page_title: Sex (film)
section_title: Controversy
hierarchical_section_title: Sex (film) / Controversy
caption_attribution_description: English: Ad for the American film Sex (1920) with Louise Glaum, Irving Cummings, and William Conklin, on pages 3040 and 3041 of the April 3, 1920 Motion Picture News.
context_page_description: Sex is a 1920 American silent drama film directed by Fred Niblo, written by C. Gardner Sullivan, produced by J. Parker Read, and starring Louise Glaum. On its surface, the film was a morality story on the evils of marital infidelity. However, the film's producer, J. Parker Read, had made a series of pictures on sex themes. The release of Sex, with its provocative title and explicit scenes of seduction and debauchery, made it the subject of controversy among censors and commentators.
context_section_description: The film's title and subject matter were the subject of controversy in some locations. Playing off of the film's provocative title, newspaper advertising urged readers to "SEE SEX SEE SEX SEE SEX".
  The Pennsylvania State Board of Motion Picture Censors refused to allow the film to be shown in Pennsylvania under its provocative title. To appease the censors, the film was distributed in Pennsylvania under the title Sex Crushed to Earth.
  In Hagerstown, Maryland, the theater owner defended his showing of the film by pointing to its "social import":
  Of all the social problems that beset the world that of Sex is indubitably the greatest. The 'mystery' of the sex equation has given rise to innumerable pruderies and pruriencies but Manager Thropp of the Colonial Theatre has come out flatly with the pronouncement that he has booked Sex ... because of its vast social import.
  The film was a box office success, and the Los Angeles Times reported that it had led to a war being declared in some quarters against "sex pictures".  Echoing the response of Sex producer, J. Parker Read, the Times in February 1921 wrote:
  Sex has an important part in life either for evil or good, and it is the producers' privilege to show the error of the former and the virtue of the latter.  Anybody who would wish to ban sex pictures from the screen, would be simply eliminating a highly important, if not the most important phase of life from the pictures.  Thus did J. Parker Read, impresario of sensational sex films, outline his attitude toward the present agitation against pictures on sex themes.
caption: Ad in Motion Picture News (April 1920)
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