Dear Ann Landers,
ecently a dearly loved, much-admired and re-spected man died. He was an ideal husband and father, a community leader, financially successful and the sort of person everyone looked up to. After his death, his wife and adult chil-dren went through his personal belong-ings-together. What they found was shattering and heartbreaking. They dis-covered a collection of pornographic magazines and books, stacks of ob-scene pictures and a suitcase filled with stag movies. The family is crushed. They now feel his life was a sham-that he was a hypocrite. No one can understand it How could a person have kept his true character so completely hidden from those who were so close to him? A prurient interest in sex is as unlike this man as night is from day. Please ex-plain. STUNNED IN CONNECT-ICUT

DEAR STUNNED,
It is not unusual for a person to have a private, kooky compartment in his life-ranging from the slightly offbeat to the wildly bi-zarre. This needn't mean the person was evil or sinister. It merely means that, in THIS particular area, he had strudel in his noodle. According to Webster's Third International Unabridged Dictionary, pornog-raphy is "art or literature that panders to man's basest appetites and desires. It depicts the lewd, licentious and obscene." And this is where the problem lies. The 1970 American Commission on Obscenity was surprised to discover that no federal statute prohibiting "ob-scene" material ever defined the term. In 1964 Justice Stewart Potter of the U. S. Supreme Court came up with what I consider the best definition yet. He said, "I know it when I see it." It is generally agreed that pornography applies to pictures, magazines or movies that show nudity or sexual activity in a manner that violates contem- THE ANN LANDERS ENCYCLOPEDIA 965 porary standards of propriety. Yet no lawyer, judge, clergyman, artist, critic or vice-squad officer has ever been able to describe those "contemporary standards" in a way that satisfies society at large. While the experts agree that the idea behind pornography is to excite peo-ple, they cannot agree on whether the results of this excitement are good or bad. What you and I consider pornographic, may be viewed as "real" and "honest" to the educated young. Each generation shapes its own moral sense of the community. Change is inherent in every civilized society. The present generation's avant-garde has opted to take sex out of the bed-room and put it on the coffee table. Photographs of every conceivable variety of kinky sex can be purchased at almost any bookstore and newsstand in the country. Will this lead to decadence, rape and the collapse of morality? There is no evidence to support those charges. I have always believed that censorship eventually leads to problems far worse than the damage done by por-nography-if indeed any damage is done by it at all. The violence on TV and in the films and the live war scenes from Vietnam viewed by millions of Americans on the six o'clock news was, in my view, far more obscene than anything for sale in the bawdiest bookstore. Adults should be free to decide for themselves what movies they want to see, what magazines and books they want to read and what kind of pictures they want to look at. This is what a democratic society is all about I would like to make it clear that I do not consider "kid pom" (photo-graphs of children between the ages of six and sixteen) pornography. This is child abuse. I have seen some of this material-little girls and boys, posing in lewd positions, both alone and with other children-or worse yet, engaging in sex acts with adult men and women. I am in favor of harsh criminal action against anyone involved in this activity. All such photographs should be con-sidered illegal. Parents who permit their children to pose in this manner should be taken into custody and put under psychiatric treatment. They are ill. The forbidden has always been immensely appealing. The sure way to get people to want something is to tell them they can't have it. And so it is with pornography. I am in favor of making the rotten (and boring) junk available to any adult who is foolish enough to throw away his money on it. After a while, in America, as in the Scandinavian countries, it will sit on the shelves and they won't be able to give it away. credit: Ann Landers. 966 THE ANN LANDERS ENCYCLOPEDIA SHE SHOULD HAVE KEPT HER HOT HANDS OFF DEAR READERS: Pass the humble pie, or the crow, or whatever you want to call it. Ann Landers has her fork ready. There's nothing like 54,000,000 daily readers to keep a girl on her toes. Every now and then I reverse my advice, usually because the readers have persuaded me I was wrong. And so it was in the case of the mother who found a collection of nude pictures in a box under her son's bed. She wrote to say she had cured her 17-year-old son by pasting the nudes on the living room wall and shaming him. "That," she crowed, "ended his career as an art collector." I thought it was ingenious and amus-ing, and I said so. Hundreds of readers let me know it wasn't funny. Hundreds more said it was a destructive thing to do to a 17-year-old boy. They said the lad's behavior was normal, and Mom should have kept her hot little hands off the pictures and said nothing. The following letter is a fairly repre-sentative example of what made me change my advice.