A4 - Friday, November 30, 1984 - North Shore News

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Strictly personal

by Bob Hunter

REMEMBER, as a youth, smuggling several of

Henry Miller’s books into Canada. Miller was

my favorite writer. It seemed incredible to me that my ‘‘democratic’’ government dared to tell me what | could or could not read.

In my innocent eyes (beheving as 1 did that freedom meant freedom)

there was only one person to judge what | could or could not read and that person, so obviously, was me

It wasn't long before all of Muller's works were available here. They were period pieces, of course Today I ex- pect they are not much more widely read than the works of

an earlier literary hero, Havelock Ellis, author of what was, in its time, the

most controversial book of the day, The Psychology of Sex,

It was Ellis who wrote that obscenity 1s a ‘“‘permanent element of human life and corresponds to a deep need of the human mind."’ He added. “‘Adults need obscene literature, aS much as children need fairy tales, as a relief from the oppressive force of convention.”’

There is no doubt in my

mind where Miller and Ellis—as well as Aristophanes, Plato, Catullus, Ovid, Shaw, Shakespeare, Shelley and Shaw, to mention a few—could stand on the

question of the freedom to distribute pornographic video tapes of Magazines They would understand that freedom means the bad ANI) the good You can't eliminate one without ultimately eliminating the other

It seems to me thal one of the modern tragedies that we have to live with is the

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degeneration of the feminist movement from a struggle for equality and liberation in- to a neo-fascist altlempt to reintroduce censorship into Western society after we have finally freed ourselves almost completely from its grip

I] happened to be in Chicago when | learned that Canadian customs authorities had seized the December issue of Pen- thouse. Naturally, | went straight to the mearest smut shop to buy one. Why? Because if a thing ts cen- sored, I feel duty-bound to look at it. I'm not kidding. ee

“If a thing is censored I feel duty-

bound to look’’

|

Repression and thought control, whatever form they take, are the natural enemies of anybody who thinks and Wiles

Anyway, having stepped into this hard-core Chicago porn shop and asked for Pen thouse, | was greeted by a sneer from the bored, sanpaku-eyed clerk perched on a stool among the dildos and whatnot With infinite contempt, he sand: "You get THAT atthe Seven Eleven *-

You see, it's all relative As Theodore Schroder, who devoted tis whole life to fighting for freedom of

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speech, wrote in A Challenge to the Sex Censors: “Obscenity does not exist in any book or picture, but is wholly a quality of the reading or viewing mind.’’

He added (and this cuts to the heart of the issue): ‘‘No argument for the suppression of obscene literature has ever been offered which by unavotdable implications will not justify, and which has not already justified, every other limitation that has ever been put on mental freedom "’

Just as misguided as the customs Officials who stop- ped Penthouse are the people who protested at the El-Cid

hotel in Gastown recently ‘‘against men’s dis cnmination over women,

men profiting from making money out of their fantasies of women, men selling this stuff to profit from women's

inequality in society,’ as their spokesperson put it. Sun columnist Der Hoi-

Yin (a mother, by the way) made a rather nice point, | thought, when she noted that a major shareholder in the hotel in question 1s a woman, Dayle Solloway

Behind the urge to control what | may or may not read, view or listen to hes a radical left or mght-wing impulse toward totalitarianism When it comes to sex, 1 can hardly see any difference bet- ween Manrvxust-style feminism and the ravings of the Moral Mapority

In Cuba, by the way, there was no porn Neither was there a copy of the Magna C arta, the Gulag Archipelago or the Bible

Pause Think about 1 Do you really want censorship?

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