by Marcia Pally

About the author: Marcia Pally is the author of numerous articles on censorship as well as the books Sense and Censorship: The Vanity of Bonfires and Sex & Sensibility: Reflections on Forbidden Mirrors and the Will to Censor.

In the late 1980s, performance artist and NEA grant recipient Karen Finley took off her clothes and smeared herself with chocolate to symbolize the shit women put up with. Most of the audience at the 1 AM performance I saw thought Finley’s feminist point was emphatic, if messy, but leaders of the political and religious right did not see it that way—at least as they read about it in the papers. They saw Finley’s piece as an unnecessarily pornographic way of expressing oneself which decent people shouldn&rsquo...