by Bill Bryson
State laws regarding obscenity and morality are equally – we might fairly say ridiculously – prone to ambiguity. Two things are notable about such state laws: first, how intrusive they are, and, second, how vague is the language in which they are couched. Many go so far as to proscribe certain acts (for example, oral sex) even between consenting adults, even sometimes between husband and wife. Most states have laws against fornication and even masturbation lying somewhere on their books, though you would hardly know it, such is the evasive language with which the laws are phrased. One of the most popular phrases is ‘crime against nature’ (though in California it is ‘the infamous crime against nature’ and in Indiana ‘the abominable and detestable crime against nature’), but almost never do they specify what a crime against nature is. An innocent observer could be excused for concluding that it means chopping down trees or walking on the grass.
Many others have laws against ‘self-pollution’, but again without providing a definition of what is intended by the expression. Occasionally statutes include a more explicit term like sodomy or masturbation, but often this serves only to heighten the uncertainty. Indiana, for instance, has a law, passed in 1905, which reads in part: ‘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.’31 If, as the law implies, masturbation and self-pollution are not the same thing, then what exactly is self-pollution? Smoking a cigarette? Failing to bathe regularly? Whatever it may be, in Indiana at least as late as the 1950s you could spend up to fourteen years in prison for it.
In those few instances where states have tried to be more carefully explicit in their statutes, they have usually ended up tying themselves in knots. Kansas, for instance, gave itself a law that made adultery in the form of vaginal intercourse illegal, but not when it involved deviant sex acts. What is certain is that most people have broken such a law at one time or another. The sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, not normally a man to make light of such matters, once remarked only half jokingly that, with what he knew from his surveys, 85 per cent of the people of Indiana should be in prison and the other 15 per cent were anaemic.
The difficulty of course is that acceptable behaviour, not just in sex but in all things, is a constantly changing concept. Just consider the matter of beards. In 1840, Americans had been beardless for so long – about two hundred years – that when an eccentric character in Framingham, Massachusetts, grew a beard he was attacked by a crowd and dragged off to jail. Yet by the mid-1850s, just a decade and a half later, there was scarcely a beardless man in America. From 1860 to 1897, every American President was bearded. Or consider hemlines. In 1921, when hemlines began to climb to mid-calf, Utah considered imprisoning – not fining, but imprisoning – women who wore skirts more than three inches above the ankle. Virginia, shocked at the other extreme, introduced a bill that would make it a criminal offence to wear a gown that displayed more than three inches of throat. Ohio decided to leave women unmolested, but to go to the heart of the matter and punish any retailer found guilty of selling a garment that ‘unduly displays or accentuates the female figure’.32 Such outrage wasn’t reserved just for female attire. As late as 1935, any male venturing on to the beach of Atlantic City with a bare chest faced arrest for indecency.33
In short, standards of acceptability constantly change. A period of repression is almost always followed by a spell of licence. The ferociously restrictive age of Anthony Comstock, which drew to a close with his death in 1915, was immediately followed by a period of relative abandon. Not only did hemlines climb to shocking heights, but young people, made suddenly mobile by the availability of cars, took to partying until all hours, drinking bath-tub gin, and engaging in heavy sessions of necking and petting – activities that had always existed of course but had only recently acquired such explicit labels. Other newly minted terms of the period – bedroom eyes; playboy; tall, dark and handsome – betray a frankness that could not have been expressed ten years earlier.
Nothing better captured the new spirit of sexual boldness, or the inevitable backlash against it, than the movies. After their cautious start, movies in the period 1915-20 became wildly daring by the standards of the day. Studios cranked out a succession of pictures with provocatively enticing titles like Virgin Paradise, Red Hot Romance, The Fourteenth Lover, Her Purchase Price, Flesh and the Devil and White Hot Stuff.34 One lurid poster promised viewers a motion picture featuring ‘neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation-craving mothers ... the truth – bold, naked, sensational’.35 Even historical epics got the treatment. Helen of Troy was advertised as ‘an A.D. Mamma in a B.C. town’.36 A very few, like the 1918 movie A Man’s World, did contain brief nudity, and others certainly implied rampant sex, but for the most part the hottest thing was the poster.
In 1921, with Hollywood rocked by scandal – it was the year of the Fatty Arbuckle case and the death in sexually questionable circumstances of a director named William Desmond Taylor – and with thirty-seven states and hundreds of municipalities threatening to come up with a confusion of censorship codes, Hollywood acted. It formed a body known as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., and appointed Will H. Hays, Postmaster General under President Warren G. Harding and a former chairman of the Republican Party, as its first head. Hays was a non-smoking, non-drinking Indiana Presbyterian whose pinched face had extreme moral rectitude written all over it. (Though, like many others in the Harding administration, his probity did not extend to financial dealings. He was happy to receive and adroitly launder hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign contributions.) At a salary of $ 100,000 a year, Hays became the moral watchdog of America’s movies.
In 1927, the Hays Office, as it was immediately if informally known, issued a famous list of ‘Don’ts and Be Carefuls’. The list consisted of eleven proscribed acts, such as ‘excessive or lustful kissing’, and twenty-six acts to be handled with extreme caution. In 1930 this was superseded by a much more comprehensive Production Code, which would remain the bible of film production for half a century. The code decreed several broad principles – that pictures should be wholesome, that the sympathies of the audience should never be ‘thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin’ – and scores of specific strictures. It forbade the uttering on screen not just of every common swear word and racial epithet, but such dramatically useful terms as eunuch, floozy, louse (the Hays Office helpfully suggested stinkbug as an alternative), guts, in your hat, nuts, nerts, cripes, hellcat, belch and even, remarkably, virtuous (on the presumption that it was a too explicit reminder that some people weren’t). Liar was permitted in comedies but not dramas, and travelling salesman could be used but not in a context involving a farmer’s daughter.37 Lord, even in reverential contexts, had to be changed to Lawsy. One of the more indestructible myths concerning the code is that it decreed that when a man and woman were shown in bed together the man must always have at least one foot on the floor. It said no such thing. However, it did touch on almost everything else. As one movie historian has put it, ‘it prohibited the showing or mentioning of almost everything germane to the situation of normal human adults’.
Even the word it in the wrong context could be considered dangerously suggestive. In 1931 the Hays Office ordered Samuel Goldwyn to change the name of his comedy The Greeks Had a Word for It to The Greeks Had a Word for Them. In much the same spirit the title of a Joan Crawford movie was changed from Infidelity to Fidelity. Three years later, when Goldwyn bought the rights to Lillian Hellman’s play about lesbianism, The Children’s Hour, Hays told him that he could by all means make it into a movie, as long as it didn’t have anything to do with lesbians and he didn’t call it The Children’s Hour. The movie was made without lesbians and with the title These Three.38
Occasionally, producers could preserve a line through trade-offs. David O. Selznick managed to save Clark Gable’s fam
ous, and at the time shocking, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ in Gone With the Wind – a line not in the original script, incidentally – by sacrificing ‘May your mean little soul burn in hell for eternity.’39 But for the most part films became sensationally cautious, and would remain so into the 1960s.
As late as 1953, the main character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was not permitted to say ‘Bottoms up’ when quaffing a drink. In the Broadway production of The Seven-Year Itch the main character commits adultery, but in the 1955 movie Tom Ewell could only agonize over the dangerous temptation of it. Captain’s Paradise, a 1952 British comedy in which Alec Guinness played a sea captain with wives in two ports, was allowed to be released in America only after the producers added an epilogue admonishing the audience not to try such a thing themselves.40 Even Walt Disney was forbidden from showing a cow with udders.41
Finally in 1968, with the Production Code almost universally ignored, it was abandoned and a new system of ratings was introduced. Originally films were rated, in order of descending explicitness, X, R, M and G. M was later changed to GP and later still to PG. XXX, or Triple-X, though favoured by owners of porno theatres (an Americanism of 1966), never had official standing.
Newspapers and magazines had no regulatory body equivalent to the Hays Office, but it wasn’t necessary because they were almost always prepared to exercise a rigorous self-censorship. In 1933, when there was a breakthrough in the treatment of syphilis, most papers were at a loss as to how to tell their readers. Most fell back on the conveniently vague term social disease. An innocent reader could well have concluded that it involved handshaking. As late as 1934, the New York Times would not allow syphilis or venereal disease to besmirch its pages even in serious discussions.42
As late as 1943, when a husband’s homosexuality was a factor in a sensational murder trial, few newspapers could bring themselves to describe his affliction. One described the man as having ‘indications of an abnormal psychological nature’.43 Rape was commonly euphemized to assault, as in the famous – but probably apocryphal and certainly undocumented – story of an attacker who ‘repeatedly struck and kicked his victim, hurled her down a flight of stairs and then assaulted her’.
Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives – darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, gosh-dang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshophat and others almost without number – but even these cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s. Mencken notes how a federal judge in New York threatened a lawyer with contempt for having the impertinence to utter ‘darn’ in his court. Esquire magazine found itself hauled into court by the Postmaster General in 1943 for daring to print backside, behind and bawdy house in various issues. It wasn’t even necessary to say a word to cause offence. During World War II, an anti-German song called ‘Der Fuehrer’s Face’ was banned from the nation’s airwaves because it contained a Bronx cheer.
Television too had a self-imposed code of ethics. As early as 1944, when Norma Martin and Eddie Cantor sang a duet called ‘We’re Having a Baby, My Baby and Me’, and accompanied it with a little hula dance, the cameraman was ordered to blur the image.44 On an early talk show, when the English comedian Beatrice Lillie jokingly remarked of belly dances that she had ‘no stomach for that kind of thing’, it caused a small scandal. In the early 1950s, after an Arkansas Congressman with the God-fearing name of Ezekiel C. Gothings held hearings on sex and violence on television, the networks adopted their own code which essentially decreed that nothing immoral would appear on America’s airwaves.45
Thus in 1952, when Lucille Ball became pregnant, the term wasn’t permitted. She was expecting. Nor was it just sex that prompted censorship. In 1956, when Rod Serling wrote a script about a black youth in Mississippi who is murdered after whistling at a white woman, the producers of US Steel Hour enthusiastically went along with the idea – so long as the victim wasn’t black, wasn’t murdered and didn’t live in the deep South.
Books by comparison showed much greater daring. Fucking appeared in a novel called Strange Fruit as early as 1945, and was banned in Massachusetts as a result. The publishers took the state to court, but the case fell apart when the defence attorney arguing for its sale was unable to bring himself to utter the objectionable word in court, in effect conceding that it was too filthy for public consumption.46 In 1948 Norman Mailer caused a sensation by including pissed off in The Naked and the Dead. Three years later, America got its first novel to use four-letter words extensively when James Jones’s From Here to Eternity was published. Even there the editors were at sixes and sevens over which words to allow. They allowed fuck and shit (though not without excising about half of such appearances from the original manuscript) but drew the line at cunt and prick.47
Against such a background dictionary makers became seized with uncertainty. In the 1960s the Merriam-Webster Dictionary broke new ground by including a number of taboo words – cunt, shit and prick – but lost its nerve when it came to fuck. Mario Pei protested the omission in the New York Times but of course without once mentioning the word at issue. To this day America remains to an extraordinary degree a land of euphemism. Even now the US State Department cannot bring itself to use the word prostitute. Instead it refers to ‘available casual indigenous female companions’.48 Producers of rape-seed are increasingly calling it canola, lest the first syllable offend any delicate sensibilities, even though rape in the horticultural sense comes from rāpa, Latin for ‘turnip’.49
Despite the growing explicitness of books and movies, in most other areas of public discourse – notably in newspapers, radio and local and network television – America remains perhaps the most extraordinarily cautious nation in the developed world. Words, pictures and concepts that elsewhere excite no comment or reaction remain informally banned from most American media.
In 1991 the Columbia Journalism Review ran a piece on the coverage of a briefly infamous argument between Pittsburgh Pirates Manager Jim Leyland and his star player Barry Bonds. It examined how thirteen newspapers from around the country had dealt with the livelier epithets the two men had hurled at each other. Without exception the papers had replaced the offending words with ellipses or dashes, or else had changed them to something lighter – making ‘kissing your ass’ into ‘kissing your butt’, for instance. To an outside observer there are two immediately arresting points here: first, that ‘kissing your ass’ is still deemed too distressingly graphic for modern American newspaper readers, and, secondly, that ‘kissing your butt’ is somehow thought more decorous. Even more arresting is that the Columbia Journalism Review, though happy to revel in the discomfort at which the papers had found themselves, could not bring itself to print the objectionable words either, relying instead on the coy designations ‘the F-word’ and ‘the A-word’.
Examples of such hyperprudence are not hard to find. In 1987 the New York Times columnist William Safire wrote about the expression cover your ass without being able to bring himself to record the phrase, though he had no hesitation in listing many expressive synonyms: butt, keister, rear end, tail. In the same year, when a serious art-house movie called Sammy and Rosie Get Laid was released, Safire refused to name the film in his column (the New York Times itself would not accept an ad with the full title). Safire explained: ‘I will not print the title here because I deal with a family trade; besides, it is much more titillating to ostentatiously avoid the slang term.’50 Pardon me? On the one hand he wishes to show an understandable consideration for our sense of delicacy; but on the other he is happy to titillate us – indeed, it appears to be his desire to heighten our titillation. Such selective self-censorship would seem to leave American papers open to charges of, at the very least, inconsistency.
In pursuit of edification, I asked Allan M. Siegal, assistant managi
ng editor of the New York Times, what rules on bad language obtain at the paper. ‘I am happy to say we maintain no list of proscribed expressions,’ Siegal replied. ‘In theory, any expression could be printed if it were central to a reader’s understanding of a hugely important news development.’ He noted that the Times had used shit in reports on the Watergate transcripts, and also ass, crap and dong ’in similarly serious contexts, like the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment hearings’.
Such instances, it should be noted, are extremely exceptional. Between 1980 and July 1993, shit appeared in the New York Times just once (in a book review by Paul Theroux). To put that in context, during the period in review the Times published something on the order of 400 million to 500 million words of text. Piss appeared three times (twice in book reviews, once in an art review). Laid appeared thirty-two times, but each time in reference to the movie that Safire could not bring himself to name. Butthead or butthole appeared sixteen times, again almost always in reference to a particular proper noun, such as the interestingly named pop group Butthole Surfers.
As a rule, Siegal explained, ‘we wish not to shock or offend unless there is an overweening reason to risk doing do. We are loath to contribute to a softening of the society’s barriers against harsh or profane language. The issue is nothing so mundane as our welcome among paying customers, be they readers or advertisers. Our management truly believes that civil public discourse is a cherished value of the democracy, and that by our choices we can buttress or undermine that value.’51
One consequence of the American approach to explicit language is that we often have no idea when many of our most common expressions first saw light since they so often go unrecorded. Even something as innocuous as to be caught with one’s pants down isn’t found in print until 1946 (in the Saturday Evening Post), though it is likely that people were using it at least a century earlier.52 More robust expressions like fucking-A and shithead are effectively untraceable.
