The History of Porn

Selling sex -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Don’t worry, the title is just a teaser – no intentions of giving you a long history of anything. I’m too lazy. But I will talk about pornography (we all know it when we see it) and some of its historical underpinnings. Porn joins capital punishment and meat-eating as a disturbingly gray subject for me. I usually like to give black-and-white pronouncements and some matters defy that. With capital punishment, I wonder if we too often kill an innocent man -- are we killing to show that killing is wrong? In my final analysis, I’m OK with it if there’s overwhelming evidence of a first degree murder. We might even be doing the killer a favor, delivering him from a private Hell of violent, confused thoughts. With our carnivorism, I wonder if the animals don’t suffer diminished lives and horrid slaughterhouse deaths. At the end of the day, I’m a “flexitarian” who eats meat (mostly fish and poultry) along with lots of fruits and vegetables. To assuage my guilt, I give to animal charities and have even given to PETA.

Now as to pornography – it encompasses every shade of gray. Pornography is as old as civilization; some rock art and cave paintings have been interpreted as early porn. It seems our minds have always been in the gutter. Up until the 19th century though, pornography was centered more in the domain of “erotic art” and was enjoyed by privileged groups (e.g., clergy and nobility). Telegraph and railroad trains of the 1800’s brought about mass-marketing where books and magazines became inexpensive and generally available to the public. Photography emerged in this same time, and the world of smut was upon us.

Pornography wasn’t even coined as a word until the mid 19th century. The English Parliament rushed to protect the masses with the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. Victorian archaeologists of the 1860’s were so shocked by the lude Roman artifacts discovered at Pompeii, they were locked away in the “Secret Museum” of Naples, only to be unveiled years later. Many new layers of legal definitions and complexity have been piled on in decades since the 1850’s. If anything, we are probably even more confused as a people regarding things like legal age or what constitutes a sex act or pornography itself.

Pornography did have staying power, and it survived the Victorian instincts to stifle its nature. It could be argued that the stifling engendered more of porn’s popularity – the phenomenon of the forbidden fruit. A federal study of 1970 showed that pornography was a $10 million industry. Similar studies in 2001 put the figure at $4 billion. A more recent study by the Forrester group puts the number at $8-10 billion annually. Porn has ridden every technology wave, starting with the printing press and photography in the distant past. In recent years, pornography has been an industry leader in technical innovation. It was a deciding factor in the VHS-Betamax battle as well as the BluRay-HD DVD battle. Porn has been an active player, not just a sideline observer in all the recent developments: satellite TV, DVD, Internet and wireless communication.

So what can we make of all this -- is pornography friend or foe? Pornography has some entrenched enemies. Politics makes strange bed fellows because the most strident opponents to porn are militant feminists and religious conservatives. Feminists focus on the “subjugation of women” when it fact porn is an equal opportunity offender – it subjugates men, women, animals, sometimes children and even inanimate objects depending on the genre. We can draw lines obviously against bestiality, kiddy porn and snuff movies. But at the other extreme we can throw canvas covers over the photos of Robert Mapplethorpe or the naked Venus de Milo. Somewhere in that murky middle is where the porn-loving populace dwells. They derive tawdry thrills from (generally) young adults who don’t mind doing private things publicly.

As with capital punishment, I see both sides of the issue. Can’t help but think that misguided youths are trashing a future career as President or CIO when they frolic though these videos or photo spreads. On the other hand, I can’t claim to be innocent of seeing these exhibitions at length. There is no black or white delineation – just gray, gray, gray. It’s difficult to assume one strident side of these issues without alternately being seen as insensitive, intolerant, hypocritical, fanatical or unrealistic.

Thus I’ll continue eating poultry, contributing to PETA, feeling safer when an avowed killer is removed from our presence, and viewing or reading adult subject matter if it’s in my face and hard to ignore. A college roommate once said, “If they’re willing to show it, I’m willing to look”. There are too many people who feel that way (unfortunately including me :-)).

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