Anthony Comstock: The 19th Century Weirdo the 21st Century Weirdos Are Channeling

A discussion with Amy Sohn, author of “The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship & Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age."

Anthony Comstock was a wet blanket in human form—a petty, prudish, conniving, vindictive, holier-than-thou killjoy whose bizarre obsession with rooting out every “matter, thing, device, or substance” that he considered “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” would up terrorizing, harming, or killing women for more than a century after his emergence onto the national scene. Ostensibly a vice hunter, he was, in reality, an overzealous Javert who existed to torment women—especially sex radicals and early feminists, abortionists and sexologists. He was also a huge asshole personally disliked even by his allies.

This sad, sanctimonious schmuck would be nothing more than a footnote from an ugly, retrograde, and bygone period of American history—except that Dobbs made the laws that bear his name suddenly relevant again. With the political ascendance of reactionary religious extremists like Leonard Leo and his hand-picked and like-minded weirdos honeycombing the entire judicial branch, “Comstockery” is enjoying a revival. Leo in particular seems to be almost a reincarnation of the nineteenth century vice hunter: they are both obese, self-righteous, monomaniacally against abortion and contraception, politically well connected, super sneaky in their methods, and funded by obscenely wealthy conservatives.

But who was Comstock, really? What made him such a woman-hating weirdo? Why did he hold sway for so long? How was Comstockery defeated? For the answers to these and other questions, I turned to Amy Sohn, author of the brilliant—and suddenly very relevant—book The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship & Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age, a chronicle of Comstock and eight of the women who found themselves in his crosshairs.

On today’s podcast, Sohn tells me all about Anthony Comstock: who he was; how he rose to power; what laws he enacted; how he’s similar to Leonard Leo, Donald Trump, and other current weirdos; and the remarkable women who were his adversaries.

Here are three takeaways from our discussion:

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1. Childhood trauma radicalized Anthony Comstock.

Born in 1844 in New Canaan, Connecticut, Comstock was a happy child, and was especially fond of his (very religious) mom, Polly Ann. “He had an incredibly close relationship with his mother,” Sohn tells me. “She epitomized for him what was called the Victorian ideal. This was the idea that the woman was the center of the family, that the most hallowed person in the family was the mother and the wife, and she was godly and divine.”

And then one day that all stopped. Sohn explains:

When Anthony was 10 years old, he came home from school to find his mother dead of a hemorrhage which he had suffered following the birth of his younger sister, Harriet. So his mother died as a result of repeated pregnancy and childbirth. And instead of this catalyzing him to have a kind of sympathy for the many dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, which certainly today—less so then—is considerably more dangerous than any abortion. Instead, he believed that his mother had died fulfilling the highest duty, which was being fruitful and multiplying according to the Bible.

He made it his life’s work not to make sure that no other woman would die the way his mother did—and no child would suffer the way he did—but exactly the opposite. He sought to deny all women access to abortions, contraception, sex education—anything that would put them in opposition to what he considered the will of God. If Polly Ann had to die like that, then every other woman should, too.

In time, after a fascinating early adulthood that Sohn brings to vivid life in The Man Who Hated Women, Comstock, a New York City postal inspector and the bane of smut dealers all across Manhattan, went to Washington to lobby for a stricter federal obscenity law. To make his case to members of Congress, he brought with him all the contraband he’d seized. As Sohn writes in her book:

[T]o garner support for his obscenity act, Comstock organized the most vivid exhibition of sex toys the capital had ever seen. In Vice President Colfax’s room in the Capitol Building, Comstock set out a display on a mahogany table beneath a shimmering chandelier. The sampling probably included contraceptives; obscene engravings, plates, woodcuts, photos, books, and playing cards; abortifacients; and “rubber articles” (which could mean contraceptives or sex toys).

Word got around, and lawmakers flocked to the VP’s chambers to see this for themselves. There would not be that many dildos in one small DC room again until the day in 2019 when Matt Gaetz and a phalanx of Republicans burst into that SCIF. But the showmanship worked. Comstock got his way, as Sohn tells me:

The Comstock Act was passed in March, 1873. And essentially what it did was criminalize the mailing of contraception and what’s called abortifacients, which are articles that cause abortion, as well as obscene books, materials, sex toys, with extremely high fines and steep sentences. It was the first federal obscenity law to define obscenity as birth control and abortifacients. We had had obscenity law, but it was widely understood to just mean dirty books and pictures and things like that. The term “obscene, lewd and lascivious” comes from the Comstock law.

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2. Anthony Comstock was a weirdo.

During his soldier days in the Civil War, when Comstock was not pissing off his comrades by pouring out his whiskey ration rather than letting someone else have it, he spent a great deal of time committing the sin of Onan, as he would have likely thought of it.

“He was an obsessive masturbator,” Sohn tells me. “He spent all of his time in the Civil War, since he wasn’t seeing a lot of action, masturbating and feeling guilty about it and writing these diary entries about how Satan had tempted him. And you read these diary entries and it’s, ‘Satan tempted me, but I did not give in. But then the next day, Satan tempted me and I did give in.’ Which I think was all his attempts not to masturbate and his failing to do so.”

He was the worst possible candidate to go live in post-Civil War New York City, with its “sporting culture,” but that’s exactly what Comstock did. Sohn explains:

The culture of New York City was the culture of young men. This was billiards and boxing and pretty waiter girls. Pretty waiter girls were waitresses who were really prostitutes. A lot of them were thieves…

So Anthony was living in this boarding house with these guys and he was very, very different from them. And what seems to be the inciting incident, the reason that we’re talking about this today, almost 150 or 150 years later, is that one of his coworkers…told Anthony that he had been tempted and diseased and corrupted.

Now, depending on how you read this, he may have gotten venereal disease from visiting a prostitute, or he may have masturbated and also visited a prostitute and got diseased. But somehow in Anthony’s mind, his friend had become sick because of sexual temptations. And I should add, whatever happened to him followed an event where the guy had read something dirty. So Anthony in his mind connects reading smut with becoming ill.

Whereupon young Anthony took it upon himself to rid New York City of smut. (He may as well set about about trying to rid the city of rats, or buskers, or the faint smell of urine.) But Comstock, alas, was quite successful in this endeavor.

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3. We are living through Comstock 2.0.

I asked Sohn about the similarities between the Age of Comstock and the Age of Trump—a modern figure with whom Anthony Comstock shared more than a few characteristics. “Here’s someone else that he might remind you of,” she tells me. “He read his own press obsessively and would write letters back complaining that he had not been treated fairly!”

As to this being a second Comstock era, Sohn says:

But what’s really incredible about him is that he was a celebrity. And I think that he became synonymous with a way of thinking. In fact, there was this term they would use, “Comstockism.” And of course, we’re living in this era of Comstockism now. Comstockism was anti-free thought, anti-free speech, anti-free love, anti-women’s rights, anti-coeducation. So many of these civil liberties issues that we thought were settled law are now coming up for debate…But we are living in an era of Comstockism where women are being sent back 150 years.

Comstock became increasingly obsolescent as he grew older:

And so by the time he dies in 1915, national attitudes about contraception are starting to change. There’s this idea that families should decide these things for themselves. And so at that point, he’s becoming increasingly out of touch with the pulse of things. We had young women coming to New York at that time. We had more coeducation. Women were working and so they had more economic freedom….

Comstock, she says,

was considered out of touch in 1915. And then where are we now? Where are we 100, almost 110 years later that, you know, that these ideas are coming back? At one point, he gave an interview where he seemed to say that he always felt that withdrawal was okay….He was interviewed by a woman journalist, and she tries to get at him in the interview, like, “What are you saying?” And then he expressed this confusion—he was frequently confused about the difference between contraception and abortion, which also has a connection to Donald Trump.

I don’t think [Trump is] completely clear on what medication abortion is. Some of this, of course, he’s doing deliberately when he seems to say that babies are being aborted as they’re coming out of the womb at nine months—he’s deliberately conflating childbirth, abortion, and contraception. It’s crazy. And I think he’s deliberate about that.

This conflation, she says, is what happened in the nineteenth century with Comstock. “[T]here was a lot of blurring of these lines. And I think the reason that it’s relevant today is because the Comstock law went after both contraception and abortifacients,” she says.

“And so, this is playing out in a very real way.”

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LISTEN TO THE EPISODE

S8 E3: Anthony Comstock: The Man Who Hated Women (with Amy Sohn)

Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) would be nothing more than a footnote from an ugly, retrograde, and bygone period of American history, except that Dobbs made the laws that bear his name suddenly relevant again. But who was Comstock? What made him such a woman-hating weirdo? Why did he hold sway for so long, and how was Comstockery defeated? Amy Sohn, the author of  “The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship & Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age,” talks to Greg Olear about all things Comstock: who he was; how he rose to power; what laws he enacted; how he’s similar to Leonard Leo, Donald Trump, and other current weirdos; and the remarkable women who were his adversaries.

Amy Sohn is the New York Times-bestselling author of 13 books, including the novels “Prospect Park West,” “Motherland,” and “The Actress”; the parodic parable “CBD!”; and “Brooklyn Bailey, the Missing Dog,” her first book for children. She has also written two screenplays, “Spin the Bottle” and “Pagans,” as well as “Avenue Amy,” one of the first original programs to air on Oxygen, in which she also starred. In 1996, a year after graduating from Brown University, she launched an autobiographical dating diary, “Female Trouble,” in the downtown weekly New York Press. She subsequently wrote a column at the New York Post and was a contributing editor at New York magazine. As a freelance journalist, she has written for the New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, Details, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Men’s Journal, Playboy, and many others. Her latest book, “The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship & Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age,” was published July 6, 2021 with Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Follow Amy:
https://x.com/amysohn

Buy “The Man Who Hated Women”:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250174819/themanwhohatedwomen

Check out her other books:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Amy-Sohn/author/B004NA8V0E

More about Amy:
https://www.amysohn.com/bio/

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Check out ROUGH BEAST, Greg’s new book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D47CMX17

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Photo credit: Two weirdos. Vance photo by Gage Skidmore.