Perversion for Profit: Citizens for Decent Literature and the Arousal of an Antiporn Public in the 1960s

Abstract

THE F I L M B E GINS. Outstanding news reporter George Putnam warns viewers that a floodtide of filth threatens to an entire generation and then presents a parade of unsubstantiated information: 75 to 90 percent of the pornography purchased by adults winds up in the hands of children; the porn industry takes in $2 billion every year; the moral decay wrought by magazines weakens American resistance to Communism; exposure of even a normal adult man to male physique magazines can pervert him into becoming a homosexual, while young boys have even less resistance; one of every twenty births is illegitimate; and venereal disease is on the rise, even among the ten-to-eighteen age bracket.' Perversion for Profit, released in 1963, crystallized the philosophy and methods of Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL), the preeminent antiobscenity group of the 1960s. The film overwhelmed its audience with this barrage of horrors but offered a solution in the law. Because the Supreme Court has placed outside the protection of the First Amendment, the film declared, citizens possess a constitutional guarantee of protection from obscenity that is best realized by forming a local CDL chapter. In the event that George Putnam's threat of your daughter, lured into lesbianism failed to motivate viewers sufficiently, the film also displayed and explained various examples of magazines, with slim red bars covering the obscene body parts. A rear shot of a naked woman appeals