Table Of ContentANNALS OF PORNOGRAPHIE:
HOW PORN BECAME ‘BAD’
BY BRIAN WATSON
for a.g. and s.m.
Table of Contents
1338-1556: Arentine and Tridentine
Perverted Humanists
The Scourge of Princes
The Positions and ‘The Reasonings’
1556-1644: To Reform and to Counter-Reform
To Reform: Sex, Scat, and Sin
To Counter-Reform
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
1647-1690: The Girls, The Earl, and The Reforms
L'escolle des filles
The Sodatical Satires of Nicolas Chorier
The Libertines
The Reformers
1690-1740: Curlicisms
The Unspeakable Curll
The Cloister of Venus
Curll’s Venereal Trial
Doctors and Lawyers and Farmers, oh my!
1740-1800: The Society for the Suppression of Fannies
Marriages, Privacies, Sexualities
Cultivating the Principles of Virtue and Religion
Fanny Hill: “The Most Depraved Fantasy of a Feverish Mind”
The Terrible Mistake of Virtue
1800-1900: The Birth of Pornography
Declarations and Proclamations
The Society for the Suppression of Vice
Lusty Struggles
Campbell's Law
The Romance of Lust
1900-1960: Sexology, Psychology, Filmography
Hick's Test
The Eldery Grey Ones
The Battle of the Lonely Well
Photography and Filmography
Conclusion
Source List
Thank-yous.
INTRODUCTION
Omnium rerum principia parva sunt. (The beginnings of all things
are small.)
Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, V. 21.
Truth! stark naked truth, is the word, and I will not so much as take
the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze-wrapper on it.
John Cleland, Fanny Hill
begin, v1 /bɪˈɡɪn/
Of common West Germanic or ? Germanic formation: Old English bi- , be-ginnan is identical
with Old Saxon and Old High German bi-ginnan. . . . The latter (Old High German and Middle
High German) had the senses 'to cut open, open up, begin, undertake'; hence it is inferred that the
root sense of *ginnan was 'to open, open up,' [and] Old English gínan 'to gape, yawn,' from a
stem *gi- , appearing also in Old Church Slavonic zij-ati , Latin hiāre 'to gape, open' (OED)
ONE REASON I begin, well, with 'begin,' is to draw attention to words. The
history of words is called etymology, and the entries in an etymology dictionary
look much like the description above for the word ‘begin’—they typically list
the earlier formats of the word, such as biginnan or begouth, and their meanings
(to 'undertake' or to 'open up'), and how those meanings changed and developed
into the word we use today. These entries can be incredibly detailed and
expansive—the entire entry for 'begin' is nearly 500 words long—far longer than
this paragraph. However, even the most detailed etymology does not tell the full
story of a word's origin, purpose, or intention. For example, here is the entry for
pornography:
Pornography, Brit. /pɔːˈnɒɡrəfi/, U.S. /pɔrˈnɑɡrəfi/
Hellenistic Greek πορνογράϕος (adjective) that writes about prostitutes (ancient Greek πορνο-
(see porno- comb. form) + -γράϕος -graph comb. form) + -y suffix (compare -graphy comb.
form), perhaps after French pornographie treatise on prostitution (1800), obscene painting
(1842), description of obscene matters, obscene publication (1907 or earlier). (OED)
Do you see the difference? This entry, in its entirety, is not even 50 words.
The usually verbose Oxford English Dictionary simply says that it is a Greek
word literally meaning 'writers about prostitutes.' It doesn't tell you that this
word is only found once in Ancient Greek, where Arthenaeus comments on an
artist that painted portraits of courtesans (an educated and upper-class prostitute).
Then the word fell out of use for 1500 years until it was used in 1842 to describe
a proposal on howto regulate prostitutes and then the erotic wall murals
depicting prostitutes uncovered at Pompeii. What happened? Why was a word
resurrected after so long? Why was it needed? Why weren’t the murals at
Pompeii just called the Pompeii Murals, or referred to as the Erotic Art in
Pompeii and Herculaneum like Wikipedia does today?
Consider another episode: On January 20th, 1674, John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl
of Rochester, delivered a poem he had promised to King Charles II. In a rather
unfortunate moment for the history of poetry, Rochester accidently delivered into
the hands of the king The Island of Britain, also known as A Satyre on Charles
II. Upon discovering his mistake (and hearing that the king wanted his head), he
was forced to flee the court for his safety. By February, however, the king
seemed to forgive him, granting him the title 'Ranger of Woodstock Park' and
allowing him to return to court. Two centuries later, in October of 1869, Daniel
Gabriel Rossetti published Jenny, in his Exhumation Proofs, a poem that had
originally been buried with his wife in 1862. This poem also met with
considerable controversy, but Rossetti was not as easily forgiven. Even years
after the fact, he was accused by Robert Buchanan, a Scottish dramatist, of being
"fleshy all over, from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes. . .snake-like in
[his] eternal wriggling, lipping, munching, slavering and biting," and responsible
for a host of offences, including “decency outraged, history falsified, purity
sacrificed, art prostituted, language perverted, religion outraged,” among others.
When the texts of the two poems are compared, however, it is Rochester's
poem that seems to outrage decency and religion, falsify history, prostitute art,
and so on. The poem begins in earnest with "In th' isle of Britain, long since
famous grown / For breeding the best cunts in Christendom, //[lives] the easiest
King and best-bred man alive," and goes on to describe both the Kings whoring
and 'tarse' (penis) in obscene detail, complaining that Charles is "starving his
people, hazarding his crown. // . . .for he loves fucking much." The language of
Rossetti's poem, by contrast, hardly perverts language—it begins with "Lazy
laughing languid Jenny, / Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea, / Whose head
upon my knee to-night / Rests for a while," which hardly seems obscene. The
most 'suggestive' the poem gets is to speak of Jenny's "dainties through the dirt"
and the only 'action' seen in it is "one kiss."
What changed in the two intervening centuries? Why did Rossetti's poem, so
tame in comparison to Rochester's, inspire such a diatribe? Why do our modern
eyes immediately peg Rochester as the 'libertine poet' or 'a profane wit,' as two
2004 books did?
This book is an attempt to answer these questions, an attempt to trace a
history through the 'underside' of Western culture, its art, literature, philosophy,
sexology, psychology and its changing laws. It is an attempt to explain the
modern view—to explain exactly why, where, and how porn became 'bad.' The
other reason I began this chapter with the word 'begin' is found in its older
meanings of 'to gape' or 'to open up'—sometimes history needs to be cut open,
revealed, and stripped. Sometimes the past is not as clear as battle dates or body
counts. Sometimes it is hidden in the shadows, buried beneath tons of rock and
ash, or taking place behind a bedroom door.
Because, like it, love it, use it, or hate it, modern society has a tortured
relationship with pornography. This relationship manifests in a number of ways,
like 2013's anti-pornography proposal in the United Kingdom, which aimed to
cut off both children and adults from internet pornography by default, or the
2015 ruling that adult eBooks could only be sold after ten pm in Germany.
Books condemning the corrupting effects of pornography appear with regularity,
with such titles as; Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, Getting
Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, or Wired for Intimacy: How
Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain, which claims that "our culture has become
pornified." Online communities like Reddit's NoFap have over 165,000
'Fapstronauts' who seek to "abstain from pornography and masturbation. . . as a
test of self-control" or to 'quit' pornography all together if "excessive
masturbation or pornography has become a problem" in their lives. The
fapstronauts encourage and compete with each other by daily updating the
community on their abstinence from PMO (Porn, Masturbation, Orgasm).
Websites like yourbrainonporn.com claim that "Evolution has not prepared your
brain for today's Internet porn," and that it causes PED, porn-induced erectile
dysfunction.
On the other side of the debate, doctors such as David Ley have published
books such as The Myth of Sex Addiction attacking the science and the
pseudoscience offered up by these sources and arguing that: sex addiction is a “a
shell game, a game that is using smoke and mirrors to hide moral judgments and
to deny personal responsibility.” At the same time, pornography companies are
increasingly profitable—one example of this is the $14.5 million purchase of the
old San Francisco Armory by Kink.com, a company specializing in BDSM
pornography, or the wild proliferation of ‘tube’ sites like YouPorn or RedTube
that are increadingly getting into the porn business themselves. Pornography use
and acceptance is also increasingly widespread; a 2013 Gallup poll found that
nearly half of Americans 18–34 years old found porn morally acceptable,
compared to 19% among those 55 and older. Additionally, pornography is
becoming increasingly legitimized—2014 saw the first publication of the journal
Porn Studies, which ran articles from a diverse array of fields. Whether the
opinion is that "increasing accessibility provided by various media technologies.
. .[has made] pornographies of all kinds accessible to a wider range of
audiences," or that "evolution has not prepared your brain," pornography's
detractors and supporters both claim that modern pornography marks a radical
break from the past—this is not your daddy's Playboy.
But as the history of the word reveals, 'pornography' has a relatively short
and modern history of about a century and a half (1850 onwards). But this does
not mean that obscene works never existed or were not understood as obscene—
such a claim would be wrong, as the history of human perversity is as long as the
history of the species. Instead, these earlier works were different. One example is
the anti-Catholic caricatures of Louis Cranach in support of Martin Luther,
which often depicted—graphically—the Pope as the 'Great Whore,' or the Whore
of Babylon. Or even Luther's poop jokes about the Pope. These pre-pornography
works are just as capable of being as graphic, shocking, or titillating as modern-
day PornHub videos, but they often integrated social, religious, or political
critiques between sex scenes, or used erotic dialogue as a means of critiquing
society at large.
The earliest surviving forms of what might be considered pornography, by
our modern eyes, circulated in private among elite, upper-class readers in
manuscript format. In this format, for this audience, it was used to critique
political figures, such as the King, or to cast suspicion on whether nuns and
monks were really chaste, or to criticize the Catholic Church for its involvement
in politics. It was only the advent of Gutenberg's printing press in 1436 that, as
in so many other fields, changed everything.
The short answer to the question of 'why porn became bad’ is that the
printing press made the reproduction of 'immoral' texts and images remarkably
cheap and easy. When this was joined with increasing middle- and lower-class
literacy, and book markets such as Holywell Street in London or the Grands-
Boulevards area of Paris, it created a type of work that supposedly had an
'undesirable' effect upon the general population. The church and state attempted
to control this effect through moral reform and legal regulation. The short
answer, however, does not capture the entire story. That is the purpose of this
