Commission created by Congress, 1967; majority report concluded "public opinion in America does not support the imposition of legal prohibitions upon the right of adults to read or see explicit sexual materials."

After seeing the London production of Oh! Calcutta!, the seventh Earl of Longford rose in the House of Lords to deliver an anti-obscenity speech so stirring that it stirred the Earl himself to action. An unofficial, privately financed 52-man committee chosen and headed by Longford, completed 16 months of investigation by publishing this 520-page report on pornography. Unlike the President's commission in the U.S., Lord Longford's study found that pornography creates an addiction leading to deviant obsessions and actions. He also recommended that Britain's anti-obscenity laws be strengthened and extended. Such conclusions would perhaps not be surprising from a group organized by a former leader of the House of Lords, a Roman Catholic convert and one of 24 knights companions of the Order of the Garter (motto: Evil to him who evil thinks). But Lord Longford is also a longtime socialist who helped design the British welfare state, a self-styled fellow-traveling member of Women's Lib and the first member of the House of Lords to speak in favor of legalizing private adult homosexual acts. Longford and the bishops, social scientists, housewives, educators, pop stars and writers who made up the committee sampled pornography of every kink and kind. They interviewed purveyors, performers and police and sorted through the 5,000 letters that poured in to them.

Named a Notable Book by The New York Times Book Review in 1995, Defending Pornography examines a key question that has divided feminists for decades: is censoring pornography good or bad for women? Nadine Strossen makes a powerful case that increasing government power to censor sexual expression, beyond the limits that the First Amendment sensibly permits (for example, outlawing child pornography) would do more harm than good for women and others who have traditionally been marginalized due to sex or gender, She explains how the very anti-porn laws pushed by some feminists have led to the censorship of LGBTQ+ and feminist works, and she examines the startling connections between anti-porn feminists and right-wing fundamentalists. In an illuminating new Preface, Strossen lays out the multiple current assaults on sexual expression, which continue to come from across the ideological spectrum. She shows that freedom for such expression remains an essential prerequisite for the equality, safety, and dignity of women and sexual/gender minorities.