음란물 또는 포르노그래피 소고

Abstract

The definition of obscenity by the Korean Supreme Court is “moralistic” in the sense that the criminal sanction is to be taken if by the moral standards of society a material as a whole is judged to appeal to the prurient interest by containing detailed and offensive sexual depiction and description. The value of freedom of expression is partially considered in the definition and accordingly a number of literature and artistic expressions have been punished as obscene. Recently the Korean Constitutional Court applied a new “liberal” standard, limiting the scope of punishable obscenity to “the sexual expressions that destroy human dignity,” and emphasized on the role of the “mechanism of ideas' competition” before punishing obscene materials. However, this new standards has not been practically accepted by law enforcement authorities and lower courts. On the other hand, the radical feminist anti-pornography arguments by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon to some extent influenced Korean feminists. It is worth listening to the feminist voices; they wonder in defining obscenity why prurience counts but powerlessness does not, and why sensibilities should be protected from offense better than women from exploitation; importantly they argue, pornography, sexualizing the male dominance, causes harm, and the law should change to recognize and alleviate that harm. However, it needs to take a caution against the interpretive problems inherent in the radical feminist censorship regime. The vague concepts in the radical feminist “anti-pornography ordinance” such as “sexual objects,” “filthy or inferior,” “domination,” “exploitation,” and so forth, inevitably give a wide discretion to the law enforcement authority, resulting in infringement upon the