pornography

pornography is notoriously hard to define. The word comes from the ancient Greek porne (whore) and graphien (write), so pornography is ‘writings by/or about whores’. Contemporary dictionaries give a very different definition: today pornography is considered ‘obscene material whose intention is to provoke sexual arousal’. Problems remain: how are we to define ‘obscene’? Are both James Joyce's Ulysses and Larry Flynt's Hustler ‘obscene’? The US government has thought so. At what point does explicit sex become ‘pornography’? One is tempted to agree with US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who concluded: ‘I know it when I see it.’

The category ‘pornography’ is relatively recent and postdates modern European obscenity by at least two hundred years. The first obscene book, The Raggionamenti, was composed by Renaissance Humanist, Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) between 1534 and 1536. The Raggionamenti is both a bawdy dialogue between two whores and a biting satire of Renaissance church and state. For the next three hundred years, obscene texts usually included anti-clericalism, religious skepticism, and political satire. During the eighteenth century, pornography played a particularly important role in intellectual life: dirty books were among the century's best-sellers and obscene pamphlets spread the spirit of criticism from the intelligentsia to a small, literate public. Late in the century, Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) perfected the themes of eighteenth-century pornography in a series of violent and explicit novels that advocated a thorough rejection of all norms, be they political, moral, or religious.

The content of pornography changed in the early nineteenth century: political obscenity vanished to be replaced by a fantasy world or what Steven Marcus calls, in The Other Victorians (1966), ‘pornotopia’. The audience for obscenity, however, remained the rich: a paper-wrapped, unillustrated book cost a Victorian reader twenty guineas. The leather-bound, illustrated, limited editions printed for rich bibliophiles were even more expensive. Because it was limited to the elite, pornography had a kind of back-door respectability. Obscene texts could be found on the shelves of the British Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale, but only in special, locked cases — the British Museum's Private Case and the Bibliothèque Nationale's Enfer — which were off-limits to working-class men, women, and children.

Rising literacy rates and the advent of national education made European elites anxious lest pornography made its way into the hands of the masses. To forestall such a possibility, governments in Europe and the US enacted the first anti-obscenity laws: the French laws of 1819, the US Customs Act of 1847, and the British Obscene Publications Act of 1857. All these acts were directed against materials cheap enough to reach ‘persons of all classes, young and old’. In the US and Europe, private crusaders like New York's Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) and France's anti-obscenity leagues railed against the evils of ‘smut’. Still, pornography proliferated: in France the number of obscene texts multiplied thirteen-fold in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, and new pornographic media — newspapers, brochures, and naughty postcards — brought obscene images to the masses.

1910 constituted a turning point. In 1913, British and US courts admitted defeat and created a new obscenity standard. Price no longer mattered; only the ‘harm’ done by pornography. Because they sought to improve society or elevate the human spirit, ‘science’ and ‘art’ escaped the charge of obscenity. Only ‘smut for smut's sake’ (to paraphrase US Judge Curtis Bok) constituted pornography. Legal tolerance (especially of written materials) continued to grow in Britain and the US. In 1967, American courts finally lifted the ban on John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Fanny Hill (1749). An American attorney observed that ‘there is no longer any obscenity law as far as writing is concerned.’

However, writing was no longer the principal form of obscenity. The image replaced the word, and obscene magazines, video strips, and films were sold in bookstores, specialized cinemas, and arcades. Even the local convenience store stocked explicit magazines, making pornography available to more consumers than ever before. In response, British, Canadian, and American governments formed special commissions in the 1970s and 80s to deal with the ‘pornography issue’. In 1968, US President Lyndon Johnson established the Commission on Pornography and Obscenity, which was followed shortly thereafter by the British Home Office Departmental Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (better known as the Williams Committee) and the Canadian Special Committee on Pornography and Prostitution. In 1985, distressed by the liberal recommendations of the Johnson Commission, President Richard Nixon established a second anti-pornography commission, the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, commonly known as the Meese Commission.

The Commissions introduced two new voices into the pornography debate: feminism and social science. In the US, author Andrea Dworkin and lawyer Catherine MacKinnon argued that pornography hurt women by condoning the objectification of women, and rape. In 1975, Women Against Pornography, or WAP, was formed and a few feminists served on the 1985 Meese Commission. Meanwhile, social scientists brought laboratory studies to bear on the question of ‘harm’. Psychologists concluded that extended exposure to violent pornography produces a ‘desensitization effect’, or an appetite for increasingly violent sexual media. The social scientists also concluded that only males already predisposed to antisocial behaviour were likely to commit rape after viewing pornographic films.

What is the future of pornography? Pornography continued to move from the margins to the mainstream of twentieth-century life. Home videos and the Internet have made seedy bookstore and sordid ‘porn’ theatres obsolete. Now consumers can experience ‘hardcore’ films in the safety and discretion of their own homes. Pornography can be acquired more easily and discreetly than ever before, which argues that pornography will stay with us in the twenty-first century.

Kathryn Norberg

Bibliography

Hunt, L. (1993). The invention of pornography: obscenity and the origins of modernity, 1500–1800. Zone, New York.
Kendrick, W. M. (1987). The secret museum: the history of pornography in literature. Viking, New York.

See also sadomasochism.