ABSTRACT
Have you ever asked yourself what is meant by the word “obscene”? If you were asked to list specific words, acts, or books, or to describe images that you thought qualified as obscene, what would you include and would your list and descriptions match those of your friends, your parents, your grandparents, or even people from another culture and/or country? Or would you, like Supreme Court Justice Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio (378 U.S. 184, 197 [1964]), refuse to define it but then declare “But I know it when I see it”? Even the effort to look the word up in Webster’s US Dictionary is no help, since one is merely provided with vague and fluid synonyms such as “lewd,” “filthy,” “lascivious,” “indecent,” and “disgusting.” As a result, one is left feeling rather confused and unsure of what constitutes an obscenity, let alone an obscenity law or how such laws could be made or applied.
