by Irving Kristol

About the author: Irving Kristol is the editor of the Public Interest and the publisher of the National Interest.

Pornography differs from erotic art in that its whole purpose is to treat human beings obscenely, to deprive human beings of their specifically human dimension. That is what obscenity is all about. It is light-years removed from any kind of carefree sensuality—there is no continuum between Fielding's Tom Jones and the Marquis de Sade's Justine. These works have quite opposite intentions. To quote Susan Sontag: "What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full human being and one's existence as a sexual being—while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up." This definition occurs in an essay defending pornography— Miss Sontag...