 On the last few episodes of this series, we've talked a lot about freedom of speech. I've criticized cancel culture, praised the First Amendment, and, ironically, still had to alter the way I write these episodes to get around the clown world s***s running our social media networks. Today, we're going to continue that discussion with a look at one of its most sensitive issues, obscenity. Now, you might think this just refers to the dirty words that would get you in trouble at school or with your mom, but it's actually so much bigger than that. Legally speaking, obscenity is a whole category of speech or expression that is not protected under the First Amendment. That's a really big deal. The First Amendment literally says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, and although many battles have already been won over the past 232 years in order to force the government to live up to its own rules, this is one area where there's still a lot left to do. So, get ready for a totally safer work, take on the not-safer work subject of s*** media on this short edition of Out of Frame. In order for something to be legally considered obscenity, it has to pass what's called the Miller Test. Basically, if the average person applying contemporary adult community standards would say that the content, one, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interests, what we would generally now refer to as graphic, mature content, two, depicts or describes s*** conduct in a patently offensive way, and three, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. That is an astonishing amount of subjective language to build federal law around, especially considering it's regarding a constitutionally protected right. But here we are. And because of that, a lot of people have gotten in trouble over the years for producing or publishing a wide array of content. As fascinating as it would be to go back to ancient Greece to examine the historical context of s*** media, instead we're just going back to the mid-20th century and the bane of moralizing busy bodies everywhere, pulp fiction. The books, not the movie. In the late 1950s, a group of entrepreneurial publishers reeling from a crash in the market for science fiction novels found renewed success by offering middle-class suburban men and women a new window into experiences they were unlikely to ever have themselves. But instead of depicting life on other planets, these new publishers specialized in lurid tales of mystery, romance, and of course, s***. You know. Over the next decade, these books would become the best sellers no one could talk about. But the story of pulp fiction in 1960s America is, in fact, a story about the intersection of commerce, culture, and freedom. In spite of massive sales enriching publishers and authors alike, pulp novels were America's dirty little secret. Everybody had books like Doc Savage, The Long Goodbye, and Strangers on a Train on their nightstands. But nobody was actually willing to admit it. In spite of the fact that those trashy novels became beloved classic films, more often than you'd think. Heck, even best-selling author Michael Crichton, who gave us the Andromeda Strain Jurassic Park and Sphere, turned out pulp fiction in the 1960s and 70s under the pen name John Lang to put himself through medical school. Ever since Frederick Wortham's Seduction of the Innocent was published in 1954, cultural conservatives, the clergy, and many politicians came to see comic books and pulp novels as corrupting influences on everyone, particularly women and children. Publishers faced arrest, prosecution, fines, and jail time for creating and distributing products that an enormous number of people were buying and reading voluntarily. Writers and artists working under pseudonyms became multi-millionaires, and yet they were often unable to tell their neighbors what they actually did for a living. Bookstore owners had to black out their windows and develop hiding systems in order to sell their products. Distributors weren't allowed to ship these books through the mail, and post office employees were tasked by the Postmaster General with enforcing the law by reviewing shipments, opening people's mail, and deciding what was or was not objectionable material. Meanwhile, publishers had no choice but to repeatedly mount legal defenses of their products while battling the fly-by-night dealers that frequently pop up in gray or black markets. Some even went to jail. In 1963, Sanford E. Adei and his partner Wallace de Ortega Maxi were prosecuted under obscenity laws for publishing books like Sex Life of a Cop. The thing is, obscenity is a pretty difficult concept to pin down, because it's based entirely on subjective judgments. But their book was deemed by the Federal Department of Justice as too obscene for the community, and Adei and Ortega Maxi were convicted on five out of 18 charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison for publishing a book containing content that would be far less explicit than your average Wednesday night lineup on the CW. Department of Justice, right? A year later in 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart issued his famous I Know It When I See It statement about obscenity when ruling on whether or not the Louis Moll film The Lovers should be considered hardcore p***** in Jacob Bellis vs Ohio. It wasn't. It's easy to think of this kind of censorship as a consequence of conservative ideas that die out over time, and that's true to some extent. Since the 60s, less and less content is considered obscene, and courts have considerably expanded the types of speech understood to be protected by the First Amendment. Happily, the trajectory of history has gone toward more legal protections for free speech rather than doubling down on the restrictions that used to put many publishers, artists, and political and social critics in jail. But that doesn't mean state censorship is dead. Each year, groups like the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and Ban Books Week Coalition put together lists of books that are removed from libraries and schools, or which face lawsuits under charges similar to those experienced by the Pulp Fiction publishers of the 1960s. Humans have always struggled with the impulse to destroy, ban, and belittle ideas and images that make us uncomfortable, or that we don't understand. And even when the government isn't forcing them to do so, we see private individuals and big corporations s**turing content they find objectionable. In response, a number of state governments have introduced bills to force even more s**torship, or alternatively to compel individuals and companies to allow content on their property that they would rather not be associated with. Neither of these behaviors is a good thing. And while I certainly find tech s**torship extremely frustrating, as I've said many times on this series, heavy-handed government intervention isn't the answer either. Increasingly, we're seeing the rise of a new kind of moralistic crusade against obscenity, one that's based around equally vague and subjective terms like hate speech and offensive and misinformation. What falls under those headings depends entirely on who's making the decisions. That's an insanely dangerous road to go down. As we talked about in a recent Behind the Scenes podcast episode, when you don't have any firm principles guiding the decisions about what is allowable and what is not, you'll always find that whatever rules you do have not only aren't applied evenly or impartially, but they can't be. But that's pretty much where we find ourselves right now, in a cycle of bad, reactive decision-making in an ever-shrinking box of allowable speech and expression. And the last thing we want is for that box to turn into a prison cell, the way it did for the publishers of Pulp Fiction. Different people are always going to enjoy different things. But that's not a problem to be fixed. That's often what makes the world so wonderful and exciting and beautiful. And more importantly, it is the interaction of different values and ideas that's led us to more knowledge and better culture over time. It'd be a terrible shame to write all that off as obscene. It's definitely worth a read. I highly recommend it. And I'm sure a lot of you have some thoughts about what we talked about today, so let me know what you think in the comments. If you want to participate in an even broader discussion, we'd love to have you join us on Discord. Our server has been growing incredibly quickly and we'd love to see you there. Also, consider giving our podcast a listen. We talk about a lot of movies, shows, books, and other things that don't necessarily make it into these videos. It comes out every Friday, but supporters on Patreon and Subscribestar get early access and special bonus content and access to an exclusive channel on our Discord server. So if that's something you'd be interested in, the links to that and everything else I mentioned are in the description below. As always, please like this video, subscribe to the channel, and share it with your friends. I'll see you next time.