Sex in the Stacks: Examining the Treatment of Explicit Materials in American Libraries

1 Introduction

Intellectual freedom is perhaps the most central foundational tenet of American librarianship. Two of the fundamental documents of the profession, the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights and The Freedom to Read Statement, both clearly articulate that a library’s main task is to provide access to a wide variety of materials—“not proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval” (American Library Association 2019, n.p.)—and to not abridge or inhibit any individual’s right to use those materials, instead trusting them “to make their own decisions about what they read and believe” (American Library Association 2004, n.p.). Yet despite the boldness of statements like these, there are some types of materials that have always been in tension with the theoretical ideals of American librarianship and with the functioning of libraries as cultural institutions, and perhaps the largest category of these is sexually explicit materials. Questions about whether and how American libraries should collect, describe, and share sexually explicit materials are a perennial source of discussion both within the profession and in the wider national public forum. This ever-present debate has led to book challenges and bans as well as legal action, and it remains a hot topic through the present day for those looking to critique the role and function of libraries in American society. But why? Why are Americans so obsessed with whether there are sexy books, movies, and magazines filed away in their libraries? If intellectual freedom and facilitating access to the widest possible variety of materials is the bedrock mission of American librarianship, why is it that libraries as a whole have been seemingly unable to make a definitive and lasting commitment to including sexually explicit materials in that mission? What are the conversations—cultural, legal, professional—that have shaped this continual discourse, and how should we understand the different ways various types of libraries deal with these questions?

Recent research (Hill and Harrington 2014; Martinez 2012; Martinez et al. 2016) has shown that while (often overly simplistic) understandings of legality and (possibly exaggerated) fears of community challenges or censorship attempts are frequently cited as reasons for not collecting sexually explicit materials, one of the most common justifications for actually actively including these materials in collections is the library’s perceived position as a bastion of education and research. This formulation is worth questioning. Without detracting from the truly vital educational role that libraries play, we should ask what this framing of the issue does to our individual and institutional understandings of how and why we collect sexually explicit materials and what their purpose is within our collections. Who are these materials for, and what are they for? Although efforts to collect and provide access to sexually explicit materials in the name of research and education may be laudable, this framework also creates a dichotomy between what is a proper use of these items—intellectual, detached, critical, mind-focused—and what is unsanctioned use—pleasurable, aesthetic, entertainment-based, body-focused. By turning a critical eye to these patterns and using tools from feminist literary and media theory, we can begin to consider how a library approach to sexually explicit materials grounded in ideas of education might perpetuate negative stereotypes about both the materials themselves and the patrons who are interested in using them. This involves confronting not only the prejudices that exist within ourselves as librarians and our profession as an institution, but also deeper Western cultural ideas about gender, bodies, and minds.

2 Defining Sexually Explicit Materials

The first question that must be answered in order to examine how libraries treat sexually explicit materials is precisely which types of materials are at issue. The categories of pornography and obscenity have been notoriously difficult to define, resulting in formulations like Justice Potter Stewart’s idiomatic 1964 claim about hard-core pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), “I know it when I see it” (as cited in Cusack 2015, 28). As Slade (2001) has observed, these definitional exercises often “founder on psychological, class, gender, and aesthetic preferences” (30). For the purposes of this analysis, however, “sexually explicit materials” will be understood to mean any materials in any medium that contain substantial (not incidental) sexual content. Basically, this would cover any item that could accurately be cataloged with a sex-related subject heading using the Library of Congress 20% rule. This lens would include everything from textbooks on human venereal diseases to explicit poetry, fetish periodicals, and hardcore videos. It includes both items that fall clearly within the category of pornography, which is material created for the explicit purpose of sexual excitement that is nonetheless protected under the First Amendment, and those that could technically be called obscenity, and thus considered illegal under existing law (exactly what those laws are and how this distinction is drawn is discussed at greater length below). This broad definition will help account for materials across forms and genres that could potentially be interpreted as sexually explicit by some users. Additionally, although issues relating to internet usage in libraries are a major element of current LIS discourse on pornography in library settings, they will not be addressed here. Instead, this analysis is centrally concerned with deliberate, informed collecting of and access provisions for sexually explicit materials by American libraries in public and academic settings.

3 The American Legal Context

Before diving too deeply into issues of collecting and providing access to sexually explicit materials in American libraries, it is instructive to review the relevant existing legal guidelines. For the purposes of this analysis, the key cases are Roth v. United States (1957), Miller v. California (1973), and Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982). With Roth v. United States, the United States Supreme Court began the process of articulating a prescriptive test for obscenity. The rule from Roth was that any material “where the dominant theme … appeals to prurient interests in a manner that is offensive to the average person in the local community” was considered obscene, and therefore not protected by the First Amendment (Cusack 2015, 13). What Miller v. California added to this calculation was the idea that if a work met the requirements of Roth but was also found, as a whole, to have redeeming value, it retained First Amendment protection. This value is judged not on local standards but on national ones, and it can be literary, artistic, political, or scientific in nature (interestingly, educational value does not qualify in and of itself). Miller also connected obscenity to depictions and descriptions of “patently offensive” sexual conduct as defined by applicable state law, another local measure. As Cusack (2015) has written, Miller’s reliance on community standards has frequently led to harsher prosecution of materials that touch on some element of minority identity including homosexuality and queerness, non-white participants, or sexual fetishism that is considered outside the norm:

Depictions may offend the establishment because they challenge traditional notions of who has power over pleasure and who is entitled to pleasure. The collateral effect of Miller and obscenity case law has been institutionalization of normality, which may authorize discrimination against minorities and politically powerless groups … These statutes were created by, interpreted by, and enforced by the dominant groups and local political agents. The dominant group in the United States has traditionally been wealthy, adult, Anglo, heterosexual, Protestant men. Their values are “normal.” “Normal” sex upholds their values and maintains their power. (42)

Of course, it follows that since this maintenance of normative values around sexuality is enshrined in the law through Miller, it will inevitably be reproduced by libraries who use the letter of the law as the guiding principle of their approach to collecting and providing access to sexually explicit materials, whether they would see themselves as agents of such hegemonic power or not.

Although Miller has been challenged and discussed at length since it was argued in 1973, it has not yet been superseded. While there are a variety of other examples in U.S. law both from earlier and later in judicial history that could be discussed in the context of obscenity and the First Amendment, including United States v. One Book Called Ulysses (1933), Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), American Booksellers Ass’n, Inc. v. Hudnut (1985), and Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002), the one that seems most crucial for a discussion of sexually explicit materials and libraries is Island Trees School District vs. Pico (1982). In that case, a school board in Long Island, NY challenged a number of books in the libraries of several district schools that were deemed “objectionable” for a variety of reasons, including obscenity and “perversion” (Mullally and Gargano 2017, n.p.). Students responded by suing the board, claiming that the removal of the books was a violation of their First Amendment rights. While the Court ended up ruling in favor of the students, Justice William Brennan “emphasized that his decision was a narrow one, limited to the removal of books from a school library, and not extending to the acquisition of books or their use in the school curriculum” (Mullally and Gargano 2017, emphasis in the original, n.p.). However, despite this professed narrowness, Pico remains the only existing Supreme Court decision on banned books in a library setting. Taken in concert with Miller, it sets up a legal environment where librarians’ choices about collection development and resource access are curtailed by ideas of local community norms and national standards for redeeming value but, at least to some extent, protected by the Court’s defense of the right to receive information and ideas, particularly in an educational context. The fact that the only existing piece of case law on book banning in libraries comes from a school setting may be one foundational element of why libraries of all types seem to lean so heavily on educational mission and value when they discuss the role of sexually explicit materials in their institutions.

4 The American Library Context

Presumably, all American libraries of any type are informed, at least to some extent, by the American Library Association’s principles and guidelines, including those on the subject of sexually explicit material, such as the ALA’s 1970 testimony to the Congressional Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. The contents of that statement largely echo the language of the Library Bill of Rights and The Freedom to Read Statement, asserting “the Association’s belief that Americans can be trusted to recognize and reject obscenity” (American Library Association 1970, 654). In that example and across most of its documentation, the American Library Association promotes a strong pro-intellectual freedom position, stating that obscenity laws are “directly in conflict with the goal of librarians to make available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those which are unorthodox or unpopular with the majority,” and thus that such legislation “must be challenged by librarians through every legal means available” (American Library Association 1970, 654). However, despite this confident assertion of librarians’ need to resist even the Supreme Court’s authority when it is in conflict with the profession’s stated ideals, individual librarians are of course only human, and thus bring their human biases and prejudices with them to their work. As already discussed above, the legal framework for prosecuting obscenity relies on community standards and the reinforcement of local and national norms. As members of local and national communities as well as subjects interpellated by prevailing cultural ideologies, it seems unlikely that individual librarians will always be able to—or even want to—follow through on the American Library Association’s idealistic call.

5 Sexually Explicit Materials in the Public Library

These tensions have often surfaced in public libraries when issues arise around sexually explicit materials. Those who represent American public libraries have a long history of viewing themselves as the keepers of culture and protectors of decency, a model which Cornog (1991) has called “The Guardianship of Society” (144). This approach “proclaims the librarian’s right and duty to provide patrons with only the highest quality reading matter, thereby promoting wisdom and society’s good” (Cornog 1991, 144). This is the same ideology that Arthur Bostwick promoted in his 1908 inaugural speech as American Library Association president when he noted the increasing popularity of “books that … teach how to sin and how pleasant sin is” but added “thank Heaven they do not tempt the librarian” (as cited in Hill and Harrington 2014, 63–64), and more recently it is the philosophy that saw public libraries refuse to add Fifty Shades of Grey, one of the fastest-selling paperback books of all time, to their collections, with at least one library director offering the justification, “We don’t collect porn” (as cited in Hill and Harrington 2014, 63). Although a 2016 survey found that library staff rated public libraries “a more suitable setting than academic libraries” for collecting sexually explicit print materials (Martinez et al. 2016, 158), the same study also revealed that the overwhelming majority of respondents believed that the main reasons for a library to collect sexually explicit materials are “educational intent” and to “have a role in preserving [the materials] for current and future research” (Martinez et al. 2016, 159). But what about entertainment and leisure reading, which has “long been a motivator for public library use” (Adkins et al. 2008, 66)? Here we begin to see a distinct disconnect between how patrons are likely to use the library (including any sexually explicit materials held there) and how library staff are thinking about the purpose of their collections, leading to collections that “match personal ideals of what library collections should be rather than collections developed with reader preferences in mind” (Adkins et al. 2008, 65). Indeed, it seems from the literature that entertainment, enjoyment, and pleasure are rarely considered as legitimate reasons for a library to collect sexually explicit materials; instead, the focus remains on educational and research value. This may also explain why library staff seem to have a greater comfort with libraries collecting textual materials over visual ones, mirroring cultural biases in favor of print over visual media as a more “legitimate” form (Martinez et al. 2016, 159).

The same community standards that are so important in the Miller test also come into play in public libraries. If the acquisition of sexually explicit materials is perceived to be in conflict with prevailing local moral standards, public librarians may self-censor and choose not to purchase such materials in order to avoid potential controversy or challenges from their community—or because they also personally agree with prevailing ideas that sexually explicit materials do not belong in the public library setting. The pseudonymous blogger “The Annoyed Librarian” published a tirade against such “publicly subsidized porn” in 2008. While the writer’s main gripe had to do with pornography available through libraries’ internet-enabled computers, the principles they cited were much more generally applied: “there is no good argument for providing free access to porn. Libraries exist to serve the public good, and what argument can be made that free access to porn is a public good?” (Annoyed Librarian 2008, 625). In the spirit of critics like Hauptman (1998), whose “Professionalism or Culpability: An Experiment in Ethics” insists that librarians who take an expansive definition of intellectual freedom “abjure responsibility to society in favor of responsibility to their role of librarian as disseminator of information” (292), the Annoyed Librarian (2008) claims that when it comes to offering access to sexually explicit materials, “librarians are required to leave their capacity for rational thought and moral reasoning at the door when they enter the library … We’re not supposed to be thoughtful citizens anymore, just neutral, amoral librarians” (627). This anonymous critique, while extreme, encapsulates many of the common underlying objections to sexually explicit materials in public library settings, including that they are an inappropriate use of funds and an intrusion of something that should be private into a public space. There is also, as mentioned above, a strong strand of judgement when it comes to materials that are created for the primary purpose of leisure or pleasure. For the Annoyed Librarian, this goes beyond sexually explicit materials: “As far as other kinds of entertainment, I don’t particularly like spending my tax dollars so somebody can get their fill of romance novels and Schwarzenegger movies. I think it’s much harder to justify libraries spending money for noneducational purposes” (2008, 628).

The invocation of romance novels in this context is telling. While some of the racier examples in that genre may plainly qualify as sexually explicit materials, even the milder offerings make an interesting comparison because of the ways romance has historically been denigrated both outside and inside the library setting, particularly because of its association with women readers and its perception as a frivolous, escapist pursuit. Yet as scholars such as Radway (1984) have shown, romance fiction fulfills a wide range of functions for its readers, including plainly educational ones (61), as well as providing an extremely meaningful outlet to “replenish the self and attend to emotional needs” (Radway 1984, 65). And even when the function is still primarily one of enjoyment and escapism, it is unclear why that in itself would make any genre less worthy of inclusion in a public library’s collections, particularly given the many benefits that readers report gaining from these texts. Yet both formal research and informal publications have shown that low opinions of this genre of fiction prevail among library staff; and even when staff profess to value the genre, collecting practices rarely support this.

Adkins et al. (2008) have affirmed the way in which public libraries that actively and thoughtfully collect romance “are acknowledging readers … have multiple purposes for reading, and that reading is as much an emotional experience as it is an informational one” (66) and also raised the question of what the underlying issues might be behind many libraries’ failures to build strong collections in this area, despite the genre’s popularity with readers: “As the majority of public librarians are women, their selection or non-selection of romance novels suggests lines of inquiry investigating women librarians’ views of stereotypically women’s genres and of the women who read these genres” (Adkins et al. 2008, 66). Although the imagined audience for other forms of sexually explicit materials is often male, not female, there are provocative connections between the denigration and neglect of these materials that are so irrevocably associated with pleasure and entertainment. There is something about these low, popular genres that deviates too far from the educational ideal that libraries wish to embody, and it is no coincidence that these genres are also associated with the literal, physical body. The valuation of the mind over the body in Western philosophy has deep roots and clear connections to the long cultural history of viewing the library as a temple to knowledge, reason, and learning. Since the public library supposedly serves the masses, popular genres like romance (often derogatively called “porn for women”) and other sexually explicit materials such as erotica, pornography, and sexuality-focused nonfiction, might seem like a natural fit for their collections. Yet there is evidence, both scholarly and anecdotal, that public libraries are particularly hesitant, even loath, to build their collections in these areas.

6 Sexually Explicit Materials in the Academic Library

If the key concern voiced by those in public libraries is that sexually explicit materials are only acceptable in the context of learning and education, then one clear solution would be to leave them exclusively to the collections of those libraries that are dedicated to educational pursuits, i.e. academic libraries. Indeed, at least in the literature, there is evidence of greater support for collection development and access provision when it comes to sexually explicit materials in academic library settings, particularly materials more on the extreme/hardcore end of the spectrum and/or visual materials like films and photographs. While respondents in Martinez et al.’s (2016) survey of library staff were likely to rate public libraries as a more suitable setting for books like The Joy of Sex or magazines like Maxim, they indicated that explicit videos were better suited to academic library collections (163). On the whole, that survey showed that “in the minds of librarians and staff, it falls to academic libraries to take up the collection of those materials that library employees find contentious yet relevant to research” (Martinez et al. 2016, 166). When librarians and staff who are responsible for collecting sexually explicit materials in academic libraries discuss these issues, they focus on the need to support existing and emerging academic fields and establish a comprehensive collection “to preserve the knowledge of our culture lest it disappears and we leave behind an incomplete record of our existence, or unfairly deny the university community access to information out of personal fears or prejudices” (Martinez 2012, 62). Perhaps because of this perceived role of the academic library as a relatively complete archive of human knowledge (as well as the fact that their patron base is likely to be made up almost entirely of legal adults), academic librarians may also report receiving fewer challenges and complaints about sexually explicit materials than their public library counterparts (Martinez 2012, 59).

Martinez et al. also comment in their survey analysis that “in academic libraries, there may be a higher likelihood of patrons using sexually related material for research versus personal gratification” (2016, 163), but do nothing to interrogate why this would be a benefit, that is, why is seems that libraries of all types have rejected personal gratification, entertainment, and enjoyment more broadly as proper or acceptable uses of these materials. This omission and its underlying reliance on a deep-seated philosophical concept of mind-body duality clearly denies the complexity of human behavior. Can we imagine a serious scholar who also finds pleasure or even sexual arousal in the materials that they study? What about a library patron who reads erotic romance set in the Regency era for pleasure but ends up learning something about human sexuality—or even about the Napoleonic Wars? Are these uses of the materials acceptable or not? What does this mean for scholars whose work is fundamentally grounded in lived experience, including bodily identity? If sexually explicit materials are okay for some libraries but less acceptable in others, what does that say about how we perceive the users in each context and their relationships to the collections?

7 Body Genres and the Life of the Mind

The big question here is what our culture of would-be censors and book-banning advocates—not to mention the librarians who have internalized their critiques—fear so much about the presence of sexually explicit materials in libraries. In many cases, it seems that the instinct toward restriction comes from a deep-held belief in (and fear of) the power of the works themselves. Those who object to particular materials and call for increased censorship, whether through regulations that will increase barriers to access or for outright exclusion of certain items from library collections, must “believe strongly in the power of reading,” as explored by Knox (2017, 270). Would-be censors imbue sexually explicit texts, images, and films with so much power that they actually perceive very little distance between reading or viewing them and doing or being the things portrayed in them. Knox (2017) describes this easy slippage as a “fear [of] undisciplined imagination and worry that reading certain materials will lead to mimesis” and belief that “reading can have short- and long-term effects on the character of the reader by, for example, introducing him or her to values with which the challenger disagrees” (271).

These fears are not particularly new or original, but in fact have connections to quite well-established ideas about why access to things like books and education are dangerous for certain types of people. For instance, for centuries and even into the early 1900s, female readers “were considered to be in danger of not being able to differentiate between fiction and life” and labeled “particularly susceptible to the fantasies they find in novels and the seductions of reading” (North 2014, n.p.); for this and related reasons, education and literacy for women were fraught issues. Echoes of these fears of art’s mimetic effects can be traced through into the context of contemporary sexually explicit visual materials via feminist film critic Linda Williams’s essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess.” Williams defines pornography (along with horror and melodrama) as a “body genre” and locates its traditionally denigrated cultural status in not just the “excesses” it presents (i.e. its content) but also in its effects on the person who interacts with it. She suggests that “the film genres that have had especially low cultural status … are not simply those which sensationally display bodies on the screen and register effects in the bodies of spectators. Rather, what may especially mark these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen along with the fact that the body displayed is female” (Williams 1999, 270).

Williams’ theory of body genres can complicate Knox’s points about censorship in some provocative ways. Williams contends that the difference between body genres and other genres of art “is an apparent lack of proper esthetic distance, a sense of over-involvement in sensation and emotion,” (1999, 271), which suggests that the person who interacts with texts of these genres is stripped of their rational, thinking mind (traditionally associated with masculinity) and beholden to the crude, natural demands of the body (i.e. the feminine). Yet while her formulation emphasizes the immediate bodily effects of pornography, which could be seen as a validation of the censor’s fear of mimesis, she also reframes the work of “cultural problem-solving” that this mimicry can initiate in how it allows for play and exploration around ideas “of what it means to be a man or a woman” through fantasy, proxy, and repetition (280). Thus the bodily experiences facilitated by the body genres translate to new paradigms of thought and experience around gender and identity, i.e. they help us think through, reframe, and reconceptualize big, complex intellectual questions and thus reveal the absurdity of trying to keep mind and body separate in art as in life.

8 Conclusions

What emerges when we examine the attitudes and collecting practices around sexually explicit materials in light of these theories about mimesis appears to be a deep-seated fear and rejection of the body in American librarianship (and, given our legal system’s treatment of obscenity, perhaps in American culture writ large). This is ingrained in the widespread professional insistence that educational functions are the highest ideal of librarianship, in the long-standing denigration of popular culture and “low-brow” materials in the library, and in the promotion of the idea that academic repositories are the proper or “safe” place for collections of sexually explicit materials—not only because this supposedly removes the possibility of users accessing these materials for strictly recreational purposes, but also because making these materials the objects of scholarly study is the only way to give them enough value to be worth collecting. When the mission of the library is appropriately far removed from any notion of pleasure or entertainment and the intended audience is no longer the masses of the general public but a rarified group of intellectuals with a clear educational mission, access to sexually explicit materials suddenly becomes sanctioned. This inverse relationship between public accessibility and the acceptability of sexually explicit materials in library settings reveals an underlying philosophical attachment to the library as a place dedicated to the life of the mind and therefore divorced from (and fundamentally incompatible with) the realities of the body. In this, we run the risk of requiring library users to fracture their identities, severing themselves from their lived experience and physical embodiment in order to earn the right to access these materials. Of course the burden of this type of requirement will inevitably fall more heavily onto those living in historically minoritized bodies, which are always already seen as necessarily distanced from the cis-het white male “neutral” standard and thus more essentially embodied from the start.

It is easy enough to see in this not only the legacy of America’s Puritan roots, but also larger themes from Western philosophy about the dichotomy between mind and body, male and female, society and nature. These shape our attitudes toward not just the materials we provide but also the people we serve, and we are in danger of perpetuating systematic oppressions if we build our professional ideals on them. Some excellent solutions have been suggested that address different aspects of how libraries approach sexually explicit materials in their collections, including better and fuller treatment of these issues in LIS educational texts (Hill and Harrington 2014) and outlines for revised subject access systems that would “encourage a greater intellectual access to pornographic materials” (Dilevko and Gottlieb 2002, 136). This is in addition to all the advocacy that the ALA and other groups regularly contribute to in the name of intellectual freedom as a larger concept. Ironically, the “Annoyed Librarian” (2008) even had some recommendations that, although offered facetiously, actually present worthwhile food for thought, including “Infoporn Literacy” instruction and increased privacy provisions for the use of internet-enabled computers in public libraries (629–630). Yet all of these answers neglect what would seem to be the deeper roots of the problem. Improving the ways that libraries handle sexually explicit materials doesn’t just mean changing our social mores around sex, although that should be part and parcel of the big-picture project. Instead, like so many aspects of modern American life, this one calls for the application of critical theory and increased scrutiny of the larger systems involved in these issues.

Interrogating how ideology comes into play is particularly important when dealing with an area that touches on so many potentially fraught topics—sex, gender, sexuality, identity—and it seems clear from the current state of the discourse and the practice in the field that not enough work has been done to question the ways in which the LIS profession perpetuates certain discourses. Perhaps we need to think more carefully about the “intellect” in intellectual freedom and how this foundational tenet’s focus on the mind at the expense of the body could be privileging a dysfunctional approach to library service. In addition to further critical theory work to deconstruct how libraries have inherited and perpetuated a harmful mind-body binary, we should also be more creative about the ways we welcome our patrons’ physical and sexual identities into the library. Could a public library collection include database access to ethically made feminist pornography? Could we work with queer pleasure activists in our local areas to build programming around sexual health and expression? Could we consciously collect explicit materials written for young adults and curate a display on exploring your sexuality? It may be challenging and uncomfortable to think in these terms when LIS as a profession has spent so long focused on the mind and the intellect, but continued deliberate ignorance about this pattern is inexcusable. Furthermore, while perhaps beyond the scope of the current analysis, these questions also have vital implications far beyond collecting and sharing sexually explicit materials, particularly for how libraries work for and with users from communities whose physical lived existence often causes them to come into conflict with our systems, such as those experiencing homelessness, people with disabilities, and patrons from communities of color. The ways in which we often fail these populations are deeply rooted in the same mind-body distinctions that have shaped our attitudes toward sexually explicit materials, and asking LIS professionals to think critically about how we can treat our patrons more holistically as human beings has the potential to be a key step toward transformative change.