We’re living, once again, in the era of artistic repression, and here’s the thing about that – repression never actually cleanses, it just curdles and simmers and finds ways to leak and bleed its way out again.
It seems that every generation invents new ways to convince itself that it’s protecting innocence, and every generation ends up eroticizing the boundaries it builds. Hollywood did it with the Hays Code just as the Victorians before them did it with morality literature. Now we’re watching the same cycle replay in school districts and state legislatures that want to decide what stories young people are allowed to consume.
So let’s take a look at how this has evolved in the U.S. over the past century.
By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hollywood had become the most powerful storytelling machine on earth – and a lot of Americans were terrified of what that meant.
The U.S. was reeling from the Great Depression, Prohibition, and rapid social change following World War I. Traditional moral authorities — churches, civic leaders, small-town morality enforcers — worried that the movies, with their glamour and suggestiveness, were corrupting public morals at a time when people were already desperate and angry.
Add to that:
- Women’s changing roles: The “flapper” era had scandalized traditionalists with short skirts, visible sexuality, and independence.
- Racial anxiety: Jazz culture and interracial representation were rising alongside open bigotry.
- Urbanization: Millions of rural Americans had moved to cities, and conservative church leaders blamed urban life for moral decay.
Movies were an easy scapegoat. Visible, influential, and filled with beautiful, glamorous sinners.
The Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code), enforced from 1934 to 1968, was designed to keep Hollywood moral. It banned nudity, profanity, “excessive kissing,” and anything that could be construed as “sexual perversion” (the euphemism for homosexuality). It also demanded that “the sanctity of marriage” be upheld and that “immorality” never be portrayed sympathetically or rewarded.
Before enforcement of the Code, Hollywood was actually quite racy. The early sound films of 1929–1934 (known as Pre-Code Hollywood) included adultery, homosexuality, drug use, prostitution, interracial relationships, and powerful, sexually autonomous women – things that would be impossible just a few years later.
Audiences loved it. Religious groups were scandalized.
Enter Will H. Hays, a Presbyterian elder and former U.S. Postmaster General, who was hired in 1922 to clean up Hollywood’s image after a series of scandals – most infamously, the Fatty Arbuckle rape and manslaughter trials of 1921-1922. (Arbuckle was not actually guilty of rape or manslaughter, but the court of public opinion and moral outrage resulted in the decimation of his career despite his eventual acquittal.) Hays became head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) – the industry’s public relations and standards office. In 1930, Hays formally introduced a written code, but it wasn’t rigorously enforced until 1934.
That’s when the studios created the Production Code Administration (PCA), led by Joseph Breen – another devout Catholic and notorious bigot – who wielded enormous power over what Americans could see for the next three decades.
The Code claimed to uphold morality and protect audiences, but it was really about maintaining social order. Its central principles included:
- “No picture shall lower the moral standards of those who see it.”
- “Correct standards of life” must be upheld.
- “Sex perversion,” “miscegenation,” and “white slavery” (read: sex work) were forbidden.
- Adultery could never be portrayed as attractive or justified.
- Crime had to be punished; authority had to be respected.
Essentially: no queerness, no interracial romance, no sexual agency for women, no questioning the police or clergy, and no moral ambiguity. It was weaponized morality. It was about control through respectability.
In times of crisis — economic, social, or cultural — moral regulation always spikes. The Code emerged from:
- Fear of women’s independence
- Fear of queer visibility
- Fear of Black visibility
- Fear of labor unrest and class anger
- Fear that art might blur the lines between virtue and sin
It was a way to reassert hierarchies – gender, racial, and religious – under the banner of virtue.
By the 1950s, the Code was crumbling under cultural pressure. Television, foreign films, and the rise of youth culture all challenged its authority. By the 1960s, filmmakers like Otto Preminger (The Moon Is Blue, Anatomy of a Murder) and Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho) simply ignored it. The Code was officially abandoned in 1968, replaced by the MPAA ratings system that we know today.
Ironically the Code didn’t actually remove sexual tension – it forced it underground. Filmmakers and studios had to find indirect, deniable ways to express desire. The Code forbade overt sexual dominance or seduction, especially by women. The result was an explosion of symbolic sexuality – smoldering gazes, double entendres, fade-to-black seductions…and, bizarrely, spanking.
Spanking scenes became the rage because they could be framed as discipline, not desire. Under patriarchal logic, a man punishing a disobedient woman wasn’t sexual – it was restoring social order. She had misbehaved (too independent, too witty, too mouthy), and he, as the male authority, was setting her straight. The subtext was erotic, but the surface narrative was moral.
That made spanking the perfect loophole: it allowed a flash of physical intimacy, female submission, and exposed legs, while pretending to enforce chastity and control. It turned the anxiety of female autonomy into a sexualized spectacle of “correction.”
Once studios realized audiences responded to that mix of titillation and propriety, they started exploiting it shamelessly. Even films that had no spanking scene would release promotional stills or posters showing the female lead draped over a man’s knee, often smiling coyly or kicking her heels, the image balanced between humiliation and flirtation. It became a visual shorthand for romantic comedy and “battle of the sexes” plots. The message was consistent: a woman could be bold and mouthy for 90 minutes, but by the end, she’d be put in her place.
That bizarre preoccupation tells you exactly how repression works. When sexuality is overpoliced, it doesn’t vanish, it merely mutates into power fantasy. During the Hays Code years, Hollywood couldn’t show sex, so it sexualized power: men controlling women, women “tamed,” punishment as flirtation or foreplay. It was both an outlet for repressed desire and a reinforcement of patriarchal norms.
And because these images were coded as moral, they could circulate widely – in posters, fan magazines, even newspaper ads – under the guise of comedy or romance.
The spanking craze of the Hays Code years was the shadow side of repression. It was Hollywood’s way of keeping sexuality on-screen while pretending it wasn’t there; a safe, sanctioned transgression that said: we can’t show you desire, but we’ll show you control.
The very thing the Code sought to suppress – erotic charge – became its most persistent byproduct. It makes a certain amount of sense, given that early Hollywood and the film industry rose on the heels of the Victorians.
The Victorian era is shorthand for prudery; all lace collars and moral panic. But that same society produced a tidal wave of erotic fiction, underground pornography, and coded queer literature.
In short: the Victorians were actually quite filthy.
The same public that swooned over morality novels also devoured Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Carmilla, and Dracula – stories that barely hid their obsessions with forbidden desire, addiction, and bodily contagion. Proper readers claimed to be horrified, but they kept reading.
That’s the paradox of repression: when you make desire unspeakable, you don’t erase it, you just make it obsessive. Victorians didn’t write about sex directly because they couldn’t, so it leaked out as metaphor, as monstrosity, as moral warning. The “corruption of innocence” became the engine of the very stories meant to condemn it.
That’s the secret every censor forgets: repression is incredibly creative. It pervasively and persistently breeds the very impulses it tries to stamp out.
When you tell artists they can’t write about sex, they invent new metaphors for it. When you tell teenagers they can’t read queer books, they find each other online and build archives of their own. Every rule spawns new language. Every ban creates new readers.
Victorian fiction, the Hays Code, and modern book bans all share the same impulse: to make desire behave. But desire never does. It adapts. It finds new forms. It speaks through ghosts, through metaphors, through jokes and taglines and fanfic.
What moral crusaders never understand is that the human imagination doesn’t take orders. The more tightly they draw the lines, the more vivid what lies beyond them becomes. The Victorians tried to write temptation out of literature and ended up inventing the Gothic. The Hays Code tried to scrub sex off the screen and gave us a decade of slow-burn erotic thrillers and a plethora of spanking posters. Today’s book bans will do the same. They’ll turn the forbidden shelf into the most sought-after one.
Because repression doesn’t kill desire. It rechoreographs it.
And every time they try to silence it, it finds a new rhythm – a new story, a new image, a new voice whispering from the margins.
Notes in the Margins 