Regulating Pornography

Pornography is notorious difficult to define, and the nature of its harms elusive. But governments have repeatedly sought to regulate it. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw great works of art and literature subject to obscenity prosecutions. In the 1960s and 1970s prosecutions shifted to non-normative sexualities, targeting LGBT and feminist sexual representations. The 1980s and 1990s saw sexual representations become a focal point of the culture wars, with high-profile prosecutions of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe. By the 1990s child pornography had become the target of government regulation and prosecution. More recently, attempts to regulate pornography, like pornography itself, have shifted to the online world. This chapter outlines the legal regulation of pornography and its transformations across three jurisdictions: the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.