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Extreme vs. Obscene Part I: The Tale Of The Tape

By: the phfraze

Here at Socialkink.com, we like to keep those of you out there who actually read these articles as informed as possible. We certainly appreciate all the views we get on our blogs and feedback sent to us through email, etc. So in our never-ending search to keep our readers happy and informed, we've decided to scrap a little off of the top in the worlds of extreme and obscene pornography. This multi-part series will take a look at a few questions: 1) Who decides the limits on this stuff? 2) Should it even be categorized as such when there are always so many different views on what is Extreme as opposed to what is Obscene? 3) What characterizes each and how different are they really? Other questions are sure to arise as we are on this little road of discovery no doubt.

The first thing we should do is attempt to come up with a basic definition for the two words and then hammer out their different meanings. The term extreme, as defined by the dictionary, is an adjective that is "of a character or kind farthest removed from the ordinary or average." I suppose we could come up with a rough meaning of what or whom ordinary people are but I won't go into that. So we can count extreme as being of a group outside the norm. Very general, but we'll run with it since this is my story and not really open to debate with anyone else except my editor. The definition of obscene is a little less general. It states obscenity as being "offensive to morality or decency; indecent; depraved." Well, maybe not as general but still a bit general to say the least. Again, for argument's sake, we'll let the moral code of the ordinary be the common denominator.

There are a myriad of individual opinions when it comes to discussing topics like extreme and obscene pornography. I suppose it all depends on the person you talk to. Many people have differing degrees of what they think to be extreme or obscene because they relate such a topic to their own lives. You may have a househusband in Portland, Oregon, who thinks going down on his wife is extreme. Or you may have a college couple in Omaha, Nebraska, who thinks having sex with the lights on is obscene. Whenever we run into these situations in the wonderful universe of Western Civilization, we generally can't come up with a consensus opinion on such a matter because a) we are afraid of offending someone, or b) we are afraid of offending ourselves. In the end we have the government decide for us.

An example of this can be seen when we look at exactly what extreme pornography is. The term was supposedly born in English Parliament as a part of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill of 2007. The bill referred directly to pornography. It covered many areas from the threatening of a person's life to the mutilation of one's genitals. The key here was in the wording, however. In each line of the explanations to the meanings of the laws are the words "or appears to" padded ever so nicely into the sentence. Example: "An act which threatens or appears to threaten a person's life." Using this wording opens things up immensely because this means the act doesn't even have to be happening, it only has to appear so. In Part 2 of this series, we will look at why this is so significant when we see what it does to people who are into fetishes like bondage, BDSM, and death fetish.

As I mentioned earlier, obscenity is a bit different. It weighs a lot more on societies as to what is obscene and what isn't. However we will be taking a look at a case that took place in 1998 between Lawrence and Gardner vs. The State of Texas, just to see how far our privacy goes before it becomes obscene. If two people are in the confines of their own home, shouldn't they be allowed to live their lives (legally of course) in anonymity without the police coming in and regulate what goes on? We'll take a peek at that as well in Part 3. Stay tuned!