CHAPTER 3:  RELEVANT LITERATURE

Introduction and Issues

I used Library Literature and similar databases to look for studies that had to do with critical classification including the subject analysis of sexually explicit materials.  This approach was not very fruitful, which illustrates the following findings about vague and obfuscatory terms used to index sexually explicit materials.

Only part of the problem is the cataloging problem of format versus genre, or “isness” versus “aboutness.”  For instance, "pornography" as a term does not usually get you examples of pornographic materials.  Instead the searcher usually finds discussions about the concept of "pornography." This is not consistently applied and therefore problematic.  But the primary problem is that in library terminologies and databases, many sexually related topics are concealed behind other, more docile sorts of search terms. 

Barrett W. Elcano and Vern Bullough detail similar kinds of problems they had with searching historical literature in their book chapter “Sexology:  a personal guide to the serial literature.” This passage discusses the problems faced by researchers when they face vague and unpredictable subject headings for sexually explicit materials.   

Scientific journals, for example, often included references to sex as part of the ongoing effort to explain physiological differences between the sexes, impregnation, hormonal influences, and so forth.  Medical and psychiatric journals often included clinical case studies with a strong sexual factor, while legal journals dealt with sexual topics through discussions of such subjects as prostitution.  Religious magazines and journals usually put references to sex in terms of general discussions of morality.

Even though these references do exist, the researcher attempting to find them in early periodicals faces great difficulties because often the articles most pertinent to any investigation of sexuality are indexed under some other topic.  In our research into serial literature of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the key words for finding articles dealing with sexuality in the indexes were marriage and family.  Medically oriented articles more often were indexed under the term sex than non-medically oriented ones, but still, many medical articles could only be found by tracing down references to pregnancy, venereal disease, and oddly enough women, a sort of catchall category for marital problems, sexual dysfunction, etc.  Legal literature also often included the word “sex” in describing certain kinds of crimes, but it was usually easier to find pertinent articles by looking up such terms as adultery, prostitution, and rape.  Religious literature, except that designed for the religious professional, rarely indexed the term sex, but in the professional literature reference terms often appeared under biblical references such as onanism, adultery, and polygamy.  Indexers avoided such terms as homosexuality, transvestism, masochism, and similar descriptive terms until the past decade or so.[1]

The International Thesaurus of Gay and Lesbian Index Terms was originally constructed to provide gay and lesbian libraries and archives a turnkey answer to problems of internally indexing the journal articles from their field.  Since there is no centralized indexing gay, lesbian, and other sexual minority journals, it is done in-house, by lone libraries, when there is time. 

Even now, most of the journals and magazines produced by and about sexual practitioners are not indexed in any of the standard tools (Wilson, Gale) – including high-circulation popular magazines reputed to have good articles, such as Playboy.  This is a problem that could be solved in part by building a general sexuality thesaurus.

Critical Classification Studies

There are several ways to critique subject headings (or classification systems].  One is to examine the change of headings over time.  Ellen Greenblatt and Gary M. Klein engaged in this process, critiquing the history of relevant subject headings in the Library of Congress Subject Headings and Education Index, respectively.  Sanford Berman of the Hennepin County Library (HCL) used direct action over a career of 30+ years to simultaneously critique Library of Congress Subject Headings, develop and use non-discriminatory subject headings for his library, and recommend that the Library of Congress adopt his suggestions. 

Gay and lesbian librarians have long lobbied the Library of Congress to change prejudicial subject headings.  Ellen Greenblatt in her article “Homosexuality:  The Evolution of a Concept in the Library of Congress Subject Headings”[2]  details the history the term “Homosexuality”.  This article is concise, well-researched, and widely cited across the literature reviewed. 

“Homosexuality” was, until 1946, a subtopic of “Sexual perversion,” and even after it moved to stand as its own heading, a ‘see also’ from “Sexual perversion” (which changed to “Sexual deviance”) remained until 1972.  Although LC is supposed to use common or popular rather than medical or scientific terms, Greenblatt emphasizes that the Library of Congress did not adopt the term “Gay” for “Homosexual” until 1987, although this change was in the literature came several years after The New York Times adopted the usage of the term “Gay.” 

Gary M. Klein studied how the subject headings for the topics of sex education and sexuality changed over time in the Education Index.  This analysis is much closer to the interests of this paper since it deals with sexuality generally, not just the GLBT portion.  It was Klein’s impression that

…throughout history there have been deliberate acts to marginalize, negate, and even destroy people’s thoughts and words with respect to all types of sex education, sexual expression, and sexuality.[3]

He uses an analysis of the changing keywords in the Education Index to make a strong case that indexers and researchers no longer have to worry about being prosecuted for “providing access to literature on birth control, sex education, or sexuality.”[4]  He claims that subject headings that conceal the real contents of sexually explicit materials stemmed from more than mere prudishness.  They also protected library collections from theft or vandalism, and librarians from persecution or prosecution.  This occupational hazard still exists, and may explain librarians continuing fondness for nonspecific subject headings. 

Sanford Berman and the ‘Fucking’ Truth

From his position as cataloger at the Hennepin County Library, Sanford Berman has long advocated fairness in Library of Congress Subject Headings.  In his 1971 work Prejudices and Antipathies:  A Tract on the LC Subject Heads Concerning People,[5]  Berman critiqued Library of Congress Subject Headings for races, faiths, ethnic groups, politics, children, men, women, and sex.  His work is distinct because it is written specifically as evidence-based suggestions to change specific LC subject headings and cross-references. 

Berman’s 1992 publication “The ‘Fucking’ Truth About Library Catalogs”[6]  is distinctive because of the clever way that he manages to get the word “Fucking” into the title of an academic article – perhaps a first.  In this article he agitates that LC should include a ‘use for’ cross-reference from “Fucking” to the preferred term “Sexual intercourse.”  This is followed by a list of about 50 more subject headings he is suggesting LC adopt, for example “Adult bookstores,” “Gay sadomasochism,” and “Topless bars.” 

LC has become more responsive to these kinds of suggestions, and has instituted a program through which member libraries can submit new subject headings.  I checked some of the headings on Berman’s list, and it appears some have been adopted, with a few changes.  For instance, his suggested “Fetishism (Sexuality)” is in LC as “Fetishism (Sexual behavior);” “Sex-change surgery” is in LC as “Sex-change (Surgery);” while “Sex tourism” and “Telephone sex” have been accepted as-is.  

If  There Were a Sex Index

Another crucial study is Berman’s “If There Were a Sex Index…”,[7]  a very good question – why isn’t there a sex index?  The truth is, sexually explicit magazines and journals remain mostly unindexed.  Information about sexual practices are hidden from researchers by this absence of information science.  Lobbying by the GLBTRT has obtained mainstream indexing of a few gay and lesbian journals.  Additionally, The International Thesaurus of Gay and Lesbian Index Terms was originally built to assist gay and lesbian archivists to index local papers and magazines.  Robert Ridinger has published an index to The Advocate, a gay newsmagazine.[8]  Playboy produces and distributes their own index.[9]  Other sexuality collections such as Homodok-LAA, NISSO, and Kinsey index some of their articles in-house and make this available on their Web catalog.  There is no centralized location that indexes these articles, however.

Berman’s book chapter consists entirely of the index, prefaced by this brief paragraph explaining his question, what if there were a sex index?

There isn’t one, of course.  Because erotic, Gay, and sexologic materials – “dirty,” “deviant” books and magazines – have traditionally embarrassed librarians.  Even scared them.  But the Sixties and the Sexual Revolution have undermined much of that Victorian tradition, producing a real impetus to now actively collect and access that vast, long-neglected, and ever-growing literature of sensuality.  So if H.W. Wilson, SIECUS, or Haworth Press did produce a Sex Index to belatedly complement the Art Index, Business Index, Education Index, etc., it should look something like this[.][10]

He took a dozen different single issues of sex magazines, made up user-friendly subject headings, and built an index of the articles.  This was done to demonstrate that it is possible to seriously address sexually explicit materials in a user-friendly way using the standard tools of librarianship.  As a surprising aside, this index showed that there were many book reviews printed in these “dirty” magazines. 

The index included ‘see’ and ‘use for’ references.  A set of ‘see’ references that will be relevant later in this paper is the entry “Adult-Child Relations.  See Boy Love; Child Molesting; Father-Daughter Incest; Mother-Son Incest; Pedophilia.”  Other proposed headings, which Berman reported disturbed printers and typesetters of this article, were “Nipple Play, Vagina Size, Fist-Fucking, and Bondage and Discipline.”   This was a list of words that were disturbing people who had to work with them. 

Proposing that libraries use such terms sounds ridiculous.  It seems at best misguided, and at worst a kind of perversion.  However, even a cursory examination of the terms used by Web directories finds a set of descriptive terms that are even more unscientific, direct, and “dirty.”  These terms are not made up by the indexers, but built by examining what terms the public enters into search engines, and what terms the information providers use to organize their resources.  The terms are not pretty or scientific, but they are very empirical.