Dictionary:

pornography

  (pôr-nŏg'rə-fē)

1. Sexually explicit pictures, writing, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal.
2. The presentation or production of this material.
3. Lurid or sensational material: “Recent novels about the Holocaust have kept Hitler well offstage [so as] to avoid the … pornography of the era” (Morris Dickstein).

[French pornographie, from pornographe, pornographer, from Late Greek pornographos, writing about prostitutes : pornē, prostitute + graphein, to write; see –graphy.]

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.

Definition: obscene
Antonyms: clean, decent, moral, pure

Literally, ‘writing about prostitutes’: obscene publications. Female pornography is seen by feminists as a mode of oppression and exercise of power by the stronger sex. The woman's body is sexualized and various parts of her anatomy are used to provide pleasure to the male gaze. Pornography entails sexual exploitation and male violence. However, similar modes of exploitation can also be located in family life and certain state policies. Pornography is associated with the abusive and degrading portrayal of female sexuality through words and sexually explicit material. Another characteristic of pornography is the dehumanization and objectification of women's bodies.

— Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert

pornography, a kind of fictional writing composed so as to arouse sexual excitement in its readers, usually by the repeated and explicit description of sexual acts in abstraction from their emotional and other interpersonal contexts; also visual images having the same purpose. The distinction between pornography and literary eroticism is open to continued debate, but it is commonly accepted that eroticism treats sexuality within some fuller human and imaginative context, whereas pornographic writing tends to be narrowly functional and often physiologically improbable. Further confusion arises from the questionable assimilation of the term into the distinct legal concept of obscenity, which usually governs the public mention or display of specific acts, organs, words, and supposed ‘perversions’. Several works of serious literary merit, including Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), have been legally condemned as obscene although they do not fit most definitions of pornography. The term's etymology is of little help: it is a rather bogus 19th‐century coinage combining Greek words to mean ‘writing about prostitutes’.

For more information on pornography, visit Britannica.com.

Pornography (from the Greek pornographos, meaning writing about prostitutes) in modern parlance denotes writings or images primarily intended to cause sexual arousal. Controversy has raged, however, about more precise definitions, especially in relation to other kinds of sexually stimulating material. The terms ‘erotica’ or ‘erotica art’, for example, have suggested a degree of aesthetic value, often with implications of costliness, exclusiveness, and rarity. ‘Pornography’, on the other hand, has been used synonymously with ‘smut’, ‘filth’, and ‘trash’, and stigmatized as cheap and corrupting. In Western societies and Japan in the 20th century, definitions of and attitudes towards pornography changed dramatically, although often unevenly as between the provinces and the metropolis. Particularly fluid was the boundary between ‘soft’ pornography (pin-up nudes and, eventually, simulated sex acts) and the ‘harder’ variety, depicting unsimulated, ‘deviant’, and sometimes illegal activity. Changing levels of tolerance, influenced by extraneous factors such as affluence, feminism, safe-sex campaigns, and shifting attitudes towards the private sphere in relation to the state, have had legal, social, and commercial consequences. Although in the past few people referred to themselves as pornographers without apology, at the beginning of the 21st century ‘porn stars’ in some societies are celebrities. Well before 2000, moreover, photographers such as Nobuyoshi Araki and Robert Mapplethorpe acquired considerable reputations while also producing hard-core material; and fashion stars like Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin could spice their commercial work with pornographic allusions and conceits.

Notwithstanding the existence of ancient sexual materials, pornography as understood today emerged during the 18th century, although the term did not come into widespread use until the mid-19th. Its purpose has varied significantly in different cultures and eras. Between 1500 and 1800, European artists and polemicists often used the shock value of sexual activity to attack the Church, the state, or prevailing conventions and ideologies. In pre-revolutionary France, pornographic pamphlets and flyers were deployed massively against the corruption of the court and the incompetence of the monarchy. However, pleasure was also important; although a distinction needs to be made between the crude materials peddled to the masses and the sumptuous books and prints available to elites.

Photography revolutionized access to and ownership of images. The desire to make photographic portraits prompted many technical improvements—especially shorter exposures and various forms of retouching—that facilitated the depiction of naked bodies and sexual scenarios. One of the earliest official records of the making and distribution of pornographic photographs, the celebrated Dossier BB3 (1855-68), originated in Paris, a long-established production centre for licentious materials. By 1841 photographers there were creating both nude studies for artists (académies) and, probably, pornographic images. While the former tended to feature figures in classical poses or settings, the latter often showed genitals and sexual acts, and/or simulated eye contact between subject and viewer. But for legal reasons the borderline was often blurred, and in the mid-and later 19th century both types of picture could be found for sale in cafés, dance halls, brothels, print shops, and photographic studios, along with printed pornography and sex aids. Documents like Dossier BB3, and the careers of photographers like Bruno Braquehais (1823-75), reveal a highly developed industry, with a complex distribution system, lucrative exports, and a model pool that included prostitutes, seamstresses, shop girls, actresses, and other entertainers. Across the Channel, a police raid on the premises of the London photographer Henry Hayler in 1874 yielded c. 130, 000 obscene photographs and 5, 000 lantern slides. Pornography, like portraiture, kept in step with evolving photographic technology, and microphotography, stereographs, cartes de visite, and eventually postcards all rapidly found pornographic uses. Hand colouring made photographs more lifelike, and even dignified pornography with fashionable ideals of beauty, such as flushed cheeks or ruby lips. Together with popular travel photographs during the second half of the 19th century came representations of exotic peoples, often nude or semi-nude. Viewing non-white, non-Western bodies, once exclusively an aristocratic privilege, became popular at world fairs, in souvenir photographs, and at peepshows like the Kaiserpanorama. (Pornographic scenes in fake or semi-fake Oriental surroundings were already an established genre).

It was in the decade or so before 1914 that the photo-pornography industry probably reached its peak. Morality campaigners identified numerous specialized firms active throughout Europe, and in more remote places like North Africa where models were cheap and regulations lax. Given the efficiency of international communications, bringing the product to market was straightforward. Exactly how much material was in circulation is impossible to estimate, given the perennial problems of definition: for some commentators, ‘pornography’ ranged from crudely explicit images to saucy postcards and reproductions of old-master nudes. But by the early 1900s most big-city police forces had mountains of banned material, and on 4 May 1910 the scope of the problem was acknowledged by the conclusion of an international treaty. On the ‘demand’ side of the equation was pervasive sexual repression (vividly recalled by memoirists like Stefan Zweig), minimal sexual education, and the criminal sanctions against certain sexual practices. In these circumstances, pornographic photographs could probably be found everywhere from schools and barracks to gentleman's clubs and the smoking rooms of stately homes. (The upper end of the market continued to be partly served by graphic artists.) By 1914, photography was capable of capturing even the most frantic sexual callisthenics, and constructing fantasy scenarios from harem orgies to boarding-school flagellation. Doubtless the bulk of the trade was in relatively stereotyped, ready-made material. However, some commercial photographers had always been ready to produce bespoke images for clients arriving with their own partners and equipment, and the antecedents of late 20th-century boudoir photography go back at least to the belle époque. At the most exclusive level, finally, on the problematical borderline between pornography and erotic photography, were gentleman-amateurs like the French writer Pierre Louÿs, who had the imagination, money, and technical skill to produce erotica at home.

Especially from the 1920s onwards, titillating images could be found in physical culture (or naturist) magazines, Hollywood films, ‘pin-ups’, and playing cards. Sexually stimulating writing could be found in literary works by acclaimed authors and playwrights as well as pulp fiction and advertising. More explicit photographs, often sold in packs, depended on sequencing to build a loose storyline. Alongside these images were photographs of sexy 1940s Hollywood stars, often featured in men's magazines like Esquire and forces publications like Yank. A post-1945 landmark was the launch of Hugh Hefner's Playboy in 1953, featuring nude photographs of Marilyn Monroe and other voluptuous women and celebrating guilt-free sexual adventure. Helen Gurley Brown gave the same advice to single women in her book Sex and the Single Girl (1962) and Cosmopolitan. A new singles culture emerged during the prosperous and permissive 1960s. The pornographic magazine industry continued to flourish during the last quarter of the 20th century, with the proliferation of publications devoted to special areas of interest along with an explosion of hardcore material on film, video, and the Internet.

In addition to these industrially produced and mass-circulated images, the second half of the 20th century was also the era of home-made pornography. First Polaroid instant photography; then home video; finally digital imaging eliminated the high-street laboratory. Couples could now make explicit images of themselves or friends without fear that they might be copied by strangers or, worse, alert the police. Home pornography also became an object of exchange, with journals like the Italian Coppia moderna in the 1970s and 1980s publishing samples, often of dire technical quality, of domestic pornography (‘Polaroid wives’) submitted by couples hoping to meet kindred spirits. By the year 2000, however, these transactions were increasingly being superseded by the webcam and the Internet.

Despite resistance in some quarters, sexuality and pornography now feature prominently in many academic disciplines. Early scholarly investigations focused on censorship, beauty, and the difference between pornography and erotica. Originally dealing primarily with the female body as an object, feminist scholarship has expanded to address the gaze, fragmentation, agency, pleasure, and power. Feminists opposed to both censorship and pornography have tended to view power as a central issue, articulated as the tension between male viewers and female subjects, or between opposing feminist camps. Some pro-censorship feminists, conservative Christian groups, and right-wing politicians have blamed pornography for violence against women in contemporary society, although the scientific evidence is, at best, inconclusive. Controversy about pornography was prominent in the American ‘culture wars’ of the 1990s, involving politics, law, religion, and art. Much of the conflict was played out through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Photographers dealing with controversial subject matter, such as sexuality and religion, had their funding revoked. Work by Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe became key examples, for anti-NEA right-wing politicians, of the type of art that should not be supported by taxpayers. A tendency to conflate the representation of nude children with child pornography affected reputable artists, including Jock Sturges and Mapplethorpe, and art administrators like Dennis Barrie who was prosecuted for exhibiting Mapplethorpe's work at Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Center. At the beginning of the 21st century, concern about paedophilia in both the USA and elsewhere has created a climate in which photographing children or adolescents (even by parents) may lead to conflict with the law.

— Jennifer Pearson Yamashiro/Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• Mendes, P., and Ovenden, G., Victorian Erotic Photography (1973).
• Dubin, S., Arresting Images: Impolite Art and Uncivil Actions (1992).
• McCauley, E. A., Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris 1848-1871 (1994).
• Bright, D. (ed.), The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire (1998).
• Childs, E., Suspended License: Censorship and the Visual Arts (1998).
• Ault, J., and Yenawine, P. (eds.), Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America (2000).
• Gilardi, A., Storia della fotografia pornografica (2002).
• Sigel, L., Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815-1914 (2002).
• Willis, D., and Williams, C., The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (2002).
• Mahon, A., Eroticism and Art (2005)

The definition is controversial: roughly an obscene representation or display, especially of human sexuality, produced to provide an occasion for fantasy. The condition that the representation should be obscene distinguishes pornography in principle from erotic art. The legal problems arise because although some human fantasies may be innocent and pleasurable, others are pleasurable to some without being innocent, and ministering to them involves representing different sections of the community (especially women and children) in degrading and humiliating lights, as victims of violence, etc. When this is so there is an argument for censorship, from the right of such groups to equal concern and respect. This argument is distinct from a general moralistic distaste for the material in question, and distinct from the contested consequentialist argument that the existence of such material helps to promote violence. The extent to which other values are infringed by such censorship is controversial.

The definition of pornography, loosely understood as written or visual images intended to excite sexually, has been notoriously slippery, and Americans have never all agreed on the boundaries of what is pornography, and on the extent to which it should be regulated. In the 1990s, hard-core pornography was widely accessible and often depicted nonconsensual sexual intercourse in violent graphic images, whereas at the beginning of the twentieth century that which was merely "immoral" or "sensational," such as a hazy drawing of a seminude woman, was viewed as pornographic. Thus, historically a far broader range of literature and visual images was subject to legal governmental regulation, from erotic photographs to literary classics. A provision of the 1842 Tariff Act restricted "obscene" pictures and prints from entering the United States. The government became more interested in pornography during the Civil War, when soldiers began trading and collecting French postcards of pictures of nude and seminude women. The U.S. postmaster general in 1865 received a limited right to confiscate "obscene" materials in the mail. The Comstock laws of 1873 went further by making it illegal to sell or distribute through the mail a multitude of images in literature and art, as well as information on birth control or abortion.

From the 1870s through the mid-1930s, legal regulation of printed material and motion pictures was at its most restrictive. During this era the Supreme Court did not use arguments based on free speech and the First Amendment to challenge or modify obscenity laws and postal restrictions on literature or visual images. Until 1957 the Court accepted with only slight modification the British 1867 definition of "obscenity," which based censorship rulings on whether the written or spoken word (or visual representation) was intended to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands such a publication might fall." In effect, the Supreme Court upheld a definition of obscenity that created a standard for culture based on the lowest common denominator of acceptability—one that would not impair the moral development of children.

Before 1933 some novels that are now regarded as classics could not be distributed in the United States. The situation changed dramatically for literature in that year when federal judge John M. Woolsey, ruled that Irish author James Joyce's Ulysses was not obscene, arguing that the work should be taken as a whole, and prosecutors could not quote passages out of context as proof a book was obscene. On its first case against motion pictures in 1915, the Supreme Court ruled that the movie industry was a profit-inspired business, not an art form, and therefore subject to regulation. This allowed censorship by review boards before distribution of movies to the public by any state or local government that deemed it necessary or desirable. Beginning in 1934 the movie industry practiced rigorous self-regulation, through the Motion Picture Association of America and its Production Code, trying to avoid federal censorship.

At the turn of the century, censorship was popularly viewed as a device for social change. Groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union joined vice societies to advocate censorship of literature and art. The American public has continued to support laws restricting the access of youth to pornographic films, as well as harsh action against anyone who creates or distributes child pornography. Like earlier reformers, Americans in the 1990s argued that censorship was necessary to protect children and family values. With Miller v. California, however, which was decided by the Supreme Court in 1973, the only adult pornography subject to governmental regulation became that which an "average person" deemed was without literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The so-called LAPS test was weakened in 1987 when the Court in Pope v. Illinois ruled that because community views varied, "reasonable person" should be substituted for "average person." Combinations of sex and violence soon began permeating not only low-budget pornographic films but mass-distributed movies, videos, and magazines, making violent portraits of adult sex readily available. By the 1990s pornographic materials were a $10 billion operation in the United States alone.

Late-twentieth-century adherents of the women's movement had divided opinions about pornography. Because of increasing violence against women, some feminists believed that pornography, especially images depicting violence against women or nonconsensual sex, are often harmful to female actors and, more broadly, to all women. This belief in the danger of pornography is based on the assumption that male viewers watch and read pornography as if it were a manual or an instruction guide to behavior, including relations between the sexes. Although the most extreme antipornography activists asserted that men learn to rape by watching and reading pornography, no study has proven a direct link; however, many researchers have indicated that pornography diminishes male sensitivity to women's legal rights including the right to withhold consent to sex. Feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin oppose pornography both as "injurious speech," because it condones and encourages violence against women, and as a violation of women's civil rights. In the 1980s they successfully lobbied for ordinances in Minneapolis, Bellingham (Washington State), and Indianapolis. All were subsequently ruled unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.

Anticensorship feminists who focus on the First Amendment argue that pornography should remain a protected form of speech. Rejecting the idea that people respond to pornographic movies or books by trying to emulate the characters, they argue that pornography may serve as a safety valve, preventing violence against women by serving as a form of fantasy and as "safe sex." Some anticensorship feminists also doubt the efficacy of censorship and dislike its tendency to be used against such political minorities as homosexuals. They suggest that pornography's most objectionable images could be counteracted if feminist women and men produced their own pornography that challenged patriarchal and/or heterosexual notions about women's place in society. Anticensorship feminists point out that violence against women was a problem before pornography became as available and graphic as it has since the 1960s and conclude that banning pornography would probably not solve the physical abuse of women.

In the early twenty-first century, advances in computer technology raised new challenges regarding the definition and control of pornography. Pornography proliferated on the internet, and computer imaging technology sometimes made it difficult to distinguish which images depicted acts between real people, and which were simply computer-generated. Whereas anticensorship laws generally protected people who wished to post or download sexually graphic images, using or creating child pornography was generally not protected, because it depicted illegal acts between legal minors. But debate arose over computer-generated images of children engaged in sexual acts: some argued that because no actual children were involved in making the images, they should be legal; others argued that the difficulty in distinguishing between "real" and computer-generated images made this course of action dangerous. Continuing advances in computer and communication technology are likely to prompt further debates over the definition and distribution of pornography.

Bibliography

Assiter, Alison, and Avedon Carol, eds. Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism. Boulder, Colo.: Pluto Press, 1993.

Baird, Robert M., and Stuart E. Rosenbaum, eds. Pornography: Private Right or Public Menace? Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1998.

Cate, Fred H. The Internet and the First Amendment: Schools and Sexually Explicit Expression. Bloomington, Ind.: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1998.

Cornell, Drucilla, ed. Feminism and Pornography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Stan, Adele M., ed. Debating Sexual Correctness: Pornography, Sexual Harassment, Date Rape, and the Politics of Sexual Equality. New York: Delta, 1995.

By the time the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) penned his infamous Philosopher in the Bedroom (1795), there was little doubt that obscene, erotic, sexually explicit writing had become a well-established and profitable genre. Books, pamphlets, and prints were sold in the capital cities of Europe, and authors and publishers were occasionally prosecuted for the production of such lascivious material. Readers recorded their responses to such works and even joked about them, as the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) would do in his Confessions, as books designed to be read with only one hand. The term pornography, however, had yet to be invented to describe this sort of material, though only a decade later the French bibliographer Étienne-Gabriel Peignot (1767–1849) would talk about "sotadic or pornographic" books when describing works that had been censured due to their moral impropriety in his Dictionnaire critique, littéraire et bibliographique des principaux livres, condamnés au feu, supprimés ou censurés (1806). The English equivalent of this work did not appear until the mid-nineteenth century. The crystallization of a terminology for this kind of erotic and obscene literature and imagery at the beginning of the early modern era reflected the importance of the period in bringing such material into being.

The origins of pornography are highly debated, in part because determining such origins depends on our ability to find people in the past reacting negatively to the circulation of sexually explicit material. The erotic statuary and poetry of Greco-Roman culture, with its celebration of the god Priapus (identified by his large, erect penis) and its explicit depictions of male and female sodomy, became "pornographic" to a later age that saw them as the embodiment of a kind of sexual libertinism condemned by Christianity. Antonio Beccadelli's Hermaphroditus (1425), for example, was burned in several Italian cities because its poetic dialogue between a penis and a vagina, dedicated to Cosimo de' Medici, future ruler of Florence, was considered morally offensive. Renaissance humanists delighted in writing priapic poems in imitation of ancient erotic poetry; the twenty-two editions of the ancient Carmina Priapea in circulation by 1517 suggest how popular these writings were in the early days of printing. Yet the fact that such works were published in Latin generally made them socially acceptable because they were intended for an educated audience. By contrast, eighteenth-century invocations of priapic cults seem far more "pornographic" because they were written in more accessible prose accompanied by engravings that recreated vividly the ancient rituals of erotic worship.

In the early decades of the sixteenth century, two works composed by Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) challenged the humanist approach to ancient sexuality by bringing the discussion of sex and society into the marketplace. Aretino's Sonnetti lussuriosi (Lecherous sonnets, 1527), written to accompany the engraver Marc'Antonio Raimondi's sixteen images depicting different sexual positions, became the quintessential image of "Renaissance pornography" as a reinvention of ancient Greco-Roman paintings of whores coupling with their clients. Today only one copy of this text survives, although dozens of imitations of the "Aretine postures" competed with each other during the next two centuries, increasing the number of sexual positions to well over forty. More powerfully, Aretino's Ragionamenti (Dialogues, 1534–1536) invented the idea of erotic initiation as a conversation between an old whore and a young girl. Later works such as Ferrante Pallavicino's La retorica delle puttane (The whore's rhetoric, 1642) and John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–1749), more popularly known as Fanny Hill, elaborated on the theme that whores, as society's sexual experts, were best able to converse about this subject. Aretino's reputation as a pornographer grew steadily across the centuries. Eighteenth-century readers delighted in works such as Aretinus Redivivus—a book listed in a 1745 London indictment against a bookseller known for his stock of lewd books—L'Arétin français, par un member de l'académie des dames (The French Aretine, by a member of the ladies' academy, 1787), and Le petitneveu de l'Arétin (Aretino's grandnephew, 1800).

The themes of early modern pornographic writing are, like most pornography, highly repetitive. The sodomitical rituals of the schoolroom, the sexual antics of convents, the amours of rulers, and, of course, whorish conversation defined the terrain. What changed primarily were the availability of this material to a reading public and the willingness of readers to talk about it. Renaissance pornography was defined by a handful of works, primarily associated with Aretino and his Venetian associates, and it was only retrospectively described as pornography. We need to contrast this situation with the dramatic increase in erotic publications in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Consider the famous case of the English diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) who first saw L'escole des filles (1655), a popular French erotic work that chastely presented itself as a "school for girls," at his bookseller's on 13 January 1668. He thought it was lewder than the popular La puttana errante (Wandering whore), often attributed to Aretino, and finally gave in to the temptation of buying it on 8 February. The next morning he read it at home, recorded its ability to arouse him, and then burned it. Pepys, in other words, was a connoisseur of erotic writing, even as he sought to present himself as a reader who ultimately did the right thing by refusing to keep such works at home. He knew where to find such works, he knew what to do with them, and he recorded his excitement and his shame.

By the late seventeenth century the publication of pornography shifted decisively from Italy to northern Europe. The English, Dutch, and French increasingly played a greater role in its production and dissemination. Early works were reprinted and translated, and new works reached a much wider audience. Pornographic writings did not remain entirely static in their content; they began to reflect new social issues. Popular French works such as Jean Barrin's Venus dans le cloître (Venus in the cloister, 1683) and the Histoire de Dom Bougre, portier des Chartreux (The history of Don Bougre, the gatekeeper of Chartreux, 1741), which recounted the lesbianism of the convent and the voracious sexual appetites of male clergy, respectively, took up the old theme of anticlericalism with new vigor in the post-Reformation era. Other works reflected the fascination with new philosophies, such as materialism, that allowed people to think about the human body as an anatomical machine, as was the case with the popular Thérèse philosophe (1748) and Cleland's controversial Fanny Hill. At the same time, pornography increasingly became a means of attacking political authority. The culmination of this final development can be found in the numerous pornographic satires of the sexual life of Marie Antoinette (1755–1793), wife of the French King Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1792) in the 1790s. The French queen was dead by the time Sade wrote his violent apotheosis of sexuality in the mid-1790s, thus he was left to imagine an impersonal world of sex and violence that sought to dissect virtually every pretension of earlier erotic works to offer a message beyond pure materialism. These were the books that Peignot had in mind when he talked about "sotadic or pornographic" works that had been condemned over the centuries.

Bibliography

Barkan, Leonard. Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism. Stanford, 1991.

De Jean, Joan. The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France. Chicago, 2002.

Foxon, David. Libertine Literature in England, 1660–1745. New Hyde Park, N.Y., 1965.

Frantz, David O. Festum Voluptatis: A Study of Renaissance Erotica. Columbus, Ohio, 1989.

Ginzburg, Carlo. "Titian, Ovid and Sixteenth-Century Codes for Erotic Illustration." In his Myth, Emblems, Clues, translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi, pp. 77–95. London, 1990.

Goulemot, Jean Marie. Forbidden Texts: Erotic Literature and Its Readers in Eighteenth-Century France. Translated by James Simpson. Philadelphia, 1994.

Hunt, Lynn, ed. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800. New York, 1993.

Kendrick, Walter. The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture. New York, 1987.

Moulton, Ian Frederick. Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England. Oxford, 2000.

Naumann, Peter. Keyhole und Candle: John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure und die Entstehung des pornographischen Romans in England. Heidelberg, 1976.

Talvacchia, Bette. Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture. Princeton, 1999.

Thompson, Roger. Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic, Obscene and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century. Totowa, N.J., 1979.

Turner, James Grantham. Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England 1534–1685. Oxford, 2003.

Wagner, Peter. Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America. London, 1988.

—PAULA FINDLEN

The representation in books, magazines, photographs, films, and other media of scenes of sexual behavior that are erotic or lewd and are designed to arouse sexual interest.

Pornography is the depiction of sexual behavior that is intended to arouse sexual excitement in its audience. During the twentieth century, Americans have debated whether pornographic material should be legally protected or legally banned. Those who believe pornography must be protected argue that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of expression, including sexual expression. Traditional opponents of pornography raise moral concerns, arguing that the First Amendment does not protect expression that corrupts people's behavior. More recently, some feminists have advocated suppressing pornography because it perpetuates gender stereotypes and promotes violence against women.

Pornography has been regulated by the legal standards that govern the concept of obscenity, which refers to things society may consider disgusting, foul, or immoral, and may include material that is blasphemous. Pornography is limited to depictions of sexual behavior and may not be obscene.

The U.S. Supreme Court has established that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. The more troublesome question has been defining what is and is not obscene. In 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476, 77 S. Ct. 1304, 1 L. Ed. 2d 1498, stated that obscenity is "utterly without redeeming social importance" and therefore is not protected by the First Amendment. The Roth test for obscenity is "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient [lewd or lustful] interest." The Roth test proved difficult to use because every term in it eluded a conclusive definition.

The Supreme Court added requirements to the definition of obscenity in a 1966 case involving the bawdy English novel Fanny Hill. In Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 383 U.S. 413, 86 S. Ct. 975, 16 L. Ed. 2d 1, the Court concluded that to establish obscenity, the material must, aside from appealing to the prurient interest, be "utterly without redeeming social value" and "patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description of sexual matters." The phrase "utterly without redeeming social value" allowed a loophole for pornographers. Expert witnesses testified that there was at least a shred of social value in the depiction of sexual behavior and social relations.

The Supreme Court established the basic legal standard for pornography in Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 93 S. Ct. 2607, 37 L. Ed. 2d 419 (1973). Chief Justice Warren E. Burger stated in Miller that pornographic material would be classified as obscene if it met three criteria: (1) the work, taken as a whole by an average person applying contemporary community standards, appeals to the prurient interest; (2) the work depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; and (3) the work, when taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Burger emphasized in Miller that only hard-core pornography could be designated as patently offensive. He listed examples of patently offensive descriptions or representations, including representations of "ultimate sex acts" and "masturbation, excretory functions and lewd exhibition of the genitals."

Based on Miller, the law distinguishes between hard-core pornography and soft-core pornography, which involves depictions of nudity and limited and simulated sexual conduct. Because it is not as graphic or explicit as hard-core pornography, soft-core pornography is protected under the First Amendment.

Child pornography, whether hard-core or soft-core, is treated severely under the law. In 1982 the Supreme Court, in New York v. Ferber, 458 U.S. 747, 102 S. Ct. 3348, 73 L. Ed. 2d 1113, held that child pornography is not a form of expression protected under the Constitution. It found that the state of New York had a compelling interest in protecting children from sexual abuse and found a close connection between such abuse and the use of children in the production of pornographic materials. In 1990 the Court went even further in upholding a state law prohibiting the possession and viewing of child pornography (Osborne v. Ohio, 495 U.S. 103, 110 S. Ct. 1691, 109 L. Ed. 2d 98).

In the 1980s some feminists began an attack on pornography and the way the Supreme Court had structured the legal debate using the First Amendment. Led by law professor Catharine A. MacKinnon and writer Andrea Dworkin, they proposed that women be permitted to sue pornographers for damages under civil rights laws. In 1982, in an alliance with political conservatives opposed to pornography, MacKinnon and Dworkin convinced Indianapolis officials to pass a municipal ordinance based on their civil rights approach. The ordinance described pornography as "a discriminatory practice based on sex which denies women equal opportunity in society" and defined it as "the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or words," especially in a violent or degrading context. The ordinance made unlawful the production, sale, exhibition, and distribution of pornography and gave anyone injured by a person who has seen or read pornography the right to bring a civil suit against the maker or seller.

Supporters of the ordinance argued that the legislation was a civil rights measure whose purpose was to fight sex discrimination. In their view the ordinance regulated conduct rather than free speech and thus did not violate the First Amendment. They argued that even if pornography was viewed as speech, it should be treated as a low-value form of speech that was not entitled to First Amendment protection.

All of these arguments were rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Hudnut v. American Booksellers Association, Inc., 771 F.2d 323 (7th Cir. 1985). The court agreed that pornography affected how people view the world and their social relations but observed that the same could be said of other speech, including expressions of racial bigotry. Yet these kinds of expression are protected as speech because to do otherwise would give the government control of "all institutions of culture" and allow it to be the "great censor and director of which thoughts are good for us." The court, adhering to the definition of obscenity first articulated in Miller, ruled that the ordinance's definition of pornography would cover many works that are not obscene because it would not take the value of the work as a whole into account or consider the work as a whole. The court of appeals' decision effectively ended this approach to the regulation of pornography.

In the 1990s attention has been paid to the new ways technology can supply pornography. The use of computer bulletin boards and the Internet to distribute pornography nationally and internationally led to the enactment of the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) (47 U.S.C.A. § 223). The CDA was designed to outlaw obscene and indecent sexual material in cyberspace, including the Internet. In Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 117 S. Ct. 2329, 138 L. Ed. 2d 874 (1997), the Supreme Court overturned provisions of the CDA prohibiting transmission of obscene or indecent material by means of a telecommunications device. The Court held that the provisions represented a content-based restriction, in violation of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.

See: Censorship; Freedom of Speech; Movie Rating; Roth v. United States; Telecommunications; Theaters and Shows; X Rating.

Books, photographs, magazines, art, or music designed to excite sexual impulses and considered by public authorities or public opinion as in violation of accepted standards of sexual morality. American courts have not yet settled on a satisfactory definition of what constitutes pornographic material. (See obscenity.)

Quotes:

"What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy." - Edward Albee

"There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, Did you get an erection? If the answer is Yes from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic." - W. H. Auden

"A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction." - J. G. Ballard

"At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves." - Jean Baudrillard

"Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude." - Jean Baudrillard

"Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers. Pornography is a satire on human pretensions." - Angela Carter

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