Author and veteran columnist Amy Sohn talks with Harry Siegel about her book, The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age, and explains why the “zombie” Comstock Law still on the federal books kept coming up during 2024’s presidential election.
https://feeds.fireside.fm/faqnyc/rss?comstockdouche
Sohn details how the lives of two “sex radicals,” Ida Craddock and Sarah Chase, were upended as they crossed paths with Anthony Comstock, the mutton-chopped celebrity behind the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and self-described “friend of women” who boasted about driving his enemies to suicide.
19th century newspaper advertisement, for “The Comstock Syringe”
It’s a story about how the government’s original anti-sex law — suppressing information about birth control as a form of obscenity — created mechanisms used to this day to suppress unpopular thoughts.
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The post LISTEN: How a Gilded Age Anti-Sex Law Bred the Modern State’s Criminalization of ‘Dangerous’ Speech appeared first on THE CITY – NYC News.
