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3 unusual facts about obscenity


Leon Washington

Washington's 2006 Bowman "Signs of the Future" card with the Jets caused a great deal of controversy during the third week of November, 2006, in which it appears that he is making an obscene gesture.

Obscenity

Four films that were originally refused a certificate, The Exorcist, Straw Dogs, The Evil Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were granted a certificate in the late 1990s and have subsequently been screened on mainstream television.

The most notable films given an "X" rating were Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973).


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obscenity | Obscenity |

1727 in literature

Publisher Edmund Curll is convicted under English law for the publication of an English translation of Venus in the Cloister (in 1724) under the common law offence of disturbing the peace, setting a legal precedent for prosecutions for obscenity.

Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress

The Anthony Comstocks, the Thomas Bowdlers and Victorian hypocrisy - the predecessors of our present obscenity laws - had yet to come upon the stage.

Anthony Rowe

He risked prosecution under Britain's obscenity laws when he printed the first unexpurgated Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which other printers had fought shy of.

Bijou Video

The first obscenity charge was brought against Toushin in 1969 for exhibiting the film Flaming Creatures, by Jack Smith, in Chicago, shortly followed by another arrest for obscenity in 1970 for exhibiting the film I Am Curious (Yellow) in Indianapolis and in 1973 Deep Throat in East Chicago, Indiana.

Bruno Bernard

In the early 1950s, Bernard fought obscenity charges that ended with a case in the U. S. Supreme Court.

Bryanston Distributing Company

It is not to be confused with the British Bryanston Films (UK) or Bryanston Pictures the production arm which was liquidated when former director "Anthony Peraino" was prosecuted by the federal government on an obscenity charge stemming from the production and distribution of the film Deep Throat, which is recognized as possibly the most financially successful independent film of all time.

Child pornography laws in the United States

Pornography is generally protected speech, unless it is obscene, as the Supreme Court of the United States held in 1973 in Miller v. California.

Flaming Creatures

During the confirmation hearings for the chief justice nomination of Abe Fortas, James Clancy, representing Citizens for Decent Literature, showed Flaming Creatures in a room in the capital among other material, inviting senators to view the sorts of things that Fortas had held in several decisions did not constitute obscenity.

Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot

He collaborated with his close friend Sir Richard Burton in the translations of two Sanskrit erotic texts, the Kama Sutra of Vatsayana (1883) and The Ananga Ranga (1885), both privately printed by the Kama Shastra Society (a fictitious organisation consisting of himself and Burton, a legal device to avoid obscenity laws).

Gangster Stories

Gangster Stories (and its companion, Racketeer Stories) quickly came under censorship pressure in New York state, instigated by John S. Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a state entity empowered to recommend obscenity cases to prosecutorial authorities.

Gay male pulp fiction

Beginning around 1964, the more than a decade of challenges to U.S. censorship laws applied to literary novels such as Lady Chatterley's Lover, Portnoy's Complaint, and Naked Lunch had redefined legal standards for obscenity.

Georg Kreisel

According to Conradi, "For half a century she nonetheless records variously Kreisel's brilliance, wit and sheer 'dotty' solipsistic strangeness, his amoralism, cruelty, ambiguous vanity and obscenity." Murdoch dedicated her 1971 novel An Accidental Man to Kreisel and he became a (partial) model for several characters in other novels, including Marcus Vallar in The Message to the Planet and Guy Openshaw in Nuns and Soldiers.

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli

He also took the risk of illegally publishing and distributing novels banned under obscenity laws, such as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

Indian Ink

Flora is a thoroughly modern girl who has modeled for Modigliani, hobnobbed with communists, and been accused of obscenity for the racy book A Nymph and Her Muse.

Jacobellis

Jacobellis v. Ohio, a United States Supreme Court decision of 1964 on obscenity

John Hanbury Angus Sparrow

He famously wrote an article for Encounter on Lady Chatterley's Lover (after the obscenity trial) arguing that the acquittal was wrong, as the novel promoted the illegal practice of sodomy.

Julius Hoffman

Over the course of his career as a judge, Hoffman presided over numerous important cases, including a tax evasion case against Tony Accardo, an obscenity case against Lenny Bruce, a deportation suit against alleged Nazi war criminal Frank Walus, and several desegregation suits.

Legal status of Internet pornography

The web filter Cleanfeed is used by the largest ISP BT Group to block sites on the Internet Watch Foundation's list, which includes sites that are "criminally obscene" as well as child pornography.

Ludwig Marcuse

The work revolves around leading obscenity trials: Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde (Jena, 1799), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (Paris, 1857), Arthur Schnitzler's Round Dance (Berlin, 1920), D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley (London, 1960), and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (Los Angeles, 1962).

Morton A. Hill

The Hill-Link Report, which recommended maintaining anti-obscenity statutes, was read into the record of both the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives.

Oslolosen

His comportment can be aggressive, and his language is often obscene and scatological.

Philip of Amphipolis

He wrote a history of Rhodes, which Suidas especially stigmatizes for the obscenity of its matter, a history of the Cos island and Thasiaca a history of Thasos.

Popular beat combo

The phrase may have been influenced by events in the 1960 obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover in which the legal profession was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked jurors to consider if it were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read".

President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography

A 1969 United States Supreme Court decision that held that people could view whatever they wished in the privacy of their own homes caused the United States Congress to fund the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, set up by President Lyndon B. Johnson to study pornography.

Roger's Profanisaurus

David Stubbs wrote that Profanisaurus "represents what you might call the maximalist tendency in obscenity".

Rusty Bugles

Rusty Bugles was a controversial Australian play written by Sumner Locke Elliott that toured extensively throughout Australia between 1948–1949 and achieved the notoriety of being closed down by the Chief Secretary's Office for obscenity.

The Lovers' Guide

While the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) granted the title an 18 certificate, which would normally be a license for general UK distribution, this was technically merely advisory and the producer, Robert Page, faced charges of obscenity, which were subsequently dropped.

The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie

A former CIA operative, Oswald LeWinter says the appointment of 'Libyan dirty tricks expert', Vincent Cannistraro, to head the CIA's team investigating Lockerbie 'would be funny, if it were not an obscenity';

The Trials of Oz

The Trials of Oz is 1991 BAFTA Award-nominated BBC drama film about famous 1971 trial in which the editors of the British underground magazine Oz were charged with obscenity.

Theatre Passe Muraille

The company gained local notoriety when it was bafflingly charged with obscenity for the only mildly provocative play by American playwright Rochelle Owens, Futz (about a farmer who falls in love with his pig, but suffers the persecution of his intolerant neighbours).

Too Much Joy

In 1990, the members of Too Much Joy were taken aback to learn that hip-hop group 2 Live Crew had been arrested on obscenity charges in Florida, and that a record store owner had been arrested for selling their music.

United States obscenity law

Many historically important works have been described as obscene or prosecuted under obscenity laws, including the works of Charles Baudelaire, Lenny Bruce, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, and the Marquis de Sade.

United States v. Extreme Associates

On January 20, 2005, District Court Judge Gary L. Lancaster dropped the charges, agreeing with the defense that the federal anti-obscenity statutes were unconstitutional, as they violated a person's fundamental right to possess and view whatever they want in the privacy of their own home.

Vulgar

Vulgarism, an instance of non-standard or non-elite usage in a language, not to be confused with "vulgarity" as a synonym for "obscenity" or "profanity"

We're Experiencing Technical Difficulties

WETD also made fun of celebrities (for example, the show mentioned a Tokio Hotel tampon ad), censors words in videos/interviews that shouldn't be (for example, the show censors the word "kiss" in the video from Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl so that it sounds like an obscenity) and jokes about sexual content.

William Melville

Had successfully defended anarchists; also unsuccessfully acted in appeal against the obscenity decision re: Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness.


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