CABOT--Growin'. Growin' ripe on the bough. (He turns and goes, his boots clumping down the stairs. Eben sits up with a start, listening. Abbie is conscious of his movement and stares at the wall. Cabot comes out of the house around the corner and stands by the gate, blinking at the sky. He stretches up his hands in a tortured gesture.) God A'mighty, call from the dark! (He listens as if expecting an answer. Then his arms drop, he shakes his head and plods off toward the barn. Eben and Abbie stare at each other through the wall. Eben sighs heavily and Abbie echoes it. Both become terribly nervous, uneasy. Finally Abbie gets up and listens, her ear to the wall. He acts as if he saw every move she was making, he becomes resolutely still. She seems driven into a decision--goes out the door in rear determinedly. His eyes follow her. Then as the door of his room is opened softly, he turns away, waits in an attitude of strained fixity. Abbie stands for a second staring at him, her eyes burning with desire. Then with a little cry she runs over and throws her arms about his neck, she pulls his head back and covers his mouth with kisses. At first, he submits dumbly; then he puts his arms about her neck and returns her kisses, but finally, suddenly aware of his hatred, he hurls her away from him, springing to his feet. They stand speechless and breathless, panting like two animals.)

• Eugene O'Neill, "Desire Under The Elms" (1925)

It should be pointed out that O'Neill had a history of skirting transgressive subjects and his plays sometimes faced censorship because of it. "All God's Chillun's Got Wings" (1924), for example, was banned from being performed in New York City for a time because of the use of vulgar language by child actors (that it dealt with an interracial relationship between a black man and a white woman probably didn't help.)

The flapper era was weird, both in the United States and Australia. On the one hand, there was plenty of actual pornography available despite considerable efforts at censorship, and on the other hand the public face of the governments and newspapers were as protectors of morality who decried nudity or overt shows of affection or bad language in a wide range of artistic works - and there was quite a bit of all of the above! Nudity in American films was relatively common until the Hays Code in 1930, and even then was often waved for "Goona-Goona epics" and other "documentary" films with purported educational value; the same claim to sober medical or scientific study led to the increase of nudist magazines and flagellation literature as a way to bypass mail censors.

Then there were the spicy pulps - which sold the sizzle but not the steak. Nominally pulp magazines with a strong sex element, the stories were quite tame by contemporary standards (and also quite tame by the standards of actual erotica) - but they were legal, despite various attempts at repression. The writers actually had strict (and sometimes hilarious) guidelines regarding what they could or could not write; it was acceptable to have a naked corpse, for example, but not a naked woman in the text! The spicies served up titillation, and the censors hated it.

A lot of the stuff that a furor was raised about in the 1920s is not sexually explicit in the sense of anything you can google today. For example, medical information on condoms, diaphragms, and other methods of birth control were often censored, and the devices themselves illegal to buy or sell. Tijuana bibles were sexually explicit, but also often crude and intentionally humorous; works like James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) was banned in the United States and United Kingdom until the 1930s.