specified circumstances, and made no mention of women; similarly, the references to homosexuality in the Bible and Talmud apply primarily to the male.

This seeming inconsistency is probably partially explained by the fact that women were considered socially less important in earlier cultures and their private activities were more or less ignored when not involving men; in addition, the special prohibition against male homosexual behavior is consistent with the Catholic emphasis on the wasting of the male seed as a sin. In medieval European history there are abundant records of death penalties imposed upon males for sexual contact with other males, but very few recorded cases of similar action against females.

In modern English and other European law, the statutes have continued to apply only to men (there are specific statutes against female homosexuality only in Austria, Greece, Finland and Switzerland); but in American law, the phrasing of most of the statutes would make them applicable to both female and male homosexual activity: The prohibitions usually refer to “all persons,” “any persons,” or “any human being,” without distinction as to sex. The enforcement of these laws is, however, quite another matter; a study of U.S. court records reveals that almost no women have ever been prosecuted or convicted for homosexuality, while the prosecution and conviction of men for homosexual activity has been extensive.

Only one state (Michigan) specifically prohibits lesbian activity. In five states (Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin) the sodomy statutes are so written as to not include female homosexuality. The Georgia statute, titled Sodomy and Bestiality, defines sodomy as “the carnal knowledge and connection against the order of nature, by man with man, or in the same unnatural manner with woman.” The law reads, in part: “Crime of sodomy as defined in this section cannot be accomplished between two women; hence person convicted on indictment charging her with sodomy, both participants in act being alleged to be females, will be discharged on habeas corpus on ground that she is being legally restrained of her liberty, in that indictment on which she was convicted was null and void.”

This statute thus offers an interesting example of the irrational nature of laws dealing with sodomy: Cunnilingus (oral contact with the female genitalia) is not a crime in Georgia if performed by another female, but it is a crime if it is performed by a male; heterosexual fellatio (oral contact with the male genitalia) is similarly prohibited. The statute states, in a further paragraph concerned with oral-genital activity: “Where man and woman voluntarily have carnal knowledge and connection against the order of nature with each other, they are both guilty of sodomy, whether offense be committed by the mouth of the man or by the mouth of the woman.” The law makes no exception for the husband and wife.

The courts have held that heterosexual cunnilingus is not “the crime against nature” in Mississippi and Ohio, and the decisions would presumably apply to homosexual cunnilingus as well; in Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa and Nebraska the vagueness of the statutes also leaves some doubt as to the status of female homosexuality. Neither male nor female homosexuality is illegal in Illinois, for it is one state in all the 50 that has no sodomy statute.

Animal Contacts

U.S. sodomy statutes universally prohibit sexual contact between humans and infrahuman species of animal life; the “abominable and detestable crime against nature” is most often defined in the statutes as being “either with mankind or beast.” Kinsey reports that animal contacts represent the smallest source of common sexual outlet, but they are by no means rare and the relatively higher percentages of such experience in rural communities, on farms, and where larger animals are more readily available, suggest that accessibility may have more to do with the incidence of such behavior than moral and legal prohibitions.

Kinsey states, “To many persons it will seem almost axiomatic that two mating animals should be individuals of the same species. This is so often true, from one end of the animal kingdom to the other, that exceptions to the rule seem especially worthy of note. To those who believe, as children do, than conformance should be universal, any departure from the rule becomes an immorality. The immorality seems particularly gross to an individual who is unaware of the frequency with which exceptions to the supposed rule actually occur….

“Even the scientists have been considerably biased in their investigations in the field, for they too have accepted the traditions. Even they have believed that matings between individuals of different species occur only rarely. Within the last few decades, however, students of taxonomy, genetics, and evolution have had the existence of interspecific hybrids increasingly drawn to their attention. These, of course, predicate the existence of interpecific matings. Some biologists are clearly uncomfortable in the face of this data, and are inclined to argue them away as they would argue away blots on their philosophy or theology. Even among the higher animals, interpecific crosses, or crosses between distinct varieties, have increasingly become known. The birdbanding work has shown that birds respect the limits of their own species much less often than the old-time naturalists would have insisted. And, finally, the students of sexual behavior among the higher mammals are beginning to report an increasing number of instances of animals mating, or trying to mate, with individuals of totally distinct and sometimes quite remote species.

“When one examines the observed cases of such crosses, and especially the rather considerable number of instances in which primates, including man, have been involved, one begins to suspect that the rules about interspecific matings are not so universal as tradition would have it. Indeed, one is struck anew with the necessity for better reasons than biologists and psychologists have yet found, for expecting that animal matings should invariably be limited to individuals of the same species.

“In light of the above, it is particularly interesting to note the degree of abhorrence with which intercourse between the human and the animals of other species is viewed by most persons who have not had such experience. The biologist and the psychologist, and the anthropologist and the student of history, will have made a significant contribution when they can expound the development of our taboos on such contacts.”

These taboos were already well-established in time of the Old Testament and the Talmud. It is worth noting that in the older Hittite code, which influenced later Hebrew law, the taboos on animal intercourse were not so clearly the moral issues that they subsequently came to be. Specifically, in the Hittite code it is decreed that “If a man lie with a cow the punishment is death…. If a man lies with a hog or dog, he shall die…. If a bull rear upon a man, the bull shall die, but the man shall not die…. If a boar rear upon a man, there is no penalty…. If a man lies with a horse or mule, there is no penalty, but he shall not come near the king, and he shall not become a priest.”

Kinsey comments, “These are proscriptions against contacts with certain animals, while contacts with certain animals are more or less accepted. Such distinctions are strikingly paralleled by the taboos which make certain foods clean and other foods unclean. [As we have previously noted, early Christians then adapted and substantially reinforced these traditions; and it became, for a time, an act of bestiality for a Christian to have sexual relations with a Jew.] The student of human folkways is inclined to see a considerable body of superstition in the origins of all such taboos, even though they may ultimately become religious and moral issues for whole nations and whole races of people.”

In any case, it is certain that human contacts with animals of other species have been known since the dawn of history: They appear in the folk tales of every ancient culture, and references to such contacts abound in the writings and art of the oldest civilizations; they are also known to every race and culture today, including our own.

Kinsey concludes, “Far from being a matter for surprise, the record simply substantiates our present understanding that the forces which bring individuals of the same species together in sexual relations, may sometimes serve to bring individuals of different species together in the same types of sexual relations.”

About 8 percent of the total male population have some sexual contact with animals. Most such experiences occur in early postadolescent years — between adolescence and the age of 20 — with the incidence dropping markedly in the older age groups. Frequency of animal contacts is similarly low in the male population, taken as a whole; for most individuals, they do not occur more than once or twice, or a few times in a lifetime.

The significance of such experiences becomes more pronounced, however, when our consideration is limited to the records of males raised in rural or farm communities, with a ready access to animals. For this group, approximately 17 percent experience orgasm as a result of animal contacts which occur sometime after the onset of adolescence; as many more rural males have sexual contacts with animals that do not result in orgasm; and there are an additional number who have preadolescent experiences, which are not included in the above calculations. In total, Kinsey reports, “Something between 40 and 50 percent of all farm boys have some sort of animal contact, either with or without orgasm, in their preadolescent, adolescent, and/or later histories. These must be minimum data, for there has undoubtedly been some cover-up in the reports of these activities.”

Kinsey found that certain western areas of the United States, where animals are readily available and social restraints related to such behavior are less severe, incidence figures for some communities rose as high as 65 percent. The marked difference in percentages of experience between rural and urban males, plus the number of experiences for urban boys that occur during visits to farms, suggests that the opportunity for such contacts is a major consideration in determining the accumulative incidence; if city-bred boys had similar opportunity, Kinsey and his associates believe that the percentages of experience for the total male population would approximate those established for rural males.

As with most other aspects of human sexual behavior, there is a high correlation between educational level and the extent of infrahuman sexual experience: 14 to 16 percent of the rural males of grade-school level, 20 percent of the rural males of high-school level, and 26 to 28 percent of the rural males of college level have some contact with animals to the point of orgasm. Well over half of these upper-level males have some sort of sexual contact with animals and nearly one in every three achieves orgasm through such contacts.

Experiences with animals usually represent a form of sexual experimentation for the adolescent male, which disappears in the mid-teens; but in some rural areas, especially in the West, there is a considerable amount of regular activity in the later teens and even through the early twenties. In most cases, such contacts are a substitute for heterosexual relations with human females; this is particularly true in rural areas where the opportunity for both social and sexual relations with girls may be limited. In most parts of the country animal intercourse is extremely rare among married males.

The animals involved in such contacts include practically all of the species that are commonly domesticated in the farm or kept as pets in the household. Because of the relatively low incidence and frequency of such activity in the population as a whole, animal contacts were significant primarily because of the extreme social and legal taboos attached to such behavior.

Kinsey comments, “In rural communities where animal contacts are not infrequent, and where there is some general knowledge that they do commonly occur, there seem to be few personal conflicts growing out of such activity, and very few social difficulties. It is only when the farm-bred male migrates to a city community and comes in contact city-bred reactions to these activities, that he becomes upset over the contemplation of what he has done….

“Anglo-American legal codes rate sexual relations between the human and animals of other species as sodomy, punishable under the same laws which penalize homosexual and mouth-genital contacts. The city-bred judge who hears such a case is likely to be unusually severe in his condemnation, and is likely to give the maximum sentence that is possible. Males that are sent to penal institutions on such charges are likely to receive unusually severe treatment both from the administrations and from the inmates of the institutions. All in all, there is probably no type of human sexual behavior which has been so severely condemned by that segment of the population which happens not to have had such experience, and which accepts the age-old judgment that animal intercourse must evidence a mental abnormality, as well as an immorality.”

Sexual contacts with animals are even less common among females and Kinsey found only 3.6 percent of the adult female population with any evidence of such activity in their histories after the beginning of adolescence. The sample was considered too small to permit any valid urban-rural or educational breakdown, although a majority of the females who reported having had such experiences were from the better-educated segments of the population.

The extensive sexual involvement of human females with a wide variety of animals in ancient folklore, Classic Greek and Roman mythology, and major literary and artistic efforts of more recent centuries (including some of world’s great art; e.g. Leda and the Swan has been a recurring, ever-popular theme with artists down through the ages, from Classic sculpture, to the paintings by Michelangelo and Rubens, to contemporary Picasso) is understood in its relation to actual sexual behavior when viewed not as a reflection of common female activity, but as a projection of erotic male fantasies about the female. The human male’s greater capacity to be aroused by psychosexual stimuli not only leads him into a far greater number of sexual experiences, and experiences of greater variety, but also produces an extensive masculine interest in unusual, rare, and sometimes fantastically impossible types of sexual activity. In consequence, as Kinsey points out, there is a great deal more discussion and a more extensive body of literature and art on such sexual themes as incest, transvestitism, necrophilia, and the more extreme forms of fetishism, sadomasochism and animal contacts, than the actual occurrence of any of these phenomena justifies.

It is clear, nevertheless, that there is a considerable diversity in human sexual behavior; that there is considerable diversity in human sexual behavior; it is also clear that most of this variety on our favorite theme is forbidden by the sterner traditions of our Judaeo-Christian heritage and by the statutory laws that it has begotten.

Kinsey points out that for most individuals the various types of sexual activity may seem to fall into categories that are as far apart as right and wrong, licit and illicit, normal and abnormal, acceptable and unacceptable in our society. To each of us, the significance of any particular activity depends largely upon our own previous experience. Ultimately, certain activities may seem to be the only ones that have value, that are right, that are proper, that are socially acceptable; and all departures from our own particular pattern may appear the extremes in what is abnormal and immoral. But scientific data now available support the conclusion that, under the proper set of environmental circumstances, most individuals could have been sexually conditioned in any of a number of different directions, even into activities which they now consider unacceptable.

In the search for a more reasonable objective and psychologically sound approach to sex, upon to which to base better social and legal codes, it would if we more clearly recognized and differentiated between the sexual behavior that is common to a large part of society and that which is relatively uncommon. Kinsey observes, “Considerable confusion has been introduced into our thinking by this failure to distinguish between sexual activities that are frequent and a fundamental part of the pattern of behavior, and sexual activities which are rare and of significance only to a limited number of persons. Psychologic and psychiatric texts are as likely to give as much space to overt sadomasochistic or necrophiliac activity as they give to homosexual and mouth-genital activities, but the last two are widespread and significant parts of the lives of many females and males, while many of the other types of behavior are in actuality rare.”

Illegal Petting

Current U.S. laws give governmental sanction to a specific set of religious ideals regarding sex. Our present quarrel is not with the ideals themselves — though we do believe that a rational society should be able to produce a better, more humane, more workable sexual morality than the present one, and we intend a fuller discussion of that aspect of the problem in a later installment; but we here object to — and it is a concern that should be shared by every individual who believes in the fundamental principles of our democracy, regardless of his personal religious and moral persuasion — is the unconstitutional church-state alliance that makes any one religious dogma the law of the land in this supposedly free society.

All sexual intercourse outside the church-state-sanctioned bonds of matrimony is prohibited under the statutes on fornication and adultery; all nonprocreative sexual activity, between the same and opposite sexes, both inside and outside the marriage, including any undue familiarity with household pets, is prohibited under the statutes on sodomy.

Our state laws on sodomy are derived directly from the religious doctrine that the only natural purpose of sex is procreation; it follows, therefore, that nonprocreative sex is a “crime against nature.”

These sodomy statutes are so all-decisive in their joyless suppression of any variety in our sexual behavior that we might be prompted to conclude that the only form of love play left legal is petting. Such a conclusion would be overly optimistic. In two states (Indiana and Wyoming) the sodomy statutes actually include a prohibition against heavy petting (the masturbation of another person of either sex who is under the age of 21). The laws in both states read: “Whoever entices, allures, instigates or aids any person under the age of twenty-one (21) years to commit masturbation or self-pollution shall be deemed guilty of sodomy.” This means, quite literally, that if a Wyoming or Indian male masturbates his 20-year-old girlfriend, he is guilty of sodomy.

The medieval Church taboos on even solitary masturbation continue to influence contemporary society’s attitude to a sexual activity that is near universal in the male and common to a majority of females as well. Ultimately 92 percent of the total male population is involved in masturbation which leads to orgasm; and among college-educated males, the incidence is higher, reaching 96 percent. In the total female population, 62 percent ultimately engage in masturbation, and 58 percent achieve orgasm in this manner; educational level predictably exists as a factor, with only 34 percent of the grade-school-level females ever achieving orgasm through masturbation, 57 to 59 percent of the high-school and college level, and 63 percent of the graduate-level females masturbating to the point of orgasm.

Heavy petting, frequently including masturbation of either, or both, sexes is extremely common in the years prior to marriage; indeed, for upper-educated males and females, such premarital sex play often serves as a substitute for coitus. Almost all males engage in fairly extensive heavy petting prior to marriage and 88 percent have some petting experience that leads to orgasm; 96 percent of all females have some premarital petting experience and 39 percent have achieved orgasm through such petting. The extent of direct manual stimulation of the genitalia of, or by, a partner, as a petting technique, is related to the amount of previous coital experience. Among females who have not had sexual intercourse, 36 percent have the same petting in which they receive such manual stimulation, and 24 percent give such manual stimulation to the male; among females who have only had a limited amount of coitus, 87 percent have relationships in which they receive, and 72 percent where they give, manual stimulation; among females with more extensive coital experience, 95 percent receive, and 86 percent give, manual-genital stimulation.

It is reasonable to assume that the male and female populations of Wyoming and Indiana are little different in such behavior than the total population of the U.S.; that being so, this unique wrinkle in the sodomy statutes of these two states attempts to suppress some of the most common sex activity in existence — activity in which almost all of the citizens have, at one time or another, been involved.

The severity of the penalties against sodomy, or “crimes against nature,” is dramatized by the Wyoming and Indiana statutes. These two states could punish the completed act of sexual intercourse between a man and a girl who happened to be between the ages of 18 and 21 as fornication, with maximum possible sentences of three and six months respectively. (If a girl were under the age of 18, the act would be considered statutory rape and permit a considerably heavier penalty.) But if the same male and female refrained from sexual intercourse, confining their lovemaking to petting — including masturbation of the female — they would be guilty of an act of sodomy and liable to imprisonment of up to ten years in Wyoming and 14 years in Indiana.

Penalties for Sodomy

The irrational nature of U.S. sodomy statutes emphasizes the lack of logic that pervades almost all of our sex laws; the severity of the penalties for what our lawmakers have deemed to be “crimes against nature” emphasizes the extreme, religiously inspired superstition and emotionalism that still persist in our attitudes toward sex in this supposed modern, rational, scientifically enlightened, just, humane and free society.

Forty-nine of the 50 states have sodomy statutes. Almost all of them make illegal the variety of noncoital sex activity discussed in this issue — at least some of which is engaged in, at one time or another, by the majority of our adult population. Almost none of these statutes make any distinction between a prohibited act when it is performed by members of the same or opposite sex (the single exception permits certain activity between two females, as noted, that is prohibited between a female and a male). None of these statutes makes any distinction between a prohibited act when it is performed by a married couple and one that is unmarried. The penalties for behavior covered under our sodomy statutes are among the most severe of any in U.S. law.

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia specify imprisonment of up to ten years at hard labor for “crimes against nature”; the maximum sentence in another six is 14 or 15 years and 11 states specify 20. In Idaho and Montana the minimum penalty for sodomy is five years, with no maximum indicated; in North Carolina the minimum is five years and the maximum 60; in Nevada the possible maximum penalty is imprisonment for life.

The American Law Institute expressed its concern over U.S. sex statutes in 1955 when it drafted its Model Penal Code to replace our present irrational laws. This model code was predicted on the premise that in a free society all sex relations entered into freely by adults in private should be excluded from our criminal law. In the nine years since the Law Institute handed down this opinion, the legislature of only one state — Illinois — has made any serious attempt to correct its statutes on sex. Some two years ago Illinois’ legislators replaced their sodomy statute with a new law patterned after the one suggested by the Institute. Illinois is, therefore, the only state in the Union with no statute for “the abominable and detestable crimes against nature.”

This example of modern legislative acumen is not without its irony, however. The Illinois lawmakers did remove the state’s sodomy statute, but they left standing the statutes against fornication and adultery. Illinois is thus in the unique position of permitting all so-called “perversion,” both heterosexual and homosexual, while prohibiting normal sexual intercourse.

It is obvious that we are still a very long way from establishing sane sex laws anywhere in these United States.

No related posts.

Over the coming months we will be adding numerous and exclusive feature articles, so please check back often!

The Playboy Philosophy Part 14

During the dark ages, the medieval Church dominated almost every level of European society. Many of the Church leaders were negatively obsessed with sex, to a degree unknown in early Christianity, and this antisexuality was perpetuated by both ecclesiastical and Church-influenced secular law.

It might be expected that the Reformation would have produced a freer society — one less inclined to sexual suppression and less controlled by an alliance between church and state — but as we have indicated in earlier installments of The Playboy Philosophy, it had no such effect.

Many of the original settlers in America left the Old World to escape religious persecution, so it might be supposed that here, finally, man would seek the personal moral and religious freedom that had been so long denied him. Indeed, our own founding fathers took seriously the lesson to be learned from the centuries of religious tyranny in Europe and gave us a Constitution and a Bill of Rights that guaranteed the separation of church and state (that they might both be free); and Thomas Jefferson wrote, in the Declaration of Independence, of each individual’s unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But how successful have we been in protecting these ideals for both ourselves and our fellow citizens? Just how personally free is each one of us in modern America? The dream of individual freedom persists, but are we actually allowed to live our own lives, rejoice in our liberty, and pursue our personal concepts of happiness — limited only by the extent that we infringe upon the like rights of others?

Incredible as it should seem, and despite all Constitutional guarantees to the contrary, we do not enjoy a true separation of church and state in the U.S. today. Each citizen in our democracy has a right to expect that the laws of his government have been established and will be enforced in a rational manner consistent with the aims and protections of the Constitution. But many of our laws are not based on any such premise; they are evolved, instead, from old ecclesiastical laws, from religious beliefs and dogma, to which some of our citizens subscribe, and many others do not.

Liberal religious leaders are among the most outspoken opponents of this church state alliance, but much of this church-state alliance, but much of the organized religion in America still includes a distinct element of antisexualism — a carryover from the teachings of the medieval Church and the Protestant Puritanism that followed it. And it is, therefore, in our laws related to sex that we find the greatest church-state intrusion upon our personal freedom.

Sex and the Law

Today, in the U.S., we have religiously oriented statutes limiting freedom of speech and press, statutes regulating personal sex behavior, marriage, divorce, birth control, abortion and prostitution, that are based not on a concern for the health, happiness and welfare of the individual, but upon various concepts of religious morality. Thus sin and crime become intermixed and confused — and the religious views of a portion of society are forced upon the rest of it — through government coercion — whether they are consistent with the personal convictions of the individual or not.

We will consider, in this issue, some of the specific statutes regulating private sexual behavior and the extent to which these laws are at odds with the sex practices of a sizable portion of the population — making us a nation of criminals. Some consideration will be given, too, to the wide disparity in the sex laws of the various states — making it possible, quite literally, for a couple to indulge in intimacies within the privacy of their home that are perfectly legal, while another couple engaging in the same activity in a house a block away (but in the jurisdiction of an adjoining state) is guilty of a crime that carries a ten-year prison sentence. We will also discuss the wholly arbitrary manner in which these various laws are enforced, or not enforced, and the effect such law enforcement has upon the entire fabric of law and order, in addition to the injustices thus perpetrated.

In our examination of U.S. sex law, it should not be assumed that we necessarily approve of all of the behavior thus brought under legislative control of the state. We will establish, in a later installment of this editorial series, what we personally consider to be healthy sexual morality for a rational society. The point to be made here is not that we find this sex behavior either moral or immoral, but that the moral questions involved – when they relate to private sex between consenting adults — are the business of the individual and his personally chosen religion, and not the business of our government.

It must be mentioned, too, that this view of the matter is shared by a number of our most highly respected religious leaders and with a majority of the leading legal minds who constitute the American Law Institute, which authorized the publication of a Model Penal Code in 1955 recommending that all consensual relations between adults in private should be excluded from criminal law. The logic underlying this recommendation was that “no harm to the secular interest of the community is involved in atypical sex practice in private between consenting adult partners” (and, as we shall see, much of the behavior legislated against is anything but atypical); and, further, that “there is the fundamental question of the protection to which every individual is entitled against state interference in his personal affairs when he is not hurting others.”

Although this Model Penal Code to govern behavior was published nine years ago, no state has yet reshaped its laws along the lines recommended by the Law Institute — despite the fact that one of the primary purposes of this illustrious judicial body is the drafting of such model codes as a guide to making more uniform and reasonable the statutes in all 50 of the United States.

Marriage and Divorce

Sin and crime are not synonymous. As Morris Ploscowe, a former judge of the Magistrates’ Court of the City of New York and presently Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at New York University, points our in the preface to his book Sex and the Law: “The fact that certain behavior is sinful should not necessarily make it criminal. The policeman, prosecutor and jailer cannot replace the priest, minister or rabbi in the control of sex behavior.” Not attending church, temple or synagogue, eating meat on certain days, or eating certain kinds of meat at any time, are sins to some members of our society, but they are not crimes. In the final analysis, personal morality (sexual or otherwise), when it does not infringe upon the rights of others, should be left to the determination if the individual.

No one can reasonably question the powerful role that sex plays in all our lives. It is a dominant force in society. It can be a force for either good or evil, but sex in itself is neither.

Some believe that the sole, or primary, purpose of sex is procreation, but there is a great deal more to sex than that. It is the single greatest civilizing force on earth. Without this attraction between the sexes, the world would be a very strange, barbaric place. Our society, its culture, its interest and desires, and many of our major motivations are based upon sex.

Because of its power, man early learned to fear sex, and in pre-Christian societies, many worshiped it. Christianity changed the fear into aversion and sex became associated with guilt and shame. To cope with this force within them that they did not understand, early Christians established complex laws to control sex. These religious laws have been handed down through the centuries to the present day, and form the basis for our own social and legal controls over sex.

Ploscowe comments, “Our legal and social attitudes toward sex bear the unmistakable imprint of early doctrines of ascetic Christianity. Sex was evil to the early Christians, while the absence of sexual activity, virginity, and chastity were great goods. All forms of sexual relations between unmarried persons were mortal sins. Even sexual thoughts unaccompanied by external acts were sinful. Sex activity was permissible only in marriage, whose necessity was grudgingly recognized by the early Christians.”

Marriage thus became the answer developed by society to satisfy the sex drives of men and women. But what about the two thirds of our society who are biologically adult, but unmarried? For them our society has supplied a simple, if unrealistic, answer: abstinence.

Marriage thus becomes a church-state license to practice sex. Without this religious-governmental approval, sex is forbidden. Thus, in a supposedly free society, our most personal actions are regulated by the state.

Sex is so vital to marriage that a marriage may be annulled where one of the members of the union proves incapable of performing coitus. Moreover, prolonged sexual intimacy between two unwed individuals may actually create a state of marriage (common-law) in the eyes of the state.

The precise legal nature of marriage in our society is not easily understood. It is a good deal more than a civil contract. As Ploscowe points out, “If the parties to a commercial agreement are not satisfied with its terms, they may without consulting any public authority rescind or modify them. What they do with a contract is their own concern.”

No such freedom exists in marriage. A husband and wife cannot, of their own volition, agree to dissolve a marriage contract. A divorce or annulment must be granted by the government, and it must be legally sufficient reasons, and not simply because the two parties involved desire it. What is more, the legal reasons for granting a divorce rarely have anything to do with the real reasons the two parties have for requesting it.

Ploscowe states, “[Our] conception of marriage stems from the Roman law. But the lawyers of imperial Rome could call a marriage a civil contract with much more justice than American lawyers, for Roman law permitted men and women to dissolve their marriages at their own will and pleasure, without he intervention of any public authority. Our law has never given married people this authority.”

Control over marriage gives the government control over sex. This need not be true, but is this case on our society, because sex is limited by law to the married.

Control over sex is not he only reason that society is interested in the institution of marriage, however. Marriage and the family are considered an essential part of our social structure and, as expressed by the court, in a New York divorce decision (Fearon vs. Trenor): “Marriage…is more than a personal relation between a man and a woman. It is a status founded on contract and established by law based on principles of public policy affecting the welfare of the people of the state…. From time immemorial the state has exercised the fullest control over the marriage relation, justly believing that happy, successful marriages constitute the fundamental basis of the general welfare of the people.”

But if marriage is truly to be an institution which serves the general welfare of the people, a great many laws and administrative procedures require serious re-evaluation. Whose welfare is served by divorce laws totally unrelated to the actual causes for the dissolution of a marriage? How can a court even begin to come to grips with the problems it faces in a suit for divorce, if the statutes regulating the court’s decision stipulate only synthetic, legally acceptable conditions that must be “met” in order for a husband and wife to end an unwanted marriage?

Each of the 50 states has its own particular set of divorce statutes — some lenient, some strict. The stricter the statutes, the more artificial, and unrelated to the actual causes of divorce, they are apt to be. Nor are the stricter divorce laws any serious deterrent to the breakup of an unsuccessful marriage.

A couple desiring a divorce simply goes to a more lenient state to secure it or, more frequently, they tailor their divorce complaint to suit their own state’s requirements. In other words, with the able assistance of their attorneys, they perjure themselves. And here we have the first example, with a great many more to follow, of how unrealistic sex statutes turn ordinary citizens into criminals.

“The fewer the grounds for divorce,” states Ploscowe, “the greater the incentive to commit perjury.”

New York is an excellent example of a state with a strict divorce law: The only ground for divorce in New York is adultery. That is the requirement that must be met in New York, if a couple wishes a divorce — adultery. The Bible says, “Thou shalt not commit adultery”; but the State of New York says, “If you want a divorce, you must!”

Despite what may appear to be a state sanction of sin, a majority of New Yorkers seeking an end to an unhappy marriage seem to prefer some manner of legal subterfuge to extramarital sex. This we were recently privileged to witness the wife of the Governor of New York journeying to another state to secure a divorce on grounds that were not legally acceptable in her own state.

More often, however, New Yorkers get their divorces at home — and if an adulterous affair is not to their liking, the state simplifies matters by making subterfuge and perjury easy: The law does not require actual proof of sexual intercourse to grant a divorce on the ground of adultery; it is sufficient if there was an opportunity to commit adultery and what the statute refers to as an “adulterous disposition.” Thus, a husband need only register at a hotel with a woman who is not his wife, followed shortly thereafter by a prearranged raiding party that conveniently discovers the pair in a state of partial undress or in a “compromising position.” This is enough to justify the granting of a divorce.

As a result, a thriving business has sprung up that caters to this need for prearranged “adultery.” In 1948 a group of such “divorce mill” specialists was exposed and indicted in New York. They offered two kinds of service to husbands and wives who were seeking divorce: (1) the set-up job, similar to the hotel-room raid described above, complete with an “unknown woman” (or man, as the case might require); and (2) the testimony job, which was simply perjured testimony about such a raid, concocted in the corridors of the courthouse. Hundreds of divorces were secured by this ring, whose nefarious doings were discovered when one of their professional “unknown women,” a Mrs. Sara Ellis, became upset over the small fees she had been receiving (eight to ten dollars a case).

How does any of this serve the general welfare of the people? Obviously, it does not. Our divorce statutes are based, for the most part, not on reason or any real concern for public welfare, but on religious convictions that are unrelated to the social problems that both cause divorce and are the result of it.

The current irrational state of affairs in divorce legislation can be corrected, and the general welfare of the people best served, by (a) establishing uniform divorce laws in the 50 separate states; and (b) relating those laws to the actual causes of divorce.

As we shall see, the problem of uniformity is a serious one that appears throughout all of our U.S. sex legislation. It is responsible for what is termed migratory divorce — a discrimination situation which permits those able to afford it to seek divorce in a state other than their own where the legislation is more lenient by setting up temporary residence there. This is not only unfair to citizens of lesser financial means, it can also produce cases like the following that occurred in Wisconsin in 1948: A man and woman were married in that state. They separated, the wife moving to Minnesota. The husband then obtained a divorce in Wisconsin; under Wisconsin law, the divorce was not final for one year. During the year, the woman remarried in Iowa. Under Iowa law this second marriage was valid — the Wisconsin one-year waiting period notwithstanding. The newly married couple returned to Wisconsin and set up house. They were both convicted of adultery, because under Wisconsin law the wife was still married to another man (State vs. Grengs).

Divorce laws should not only be uniform in all the states, they should be based on the actual reasons for seeking an end to a marriage, even when the reason is no more complicated than the fact that a couple no longer cares for each other. It is to the best interests of the husband and wife, as well as to the best interests of the court and society as a whole, to permit the couple contemplating divorce to seek it on honest grounds. By thus encouraging a frank and open discussion of the marital problems that produced the proceeding, the court is in the best possible position to deal with the problems and possibly save the marriage.

Where children are involved, a special attempt should be made to salvage the relationship, through the introduction of professional counseling and a period of readjustment. Failing in this, however, the divorce should be granted on the simple and quite honest basis that the couple no longer wishes to remain husband and wife. Society does not benefit from the forced perpetuation of a marriage that is no longer desired by the couple involved. More harm is done to children raised in a family torn by disunity, tension and personal dissatisfaction than results from a broken home.

Permitting divorce to be granted on the basis of mutual consent, instead of requiring a couple to meet arbitrary and often artificial legal requirements, would maximize the court’s chances of saving the marriage by eliminating the significant element of subterfuge in present divorce hearings. Despite this face, Ploscowe observes ironically, in Sex and the Law: “Divorce by consent may have been good enough for the heathen Romans of imperial Rome under the dictum that ‘if marriages are made by mutual affection it is only right that when the affection no longer exists it should be dissoluble by mutual consent.’ It may have appeared attractive to the mountaineers of the Swiss cantons. It may have appeared desirable during periods of revolution and disorder like the French and Russian Revolutions, when all institutions of society tend to break down. Divorce by consent may even have been urged by great men such as John Milton, Sir Thomas More, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. However, divorce by consent has never been recognized by English or American law.”

It is feared that more realistic and, therefore, more seemingly liberal laws would appreciably increase the rate of divorce, but even if the perpetuation of unwanted marriages could be rationalized as beneficial to society, it is doubtful that the present statutory hodgepodge achieves that end. Despite the seeming strictness of our present statutes, divorce itself is commonplace and can be secured with relative ease by any couple so inclined. At the turn of the century, there was approximately one divorce for every 12 marriages; by 1930, the ration had jumped to one out of every six: today, approximately one marriage in four winds up in the divorce courts.

Whatever else they may prove, these statistics make one fact abundantly clear: For a sizable section of our society, “trial marriage” is not just an interesting social theory — it is a way of life. If a person becomes dissatisfied with his or her choice of mate, one can always obtain a divorce and try again. We may pretend to live in a monogamous society, but a great many of us are practicing what has been called sequential polygamy.

The polygamous nature of our society — all pretense to the contrary — prompts a side observation on marriage and religious freedom, unrelated to the problem of divorce: The Mormon Church historically countenances polygyny, in which one husband is permitted to take several wives — all of whom dwell in a single household, with their assorted offspring. Despite the question of religious freedom clearly involved, the government prosecutes as bigamists any followers of the faith who take their religion seriously in this regard; the Biblical injunction to “be fruitful and multiply” has U.S. government approval only so long as it is done with one spouse at a time.

Though the majority of us undoubtedly prefer our mates in sequence — and, indeed, most husbands find the problems presented by a single wife quite sufficient — it is difficult to see how the welfare of society is served, when a man wished to take a new mate, by forcing him to desert his original family.

Returning to the problem of divorce, it seems doubtful that stricter laws would help matters any — they would simply intensify courtroom subterfuge and render the courts even less effective in dealing with the actual causes of marital mishap.

Divorce should also be recognized as a symptom of social disease, rather than the disease itself; attempts at cure should logically be directed more at the disease — marital unhappiness — than at the symptoms, especially since the request for a divorce represents one of the last stages of an unstable marriage, when the chances of cure are appreciably less than they might previously have been.

It should also be recognized that the substantial increase in the divorce rate over the last half century does not necessarily represent a comparable increase in marital disharmony. It is reasonable to assume that the greater number of divorces is more the result of a lessening of society’s taboos in that area and our increased emphasis on the importance of individual happiness in present-day society; unhappy marriages were probably just as common in 1900 as they are today, but contemporary men and women are more inclined to do something to solve their unhappiness.

If society is sincerely interested in happy, successful marriages as being in the best interests if the public welfare, what is needed is stricter marriage laws, not stricter laws on divorce. We will expand, in a later issue, on our belief that too easy and too early marriages are the primary causes of marital unhappiness and failure. But we should recognize here the extent to which society and the estate produce early and subsequently unhappy marriages.

By making marriage a church-state license to enjoy the pleasures of sex — by making sex outside of marriage a social and legal taboo — our society supplies a tremendous impetus to early marriage, whether couples are emotionally, psychologically and economically prepared for it or not.

Laws limiting the marriage of children, and the mentally and emotionally incompetent are too lax. Indeed, if an underage couple eloped and the union has been sexually “consummated,” our irrational religious heritage lends strong argument to allowing the marriage to stand, whether or not the couple is mature enough to comprehend and undertake the responsibilities inherent in marriage and the raising of a family.

So-called “shotgun” marriages may even force one member in a relationship into marriage against the person’s better judgment, because there has been sexual intimacy or, more often today, because that intimacy has resulted in pregnancy. If a literal “shotgun” attitude still persists and society seems more anxious to force the unprepared into wedlock than to properly educate the young in how to avoid unwanted pregnancy or solve, in any rational and humane manner, the problem of undesirable pregnancy (through legal abortion) when it does occur.

If an engagement prior to marriage is seen as a period during which a man and woman are allowed a time of close acquaintanceship that they may better judge if each is best suited to the other, then the entire legal history of breach-of-promise suits is irrational — wherein a person (almost always the male), once having proposed marriage, is penalized (and sometimes heavily) for changing his mind.

The observation has been made that in breach-of-promise actions the average jury, historically generous with other people’s money, utilizes two prime considerations in the computation of damages: (1) the plaintiff’s beauty; and (2) the ability of the defendant to pay. As a result, verdicts have been generous and appellate courts have sustained damages ranging from $500 to $45,000 against charges that they were excessive. In one New York case, the plaintiff had admitted that she did not love the defendant. She was 29 years of age and the defendant was 84 and partially palsied. However, his fortune was estimated at $15 million. The offer to marry the plaintiff was made only a few days before the breach-of-promise action was taken. Nevertheless the jury awarded the plaintiff $225,000, which the appellate court reduced to $125,000. In a Michigan case, the jury awarded a woman the sum of $450,000, which was reduced to $150,000 by the court.

Ploscowe comments, “These verdicts, however, present only a partial picture of the social consequences of the breach-of-promise action. Large numbers of breach-of-promise actions are settled outside of court because of the consequences which might flow from publicity which this type of action entails. No man of prominence or social position can afford to have his love life aired in the way that the tabloid press has made familiar. As a result, the adventuress and the gold digger are presented with an unparalleled opportunity for shakedown and blackmail.”

Our legislatures and courts have finally come to recognize the undesirable nature of breach-of-promise suits and approximately 17 states, including New York, have now outlawed such actions. Breach-of-promise suits should obviously be abolished in all states.

Fornication

No human act between two people is more intimate, more private, more personal than sex, and one would assume that a democratic society that prided itself on freedom of the individual, whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed the right of every citizen to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and whose Constitution guaranteed the separation of church and state, would be deeply concerned with any attempted infringement of liberty in this most private act.

But our society still carries the searing brand of antisexualism inherited from the medieval Church of Europe and the Puritanism of England and so, while America has been traditionally permissive in most areas of human behavior, we have been restrictive in matters of sex.

We have prized virginity and chastity, especially in women, and proclaimed that sex outside of the married state is wrong. We have reinforced this religious viewpoint at every level of secular society and the state has further established this restriction by legislative edict: non-marital and extramarital sexual intercourse between adults is prohibited under statutes covering fornication, adultery and lewd cohabitation in 48 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia (excluding only California and Tennessee), as well as the Federal Mann Act where interstate activity is involved.

This behavior, publicly condemned throughout most of our society, and forbidden by both state and federal law, is privately practiced — not by a select minority — but by a considerable majority of our adult population. Nonmarital coitus (fornication) is engaged in by approximately 90 percent of adult males, according to Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey and his research associates at Indiana University (Wardell . Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, Paul H. Gebhard), in their monumental study of U.S. sex behavior, published in two volumes, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.

Dr. Kinsey and his associates found that sexual activity varies greatly, in both form and incidence, depending upon educational and social backgrounds. Among males who go to college, some 67 percent have sexual intercourse prior to marriage; among those who receive some high-school education, but do not go further, approximately 84 percent have premarital intercourse; and among males who do not go beyond a grade school education, the accumulative incidence figure is 98 percent. Kinsey reports that in some groups among the lower social levels, it is virtually impossible to find a single male who has not had sexual intercourse by the time he reaches his mid-teens. In addition, nearly all men (about 95 percent) who have been initiated into regular coital experience in marriage, continue to engage in sexual intercourse after their marriages have been terminated by the spouse’s death, by separation or divorce. They “repudiate the doctrine that intercourse should be restricted to marital relations. Nearly all ignore the legal limitation on intercourse outside of marriage. Only age finally reduces the coital activities of those individuals, and thus demonstrates that biological factors are, in the long run, more effective than man-made regulations in determining the patterns of human behavior.”

Kinsey comments on the nature and number of partners that may be involved in premarital intercourse for the male: “There are males, particularly of the upper social level, who may confine their premarital intercourse to a single girl, who is often the fiancée. There are males who have some dozen or scores of partners before they marry, in some cases, lower-level males may have intercourse with several hundred or even a thousand or more girls in premarital relations. There are quite a few individuals, especially of the grade-school and high school levels, who find more interest in the pursuit and conquest, and in a variety of partners, than they do in developing long-time relations with a single girl.”

Although our society places the strongest taboos upon women engaging in sexual intercourse outside of marriage, approximately 50 percent of all females have premarital coitus. Unlike the men, however, the higher educational and social level females tend to have a higher, rather than a lower, percentage with nonmarital sex experiences; among women with a college education, approximately 60 percent have premarital intercourse. Postmarital sex for females, who have lost their spouses through death, or separation or divorce, follows the same general pattern as with the men — once a woman has engaged in regular coital experience as a part of marriage, she tends to continue to engage in such experience after the marriage has ended. Significantly, with both men and women, the percentage of total sexual outlet through coitus continues to be approximately the same after the conclusion of a marriage as it was within it.

In contrast to U.S. laws forbidding nonmarital sex, Kinsey comments, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male: “Premarital relations have been more or less openly accepted in most of the other civilizations of the world, in the Orient, in the Ancient World, and among most European groups apart from the AngloAmerican stocks.” And in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Kinsey states: “There is no aspect of American sex law which surprises visitors from other countries as much as this legal attempt to penalize premarital activity to which both of the participating parties have consented and in which no force has been involved…. There is practically no other culture, anywhere in the world, in which all nonmarital coitus, even between adults, is considered criminal.”

In England, which shares with us a common Puritan heritage, there are no specific laws prohibiting fornication or adultery. In the United States, however, 38 states have specific statutes forbidding fornication — a single act of coitus between consenting adults. The penalties for fornication range from a $10 fine in Rhode Island to a $500 fine and five years in prison in South Dakota.

Arizona, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Vermont and Washington have no state statutes prohibiting fornication, but Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Washington do have laws prohibiting lewd cohabitation — a habitual relationship or one in which an unmarried couple lives together as man and wife. Alaska law prescribes a maximum fine of $500 or two years’ imprisonment for fornication, or both; Connecticut specifies a $100 fine or six months in jai as a maximum penalty; North Carolina law calls for a fine and/or imprisonment, “as the court may direct”; Colorado law imposes a $200 fine or six months; imprisonment as the maximum for the first offense, a doubling of the sentence for the second conviction, and so on.

Lewd Cohabitation

Cohabitation is defined as a habitual sexual relationship or one in which an unmarried couple lives together as man and wife. Fourteen states have specific statutes prohibiting cohabitation. It would seem logical for society to prefer sexual liaisons of a more permanent nature to the more casual, indiscriminate variety, but logic has very little to do with our sex laws and, in general, the penalties for cohabitation are more severe than for random fornication. Arizona, which has no statute prohibiting fornication, does have one against cohabitation, with a maximum sentence of three years’ imprisonment; Maine, with a $100 fine and 60-day jail sentence for fornication, has a maximum penalty of $300 and five years for cohabitation; Massachusetts, with $30 or 90 days for fornication, raises the sentence to a maximum of $300 or three years for cohabitation; Arkansas, with no statute prohibiting either fornication or adultery, stipulates a penalty of $20 to $100 for cohabitation on the first conviction, a $100 minimum or one-year maximum for the second conviction, and one to three years’ imprisonment for the third.

Some fornication statutes actually read more like cohabitation laws, as in South Carolina, where the statute reads: “Must be habitual or parties must live together…. Not less than $100 nor more than $500, or imprisonment for not less than six months not more than one year, or both fine and imprisonment, at the discretion of the court.

The Alabama law against fornication also has this cohabitation aspect to it; it is written specifically to discourage a continuing relationship between the same two partners: “Not less than $100 and may be sentenced to the county jail for not more than six months; on second conviction with the same person, not less than $300 and may be imprisoned in county jail for not more than 12 months; and on third conviction with the same person, shall be imprisoned in penitentiary for two years.” (Italics added.)

The Mann Act

In addition to the individual state statutes, there is a federal law, commonly referred to as the Mann Act, that is used to prosecute persons who engage in illicit sexual activity, where interstate travel is involved. Though officially titled the White-slave-traffic Act, and passed by Congress in 1910 for the specific purpose of curbing interstate prostitution, the law states, “Any person who shall knowingly transport or cause to be transported, or aid or assist in obtaining transportation for…any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose…shall be deemed guilty of a felony.” The federal courts have interpreted “any other immoral purpose” to include fornication — sexual intercourse between consenting adults — and the penalty is a maximum fine of $5000 or five years in prison, or both; if the girl involved is under the age of 18, the potential penalty is up to $10,000 and imprisonment for up to ten years.

The first unfortunate fellow to be convicted under the Mann Act was a Californian named Caminetti who took a female friend to Reno with him for a weekend. Alan Holmes commented on this case in an article on the subject in Playboy (The Mann Act, Playboy, June 1959): “Clearly, it not had been the intent of Congress to apply the Mann Act to this kind of peccadillo — but in order to revise the law to conform to its original purpose, some brave congressman would have had to propose an amendment which would surely result in his being tagged throughout the land as an advocate of sin. A congressman that brave was not to be found at the time, and none has appeared since.

“Appellate courts have consistently ruled, therefore, that premarital intercourse comes under the heading of ‘any other immoral purpose,’ even though it isn’t even illegal in many states — New York for one. Thus, in that state it is not illegal to crawl into the sack with a girl, but it is a serious crime to drive her there from another state with the intention of doing so.” Mr. Caminetti’s weekend in Reno cost him a $1500 fine and 18 months in prison.

In his article for Playboy, Holmes describes the strange workings of this law: “Let’s suppose that you live New Jersey. One bright morning at the office you spot a new addition to the staff: a soft auburn hair, cute face, big wide-set eyes and a lovely pneumatic figure. It turns out that she lives in your town, too; she’s 23 and a B.A. from Bennington. You move in and your expense is rewarded with a date on the following Friday for dinner and a play in Manhattan. You pick her up on the appointed night and you roll through the Lincoln Tunnel into the glittering world of midtown Gotham after dark. You stuff her with seafood coquille and tournedos at Le Chanteclair and get her to the theater just as the curtain rises. So far, so good. But you really have no idea how far you can get with this girl. Being basically a pessimist, you don’t expect much more than a few kisses at her doorway. But as the evening progresses, so do you; the dear little thing proves far friendlier than she looks, and you end the evening in a small suite in a Gramercy Park hotel.

“Next day you discreetly describe the girl’s warm and affectionate nature to your best buddy, who promptly decides that he is just as deserving as you are. He makes a date and takes her across the Hudson, too, fully expecting to follow in your fortunate footsteps. Alas, he scores a goose egg; he leaves her at her doorstep with the warm memory of a sincere-type handshake to speed him on his way.

“A serious federal offense has been committed here. By you? Not at all. By your friend, who could be dragged off to the penitentiary for five years and fined $5000 to boot. He has violated the Mann Act, though he got nothing but a handshake for his pains. You, who enjoyed the fullest pleasure the lady had to offer, could not be booked for so much as jaywalking. You are completely in the clear….

“The ‘crime’ the Act condemns is not ‘immorality.’ It is the transportation of a woman with an immoral intent. Once you take her across a state line (with the lurking thought that you may score), the crime has been committed, no matter what happens next — or doesn’t happen. Your friend broke the law because he had an ‘immoral’ intent when he took Miss Bennington through the Lincoln Tunnel. You, not even considering the possibility of making out (until after all the transportation was over), are in the clear.”

Because it is transportation for an immoral purpose that the law forbids, a businessman was charged with a violation of the Mann Act when, after a few days’ vacation in Florida, he became lonely and wired a girlfriend, with whom he had previous relations, to join him there. His wire included the cost of air transportation; she caught the next flight to Miami Beach, and they spent the rest of his vacation there together. At vacation’s end, they had a quarrel, but being a gentleman he saw to it that she was returned safely home. Subsequently, on her testimony, the man was charged with and convicted of violating the Mann Act.

Because the intent to commit an immoral act is all that is required, the man could have been convicted of violating the Mann Act even if the girl had refused to join him in Florida. Even if he had not paid for her transportation, he could have been found guilty, because the law specifies that to “induce” or “entice” is sufficient — thus, theoretically, the mere invitation, with the expectation of sexual intimacy, would have been enough.

Holmes notes, “If you make arrangements with a young lady to spend the night in a hotel room in another state, and you and she travel there in separate cars, at different times, you have nevertheless broken the law if you ‘persuaded, induced, enticed, or coerced’ her to go. (Money, incidentally, is readily recognized as a powerful ‘persuader,’ etc.) On the other hand, if the whole thing was her idea in the first place, there is no violation. Nor can a woman be convicted under the Mann Act for transporting herself across a state line, though she can be held liable for transporting another woman. There is no section in the Act which makes it a federal crime for either a man or a woman to transport a man across a state line for immoral purposes.”

For those unfortunate enough to live in the District of Columbia, matters are worse still. In our nation’s capital, you don’t even have to cross a state line to violate the Act — all you have to do transport, with the necessary immoral intent, of course. “If you are taking your girl home in a Washington taxi and the possibility of spending the night with her flits through your mind,” observes Holmes, “you have just violated the Mann Act. If you walk her home, however, you’re safe — but don’t get gallant and carry her into her apartment. (To be really and truly safe, you can do no better than follow the dictum of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which recently held that ‘about the only place where sexual intercourse can take place without running athwart the local law is in an anchored balloon.’)”

The most notorious prosecution under the Mann Act was that of famous comedian Charlie Chaplin, when the government charged him with the violation for taking a cross-country train trip with a comely young “protégé”; she later proved the wisdom of Congreve’s 17th century adage about the fury of a woman scorned when she became the state’s star witness against poor Charlie. He escaped the Mann Act charges, but she nailed him with a paternity suit, even though medical evidence, held inadmissible by the court, proved conclusively that he was not the father of her child.

A popular song of a few years back musically endorsed the pleasures of “love on a Greyhound bus.” Enjoyable they may be, but if the bus crosses any state lines, you’ll be wise to get out and walk.

Adultery

In our society, adultery is generally held to be a worse sin than fornication. This is reflected in our state statutes which tend to treat this behavior as a crime warranting more severe punishment.

Adultery is forbidden in the Ten Commandments, which play an important part in both the Christian and Jewish religions. It doesn’t matter that the original Judaic injunction against adultery was primarily concerned with property rights (when a wife was considered her husband’s possession); nor that the admonition historically applied only to women (it was not thought improper in olden times for married men to have sexual intercourse with other than their wives). The antisexualism of the Middle Ages imbued adultery with its present sexual significance and broadened its prohibition to include male and female alike (though even today society is more tolerant of the adulterous husband than wife).

Statutes forbidding fornication and adultery have no historical basis in common law — traditionally this behavior has been dealt with by the ecclesiastical court; consistent with its origin as a violation of property, however, common law has permitted the innocent spouse to claim damages through civil action.

Fornication is easily defined as illicit sexual intercourse between two unmarried individuals, but a legal definition of adultery is not quite so simple. What distinguishes adultery from fornication? The married state of one or both of the partners in illicit coitus is the determining factor, but beyond that the definition is variously applied. Suppose a married man and a married woman were to have intercourse with a single woman and a single man; which of the four would be guilty of adultery and which of fornication? Some would hold that all four — married and unmarried — would be adulterous, since one member of each relationship was married; others would consider that the three of the four had committed adultery — excluding only the single female who had intercourse with the married man; still others would say that two of the four had committed adultery, though they would not necessarily agree on which two — some suggesting that only the pair who were married were guilty of adultery and some stating that the married woman and her lover were the adulterous ones; and still others would argue that one of the four had committed adultery — excluding all but the married woman. Here we find a differentiation of definition dependent not only upon the marital state, but also the sex of the participants in illicit coitus — varied viewpoints that have their origin, of course, in the fact that prohibitions of adultery originally applied only to married women.

On this confusion, Ploscowe writes, “The Roman law, which influenced much of our thinking on this question, differentiated between the illicit sexual intercourse of a married man and that of a married woman. A married man might have sexual intercourse with a single woman and not be guilty of adultery or any other crime. A married woman was guilty of adultery whenever she had sexual intercourse with a man who was not her husband, whether that man was married to someone else or was single. In such a case, both the married woman and the paramour were guilty of adultery.

“These Roman-law conceptions may be encountered in common-law views on adultery. While adultery was not generally regarded as a crime at common law, it might still be on the subject of a civil suit for damages…. If an Englishman wanted a divorce, he had to bring an action first for criminal conversation based on the adultery of his wife. Only a husband could bring such an action. A wife could not sue another woman for damages because the latter had made love to her husband. Adultery was therefore defined as common law as at Roman law; the sexual intercourse with another man’s wife was adultery.

“Many of our modern criminal statutes on adultery are interpreted in the same way, making sexual intercourse with another man’s wife adultery and sexual intercourse by a married man with a single woman fornication or no crime at all. The justification of this distinction between married men and married women, with respect to extramarital sexual intercourse, has come down to us from medieval times and is reiterated by modern cases. For example, in this case of State vs. Armstrong, the court stated: ‘…the gist of the crime, independently of statutory enactments, is the danger of introducing spurious heirs into a family, whereby a man might be charged with the maintenance of children not his own, and the legitimate offspring be robbed of their lawful inheritance. That an offense which may entail such consequences upon society is much more aggravated in its nature than the simple incontinence of a husband, few can doubt….’ “

But Plascowe notes, “If this rationale were adequate, sexual intercourse with a married woman who was unable to bear children should not be adultery. We have been unable to find any judicial decision which makes such an exception to the adultery statute.

“The English ecclesiastical law took an entirely different approach to adultery than the Roman law…. Adultery was defined by the ecclesiastical [court] as ‘the inconstancy of married persons, a sin arising out of the marriage relation,’ which was equally great whether the offender was male or female….”

This view of adultery was adopted by the early American courts and has also received statutory sanction in many states. For example, in the Massachusetts case of Commonwealth vs. Call, the defendant, a married man, was found guilty of having intercourse with Eliza, a single woman. Call contended that this was adultery, stating in its opinion, “Whatever…may have been the original meaning of the term adultery, it is very obvious that we have in this Commonwealth adopted the definition given to it by the ecclesiastical courts…. We hold the infidelity of the husband as well as that of the wife the highly aggravated offense constituting the crime of adultery.”

This religious interpretation of the word is specifically adopted by a number of state statutes; for example, the New York Penal law reads: “Adultery is the sexual intercourse of two persons, either of whom is married to a third person.” Under this type of statute, both the man and the woman are guilty of adultery, only if one of the parties (either one) is married.

There are other states, however, which hold husbands and wives to the same standards of sexual fidelity, but make distinctions between the guilt of the single partner in illicit intercourse and the married one. In these statutes, the single partner is deemed guilty of fornication and the married one is declared guilty of adultery.

Ploscowe adds this postscript, which helps underscore the earlier Roman definition of adultery as a crime involving married women: “At the end of 1961, it is interesting to note, the High Constitutional Court of Italy, the country’s highest tribunal, upheld a provision of the penal code enacted 30 years previously, under which a wife faces up to two years in jail if found guilty of adultery…. Under the law, however, a husband cannot be punished at all for simple adultery.”

But whichever definition we apply to the term, the Kinsey studies of our sexual behavior make abundantly clear that all the combined church and state prohibitions have been notably unsuccessful in suppressing adultery in America. Kinsey’s statistics on extramarital sexual intercourse include only the incidences of extramarital coitus of married adults; the coital experiences of the partners in these relationships, when the partners are themselves single, appear in the studies as part of the premarital and postmarital calculations, even though this behavior is legally termed adultery by a number of the states. If these additional statistics were added to those that follow, the incidences for adultery would be, of course, much closer to those of other nonmarital intercourse.

Kinsey’s research indicates that approximately 50 percent of all married males have intercourse with women other than their wives at some time while they are married. Kinsey and his associates found a higher degree of cover-up and reluctance to supply answers on questions related to extramarital sexual experience than was evidenced in other part of their studies. The 50-percent figure is therefore considered a minimum one and the real figure is probably somewhat higher. Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of the married males in a study conducted by Terman in 1938 expressed an interest in extramarital relations, and Kinsey’s extensive study revealed a “similarly high proportion” who expressed such desires. The gap between the desire for such experience and actual behavior must be viewed as the result of the strong taboos placed upon adultery in our society and on lack of opportunity.

As with premarital sex, educational and social backgrounds play an important role in determining the frequency and form of extramarital sexual activity. Married men of grade- and high-school education tend to have more extramarital coitus in the early years of marriage, but the incidence tapers off sharply with older married men; conversely, males with a college education tend to have fewer extramarital experiences in their first years of marriage, increasing the number of such relations in later years. The increasing incidence of extramarital coitus for married males with a college background can be understood as resulting from a lessening of the greater sexual inhibitions evidenced in early life by upper-level males; Kinsey is unable to offer any similar explanation for the reverse trend in lower-level married males, however.

For most men, at every social level, extramarital intercourse is usually sporadic, occurring on an occasion or two with one female, a few times with the next partner, not happening again for some months or a year or two, but then occurring several times, or every night, for a week or even for a month or more, after which the particular affair is abruptly ended. Kinsey reports, “There are extreme instances of younger males whose orgasms, achieved in extramarital relations, have averaged as many as 18 per week for periods of as long as five years; but these are unusual cases. Lower-level males are the ones who are most likely to have more regularly distributed experience, often with some variety in females. Among males of the college level, extramarital relations are almost always infrequent, often with not more than or two or a very few partners in all of their lives, and usually with a single partner over a period of some time — in some cases for a number of years.”

In the study of the U.S. female, 26 percent admitted extramarital intercourse; among women with a college education, the incidence is somewhat higher, amounting to 29 percent. Here again, the cover-up evidenced in this portion of the studies suggests that the true percentages are somewhat higher than those reported.

For both the male and female, there are few types of sexual activity which occur more irregularly than extramarital intercourse. This, as Kinsey points out, is primarily because of limited opportunities and the fear of discovery; in addition, many married persons sharply limit their extramarital relations in order to avoid emotional involvements which might seriously endanger their marriages.

It is interesting to note that Kinsey found nearly half of the women who admitted to extramarital intercourse stated that their husbands either knew about it (40 percent) or suspected it (9 percent).

There are a variety of psychological and emotional, as well as some physical causes for extramarital intercourse in both sexes. We will not attempt, at this point, to evaluate the effect that extramarital sex may have upon a marriage relationship, though obviously the effect is far more dependent upon the attitudes of the person involved than on the sexual activity itself. The only point to be emphasized here is that these problems are personal ones and should remain the private business of the people involved; they are not the proper business of our government.

Nevertheless, 45 of the 50 states (excluding only Arkansas, California, Louisiana, New Mexico and Tennessee) have specific statutes prohibiting adultery. These laws are, in general, more severe than those for fornication, and range from a $10 fine in Maryland to a maximum penalty of $1000 or five years’ imprisonment in Maine; Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Wisconsin all have statutes with a maximum prison sentence of three years for conviction of adultery; in Michigan it is four years; in Connecticut, Maine, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Vermont, it is five.

Seventeen states have the same penalty for adultery as they do fornication; Florida has a $300 or 90-day maximum for fornication and a $500 or two-year maximum for adultery, however, and Illinois a $200 and six-month maximum for fornication, with $500 and one year for adultery; in Nebraska the maximum penalty for fornication is $100 and six months, while conviction on a charge of adultery can bring imprisonment up to a year; in Wisconsin fornication may bring $200 and six months, while adultery may be good for $1000 and three years.

Arizona, Delaware, Iowa, Maryland, New York, Oklahoma, Vermont, and Washington have no law against fornication, but do have statutes prohibiting adultery; no state has a law against fornication, but no law for adultery, though several have laws for neither, but prohibit illegal cohabitation (Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico); as we commented earlier, only California and Tennessee have no statutes prohibiting any of the three.

Alaska is the only state in which the penalty for fornication (maximum of $500 or two years for both) is greater than for adultery (maximum of $200 or 90 days), presumably because the Alaska fornication law has some of the elements of statutes prohibiting cohabitation. Hawaii is the only state that has different adultery penalties for men and women — $30 to $100 or three to 12 months or both for men; $10 to $30 or one to three months for women. Hawaii is a doubly unique among the states in that the greater penalty applies to the male, whereas society is generally more severe with women for such behavior (as exemplified by the two years’ imprisonment for women for adultery in Italy, with no comparable penalty for men).

A study of the statutes of the various states affords us only a portion of the true picture of things, of course, since many laws exist that are not actively enforced. These sex statutes are, in fact, among the least enforced and least enforceable of any in existence in these United States. During the fiscal year of July 1959 through June 1960 in New York, for example, 1700 divorces were granted in New York City on grounds of adultery, but an analysis of the Annual Report of the Police Department for the same period fails to disclose a single arrest for the crime, which is punishable in New York with a fine up to $250 or six months in jail or both. The same evidence of adultery that is legally acceptable for the granting of a divorce is rarely then applied to a criminal prosecution for the activity.

However, some arrests and convictions for fornication and adultery do take place. For the year 1960, for example, the following typical municipal arrests for adultery were reported: Baltimore, two (both dismissed): Dallas, ten; Seattle, 31 (adultery and fornication). In 1959, Boston reported that two males and 17 females had been arrested and committed to a city prison for adultery; ten cases of fornication were similarly dealt with. Philadelphia reported the arrest of three adulterers.

The arbitrary and often capricious manner in which these laws are enforced constitutes a serious problem for the nation. By making the sexual behavior of the majority of adults illegal, these laws breed contempt for all law, and the fact of their being so widely unenforced induces disrespect for all law enforcement, in much the same way that Prohibition did in the Twenties. In addition, their existence permits them to be used by the unscrupulous for intimidation and blackmail.

Dr. Alfred Kinsey states, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female: “The current sex laws are unenforced and are unenforceable because they are completely out of accord with the realities of human behavior, and because they attempt too much in the way of social control. Such a high proportion of the females and males in our population is involved in sexual activities which are prohibited by law of most of the states in the Union, that it is inconceivable that the present laws could be administered in any fashion that even remotely approached systematic and complete enforcement…. The consequently capricious enforcement which these laws now receive offers an opportunity for maladministration, for police and political graft, and for blackmail which is regularly imposed both by underworld groups and by the police themselves….”

Finally, these sex statutes stand as mute evidence of the extent to which we have failed to live up to the ideal of a free and separate church and state in America.

No related posts.

Over the coming months we will be adding numerous and exclusive feature articles, so please check back often!

The Playboy Philosophy Part 13

CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY is undergoing a profound Sexual Revolution — it is apparent in our books, magazines, movies, television and everyday conversation — in every area of communication.

To some it represents a decline in moral standards — a turning away from the divinely revealed Word of God, as expressed in the Bible, the Ten Commandments and the Judaeo-Christian heritage that a majority of Americans share; to others it represents a facing up to the “facts of life,” an enlightened search for a new morality more in keeping with modern man’s greater understanding of both himself and the world in which he lives — a quest for a new code of conduct consistent with our conduct itself and based upon reason rather than superstition.

But whatever viewpoint one espouses, there is common agreement that a Sexual Revolution is taking place and that the old religious restrictions have little or no influence on the sexual behavior of a sizable segment of our society. For these citizens, at least, a new, more acceptable moral code must be found.

We will offer, in a subsequent issue, our own concept of a sexual ethic for modern society. But first we wish to consider the extent to which the old tradition and taboos surrounding sex have become inoperative and largely ineffectual; we want to discuss, also, the dangers inherent in any such societal schizophrenia — where a significant gap exists between professed beliefs and actual behavior — and the effect that such inconsistency can have upon the very fiber of society itself, especially when the moral code that a major part of society refuses to accept is reinforced by legal restraints in all 50 of these United States.

Religion in a Free Society

We have previously discussed the importance of the separation of church and state in a free society and concluded that any fusion of religion and government is irreconcilable with the ideals of our democracy. The founding fathers took seriously the lessons of religious persecution and tyranny offered by history and gave us a Constitution and a Bill of Rights that guarantee full freedom to and from religion.

The dominant religion in America is Christianity and all who accept its teachings should be free to live accordingly. But it is obvious to even the casual observer that there is a wide divergence in the social, moral and religious precepts of the various Christian denominations. And what of the non-Christians in our democracy? Obviously the Jews, Buddhists, Mohammedans, existentialists, agnostics and atheists should be equally free to follow their own religious convictions. Each man’s freedom should be limited only to the extent that it infringes upon the freedom of others.

It was the search for such religious freedom that brought many of the original settlers to the New World in the first place. It was the awareness of the importance of such freedom that prompted George Washington to say, “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

And James Madison, another of our founding fathers, said, “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?”

Clearly, then, each member of society should be free to practice, and to preach, his own particular religion, but no religious doctrine can be justifiably forced upon society by the state.

Religion and Morality

All religions include some moral precepts as a part of their theology and there are broad similarities among the moral codes of the major religions of the Western World — Protestant, Catholic and Jewish. But there is not nearly the unanimity of opinion on sex within organized religion in the U.S. that is often assumed, and among laymen there is virtually no agreement whatsoever.

Modern Christianity includes a significant strain of antisexuality — introduced, as we observed, first by St. Paul, strongly reinforced by the medieval Church, and again by the letters of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation. The Protestant Puritanism that developed first in England and then America drew its antisexual prejudices primarily from the teachings of Calvin. Puritanism became the principal religious influence on the social patterns that evolved in both countries; in the U.S., Jewish and Catholic immigrants were influenced by the puritanical Protestant culture, and the Catholics reinforced our antisexual mores with sexual prejudices of their own. Thus the Protestant, Catholic or Jew in America is more apt to be sexually repressed than his counterpart in free societies elsewhere in the world.

Jewish Morality

As the oldest of the major religions of Western civilization, Judaism supplied the historic soil from which Christianity grew. Christian antisexualism was not derived from the earlier Judaic culture, however, and Jewish societies have been traditionally more permissive in matters of sex than either the Roman Catholic or the Protestant.

As we have already stated in our historical consideration of religion and sex in the August and September issues, early Judaism accepted sex as a natural part of life. The early Jews, according to G. Rattray Taylor, in Sex in History, “believed strongly that one should enjoy the pleasures of life, including those of sex, and some teachers held that [on one's] last day one would have to account to God for every pleasure that one had failed to enjoy.”

The only sexual injunctions in the Ten Commandments are against adultery and coveting of a neighbor’s wife. Of these, Taylor says, “It must be understood that in this period, just as in Rome and Greece, adultery was a property offense and meant infringing the rights of another man. It did not mean that a man should restrict his attentions to his wife; indeed, when a wife proved barren, she would often give one of her hand-maidens to her husband that she might bear children for him. Moreover, as the Bible often reminds us, men were free to maintain mistresses, in addition to their wives; on the number of wives a man might have there was no restriction.

“Nor was there any ban on premarital sex; it is seldom appreciated that nowhere in the Old Testament is there any prohibition of noncommercial, unpremeditated fornication — apart from rape, and subject to a father’s right to claim a cash interest in a virgin [daughter]. Once the girl had reached the age of 12½ years, she was free to engage in sexual activity, unless her father specifically forbade it. Prostitution, though frowned on, was common, and in Jerusalem the whores were so numerous that they had their own marketplace. Nor in pre-Exilic days was sodomy a crime, except when committed as part of religious worship of non-Jewish gods.”

In an article in a recent issue of the Journal of Religion and Health, Nathaniel S. Lehrman confirms that premarital virginity and extramarital fidelity were “not demanded of Hebrew men. Prostitution, both sacred and profane, existed in Israel….” Morton M. Hunt writes, in The Natural History of Love, “Men in the Old Testament were patriarchal and powerful, and often guiltlessly enjoyed the services of several wives and concubines.”

Lehrman states further, “Because the bearing of children was regarded as such a blessing, dying in the virgin state was considered unfortunate rather than desirable…. Sexuality and eating…would seem to have been regarded rather similarly by the Old Testament. It permanently forbade certain types of food and sex, and sometimes temporarily prohibited all eating and sexual activity. Permanent and total sexual abstention seems to have been as foreign to its thinking, however, as permanent and total abstention from food.

“Although sexuality was accepted without question throughout early Biblical times, and in the Mosaic code in particular, various aspects of the latter have given rise to the erroneous belief that the Old Testament is antisexual. Such asceticism appears to be altogether foreign to the traditions of Israel.”

In Hebrew Marriage, David Mace writes, “The entire positive attitude toward sex which the Hebrews adopted was to me an unexpected discovery…. I had not realized that it had its roots in an essentially ‘clean’ conception of the essential goodness of the sexual function. This is something very difficult for us to grasp, reared as we have been in a tradition which has produced in many minds the idea that sex is essentially sinful….”

Post-Exilic Judaism developed certain sex fears and repressions as a masochistic reaction to persecution. These same fears and restrictions later found their way into early Christianity, which also suffered persecution and hence proved a fertile field for them. The extreme asceticism and antisexuality of the medieval Church and of Protestant Puritanism have no parallel in Judaic history, however.

Whatever antisexual element exists in modern Judaism is probably due, for the most part, to the nearly 2000 years of coexistence in primarily Christian cultures. American Jews — while not nearly as sexually permissive as the Hebrews of the Old Testament — are more liberal than either American Catholics or the mainstream of American Protestantism.

Catholic Morality

Christian antisexuality began, as we have stated, not with Christ, but with St. Paul, who was strongly affected in his views by the mystical religions of the Orient, which were then spreading throughout the Roman Empire. Paul had an extremely negative, pessimistic view of mankind in general, and sex in particular; he believed that the cataclysmic end of the world was imminent and that man should, therefore, put away all things worldly to prepare himself for that event.

John Short writes of Paul, in The Interpreter’s Bible, “Obviously the marriage relationship did not appeal to him…[he] seems to have regarded the more intimate sex relationship with some distaste. He is of the definite opinion that it is better for Christians to follow his personal example, and remain unmarried.” Paul himself wrote, “It is well for a man not to touch a woman….” but conceded that it was better to marry than to “burn.” He also wrote, “For I know that in me dwelleth no good thing…. For the good that I would do, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do…. Oh wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

But St. Paul’s antisexualism was slight compared to the twisted theological thought that followed him — and upon which much of our more recent Christian antisexuality is based. In Sex in Christianity and Psychoanalysis, William Graham Cole, then Chairman of the Department of Religion at Williams College, wrote: “All unwittingly [St. Paul] marked the transition point between the healthy and positive attitude toward the body which characterized the Old Testament and Jesus, and the negative dualism which increasingly colored the thought of the Church…. Although in most respects the Church successfully defended the ramparts of naturalism, the citadel of sex fell to the enemy. Increasingly, virginity became a cardinal virtue, marriage a concession for the weak…sex had become an evil necessity for the propagation of the race, to be avoided and denied by the spiritually strong…. Even those ‘consumed with passion’ were urged not to marry, to discipline themselves, to mortify the flesh, for the flesh was evil….”

Out of Pauline dualism — derived from the mystical religions of Asia — the early Church conceived of the body and soul of man as being perpetual combat; deprive the body and you feed the soul; satisfy the body and the soul is damned to eternal hellfire. Asceticism turned into masochism and self-torture as fanatical monks retired to the burning deserts of North Africa to mortify their flesh, fasting, flagellating themselves, going without sleep and refusing to wash; some castrated themselves in order to be freed from the torments of the flesh.

The Church’s concern with sex became an obsession; virginity, sexual restraint and denial were prized above all else and eventually became a requirement of all those taking churchly vows. Sexual pleasure became a sin — first outside of marriage, and eventually inside of it as well. Marriage itself was held in low esteem, as were all women — who were viewed as a temptation to evil.

Roman society was sexually liberal and had tended to upgrade the status of women, in comparison to earlier times. In his book Premarital Sexual Standards in America, Ira L. Reiss, Professor of Sociology at Bard College, states: “The Christians opposed from the beginning the new changes in the family and in female status….. They fought the emancipation of women and the easier divorce laws…. They [had] a very low regard for sexual relations and for marriage…. Ultimately, these early Christians of the first few centuries accorded marriage, family life, women, and sex the lowest status of any known culture in the world.”

Taylor states that the Christian code was based, quite simply, “upon the conviction that the sexual act was to be avoided like the plague, except for the bare minimum necessary to keep the race in existence. Even when performed for this purpose, it remained a regrettable necessity. Those who could were exhorted to avoid it entirely, even if married. For those incapable of such heroic self-denial, there was a great spider’s web of regulations whose overriding purpose was to make the sexual act as joyless as possible and to restrict it to the minimum.” Taylor points out that it was not the sex act itself which was considered damnable, “but any pleasure derived from it — and this pleasure remained damnable even when the act was performed for the purpose of procreation….”

Not only was the pleasure of the sex act held to be sinful, but also the mere desire for a person of the opposite sex; even when unconsummated. And since the love of a man for a woman could be conceived as, at least partially, sexual desire, this led to the concept that a man should not love his wife too much. In fact, Peter Lombard maintained, in his De excusatione coitus, that for a husband to love his wife too ardently is a sin worse than adultery.

By the Eighth century, the Church had begun to develop a strict system of ecclesiastical laws, codifying every aspect of sexual activity in a series of “penitential books.” Celibacy was the ideal, though it did not become universally required of those with priestly functions until the 11th century. Since chastity was a virtue, it became virtuous for wives to deny sex to their husbands, which many apparently did. As we previously observed, however, it is doubtful if this actually increased the sum total of chastity, since many husbands were probably driven to extramarital relations as a consequence.

In some penitentials, fornication was declared a worse crime than murder. Attempting to fornicate, kissing, even thinking of fornication, were all forbidden and called for penalties: For the last named transgression, the penance lasted for 40 days. Nor was intention a necessary requisite for sin, for involuntary nocturnal emissions were considered sinful: The offender had to rise at once and sing seven penitential psalms, with an additional 30 in the morning.

The penitentials also devoted an inordinately large amount of space to penalties for homosexuality and bestiality, but the sin upon which the greatest stress was placed was masturbation. In Social Control of Sex Expression, Geoffrey May states that in five comparatively short medieval penitential codes, there are 22 paragraphs dealing with various degrees of sodomy and bestiality, and no fewer that 25 dealing with masturbation by laymen, plus a number of others dealing separately with masturbation by members of the clergy. According to Aquinas, it was a greater sin than fornication.

We have remarked previously on the insights supplied by modern psychiatry into societies with severe masturbatory taboos. The activity is nearly universal in infants, and since punishment comes when the child is too young to understand its significance, and when masturbation represents his primary means of pleasure without outside assistance, a fear of this specific pleasure becomes imbedded in his unconscious and later generalized into a fear of other sexual pleasure. Such taboos are thus to be found in almost any society suffering from repression or feelings of guilt and shame related to sex.

The Church fathers increasingly codified every aspect of sexual behavior to the point where only coitus between husband and wife, for the purpose of procreation, in a single approved position, was considered “right” and “natural.” Sodomy, fellatio and cunnilingus were prohibited — even among married couples and where such foreplay might be the prelude to coitus. Sex was also restricted to certain days of the week and times of the year: G. Rattray Taylor states that at one time in the Middle Ages, “the Church forbade sexual relations — even between man and wife — for the equivalent of five months out of every year.”

Taylor makes clear his conviction that these limitations on sex were calculated to make it as pleasureless as possible and that the Church laws prohibiting polygamy (which had been permitted pre-Exilic Jewish society and not forbidden by the early Christian fathers) and divorce (which the early Church had recognized for a limited number of reasons, including barrenness, religious incompatibility and prolonged absence) were motivated by an interest in curtailing sexual opportunity to the absolute minimum.

Similarly, laws against incest were broadened in the 11th century to include second, and eventually third, cousins — as well as the godparents and the witnesses at a baptism or confirmation (it eventually became a sin for even relatives of the godparents, priest and witnesses to marry one another). All of this tended to reduce the opportunity for “sin” (sex) and it is easy to imagine that in some small villages there might have been literally no one to whom a person of marriageable age could be legitimately wed.

The Church forbade all sex with animals (bestiality) and then defined copulation with a Jew as a form of bestiality, with the same penalties — which is not without a certain irony, since the Christian law against bestiality was derived from the Jews.

Because it considered marriage a contaminating process, the Church at first refused to perform the marriage ceremony, but later — as a part of its comprehensive attempt to control all sexual matters — it urged couples to take their marriage vows in the church, eventually proclaiming church marriage compulsory and all civil ceremonies invalid. The Church then refused to perform weddings at certain times of the year and Taylor reports that at one point “there were only 25 weeks in the year when marriages were legal….” The Church also restricted the hours during which the wedding vows could be taken; first declaring that the ceremony should be performed openly, “it established that marriages must take place in daylight, but later defined daylight as eight a.m. to noon.”

The Church fathers had no reservation about rewriting the Bible to their own ends. W.H. Lecky states, in The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, “The fathers laid down a distinct proposition that pious frauds were justifiable and even laudable…[and] immediately, all ecclesiastical literature became tainted with a spirit of the most unblushing mendacity.” Taylor says, “Only real desperation is enough to explain the ruthlessness with which the Church repeatedly distorted and even falsified the Biblical record in order to produce justification for its laws.”

Attaching, as they did, so much importance to preventing masturbation, the medieval churchmen sought Biblical justification for this prohibition and finding none, they twisted the Scriptures to suit their purpose. Genesis 38 refers to Onan’s seed falling upon the ground and his subsequently being put to death. The interpretation was established — and is still widely believed — that this passage refers to masturbation, from which we derive the word onanism as a synonym for the practice. The passage actually refers to coitus interruptus and Onan was put to death for violating the law of the levirate, by which a man must provide his deceased brother’s wife with offspring, so that the family’s possessions can be handed down to direct descendants.

The Catholic writer Canon E. de Smet, in his book Betrothment and Marriage, comments upon this: “From the text and context it would seem that the blame of the sacred writer applies directly to the wrongful frustration of the law of the levirate, intended by Onan, rather than the spilling of the seed.”

The Romans, Jews and Greeks had not opposed abortion, but Tertullian, using an inaccurate translation of Exodus 21:22, which refers to punishing a man who injures a pregnant woman, popularized the belief that the Bible held abortion to be a crime. Rabbi Glasner states, “The Bible itself does not mention it all…. One might argue that therapeutic abortion, at least, would not be considered objectionable, since the embryo [is] a part of the mother (like a limb), and not a separate entity.” Taylor notes that though the error in translation has long since been recognized, the Church still maintains its position opposing abortion, and this opposition has been incorporated into secular law. Which also demonstrates that the moral laws of Christianity are frequently not so much derived from Biblical authority, as Biblical authority is sought to justify the particular prejudices and predilections of the time.

The Church’s interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden provides an especially striking example of construing Scripture in ways not consistent with the text. To support its general position on sex, the story was changed to suggest that the “forbidden fruit” Adam tasted in the Garden was sex, with Eve cast in the role of temptress. Thus the Original Sin that Adam handed down to all of us was sexual in nature. But the Bible makes no such statement: The book of Genesis states that Adam defied God by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, making him godlike, and it is for this that God expelled him from Paradise. William Graham Cole wrote: “The preponderance of theological opinion, in both Jewish and Christian circles, has interpreted the Original Sin as pride and rebellion against God. The Church’s negative attitude toward sex has misled many into belief that the Bible portrays man’s Fall as erotic in origin. Neither the Bible itself nor the history of Christian thought substantiates such a belief.”

It is also worth noting that in the story of the Garden of Eden, the female is viewed in an unfavorable light — not only is she created from one of Adam’s ribs, placing her in a position of being his possession, but Eve is also the one who tempts Adam into breaking God’s commandment, thus causing their downfall. In an alternate explanation of the story, menstruation was explained as a “curse” imposed upon women for Eve’s treachery and that time of the month is still referred to by women today as “having the curse,” without any knowledge of the expression’s derivation.

Women are generally considered a source of sin and contamination, along with sex and marriage, by the Church of the Middle Ages. It was believed that sexual evil really dwelt within woman and that she was a constant temptation to man, who might otherwise remain pure. Tertullian proclaimed to all women: “Do you know that each one of you is an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: The guilt must of necessity live, too. You are the Devil’s gateway…you are she who persuaded him whom the Devil was not valiant enough to attack….”

Nor were such attitudes held by only a few members of the clergy. Robert Briffault states, “These views were not, as been sometimes represented, exceptions and the extreme….[The fathers of the Church] were one and all agreed. The principles of the fathers were confirmed by decrees of the synods, and are embodied in the canon of the Council of Trent.”

John Langdon-Davies states, in his Short History of Women, “To read the early Church fathers is to feel sometimes that they have never heard of the Nazarene, except as a peg on which to hang their own tortured diabolism, and as a blank scroll upon which to incite their curious misogyny.” Havelock Ellis says, “The ascetics, those very erratic and abnormal examples of the variational tendency, have hated woman with a hatred so bitter and intense that no language could be found strong enough to express their horror.”

An anonymous philosopher of the medieval Church wrote, “A Good Woman is but like one Ele put in a bagge amongst 500 Snakes, and if a man should have the luck to grope out that one Ele from all the Snakes, yet he hath at best but a wet Ele by the Taile.”

Christianity’s fierce hostility to sex produced a repressive society in which perversion and sadomasochism soon became prevalent and it erupted finally in the witch trials of the Inquisition, with the persecution, torture and death of millions throughout almost all Europe.

Modern Roman Catholicism can hardly be held accountable for the sins of the medieval Church, but much of the antisexuality conceived out of the irrational obsession with sex that marked the Middle Ages persists in the Church doctrine of today.

The Catholic Church remains more adamant in its opposition to sex outside of marriage than either the Jews or Protestant denominations. Catholic dogma still proclaims that the sole purpose of sex is procreation and so forbids all mechanical means of birth control, though the recent introduction of “the pill” (discovered by a Roman Catholic) and the pressures of population explosion in many underdeveloped countries of the world are producing a reevaluation of this doctrine.

Catholicism still considers civil marriage invalid for Catholics and opposes all divorce. It also forbids abortion — even therapeutic abortion, condoned by many Jews and Protestants.

The Church’s concern over sex has led many Catholics into active participation in censorship groups and their concern over birth control has sometimes produced an antagonism to public sex education. It is understandable, therefore, why the Catholic religion is still viewed, by some, as basically antisexual.

There is a more liberal element with modern Catholicism, however. Dr. John Rock, a devout and highly respected Catholic scientist, is one of the major researchers in the field of oral contraception and in his bold book, The Time Has Come, he forthrightly faces the linked problems of overpopulation and birth control; he also expresses the opinion that no state government has the right or competence to legislate on the religious aspects of the problem (this comment from the Boston scientist refers especially to the archaic laws of both Massachusetts and Connecticut, which prohibit doctors from giving out any information on birth control to their patients, even when it is requested) and states his conviction that all governmental restrictions on birth control, written or unwritten, should be removed.

In this same area, it is worth noting that whereas our previous President, a Protestant, refused to approve a policy whereby the U.S. would give out birth control information to nations suffering with the problem of overpopulation, remarking, “I can not imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity or function or responsibility.” President Kennedy, a Catholic, fully endorsed such assistance and permitted his representative at a UN debate on the subject to say, “So long as we are concerned with the quality of life, we have no choice but to be concerned with the quantity of life.”

The more liberal element in current Catholic thought is evident in this statement from The Church and Sex by R.F. Trevett, published in 1960 as Volume 103 of The Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, with the official nihil obstat and imprimatur: “We have an occasional sneaking wish that the laws of the Church might be modified…. Surely there is room for more tolerance toward those struggling with a very powerful instinct that is apparently always warring against principles….

“Why is our sex life bedeviled with problems? Are those problems genuine or the result of taboos?… If we can find positive and practical answers to these questions, we may also hope to discover something very different from the negation and prudery, the obscurantism and intolerance which many sincerely believe — and we Catholics must take our share for this sorry state of affairs — make up the Church’s teaching on sex.”

Protestant Morality

It might be assumed that the Protestant Reformation would have produced a more natural, positive, less restrictive attitude toward sex. Just the opposite occurred.

The Roman Church had started to become more liberal in its attitude on sex with the Renaissance and this sexual permissiveness was one of the things that Protestant leaders like Calvin and Luther opposed. Calvin, especially, preached a doctrine that rejected not only sex, but all pleasure.

Calvinist Puritanism became popular in England and, later, America. The Puritans perpetuated the witch hunts of the Inquisition which, as we recorded in the August issue, were predominantly sexual in origin. The interinvolvement of church and state was extended rather than diminished and the Puritans actually gained control of the English Parliament in the 17th century, overthrew the monarchy (executing Charles I in a manner that would have made the most bestial barbarian proud), and ruled the government for a brief period, until strong opposition to their oppressive laws forced them from power.

The English Puritans attempted to make “immorality” impossible by imposing the harshest of penalties. For adultery and for incest (the latter being defined as sexual relations between any couple prohibited from marriage because of their relatedness) the punishment was death. Because the Puritan rule was not a popular one, juries most often refused to convict, but in Puritan, Rake and Squire, J. Lane reports that a man of 89 was executed for adultery in 1653 (which, as we observed in September, age considered, may seem more a compliment than an injustice) and another for incest (with his brother-in-law’s daughter) in 1656. These penalties were repealed with the end of Puritan rule, but as late as 1800, and again in 1856 and 1857, attempts were made to have Parliament reimpose the death penalty for adultery.

The first courts established by the Puritans in America were clerical rather than civil, and some simply introduced the Bible as the basis for their laws. The Puritans in America never burned any witches, but they did hang a few and one of them was crushed to death.

Centuries of religious sex suppression have not succeeded in stifling the natural mating urge in humankind, but they have managed to spawn a society in which sexual expression is excessively burdened with feelings of guilt and shame. Antisexualism reached its peak in England during the early reign of Queen Victoria and, in America, extended well into the 19th century. In that time, all sexual words and references were deleted from books, including the Bible; women wore several pounds of excess clothing, and a lady’s ankle was apt to cause more excitement than the sight of an entire leg does today; a woman was never pregnant, she was “in a family way”; sex education for children had babies being delivered by the stork; maidenly modesty forbade the discussion of sex, even with one’s own doctor, and rather than undergo a personal physical examination a female patient would often point to the ailing part of the anatomy on a small doll doctors kept in their offices for such occasions; undergarments and even male trousers were referred to as “unmentionables”; legs were discreetly called “limbs” — on people, the Thanksgiving turkey, and even on furniture; proper ladies covered the “limbs” of their chairs and couches with little skirts of printed crinoline, for modesty’s sake; some even took to separating the books on shelves by the sex of the author lest the volumes by men and women be permitted to rest against one another; the uncommonly prudish unmarried woman would not undress in a room in which a portrait of man was hung.

Far from de-emphasizing sex, such actions had the opposite effect, and so instead of remaining aloof from it, this period of English and American history must be seen as sexually obsessed — as are all periods of sexual repression.

While Victorian man urged women to purity, he distrusted them also. He wanted them to be virgins, but suspected secretly that they were whores. He was therefore compelled to divide the female sex into two categories: “good” women, who had no taste for sex; and “bad” women, who had. It is revealingly symptomatic of the times that W. Acton asserted, as a supposed statement of fact in a scientific work, The Functions and Disorders of the Re-productive Organs, that it was a “vile aspersion” to say that women were capable of sexual feeling. In A History of Courting, E.S. Turner states, “Sexual instincts became something no nice girl would admit to possessing; her job was to make man ashamed of his.”

In The Natural History of Love, Morton M. Hunt writes, “The role in which Victorian man had cast woman had its inevitable effect on man himself. Patriarchal he might be, stern to his children, frock-coated, mightily bewhiskered, and not to be trifled with, but he played this part at the expense of his own sexual expressiveness and his own peace of mind. If he were a libidinous man, he was driven to resort secretly to brothels. If he were weakly sexed, the emphasis on the purity of woman might actually unman him. If he were an average man with an average drive, he might live his entire life galled by the need for self-denial and self-restraint.”

Such is the stuff of which our sexual heritage is made.

It is difficult to state a contemporary Protestant view of sex, because the very nature of Protestantism, with its many denominations, makes for many viewpoints. Protestant attitudes thus range from the conservative to the most liberal.

The Puritan influence upon Protestantism, and upon the entire fabric of American society, is still pronounced. But there is also a new awakening to the sexual nature and needs of man within Protestantism, and some Protestants are quite outspoken on the subject.

In an article titled A 20th Century Philosophy of Sex, Joseph Fletcher, teacher of social ethics at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, states, “The Christian churches must shoulder much of the blame for the confusion, ignorance and unhealthy guilt associations which surround sex in Western culture. The Christian church from its earliest primitive beginnings has been swayed by many puritanical people, both Catholic and Protestant, who have treated sexuality as inherently evil.”

In The Bible of the World of Dr. Kinsey, William Graham Cole, head of the Williams College Department of Religion, put it even more strongly: “There can be no quarrel with the secular world at this point. It is right and the church has been wrong. Sex is natural and good…. It is attitudes which are good and evil, never things…. Those who take the Bible seriously must stop apologizing for sex…they must begin with a concession to the secular mind, granting that sex is natural.

“In its efforts to prevent irresponsible procreation, Western civilization has used the device of what Freud called the walls of loathing, guilt and shame. On the whole this method of social control has worked reasonably well, but a price has been paid for its success — the price of sexual perversion, which is the product of fear and anxiety…. The method of moralism has been weighed in the balance and found wanting, partly because it moves in the wrong direction and partly because it has based its case on fear.”

In Religion and Sex: A Changing Church View, David Boroff wrote in a 1961 issue of Coronet, “Much of Protestantism no longer wishes to be identified with repression and Puritanism. ‘In fact,’ says Professor Roger Shinn, of New York’s Union Theological Seminary, ‘repression is a Christian heresy…. In this country, Puritanism…has been hostile to the expression of sexual feeling. But in recent years, Protestant theologians have reexamined these concepts. They now argue that Puritanism, when it insists that sex is evil, is actually a distortion of Christian doctrine. These thinkers have been influenced not only by recent Biblical scholarship, but also by the findings of psychiatry — especially the revelation of the psychic damage that may be done by sexual repression.’”

As we observed in the July installment of The Playboy Philosophy, England is undergoing a Sexual Revolution. Time reported in its March 22, 1963 issue: “…The British are deeply concerned with their search for what some call ‘a new morality’ to fit the hushed-up facts of life. ‘The popular morality is now a wasteland,’ said Dr. George Morrison Carstairs, 46, professor of psychological medicine at Edinburgh University, in a recent BBC lecture. ‘It is littered with the debris of broken convictions. A new concept is emerging, of sexual relations as a source of pleasure but also as a mutual encountering of personalities, in which each explores the other and at the same time discovers new depths in himself or herself.”

In a controversial report, an English group called The Religious Society of Friends attacked the onus attached to “a great increase in adolescent sexual intimacy” and premarital affairs. “It is fairly common in both young men and women with high standards of conduct and integrity to have one or two love affairs, involving intercourse, before they find the person they will ultimately marry.” This, the report concluded, is not such a sin. “Where there is genuine tenderness, an openness to responsibility and the seed of commitment, God is surely not shut out.”

The same month, Associated Press carried a story, date-lined London, which reported that a pastor of the Church of England challenged religious taboos against extramarital sex: “In a sermon delivered from the pulpit of Southwark Cathedral in London, Canon D.A. Rhymes declared the traditional moral code implied that sex is unavoidably tainted. ‘Yet there is no trace of this teaching in the attitude of Christ,’ he said. ‘He does not exalt virginity over marriage, or marriage over virginity — He merely says in one place that some have chosen virginity to leave them free for the work of the kingdom.

” ‘Nor does Christ ever suggest that sexuality, as such, is undesirable or that marriage is the only possible occasion of any expression of physical relationship.’

“…Canon Rhymes said the moral code of today is being ignored because it is outdated. ‘We need to replace the traditional morality based upon a code with a morality which is related to the person and the needs of the person….’” The pastor concluded that if we want to live full and healthful lives, “we must emphasize love,” not an inflexible, impersonal and unfeeling morality.

Morality and the State

There is obviously much theological disagreement regarding sex in America today and there is most certainly no single sexual ethic to which even the most pious individuals in contemporary society would subscribe. In truth, each individual is apt to view the piety and morality of his fellows in terms of how closely they conform to his, not their own, religious ideals.

But even if all of the religious leaders of the nation were of a single mind on the subject, it is clear that in this free democracy, they would have no right to force a universal code of sexual conduct upon the rest of society. Our religious leaders, of every faith, can loudly proclaim their moral views to one and all, and attempt to persuade us as to the correctness of their beliefs — they have this right and, indeed, it is expected of them.

They have no right, however, to attempt in any way to force their beliefs upon others through coercion. And most especially, they have no right to use the power of the government to implement such coercion. Any such action would be undemocratic in the extreme — it would contradict our most fundamental concepts of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. It would frustrate the intent of our founding fathers and their dream that all Americans should be forever free of the tyranny and suppression, that, historically, have accompanied all church-state rule. It would oppose the guarantees of the U.S. Constitution.

Since no common agreement exists among the clergy of modern America, it is all the more incredible — if no more monstrous — to consider the extent to which religious dogma and superstition have, all democratic ideals and Constitutional guarantees to the contrary, found their way into our civil law. And nowhere is this unholy alliance between church and state more obvious than in matters of sex. In our most personal behavior, no citizen of the United States is truly free.

Moreover, many of the statutes dealing with sexual behavior in all of the 50 states reflect the extreme antisexuality of the medieval Church and Calvinist Puritanism, with which an increasing number of the clergy of most religions are no longer in agreement. The most common kinds of sexual behavior, engaged in by the great majority of our adult society, are illegal. Almost every aspect of sex, outside of marriage, is prohibited by laws on fornication, adultery, cohabitation, sodomy, prostitution, association with a prostitute, incest, delinquency, contributing to delinquency, rape, statutory rape, assault and battery, public indecency or disorderly conduct. And though few realize it, every state but one (and that one, we are personally pleased to report, is Illinois) has statutes limiting the kind of sexual activity that can be legally engaged in within marriage as well, between a husband and his wife. The precoital love play endorsed by most modern marriage manuals and family counselors on sex is prohibited by law in 49 states.

Marriage itself is regulated through religiously inspired laws on divorce and bigamy (although the Mormon religion endorses polygamy, it is outlawed by legislation passed by more powerful religious factions). Abortion remains illegal in all states of the Union, although it is undergone by hundreds of thousands of women annually, under circumstances that seriously endanger not only their health and welfare, but their very lives.

Modern birth control devices and drugs are nowhere publicly advertised and a number of states have laws curtailing or prohibiting their sales. In a recent article for Look on the importance of the separation of church and state, the Reverend H.B. Sissel, Secretary for National Affairs, of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. wrote: “Seventeen states prohibit the sale or distribution of contraceptives except through doctors or pharmacists; five states ban all public sale of such devices. Although these statutes were enacted in the 19th century under Protestant pressure, times and attitudes have changed for many Protestants. Today, they believe that Catholics have no right to keep such laws in operation. Some Catholic spokesmen have agreed that their church is not officially interested in trying to make the private behavior of non-Catholics conform to Roman Catholic canon law. Meanwhile, the laws stay on the books, though they are being tested in the courts.”

Church-state legislation has made common criminals of us all. Dr. Alfred Kinsey has estimated that if the sex laws of the United States were conscientiously and successfully enforced, over 90 percent of the adult population would be in prison.

A free society, through its government, passes and enforces laws for the protection and welfare of its individual members. Thus the state may sometimes quite properly prohibit certain actions — murder and theft, for example — that are also condemned as immoral or sinful by religion. This overlap of secular and clerical law is not, in itself, any indication of the improper interinvolvement of church and state. But secular law should be based on a rational concern for the happiness and well-being of man; whereas clerical law is based upon theology or faith. It is only when secular law is predicted on religious faith, rather than reason, that it is improper.

The Ten Commandments provide the basic moral laws for both the Christian and the Jewish religions, and while the Commandments “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not steal” have their logical conterparts in our secular law, protecting the individual citizen’s life and property, few would seriously suggest that these ten Biblical pronouncements be turned, in toto, into legal statutes. The devout may accept “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” may consider it a sin to “take the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain,” and may sincerely believe that we should “remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy,” but only the smallest handful would want these religious laws turned into governmental ones; and only the most tyrannical parent would wish “Honour thy father and thy mother” turned into a legal edict.

From whence, then, comes the logic of turning the Sixth Commandment (or the Seventh, depending on your religious affiliation), “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” into a criminal offense? Only if one adheres to the ancient concept of the wife being property of the husband, rather than an individual human being, can one justify such a law; and it is from this idea of the female being a possession of the male, as we have previously noted, that the prohibition regarding adultery originally sprang. This is re-emphasized by the last Commandment(s), in which a number of specific possessions are mentioned, with the admonition, “Thou shalt not covet,” presumably listed in the order of their importance: “thy neighbour’s house…thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.” In a rational society that views all human beings as free individuals, how do we justify turning the religious Commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery” into a secular law? And how do we broaden its original Biblical implication to include, not only wives, but husbands as well? In the time of the Old Testament, it was accepted that the wealthy male should have many wives and mistresses. We have shown that the broader antisexual implications were supplied by the medieval Church and that it was in that time that they found their way from the clerical into the secular law. But how did they find their way into our own law — with all of our righteous proclamations about religious freedom and the separation of our church and state in America?

And what of fornication? There is nothing in the Old Testament, or in the teachings of Christ, that specifically prohibits all sex out of wedlock. This too is derived, not from the Bible, but from the extreme antisexualism of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, in 1963, in an era of supposed enlightenment, in a society supposedly free, premarital sex is prohibited by law by most of the 50 United States.

But it is not our place to point out the non-Biblical origins of these religious laws — for modern theological dogma can be drawn from any source, or from no source at all. Neither is our intent to proclaim the moral desirability of either adultery or fornication. It is simply our purpose, at this moment, to point out the utter lack of justification in the state making unlawful these private acts performed between two consenting adults. Organized religions may preach against them if they wish — and there may well be some logic in their doing so, since extreme sexual permissiveness is not without its negative aspects — but there can be no possible justification for religion using the state to coercively control the sexual conduct of the members in a free society.

Some sexual behavior is the proper concern of the state. In protecting its citizens, the state has the right to prohibit unwelcome acts of sexual violence or aggression; it also has the right to protect the individual from sexual exploitation and fraud. Before a certain age, individuals lack the maturity necessary for full participation in a free society and so it is logical to have special legislation for the protection of minors — although in matters of sex, our society is woefully unrealistic about both the nature and needs of its youth and is, itself, largely responsible for perpetuating sexual immaturity and irresponsibility in our young. Society also has the right to prohibit, solely on the grounds of taste, public sexual activity or immodesty that may be unwelcome to other members of the community — though in this regard, we should mention that sexual anxiety, repression, guilt and shame traditionally accompany a social order that is, by our standards, relatively immodest.

All other sexual activity — specifically, all private sex between consenting adults — is the personal business of the individuals involved and in a free society the state has no right to interfere.

This is not the radical viewpoint that some readers may assume. It is shared by a great number of the religious leaders of America and represents the general trend in religious thinking regarding sex in our contemporary society. This position was expressed recently by Father James Jones, a priest of the Episcopal Church, in a television debate on changing sexual morality; Father Jones pointed out that when private morality is legislated against by government, it goes underground, and it thus becomes more difficult for religion to reach and influence.

As we have previously noted, England is presently undergoing a Sexual Revolution quite similar to our own; their similar Puritan heritage produced a like set of unrealistically suppressive sex laws also. On this matter, the Moral Welfare Council of the Church of England recently stated: “It is not the function of the state and the law to constitute themselves guardians of private morality, and thus to deal with sin as such, which belongs to the province of the church. On the other hand, it is the duty of the state to punish crimes, and it may properly take cognizance of, and define as criminal, those sins which also constitute offense against public morality.”

The now famous Wolfenden Report was presented to the British Parliament in the fall of 1957 by a committee drawn from the clergy, medicine, sociology, psychiatry, and the law, under the chairmanship of Sir John Wolfenden, C.B.E. The Wolfenden committee not only included members of the clergy, it sought advice and guidance from others in both the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches. Thus, seven Catholic clergymen and laymen appointed by the late Bernard Cardinal Griffin, Archbishop of Westminster, submitted a report to the committee that stated:

“It is not the business of the state to intervene in the purely private sphere but to act solely as the defender of the common good. Morally evil things so far as they do not affect the common good are not the concerns of the human legislator.

“Sin as such is not the concern of the state, but affects the relations between the souls and God. Attempts by the state to enlarge its authority and invade the individual conscience, however high-minded, always fail and frequently do positive harm.”

The official Wolfenden Report to Parliament reflected these same views. As yet no significant British legislation has resulted.

A similar trend in thinking exists in legal circles here in the United States. The draft of a Model Penal Code published early in 1955 by the American Law Institute contained a recommendation that all consensual relations between adults in private should be excluded from the criminal law. The philosophy underlying this recommendation was stated to be that “no harm to the secular interests of the community is involved in atypical sex practice in private between consenting adult partners” and “there is the fundamental question of the protection to which every individual is entitled against state interference in his personal affairs when he is not hurting others.”

Although this Model Penal Code was published nearly nine years ago, no state has yet reshaped its statutes on sex along the lines recommended by the Law Institute.

No related posts.

Over the coming months we will be adding numerous and exclusive feature articles, so please check back often!

The Playboy Philosophy Part 12

OVER THE PAST YEAR, we have attempted a general evaluation of a number of our society’s strengths and weaknesses: We have discussed the importance of the individual in a free society, the over-emphasis on conformity and security, and the need for a revitalization of both our democracy and the free-enterprise system through greater stress on the uncommon man, and uncommon endeavor and accomplishment; we have considered the importance of the separation of church and state to a democracy and pointed out how, throughout history, whenever government and religion were not kept apart, an erosion of man’s liberty was certain to ensue; we’ve discussed censorship and how a free society cannot long remain free without the full protection of free speech and press, and the uninhibited expression of even the most unpopular and, to some perhaps, objectionable ideas; we’ve analyzed obscenity and demonstrated how a single suppression of free expression can be used to outlaw a wide variety of unpopular opinions and actions; we have documented the historical sources of many of our antisexual concepts, considered America’s own puritanical heritage, the current Sexual Revolution and our society’s search for a new sexual morality.

Because the area covered in the first 12 installments of The Playboy Philosophy has been so broad, our first, quite general discussion has left a number of questions still to be answered and a great many side considerations yet to be explored. As we enter into the second year of this continuing editorial series, we will attempt to answer some of the numerous queries raised by readers along the way (we cannot mention our readers without pausing to note that the enthusiastic response to these editorials has made the effort expended on them a most gratifying experience) and try to offer positive solutions to some of the societal problems we face in our time.

We have spent most of the past few installments on an historical analysis of sex suppression and a consideration of how this antisexual aspect of society has created a censorship of communication among free men in both the past and the present. In the months ahead, we will discuss contemporary sex behavior and its conflict with our professed religious and moral teaching; we will consider the gap that exists between sex behavior and the law, and the effect such a hypocritical schism can have upon a community’s mental and moral health. We will discuss sexual responsibility, both in and outside of marriage; the importance of the family in raising children; divorce, birth control, abortion, prostitution; and such nonsexual moral problems as racial discrimination, capital punishment, legalized gambling and drug addiction.

We will comment on the changing roles of men and women in contemporary America, our drift toward an asexual society, and the inherent dangers we foresee in such a trend, for men and women alike; we will consider the single vs. the double standard in sexual morality and attempt to analyze the positive and negative aspects of both. While our principal concern will remain the individual and his relationship with himself, with other individuals, and with his society, we will also consider the broader implication involved in the international morality of nations and world responsibility in the Atomic Age.

Out of these various fragments, we hope to evolve and set down our personal philosophy for a happier, healthier, more productive, more rational, more truly human and humane world. We will state our views as frankly and honestly as we know how, confident that our readers will respect our candor and the sincerity of our intent, even when they find themselves in disagreement with some of our conclusions. As in the past, we will welcome the reactions — both positive and negative — of our readers, believing above all else that the free exchange of ideas on subjects such as these offers the surest guarantee of our society’s continued growth and freedom.

Society and the Individual

Our view of the world is predicated on the paramountcy of the individual and each person’s inherent individuality. Society benefits as much from the differences in men as from their similarities, and we should create a culture that not only accepts these differences, but respects and actually nurtures them. We have previously stressed the value of the rebel to society, not because we feel that mere rebellion or the desire to be different is beneficial in itself, but because the rebel attitude, and the divergent ideas it produces, are essential to progress. Through constant questioning, reevaluation and reanalysis of established ideas, ideals, traditions and “truths” of a society, we stand the best chance of discovering more significant ideas, establishing better traditions and learning greater truths.

In addition, we believe that each individual has a right to explore his own individuality — to discover himself, as well as the world around him — and to take pride in himself and the individuality that sets him apart from the rest of mankind, as fully as he takes pride in the kinship that links him to every other man on earth — past, present and future. A society should exist not only for the purpose of establishing common areas of agreement among men, but also to aid each person in achieving his own individual identity.

It is important to remember that our American democracy is based not simply on the will of the majority, but on the protection of the will of the minority. And the smallest minority in society is the individual.

A Rational Society

Second, we believe in a society based upon reason. The mind of a man sets him apart from the lower animals and we believe that man should use his intellect to create an ever more perfect, productive, comfortable, fulfilling, happy, healthy and rational society.

We believe in the existence of absolute truth — not in a mystical or religious sense, but in the certainty that the true nature of man and the universe is knowable, and the conviction that the acquisition of such truth should be one of the major goals of mankind. Truth may play a part in religious dogma, but we think it presumptuous for any one religion to assume it has the inside track on truth, divinely revealed. We think it natural that man be awed by the overwhelming marvel and magnitude of the universe in which he exists, and if this awe leads to reverence, faith and worship, that, too, may enhance his spiritual awareness and his sense of wonder.

It is only when faith in the unknown produces resistance to the acquisition of greater knowledge that we oppose it — or when the perversion of faith produces bigotry, intolerance, or totalitarian intimidation, coercion, persecution or subjugation of those of different beliefs.

There is a curious philosophical inconsistency in the fact that while science is based primarily upon reason and religion primarily on faith, it is science that currently stresses man’s inability to use his rational mind (projected in the theory of determinism, in which man is seen as the sum of his heredity and environment) and religion which stresses free will and responsibility (making him accountable in an afterlife, where he is punished or rewarded for his actions).

It is our view that man is a rational being and while his heredity and environment play a major role in setting the pattern of his life, he possesses the ability to reason and the capacity for choice, not granted to the lower animals, whose response to life is instinctually predetermined. The use, or lack of use, of his rational mind is, itself, a choice and we favor a society in which the emphasis is placed upon the use of reason — a society that recognizes man’s responsibility for his actions.

We believe in a moral and law-abiding society, but one in which the morality and the laws are based upon logic and reason rather than mysticism or religious dogma.

A Free Society

Third, we believe that man was born to be free, that freedom should be his most cherished birthright, and that it should be society’s function to see that his freedom is preserved.

Freedom in a rational society must have its limitations, of course, but the limitations should be logical and just, commencing at that point where one man’s freedom infringes upon the freedom of others.

Society also has the right to limit the freedom of those who have broken its laws; who, because of mental or emotional disorder, are incapable of conducting themselves rationally within society; and those who have not yet reached an age at which they may be expected to accept the responsibilities of the full freedom granted to adults.

Happiness and the Pleasure Concept

Fourth, the primary goal of society should be individual happiness. We believe that pleasure is preferable to pain and that any doctrine which teaches otherwise is masochistic.

Happiness and pleasure are mental and physical states of being and society should emphasize the positive aspects of both. For many individuals, happiness includes spiritual values: They should be free to follow their spiritual beliefs, but not to force them upon others.

For ourselves, any doctrine is evil if it teaches that ignorance is preferable to knowledge, pain is preferable to pleasure, self-denial is preferable to self-gratification, poverty is preferable to wealth; or that the acquisition and enjoyment of material possessions is improper or wrong, and that they preclude ethical and moral rectitude, creativity, usefulness to society and all other admirable qualities presumed, by some, to be the sole property of the self-sacrificial.

We believe that a society that emphasizes the individual and his freedom, is based upon reason, and has happiness as its aim is an ideal society and the one to be strived for.

Enlightened Self-Interest

We think it is natural and right for the individual to be principally concerned with himself. We think that man, like the lower animals, is primarily motivated by considerations of self, but that rational man should be expected to exercise what is termed enlightened self-interest.

We oppose the tendency to meaningless selflessness in our present society. Self-sacrifice and self-denial are, in themselves, wrong unless they are motivated by a desire for some greater individual good. This does not mean that man should be unconcerned about the well-being of his fellow man. To the contrary, intelligent self-interest includes a concern for others. The individual should be willing to assist those less fortunate, for a society — and each individual in it — benefits from a concern for the welfare of all. We simply mean to emphasize that it is right and natural for the individual to be primarily concerned with himself, dedicated to his own interests, proud of his efforts and his accomplishments. Such dedication and pride are of definite benefit to both the individual and rest of society.

A Human and Humane Society

A society that emphasizes rational self-interest is not an impersonal one. Just the opposite. An emphasis on the intelligently self-dedicated individual produces both a more human and more humane social order. Moreover, these are the very qualities that our society is in greatest danger of losing.

As society becomes more complex, more structured and specialized, there is an increasing tendency to de-emphasize the personal, the individual and the human. Even as man’s technology becomes automated, man himself runs the risk of becoming a depersonalized automaton. Pride in individual accomplishment becomes more difficult when he is a single cog in the machinery of mass production — and this is equally true whether he works on the assembly line in a factory or at a desk performing a repetitive, routine white-collar job.

He dresses the same as the man next to him, drives a similar car, lives in a similar house, watches the same television programs, smokes a similar cigarette and drinks similar beer. He enjoys a two-party political system, but both candidates run on similar platforms; he enjoys a free press, but is often given only one side of major local, national and international questions.

Mass communication and mass advertising produce in him the same interests, ideals, dreams, aspirations and brand images as in everyone else. And to make certain his opinion, likes and dislikes don’t become too different from everyone else’s, opinion polls on everything from political figures and important issues of the day to the popularity of TV shows and the products they sell inform him, down to a tenth of one percent, what his fellow Americans are thinking and doing.

Moreover, if his manner, morals, politics or religious beliefs are too different from the rest, he runs the risk of losing his job and being ostracized from his community.

His Social Security number is more important than his name, when he is applying for a job; the number on his credit card is more important than his reputation when he seeks credit in a restaurant or a department store. He is a number to the Internal Revenue Service when he pays his taxes; another number to the insurance company when he pays his premium or makes a claim; and still another number to the people who supply him with gas and electricity. It’s a matter of little consequence, we suppose, and we don’t doubt that the new system is more efficient (at least for AT&T), but since the telephone company began changing exchanges to numerals, we can’t remember the phone numbers of any of our friends anymore.

An incident reported in The New Yorker several weeks ago illustrates just how far we’ve really gone in losing our identities in this numbers game: “A young lady from Boston recently joined the staff of the New York Hospital and was given a small blue identification card with her name and address on it. This proved of no help to her when she tried to cash her first paycheck at a bank, and since she had no drivers license, she was in danger of starving for lack of liquid funds. Then, resourcefully, she neatly printed six arbitrary numerals along the top of her identification card. After that, her checks were cashed without any ado, the bank tellers dutifully copying down the bogus numerals. She likes to think of her six figures being copied by the central bank clerk, punched into monster IBM machines and immortalized on magnetic tape.”

Most of our mass communication, mass production, automation and numeralization serves worthwhile ends and makes possible the more effective operation of an ever more complicated economy and involved social structure. But to offset this depersonalizing process, we require a conscious emphasis on the individual that was never so necessary before. Now, as never before, we need to explore, reassess and revitalize those qualities that make us truly human, as well as truly individual, distinctive and different from one another.

The much discussed New Leisure, made possible by the shorter work week resulting from mass production and automation, must be used not only to escape the tedium of a routined existence, but to develop interests, avocations and personal potentialities that are otherwise stifled. Since this publication is devoted to such leisure-time living, it can play a significant part in exploring this increasingly important area of our existence and, most especially, in motivating its readers to personally examine and develop aspects of their individuality, interests, talents and activities perhaps previously dormant.

Any such development of our individualism is a personally rewarding experience certain to make each of us more truly human. It should also make us more humane, for an emphasis on one’s own distinctive traits, interests and ideas ought to produce an appreciation of the individual differences in one’s fellow men. By contrast, the do-gooder and the busybody are preoccupied with others — and are noted for their intolerance.

The Individual vs. The Group

It is essential that a free society continually reestablish and reemphasize the importance of each individual within it remembering that a society and its administrator government are only the means to an end, and not an end in themselves. The all-important end is, and must always be, the individual — his interests, his freedom and his happiness.

Group good should not be allowed to overshadow individual good. Group good should not become disembodied from individual good.

An overemphasis on a collective idea, ideal or ideology can give them an identity unrelated to the interests of the individual. And totalitarian control over the mind and body of man is most easily accomplished by stressing a depersonalized group: in a dictatorship the interests of the state are placed above those of the common citizen; the Inquisition would not have been possible without putting the concerns of the church ahead of those of the people; few of history’s bloodiest wars would have been fought if the interest of the individuals involved had not been subordinated to those of the nation; religious bigotry and racial discrimination require our thinking in terms of groups rather than individuals; World Communism requires that its members dedicate themselves wholly, unquestioningly, unthinkingly to the good of the Party.

This is not to suggest that worthwhile ends may not also be served through group action and dedication, but when the group itself, or the ideal, or cause becomes more important than the individual members dedicated to it, as well as the individuals in society who may not be, then the scene is set for the perpetration of the most monstrous atrocities against mankind.

It is our further belief that the greatest benefits to society have come, throughout history, from individual effort. While group endeavor obviously has its place in society and an increasingly complex social order requires more joint effort than was necessary in simple times, the need for individual initiative and thought has also never been greater.

We suffer today from too much group-think and group action and too little individual endeavor. No council could have created Hamlet and the Mona Lisa could never have been painted by a committee. In science there is a virtue in joint effort that does not exist in art and literature, but even here the appearance of group productivity is deceiving. For while a complex scientific project, like the search for a cure for cancer or some aspect of the U.S. space program, may involve the energies of many men, a single mind must conceive the nature of the problem and a possible solution to then be explored by the research of many. Collective effort may have been required to build the atom bomb, but the formula E=mc2 came from a single genius — the technology of science depends upon group interaction, the inspiration of science depends upon the individual.

We do not mean to suggest that men are intellectual islands, for it is obvious that in most areas of endeavor, each man’s effort is built upon the previous effort of others, but the greatest achievements, whether in art or science, have been produced by a solitary, dedicated, self-involved individual. “Eureka!” is an individual expletive.

It should also be clear that man must remain free if he is to continue to thus conceive and create, for history has proven, in every age and place, that the men most responsible for the world’s progress are often ridiculed and derided by their fellow men and their contribution only perceived with the passage of time.

It is also true that those who have accomplished the most are not, by and large, history’s humanitarians. Society esteems self-sacrifice, but the self-dedicated man is more apt to give the world the things of most lasting value. The creative man’s achievements may benefit humanity, but this benefit is the by-product only, for it is the quest for a new beauty or truth that more often drives him — as he climbs upward to the farthest reaches of knowledge thus far attained. He climbs with his mind for the same reason as the man who scales mountains — because the problem is there and the challenge exists in conquering the unknown. He climbs until, at last, he stands alone on a dark plateau where no man has ever stood before — and then climbs on, pitting his intellect, ingenuity, and imagination against the bleak, uncertain rock, that holds the new truth or treasure that he seeks. Each generation a few great men reach these upper regions, where the fresh air is rarefied and pure, where no other mortal has ever breather the air before, and then climbs down again clutching some new bit of knowledge, a discovery, a piece of art or music, a formula, a view of man or molecules, of life or death, or time, or space — and the world is richer for it.

It is a lonely journey — this climb up the mountain of the unknown, but it can produce the fiercest kind of satisfaction — it can give man the meaning of what it is to be a man. And it is much the same in every worthwhile area of human endeavor in which the individual can find identity, purpose and a feeling of accomplishment.

The Fall of the Uncommon Man

Each generation produces its giants — those searchers after truth, creators of beauty, and doers of deeds, who stand out, head and shoulders above the rest. It is to such as these that we referred when we wrote, in an earlier issue, of the need to honor and esteem the uncommon men among us. We observed then that the legitimate concern over the plight of the common man during the years of the Great Depression had turned into a near deification of the common and the average, whereas, what is needed is a greater emphasis on the uncommon and the unusual.

The tendency to suspect unusual effort, to resent and demean the uncommon accomplishment, is in sharp contrast to the attitude of Americans during this nation’s formative years, up to and including the Twenties. There was a time when men took pride in their work, truly honored intellectual pursuit, and made heroes of the men of greatest accomplishments — whether in science, arts and letters, sports, or adventuresome derring-do. But the Depression Thirties was not a time for heroes and most Americans were more than willing to believe that even their idols had feet of clay. As we have already noted, our two beloved Charleses of the Roaring Twenties — Lindbergh and Chaplin — suffered much the same reversal of public sympathy in the dismal decade that followed, as did still another Charles — King Charles I of England, at the hands of the Puritans in the middle of the 17th century — though the English monarch paid a somewhat heavier penalty for falling out of public favor, being sentenced to hanging until not quite dead, castration, disembowelment and decapitation.

The hanging, castration, disembowelment and decapitation of two of America’s most popular heroes was only symbolic — we being more civilized and all — but the job was about as thorough as was done on the unfortunate English potentate. The public images of the Lone Eagle and the Little Tramp were trampled in the muck and mire, not so much for any misdemeanor on either of their parts, but because of the public’s need to destroy its giants — to reduce all men to the level of the common denominator. Lindbergh and Chaplin were logical choices — they were the most popular — they had the furthest to fall. Besides, they both walked right into it.

Lindbergh was ostracized for expressing an unpopular prewar estimate of the strength of the German Luftwaffe; he also accepted a German medal for his air exploits of a decade before and advised against war, which added up to appeasement. Both public and press were properly horrified and the owners of the Lindbergh Beacon, a Chicago landmark, went looking for a new name for their light.

Chaplin produced a brilliant satirical indictment of the Nazis, The Great Dictator, at about the same time, but that wasn’t enough to save his skin. He was vilified and savagely abused by the public, the press and the U.S. government for his sexual immorality, unpopular political views and the fact that he had never shown sufficient gratitude for this success here to bother applying for U.S citizenship.

Since the aspersions of his political attitudes appear to have been wholly unwarranted, and since America is not in the habit of attacking every member of the community who is not a citizen, sex appears to have been Chaplin’s principle sin, and it is certainly the one that received the widest attention, in two highly publicized trials, involving an alleged violation of the Mann Act and a paternity suit — both brought about by the same spurned and vindictive woman. He was found not guilty in the first case and though conclusive scientific evidence proved him innocent in the second also, the court ruled the evidence inadmissible and convicted him anyway. The government persecution of the man, heralded the world over as the greatest comedian of modern times, included a temporary revocation of his passport as “an undesirable alien.” Commenting on this phenomenon in his sympathetic personality piece, Chaplin (Playboy, March 1960), Charles Beaumont wrote: “High on the list of America’s pet hates is a man who, over a 30-year period, gave this nation — and every other nation throughout the world — a gift valuable beyond price and beyond estimation, the most desirable and most difficult to receive: the imperishable gift of joy.”

Beaumont continued: “An anti-Chaplin campaign was begun, calculated by its emphases and omissions to present a single image of Chaplin, so hateful an image of Chaplin, so hateful an image that some European critics concluded that it was a classic admission of guilt conscience.”

Beaumont noted that Errol Flynn had weathered a far nastier sex trial (involving the statutory rape of a teenager) at about the same time, without ever having the public turn against him (the phrase “In like Flynn” became, in fact, a popular sexual compliment of the day and Flynn wanted to call his best-selling autobiography In Like Me, but the publisher demurred and he had to settle for My Wicked, Wicked Ways). Beaumont observed: “Flynn, even when he was consorting with girls young enough to be his granddaughter, could do no wrong. Chaplin could do no right…. Perhaps,” Beaumont suggested, “because he [Flynn] did not add to these [his affairs] the affront of genius.” An understandably embittered Chaplin finally left America forever, to live out his days with his wife and family in Switzerland, where the remarkable gentleman is still siring children in his mid-seventies — a fact that would no doubt get him literally castrated and disemboweled by less potent and more irascible of the Geritol set, if he were still around where we could lay our hands on him.

Anti-Intellectualism

The anti-intellectual syndrome in America is a part of our society’s subconscious desire to elevate the mediocre and demean the uncommon in education and intellect. No one needs to be told that men of learning, and the acquisition of knowledge, should be esteemed far more highly than they are in the U.S.; and this is the only civilized country in which educators and education are given such lowly status.

Throughout the Thirties, Hollywood produced musicals and comedies that appealed to the popular prejudice that the typical U.S. college was a place of campus high jinks rather than a fount of learning. And the stereotype stuck: Mass media still represent the typical college boy as more interested in football and panty raids than an education; the cliché college professor is “absentminded.” Everyone knows that “common sense” is superior to acquired knowledge. In the Forties, the press added a new word to the language — “Egghead” — a term of derision for the intellectual.

For many Americans to be cultured is to be considered effete. Classical music is played by “longhairs” and appreciated by “squares.” The man or woman of learning or cultural accomplishments, the poet and opera singer — have long been stock comedy characters in movies. Modern art is still more apt to evoke a wisecrack in the popular press than sincere interest or critical comprehension.

Television has simply continued to make use of the clichés already established by movies, magazine and newspapers: Time magazine recently commented, “To watch TV tell it, the U.S. teacher has long been a simple sap like ‘Mr. Peepers.’”

But times are changing. As we have previously observed, America is giving every evidence of entering into a cultural renaissance. The Time comment quoted above was the lead-in to a review of a new TV show, Mr. Novak, in which the teacher-hero projects a very different, more complimentary image. And television in general, with gentle prodding, is becoming increasingly concerned with matters educational and cultural, though there is still far too much attention paid to the rating systems instead of programming quality and variety.

American movies are now willing able to tackle adult themes in a grown-up manner unthinkable a generation ago and are, in general, better than they ever were in Hollywood’s heyday. AM radio is, by and large, worse than ever — with its accent on “Top 40″ rock ‘n’ roll, but there is the remarkable FM radio boom, with quality and culture galore. The same holds true for the recording industry; the single-record business, which is all we knew as a lad (spinning Miller, Ellington and Dorsey at 78 r.p.m), has been taken over by the screechers and howlers (on those tiny 45-r.p.m. records with the giant holes in the center — to match the ones in the heads of their listeners); but the postwar long-play album and hi-fi and stereo popularity have given us sounds we never knew in our teens.

Jazz is busting out in half-a-dozen different inventive directions and there is more interest in classical music, both recorded and live, than at any previous time in our history; interest in ballet and modern dance is on the increase, too. Since the war, American painters have taken the initiative away from the Europeans in modern art and produced the first really important are movement this country has ever known. U.S. literature is probing new levels of life and existence in a new and refreshingly honest way and important books previously suppressed, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Lawrence and Lolita by Nabokov, are now being published here legally for the first time.

America’s anti-intellectual and anti-cultural history has undoubtedly hurt us as a nation and while U.S. education is now receiving increased attention, the symptoms of our earlier prejudices are still reflected in the public primary and secondary school systems across the nation, which devote more time, money and effort — special instruction, special classes, special schools — to the subnormal child than to the superior one. Although both deserve extra attention, it seems clear to us that society would benefit far more from a reverse of the present emphasis, since it is from among the superior children of today that most of tomorrow’s leaders will come — and the first years in the life of any person — normal or abnormal — are the most important in determining motivation, interests, personality, etc. Whereas our institutions of learning should stress free inquiry and academic achievement, too often they only perpetuate conformity, reinforce society’s prejudices, promote social and nonacademic curricula, suffer from low teacher status and pay, and are plagued by political and religious interference.

In class-structured societies, intellectual and cultural interests traditionally have been perpetuated by an elite leisure or ruling class and filtered down thence to the lower classes. In a relatively class-free democracy, no such process exists and an interest in such pursuits should be emphasized at every level of society.

Those in positions of prestige, influence and power in a democracy can be especially valuable in promoting education and intellectual achievement, cultural and civic interests, and in promulgating the growth of the democratic process by directing attention to the significant issues of the day, seeing that all sides of important questions are given full and proper coverage, and keeping open the channels of inquiry and communication that are the foundations of a free society.

It is obvious that those in positions of prestige, influence and power in the U.S. have not always done this, that the men in control of our various media of communication have too often simply pandered to popular taste and prejudice rather than making any serious attempt to lead or enlighten.

Though we have as free a press as any nation in the world, some unpopular ideas and issues of public concern do not often receive full and unprejudiced coverage in the mass magazines and newspapers; among them: communism, Cuba, Red China’s membership in the UN, world government, the dangers of radioactive fallout from atomic testing, religious totalitarianism in America, censorship, sexual morality and law, divorce, birth control, abortion, prostitution, sex in prison, capital punishment and drug addiction.

Even the heads of our leading institutions of learning cannot always be counted upon to publicly endorse the most basic tenets of democracy — as when loyalty oaths were required of the teachers of many of our prominent universities and colleges, during the hysterical period of the McCarthy and House Un-American Activities probes; when the president of the University of Illinois fired biology professor Leo Koch for writing a letter to the Daily Illini expressing a liberal view on sexual relations before marriage; or when the president of Baylor, early this year, forced the university’s drama department to close its production of Eugene O’Neill’s prize-winning play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, in mid-run, because, “the language of the play was not in keeping with the ideals of the university.” The Baylor incident prompted Paul Baker, the highly regarded head of the drama department, and 11 members of his staff to quit. In a joint statement, the departing faculty members said, “Our decision is not a hasty one. It has evolved from many hours of soul-searching conferences and prayer on the part of each faculty member. It was a heart-wrenching decision. The faculty, representing 140 combined years of dedicated effort, has worked to make a contribution to the promotion and growth of Baylor. It is not easy to leave such a large investment…. It is our fervent hope and prayer that Baylor University will grow beyond the confines and pressures of the present moment and that it will fulfill its destiny as a complete and great university.” During his 28 years at Baylor, Baker had pioneered in many phases of theater and attracted international attention and acclaim: Thankfully, comstockery does not infest the entire academic community: Within an hour of his resignation, Trinity University announced Baker’s appointment as chairman of its speech-and-drama department.

This fall Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster Jr. was confronted with a difficult decision concerning academic freedom in the student body: a request from the school’s Political Union to allow rabid segregationist George Wallace, governor of Alabama, the opportunity to speak at Yale. Brewster denied the request, because he felt it might insult or incite New Haven negroes. We believe it was the wrong decision for, as Time pointed out, in a democracy free speech must be “for the bad guys as well as the good guys.”

Other Ivy League schools did not compound Brewster’s error: The Harvard-Radcliffe Young Democrats invited Wallace to speak there after receiving a ruling of “no-objection” from President Nathan M. Pusey; when the Brown University Daily Herald invited Wallace to speak. President Barnaby Keeny said that Brown is open to all speakers — “communists, fascists, racists, and bigots.” Princeton’s president , Robert Goheen, sanctioned a student invitation to Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, though he termed it “untimely and ill-considered,” adding, however, that free inquiry is “pivotal to the very idea of a university.”

The reaction to the Yale refusal became so intense that law students at the school decided to reinvite Wallace, and this time Kingman Brewster, while making it clear his considered it “offensive and unwise,” did not interfere. Voltaire expressed the pertinent point best, more than 200 years ago, when he said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire understood, as all those who believe in democracy should, that a free society depends upon the free interchange of ideas — an unhampered interchange of ideas both popular and unpopular, ideas that seem significant and those that seem insignificant, ideas with which we agree and those with which we disagree. And when we refuse the right of free expression to anyone, we have reduced — to that extent — the freedom of us all.

Free Enterprise in a Free Society

We favor capitalism above any other economic system — not because it is “The American Way,” but because it is consistent with our belief in the individual and his freedom: Competitive free enterprise is the logical economic counterpart of a free democratic society.

We have expressed our concern over the degree to which capitalism has become a dirty word — even in America. We believe this is caused by a lack of knowledge of what capitalism really is, how it differs from controlled economics like socialism and communism, and the extent to which it has proven its superiority over them. Americans’ mixed emotions about capitalism stem, in part, from the puritan religious and moral heritage that equates material possessions and the accumulation of wealth with sin, and in opposition to the supposedly more worthwhile spiritual aspirations of man. But, for us, no conflict need exist between the spirit, mind and body of man, nor between a consideration of spiritual values and the acquisition of both knowledge and the material benefits of a free economy.

Americans have traditionally “worshiped the Almighty Dollar” — as our social critics have expressed it — and suffered a gilt-edged guilt complex as a result. But the emphasis on competitive enterprise and economic gain has given this country the highest standard of living in the world, producing not only an unequaled national prosperity and the physical possessions and comforts that only money can buy, but also the elimination of illiteracy, famine and disease (the compatriots of poverty), a longer life expectancy, greater upward social and economic mobility, the benefits of fuller, freer communication (through books, magazines, newspapers, radio, television, films and theater), increased education (despite our failure to give education its full due), more opportunities — both vocational and avocational — and more leisure time to enjoy the latter.

Capitalism has proven itself superior to any controlled economy, just as democracy has proven itself superior to any other political or social order. Free enterprise is the best, most productive economic system because it assures the fullest scope to individual initiative, taking advantage of man’s naturally acquisitive and competitive nature and offering the greatest opportunity to the greatest number, with maximum potential benefits to all.

Capitalism places the ownership of property in the hands of individual citizens instead of in the hands of government. Property represents power and if power is to rest with the individual in a free society, as it must if the individual is to remain free, then he must have the right to possess property. A society in which the state owns all property, or so controls the use of all property as to enjoy the equivalent of ownership, is not free. Without private property, the individual is a slave of the state.

Because the individual cannot be truly free if he is robbed of the power of property, the economic system of socialism is incompatible with the sociopolitical system of democracy. A simple example of the way in which freedom is linked to property will help to make the point: A society may profess the ideal of a free press, but if all paper, printing and binding equipment, and the book-, magazine- and newspaper-publishing firms themselves, as well as the distributing companies, bookstores, and magazine and newspaper stands are owned by the government, a free press does not really exist.

We do not believe it is possible to return to a completely laissez-faire economy — some minimal controls over our economic life are desirable and necessary. But the clear purpose of these controls should be not to stifle individual initiative and enterprise, but to stimulate them — to keep the economy truly competitive through checks and balances that make impossible the undue acquisition of wealth and power by any group — be it of management or labor.

We are familiar with the seemingly negative aspects of the free-enterprise system — the tendency to cycles of boon and bust; the fact that in a competitive economy not everyone can come out on top; the waste of duplicated effort, products and services, by competing companies; the creation of unreal “needs” through aggressive advertising; the evil of built-in obsolescence.

But not all such negatives are the inevitable by-products of a free competitive economy. In addition, our economic advisors have found remedies for the worst of these deficiencies and the negatives that remain are slight, indeed, when compared with the benefits that accrue to society as a whole from private ownership, the profit motive and free competition.

Without some governmental direction, the present economy would not long remain either competitive or free. Yet many of the current checks and balances would not have been necessary if previous controls had not been introduced which created new and unanticipated situations requiring still further and different controls.

It is only a few decades since the U.S. began enacting laws to protect labor from the abuses of power by Big Business; today there is evidence of a growing need for legislation to protect business from the abuses of power by Big Labor.

Our present tax structure offers another significant case in point. Excessive taxes inhibit initiative, investment and business expansion — they have a deleterious effect upon free enterprise and the economy. As U.S taxes grew — often in a haphazard and wholly arbitrary manner — the harmful effect upon the economy was partially offset through the introduction of equally capricious exceptions, exemptions, special depreciation, depletion allowances and deferrals.

The result is an unnatural monster of a tax structure — Frankensteinian in concept — created from the blood and bones of private individuals and industry — crippling free competition and sapping the strength of an otherwise vigorous economy.

The current tax setup, both personal and corporate, not only stifles initiative, but the special allowances and loopholes set otherwise honest men to searching for ways and means of avoiding their tax obligations, and a whole new breed of tax counselors and consultants has sprung up to aid them in doing just that. This generates the same sort of antisocial behavior that Prohibition did, and when social commentators criticize the immortality of the modern businessman, they would do well to examine current U.S. taxes, as one of the significant causative factors.

It is not usually recognized, but our excessive taxes, including the graduated income tax, favor the already wealthy individual or company and work their primary hardship on the newcomers who might otherwise offer competition to those at the top. The previously prosperous amassed their wealth before prohibitive taxes were introduced; the present tax structure makes it most difficult for anyone else to duplicate the accomplishment. Higher taxes thus tend to protect established wealth and power, reduce competition and perpetuate the status quo.

Excessive taxes not only limit our own business growth and prosperity; additionally, they compare unfavorably with the taxes of most of the countries of the Common Market, making it difficult for U.S. business to compete internationally.

We approve of President Kennedy’s proposed tax cut and only wish it was more substantial. We also wish that the proposed plan included more tax reforms, as was originally contemplated. But our present tax laws are such a maze of special concessions and considerations that the passage of any meaningful reforms is almost impossible. It has been seriously suggested that the best plan of all might be starting all over again from the beginning. That might not be such a bad idea.

The last few generations have witnessed a general trend, in the United States, away from free competitive enterprise toward a more controlled economy. Some of these controls, in the form of social legislation, have served desirable ends and benefited both society and the individual; some have had a stifling influence — shifting the emphasis from initiative to security, discouraging productivity, investment and economic growth.

It is sometimes argued that free enterprise was practical when our society was simpler, but that a complex modern economy requires greater government regulation and control. The opposite view seems to us to make more sense. It is precisely because a modern industrial economy is so extensive and diverse that it requires the managerial supervision of many individuals for its efficient operation rather than the supervision of a single government appointee.

Government control over business should always remain at a practical minimum, because it is our firm conviction that the individual operates best with the fewest number of restrictions and our further belief that excessive power endangers freedom — whether that power is in the hands of government or any other entrenched group.

There is this additional, all-important consideration also: Private enterprise is, other things being equal, more efficient than government; a free society is more productive than a controlled one.

It is not that men in government are any less capable — it is simply that when one removes the primary motivations of personal ownership and profit, along with competition, it markedly reduces enterprise and efficiency.

General Motors and U.S. Steel annually produce profits of most impressive proportions, but though it is not plagued with prohibitive taxes and controls, no one can remember when the biggest American business of all — the U.S. Government — last operated in the black.

The U.S. Postal Department incurs a remarkable deficit each year delivering the mail, despite periodic rate increases with no related increase in service. In contrast, AT&FT supplies Americans with another form of communication and, distressed by the depersonalization of digit dialing or no, we’re impressed by the handsome profit they manage to show at the end of every fiscal year and the handsome dividend they regularly send to stockholders, while generally improving the service, lowering the rates, purchasing all those swell ads showing nice folks conversing with loved ones on the phone and giant fingers doing the walking, with enough loot left over to put Telstar into space.

We’re not suggesting that the mail delivery be returned to private enterprise where, incidentally, it began; we’re simply indicating that the profit motive is a powerful factor in improving efficiency — no doubt, if AT&T had significant competition, that would only further improve our telephone company’s operation.

The Cincinnati Enquirer recently offered further evidence of the high cost of government effort in an editorial on the Peace Corps — a pet project of the current administration of which, we hasten to add, both we and the Enquirer approve: “It is worth noting that the budget for the current year allocates the Corps some $40 million, which, according to R. Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps’ director, includes $9000 for each Corps member. A survey of the private and religious organizations that send missionaries abroad — to do very much the same kind of work for which the Peace Corps is responsible — reveals that their normal maintenance cost for each missionary is $2000 a year.

“The obvious moral to be drawn is not confined to the Peace Corps. Whatever government undertakes, it does at several times the rock-bottom cost — a circumstance that ought to make every American think twice before he invites the federal government into any new areas of activity.”

A look abroad only confirms the conviction that competitive free enterprise supplies an impetus missing in state-owned or -controlled economies. East and West Germany offer a dramatic contrast in postwar recovery, with half the country prospering under capitalism and the other half suffering the deprivation and despair of Communist control.

The Common Market has demonstrated the remarkable economic stimulus that free competition can provide on an international basis, with the cooperating countries enjoying an unprecedented prosperity as a result. Even Russia has, in recent years, found it necessary to resort to capitalist incentives in both her industrial and farm programs to improve the efficiency of the workers. And while the United States contemplates the problem of grain surpluses, Russia — which once was in the position of being able to export a certain amount of grain herself, this year has been forced to import hundreds of millions of dollars of wheat from the U.S. and the rest of the free world to make up for the deficiencies in its own agricultural output.

The contrast in efficiency between various forms of government reminds us of the humorous list of definitions that crossed our deck awhile back:

Socialism — You have two cows and give one to your neighbor.

Communism — You have two cows; the government takes both and gives you the milk.

Fascism — You have two cows; the government takes both and sells you the milk.

Nazism — You have two cows; the government takes both and shoots you.

Bureaucratism — You have two cows; the government takes both, shoots one, milks the other and throws the milk away.

Capitalism — You have two cows; you sell one and buy a bull.

This spoof of the “Isms” may not supply new insights into the economic policies of the various forms of government listed, and perhaps the elephant jokes have reduced your enthusiasm for animal humor, but the overall point of these definitions is a sound one — the best, most efficient economy is a free economy, which relies upon the resourcefulness of the free individual.

At this crucial time, when our nation is involved in a cold war of ideologies for the uncommitted countries of the world, it is most important that every American have a clear understanding of just what capitalism really is — and recognize that while it may have its defects, as anything man-made does, it is the best economic system yet conceived.

Freedom of Opportunity

Freedom, for us, is quite clearly more than the right of each individual to do and say what he wishes, without fear or favor from the state or from society — it also includes opportunity.

If man is to be free to fully explore his individual potential — for the good of himself and his society — it also includes opportunity.

While we have pointed out the dangers in the state becoming overly protective, believing that too much paternalistic concern for its citizens can sap them of the individual initiative and enterprise that are the essence and strength of a democracy, the government may rightly interest itself in the education, health, and welfare of the individual, since the ignorant, the unhealthy and the destitute have only a limited opportunity for the pursuit of happiness, as guaranteed by our Constitution.

A competitive economy benefits society as a whole, but it also produces casualties. Not everyone can wind up on top. It is just and proper that society concern itself with those who might otherwise suffer unnecessarily from the competition.

Each of us deserves some part of the knowledge, and the scientific and technological advances produced by the generations that preceded us. If society and its government, as the established administrator of society, can be forever reminded of their true purpose — which is to serve the individual and not to hamper, impede or control him — then we can all share in our common cultural, educational, philosophical, scientific and technological heritage — and it can serve as a springboard to greater accomplishment and a motivation to new achievement, rather than being a source of initiative-stifling security and conformity.

The distribution of the benefits of past progress to the many both improves and strengthens society for each member in it — for no social order is any more well off, more healthy, more prosperous, more educated and more culturally aware than the sum of all of its parts.

A country’s most valuable natural resource is not its mineral deposits, its oil, its timber, or its agricultural produce — it is its people. And no nation, big or small, rich or poor, can reasonably afford — in this increasingly competitive world — to waste any part of this most valuable of its natural resources, by permitting the perpetuation of ignorance, disease, hunger or poverty.

Furthermore, our view of society — of the community of man — is worldwide. It has no regional or national boundaries. The individual and his rights remain supreme — the world over — without regard to race, religion or ethnic origins.

Man’s scientific skills have given him the ability to literally destroy the earth and everything on it; it remains for man to learn how to live on it as well. And just as man’s problems no longer know any boundaries, so his decisions, his hopes, dreams and aspirations must be free of all limiting boundaries also. Man’s destiny encompasses all the earth, and more — it now reaches to the stars.

A United World

Science and technology have shrunk the earth to the size of a community. As a result, we must now deal with one another on an international basis to an extent that was never necessary before. It seems obvious that this must eventually lead us to some form of world government — that even as we now have a United States of America, we must eventually establish a United Nations of the World.

This is not inimical to the interests of individuals or nations, but is consistent with them, for it is to be hoped that when world government becomes a reality, it will be based upon the same concepts of freedom and the importance of the individual as our founding fathers established for America through the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

We are presently trying to solve vital international problems without the world organization necessary to make them a reality. The United Nations is a beginning, but until it possesses the power to establish laws — by democratic process — and enforce them, we can never achieve international freedom for each individual man. Until the United Nations, or some similar world-governing body, has the power to enforce its decisions, it can never be more than a debating society of nationalistic interests.

The greatest single problem facing mankind today is the possibility of its extinction though atomic conflict. But the only possible solution to the problem — true world government — is given relatively little attention. By placing national interests ahead of the interests of the individual, we run the risk of world annihilation.

It is as though the United States were to attempt to solve its national problems without any national government. Imagine, if you will, the impossibility of ever achieving the individual rights, the freedom and the prosperity we presently enjoy, if each of the 50 states had its own powerful army and was engaged in an arms race with every other state, and the guarantees of the Constitution and the resulting federal laws were limited by each sovereign state’s willingness to accept or reject them.

No rational human being would want to live in a community in which there was no police force, in which each family was armed, and where disputes were settled by the use of these arms rather than on the basis of justice and reason. And yet that is exactly how we have traditionally settled our differences as nations. In the past, men have thus decimated whole generations, destroyed the cultural advances of centuries, and subjugated the population of entire countries, in settling their disagreements.

Now, however, man’s scientific advances have so exceeded his social progress, that he is in immediate danger of destroying his entire world and everything in it.

We can never escape this danger until the ability to wage such warfare has been eliminated, but international disarmament alone is obviously not the answer — any more than the answer for a community is simply the disarming of each household. Without a police force, families would still settle a great many disputes through the use of whatever force remained at their command, and so would nations. The only logical solution to the problem is the same, on an international basis, as it is for a single community: the establishment of a world government, conceived in liberty, with justice for all, with an all-powerful international police force to implement its laws.

Before the invention of atomic weapons, such an ideal would have been considerably more difficult to achieve. Now, however, it is relatively simple. If all atomic arms were in the possession, not of individual nations, but of a truly international army, established to enforce the laws of a democratically conceived international government, war would cease to exist. Disputes between nations would then be settled, as they should be, not by power or coercion, but by law, justice and reason.

Nor is this ideal an impractical concept, unrelated to the realities of the world as it exists today. Ideally all of the nations of the world, and especially the most powerful ones, should be dedicated to such a plan, but this is not essential to its success. If the United States and a majority of the free nations of the world were to institute such a plan, no single nation or group of nations, including Russia and the Communist bloc, would be powerful enough to stand against it. Moreover, if the world government were established on a truly just and equal basis, rational men of every nation would recognize that it offered the only alternative to world annihilation. Most certainly the great majority of the presently uncommitted nations of the world would commit themselves to such a plan, which favored international justice rather than any national or power-bloc interest.

The need for such international control of atomic weapons is also immediate, before more nations achieve the power to plunge us into oblivion. Most of us recognize that the greatest danger of atomic warfare exists, not today — between the United States and Russia — but in the immediate future, when Communist China, which rejects the concept of peaceful coexistence, becomes an atomic power. A world government, which outlawed the development or possession of atomic weapons by any one nation, would put an end to the ever-present possibility of total destruction of the human race.

It would also produce a new prosperity throughout the world by eliminating the current arms race and the need for countries to expend, and thus waste, a staggering part of their wealth and productivity in the building and sustaining of the ever more powerful, more expensive weaponry for a war they dare not wage.

An Irrational Society

This, then, is the foundation of our philosophy — an emphasis on the importance of the individual and his freedom; the view that man’s personal self-interest is natural and good, and that it can be channeled, through reason, to the benefit of the individual and his society; the belief that morality should be based upon reason; the conviction that society should exist as man’s servant, not as his master; the idea that the purpose in man’s life should be found in the full living of life itself and the individual pursuit of happiness.

This concept of man and society may seem so elementary that the reader will take for granted that most men of intelligence concur. But witness the society in which we live. Out morality is based, in large part, on mystical dogma, not reason. Our lives are governed by superstition and prejudice rather than knowledge. Self-sacrifice is prized above self-interest and self-esteem. Society is placed above the individual. And the goal of happiness is lost in a labyrinthine maze of emotional responses, self-doubts, self-denials, inhibitions, prejudices, unthinking value judgments, superstitions and hypocrisies. Our society is predicated largely on the irrational rather than the rational.

Nowhere is this more true than in the realm of sex. We have already considered the historical origins of our national sexual neuroses. Next month we will contrast our contemporary sex laws and supposed beliefs with actual behavior, and consider the effects of such inconsistency on the psychological and moral fabric of society. Following that we will suggest a more rational sexual code, consistent with the philosophy thus far expressed, and more apt to produce a happier, healthier social order in the future.

No related posts.

Over the coming months we will be adding numerous and exclusive feature articles, so please check back often!

The Playboy Philosophy Part 11

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW wrote, “All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.” Eugene O’Neill put it more bluntly: “Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last cowardly resort of the boob and the bigot.” On June 4, we were arrested in our home by four intrepid officers of the law, on order of Chicago Corporation Counsel John Melaniphy, for “publishing and distributing an obscene publication.” The “obscene publication” turned out to be the June issue of Playboy and what the Corporation Counsel objected to, he said, was the picture story on film star Jayne Mansfield nude in bed and bubble bath in scenes for her latest contribution to cinematic art, Promises, Promises! We discussed the obscenity charge and arrest at length in the last installment of The Playboy Philosophy, because we believe this single example of censorship can add considerable insight into the real dangers of such police action in a free America. We hope to prove beyond any reasonable doubt, in this second installment on the subject, that a good deal more is involved here than nude photographs of Jayne Mansfield and that what we are faced with is a frightening example of church-state suppression of freedom of the press that strikes at the very heart of our democracy.

Why Now?

Irv Kupcinet expressed the feelings of many when he wrote, in his Chicago Sun-Times column: “The obvious question about the arrest of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner on obscenity charges based on the Jayne Mansfield nudes in the June issue is: Why now? Playboy has been publishing nudes of voluptuous dishes for years.” Why now? It is a very good question and in attempting to find the answer — in attempting to establish the real motivations behind the arrest — an insidious, twisted labyrinth of pious prejudice and prudery may be brought to light. It is virtually impossible to look deep within the human mind and find the sometimes complex motives that lie hidden behind a single act, unless your subject reclines willingly upon a psychoanalyst’s couch. We have no analytical couch, and if we had, our adversaries in this little melodrama would surely decline to lie there. So instead of supplying suspected motives, we’ll offer up not one, but a chain of events, and let the reader draw his own conclusions. First it must be mentioned that Playboy has never been adjudged obscene by any court in the land. In last month’s editorial, we entered into an extensive examination of the recent Supreme Court and other high-court decisions on, and definitions of, obscenity. We successfully established, we think, that not by the wildest extensions of these definitions and decisions could be the June issue — or any issue — of Playboy be considered legally obscene. We went further, pointing out the extent to which Playboy meets contemporary community standards, as defined by the Supreme Court, and how the text and illustrations in this magazine are considerably more respectable than much of the material now available in a great many books, magazines and movies in our present-day society –and far less objectionable, by any objective standard, than material already declared not obscene by our courts. We went further still, pointing out that Chicago censors had approved scenes in a French film for exhibition that very month that were far bolder than the still photographs in Playboy. And pointing out, too, that similar (if less revealing) nude bed scenes (it was the photographs of Jayne in bed to which the Corporation Counsel took particular exception) were published at the same time in two other major magazines (Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post) with nary a Counsel criticism. And after all else was said and done, since similar photographs had appeared many times before in the pages of Playboy during our nearly ten years of publishing, with never so much as a discouraging word from the custodians of this fair city’s morality — why now? What special, possibly pre-established perspective or prejudice set Playboy apart from the rest? And what prompted the action at this particular time?

Religious Freedom in Chicago

If the June pictorial on Jayne Mansfield is not so different from many that Playboy has printed before, what is different about the June issue — or perhaps one or more of the issues that immediately preceded it? Well, nothing really — except…! Except The Playboy Philosophy, this continuing editorial statement of our personal convictions and publishing credo, begun last December and carried in each issue since. These first installments have been primarily devoted to our concern over the separation of church and state in a free society and critical of organized religion’s undue influence over portions of our government and law, thus emphasizing that true religious freedom means not only freedom of, but freedom from religion.

Chicago remains one of the few major cities in America that is dominated by a single religious denomination — that is, where a majority of the officials in power belong to one church and where their administrative decisions sometimes appear to be predicated more on religious dogma than civil law. We state this fact sadly, for it is also true that the present city administration is far and away the best that Chicago has had in many, many years.

In earlier installments of the Philosophy, we cited, and criticized, a number of specific instances in which, it seemed to us, Chicago officialdom had been less concerned with the importance of maintaining a separate church and state than they should have been. The Chicago Censor Board, made up of the wives of policemen, denied a license to the Italian film, The Miracle, on the grounds that it was “sacrilegious.” (New York, another city that has a history of similar religious prejudice, did the same.) The Supreme Court declared this an unconstitutional basis for censorship, as it infringed upon religious freedom. In his decision in the Times Film Corp. vs. Chicago, Chief Justice Earl Warren stated, “Recently, Chicago refused to issue a permit for the exhibition of the motion picture Anatomy of a Murder…because it found the use of the words ‘rape’ and ‘contraceptive’ to be objectionable…. The New York censors forbade the discussion in films of pregnancy, venereal disease, eugenics, birth control, abortion, illegitimacy, prostitution, miscegenation and divorce. A member of the Chicago Censor Board explained that she rejected a film because ‘it was immoral, corrupt, indecent, against my…religious principles.’”

Following the Supreme Court’s decision, Chicago censors promptly rebanned The Miracle on the basis that it was “obscene.” (Which supports our earlier observation that the charge of obscenity is often used to censor material that offends a particular group for reasons that have nothing to do with sex, from religion to racial equality.)

And it should be noted that the word “contraceptive,” which Chicago censors wished to expunge from Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, can be considered offensive to only that specific religious minority that opposes birth control.

Birth control became a major issue in Chicago earlier this year, after millionaire philanthropist Arnold H. Maremont had accepted a position as chairman of the Illinois Public Aid Commission. Maremont announced that the IPAC had adopted a resolution to make birth control information and devices available to public-assistance recipients upon request and provided that the contraceptives were prescribed by a physician.

Maremont stated that the new IPAC program would accomplish the following worthwhile ends: (1.) “It will give the needy the same option of determining the sizing and spacing of their families that others in our society have.” (2.) “It will curb the soaring numbers of illegitimate children we currently are closing our eyes to.” (3.) “It will produce a multi-million-dollar annual savings for the taxpayers of this state.”

Then the public furor began — with sides chosen along disturbingly, if predictably, religious lines. Prominent Catholics, including Chicago’s Mayor Daley, denounced the plan as “immoral,” because it would make the assistance available to the public-aid recipients who were not married and not living with their husbands. The day before the mayoral election, which Daley won handily, Republican candidate Benjamin S. Adamowski made a bid for the city’s Catholic vote by filing an anti-birth-control suit against the IPAC in Superior Court. The IPAC would have customarily been defended by Illinois Attorney General William G. Clark, but Clark, a Catholic, announced that he, too, was opposed to the program. Clark stated that he considered the plan illegal and he advised the State Auditor not to sign and the State Treasurer not to honor warrants drawn to cover the costs of the birth-control program.

Maremont hired private legal counsel and vowed to carry the fight for approval of the Commission’s program to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary. “This issue and all its ramifications will be aired before the highest tribunals of the land, if that is what it takes to permit us to move ahead with the program,” he said.

“This Commission has every right to establish its policy, a policy which countless individuals and organizations support…. I have stated many times that this policy has been established with all the built-in safeguards that our conscientious and deeply concerned commissioners can provide.”

Attorney Thomas C. McConnell, hired by the IPAC to defend it after Attorney General Clark sided with opponents of its program, charged in the court that Clark had “sold his client [the IPAC] down the river” by joining Adamowski in his suit. McConnell accused Clark of following “the dogmas of his own religion” and he requested a change of venue on the ground that Superior Court Judge John J. Lupe was prejudiced.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported, “Outside the court, Clark, a Roman Catholic, said: ‘This is not a Catholic question, a Protestant question, or a Jewish question. All religions say that couples should marry before engaging in this type of conduct.’ Clark repeated that he opposes the IPAC’s program on grounds that it encourages illicit and immoral behavior….”

Clark neglected to mention that the “morality” aspect of the program was actually a smoke screen raised by some of its opponents and that most of the prominent Protestant and Jewish individuals and organizations that had been contacted, as well as those of no religious affiliation, favored the IPAC plan. The Illinois Council of Churches, representing 11 Protestant denominations, went on record as favoring the birth-control program for the public-aid recipients; the policy statement was adopted unanimously by the Council’s legislative committee.

Ethel Parker, of the Independent Voters of Illinois, stated, in a letter to the Sun-Times: “The Independent Voters of Illinois at this time repeats its stand on using public funds to furnish birth-control information and supplies to women on relief. We are in favor of such a plan.

“Our contention is that preventing an increase of unwanted children is a policy of moral responsibility first and secondarily a prudent economic move…. So long as birth control is not forced on anyone whose religious views forbid it, IVI fails to see how religion enters into this controversy. It is also very naive for anyone to believe that the use of contraceptives promotes immorality. In our view their use merely prevents adding to social ills resulting from promiscuity.”

In another letter, in the same issue of the Sun-Times, a Catholic reader insisted that the State Senate intervene, altering the IPAC program so that the contraceptives could be “prescribed only by a doctor for married women living with their husbands and only when their lives would be endangered by pregnancy.” (Emphasis added.) The reader also indicated that Governor Kerner should ask for Arnold Maremont’s resignation.

Catholic Superior Judge Lupe refused to grant a change of venue, requested on the ground that he was prejudiced, and proceeded to rule against the IPAC in the Adamowski suit to halt the birth-control program. The State Senate then passed a measure drastically curtailing the Illinois Public Aid Commission’s authority to help mothers under its care to avoid childbirth by use of contraceptives, and Senator W. Russell Arrington introduced a bill to abolish the IPAC. In a seemingly inconsistent move, the Senate confirmed Governor Kerner’s reappointment of IPAC Chairman Maremount, but then — in an unprecedented move — it revoked the reappointment, because a number of the senators took exception to some of Maremont’s public utterances regarding the Senate and IPAC aid. Financier Maremont was thus returned to the less fickle world of his private businesses and philanthropies, and Illinois lost the services of an exceptionally gifted public-spirited citizen.

The point in this controversy over birth control, as in the matter of censorship, is not the right of Catholics, or any other religious group, to hold and exercise whatever belief they choose. It is the undemocratic action of forcing their religious convictions on other citizens who do not share their views.

In commenting on the Chicago controversy in an article on religious freedom and the importance of the separation of church and state, Reverend H.B. Sissel, Secretary for National Affairs of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., wrote recently in Look: “Seventeen states prohibit the sale or distribution of contraceptives [to the general public] except through doctors or pharmacists; five states ban all public sale of such devices. Although these statutes were enacted in the 19th century under Protestant pressure, times and attitudes have changed for many Protestants. Today, they believe that Catholics have no right to keep such laws in operation. Some Catholic spokesmen have agreed that their Church is not officially interested in trying to make the private behavior of non-Catholics conform to Roman Catholic canon law. Meanwhile, the laws stay on the books, though they are being tested in the courts.”

The Reverend Sissel commented on a number of other church-state conflicts in society today and concluded his thoughtful article by stating: “The so-called ‘wall of separation’ between church and state has been breached often by both, each using the other for its own ends….

“I know it is a sign of my bias as a Christian (I hope many other Christians share the bias) that I believe, in the long run, that political and civil liberties are safest when the church is free to be the church. And by ‘free,’ I do not mean just free of external coercion. The freedom of the church lies in its recognition of its basic mission: to be deeply involved in the personal, social, political and economic life of the world — but not to be identified with the world: to encourage compassion, a desire for justice and a vision of what it means to be truly human; and to renew that vision by living to the wellspring of its faith.

“Churches and synagogues, clergymen and churchgoers, all must regain the unique sense of purpose and mission that God has given them to perform by worship within and witness without. All need to face, and deal with, the urgent problems bound up in the issue of church and state. And all need to recognize that when men of faith begin to look to the state as a pillar of religion, the edifice of faith they seek to save has already begun to collapse.”

Nowhere is this truth more evident than in the matters of free speech and press. Religious censorship reared its ugly head in Chicago in an even bigger controversy than the recent birth-control suppression when, late in 1956, the film Martin Luther was scheduled to be shown over WGN-TV and then suddenly cancelled. Prominent Protestant clergymen and private citizens charged “Roman Catholic censorship” and a Protestant Action Committee issued a statement saying: “Pending a full review of the situation, the committee decided today to authorize a formal protest with the Federal Communications Commission against WGN-TV for the banning of the film.”

Robert E.A. Lee, executive secretary of Lutheran Church Productions Inc., which made Martin Luther, wrote of the Catholic censorship of the film in Chicago, and around the world, in The Christian Century, saying: “In Chicago all the fuss is focused on just why WGN-TV got cold feet and ‘pulled the film.’ Martin Luther was scheduled for the December date at the specific request of the station after its officials had carefully previewed it…. [Then] the showing was canceled.

“Aroused Chicagoans were convinced that they knew why. A volunteer action committee of Protestant leaders of the city called a press conference and bluntly charged ‘de facto censorship,’ claiming WGN-TV had yielded to pressures ‘mobilized by the Roman Catholic Church.’ The station’s public relations department declared, in a polished euphemism, than an ‘emotional reaction’ had led them to cancel. A spokesman for the chancellery of the Chicago Roman Catholic archdiocese denied that any ‘official’ protest was made. It is conceivable that the representative of Cardinal Stritch who visited a WGN-TV official at 2 p.m. on December 14 [one week before the planned showing] had other reasons for the appointment. But, oddly enough, a responsible station executive telephoned us in advance of the representative’s visit to get information to support his own arguments as to why Martin Luther deserved to be televised.

“The Chicago case makes more urgent that question that many concerned individuals — including some Catholics — have been asking: Is one religious group really attempting to dictate what the public can see and hear through mass-communication media? Is the Roman Catholic Church becoming more aggressive in extending its censorship programs beyond its own sphere?”

Lee went on to comment on the banning of the film in Quebec: “In that part of the world the political influence of the cardinal is no secret. It is known that the censor received his instructions from higher authorities. And a person who discussed this situation frankly with the provincial premier revealed that the decision was ‘requested’ by an ecclesiastical authority. This despotism boomeranged mightily — as such despotism anywhere must sooner or later. When, in spite of the ban, a courageous group of Protestant churches in the Montreal area staged a united demonstration by showing the film simultaneously for a week on their own premises, they had seats for only half of the comers. But the government refused to rescind the ban.”

The Canadian ban was not lifted until 1962, when the censorship board of Quebec was changed and the new board permitted showing of the film. Lee mentioned that a number of Catholic leaders throughout the world had not reacted so emotionally to the movie which, while showing the Protestant side of the Reformation, was in no sense anti-Catholic. Many Catholics, here and abroad, were also openly concerned about their fellow Catholics acting as censors. A letter in Time said: “I am one of the many Catholics, I hope, who are appalled at the shallow thinking of our Chicago brethren who became a pressure group protesting the showing of the TV film Martin Luther. If, as Catholics, we possess the truth, why do they resort to such intolerance in order to prohibit what they consider to be false from the beginning. We cannot deny the historical existence of Luther and his founding of the Protestant Church. Do Chicago Catholics fear the facts of history? I wonder if they realize how much their bigotry damages the cause of Catholicism and the fellowship of man?”

Despite the controversy caused by the Chicago censorship, WGN-TV declined to reschedule the film. Sterling “Red” Quinlan, the rebel head of rival TV station WBKB, then accepted the motion picture and aired it without further incident. “Red” Quinlan is a liberal Catholic.

The banning of the June issue of Playboy caused no comparable public outcry — or the religious implications were less clearly defined. But as we shall see, the situation is disturbingly similar.

In The Playboy Philosophy, we have been outspoken in our opposition to any tyranny over the mind of man, whether invoked in the name of the state or in the name of God. We specifically criticized the part that organized religion — Protestant as well as Catholic — has played in such suppression throughout history, down to the present day. The views that we have expressed are shared by many of the more liberal clergy — of all denominations — who recognize that religious freedom requires that the church remain free from any involvement in government and any direct coercion of the citizens in a free society.

We were especially critical, in the April and May issues, of the Chicago “justice” meted out to comedian Lenny Bruce. In June the administrators of that “justice” turned their ire on Playboy.

Bruce was arrested on charges of giving an obscene performance. He had been previously arrested on the same charge in San Francisco and Los Angeles. There were differences in the Chicago and California incidents, however: In San Francisco, he was acquitted and in Los Angeles, all charges were subsequently dropped; in Chicago, he was found guilty and given the maximum sentence of one year in prison and a $1000 fine (the decision is now being appealed). In Chicago, also, the license of the nightclub in which he appeared was revoked for two weeks, in an administrative proceeding that preceded the trial. In other words, before the actual charge of obscenity was ever heard in a court of law, the city suspended the nightclub’s license for having permitted an obscene performance on its premises. And by this action, Chicago officials succeeded in banning Bruce from any future appearances at nightclubs in this city, since — no matter what the final outcome of the trial — it will take a very brave club owner indeed to book Bruce knowing he is thereby placing his liquor license in jeopardy.

Why did California and Chicago trials end so differently? There were religious implications in the Chicago arrest and trial that did not exist in either San Francisco or Los Angeles. Variety reported, after the first day of the hearings on the liquor-license revocation: “After nearly a full day of hearing prosecution witnesses, it is evident that, in essence, Bruce is being tried in absentia. Another impression is that the city is going to a great deal of trouble to prosecute Alan Ribback, the owner of the club, although there have been no previous allegations against the café and the charge involves no violence or drunken behavior…. Testimony so far indicates that the prosecutor is at least equally as concerned with Bruce’s indictment of organized religion as he is with the more obvious sexual content of the comic’s act. It’s possible that Bruce’s comments on the Catholic Church have hit sensitive nerves in Chicago’s Catholic-oriented administration and police department.”

The religious considerations in the case arose again during the trial, as Variety reported in a second news story: A number of people “have been puzzled by the arrest, since it is the general opinion of many café observers that performances with similar sexual content have been overlooked at other Chi clubs. It’s thought that Bruce’s attacks on organized religion may have been the deciding factor in making the arrest, or so the line of prosecution questions would indicate to date.”

Chicago’s daily newspapers made no mention of the religious implications in the arrest and trial, but on the basis of sworn affidavits from two witnesses, The Realist reported the following conversation between the Captain of the Vice Squad and the then owner of The Gate of Horn (he has since been forced to sell his interest in the club) following Bruce’s arrest.

Captain McDermott: I’d like to speak to the manager. Alan Ribback: I’m the manager. McDermott: I’m Captain McDermott. I want to tell you that if this man ever uses a four-letter word in this club again, I’m going to pinch you and everyone in here. If he ever speaks against religion, I’m going to pinch you and everyone in here. Do you understand? Ribback: I don’t have anything against any religion. McDermott: Maybe I’m not talking to the right person. Are you the man who hired Lenny Bruce? Ribback: Yes, I am. I’m Alan Ribback. McDermott: Well, I don’t know why you ever hired him. You’ve had people here. But he mocks the pope — and I’m speaking as a Catholic. I’m here to tell you your license is in danger. We’re going to have someone here watching every show. Do you understand? Ribback: Yes.

Anyone who has ever heard Lenny Bruce knows that his act is not an attack against any specific religious group, but against all of society’s intolerance and hypocrisies. His technique is vitriolic and his manner often so free-form that it becomes a verbal stream of consciousness. But his basic message is not one of hate, but of charity, love and understanding.

“Lenny Bruce is here to talk about the phony, frightened, lying world,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Will Leonard less than a week before Lenny’s arrest. And Richard Christiansen, in the Chicago Daily News, termed Bruce “the healthiest comic spirit of any comedian working in the United States today.” His act, said Christiansen, “is right smack at the center of a true comedy that strips all prejudices and reveals man’s inhumanity to man.”

Nor do all Catholics fail to understand. Writing on the subject of Bruce and his vocabulary, Professor John Logan of the University of Notre Dame stated: “I find him a brilliant and inventive moralist in the great tradition of comic satire — Aristophanes, Chaucer, Joyce. If his use of four-letter words constitutes obscenity, then those satirists were also obscene.”

The point, as we have previously stated, is not whether any one of us agrees with all, or any part, of what Bruce has to say, but whether a free society can long remain free if we suppress the expression of all ideas that are objectionable to a few or to many.

The charge against Lenny Bruce was obscenity, but his actual “crime” seems to have been speaking out too openly on certain negative aspects of organized religion. The charge against Playboy is obscenity, also.

The NODL

In the February issue, we commented on the National Organization for Decent Literature, which headquarters in Chicago. The NODL prepares a monthly list of “disapproved” books and magazines that is supposed to be a guide for Catholic youth, but is often used as a weapon for adult censorship. Local organizations — sometimes openly Catholic and sometimes seeming to represent a cross section of the community, while actually under Catholic control — use the NODL black list to suppress reading matter in their community through the action of sympathetic officials or through the intimidation of local book and magazine dealers through threat of boycott or other coercion.

Exactly this sort of extralegal coercive action was suggested by Illinois’ Assistant State’s Attorney James R. Thompson, in a newspaper story reporting on the Playboy arrest. He suggested: “(1) Citizens report to the State’s Attorney’s office books and magazines suspected of being obscene. (2) Formation of community or neighborhood organizations to meet with merchants who sell objectionable material. (3) Boycotting of stores which sell obscene literature.”

The effect of such action is to set up citizen-censorship groups for the specific purpose of suppressing the reading matter of their fellow citizens, rather than allowing each individual to make up his or her own mind about what to read.

In an editorial titled “The Harm Good People Do,” in the October 1956 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Editor John Fischer wrote: “A little band of Catholics is now conducting a shocking attack on the rights of their fellow citizens. They are engaged in an un-American activity which is as flagrant as anything the Communist party ever attempted — and which is, in fact, very similar to Communist tactics. They are harming their country, their Church, and the cause of freedom.

“Their campaign is particularly dangerous because few people realize what they are up to. It can hurt you — indeed, it already has — without your knowing it. It is spreading rapidly but quietly; and so far no effective steps have been taken to halt it.

“Even the members of this organization probably do not recognize the damage they are doing. They are well-meaning people, acting from deeply moral impulses. They are trying, in a misguided way, to cope with a real national problem, and presumably they think of themselves as patriots and servants of the Lord. Perhaps a majority of Americans, of all faiths, would sympathize with their motives — though not with their methods.

“They do not, of course, speak for all Catholics. On the contrary, they are defying the warnings of some of their Church’s most respected teachers and theologians. The Catholic Church as a whole certainly cannot be blamed for their actions, any more than it could be held responsible a generation ago for the political operations of Father Coughlin.

“This group calls itself the National Organization for Decent Literature. Its headquarters are in Chicago; its director is the Very Reverend Monsignor Thomas Fitzgerald. Its main purpose is to make it impossible for anyone to buy books and other publications which it does not like. Among them are the works of some of the most distinguished authors now alive — for example, winners of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

“Its chief method is to put pressure on news dealers, drugstores and booksellers, to force them to remove from their stocks every item on the NODL black list. Included on the list are reprint editions of books by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, George Orwell, John O’Hara, Paul Hyde Bonner, Emile Zola, Arthur Koestler and Joyce Cary. [The current list also includes Serenade by James M. Cain, Mister Roberts by Thomas Heggen, From Here to Eternity by James Jones, What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg, The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw, Native Son by Richard Wright and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.] In some places — notably Detroit, Peoria and the suburbs of Boston — the organization has enlisted the local police to threaten booksellers who are slow to ‘cooperate.’

“This campaign of intimidation has no legal basis. The books so listed have not been banned by the mail, and in the overwhelming majority of the cases no legal charges have ever been [sustained] against them…. Its chosen weapons are boycott and literary lynching.

“For example, early last year committees of laymen from Catholic churches in the four northern counties of New Jersey — Union, Hudson, Essex and Bergen — began to call on local merchants. These teams were armed with the NODL lists. They offered ‘certificates,’ to be renewed each month, to those storekeepers who would agree to remove from sale all of the listed publications. To enforce their demands, they warned the merchants that their parishioners would be advised to patronize only those stores displaying a certificate.

“Contact, a bulletin published by the Sacred Heart Parish Societies of Orange, New Jersey, listed 14 merchants in its March 1955 issue. ‘The following stores,’ it said, ‘have agreed to cooperate with the Parish Decency Committee in not displaying or selling literature disapproved by the National Organization for Decent Literature…. Please patronize these stores only. They may be identified by the certificate which is for one month only.’

“Such tactics are highly effective…. The Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Men in St. Louis [reported] that it had ‘obtained the consent of about one third of the store owners approached in the campaign to ask merchants to submit to voluntary screening….’

“The Detroit NODL states that its list is ‘not intended as a restrictive list for adults’ — though it does not explain how adults could purchase the books if merchants have been persuaded not to stock them.

“But the movies of these zealous people are not the issue. The real issue is whether any private group — however well-meaning — has a right to dictate what other people may read.

“Clearly any church, or any subgroup within a church, has a right to advise its own members about their reading matter. Clearly, too, anybody has a right to try to persuade other people to read or to refrain from reading anything he sees fit. The National Organization for Decent Literature, however, goes much further. Its campaign is not aimed at Catholics alone, and it is not attempting to persuade readers to follow its views. It is compelling readers, of all faiths, to bow to its dislikes, by denying them a free choice in what they buy.

“This principle is of course unacceptable to Catholics — as it is to all Americans — if they take the trouble to think about it for a moment. How would Catholics react if, say, a group of Jewish laymen were to threaten merchants with boycott unless they banned from their shops all publications which referred to the divinity of Christ? Some religious denominations believe that gambling is immoral; most Catholics do not, and many of their parishes raise considerable sums by means of bingo games and raffles. What if some Protestant sect were to try to clean out of the stores all publications which spoke tolerantly of gambling, and to boycott every merchant who bought a raffle ticket?”

The CDL

Catholic censorship is implemented at the local community level by an organization called Citizens for Decent Literature. It is a Catholic lay organization though it gains its acceptance in some communities by appearing to be a civic group with no specific religious affiliation.

The Californian reported recently on CDL censorship activity in its state: “In California, where the campaign against ‘obscene’ literature has taken on the aura of a respectable community project, the tide has been swung by a group called Citizens for Decent Literature, whose national chairman admitted publicly that his organization is conducting ‘a religious crusade.’ Nevertheless, CDL was able to induce the San Francisco News-Call Bulletin to carry on a week-long campaign against ‘smut,’ in which quotes from CDL were featured prominently. For example, CDL’s chairman, Charles H. Keating Jr., billed as a former All-American swimming champion, was quoted at the beginning of the series in a statement that San Francisco is the ‘smut capital’ of the nation. What readers of the News-Call could not have known was that Keating has made this statement in every city in which his organization has carried on its ‘religious crusade.’

“Actually, the CDL is only a front group for a larger organization called the National Organization for Decent Literature. The NODL uses groups like CDL and the Legion for Decency to infiltrate communities under the guise of nonsectarian activity and independence from a list of banned books published by the NODL. The reason is that NODL has been stamped as a Catholic organization that has tried to have books called unfit for Catholics to read banned for persons of all other religious denominations, too. This has resulted in widespread opposition to NODL, which has therefore been forced to use groups in communities that go by different names. These groups will deny they are connected with NODL, but they use NODL’s banned-books list as they parrot NODL’s philosophy.

“For example, listen to CDL’s Charles Keating testifying before the House Subcommittee on Postal Operations: ‘…The rot they peddle…causes premarital intercourse, perversion, masturbation in boys, wantonness in girls, and weakens the morality of all it contacts…. Attention is given to sensationalists such as Kinsey, who draw sweeping conclusions from a handful of selected subjects and defraud the public by calling their meanderings a scientific study — and Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen who, finding fellow travellers in erstwhile respectable media, manage to disseminate, directly and indirectly, their absurd and dirty bleatings and pagan ideas…. It seems strange to me that we credit — I should say that our mass media credit — the unestablished generalities of a few so-called experts, but ignore the overwhelming testimony of the true experts like so many of your previously testifying witnesses, of men like Pitirim Sorokin, J. Edgar Hoover…. One might say, even the laws, the words of God himself are ignored.

“‘So now you see that I claim to speak for most of our American citizens. I come by this claim as a member of Citizens for Decent Literature, having in the past four years traveled extensively giving hundreds of speeches. Through our CDL office, we receive and answer about 300 letters a month, all from indignant citizens…who want, as I do, this demoralizing traffic in filth stopped now.

“‘Citizens for Decent Literature has been successful in all areas where it has been militant in the first phase of its program. There has been the usual opposition by extremists such as the persistent, illogical, comical and theatrical — but legalistically skilled — activities of certain “civil liberties” groups…. They constantly — particularly the California collections — impose censorship by threats, bullying, intimidations and smears…these elements and those foul producers and salesmen of this depravity…take these slick magazines with their emphasis on seductively posed nude females. To those who say: “But whom do they effect and how?” — I reply: Why disbelieve the countless clergymen, who, from their flocks, know these magazines cause masturbation and other immoral behavior among boys.

“‘The Kronhausens and their ilk I think deliberately appeal to the mass audience by inclusions in their works of the most rank obscenities imaginable…. It seems to me that the basic contention of these people is that guilt feelings are the result of moral restrictions, and that the remedy lies in abandoning the restrictions. For example, a boy who is in the habit of masturbation would undoubtedly suffer a depression and moodiness and guilt feelings which the Kronhausens would remove, not by stopping his habit or eliminating his habit of masturbation, which is a difficult process perhaps, but by convincing the boy that if masturbate he must, then go to it, but get rid of the puritanical and inbred fanatical religious attitudes which cause him to think of this as being something sinful.

“‘We get a lot of mail indicating people who have picked these (nudist) magazines up and find them filled with semen when boys masturbate on the pictures, and so forth. Nothing else could be expected.

“‘In these days, speaking of masturbation, when you run into that problem, I just mention it casually and take for granted that most people think that it is a very bad thing and very dangerous to the health and moral welfare, physical and mental, of the people who have the habit. But we had a psychiatrist on the stand in Cincinnati recently for the defense, who said, sure, these magazines stimulate the average person to sexual activity, but it would be sexual activity which would have a legitimate outlet. The prosecutor said to him, “Doctor, what is a legitimate or socially acceptable outlet for an 18-year-old unmarried boy?” The doctor answered, “Masturbation.” When you are met with that kind of situation, you begin to wonder.’”

When you are met with that kind of wild-eyed sexual fanaticism, on the part of the chairmen of CDL and the chief proponent of censorship in the U.S. today, you do, indeed, begin to wonder.

The Californian felt obliged to observe: “Keating’s testimony is full of typical revelations of this type of mind. Premarital sexual intercourse is evil. Kinsey and other scientists are ‘fellow travelers,’ and purveyors of filth in disguise. Scientists like Kinsey and the Kronhausens are not the true authorities; the true authorities on sex are men like J. Edgar Hoover. Anyone who sells or reads sexy literature is a ‘pagan’ defying the law of God. They have the support of ‘civil liberties’ groups [placed in quotations to indicate contempt], and California ‘collections’ [as if to say, the groups of wild-living people in that state]. Masturbation is so obviously immoral that it is to be taken for granted that most people think it is immoral.”

Keating’s statements remind us of the observations made by Dr. Benjamin Karpmen, Chief Psychotherapist of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., on the neurosis know as pornophilia — the obssessive and excessive interest in pornographic materials:

“This interest in obscenity — pornophelia — may take another direction. It may be covered up by a reaction formation. The interest may be denied by bitter opposition to all forms of obscenity, the same as a condemnation and attack against homosexuals can cover up latent homosexuality. Crusading against obscenity has an unconscious interest in it; that is, it may cover up latent homosexuality. Crusading against obscenity has an unconscious interest at its base. The interest is negatively displaced in consciousness.”

Not every censor is neurotically obsessed with sex — some good people become involved in censorship campaigns because of religious or moral convictions and a lack of understanding of what censorship really involves, and some public officials become outspoken advocates of censorship because they believe it will be to their political advantage. But Keating’s rantings are almost classic as he projects his own sick view of sex and obscenity onto the rest of society.

The Californian continued: “It would appear that because this mind reveals such deep fanaticism, a throwback to Cotton Mather and the reign of the Puritans in America, that there would be widespread community opposition to him and groups like the CDL. Instead, headline-seeking newspapers play up Keating’s distorted presentations without adequate quotations revealing his fanaticism, and thus he is able to gain tremendous support and little opposition. It worked precisely that way in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“Perhaps there would be opposition if information were made available to show that Keating and CDL, like other such groups, are only fronts for the NODL, even among Catholics themselves. But with groups like CDL posing as nonsectarian organizations, religious fanaticism is too often left out of the picture and communities receive the impression that the crusade is civic, rather than religious. Even when Keating admits publicly, as he did in San Francisco, that his is a ‘religious crusade,’ the newspapers — hence the community — ignore it. Yet, Keating, CDL and other such groups are Catholics working [in conjunction with] NODL and using NODL’s banned-books list…. They are all part of the same organization — the NODL, which was established in 1938 by the Catholic Bishops of the United States as a watchdog committee for the Roman Catholic Church. In some communities, its branches are admittedly Catholic, and in others they operate on an inter-religious basis. They all use the banned-books list of NODL, however — a list which is drawn up…in conformance with Catholic religious beliefs and Catholic moral codes. The purpose of this list and of the NODL, according to a statement of the Bishop’s Episcopal Committee, is ‘to organize and set in motion the moral forces of an entire country…against the lascivious type of literature which threatens moral, social and national life’…to evaluate [this] literature…the NODL uses a reading committee of mothers of the Roman Catholic faith in the Chicago area….

“Despite the obvious fanaticism of those who would draw up such a list, the NODL has been amazingly successful in putting its banned-books list into effect on a vast scale. Local NODL-organized groups have been able to boycott newsstand dealers and bookstores into carrying only titles not banned on the list. In some communities they have things so well-organized that no dealer will carry anything on the list and has even agreed to do this without examining the books or the list in advance. In many cases, police, prosecuting attorneys and military commanders on Army posts have issued instructions or orders that no books or magazines on the NODL list will be sold without their jurisdiction.

“An example of how the NODL works may be taken from the town of Springfield, Vermont. There, a civic leader named Mrs. Henry Ferguson, president of Springfield Catholic Women, organized an ‘Inter-Denominational Church Group’ to rid local newsstands and bookstores of vulgar comic books. Since she was able to convince other civic leaders that the group would be composed of 12 church denominations, there was widespread support for her campaign. Everyone was in favor of getting vulgar comic books out of the hands of children. The newsstand dealers offered little opposition. With this backing, then, Mrs. Ferguson’s group began policing newsstands, asking the dealers to remove objectionable comic books; and the dealers complied.

“Soon the dealers discovered, however, that Mrs. Ferguson’s group was not going to stop with comic books. Women from the group began asking the dealers to remove certain paperback books which they said were getting into the hands of children. Again the cry, ‘Protect our children,’ was the magic wand in Springfield. Community backing was won and the dealers were forced to begin removing the more lurid paperback books. Again there was no objection, because this kind of book did not sell well in Springfield anyway. But then came the finale.

“Having experienced no opposition up to this point, Mrs. Ferguson introduced to her ‘Inter-Denominational Church Group’ a list of banned books and magazines published by the NODL in Chicago. She supplied all of her members with the list and asked them to call on the merchants, check their shelves by the list, and ask them to remove any books and magazines on it. At this, the merchants balked. Some of their best-selling paperback books were on the list: James Jones’ From Here to Eternity, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre. Some of their best-selling magazines — Playboy, for example — were on the list. So the merchants balked.

“But by this time, Mrs. Ferguson had community sentiment behind her. She was able to get a town ordinance enacted against ‘obscene’ literature. This ordinance was the last wedge she had been waiting for. Now, she was able to threaten the merchants with prosecution. Therefore, they begin to yield to Mrs. Ferguson and her group, first removing the books which might possibly subject them to prosecution under the town ordinance. Finally, when all these were gone and the merchants were down to nothing but books and magazines which could not be prosecuted under any ordinance or law enacted anywhere in the United States, a showdown came. Some of the more stouthearted merchants refused to yield any further.

“Mrs. Ferguson met this opposition with the final tactic: boycott. She and her women spread the word through the community that any merchant not cooperating with her group should be boycotted by the community. Friends should be advised not to deal with that merchant. Faced with this loss of business, the merchants yielded to the last indignity. They permitted Mrs. Ferguson and her women to design a plaque stating that a given store had been inspected by the Springfield Church Group and was found not to have any objectionable literature in it, and to hang this plaque in a prominent place in all stores in Springfield selling literature.

“Today, in the town of Springfield, you will find one of these plaques displayed by every newsstand and bookstore. You will not find Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, or Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, or Playboy magazine. They are all banned from Springfield — banned according to a list published by one segment of the Catholic Church.”

The CDL in Chicago

In Chicago, home of the NODL, the CDL functions in the guise of an interdenominational organization. The Chicago Citizens for Decent Literature is headed by a Catholic priest, Father Lawler, and its book-burning activities over the past year have been, if anything, even more flagrant and oppressive than those of the CDL in California. And that is easily understood, for here in Chicago Catholic censors have a sympathetic administration to implement their publishing purges.

The Catholic CDL censorship campaign enjoys the cooperation of the Catholic-dominated Corporation Counsel’s office, which is responsible to a Catholic mayor, abetted by a predominantly Catholic police force, with cases usually tried before Catholic judges. Under such circumstances, it is a tremendous tribute to Chicago officialdom that democratic justice triumphs as often as it does — evidence that a significant number of this community’s Catholic administrators, legislators, judges and police officers truly understand the importance of keeping separate their governmental and religious obligations.

On several occasions over the past few months, however, incidents involving freedom of administrative action (IPAC’s birth-control program), freedom of speech (Lenny Bruce), and the freedom of press (Playboy), have suggested that sometime the appropriate concerns of church and state become confused in the City of Chicago.

The CDL seems to have been particularly successful in overriding whatever scruples Chicago officials have against permitting religious influences to interfere with the lawful rights of men in a free society. With the aid of Chicago’s Corporation Counsel, they have ridden roughshod over book and magazine dealers throughout the city. But, thank heaven, the Constitutional freedom of expression is reasserted when these cases are brought to court. As a result, the Citizens for Decent Literature has had the frustrating experience of achieving a great many arrests and very few convictions — even in the lower courts. So much so that, immediately prior to the Playboy arrest, the CDL struck out viciously at it own staunchest ally, the Chicago Corporation Counsel office, vilifying one of its top prosecutors for not being more successful in obtaining convictions.

The story in the June 1 issue of the weekly Negro newspaper, The New Crusader, offers significant background on the Chicago CDL just one week before the Playboy arrest on June 4:

“The powerful wrath of a vicious book-burning organization, masquerading under the title of Citizens League for Decent Literature, was felt last week when the ax fell on Leonard Kaplan, attorney for the Fifth Ward Regular Democratic Organization. Kaplan, a ten-year veteran prosecutor in the city’s Corporation Counsel office, announced his retirement and decision to enter private practice when the Citizen’s League began bombarding key city officials with letters critical of his handling of prosecutions in certain obscenity cases.

“The League, largely composed of Victorian housewives, sends out teams of women to investigate newsstands, counters and bookstores to ferret out reading matter it deems in poor taste for Chicagoans. Led by a Catholic priest, Father Lawler, the group is meeting with growing resistance to its censorship efforts. Two judges of the Municipal Court, who declined to be named, pointed to the attack on Kaplan as a key factor in the group’s loss of support.

“Attorney Kaplan, who had prosecuted several of the obscenity cases successfully, had the recent misfortune of losing a jury trial involving one of the League’s cases. Although he enjoys a splendid reputation as a lawyer, and although impartial court observers attested to his good showing, the League’s members began writing poison-pen letters to Mayor Daley and Corporation Counsel John Melaniphy in which Kaplan was accused of ‘selling out’ and not putting forth his best efforts.

“When the well-liked lawyer was shown the letters, he expressed great shock, inasmuch as the League had been hailing him as their hero up till then.

“He observed that when a group elects to deny one the right of citizens, they care little about denying anyone’s right. One example cited concerned a cigar store owned by an aged widow. Finding a paperback book on their banned list, they secured the arrest of the old lady and shortly thereafter prevailed upon the City Clerk’s office to revoke her cigarette license. Happily, Mayor Daley heard of the vicious incident and restored the license.

“Father Lawler, a one-man terror, is a veteran of campaigns to adjust folks’ morals to suit his own. Other Catholic priests disagree with his tactics, but dare not publicly oppose him. One of Lawler’s recent blitzes brought tears to the eyes of many of the area’s young ladies, when he inspected the dresses of all the girls attending proms of Catholic high schools and colleges. If the gown was not to the priest’s liking, the guest was ejected. He advocated high collars and long, Victorian-style formals.

“The campaign to purify dresses also included a drive to require coed’s daily attire to be four inches below their knees. After resistance to Lawler’s drive grew, he switched to his present literature cleanup.”

Whether CDL’s accusation to the Mayor, the Corporation Counsel, and others, just prior to the Playboy arrest, charging that a member of the Corporation Counsel’s legal staff was guilty of “selling out” and not putting forth his best effort in a previous obscenity case, was responsible for the move against us as a concession to Lawler, we do not know. We do know, however, that Lawler and his Citizens for Decent Literature had been attempting to get Melaniphy to take action against Playboy for many months, personally bringing each new issue to his attention with a request for prosecution.

This substantiates — finally and conclusively — that it was not the Jayne Mansfield pictorial feature in the June issue that initiated the attempt at censorship, but the continuing editorial content of the magazine. It makes clear that the question here involved is not simply the right to publish “all the nudes that’s fit to print,” as one punster once claimed of Playboy, but the right to express personal editorial opinion, as we have been doing over the past dozen months in The Playboy Philosophy, even though some of the ideas put forth may not receive popular acceptance in all quarters of our society.

The CDL and Playboy

We have met Father Lawler on a couple of occasions in the ten years since we began publishing Playboy. The first time was at our request; the second was at his. He’s a relatively young man — about our own age, we would judge — handsome, bright and disarmingly personable.

Our first meeting came in the early years of Playboy’s young life. We had just begun to go after advertising in a serious way and were running a series of full-page ads in Advertising Age, illustrated by LeRoy Neiman and telling the story, through statistics, of Playboy’s quality readership. We received word from an Ad Age exec that a complaint had been lodged with them by a priest, who objected to their accepting advertising from us. The Ad Age exec was polite, but firm, in his position that they must accept all legitimate advertising from responsible companies. That resolved the immediate problem, but we decided a personal meeting with Father Lawler might serve some useful purpose, since, at best, we might convince him that we were sincerely dedicated in our attempt to make Playboy the best men’s magazine in the nation (even then our dreams were lofty); and, at the very least, a personal meeting should convince him that we were not, as we thought he might suspect, the Devil incarnate.

We called him and arranged to meet for dinner. It was the most warm and cordial meeting, though we were somewhat distressed to learn that he was presently involved in a poison-pen campaign in which Catholic grade-school children were writing letters to a local radio station, as a class assignment, attacking the then most popular disc jockey in Chicago because as Lawler explained it, the radio personality had a large juvenile following and much of his repartee was sexually oriented and too “blue” for the innocent ears of children. Lawler swore that he would be successful in driving the disc jockey off the air, which he never accomplished, although he did give the performer a rather bad time of it for a while.We left that dinner-meeting feeling rather sorry for the disc jockey, but convinced that we had made a friend — if not a convert — who respected our right to a point of view that differed from his own.

It was several years before we heard from Father Lawler again. He asked us to come and see him at his office and we complied. We observed, with some pride, that our promises and predictions regarding the future of Playboy had, in the intervening years, come to pass. He conceded that they had and seemed to feel we were publishing quite a good magazine, though he expressed the wish that we would get a bit more clothing on our Playmate of the Month. What he really wanted to see us about, he explained, was a number of shoddy paperback books that were currently being produced by fly-by-night publishers in and around Chicago. We told him what little we knew about them — which was precious little — and he carried on a bit about the growing “smut market” and its effect upon children, emphasizing his point by pulling from the briefcase he carried with him some decks of playing cards that offered 52 varieties of photographic hard-core pornography to the set. We thought he went through these with just a bit too much enthusiasm, while emphasizing the point of “smut’s” evil influence on our youth, but we kept that thought to ourselves and departed as cordially as before.

We remembered these two meetings with Father Lawler when we read about his more recent activities as guardian of the public morals and head of the Chicago CDL, and we couldn’t help remembering, as we had after the Keating testimony, what Dr. Benjamin Karpman had had to say about a negatively displaced obsession with obscenity — that crusading against sex is often an unconscious cover-up for an interest in the subject.

Our arrest — on the charge of “publishing and distributing obscene material” — was a surprise, to say the least. It was a surprise, because we knew that Playboy wasn’t obscene, and we had enough respect for Corporation Counsel John Melaniphy’s legal acumen to be convinced that he knew it, too. Nevertheless, we were arrested — in our home — by not one, but four armed officers of the law. And the television cameras, having previously been cued by the cops, were there to record the event, with the press and radio waiting for us at the police station when we were booked.

During our brief visit to headquarters to post bail, we engaged in friendly conversation with some of the local constabulary and one of the officers offered the information that the man behind the arrest was Father Lawler. Lawler had been there often during the past few months, he said, and always with copies of Playboy. We found ourself wondering what had happened to those decks of pornographic playing cards.

Censorship and the Press

The day after the arrest we received an anonymous tip that, before the warrant was issued, the CDL had sought and received promises of cooperation from the Catholic head of a local radio station and a Catholic editor of one of Chicago’s daily newspapers: The station was to begin an immediate, daily anti-smut campaign, in conjunction with CDL, and if the Corporation Counsel arranged our arrest, the newspaper editor allegedly promised to give the story maximum coverage with a strong anti-Playboy slant.

Thus, a conspiracy of censorship was apparently entered into between a phony nonsectarian “citizens” league, the city prosecutor, the manager of a local radio station and the editor of a Chicago newspaper — all representing the viewpoint of a single religious denomination.

We know the editor personally and consider him to be one of the best newspapermen in the city; we frankly doubted, therefore, that the rumor was true. But we remembered that in San Francisco, one of the CDL’s preliminary tactical maneuvers was to obtain, in advance, a local newspaper’s commitment to actively cooperate in the censorship drive. The newspaper proved so “cooperative” that more liberal forces in the city called it “hysterical,” “irresponsible,” and a good deal worse.

Morris Lowenthal, a prominent San Francisco attorney and chairman of the Freedom-to-Read Citizen’s Committee stated, at a hearing to consider a new anti-smut bill promoted there by the CDL: “Besides the efforts of certain well-known newspapers to increase their circulation by cheap journalism, leading the bandwagon in maintaining that the state laws on obscenity are obsolete and that more stringent measures are required is the largely sectarian League for Decent Literature — a private group whose national office elsewhere in the country has been accused of illegal boycotts and coercion against booksellers and newsstands. Charles H. Keating, the national chairman of this organization, recently asserted that his group is engaged in a ‘religious crusade’ to enact strict censorship laws and to suppress publications deemed offensive by the League. His charges, for example, that San Francisco is a ‘world center of filthy books’ and ‘the smuttiest of the nation’ gained blaring headlines, especially in the News-Call Bulletin, which at the time was striving to increase its circulation by joining forces with Frank Coakley, the Alemada County District Attorney, in his hysterical publicity drive against ‘smut.’ The San Francisco Chronicle noted, however, that Keating made the same charges against every city that he has visited in the United States.”

The obscenity bill was defeated in committee, but the newspaper tirade continued, and a rehearing was scheduled. At the rehearing, Lowenthal was joined by Lawrence Goldberg, attorney representing the American Jewish Conference, and both vigorously opposed the new obscenity statute. They were aided by Democratic Assemblyman Nick Petris of Alameda, whose subjected those testifying for the bill to strict questioning. He got Mrs. Margaret Berry, president of the California Congress of Parent and Teachers, which had lent its support to the passage of the bill, to admit that she was not even familiar with the contents of the proposed statutes.

“I don’t have to know all the technicalities,” she said.

Petris explained that some measures in the bill could have drastic effects on anyone possessing material which someone else considered obscene, if they cared to turn in the possessor. Petris asked Mrs. Berry if she felt she would have the right to act as a censor if the new bill was enacted.

“If I see a book the law says is obscene, I have a right to be a censor,” she said.

Finally, the assistant district attorney of Alameda County testified on behalf of D.A. Frank Coakley, who had been leading the anti-obscenity campaign in California. Under questioning, the assistant district attorney gave his definition of what is obscene: “Anything that is obscene is obscene.”

The nationally respected San Francisco Chronicle published a long and thoughtful editorial evaluation of the so-called “anti-smut bills” and stated that they “should be decisively rejected as offensive to fundamental American ideals of freedom and to ordinary common sense.

“The measures resulted from a climate of hysteria engendered by outrageously exaggerated reports that California had become the smut capital of the nation….

“The first widely extravagant attempts at legislation to discourage this imaginary assault upon the youth of the state were patently outrageous even to the authors. The bills have been subsequently amended or re-amended, but they remain vague, contradictory, excessive, in some provisions ridiculous, and in others probably unconstitutional….

“The current attempts at censorship,” concluded the Chronicle, “are ridiculous in conception, inept in design, and if permitted to prosper must inevitably work far more harm than they could possibly cure.”

The News-Call Bulletin had taken a stand favoring the CDL “anti-smut” campaign at the outset and despite all logic to the contrary, it stayed with that position to the bitter end, countering the Chronicle editorial with a lengthy editorial feature of its own, with the headline: “HOW NEW LAW WOULD FIGHT SMUT.”

The Californian branded the article “one of the most warped, distorted, inaccurate pieces of journalism ever to come out of that newspaper.” In order to make the new California obscenity law seem reasonable, claimed the editor of The Californian, “the News-Call omitted all the damaging sections from discussion and twisted all those mentioned beyond recognition.”

If it happened in San Francisco, it could happen in Chicago. The pattern seemed the same in both cities. If Keating and the CDL could convince the News-Call of the rightness of a pro-censorship stand, Lawler and the CDL might do the same here — especially with an appeal to an editor with whom there was a religious empathy.

We have always considered this editor a man of considerable professional integrity and something of a Playboy fan to boot. He had offered us valuable advice when we were having problems with Show Business Illustrated and had complimented us on the overall operation on more than one occasion. How, then, could he possibly be involved in this abortive attempt to suppress the magazine?

It was possible, we realized, that he might not see this action in the same light we did — as an attempt, on the part of one minority group, to project its personal point of view onto the rest of the community. He might sincerely believe that the actions of both Lawler and Melaniphy were justified, for he certainly couldn’t know all the unsavory details that had come to our attention regarding CDL, and might not recognize any of the church-state implications in the arrest. For this editor, and for a great many others, our arrest might truly seem to be just a matter of those Jayne Mansfield nudes in the June issue — and nothing else. And without any special insight into either the psychological or legal implications, the idea of “obscenity” might be just as repugnant to him as the idea of censorship is to us.

We arranged a meeting with the editor to learn what we could about his part in the arrest; he was cordial, but he refused to discuss the matter. The answer came soon enough, however, in the pages of his newspaper, Chicago’s American. The original reporting of the arrest was about the same in all four Chicago dailies, except that it received a little more space in the American. But two days after the arrest, when the other papers had dropped the story, except for an occasional humorous quip in the columns, the American was just getting warmed up.

Under the headline, “U.S. STUDIES PLAYBOY CASE, MAY PROSECUTE,” the paper announced that we faced “possible federal action in connection with the magazine’s June issue.” The story went on to say that the Chicago postmaster had mailed a copy of the magazine to the Post Office department in Washington for an opinion on whether or not it was “obscene.” We were too busy reading the list of dire penalties that would befall the publisher if it was, to speculate long on who might have pulled the local postmaster up to this stunt. But no one had to hold his breath very long waiting for the word from Washington, because — though the newspaper story made it seem all very serious — anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of current obscenity law in America knew that the June issue of Playboy did not even begin to approach the obscene.

The American also quoted the Chicago postmaster as saying, “The next issue is going to get a much closer look before it is sent through the mails. If it appears that there is any obscenity, the magazine will be held from the mails until I can obtain an opinion from Washington.” No one bothered to point out in this “news” story that any such action on the part of the local postmaster would be illegal, or to consider what a frightening power would be placed in the hands of an appointed civil servant if he could, indeed, withhold from the mails any periodical he considered objectionable, until he was able to “obtain an opinion from Washington.”

What if all the copies of Chicago’s American that are delivered by Uncle Sam were unexpectedly “held from the mails,” while awaiting word from another government official in Washington? Even if the word that came back was favorable, the newspaper would be, by then, as worthless as — well, as yesterday’s newspaper.

The U.S. courts have made it abundantly clear that the Post Office’s duty is the efficient delivery of the mails, not the censoring of them. And if a postal official were ever to find truly obscene material being sent through the mail — a rare occurrence — it would then become a matter for the courts, not arbitrary censorship by an administrative assistant. Do Chicago’s American and the Chicago postmaster both need to be reminded that our democracy is based upon the protections of due process of law?

The story ended with the statement: “Meanwhile, religious leaders urged community action in taking smut literature off newsstands and out of bookstores, where it is often purchased by juveniles.” And with quotes from Msgr. John M. Kelly, editor of the Catholic newspaper, New World, who said, “Literature or pictures that adversely affect the minds of adults or children are immoral, and can be presumed to hurt many. It’s a far worse thing to threaten human minds and souls than to threaten human bodies,” and a Protestant and a Jewish clergyman expressed related sentiments.

There were no comments from educators, sociologists, psychologists, pathologists, or psychiatrists — i.e., no scientific evaluation of the significance and effect of obscenity on society; no comments from experts and constitutional law on the legal implications of such censorship or juridical opinion on whether or not the material in question actually fell within the Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity; no comments from writers, editors or publishers on the importance of a censor-free society as a necessary environment for the survival of independent newspapers, magazines and books; no comments from the Civil Liberties Union or others concerned with the protection of free speech and press in America. Presumably none of these sources of far more pertinent comment were solicited; certainly none were published.

That same week, radio station WLS began a concentrated, daily anti-obscenity campaign.

The next Chicago’s American story was headlined, “COPS SEEK TO BAN ‘PLAYBOY,’ ” which stated, “The Police Department, at the request of the Corporation Counsel’s office, today began a drive to halt further sale of the June issue of Playboy magazine. Brian Kilgallon, Assistant Corporation Counsel in charge of enforcing the city’s obscenity ordinances, said police throughout the city will attempt to purchase the magazine at newsstands, drug and bookstores, and other distribution points. Warrants charging the sale of obscene matter will be sought against dealers who sell the June issue with knowledge that the city has declared it objectionable, he said.”

The newspaper did not point out to its readers that, in issuing this declaration, the Corporation Counsel was guilty of illegal intimidation of the city’s magazine dealers, since the issue could not be considered legally obscene until its case had been tried in court. The point was academic, since the issue was already completely sold out, but no one bothered to mention that the fact that “the city (meaning Corporation Counsel John Melaniphy) had declared it objectionable” was not a basis for banning the magazine, since only a court of law is empowered to legally determine a question of obscenity and Playboy had yet to have its day in court.

The American went on to quote Kilgallon as saying, “‘Most people are concerned over how we can prevent this type of magazine from falling into the hands of children.’ Kilgallon estimated that two out of three of the magazine’s readers are under 21 years of age.” We exposed, last month, the fallacious nature of that “estimate” and pointed out this is but one more example of using a “concern” for the children to justify the attempted censorship of adult reading matter.

This story concluded with the suggestion from Assistant State’s Attorney James R. Thompson, that citizens form community vigilante groups to illegally boycott retailers who display or sell books and magazines of which they do not approve.

Chicago’s American completed round one of its Playboy campaign with an editorial that described the Jayne Mansfield feature and then stated: “Hefner’s philosophy appears to be that the ‘modern urban male’ likes and even needs to look at pictures of naked, suggestively posed women; that this a very healthy and virile way to be, and that it’s practically a duty to encourage the habit — the law should have no right to interfere.

“Our view is that mass-produced lewdness can have a weakening, damaging effect on the moral framework of a community, and that the community should have — and use — means of restraining it.”

Bypassing the point that the American knows full well, or should know through its contact with CDL, that the photographs in the June issue of Playboy were not the actual, underlying cause of the arrest, we would point out that the expert scientific opinion, which the American did not bother to seek out, refutes the notion that sex in books and magazines — either written or pictorial — has any such “weakening, damaging effect” on society; that a significant portion of the scientific fraternity specializing in the subject, including Drs. Kronhausen, Ellis, Reik, Roch, Karpman, Caprio, and many others, believe that it has just the opposite effect — acting as a healthy release for sexual tensions, inhibitions and repressions; that it is the suppression of sex rather than its open appreciation that, as history has proven all too well, can have a “damaging effect” upon society; that if society cannot enjoy an open appreciation of positively expressed heterosexual sex, as published in Playboy, it will turn to sick or antisocial sex instead — homosexuality, sadism, masochism, fetishism and all manner of other perversions, plus the repression that produces frigidity, impotence and a variety of other neurotic ills; that these are not our opinions, but the opinions of modern science.

Moreover, the “moral framework” to which the editorial refers is not the moral framework of our entire community — a substantial portion of that community has made Playboy the most successful publishing venture of our generation; it is, instead, the moral framework of a particular segment of our society — a minority, portions of which give every evidence of wishing to project their personal moral views onto the rest of society, whether we want them or not.

“The actual issue here,” said the Chicago’s American editorial, “is how far a magazine can go in presenting this kind of display.”

We disagree. The actual issue here is whether or not any segment of society has the right to suppress the opinions of the rest; whether we truly believe in our democracy; whether we are willing to grant to those with whom we do not happen to agree the full freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.

It is not Playboy that considers itself above the law — that “the law should have no right to interfere.” It is the full protection of our right to equal justice under the law that we feel is jeopardized when religious sentiment promotes governmental action against us that the law itself, as clearly established by recent high-court decisions on obscenity, does not demand. (For the Corporation Counsel confirmed, according to reports in other newspapers, that he was “fully aware of the difficulty in getting a conviction in the Playboy case, in view of recent Supreme Court decisions” and unidentified spokesmen for the CDL “admitted that there was little chance of obtaining a conviction against the Playboy photos inasmuch as the Supreme Court has already ruled that the [portrayal of the nude] male or female does not constitute obscenity. But the CDL feels that it has achieved success whenever it secures the arrest of an individual, since this causes untold harm and injury.”)

We make a plea for freedom, not for license — though the latter word is used too often to describe the freedom that someone wishes to deny to others. We do not favor editorial irresponsibility. But we do request the right to edit our magazine in our own way, without extra-legal coercion or intimidation, for that particular portion of the community with whom we have managed to establish a genuine rapport.

What saddens us is not simply the American’s campaign against Playboy — and we are certain that it is sincerely inspired, for the American has displayed no Playboy prejudice in the past, having published an extremely complementary front-page series on our success little more than a year ago — but the fact that no daily newspaper in this city saw the church-state implications in the case; bothered to determine, through outside legal opinion, that the charge of obscenity against the June issue of Playboy was without any legal merit, or saw fit to editorialize on the grave implications in censorship — a cause in which every citizen, and most especially every member of the fourth estate, has a vital stake.

It took a newspaper as faraway as California to seriously question the censorship aspect of the case. The Fremont News Register said, in a first person editorial devoted to the subject: “…What we have here is a small group of self-appointed judges and ‘protectors’ of our morals, who feel that they must protect from the inevitable disastrous effects of a few photographs. Why they thought these particular photographs were dangerous and the thousands of others almost exactly like them published every day in numerous other magazines were not, is still a mystery to me….

“It would seem that this is definite attempt to censor the magazine or dictate the content of it. This, I feel, is the most dangerous phase of the whole problem, for censorship in any shape, form or degree is definitely against the fundamental principles of our democracy.

“What is even more dangerous, of course, is the seemingly increasing number of public officials who place themselves [in the position of] censors and attempt to dictate what we, the public, should read and be allowed to see…. It would seem to me that the people of Chicago would profit much more if the police department there spent more time patrolling the streets and giving traffic citations rather than attempting to judge the value of magazines or any other type of literature.”

No such sentiment was expressed on the editorial pages of any of Chicago’s daily newspapers and not only was the question of religious prejudice never raised, Father Lawler and his Citizens for Decent Literature, who instigated the entire affair, were never ever mentioned.

It took the weekly Crusader to publicly tie the CDL in with the arrest. Under the headline, “NAKED JAYNE MANSFIELD IS OBSCENE, SAYS CDL,” the paper stated: “Hugh Hefner, who put Chicago on the international map of sophistication, this week found that like most prophets he is a hero except in his own hometown. Hefner, 37, editor and publisher of Playboy magazine and maître de of the homes for live Bunnies, the Playboy Clubs, was arrested and jailed on charges brought by the Citizens for Decent Literature concerning photographs of busty cinema actress Miss Jayne Mansfield in the altogether.

“The Citizens for Decent Literature, a group of Victorian housewives, still smarting from the effects of a recent edition of Playboy magazine’s philosophy, which hailed the Supreme Court for liberalizing obscenity tests, prevailed upon the office of John Melaniphy, city prosecutor, to secure a warrant for Hefner….

“The New Crusader has learned that more than 400 arrests of individuals have been made in the last two years, since the CDL moved into high gear in its campaign to make itself the censor of what Chicagoans can read in newspapers, [books and] magazines.

“The danger of giving in to the CDL and conforming to its edicts was expressed this week by an Indianapolis distributor. He was the only wholesaler in the community when he was visited by CDL representatives who asked that he not carry certain paperback books. He gave in and removed the books from those he distributed. Each week the list grew. Finally, it reached the point where he was told not to distribute this month’s McCall’s or a certain issue of Reader’s Digest because the contents did not conform with the views of the CDL.

“The CDL has enlisted the air lanes also in its book-burning campaign. Radio station WLS is broadcasting earnest appeals to its listening audience to give assistance to the Citizens for Decent Literature. The radio appeals state that the way to stop the sale of obscene material to minors is to cooperate with CDL. Actually, even though CDL professes to be after pornographers and dealers who sell to persons under the age of 16 certain matter it deems to be indecent, there is not a single case on record where the defendant is charged with the sale of merchandise to minors.

“The CDL is also active on the legislative front. House Bill 1072 has been introduced which, if passed, would entitle authorities to put bookstores out of business by permitting injunctions against them when they carry books not to the liking of the CDL.”

Censorship From Jazz to Bunnies

Even if Chicago’s daily newspapers failed to discern the link between CDL, the Corporation Counsel and the Playboy arrest, they should have remembered that this was not the first time the city’s Catholic hierarchy had struck out at us.

In 1959 Playboy contemplated producing the world’s greatest jazz festival. The city was sponsoring a Festival of the Americas that summer, in connection with the Pan-American Games, and they invited us to stage our jazz spectacular in Soldier Field as a part of the Pan-Am event. Then, after a joint press conference announcing the event, and after Playboy had signed contracts with most of the $100,000 worth of talent scheduled to appear, city officials unexpectedly withdrew the invitation and permission to use the Field.

The official explanation given was that the jazz festival might harm the cinder track to be used for the Games. Public and press reaction ranged from incredulity to indignation. Irv Kupicinet wrote, in his Chicago Sun-Times column: “Playboy is getting a nifty run-around in trying to learn the real reason its August 8-9 dates for a jazz festival in Soldier Field have been denied. ‘Run-around’ is an apt description, for supposedly Soldier Field’s new running track is the cause of the mysterious refusal — even though Playboy had no intention of erecting stands on the track or using it in any way. The Park District refused the festival dates ‘on recommendation of the Pan-American Games Committee.’ And Jack Reilly, executive director of the Pan-Am, who originally hailed Playboy for bringing the jazz festival to Our Town, countered with, ‘It’s the Park District’s baby — they have complete jurisdiction over Soldier Field, not us.’”

Chicago’s American stated: “Everyone is passing the buck on Playboy magazine jazz festival for August 8-9, in advance of the Pan American games. Playboy, as its readers know, is an authority on American jazz. But it is also, as practically everybody knows, an authority on the female form.

“Along with its articles on modern music and foreign cars, Playboy features color photos of lush young ladies, wearing dazzling smiles, maybe a pair of shoes and little or nothing else. It’s that which has injected a sour note into the jazz festival plans. It’s more or less an open secret that the reason the Park District and the Pan-American Committee hedged on letting Playboy use Soldier Field was pressure from those who disapprove of the magazine’s reputation.

“James Gately, Park District president, said the matter is out of his hands and is up to the Pan-American Committee. Victor Perlmutter, Pan-American Festival Committee president, subsidiary of the Games committee which is arranging various cultural events in connection with the Games, said: ‘As far as I’m concerned, I’m in favor of the jazz festival. I think it would be a fine contribution.’”

The man behind the city officials’ sudden reversal was the Very Reverend Msgr. John M. Kelly, editor of the Catholic New World, who the American more recently quoted on the subject of obscenity. Msgr. Kelly admitted that it was he who called Playboy’s “reputation” to the attention of the Park District, the Pan-American Games Committee and the mayor. He told the American: “Playboy is not a fit sponsor for such an event. The quality of the magazine is such, in my opinion, that it should not share in the sponsorship of any part of the Pan-American Festival.”

The Sun-Times published a letter from reader Joan Gallagher who said: “The sordid efforts of both the Chicago Park District and the Pan-American Games Committee to keep the Playboy magazine Jazz Festival out of Soldier Field are among this year’s most disgusting events.

“It is unfortunate that in a city that begs for cultural events, jazz cannot find a home. The Playboy Jazz Festival promised to be one of the major cultural events in the city’s recent history. It is testimony to the spinelessness of our administrators that the festival could not be held as planned, as part of the Festival of the Americas.

“Jazz speaks well for America, but Chicago doesn’t speak well for jazz. I know that I am among the many jazz fans who hope that the festival will find a home here, despite the Park District and the Pan-American Committee.”

The North Loop News editorialized: “The Pan-American Games scheduled for Chicago this summer deserve to be a flop if the sponsors [ignore] the principles of sportsmanship and feel free to break their solemn word at will. Regardless of the merits of their stand, which is not necessarily tenable, official of the Games told Playboy magazine that it could have the use of Soldier Field for its Jazz Festival August 7, 8 and 9. Now they are backing out. The reasons they give are vague, but it now appears that the pressure is coming from sources that object to sponsorship of the festival by Playboy magazine. This sort of pressure is dangerous, and the present indication that Pan-Am officials may bow to it is no credit to them.”

The Pan-American Games and the Festival of the Americas were a flop.

Msgr. Kelly announced that he would continue to oppose Playboy’s sponsorship of a jazz festival anywhere in the city. But we produced the events just the same — in the Chicago Stadium — and it turned out to be the most spectacular and successful jazz show ever presented anywhere in the world. All of the jazz greats were there — from the big bands of Kenton, Ellington and Basie, and the swing combos of Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, to the vocal stylings of June Christie, Chris Connor, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, the Four Freshmen, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported: “Some 19,000 Chicagoans packed the Chicago Stadium to pay a thundering homage to the Great God Jazz. They came from uptown, downtown. They came in cabs, on foot, on cycles. Because of heavy traffic and a drizzling rain, they came slowly, filling the giant stadium in almost unnoticeable ripples. By the time the last clusters were seated, half-an-hour after the star-studded Playboy Jazz Festival had begun, those who had come early were already gone. And I mean gone, man, really gone! They were caught up in the wild rhythms hurled out by Count Basie’s band, which opened the four-hour concert.

“The festival, the biggest ever anywhere, was attended by jazz buffs from all over the world. There were some 200 newsmen from papers and magazines all over the United States and Europe. Photographers numbered in the 50s. The National Broadcasting Company and the Armed Forces Network taped the entire concert.

“The performance was a benefit for the Chicago Urban League. Said Dr. Nathaniel Calloway, League president: ‘The turnout has exceeded our fondest expectations.’

“Perhaps Leonard Feather, noted jazz critic, best summed up the spirit of the evening when he said: ‘Man, it was like being born again. I never dreamed anything this big could ever happen.’

“Added Feather: ‘You know, it’s great to see Chicago, where so much great jazz came from, become the center of the birth of jazz on this scale. It’s sort of like this is where it should have happened. And I’m glad it did.’”

Nearly 70,000 attended the festival’s five performances and after it was over most of the critics and jazz buffs who made the scene agreed with Leonard Feather’s conclusion: “It was the greatest weekend in the 60-year history of jazz!”

Mort Sahl, who m.c.’d the show, noting the rain on opening night that would have dampened the affair if it had been held in the open-air Soldier Field as originally scheduled, remarked to the audience: “Well, I guess this proves which side God is on.”

Six months later, Playboy opened its first key club. And, once again, Chicago officialdom became officious. Although Chicago had had key clubs for 25 years, the week we launched the first Playboy Club, Corporation Counsel John Melaniphy announced that key clubs were illegal.

There wasn’t any law that said so, but Mr. Melaniphy made the announcement just the same. We weren’t about to try building an international key-club operation with that kind of cloud hanging over us, so we took the matter to court and won a decision stating that the Playboy Club was legal and proper. Melaniphy appealed the decision and we won again in the Court of Appeals. Three years later, we found ourselves back in court with the same Corporation Counsel — this time Melaniphy contends that the June issue of the magazine is illegal.

Chicago isn’t the only major city in the U.S. where church and state are still associated in an unholy alliance. In New York, where the only ground for divorce is adultery, and where a judge recently ruled that a child born in wedlock as the result of artificial insemination is illegitimate, Playboy has had to fight its key-club battle all over again. The SLA Liquor Scandal has been only one part of our multiple problems with New York officialdom since opening a Playboy Club in Manhattan last December. The State Liquor Authority announced, just as Melaniphy had, that the New York Playboy could not be a for-members-only key club, although the pertinent laws of the state are almost identical to those in Illinois. We took the case to court a third time, and won the same point — already confirmed twice in Illinois — once again; the SLA is appealing the decision.

Even more serious, Catholic Commissioner Bernard O’Connell refused to grant the Playboy Club a cabaret license, without which the Club is unable to offer patrons any entertainment, other than background music and the Bunnies. This wasn’t a matter of official corruption, as we faced when first applying to SLA for a liquor license. Commissioner O’Connell is an honest man who is guilty only of allowing his personal religious convictions to influence his administrative decisions. O’Connell is opposed to the Playboy Club in concept, because of its association with the magazine — in the same way Melaniphy was opposed to it in Chicago (although the Playboy Clubs have proven to be the biggest convention attractions of any nightspot in either city), as Msgr. Kelly opposed the Playboy Jazz Festival and the unofficial representatives of the St. Louis Archdiocese opposed our syndicated television variety show, Playboy’s Penthouse, forcing it off the air in that city at midseason.

Commissioner O’Connell was opposed to the Playboy Club before he knew anything about it or had ever held an official hearing on granting us a cabaret license. Prior to the hearing, O’Connell called a friend — an honest member of the new State Liquor Authority — and voiced his negative feelings about Playboy and the fact that SLA was, at that point, planning on issuing a liquor license to the Club. O’Connell was especially concerned, he said, about the costuming of the Bunnies. The SLA board members laughed and said; “Don’t be an old woman, Bernie. My daughter goes to the public beach wearing less than those girls at the Playboy Club.”

The commission held his official hearing, though he did not personally attend it, and then issued a statement refusing the Playboy Club a cabaret license. The reasons he gave were: (1) that the Playboy Club was a fraud, in that it held itself out to be a key club, whereas the SLA, at that point, was insisting that it had to be open to the general public without any payment of a key fee — a matter that has since been decided in our favor in the court; (2) the Bunnies “mingled” with the customers, which was against New York law — though the only “mingling” allowed in the New York Club is the serving of food and drink and the mingling referred to in the law refers to B-girls, who sit and drink with the customers; and (3) he disapproved of the Bunnies’ costuming — although a number of waitresses in other New York clubs wear similar abbreviated costumes and the showgirls in the Latin Quarter wear a great deal less — and Bunnies have appeared, in costume, on network television, and in photographs in family newspapers and magazines all across the country.

The Playboy Clubs are, as anyone who has ever spent any time in one knows, the most closely supervised, carefully and conscientiously run nightclubs in the country. Commissioner O’Connell doesn’t know this, of course, because he has never been inside one. He doesn’t know, because he doesn’t want to know.

We appealed the commissioner’s decision to the courts and the American Civil Liberties Union entered the case as amicus curiae (friend of the court), validating the fact that more was involved here than the usual discretionary decision of an administrative official. The ACLU brief stated that O’Connell had “prejudged” and “precensored” the Playboy Club, and thus deprived us of our civil rights.

Judge Arthur G. Klein decided in favor of the Playboy Club, ruling: Commissioner O’Connell “is neither a censor nor the official custodian of the public’s morals. To satisfy his personal moral code, it is not incumbent upon the petitioner to dress its female employees in middy blouses, gymnasium bloomers, turtleneck sweaters, fishermen’s boots, or ankle-length overcoats.” The court noted that the costume worn by the Bunnies was no more revealing than a bathing suit or a low-cut formal evening gown. The court said that while Mr. O’Connell might not like certain “sophisticated” cartoons and photographs displayed in the Club, it is not required to “substitute pictures of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers or of Washington Crossing the Delaware” to satisfy the commissioner’s taste.

Commissioner O’Connell reused to let the matter end there. He had the New York Corporation Counsel appeal the decision and the Court of Appeals reversed, in favor of O’Connell. And there it stands. We must now appeal the decision once again, to the highest court in New York, and the case will not be heard until the very end of the year. In the meantime, 60,000 New York members of the Playboy Club and their guests are being deprived of entertainment to which they are entitled, the stages of three of the finest showrooms in New York remain empty, a countless number of performers are deprived of the opportunity to earn a livelihood at the Manhattan Playboy, and the Club is being deprived of more than $50,000 a month in additional revenue from showroom cover charges. All of this, plus many thousands of dollars in legal fees and court costs on both Playboy’s and the city’s part, because a single New York official has arbitrarily allowed his personal religious prejudices to play a part in his functioning as a license commissioner.

If Commissioner O’Connell, or Corporation Counsel Melaniphy, lived in a community in which all of the citizens they serve were, by their own choosing, Catholic, there might be some justification for such actions. As things stand, however, these officials are guilty of projecting the religious-moral convictions of their own particular church group onto the rest of a society in which each one of us is supposed to be allowed, by constitutional guarantees, to make such decisions for himself.

Two Sides of the Coin

The problems that we have discussed this month are not peculiar to Catholicism only — they are present when the followers of any faith allow their religious beliefs to override such primary considerations as the fundamental freedom of man and the right of every individual, in a free society, to practice his own personal moral standards, and to speak, read, write and otherwise communicate with his fellow man without fear of censorship or illegal reprisal.

The Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, published by the American Library Association, published the following report from a member in its May issue: “Several years ago two nice young men who said they were missionaries of the Mormon Church came to the library. They told me they had looked in the catalog and seen that there were some 50 cards under Mormons and Mormonism but there was a lack of up-to-date material. They offered us a choice from a list of books, and we selected a new pictorial history, a biography or two, and some doctrinal works. A few weeks later they came in with books…. Again an interval, after which they came to see me to say that they noted the books were now cataloged and on the shelves. Now that we had these books which told the truth about their religion, undoubtedly we would like to discard other books in the library which told lies about the Mormon Church. Other libraries they said had been glad to have this pointed out to them.

“I answered that this certainly did seem logical at first. But I asked them to consider my position: Suppose the Christian Scientists asked us to take out medical books, and then the doctors objected to the Christian Science books. Vegetarians might want the meat-cookery books taken out and then the butchers might retaliate on the fruit-and-nut people. What would we be able to say to people who came in and asked us to remove, on the grounds that they were untrue, the very books that they have given us? The young men saw the point and were very nice about it.”

Nor are we, in any sense suggesting that the problems we have been discussing this month represent a universal Roman Catholic viewpoint. The men who take the sort of undemocratic action described herein, be they Catholic clergy or laymen, are actually enemies of their Church, whatever they may think to the contrary, for they hurt the cause of Catholicism. No religious minority in America can benefit from a reputation for intolerance or dictatorialism.

Time magazine reported, in its issue of March 29, 1963: “Catholic University in Washington D.C., has a high aim — ‘to search out truth scientifically, to safeguard it, and to apply it’ — qualified in practice by a timid feeling that now and then some of the truth has to be suppressed. The newest case of suppression has the school’s faculty in revolt and deeply worries many of the 239 Roman Catholic bishops in the U.S., who are C.U.’s guardians.

“Barred from a student lecture series at C.U. last month were four eminent Catholic intellectuals, including two of the nation’s top Jesuit theologians, Father Gustave Weigel and John Courtney Murray; a noted Benedictine liturgical scholar, Father Godfrey Diekmann; and one of the official theologians at the Vatican Counsel, Germany’s Father Hans Kung. To Monsignor William J. McDonald, rector of Catholic University of America, giving a forum to these scholars might seem to place his school on the liberal side in debate at the Council — and he did not want the school to be on any side.

“By last week, six major faculty groups had backed resolutions calling on the C.U. administration to rethink its notions of academic freedom. ‘Now all this is out in the open,’ says one faculty man ‘The trustees cannot bypass the situation as it exists.’ Rector McDonald himself gave a sign that all the protest was having a telling effect. He announced the appearance at Catholic University next month of a timely guest speaker: Augustin Cardinal Bea, a towering liberal at the Vatican Council. Bea’s topic: ‘Academic Research and Ecumenicism.’”

On the negative side, a pamphlet being distributed by the San Diego Catholics for Better Libraries lists some 40 authors and illustrators who “have had Communist Front affiliations and/or write against faith, morals and the American way of life,” with the suggestion that all Catholics check their own libraries against the list. The book, The Last Temptation of Christ, was removed, last spring, from the Ashland, Wisconsin, public library after a Roman Catholic priest forbade his parishioners to read it on pain of mortal sin. “Furthermore,” said the American Library Association Newsletter, “he forbade the parishioner who showed him the book to return it to the library, since it would be a mortal sin to make it available to others. ‘I still have the book,’ said Father Schneider. ‘I’ll have to return it to the librarian now and see that it’s burned.’”

The Catholic Messenger editorialized against the book’s suppression, however. Putting aside the fact that the book’s author, Nikos Kazantzakis, “is held in high regard as a serious writer, and that his fictionalized interpretations of religious figures (his recently published St. Francis of Assisi, for instance) have been generally accepted as unorthodox, but reverent”; putting aside also that “precious few of the people attacking the book seem to be familiar with it” — the Messenger pointed out that after the 31-member Arcadia (California) Council of Churches “voted overwhelmingly in favor of forcing the book out of the library, it was established that only three of the 31 members had read the book.

“These facts, as we say, we put aside. As revealing as they are, they do not touch the main issue at stake, and that is the freedom of the public at large to have access to literature that a minority find obnoxious.

“There are probably very few books on the shelves of the average public library that don’t irritate some group of people. If the library were to be at the mercy of every pressure group annoyed by a given book, it seems obvious that only the most harmless, least valuable books would be available through library facilities.

“Quite clearly this is not the function of a public library. It must open its shelves to books reflecting the free interplay of ideas, and if a given book irritates a given group, the group has an easy recourse: not to read the book. Why it should not be able to do, just as clearly, is to keep the rest of the public from reading it, and this is the kind of suppression that the California clergymen [and the Wisconsin priest] are trying to practice at the moment.”

On the negative side, a Catholic reader misinterpreted remarks we made in the third installment of The Playboy Philosophy, drawn from a story and comments in Newsweek and Harper’s, regarding a Post of the Catholic War Veterans in Hartford, Connecticut, that justified a censorship campaign they had undertaken by commenting favorably on a similar book-burning purge in Red China: “We have to hand it to the Communists…who have launched a nationwide campaign against pornographic trash…. Should not this example provoke a simple literary cleanup in our land where the morality of our actions is gauged by service to God and not to an atheistic state?” The reader wrote to a Catholic periodical, the Brooklyn Tablet, with the suggestion that militant action be taken against us for what he considered as a slur: “Incredible to equate Catholicism with communism? Well, Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy, in the February issue, on page 46, does just this in an attack on the Catholic War Veterans. It is worth mobilization of effort to uphold Licenses Commissioner O’Connell, who in refusing Hefner a cabaret license recently was ridiculed by some judge.”

By this reader’s logic, the present installment of this editorial series will be viewed by some as a general tirade against Catholicism, which it is not, of course. It is strenuous opposition to censorship and attempts at totalitarian control by a few within the Catholic religion (and everywhere else these same undemocratic tactics exist) and it is addressed to free men of good will of every religious affiliation — Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and those of no religious affiliation at all.

Another letter was written recently by Reverend Harold J. Drexler, assistant pastor of the Sacred Heart Church, Dubuque, Iowa, to a number of Playboy’s advertisers. The letter read: “We have been concerned with certain magazines in our neighborhood stores. We have over 1200 children of school age and like to protect them from harmful reading matter. We found the Playboy magazine in our area and the managements cooperated in their regard.

“However, we noticed your large advertisement in this magazine. We were surprised that such a reputable business firm as yours would advertise in this type of magazine. We hope that you would reconsider your policy of advertising in this type of publication. It is our judgment that you are doing your firm’s good name more harm than good by supporting a magazine that treats relations between man and woman as something of a game. Other advertisers whom we have written have acknowledged the soundness of our disapproval. May we hear from you?” A postscript referred to the June-issue arrest “on charges of publishing and circulating an obscene magazine.”

The seemingly personal correspondence was actually a form letter sent to a majority of the advertisers in a particular issue of Playboy. We’ve no notion who those advertisers might be who “acknowledged the soundness of our disapproval,” since advertising lineage, like readership, continues to climb at an astounding rate, and we are aware of no advertising cancellations related to this letter. Here, however, are letters of response from a couple of advertisers that we do know about, because they sent us copies of their replies.

A vice president of After Six Formals wrote, “We would like to point out to you that our relationship with Playboy is a business one and that our advertising in the publication does not constitute an endorsement of its editorial contents, any more than an advertisement in a Republican or Democratic newspaper constitutes a political endorsement.

“Playboy magazine is certainly not intended for children and neither are the products advertised therein. Our highest courts have repeatedly held that adults may not be deprived of reading what they want to read, simply on the grounds that the subject is not fit fo