Pornographia

In the state of Washington and the cities of Omaha and Chicago, last week, decrees were issued by the local district attorneys banning from the mails certain publications variously defined as "salacious," "indecent," "pornographic." These decrees, the first conscipuous discrimination against a type of literature that has long fouled the public newsstands and encumbered the mails, were issued without organized cooperation. They are an indication of a resentment that has long been gathering, undirected and unexpressed, in widely separated parts of the U. S.

The magazines most generally excoriated were: Artists and Models, La Vie Parisienne, Hot Dog, Capt. Billy's Whiz Bang, Cis Weekly--booklets which, with a clutter of others, including Paris Nights, So This Is Paris, Ziffles, True Confessions, obtain a certain insecure circulation by pandering to the suppressed bawdiness of soiled minds. They marshal their pornography under a variety of shams: some affecting the disguise of wit, some the imposture of art. The wit is usually flaccid filth which lacks the forthright virtues of true ribaldry; the art similar to the crude but spirited masterpieces with which anonymous Raphaels adorn the walls of railroad stations.

Artists and Models is of the latter type. Its aim is to inculcate the conviction that the human body, devoid of clothes, is an obscenity. Photographs of models in postures whose suggestiveness is made possible only by their awkwardness are varied with reproductions of famed paintings that the vulgar can be relied upon to misinterpret. Interspersed are brief sketches in prose under such engaging captions as One Night in a Harem, To the Pure All Things Are Pure.

Capt. Billy's Whiz Bang alternates between the urbane pleasantries of high-school debauches and the vicious smut of discontented sheepherders: Fly-speckled jokes, limaceous verses, epigrams as forlornly disorderly as the cigar ashes left behind the curtain of a cheap hotel room by its last occupant. La Vie Parisienne presents pornography that often cannot be understood without a modicum of sophistication or an understanding of the more bizarre manifestations of the sexual impulse ; its drawings are occasionally clever. In these respects, it is superior to competitors. English translations, however, accompany the more salacious jocosities, and these invariably emasculate whatever finesse there may have been in the original.

Paris Nights announced, on its May cover, the following articles: Nono Steps Out, Pink Cheeks and Red, Experiences With Models, A Woman's View of the Artists' Ball, etc., etc.

There are innumerable other septic sheets, selling at from 10-c- to 25-c-. which fall roughly into one of the above classifications. Their readers are of two kinds: curious adolescents, repressed adults. To the former, they supply a vicious stimulation of impulses normally dormant, a concrete embodiment of restless speculations and images, and an incentive for unhealthy physiological experimentation. In the latter, they nurse that weakness for vicarious sensuality which is an invariable characteristic of the pervert and the frustrate. Sane people, recognizing the menace of this pestilence of pornography, register, here and there, a recognizable protest, of. which the most effective so far have been those in Washington, Omaha, Chicago.