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49 We do not know why or if pornography produces the effects we assume it does. In contrast to nineteenth-century accounts, pornography is no longer a clearly recognizable category of material and meaning; rather, it is simultaneously pervasive and opaque. Moreover, this simultaneous pervasiveness and opacity—this invisible circulation— defines pornography itself. As pornography became increasingly visible (or was perceived as such), it also became increasingly protean, intangible, and so promiscuous that it traversed the threshold between private and public, especially after the war.

And yet a jury acquits him, believing him to have temporarily lost his mind, and hence the ability to discern the relationship between cause and effect and right and wrong. 48. Sylvain Bonmariage, Les Plaisirs de l’Enfer (Paris: Raoul Saillard, 1938), 231, 220. 01B-C0844 10/18/99 9:53 AM Page 47 Pornography and Perversion 47 Here, murder is not the symptom of a clear cause—the deleterious effects of pornography and the victim’s particular susceptibility to its stimuli. Instead, murder is the effect of an indeterminate cause, and our hero slips down the slippery slope from nausea to arousal to murder because he has, as the book implies, denied his own susceptibility to sexual stimuli.

Between 1899 and 1907, the number of those condemned for violations quadrupled. 18 The Meaning of Pornography The danger posed by pornography was thus inseparable from anxieties about democratization, and rhetoric about pornography as a symptom of democracy and degeneration abounded in the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. One fin-de-siècle critic noted that pornography had escaped the confines of the brothel where it had originated (since pornography in Greek originally meant writing about prostitutes).