1. History of pornography

2. Plan
Introduction
Definition: ‘The depiction of erotic behavior intended to cause sexual excitement’
A modern concept; a historical construct; ‘pornography before pornography’; the eighteenth century
Availability: mass culture; regulation; pornography created by its suppression
Good to think with?

3. Keith Haring
Keith Haring, Safe Sex (1985)

4. Commission on Pornography

5. Issues
1) The problem of suppression without complicity in the very thing being suppressed. 2) The problem of determining or defining pornography: one person’s pornography is another person’s art.
3) Pornography is created by its suppression: a supreme example of the way in which prohibition of sex contributes to the construction of sex. 4) Pornography is a historical as well as a social construct. Like so much else, it dates from the nineteenth century when the emergence of mass print and mass literacy made the distribution of obscene material a problem for those who wished to protect the morality of women, the working classes, and children. At first, the control of pornography focused upon the print media – words mainly. Then it shifted to the visual: photographs, film, magazine and video. More recently still, the shift in focus has been towards the internet and digital images. Finally, pornography’s labelling and attempted containment is in order to protect some ideal target: since the nineteenth century it has been either women or (most recently) children.

6. Definitions
The term pornography is hard to define. One Supreme Court justice said that he knew what it was when he saw it – but that is not of much help. In fact much of pornography’s history consists of arguments about its definition, attempting to define exactly what it is. Ian Moulton has described pornography as words and images aimed primarily at sexually arousing their reader or viewer; ‘its structure’, as he puts it, ‘is one of infinite enumeration (or positions, of partners) within a field that is always and only sexual’. The novelist Angela Carter called it ‘propaganda for fucking’. The Penguin Dictionary defines pornography as ‘the depiction of erotic behaviour intended to cause sexual excitement’.

7. Pietro Aretino
Aretino’s eleventh posture (1527)

8. Philosophical discussion
Pornography as philosophical discussion: Histoire de Dom B (1740), on the left (note the voyeurism and masturbation). And Thérèse Philosophe (1748), on the right.

9. Philosophical discussion
In the eighteenth century, French pornography – in the sense of material with explicit erotic content – served a role for attacking the crown, or the church, or aspects of society. It served a philosophical or political or anti-religious function. The historian Robert Darnton has described one famous French pornographic novel where a Jesuit priest flogs a young woman while giving her a radical philosophy lesson. As Darnton puts it, ‘Strange as it may seem to a modern reader, the sex and the philosophy go hand in hand throughout the novel. The characters masturbate and copulate, then discuss ontology [that is, the nature of being] and morality’. Much of this literature was so hostile to the church, to the clergy, that it seems to be more about religion than sex.

10. Anticlericalism
Pornography as an attack on the church: satire of a monk. The caption reads: ‘I’m coming … I am the good Constitution’. Dates from c

11. The geometry of pornography: pornotopia
Group sex in Marquis de Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795)

12. Pornotopia
Steven Marcus: when ‘almost every human consideration apart from sexuality is excluded’, which he sees as marking the character of modern pornography. This sort of pornography is not about people and emotions but about organs, body parts in bewildering variations of congress. The penis – and the smaller penis, the erect clitoris – are supreme. Marcus has put it rather nicely, the man in such scenarios is not a man as such but an enormous erect penis that just happens to be attached to a man. Men in this literature are always potent and women are always burning with lust – even when they don’t know it. This sort of pornography is a combination of fantasy and cliche. It achieves a double trick with reality: everything that it not sexual is excluded, and everything that is included is sexualised. Because of this sexual quest and obsession, Marcus has pointed out, pornotopia is different to normal literature. Normal literature has a multiplicity of message and intention: pornotopia has only one.

13. Availability
It was not until the nineteenth century that pornography threatened to became widespread through the print media. This century saw the shift from pornography locked away in private collections, and/or printed in small, expensive print runs, or in a language accessible only to the enlightened elite, to the possibility of pornography available for purchase by large numbers of the population, no longer confined to elite men but there to corrupt women and children. This happens with photographs and postcards in the late 19th century. And then, in the 20th and 21st centuries, the possibilities for production explode still further with print, photography, film, video, computer, and digital technology.

14. The photograph: 1920s pornography
The role of photography. An image, classified as ‘Homosexual female TRB [tribadism]’ and sourced in St. Louis Missouri, 1923, held in the collection of the Kinsey Institute.

15. The photograph: 1930s pornography
The role of photography. An image, dated 1931–5, held in the collection of the Kinsey Institute. It is identified as a pornographic photograph, sourced in San Francisco and Chicago: ‘Sold by a Chinese drug peddler’.

16. The photograph: 1940s pornography
Another pornographic photograph from the Kinsey Archives. This one dates from the 1940s and was said to have been purchased in Chicago. It was confiscated from three ‘boys’ (actually 18–22 years old), one of whom was convicted of selling indecent material.

17. Photography 1960s
Photographic pornography continued after the advent of the moving image, sometimes in the form of film stills. This image of a bored participant is also from the Kinsey Archive, identified as English, 1960s.

18. The Stag Film: early moving image pornography
Stag films, often difficult to date, were shown to (mainly) groups of men from the 1900s through to the 1950s. This undated one, American, from the 1930s or 1940s, is interesting because of its inclusion of interracial sex.

19. Comic pornography, 1930s‚1940s, and 1950s
Cheap pornography in comic form, popular in the US, known as Tijuana Bibles. This one features Laurel and Hardy. Others featured comic book heroes, film stars, politicians, and a range of occupations, scenarios, and characters.

20. Comic pornography, 1930s‚1940s, and 1950s
Cheap pornography in comic form, popular in the US, known as Tijuana Bibles. This one features Mickey and Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck. Others featured comic book heroes, film stars, politicians, and a range of occupations, scenarios, and characters.

21. Print and pornography: 1960s sleaze
Millions of these items circulated in the 1950s and 1960s.

22. This amusing Slovenian film, Porno Film (2000) plays with the tropes of pornography. It is about a group of friends trying to make the first Slovenian porno film.

23. Pornographication