NEW YORK — First they went after the magazine. Then the letters. Then the woman. Mady Feldman was a divorced mother on Long Island, raising two children who had lived with her since birth, when her ex-husband Phil stormed into court with a copy of SCREW, some explicit replies to a swingers ad, and the kind of moral panic that passes for fatherly virtue when jealousy puts on a necktie. He told the court he found the magazine in her home and letters responding to an ad she and a male companion had placed in it, looking for “other couples or groups” for “fun games.” A lower court looked at that pile of smut, blanched, and transferred custody of the children from the mother to the father. They didn’t just shame her. They took her kids.
That was 1974.
And that was the real filth in the case of Feldman v. Feldman. Not (so much) the magazine. Nor the ad she placed in it. Not the bizarre snapshots and horny mail that sent the room into cardiac arrest. The filth was that the court dressed up disgust as concern and called it “the best interests of the child.” The trial court never truly proved the children were harmed by any of it. In fact, the record showed the opposite: the father admitted the children had never seen or commented on the material, the kids were doing well in school, both had been elected class officers, the home was cheerful and well kept, and the mother was devoted to them. But none of that mattered once the whiff of female sexual freedom entered the courtroom. Suddenly a copy of SCREW became more damning than facts.
It became a weapon.
The case gets even uglier when you look at how nakedly the system tipped its hand. The father himself had carried on extramarital affairs during the marriage, but that was treated like background static, just another man being a man. The mother’s post-divorce sex life, meanwhile, was treated like radioactive waste. At the hearing, she admitted placing the ad, saying it was partly for “kicks,” but the appellate opinion made clear that private sexual conduct, even conduct polite society considers deviant or aberrant, does not automatically make a parent unfit. One concurring judge practically grabbed the whole lower-court ruling by the lapels and shook it, noting that the evidence did not support the feverish picture painted below and that the trial court’s horror at SCREW and sexual material had infected the entire case.
Then came the part that matters. The appellate court stepped in, cut through the piety, and said no. It held that the mother’s private sex life did not involve or affect the children, that she had not been shown unfit, and that changing custody on those facts was error. The order was modified to deny the father’s petition, which is the judicial way of saying: give her children back. The opinion even went further, warning that courts have no business punishing a person for reading sexual material in the privacy of the home and invoking constitutional privacy principles along the way.
So the story of Feldman is not simply that a woman liked dirty magazines and dirty possibilities. It is that a court tried to make her pay for it with her children, and a higher court had to remind everybody involved that being sexually adventurous is not the same thing as being a bad mother…
…and that women have the same inalienable right to be perverted as men.
—P.
FELDMAN V. FELDMAN
COVER ART BY SHEELA ROSE LOVE
