Episode 390: How a Gilded Age Anti-Sex Law Bred the Modern State’s Criminalization of ‘Dangerous’ Speech

Author and veteran columnist Amy Sohn talks with Harry Siegel about her book, The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age, and explains why the “zombie” Comstock Law still on the federal books kept coming up during 2024’s presidential election. Sohn details how the lives of two “sex radicals,” Ida Craddock and Sarah Chase, were upended as they crossed paths with Anthony Comstock, the mutton-chopped celebrity behind the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and self-described “friend of women” who boasted about driving his enemies to suicide. It’s a story about how the government’s original anti-sex law — suppressing information about birth control as a form of obscenity — created mechanisms used to this day to suppress unpopular thoughts.