Foreignness and American Antipornography Narratives in the Early Cold War

During the first decade of the Cold War, American politics saw a notable increase in public discourses surrounding gender norms and “deviant” sexuality. As previous historians have demonstrated, this preoccupation with sexuality took such varied forms as anti-homosexuality purges in the State Department, congressional hearings on violence and sexuality in comic books, and a new focus on teenage crime and deviance in popular culture. It also, however, manifested in public conversation about pornography as an international issue. Using newspaper accounts and congressional records from the 1950s and early 1960s, this paper illustrates that American anxieties over pornography were not merely a domestic concern, but were in fact deeply intertwined with America’s image abroad. As analysis of these discourses demonstrates, Americans had a complicated relationship with images of overseas pornography; foreign pornography consumption sometimes served as a marker of deviance and Otherness, but excessive regulation of pornography could also function as a symbol of totalitarianism contrasted with American protections of free speech. This research has important implications not only for studies of legal regulation of pornography in the twentieth century, but also for broader conversations about transnational processes and cultural trends during the Cold War.