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

Sex in the Stacks: Examining the Treatment of Explicit Materials in American Libraries PDF free Download. Think more deeply and widely.

Rachel Greenhaus*

Sex in the Stacks: Examining the Treatment of

Explicit Materials in American Libraries

https://doi.org/10.1515/libri-2021-0133

Published online January 12, 2023

Abstract: 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

challengesandbansaswellaslegalaction,andit

remains a hot topic through the present day for those

looking to critique the role and function of libraries in

American society. By examining elements of this history

and how these questions have been addressed in both

public and academic library settings, we can start to

uncover some of the deeper cultural biases at play in the

American LIS profession’s failures to fully embrace

sexually explicit materials as a meaningful part of our

collections and, relatedly, our larger philosophical fail-

ures to treat our patrons holistically as human beings

whose physical lives are inextricably linked to their

intellectual ones. A critical reconsideration of the place

of pleasure and embodiment in our libraries has deep

implications for how we work with and for our communities.

Keywords: collection development, intellectual freedom

and censorship, pornography, sexually explicit materials

1 Introduction

Intellectual freedom is perhaps the most central founda-

tional tenet of American librarianship. Two of the

fundamental documents of the profession, the American

Library Association’sLibrary Bill of Rights and The

Freedom to Read Statement, both clearly articulate that

alibrary’smaintaskistoprovideaccesstoawidevariety

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 dis-

cussion 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

remainsahottopicthroughthepresentdayforthose

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

*Corresponding author: Rachel Greenhaus, Printed and Published

Materials Department Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the

History of Women in America, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, 3 James

Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA,

E-mail: rachelgreenhaus@gmail.com. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-

8289-6231

LIBRI 2023; 73(1): 77–84

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 West-

ern 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 cate-

gories of pornography and obscenity have been notori-

ously 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 is-

sues 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 stan-

dards has frequently led to harsher prosecution of mate-

rials that touch on some element of minority identity

including homosexuality and queerness, non-white par-

ticipants, 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

78 R. Greenhaus

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 them-

selves 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

booksinthelibrariesofseveraldistrictschoolsthatwere

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 “empha-

sized 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 cur-

riculum”(Mullally and Gargano 2017, emphasis in the

original, n.p.). However, despite this professed narrow-

ness, Pico remains the only existing Supreme Court deci-

sion 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 educa-

tional 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 state-

ment largely echo the language of the Library Bill of Rights

and The Freedom to Read Statement, asserting “the Asso-

ciation’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 documenta-

tion, 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 expres-

sions, including those which are unorthodox or unpopular

with the majority,”and thus that such legislation “must be

challenged by librarians through every legal means avail-

able”(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 rein-

forcement 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

Sex in the Stacks 79

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’tcollectporn”

(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 over-

whelming 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”

(Martinezetal.2016,159).Butwhataboutentertainment

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 legiti-

mate 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 under-

lying 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’scollections,

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

80 R. Greenhaus

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 devel-

opment and access provision when it comes to sexually

explicit materials in academic library settings, particularly

materials more on the extreme/hardcore end of the spec-

trum and/or visual materials like films and photographs.

While respondents in Martinez et al.’s (2016) survey of li-

brary 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

andemergingacademicﬁelds and establish a compre-

hensive collection “to preserve the knowledge of our

culture lest it disappears and we leave behind an incom-

plete record of our existence, or unfairly deny the uni-

versity 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 rela-

tively complete archive of human knowledge (as well as

thefactthattheirpatronbaseislikelytobemadeup

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 likeli-

hood 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 li-

brary 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 re-

lationships 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

Sex in the Stacks 81

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 imagina-

tion 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).

Thesefearsarenotparticularlynewororiginal,but

in fact have connections to quite well-established ideas

about why access to things like books and education

aredangerousforcertaintypesofpeople.Forinstance,

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’streatmentof

obscenity, perhaps in American culture writ large). This is

ingrained in the widespread professional insistence that

educational functions are the highest ideal of librarian-

ship, in the long-standing denigration of popular culture

and “low-brow”materials in the library, and in the pro-

motion 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

materialstheobjectsofscholarlystudyistheonlywayto

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

placededicatedtothelifeofthemindandtherefore

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

82 R. Greenhaus

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 pro-

vide 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 in-

tellectual freedom as a larger concept. Ironically, the

“Annoyed Librarian”(2008) even had some recommen-

dations 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 li-

braries 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 partic-

ularly 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 intel-

lectual 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 inex-

cusable. 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 mate-

rials, 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 trans-

formative change.

Research funding: The author received no ﬁnancial

support for the research, authorship, and/or publication

of this article.

References

Adkins, D., L. Esser, D. Velasquez, and H. L. Hill. 2008. “Romance

Novels in American Public Libraries: A Study of Collection

Development Practices.”Library Collections, Acquisitions, &

Technical Services 32 (2): 59–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.

lcats.2008.08.014.

American Booksellers Association, Inc. v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323

(7th Cir. 1985).

American Library Association. 2004. The Freedom to Read Statement.

Chicago, Illinois: Issues & Advocacy. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/

intfreedom/freedomreadstatement (accessed June 30, 2004).

American Library Association. 2019. Library Bill of Rights. Chicago,

Illinois: Issues & Advocacy. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/

intfreedom/librarybill (accessed January 29, 2019).

American Library Association. 1970. “Intellectual Freedom.”American

Libraries 1 (7): 653–5. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25617996

(accessed September 30, 2021).

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Annoyed Librarian. 2008. “Chapter Nine: Take the Library Porn

Challenge.”Journal of Access Services 5 (4): 623–30. https://doi.

org/10.1080/15367960802175091.

Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002).

Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v.

Pico, 457 U.S. 853 (1982).

Cornog, M. 1991. “Chapter 10: What Happens When Libraries

Subscribe to Playboy?”In Libraries, Erotica, Pornography, edited

by M. Cornog, 144–66. Phoenix: Oryx Press.

Cusack, C. M. 2015. Pornography and the Criminal Justice System.

London: CRC Press.

Dilevko, J., and L. Gottlieb. 2002. “Deep Classiﬁcation: Pornography,

Bibliographic Access, and Academic Libraries.”Library

Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services 26 (2): 113–39.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1464-9055(02)00229-4.

Hauptman, R. 1998. “Professionalism or Culpability?: An

Experiment in Ethics.”In Ethics, Information, and Technology,

edited by R. N. Stichler, and R. Hauptman, 291–5. Jefferson:

McFarland.

Hill, H., and M. Harrington. 2014. “Beyond Obscenity: An Analysis of

Sexual Discourse in LIS Educational Texts.”Journal of

Documentation 70 (1): 62–73. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-

2012-0150.

Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964).

Knox, E. J. M. 2017. “Opposing Censorship in Difﬁcult Times.”Library

Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 87 (3): 268–76.

https://doi.org/10.1086/692304.

Martinez, M. 2012. “Pornography and Erotica in an Academic Library.”

In True Stories of Censorship Battles in America’s Libraries,

edited by V. Nye, and K. Barco, 57–63. Chicago: American Library

Association.

Martinez, M. M., E. Cassidy, K. Landry Mueller, L. Shen, M. Thompson,

and Z. Valdes. 2016. “Collecting Sex Materials for Libraries.”

Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian 35 (4): 151–70.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01639269.2017.1283181.

Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973).

Mullally,C.,andA.Gargano.2017.Banned Books. Laurel, Maryland:

Freedom Forum Institute. https://www.freedomforuminstitute.

org/ﬁrst-amendment-center/topics/freedom-of-speech-2/

libraries-ﬁrst-amendment-overview/banned-books/ (accessed

November 29, 2017).

North, A. When Novels Were Bad for You. New York, New York: New

York Times. https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/

when-novels-were-bad-for-you/ (accessed September 14, 2014).

Radway, J. 1984. “Interpretive Communities and Variable Literacies:

The Functions of Romance Reading.”Daedalus 113 (3): 49–73.

Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957).

Slade, J. W. 2001. Pornography and Sexual Representation:

A Reference Guide, Vol. 1. Westport: Greenwood Press.

United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses,”5 F.Supp. 182

(S.D.N.Y. 1933).

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In Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, edited by S. Thornham,

267–81. New York: New York University Press.

84 R. Greenhaus

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Rachel Greenhaus*

Sex in the Stacks: Examining the Treatment of

Explicit Materials in American Libraries

https://doi.org/10.1515/libri-2021-0133

Published online January 12, 2023

Abstract: 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

challengesandbansaswellaslegalaction,andit

remains a hot topic through the present day for those

looking to critique the role and function of libraries in

American society. By examining elements of this history

and how these questions have been addressed in both

public and academic library settings, we can start to

uncover some of the deeper cultural biases at play in the

American LIS profession’s failures to fully embrace

sexually explicit materials as a meaningful part of our

collections and, relatedly, our larger philosophical fail-

ures to treat our patrons holistically as human beings

whose physical lives are inextricably linked to their

intellectual ones. A critical reconsideration of the place

of pleasure and embodiment in our libraries has deep

implications for how we work with and for our communities.

Keywords: collection development, intellectual freedom

and censorship, pornography, sexually explicit materials

1 Introduction

Intellectual freedom is perhaps the most central founda-

tional tenet of American librarianship. Two of the

fundamental documents of the profession, the American

Library Association’sLibrary Bill of Rights and The

Freedom to Read Statement, both clearly articulate that

alibrary’smaintaskistoprovideaccesstoawidevariety

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 dis-

cussion 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

remainsahottopicthroughthepresentdayforthose

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

*Corresponding author: Rachel Greenhaus, Printed and Published

Materials Department Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the

History of Women in America, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, 3 James

Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA,

E-mail: rachelgreenhaus@gmail.com. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-

8289-6231

LIBRI 2023; 73(1): 77–84

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 West-

ern 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 cate-

gories of pornography and obscenity have been notori-

ously 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 is-

sues 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 stan-

dards has frequently led to harsher prosecution of mate-

rials that touch on some element of minority identity

including homosexuality and queerness, non-white par-

ticipants, 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

78 R. Greenhaus

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 them-

selves 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

booksinthelibrariesofseveraldistrictschoolsthatwere

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 “empha-

sized 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 cur-

riculum”(Mullally and Gargano 2017, emphasis in the

original, n.p.). However, despite this professed narrow-

ness, Pico remains the only existing Supreme Court deci-

sion 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 educa-

tional 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 state-

ment largely echo the language of the Library Bill of Rights

and The Freedom to Read Statement, asserting “the Asso-

ciation’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 documenta-

tion, 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 expres-

sions, including those which are unorthodox or unpopular

with the majority,”and thus that such legislation “must be

challenged by librarians through every legal means avail-

able”(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 rein-

forcement 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

Sex in the Stacks 79

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’tcollectporn”

(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 over-

whelming 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”

(Martinezetal.2016,159).Butwhataboutentertainment

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 legiti-

mate 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 under-

lying 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’scollections,

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

80 R. Greenhaus

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 devel-

opment and access provision when it comes to sexually

explicit materials in academic library settings, particularly

materials more on the extreme/hardcore end of the spec-

trum and/or visual materials like films and photographs.

While respondents in Martinez et al.’s (2016) survey of li-

brary 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

andemergingacademicﬁelds and establish a compre-

hensive collection “to preserve the knowledge of our

culture lest it disappears and we leave behind an incom-

plete record of our existence, or unfairly deny the uni-

versity 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 rela-

tively complete archive of human knowledge (as well as

thefactthattheirpatronbaseislikelytobemadeup

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 likeli-

hood 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 li-

brary 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 re-

lationships 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

Sex in the Stacks 81

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 imagina-

tion 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).

Thesefearsarenotparticularlynewororiginal,but

in fact have connections to quite well-established ideas

about why access to things like books and education

aredangerousforcertaintypesofpeople.Forinstance,

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’streatmentof

obscenity, perhaps in American culture writ large). This is

ingrained in the widespread professional insistence that

educational functions are the highest ideal of librarian-

ship, in the long-standing denigration of popular culture

and “low-brow”materials in the library, and in the pro-

motion 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

materialstheobjectsofscholarlystudyistheonlywayto

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

placededicatedtothelifeofthemindandtherefore

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

82 R. Greenhaus

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 pro-

vide 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 in-

tellectual freedom as a larger concept. Ironically, the

“Annoyed Librarian”(2008) even had some recommen-

dations 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 li-

braries 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 partic-

ularly 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 intel-

lectual 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 inex-

cusable. 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 mate-

rials, 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 trans-

formative change.

Research funding: The author received no ﬁnancial

support for the research, authorship, and/or publication

of this article.

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