Two current reports that are only a few hours apart. First message: “The UK government wants age verification for access to porn websites in the UK make it compulsory.” A long overdue youth protection measure. Second report: “After a discovery of several porn magazines in a ditch The police in Middle Franconia are investigating the distribution of pornographic writings.” The perpetrator, it is said, faces “up to a year in prison”.
Man and desire, it is a painful story. The ancient Greek compound from pornē and graphein (roughly: drawn harlot) is found for the first time in the writings of the writer Athenaios at the beginning of the third century. In the 18th century, the term “pornography” appeared in connection with prostitution, and some murals freed from Vesuvius ash that archaeologists found in Pompeii are also described with this word. Up until the 1990s, it was quite easy to regulate who saw something pornographic and when. Stuttgart, for example, had to do that Bookseller Wendlin N. who was sentenced to a fine of 300 marks in 1971 by the district court responsible for the illegal “distribution of obscene and youth-endangering writings”. Today, liberal things can be found everywhere – which doesn’t make the work of state inspection bodies any easier.
mockery and ridicule on social media
In fact, there was great scorn and ridicule on social channels when the Bad Windsheim police asked for information on which perpetrators at Marktbergel could have disposed of their magazines. In the forums it was said that the state should rather – like Great Britain – take care of a functioning proof of age on the corresponding websites. If anything, the perpetrator could be prosecuted for illegal waste disposal. Antje Gabriels-Gorsolke from the public prosecutor’s office in Nuremberg-Fürth refers to Section 184 of the Criminal Code and Section 27 of the Youth Protection Act, according to which the mere dissemination of pornography can already be punishable.
And so it will be interesting to see how the story continues. One-hand readings have always been considered not only degoutant, they are also dangerous: In 2017, a 50-year-old Japanese man was found in his apartment buried under junk books. His collection is said to have weighed six tons. Although such cases are rare these days, it’s not just the police who deal with valuable publications. When a researcher at Brookes University in Oxford published explicit material from Franz Kafka’s estate a few years ago (“dark and shocking”), the magnitude of the shock reached into the high feuilleton.
A three-year-old case from the Austrian Waldviertel proves that disposal can also go unpunished. as himself a woman in the Horn district complained about booklets, which an unknown person placed in front of the house, the police and the judiciary saw no criminal offense. The reason: the stranger had packed each of the more than 40 magazines he had left at the garden gate in a separate envelope. A public hazard could thus be ruled out.