Perversion for Profit

This article is about the 1965 propaganda film. For other uses, see Perversion for Profit (disambiguation).

Perversion for Profit
George Putnam in Perversion for Profit
Narrated by	George Putnam
Starring	George Putnam
Distributed by	Citizens for Decent Literature, Inc.
Release date(s)	1965
Running time	31 mins.
Country	United States
Language	English

Perversion for Profit is a 1965 propaganda film financed by Charles Keating and narrated by news reporter George Putnam. A vehement diatribe against pornography, the film argues that sexually explicit materials corrupt young viewers and readers, leading to acts of violence and "perverted" attitudes regarding sex--including inclination toward homosexuality. Although Perversion for Profit is quite serious in its suggestion that pornography could erode the integrity of American culture, its broad claims and dramatic presentation make the film somewhat comical.

Today Perversion for Profit is in the public domain, and due largely to its humor value, it has become popular on the Prelinger Archives website and on YouTube . As Peter L. Stein observes in an article for the San Francisco Chronicle, however, the film also has considerable historical significance, serving as a sort of time capsule of pornography from the era as well as an example of historical concerns regarding media influence:

"...as the parade of girlie magazine covers, men's physique pictorials and campy S&M leaflets continues, the film betrays a kind of prurience the filmmakers could hardly have intended. What results is a remarkable visual record of midcentury underground literature and sexual appetites, and a gloss on the values of the society that condemned them."

At the time the Chronicle article was written, Perversion was the Prelinger Archive's second most popular download, superseded only by the well-known Cold War film Duck and Cover. Like Stein, ephemeral film scholar Rick Prelinger, founder of the Archive, views such films as illuminating historical documents or what he calls "unofficial evidence of everyday life"

Allusions

To bolster his position, Putnam makes a reference to "Dr. Sorokin, the renowned Harvard sociologist". This individual is Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian-American who founded Harvard's Sociology department and served as the American Sociological Association's 55th president.

In order to provide an example of corruptive literature, Putnam reads a lurid passage from a pulp fiction novel entitled Sex Jungle. Published in 1960, Sex Jungle was credited to Don Elliot, a pseudonym for Robert Silverberg, a prolific science fiction novelist. In a 2000 interview, Silverberg explained that the erotic fiction that he published under the Don Elliot pseudonym "was undertaken at a time when I was saddled with a huge debt, at the age of 26, for a splendid house that I had bought. There would have been no way to pay the house off by writing science fiction in that long-ago era, when $2500 was a lot to earn from a novel that might take months to write, so I turned out a slew of quick sex novels. I never concealed the fact that I was doing them; it made no difference at all to me whether people knew or not. It was just a job. And it was, incidentally, a job that I did very well. I think they were outstanding erotic novels."

A typical image from the film: a photograph taken from a lesbian pornography magazine and censored with colored rectangles

Quotations

• "Now, you might ask yourself 'Why this sudden concern? Pornography and sex deviation have always been with mankind.' This is true. But, now, consider another fact: never in the history of the world have the merchants of obscenity, the teachers of unnatural sex acts, had available to them the modern facilities for disseminating this filth. High-speed presses, rapid transportation, mass distribution: all have combined to put the vilest obscenity within reach of every man, woman, and child in the country."—George Putnam, narrator.

• "This same type of rot and decay caused sixteen of the nineteen major civilizations to vanish from the Earth. Magnificent Egypt, classical Greece, imperial Rome, all crumbled away not because of the strength of the aggressor, but because of moral decay from within. But we are in a unique position to cure our own ills: our Constitution was written by men who put their trust in God and founded a government based in His laws. These laws are on our side. We have a constitutional guarantee of protection against obscenity. And, in this day especially, we must seek to deliver ourselves from this twisting, torturing evil. We must save our nation from decay and deliver our children from the horrors of perversion. We must make our land, 'the land of the free', a safe home. Oh, God, deliver us, Americans, from evil."—George Putnam, narrator (closing words).

• "This moral decay weakens our resistance to the onslaught of the communist masters of deceit."—George Putnam, narrator.

Further reading

Perversion for Profit was produced by Citizens for Decent Literature and financed by Cincinnati lawyer Charles Keating. Whitney Strub offers a substantial critical history of CDL and Keating in her book Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right (Columbia University Press, 2010).

See also

• List of films in the public domain

External links

• Perversion for Profit is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
• Perversion for Profit at the Internet Movie Database