Attitudes Toward Pornography in a Southern Community

The Supreme Court has determined that obscene speech should not be protected under the First Amendment, but an unambiguous definition of obscenity is required if negative legal sanctions are to be enforced without jeopardizing due process. According to current guidelines, a media presentation of sexually explicit materials must exceed limits of sexual candor to be defined obscene. However, establishing such limits requires articulation of a normative standard for a specified population—a population defined by the court as being a community. The present research is designed to identify such limits of sexual candor within a community in the South. The results demonstrate the existence of ambiguity in the articulation of community standards. First, little consistency is found between personal standards and the perceptions of community standards. This lack of consistency presents a problem for jury deliberation since a single frame of reference is not available to guide jurors in reaching decisions on obscenity. Second, both perceptions of community standards and personal standards are significantly influenced by extracommunity factors of sex, age, race, education, religiosity, and moral rigidity. Existence of such effects raises the additional question of jury bias in the event that there is an overrepresentation of any one segment of the community on a jury.