Pornography

As the related entries for censorship and obscenity show, fundamental problems of definition have not really been resolved. The same is true of pornography . Explicit descriptions of nudity, sexuality, and erotic behavior continue to be cultural areas of considerable dispute, repression, and legal action involving complex criteria of authorial intention, likely audience, and in recent decades, choice of vocabulary. The controversy attracts conflicting views and counterclaims of decadence, liberation, Puritanism, and repression. The Judeo-Christian view of sex as a taboo subject in literature and art largely prevented the public depiction of frankly erotic subjects until the twentieth century. Comparisons with the literature and artifacts of other cultures show the diversity and relativity of norms and standards. These include the obscene farces of Plautus and the ancient Greeks, Priapic cults, nudes on Greek vases, the erotic mosaics at Pompeii, similar statues in India, and the naked giant with rampant penis depicted on the hillside at Cerne Abbas in Dorset.

Prior to the nineteenth century there was neither a specific legal category of pornography nor a statute against obscenity. In 1708, when James Read, a printer, was brought to court for having published the anonymous Fifteen Plagues of a Maidenhead , Lord Justice Powell dismissed the indictment of obscene libel, ruling strictly on the grounds of libel per se :

This is for printing bawdy stuff but reflects on no person, and a libel must be against some particular person or persons, or against the Government. It is not stuff to be mentioned pub- licly; [but] if there should be no remedy in the Spiritual Court, it does not follow that there must be a remedy here. There is no law to punish it, I wish there was, but we cannot make law; it indeed tends to the corruption of good manners, but that is not sufficient for us to punish.

(cited in Rawson 1991, 7)

This judgment perhaps explains the efflorescence of similar works (at least fifteen between 1700 and 1710, according to Eighteenth Century British Erotica (2002). However, Edmund Curll was the first person convicted of corrupting public morals by publishing Venus in the Cloister, or the Nun in her Smock in 1727, and John Wilkes similarly went to jail for publishing An Essay on Women (1763), a bawdy poem with many four-letter words, the most memorable lines being “just a few fucks and then we die” (l. 4) and “Prick, cunt and bollocks in convulsions hurl’d” (l. 41). But both prosecutions were probably more politically motivated than for obscenity per se . These factors perhaps explain why John Cleland received merely a fine and a reprimand from the Privy Council for his notorious but highly popular Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749).

The strength of the Puritan influence in America probably explains the curious absence of pornography in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century (see Mills 1993, 218). Yet as the entries for censorship and lawsuits show, the judgments on Ulysses (1933), The Well of Loneliness (1929), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1959) in the American courts were more liberal than those in Britain. The climactic line in Radclyffe Hall’s landmark novel on lesbianism, The Well of Loneliness , is “and that night they were not divided,” which as Jane Mills rightly observes, “today seems more romantic than erotic” (281).

Pornography , a comparatively recent coinage dating from the 1850s, derives from Greek porne meaning a “harlot.” The first meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary is thus literal: “description of the life, manners etc., of prostitutes and their patrons,” a topic regarded as potentially prurient and thus suspect. It is significant that the term should have arisen in the Victorian era, when prostitution was rampant. (The euphemism French prints for pornographic images dates from ca. 1850.) However, even in the nineteenth century, the extended meaning of pornography included topics with no clear connection with prostitution, and modes that were not explicit: “the expression or suggestion of obscene or unchaste subjects in literature or art.” This was to become the core of the dominant, but highly disputed meaning for decades. The first instance cited in the OED is pictorial, from Webster’s Dictionary of 1864: “licentious paintings employed to decorate the walls of rooms sacred to bacchanalian orgies, examples of which exist in Pompeii.” Indeed, the pictorial or descriptive element is still often primary, even in discussions of literature.

Most modern definitions dispense with moralistic terms such as obscene, unchaste , and licentious , in the manner of Collins Concise Dictionary (2000): “writings, pictures, films, etc., designed to stimulate sexual excitement.” This behaviorist core has led to considerable debates about the varieties of stimulation and the assumptions that pornography demeans women by depicting them as promiscuous and available sexual objects for male gratification and sexual violence. This presupposes that men are the principal readers of pornography, a traditional assumption slightly weakened by the views of such modern feminists as Germaine Greer and Angela Carter. Furthermore, as Thomas W. Laqueur shows in his monumental study, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation , in the eighteenth century the artistic tradition of women reading “is translated into explicit pornography of women rapturously masturbating while reading” (2003, 343). The images, French and English, become increasingly explicit, as do the titles, one of which is The Dangerous Novel (1781). However, these are still fantasized erotic images of women by men, constituting a male projection, a “double pornography.”

Given the problems of definition inherent in the issues of authorial intention and likely audience, let alone those in defining “obscenity,” many legal actions sought to focus on the choice of vocabulary. This verbal emphasis can be futile, as is shown in John Cleland ‘s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), now widely regarded as a pornographic “classic,” but containing none of the traditionally taboo terms, only picturesque and ingenious metaphors couched in classical vocabulary. The same point could be made about Vladimir Nabokov’s highly literary Lolita (1955). In the Postscript “On a Book Entitled Lolita ” Nabokov discourses amusingly on the formulaic expectations of the genre: “in modern times ‘pornography’ connotes mediocrity, commercialism and certain strict rules of narration. Obscenity must be mated with banality … action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés” (1997, 311). Nevertheless, in many of the earlier trials, the mere existence of a sexual theme or of sexual terminology was sufficient to secure a conviction. Gore Vidal was ironically dismissive on this point: “Because of [Henry] Miller’s hydraulic approach to sex and his dogged use of four-letter words, Sexus could not be published in the United States for twenty-four years” (1974, 198). As the entry on Lady Chatterley’s Lover shows, the proceedings of this landmark case of 1960 were largely taken up with the question of whether D.H. Lawrence was attempting to “redeem” the notorious “four-letter words.”

The Chatterley verdict encouraged the growth of a huge pornographic industry, blatantly advertising itself in titles such as Screw, Ban, Orgy, Pleasure, Suck, Cunts and Grunts, The Whipping Post , and Kinky Komics . This outpouring provoked in the United States the Presidential Commission on Pornography (1970), followed in the United Kingdom by the Longford Report (1972) and the Williams Report (1979). The U.S. report recommended abolition of censorship, but was rejected by President Nixon as “morally bankrupt.” The Longford Report proposed a new standard of “outraging contemporary standards of decency.” The Williams Report recommended that “the written word should be neither restricted nor prohibited” (1979, 102), but proposed a more specific definition of obscenity in visual material “offensive to reasonable people by reason of the way it portrays or deals with violence, cruelty or horror, or sexual, faecal or urinary functions or genital organs” (1979, 124). Neither report was transmuted into law.

The pornography industry is now commonly quantified as larger than the film and record industries combined. Although even prior to the Chatterley judgment the now-familiar abbreviations porno and porn were in currency, the expansion of the market was reflected in the emergence of such terms as pornobiography, pornocrat, porno-film, porno-magazine, pornomania , and pornophile in the course of the 1960s. (The upscale term erotica dates from 1854, and is steadily increasing in currency.) The further expansion of the category is shown in the distinction between “soft” and “hard” pornography, the latter having come to include perversions such as sadism, masochism, child pornography, and bestiality, which have no explicit vocabulary.