Smut! Give me smut and nothing but –
A dirty novel I can’t shut
If it’s uncut, and unsubtle…

Despite the wild and lurid territories that have been charted in mainstream culture in the intervening years, from John Updike to Basic Instinct, Tom Lehrer’s 1964 song still echoes down the decades. Prurient or otherwise, there is always a chorus of disapproval when new “naughty books” come out; from the feminist outcry at the glossy antics elaborated in Diary of a Call Girl to the gasps that met the publication of Wetlands, a much-hyped German novel that depicts a teenage girl’s fascinated discovery of what she can do with (or put into) her orifices.

As the Judge said on the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense,
To be smut it must be utterly without redeeming social importance.

Graphic descriptions of sex are often praised by men as bold and daring and excoriated by women as disgusting and badly written. The men accuse the women of prudishness, the women respond that the men objectify them, and so it goes on. Danuta Kean wrote an excellent article on this subject for The Independent a couple of months ago, exploring the notion that “in publishing, where there’s muck there’s brass”, whether the work is packaged as high class literature or low class pornography. This is surely justification enough for most editors in today’s climate: I predict a rash of covers featuring the naked, airbrushed author.

More, more, I’m still not satisfied

Comic books are especially difficult to classify. Japanese manga almost always includes some sexual imagery; some of the more extreme versions depict child rape and even the adventures of Lupin the Third, the high society thief beloved by millions of Japanese kids, feature him pressing hopefully on his heroine’s nipples as if pushing a doorbell. Even Anglo-Saxon comics include a smidgeon of erotica: in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, the main character sees his mother having sex at a young age, while The Lost Girls, by the same author, is the story of a number of superheroines’ sexual adventures.

But now they’re trying to take it all away from us unless
We take a stand, and hand in hand we fight for freedom of the press
In other words – Smut, I love it

The British government is planning a crackdown: this week, MPs will debate a law that will make it a criminal offence to own cartoons depicting certain forms of child abuse. As Jerome Taylor reports in The Independent, opponents of the legislation claim that it is too sweeping and will stifle freedom of expression. He cites a recent blog post by Neil Gaiman, who says: “If you accept — and I do — that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible.” He endorses the aforementioned Moore comic on the grounds that it is erotic and artistic: under the proposed legislation it might be banned because the characters are under eighteen when they have some of their encounters. There is clearly a big difference between Moore’s work and the images that it appears desirable to censor.

Stories of tortures used by debauchers,
Lurid, licentious and vile – make me smile.

This is an area where even the most liberal people can suddenly find themselves arraigned on the side of the medieval-minded. I’m one of them: when it comes to child pornography, my automatic response is “lock ’em up and throw away the key”. Problem is, this isn’t really child pornography; no children are harmed during the making of these images. It’s difficult to understand why images of child abuse are necessary to a cartoon –- but then, some novels describe incidents that are just as harrowing; creators of both genres would presumably argue that these scenes are essential to plotlines. The crucial difference is that when reading novels, we have to fill in the visual details ourselves and can choose not to.

Let’s hear it for the Supreme Court –
Don’t let them take it away!

We don’t have a Supreme Court in Britain. We do have an increasing encroachment of freedom of speech. Much though it sickens me to think that people might get off on this stuff, the fact that it is all drawn from imagination means that it can’t be swept into the same pile as photographs and videos. The Ministry of Justice swears that it will differentiate between the erotic and the obscene. If only we could trust them. Similar legislation has already passed in Australia: earlier this month, a man was sent to prison for downloading cartoons of the Simpsons in odd sexual positions. Not that the Simpsons are my idea of erotica –- but isn’t that reaction a little extreme?