Two Definitions of Obscenity

Permissiveness in publishing has come a long way. Today almost every corner newsstand offers as titillating a peep show as the old burlesque houses ever managed--and nobody is there to ring down the curtain. Dozens of "girlie" magazines wink at the casual browser; even at the local bookseller's, the shelves are loaded with books that once had to be bought under the counter in Paris and smuggled past customs.

But elastic as the limits may be, there are still limits. Last week two publishers accused of violating them were in trouble with the law.

Patently Offensive. The first to take a fall was aggressive, Brooklyn-born Ralph Ginzburg, 33, a onetime Esquire staffer with a sharp eye for a salable commodity that is spelled sex. In 1958 he published An Unhurried View of Erotica, a sort of bibliography of banned books, and sold 275,000 copies. Last year he began publishing Eros, a quarterly "devoted to the joy of love." At $10 a copy, Eros offers little more than what can be picked up by a determined voyeur with scissors and a library card--a reworking of Lysistrata, ribald pieces by De Maupassant and Balzac, Frank Harris' My Life and Loves--but Ginzburg claims he now has a circulation of 150,000.

The Government began keeping an eye on Eros after 25,000 letters poured into the Postmaster General's Office complaining about the magazine's oversexed promotional pamphlets. Ginzburg "used every publicity gimmick in the book to almost force us to ban it," said one official, even down to mailing the magazines from towns like Intercourse, Pa., Middlesex, N.J., and Blueballs, Pa. Finally the Justice Department haled Ginzburg into the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia on 28 counts of mailing obscene matter--the winter issue of Eros, a newsletter of current events on the sex front called Liaison, and The Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity, a Tucson woman's clinically detailed sexual autobiography that covers her activities from age 3 to 36.

Ginzburg marshaled 65 psychologists, sexologists and assorted literati to testify. Lillian Maxine Serett, who wrote The Housewife's Handbook under the pen name Key Anthony, told the court, "Women's role in sex is widely misunderstood. Women do have sexual rights." Essayist Dwight Macdonald testified that he found inoffensive a "photographic tone poem" in Eros showing a nude Negro man and a nude white woman in eight pages of assorted full-color embraces. But when it came to Liaison and The Housewife's Handbook, even Macdonald drew the line. They were, he said, "vulgar and of no literary value."

Assistant U.S. Attorney J. Shane Creamer found the publications worse than that. They are "patently offensive" and "go beyond the customary limits that society tolerates," said he. Judge Ralph C. Body apparently agreed. Last week the judge convicted Ginzburg on all 28 counts--leaving the publisher liable to fines as high as $140,000 and 140 years in prison when he is sentenced, sometime in the next few weeks.

Why the Pinch? The other publisher accused of crossing the line is Playboy's Hugh M. Hefner, 37, who was asleep in his humble 40-room pad on Chicago's North Side one afternoon earlier this month when four men from the vice squad came calling. A brass plaque on the front door carries the Latin legend "Si non oscillas noli tintinnare"--"If you don't swing, don't ring"--but the cops rang anyway and swung Hefner off to be booked on charges of publishing and selling an obscene magazine.

What got Chicago's vice squad into the act was an eight-page exposure in the June Playboy (circ. 1,250,000) of overripe Actress Jayne Mansfield. In bed and bubblebath, Jayne revealed everything except what an un-Sanforized G string might conceal. But there was nothing particularly unusual about that, for scores of equally nude "playmates" have appeared in the magazine in its 9 1/2-year history. Why the pinch now? "Jayne has more than most," says Hefner by way of explanation. "She makes people nervous."

There is more to the case than that. Some of the pictures show a man on the bed too--fully clothed, but a man. One caption tells how Jayne "writhes about seductively," another how she is "gyrating." "The real issue," said Chicago's American in an editorial, "is how far a magazine can go. 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 it is practically a duty to encourage the habit."

Hefner certainly does little to discourage it. In half a dozen rabbit hutches known as Playboy Clubs, he keeps on display 421 Bunnies, who are wired and cinched into tight, brief costumes with padded balconies and wiggly little cottontails. "We total over 24.5 tons of bunnies," says Hefner, nibbling reflectively on a chicken. "Their collective chest measurement is 15,156 in., which is about one-quarter of a mile. The waistlines total 9,4721 in. and their hip circumference is 14,777 in."

In his magazine he offers full-color, fold-out nudes sandwiched between big-name fiction and big-deal nonfiction. He seems convinced that what Playboy really needs is more sex, not less. "If the secret psyche of the typical young male adult could be probed," wrote Hefner in an apparently endless editorial on "The Playboy Philosophy" that has already been running in serial form for eight months, "we suspect that we probably err in the direction of less emphasis on sex than the average, rather than more."

Rambling Bunny Hop. Hefner's editorial is a rambling bunny hop through the fields of Puritanism and Prohibition, Freud and Free Love, Capitalism and Communism. But deep in his turgid rhetoric, he actually does take a crack at answering the charge of obscenity. "Who can define the word?" he asks. Lest anyone can, he adds the thought that "a serious school of scientific opinion believes that obscenity actually makes a valuable contribution to the mental health of society."

Whether Chicago's South State Street Court agrees is a matter that will be settled when Hefner appears next week for his obscenity hearing. Meanwhile, he is losing no sleep over the matter. All a conviction can cost him is $400 in fines.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.