Allusionist 116. My Dad Excavated A Porno

Here’s a list of resources to support Black lives in the USA.

Here’s a list of resources to support Black lives in the UK.

The word 'pornography' arrived in English in the 1840s so upper class male archaeologists could talk about the sexual art they found in Pompeii without anyone who wasn't an upper class male archaeologist knowing about it.

MP3 • APPLE PODCASTS • RSS • SPOTIFY • RADIOPUBLIC • GOOGLE • TRANSCRIPT

The word ‘pornography’ arrived in English in the 1840s so upper class male archaeologists could talk about the sexual art they found in Pompeii without anyone who wasn’t an upper class male archaeologist knowing about it. Even though, at the same time, Victorian England was awash with what we’d now term pornography.

Dr Kate Lister of Whores of Yore and pornography historian Brian Watson of histsex.com explain the history of the word, and how the Victorian Brits dealt with material that gave them stirrings in their trousers. Sorry, ‘sit-down-upons’. ‘Inexpressibles’! If they couldn’t even express trousers, it’s little wonder they struggled to cope with pornography.

Content note: though the episode is educational and thoroughly untitillating - I know, I know, what a disappointment - the nature of the topic is such that the episode may not be suitable for all audiences or circumstances.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

About winged penises.
Very interesting history of Holywell Street, the hotbed of Victorian porn bookshops that has since been demolished.
“Obscenity was now becoming something to be explicitly traded upon and it was now using something that should theoretically be as innocent and beneficial as reading to permeate respectable society.” An interesting and thorough account of the Obscene Publications Act and the years after that led to the Hicklin Test.
About the problem of ‘porneia’ in the Bible.
About the Secret Museum in Naples, where the excavated Pompeiian sexual art was bricked up for 100 years.
Read the first appearance of ‘pornographer’ in Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, if you so wish…
…and the first appearance of ‘pornography’ in English on page 712 of the 1842 Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities.