You are absolutely right that different cultures, including the same culture through time, can have different standards for what is obscene. But the very fact we can talk about different standards means there have been and are standards. So it is possible to prohibit content based on a community standard.
You abruptly changed from the plural standards to a singular “standard” at the end there. If you were trying to come up with a single standard nation wide you’d have to be rather permissive to find the intersection of these multiple standards. Taking a naked bike ride in Seattle or a woman walking topless in NYC are acceptable according to the local standards of those areas, but not so in some other areas. These of course have to do with public displays. When talking about behind closed doors or in buildings where proof of age is required there tends to be more permissiveness.
There was a Supreme Court case overturning prosecutions against citizens owning pornography for private use in Redrup v. New York (1967). From that case
In none was there any suggestion of an assault upon individual privacy by publication in a manner so obtrusive as to make it impossible for an unwilling individual to avoid exposure to it.
From what I can see there appear to be various levels of permissiveness based on how visible something would be to a person otherwise not looking for it that also vary from one community to another. It seems that for the “problem” at hand, which was narrowed to pornography accessible through the television, people are not going to happen upon it unless they go looking for it and pay for it.
Note: there are those that may consider something obscene while at the same time don’t support the idea of it being prohibited. For the sake of clarity unless mentioned otherwise when I refer to something obscene I am referring to something that one fines obscene and also would support a prohibition of it.
I do think however that we can more objectively define pornography as Fr. Sherpa did in the question now at the top of the Ask an Apoligist section as ‘the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement’.
Interesting, that seems broad enough to include romance novels. Establishing intent might be interesting. In “Game of Thrones” there was a scene in which a man that was captured and bound found naked women entering into his room. Moments after the character became aroused another man came into the room and castrated him. There was probably some number of people watching this episode that were aroused by it. But it could be argued that the intent wasn’t to excite the audience, but to advance a story or illustrate the character of one of the people in the story.
I think both pornography and obscenity can be banned and they are in fact now banned.
I don’t think they are banned. While there’s restrictions on being able to have certain displays within public (those restrictions possibly varying even within a specific nation) the above mentioned Supreme Court ruling seems to say there’s generally no ban for private use. The only bans of which I can think involves depictions (whether real or imaginary) of minors or people that didn’t willingly choose to be recorded
For instance try going into a courtroom and doing something obscene. The judge will have no trouble discerning your obscene behavior and you’ll find yourself so charged.
A court room probably is not a good sample environment for testing how acceptable something is out in public. There are behaviours that are rather innocuous that can land someone in trouble in a court room while being fine in most other situations.
You do make a good point that obscene may be less well defined in modern America. Personally I think this is part of a purposeful movement to destroy our moral fabric.
I don’t think that’s the case, especially after looking at a history of obscenity and profanity and how it’s evolved. While there are a number of books that track the evolution of such things there’s one by a Melissa Mohr that I like the best. It focuses primarily on language but does include references to visual imagery. Though I would not suggest those that might be upset by reading 4-letter words to even so much as check out the book’s cover.
). Nature happened to combine the reproductive and the eliminating organs, and that was the source of this ambivalent attitude.