Conversations on the New Eroticism

As last month's TIME-Louis Harris Poll made clear, there are two Americas of morality. One is concentrated largely in urban areas and in more highly educated groups, and applauds the new permissiveness. The other is a world that clings to established values. In between are those who are willing to tolerate permissiveness without enthusiasm and those who are ready to oppose it without fanaticism. Evangelist Billy Graham stands for a fundamentalist view of good and evil that still has a strong appeal for many Americans. He expressed that view in an interview with TIME Reporter Jill Krementz. To explore the views of the other America, TIME gathered eight experts for an afternoon's discussion. The eight: Wynn Chamberlain, paint er and producer-director of erotic films; Maurice Girodias, founder-editor of the Olympia Press, which published J. P. Donleavy, William Burroughs, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita; Sally Kirkland, actress in several erotic and/or nude plays; Jacques Levy, director of Oh! Calcutta!, America Hurrah and Scuba Duba; Charles Rembar, the attorney who successfully defended Lady Chatterley's Lover, Fanny Hill and Tropic of Cancer against obscenity charges; Terry Southern, author of Candy; Kenneth Tynan, British author, critic and organizer of Oh! Calcutta!; and Dr. Ernest Vandenhaag, New York University psychoanalyst and professor of social philosophy. On these pages are samplings of the conversations.

SYMPOSIUM OF EIGHT: THE MERITS OF PERMISSIVENESS

Tynan: Pornography seems to me a necessary and useful thing to have around as an adjunct to ordinary sex, and as an alternative to ordinary sex. I think it's a boon to the tired traveler --in a foreign country where he doesn't speak the language or doesn't know anybody. I think it's an absolute social necessity in the case of some people who are ugly and old and lonely, but that does not mean it should only be for the ugly, the old and the lonely. I do think that more good artists should enter the field in order to raise its standards.

Vandenhaag: Mr. Tynan's idea is apparently that pornography can be good, depending, of course, on the quality of who creates it. Now as I think of art, it is not the experience itself, but a reflection upon experience. As Santayana put it, high art cancels lust. My view would be this: the better the writer, the less effective his writing as "pornography" as you defined it, however sexual his subject may be.

Levy: How do you define the difference between a Playboy spread and a nude painting by Picasso or Goya?

Vandenhaag: Intent is what you do know. Effect is what you do not know. You can't expect the artist to know about the effects.

Tynan: Until quite recently, erotic art was a category of art, accepted as such in China and India. Boucher's paintings for Louis XV were intended to arouse Louis XV, and by all accounts they did. I have been sexually aroused reading D. H. Lawrence, reading Ovid and reading of Hero and Leander. And it was Sir Kenneth Clark who said that anyone who paints a nude with no desire to produce an erotic effect is a hypocrite.

Southern: I think we should talk about "eroticism." It's a good word, you know, deriving from eros and having to do with love. There is such a thing that is esthetically erotic which is very positive and beautiful. I think what is described as "pornography" is usually something erotic that just didn't make it.

Boring Pornography

Chamberlain: I would like to posit that pornography itself is an old-fashioned idea. St. Augustine, according to most of my legal friends, is the one who is really responsible for the whole concept in law that somebody has the right to tell you that you're doing something which isn't good for you to do.

Vandenhaag: Freud described a process that is called repression in individuals: that which takes place when the individual is confronted with impulses that part of his personality has to reject--at least temporarily--because of fear of being swamped by these impulses. One way to look at censorship is to consider whether it may not be the social analogue of deeper repressions that take place in the individuals. That is, the society also, rightly or wrongly, finds it necessary to repress those things that it fears may swamp its order and impair its function. One danger in having pornography is in time it may come to resemble sex instruction in school: it can make sex as boring as it already is in Sweden and in Denmark.

Rembar: I think what will happen is that the Supreme Court won't go back to banning books. Where you'll have the conflict is in the theater, film, television. You may find a conservative court saying that what happens on the stage is not so much expression as it is action, and you'll have a legal battle right there. You see, the fact that it is also communication won't answer. The poor guy arrested for indecent exposure on the street can also say that his effort was to communicate, and no doubt it is. But the Supreme Court is not going to say that he's got a right to.

Tynan: I was asked in the Fanny Hill case in England years ago to justify the defense that the book had redeeming artistic merit. I told the counsel that I was going to go into the witness box and say yes, it has artistic merit because it used artistic skill to arouse me sexually.

Rembar: And so the counsel said "Don't bother."

Tynan: He went through the rules and said that that wasn't a legitimate artistic purpose of art. Would such a defense work in an American court?

Rembar: Not now. But I think we're coming very close to it, because I think that entertainment will be accepted by the court as having social value.

Innocent Nudity

Girodias: I don't think that pornography is even a thing that exists at all. 1 think that it's a thing that was killed about 20 years ago when Terry wrote Candy. After that, there was no reason for using the word "pornographic." I think the reality of today is represented by something like Oh! Calcutta!, which is a form of art at a popular level in which people will enjoy eroticism in a completely free manner.

Kirkland: There is nothing more innocent and vulnerable than the naked human body. When we come to the day and the year when no one in this country feels funny about taking off his clothes, then we've come to a very healthy time. I'm embarrassed by nudity --but that's what it's all about. I want to be embarrassed. And I want you to be vulnerable to my embarrassment and then maybe we can talk as soul mates.

Tynan: The British Foreign Secretary of ten years ago uttered a very unwittingly revealing remark when there was a movement in the Socialist Party to ban the H-bomb--that England should give it up. He said: "I would not want the Foreign Secretary of this great country to walk naked into the conference chamber." What he meant, of course, was that he had to be carrying that bomb to feel clothed.

Kirkland: With nudity, we'll get some honesty, which we haven't had in the arts in a long time.

Vandenhaag: Why do you insist that a naked man cannot lie?

Kirkland: Because a naked man is more vulnerable.

Vandenhaag: I have lied naked and I have lied dressed, and I find no difference. I have not found much occasion to be naked in public, but even if it were introduced as a general custom, I don't think it would change anything in particular.

Levy: I feel that the "sex explosion" and pornography are destructive to civilization. This is not the first time that this has happened. When a society gets to the point where it is eating its own entrails and its civilization is about to crumble, it immediately returns to the expression of sexuality as the only thing left to somehow titillate and excite. What we're seeing now is a kind of decay and destruction of the Judeo-Christian society with its ethics and values.

I think what we're seeing now, when I talk about the destruction of the old society and the moving on to the new, is a new set of values that allows people to have rather simple and direct pleasures that do not require such enormous responsibilities and don't require the enormous debt that you pay in giving love. I think the people are learning to play with one another. Now, one of the things that happens is that love becomes cheap. I think that what we're seeing now is a time when in fact we will have fewer deep, stable relationships among people. The civilization that we're moving into is one that cannot sustain two people in a bedroom all by themselves for 40 years. It's impossible anyway in this new civilization, because people have too much time on their hands--too much leisure.

Rembar: My interest is in freedom, and freedom means freedom for a lot of things that are probably bad as well as good. I'm not at all convinced that what you so modestly call "pornography" is a good thing. My feeling would be that vicarious satisfaction in the end diminishes the net sum of human pleasure. But whether the law should be allowed to interfere with this thing is something else again.

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