From the book: Current Issues and Enduring questions

Name
Professor
Course
18 October 2018
A First Amendment Junkie
Jacoby in her article for the New York Times in 1978 A First Amendment Junkie ” implies that permitting prosecution of persons on obscenity charges will lead eventually to censorship of "open discussion" of important issues such as "rape, abortion, menstruation, contraception, lesbianism" (Barnet & Bedau, 119, para 9)
Jacoby gives enough evidence to support this claim. She argues that if women support the censoring of girlie magazines, then they would be helping opponents of women’s movements in censoring important issues affecting women such as rape among others. Jacoby adds that pornography does not pose a more serious threat “than a march of neo-Nazis is to the survivors of the extermination camps” (Barnet & Bedau, 118, para 4). She warns against using examples such as “kiddie porn” because that’s an issue of child abuse and not about the first amendment (Barnet & Bedau, 118, para 5).
According to Jacoby, there is no unanimity in what women’s view of what constitutes obscenity. Some feminists think that censoring pornography can be more rational than some other kinds of censorship but a nude woman picture elicits different reactions in wo...