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Porn is everywhere and we don't know how it got here.....well, until now. Patricia Davis, Ph.D., Simon Noble and Rebecca J. White have posted their recent paper on the modern history of pornography.
Porn was popular in the ancient Roman empire - reached a crescendo during the French Revolution where images of Marie Antoinette having sex with her children and animals were used politically to discredit the monarchy - and the legal crackdown began in the 1870's in New York (a big thank you to Anthony Comstock :P)
What I didn't know was that feminists turned on porn in the 1970's in response to fictional snuff films where the woman was murdered at the end of the sex scene (the FBI has spent millions trying to find a real snuff film to no avail). Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon were the Meese Commission's star witnesses. I never knew "why" they sided with the government arguing porn caused sex crimes and not with the scientists who found the opposite: porn actually reduced the number of sex crimes in a culture (post-WWII Japan is the perfect case study).
Can you imagine living in ancient Rome and entering your home through a door in the shape of a vulva with a clit at the top? Can you imagine living in colonial American and finding an ad for an erotic novel in the NY Times? God, things have changed.
Betty and I had to take down the genital art gallery to comply with new "porn" regulations that criminalize the publication of images of genitals anonymously. This is a new wrinkle - it used to be that simple images of genitals were fine - only images depicting sex acts were regulated.
If all images of genitals are pornographic, then all images will depict the caricaturized genitals of porn stars who modify their bodies in the name of entertainment. How will we know what real genitals look like and whether we're "normal"?
According to Patrica, Simone and Rebecca, technology has only increased porn consumption and porn isn't going anywhere any time soon. Maybe that's why the Justice Department is taking the stance that all images of genitals are obscene. Don't we have a right to view real images of real genitals as part of our sex education? Guess not.
Porn is as old ass human expression itself.
Davis, Noble, & White may begin their historical survey of porn with the Roman Empire, but "porn" (depending on how one defines it) goes back much farther. It was certainly a feature of ancient Greek art, as attested to by their depictions of every imaginable liason; men and women, women and women, women and animals, men and boys, gods and humans, and so on.
There are even scholars who suggest that the ancient neolithic "venus" figurines may have served both an erotic as well as a religious function among our ancient ancestors for whom sexuality and spirituality may have been synonymous.
Porn seems to be as old as human expression itself and, like the sexuality it represents, exists as a rich, vital, and important social practice that serves an important role.
No Fig Leaf Needed
Don't we have the right to view real images of genitals just because they are beautiful?
The paper is about modern porn and starts in the 16th century
well after the Roman empire.
I would like to know how the modern day pornography started.
Lasse Braun claims in his bio that he was a main force, for example in Denmark.
http://www.lassebraun.com/newbio_06.html
He is mentioned in this text, but his role in getting rid of censorship in Denmark isn't.
Not many details in this text, it's more like an overview over the last half millenium.
And what I'm not getting is, why are all those sites with youtube style free porn still running ? Nobody can check age issues of the uploaded stuff.
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