Listen to this episode and learn more about the topics in it at theallusionist.org/pornography
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, maintain a six foot distance from language.
A little note from the frontlines of fact-based light entertainment podcasting: I know a lot of you listen to my stuff to simmer down when times are hard, and I want to provide that relief; but it also feels disingenuous to act like the present is something that can be escaped. On the other hand, nobody came here for my pained takes on current events, including me. So what I’ll say is: a lot of what the Allusionist is about is power, how it is enacted and perpetuated through language. And of course, I talk mostly about the English language, which has been an oppressive force in many cultures; and its story as a global language is also a story of colonialism and empire, things of which, to put it extremely euphemistically, I am not a fan. The repercussions are very much in our lives today, and are in the words we use all the time. So, learning about language might not be news, but it’s always relevant.
And I guess today’s episode is also about something that’s always relevant: pornography. Content note: though the episode is educational and thoroughly untitillating - sorry - the nature of the topic is such that the episode may not be suitable for all audiences or circumstances. The etymology of ‘titillating’, by the way, is from the Latin ‘to tickle’.
On with the show.
KATE LISTER: I remember finding porn mags in a bush when I was a really little kid.
HZ: Pre-internet, that's how we did.
KATE LISTER: I was about 8 or 9, I suppose. I didn't even really know what I was looking at, I didn't know that women look like that without their clothes on, I didn't know any of it, but I was absolutely fascinated by it. And I think that's stayed with me, just what is this thing? And then as I got older and I actually did research, I became really interested in it as social history, and especially about how it frames debates today that it isn't just dead history, that it's really important that we know where our own attitudes today have come from, where they've been shaped.
HZ: We got the word ‘pornography’ from ancient Greek, the ‘graphy’ bit from the verb ‘to write or draw’, the ‘porn’ from the word for sex worker; itself derived from the verb to sell, possibly not so much for the sex the people were selling, but because the people may themselves have been sold into sex work.
So the Ancient Greek word πορνογράφος meant someone drawing or writing about sex workers, and the first known appearance is from the third century CE, in Athenaeus of Naucratis’s work Δειπνοσοφισταί, meaning something like ‘The Dinner Sophists’: it’s a series of conversations set at banquets in Rome, covering the arts, food and drink, games, and sex. In the thirteenth of fifteen volumes - phew! That’s a looong dinner - a character is being insulted: firstly for having one foot made of cow-dung, then mocked for spending so much of his time with sex workers and reading books about them; so addicted to amatory pursuits is he that “a man will not be much out who calls you a pornographer”.
Although rare in writing, I’d assume that πορνογράφος was already in wider use in Athenaeus’s time, for that reference to fly. But note: the word here only referred to a person creating the material - not the material itself.
BRIAN WATSON: You'll never see the word ‘pornography’ because there wasn't really a concept of what we would think of as pornography, like erotic material that's meant to turn on the reader or the viewer. There wasn't really that concept; that concept is a very Judeo-Christian one, and definitely a very post-Roman one.
HZ: Brian Watson is a historian of pornography and obscenity, and the author of the book Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became ‘Bad’. And although the concept of pornography in the current sense of arousing material goes back a very long way, the word only landed in print in English in the 1840s.
BRIAN WATSON: I'm looking at the OED right here. The first appearance is '42 and it's by W. Smith in the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities.
HZ: The word appears twice in the section about painting, subsection ‘Decline’: “Pornography, or obscene painting, which in the time of the Romans was practiced with the grossest license, prevailed especially at no particular period in Greece, but was apparently tolerated to a considerable extent at all times.”
BRIAN WATSON: So from the beginning it's associated with this Greek and Roman sexual art.
HZ: The word likely was enshrined in English at that time, the 1840s, as English-speaking archaeologists copped a load of art being excavated in Pompeii in southern Italy, the town having been buried in volcanic ash in 79CE.
BRIAN WATSON: And as they dug up Pompeii, they started to find these brothels with mosaics of prostitutes on the wall. Thus ‘porno’ for a prostitute and ‘graphos’, drawings of prostitutes on the wall.
HZ: Did they come up with this term because they thought, “Hmm, what would we call this if we were Ancient Greek?” or more likely because they were aware of the word ‘pornographie’ which had already been around in French for a century, notably the writer Retif de la Bretonne entitled his 1769 book proposing the regulation of sex work Le Pornographe. And English has a habit of referring to French for saucy terminology - French kissing, French letter, French fries - no, wait, hang on...
Anyway, what they called ‘pornography’ in Pompeii was probably acting like the illustrations on a menu.
BRIAN WATSON: They believe the imagery in Pompeii, for example, was meant so that even people who couldn't read or necessarily speak very good Latin would be able to point out what they wanted at the brothel. They would have images and there were a bunch of, variety of images; and I'm sure they're meant to be erotic, but one of the cautions of the history of sexuality that you can't start projecting these modern ideas into the past.
HZ: So don’t go thinking that the way you define pornography now would have been what the word meant to people back in the 1840s.
BRIAN WATSON: And the word itself was created as a means for the upper classes to discuss what they had discovered at Pompeii without the lower class women, children, and men finding out.
HZ: So it was like fancy archeologists protecting the delicate sensibilities of anyone else.
BRIAN WATSON: Yes. That’s exactly it. But it also let the upper class men... To see what they had dug up at Pompeii, you had to go to the museum at Naples - there's a Secret Museum at Naples and you have to be able to prove that you could speak Latin and or Greek, sometimes both. You had to be well-dressed and you had to be able to pay. And just getting out to Naples in the 1800s was proof that you could probably quite afford it, and you were the right kind of gentleman that could look at this material.
HZ: Imagine if now, you wanted to buy porn, you had to prove that you could speak the classical languages.
BRIAN WATSON: I think it might be slightly more expensive.
HZ: So shocking did they consider this material that the Secret Museum in Naples bricked up the collection of Pompeiian sexual art in 1849, and only rarely were people allowed to see it, until it was at last unlocked for the public in the year 2000. And if you visited the site of Pompeii before the 1960s, the frescoes depicting sexual acts were hidden behind metal cabinets, and men - and only men - could pay extra to see them. Meanwhile in Britain, the erotic artefacts collected from ancient sites were similarly hidden away at the British Museum.
KATE LISTER: It was accessible only to a few; and when they wrote about it, they tended to write about it in Latin. So it was deliberately elitist and exclusionary. I suppose it was to kind of prevent people knowing about it, but it was much more in a kind of like "We must protect you because you couldn't possibly cope with this, it's just too much for people" type of a thing.
The word was coopted, but it was already there, there were already erotic materials there, but they wouldn't have called them that; they would've called them lewd or lascivious publications. So they just gave another name to something that actually already existed.
HZ: Dr Kate Lister is a university lecturer, the author of A Curious History of Sex, and she runs the research project Whores of Yore, which explores the history of human sexuality.
KATE LISTER: They were really quite deeply shocked, the Brits, to find out the things that the ancient Romans had been getting up to, all the archaeology stuff that we - well, we nicked, we stole it from Pompeii, I was gonna say the stuff that we took, that we ‘acquired’ from Pompeii but that's not true; we just nicked it. But they were really shocked at all the erotic frescoes and all the penises carved everywhere and winged phalluses that they found and obscene statues.
HZ: The phalluses were a protective symbol for the deity Fascinus - yes, the etymology of the word fascinating comes from this penis deity - to ward off the evil eye. And there must have been a lot of evil eyes looking at Pompeii, because there are SO MANY phalluses around town.
KATE LISTER: They really had to try and reassess what they thought of the ancient world because of that.
HZ: “Oh no! The people of the ancient world had penises?! With WINGS!?”
HZ: The Victorians really did a number on people. I feel like we're still unpicking Victorian attitudes.
KATE LISTER: Yes, we are. I mean, we're still very much the children of the Victorians, and they're a fascinating bunch, the Victorians. No generation, at no point in history, has sex been successfully repressed, ever. It just doesn't happen. But what you have is really strict social morality, conditioning and mores and constructs and power dynamics around sex that dictate what we are and what we're not supposed to be doing. And outward facing, they were so repressed and polite society and so offended by everything even remotely to do with sex, to the point of where they wouldn't say the word 'trousers' because they thought they were too rude. They were 'sit down upons'.
HZ: Or unmentionables, or inexpressibles, or indescribables. Funny how the Victorians could be so prim at home that they couldn’t even describe trousers, yet so, er, unrestrained with the rest of the world.
Really the easiest thing for the Victorian moralists would have been if humans did not have bodies at all. But then: “Hmm, that cloud is looking voluptuous: prosecute it!”
KATE LISTER: Yes. It's absolute nonsense. But then beneath that veneer: pornography is flowing through Victorian Britain, Victorian Europe. There's sex work is absolutely off the scale; they clearly weren't sexually repressed, they're absolutely enjoying sex. But yeah, that shaming sex and thinking that it's something to worry about and to be upset about and using it to control and shame people: the Victorians did that very well. And we're still, as you said, unpicking that today.
HZ: Why? What is it about the Victorians that made them particularly like this? Were the Georgians also on this kind of route?
KATE LISTER: It's like every generation that comes along seems to need to rebel against the one that's gone before it. And who'd come before the Victorians, before they really got going, were the Georgians. They did have a reputation of being more sexually open and liberated and more kind of bawdy and raucous than the Victorians. So a lot of it was about social control and it was about saying, “We're not like that anymore, we're going to behave ourselves.” And the thing about repressing sex is it's not really about repressing sex; it's about self-control. It's about showing that you are in control. And it's interesting that it came about the same time as Empire, when the Brits thought that we were the most amazing and in-control, stoic people on the planet. And that went hand-in-hand with this idea of "And we don't even need to have sex if we don't want to."
So I think it's a control thing. I think anywhere where we are subject to desires and urges often seem beyond our control is we get a bit freaked out about it. And sex can definitely do that. For all that, you might think that you are logical and rational and a very sensible person is we've all done stupid things when we've got horny, you know? Countless! So I think it's it's also about control. It's anywhere that we feel scared that we don’t have full control of ourselves, about anything pleasurable, I suppose, is we have real hang ups around it, this idea that if we deny ourselves, then we're totally in control of it. And if you give up to pleasure, then you're somehow weaker. You're a weak person for doing it.
HZ: The birth rate was pretty high, so they must have figured something out.
KATE LISTER: Yeah, there's been a lot of historical debate and arguments, particularly why the Victorians got so uptight about sex. And yeah, there's all kinds of reasons - reacting against the Georgians that came before; a shift in social attitude about what was acceptable and what was not; and venereal disease as well, I suppose, which was running rampant.
HZ: So amidst this ferment of attitudes, the word pornography pivoted from its old meaning towards its current one.
As well as the word being exclusionary to people who were not conversant in ancient Greek, one of the components it was formed of carried negative connotations. As well as ‘porneia’ meaning sex work in Ancient Greek and thence Latin, it developed a secondary meaning of any unsanctioned sex.
BRIAN WATSON: Porneia is this concept of immoral, incorrect behaviour, but it's really meant to refer to adultery, homosexuality and lesbianism to a lesser extent, but sexual intercourse before marriage or sexual intercourse with relatives that are too close for the church to be comfortable with.
HZ: And then early Christian writers got hold of the word and really ran with it - it could also mean bestiality, incest, child abuse, anything bad they could think of, and they conflated those acts with not worshipping the Christian god, if you weren’t a Christian you must also be having sex with beasts, and some of these writers would dub enemies of Christianity ‘pornai’. So a specific word for sex worker became a much broader word with which to insult or condemn someone.
BRIAN WATSON: And pornea is like wrong behaviour, immoral behaviour, incorrect behaviour, and you see it in the New Testament.
HZ: And there it caused a problem for translators of the Bible, who had to figure out an English equivalent for this multifold word that appears 25 times in the New Testament. The King James version translated ‘porneia’ as ‘fornication’, the New American Standard Bible opted for unchastity - that’s pretty broad-spectrum - while other Bibles went for ‘infidelity’ and ‘immorality’. Essentially, the translators knew it had to mean something sexual that was disapproved of, but being more specific with their words was a struggle, a situation which was also encountered later, in 1857, when the Obscene Publications Act was passed into law in England and Wales.
BRIAN WATSON: The Obscene Publications Act gives for the very first time the police to go and seize this type of material and to destroy it. And they only managed to push it through after a lot of writing letters to members of parliament, after going into the newspapers and writing editorials.
HZ: It was not a popular act, but there was a lot of force behind it; for although the word ‘pornography’ was pretty new to English, the concept it describes was not at all new - on one street alone in central London, there were some 50 porn bookshops; it was more than a century since the publication of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, considered the first pornographic novel in English and promptly banned - though widely circulated in pirate editions.
KATE LISTER: It’s not new, this stuff. But I think what changed in the 19th century and what made it so much of a bigger, more prominent issue is probably the same thing that happened to us when the internet was invented: the actual thing doesn't change, but technology changes around it.
What changed in the 19th century was production methods, photographs, and, by the late 19th century, videos. But being able to mass produce books, texts, photographs, images: that changed everything. So that's one of the reasons why you find it particularly concerning in the 19th century, is not because it's not been around before, it's just because there's now more of it.
HZ: And thanks to the abolition of a tax on newspapers in 1856, publications were more affordable than ever; the penny post had come in in 1840, so publications could be obtained more easily, and more discreetly; plus, over the course of the 19th century educational reforms meant far more people were literate, and thus able to read pornographic publications. So there were more publications, and more access to publications.
BRIAN WATSON: But the real pickup is when the middle classes start getting involved. They found the Society for the Suppression of Vice, 1802. The Society for the Suppression of Vice spends almost all their time going after publishers of erotic books, and they lobby parliament, they go and give speeches at Parliament.
HZ: The Society for the Suppression of Vice kept busy through the first half of the 19th century trying to crush atheism, swearing, blasphemy, gambling, and the publication of blasphemous, licentious and obscene books and prints. But legally, they couldn’t do a lot, as although the sale of obscene books and pictures had been outlawed in 1839, publishing them was merely a misdemeanour, and buying them was not an offence. Until the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 decided to take care of that.
BRIAN WATSON: And it's funny because Parliament is debating this Obscene Publications Law almost at the same time they get the news of the Sepoy Revolution vote in India. So you have all these very upset old white men arguing about dirty books and at the same time India is melting down essentially. You can see where, where the balance was and the concern was there.
HZ: Priorities.
BRIAN WATSON: Yes, apparently!
HZ: The Obscene Publications Act was pushed through, but there were a lot of problems with it. The police, a relatively new force, could stop and search a person or premises just in case they had obscene materials on them, even if there was no reason to suspect that they did; or, for instance a bookshop proprietor could face prosecution if, amongst the thousands of books in the bookshop, there was just one that could be deemed obscene in the estimation of one person, say a customer in a bad mood or a rival bookseller. Because the Obscene Publications Act didn’t define what ‘obscene’ meant.
KATE LISTER: It's really difficult to do that still. What does obscene mean? What does that mean for somebody? Because your obscene will be different to someone else's obscene. Like, for example, my website where I host lots of images of Victorian pornography, photographs or erotic art and things like that: is that obscene? But the context is different. I'm using it in a historical, hopefully educational way; but the actual image is not any different, it's still porn. So one of the things that they found really, really tricky was trying to define exactly that: what do you mean by obscene? When does something stop being obscene? What's okay and what's not? It was really difficult. And that's why it didn't work.
HZ: Etymologically ‘obscene’ meant ‘inauspicious’, but that’s not a whole lot of use. Offensive to the senses, offensive to decency, as dictionaries defined it: very subjective. The courts had to figure out what ‘obscene’ meant in every single Obscene Publications case.
And then how do you make ‘obscene’ apply only to the right things? They had to debate whether statues or anatomical models or pathology waxworks counted as publications, and if they’re for instruction are they obscene or not obscene? What of medical texts? And newspaper reports of obscenity trials? Would the Bible evade this law?
What of works of great art and high literature that acknowledge the existence of sex, what of the Victorians’ beloved writers of Ancient Greece and Rome, and their gods who are always at it too?
KATE LISTER: When rich clever people do, it's erotica and yeah, that's the rules.
HZ: You can put it on the wall when it's erotica.
KATE LISTER: Yeah, absolutely. That's fine.
HZ: It’s like whenever a film features unsimulated sex but has an auterish director, like 9 Songs or The Idiots, there’s always a debate: “Is it porn or is it art? Is it porn or is it art? They’re having sex but it’s not turning me on, it’s making me nod my head in admiration at the melancholy lighting.”
KATE LISTER: I think it's probably a class thing again, you know, I think if it's an art which is regarded as highbrow and educational and cultured, then suddenly you can get away with a lot more. For all Victorians were prudish and really upset about actual photographs of naked people, they had nude paintings all over the place; hanging in their galleries, they're absolutely fine with it. So I think it is a class thing as well, the idea that if something is erotica, then we've kind of sanitized a little bit away from the more dirty and naughty associations of porn.
HZ: And the more publicly available the material was, the more obscene it was considered. Fancy that.
The crux came not from porn, in the end, but from a religious pamphlet. In the mid-1800s, religious tensions rose in England; a million Irish people had emigrated there in the wake of the potato famine, and anti-Irish xenophobia was often couched as anti-Catholic sentiment. The vagueness of the definition of obscenity allowed the Protestants and Catholics to use the Obscene Publications Act to discredit each other’s publications. In 1868, the courts debated for the third time whether an 1865 anti-Catholic pamphlet entitled The Confessional Unmasked was obscene, and through this case, they conceived of the Hicklin Test, where you ascertain what is obscene according to whether a father could read it aloud in his household, women and children of course being more vulnerable to obscenity than the man of the house. The ruling was that material is obscene if it might, I quote, “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” So even if the publication did not intend to deprave or corrupt, if it happened to have that effect, it was legally obscene. The Oscene Publications Act scored way more prosecutions after that, especially as it could outlaw publications in which even one portion could be deemed obscene.
BRAIN WATSON: And this law is basically copied over in the United States. It's called the Comstock Act here, and it's where we get that word comstockery. And Comstock just spends the rest of his life going after people who publish birth control stuff, people who publish abortionist material, erotic literature, and he even started going after art students in the end, who might have a picture of a model in order to learn how to draw better. So that's really where the law itself begins developing. And then we definitely have this concept of pornography.
HZ: The Obscene Publications Act stayed in place until 1959. Although of course it didn’t stop people making or publishing or looking at pornography. Or using new technologies to make more of it.
BRIAN WATSON: In the beginning it really means writing, but also the influence of photography and videos in creating this idea of pornography, and that's the late 1800s, early 1900s, when you start to have this easy access of photography, and the easy access to that means that it needs to be regulated. So in the beginning it's seen as this great thing, this beautiful breakthrough, and then very very quickly, people realize you can start selling naked bodies for money, and that is a very profitable way of continuing to exist. And then that is regulated too. Photography and videos really just followed the track that books had laid down before. And because there's already this pre-existing concept of pornography, it's easy that then we assign the idea of books to it, we assign the idea of photography to it, we assign videos to it. So it gets assigned to this cultural concept that we now have, of pornography. So the ‘graph’, the writing on it, is a very very slow prequel to what happens with photography and videos.
HZ: So the word went from material you could only see if you were allowed into a secret museum, to magazines you could find in bushes, to online kicks of all kinds that are only a click away.
BRIAN WATSON: So often we're told that we live in the most dirty or obscene or overly sexual times, and that's not really true. Are we really? Is this really the worst of all time? I don't really think it is. It was so much more common to see it everywhere in the streets, and if you grew up in a house in the 1500s, 1400s, everybody shared the same bed; you might very well be aware of how your parents made your siblings, and you were on a farm, you would be very well aware of how little animals came into being. So in some ways we live in a kind of a cleaner time; but it just says something about who we are that we think is the worst of all times, and if we can go forward with knowing that pornography has a history, and it's tied into the history of religion, the history who we are as people, the history of privacy, the history of the body; oornography really tells us something about the history of desire.
KATE LISTER: Yes. That's interesting, that every generation that you get thinks that they've invented sex, that they just can't conceive of people in the past having sex - although we obviously we know that they must have done because we're the living proof that they did. But the idea that they had kinky sex or that they enjoyed sex - that for some reason just doesn't figure very much in our perceptions of what people did in the past. But they absolutely did. People have been thoroughly enjoying sex and been very, very kinky ever since they first worked out what went in where. Yeah. There's nothing new under the sun.
HZ: Dr Kate Lister is the author of A Curious History of Sex, and she runs the research project Whores of Yore, which you can find on Twitter and at thewhoresofyore.com.
Brian Watson is a historian of pornography and obscenity, and the author of Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became ‘Bad’. They also are working on a new project setting up an international and interdisciplinary resource of information about the history of sexuality, and if you’re interested in getting involved, you can find out about it at histsex.com.
And in today’s Minillusionist, I ask Brian and Kate about a use of the word ‘porn’ that isn’t meant to be sexy. I think.
MINILLUSIONIST
HZ: Do you think that now, the word 'porn' is used appropriately? Because on the one hand, I see scary headlines where they're like "Porn public health crisis" and on the other hand: ‘cabin porn’.
KATE LISTER: Yeah, I think it is quite sensationalized, isn't it? And we've definitely got gradations within it because if you described soft porn to somebody, that means something or if you said ‘food porn’, that means something else again.
BRIAN WATSON: Food porn; truck porn; design porn; cabin porn; or war porn is one.
KATE LISTER: So again, that the meaning is mutating and changing.
BRIAN WATSON: That is a really curious transition, and it's kind of like the recognition by the mass culture as pornography as not really being threatening anymore, not really being dangerous. It can be funny, and it's kind of returning back to its roots in that sense, in a sense of, "Oh, this is just a comment about the everyday, an excessive thing about the everyday."
Our concept of pornography comes out of the earlier concept of obscenity, and then even earlier concept of "erotic discourse", is what I call it in my book. And what it was was a way of making fun of the church, making fun of the king, making fun of the culture by throwing porn at it; it's that same kind of way of making fun of this political figure. And back then, for example, it was the Pope. Pietro Aretino, who was called the father of pornography, he puts out this series of books, and he has the Pope and the various cardinals hooking up with these prostitutes, and they are characters in the book, and it's a way of making fun of that. So it's like this very charged erotic political discourse.
That begins to be regulated during the Reformation, and this concept of "obscenity" develops, and obscenity is this thing that, well, you're insulting the kings, and it's obscene libel, so you're obscenely libeling the king, and we can either kill you in some Catholic countries, or put you in jail in England specifically. And from that, we begin to see the split between political satire that we know today, like, I don't know, I always say Colbert. So that’s satire, and they don't tend to touch on erotic things. So really only been around for about a hundred and fifty years when you sit down and look at where that modern concept comes from.
In the end, everybody looks the same when naked, and that's the same point a lot of these early pornographers are trying to make, they're trying to make the point that even the King, when he's naked, or even the Pope when he's naked, they look the same, they're just human, and they're going to die, after all.
The Allusionist is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the finest independent podcasts around. Find all our shows at radiotopia.fm.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is...
ichor, noun: 1. Greek mythology: the fluid said to flow like blood in the veins of the gods. 2. Archaic: a watery fetid discharge from a wound.
Lovely. God juice or fetid discharge, something for everyone. Try using it in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with music by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. Thanks to Nick Harris, Ian Steadman, Ishbel McFarlane, Eleanor McDowall and Lily Sloane.
You can find me at @allusionistshow on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. You can hear all the Allusionists and the special extra-soothing Tranquillusionists, and read transcripts of the episodes, see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, read more about each topic at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
