My objection to obscenity is that it distorts this beauty, making it boring and even grotesque. I dislike unwarranted smut and brute violence because they spoil what promised to be a delightful presentation. It's like finding a bug in my soup. To my mind, obscenity is whatever degrades human dignity and violates the trust basic to human relationships. What we have is not liberation, but dehumanization.
Dehumanization is indeed a threat.
They became de-sensitized by such exposure, so that what at first seemed gross and disturbing was gradually accepted as normal. They tended to be influenced to act-out the brutality portrayed, so that fantasy becomes reality. Surely we deserve protection against poisoning the wellsprings of morality. Such protection is not available in our common law because the courts tend to shield even gross pornography under the First Amendment, and perhaps wisely so, for government censorship has historically proven at least ineffective if not repressive. So that puts the remedy squarely in the area of personal responsibility.