What is Obscene?

What is obscene? Obscenity is to scare children with Satanic imagery, to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, to speak ill of Mohammed, to burn the Quran or the Indian flag, to criticize Putin, sex and love in public, public nudity, swear words, to commit sacrilege, to give the evil eye: to some. In other words, are those obscene, though?

Lenny Bruce before dying had the notion of obscenity. He had a number of comedic pieces on the obscene talking about the words and the references to the obscene. The idea being the obscene isn’t really in the words themselves. This would be reprised by George Carlin at later points. In that, the “Seven Dirty Words” were the words one could never say in public fora: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.

Now, they’re common patois. Lenny Bruce pointed out or identified the obscene, apparently, is to “appeal to the prurient interest” — to get people horny. In this sense, breasts, genitalia, nude figures or silhouettes, words in reference to sex or the sexual act, and so on, all become possible obscenities.

Bruce made the more accurate observation, at some point, where I had some trouble finding the video content of his point about it. What is obscene, in fact? War, cruelty, racism, violence, starvation, killing of the innocent, greed, and others, those are obscene, not the words about them or in relation to them; but the existential realities around them.

When we focus on a completely different set of concepts, those related to anything sexual. Yet, we don’t even focus on the sexual content necessarily. Our focus is on the words related to those prurient interests: words about sex. I was thinking about that tonight after a long day at the ranch here, and denial of reality being bedeviled by words when other words describing other realities and those other horrors themselves are more truly obscene.

That, in and of itself, is the obscenity of the culture as a whole.