The History of Porn

[EveKnight75]

The Naked Truth: A History of Pornography

That's right, folks. I found this on a teen mag site. Gurl is the teen version of iVillage. I used to visit it - still do actually. It's interesting to see what kind of advice they give out nowadays and I'm the one who has to monitor my sister's web activity anyway.

Who am I kidding? It's a guilty pleasure and I have a good cover.

Anyway, I found this there. It's a time-line on the history of porn. If you click on each bubble, it gives you a brief synopsis for that era. Obviously, it's relatively clean considering the subject matter (it has no choice). Still, I found it interesting and thought this would be the kind of thing that you guys would find interesting too.

[Oishiichan]

Wow that is only a recent history of porn... they didn't even go back as fa as B.C. era, you would think it was only a fairly modern concept looking at this.

[taker]

BA! Good find. I liked it.

[Guest Agaib]

I'm not sure porn was that much of a topic before this thing starts off. There have been some erotic statues and paintings, and they're interesting, but I think they're fairly displaced when comparing it to the modern definition of "porn."

Porn is a lot like homosexuality. The idea of Homosexuality wasn't really around until the last few hundred years.

Men had sex with men, and women had sex with women on occasion, but the idea of someone exclusively dedicating themselves to a sex because of some intrinsic reason is quite modern.

[Guest Yhitzak]

While this is a cute link, it's not very informative and leaves out a LOT of information. It's not bad for a quick, surf, though. And I definitely like the layout. Thanks for sharing!

So... I'm really not looking to start an argument or whatever, but to say that pornography wasn't really around prior to the 1600s is like... grossly inaccurate. Pornography has certainly changed faces over the years (compare -for example- A Night In a Moorish Harem or The Venus In Furs with virtually anything posted on the fiction board of this site; not only has language changed, but social acceptability of the practices discussed in these works has also greatly changed), but its purpose has remained more or less the same: "the depiction of erotic behavior designed primarily to cause sexual excitement." (Taken from a Merriam-Webster dictionary.) The idea that such a form of entertainment is even remotely newfangled is... silly, at best. Something that may once have been considered hardcore pornography could be considered by modern standards to be not only tame, but hardly erotic. That doesn't mean it's not pornography.

Homosexuality as a lifestyle is not limited to the last few hundred years. It has become a blatant social issue in the last few hundred years, but men and women have been participating in strictly homosexual relationships since the dawn of mankind. Even in Ancient Rome (this is just an easy example and I'm really not looking to turn this into a historical debate), men and women had same-sex relationships not just as a learning mechanism, but as a real thing. Many people in that time only married because they had to have heirs to leave their legacy to, men and women alike. Kind of like today, neh? The 'intrinsic reasons' behind sexual encounters are also not new or modern; to make such a statement implies that we (as 'modern' humans) are of a different breed than those who preceded us.

Speaking on the topic of homosexuality and erotica throughout history, here's a great book on the subject: Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts by James M. Saslow ISBN# 0-14-024435-2

[Oishiichan]

The chinese have had pornographic how to pillow books with graphic pictures since the 700's. Greek temples to Aphrodite Pan had reliefs that stretched around the room depicting orgies. There is also poetic stories from the Greek and Roman periods describing erotic encounters as well as plays. Greeks also had lesbian porn for men, long poems describing things they wished to do to one another written by women to other women, this was done for the entertainment of men. They have even found some written in ancient cuneiform. The Persian empire had wonder poets, and story tellers of erotic literature, these books also came with pictures to help guide the imagination. Ancient Egyptians were so erotic and had such high pornography content Greek scholars were appalled and offended by it. The naughty and erotic Greeks were offended by someone else's depictions and erotic natures because they were so strong and prevalent in their society.

Modern porn be it graphic or written has been around for centuries. Technicaly the older the the stuff is the more it falls under the erotica category, modern porn is just a depiction of pure sex, where as older stuff served an artistic function.

Porn: the explicit representation of the human body or sexual activity with the goal of sexual arousal.

Erotica: refers to works of art, including literature, photography, film, sculpture and painting, that deal substantively with erotically stimulating or arousing descriptions.

Now most times these lines blur, because porn gets boring without some type of artistic influence, and art is always spiced up by the act of sex. Now I have been an erotic dancer and if someone told me I was just working for the porn industry I would have been highly offended, lots of pornography stars prefer to be called erotic artists, in todays world the word porn is a naughty, dirty, nasty thing, no one wants to be associated with it due to the puritan influences placed on the America's by the immigrating settlers. Not all cultures in the world have this problem and haven't for time beyond measure, and some cultures never did.

[Guest Agaib]

Shesh, all I was saying that the modern schema of porn is fairly recent. You know... the porn magazine that people hid under the mattress away from sight. I fully understand that erotic imagery has existed for a long time, and that it has been of fluctuating prevalence in different societies. Often there is a discrepancy between the dictionary definition of a topic and the general public schema for an idea.

The comment really wasn't meant to be confrontational in any sense. I was just pointing out that the author that little brief history wasn't entirely improper...

And about homosexuality, I do know that people were had homosexual relationships before the social controversy erupted. I was just pointing out that many people denied that making yourself exclusive to your own gender existed at all, and those who didn't kept quiet for the most part. In societies where homosexuality was accepted (at least in certain situations), it was considered literally unthinkable that a man would refuse to take a wife in exchange for a partnership with a man. By unthinkable literally mean that most people didn't think about it because the idea seemed random or absurd.

Even today some people deny that homosexuality exists. They claim that people only become homosexuals to get back at the opposite gender or other silly things like that.

[quamp]

Actually, porn predates writing, so we don't know who first came up with it. We do know that in the caves of France, there have been clay figures of naked men and women found, along with pictures of people naked.

It's been theoried that porn even predates humankind - that porn goes as far back as somewhere between homo erectus and Neanderthal man.