by Sara Pascoe
The art from Pompeii depicted all the sex positions. There were illustrations of oral sex and sodomy. There were statues with massive phalluses and mosaics of bestiality and gods swapping hand jobs, and while you might be thinking:
Finally, an art collection that isn’t boring.
the Victorians decided these items must NEVER be seen by the innocent eyes of Mr and Mrs Public. They set up A SECRET MUSEUM that only everybody knew about. No one was allowed in except the most perverted qualified experts. It was opened in 1821, the door was bricked up by 1849 and the time in between was taken up with discussing obscenity and decency.
It is actually, actually fascinating that one historical period’s public decorations become another culture’s verboten. In Pompeii there were these street penises which poked out from buildings above street level. For some reason ancient Italians liked some of their buildings to have willies. Were they totems? Reminders of legends and myth? Or somewhere high to hang your cloak? We can’t know for sure until you finish that time machine.
Along Oxford Street in London there are statues above shops of Britannia or boats and stuff. Tourists walk around and don’t even notice until I shout, ‘Look up and respect our sculptures.’ Imagine if in two thousand years these statues were in museum prison because billowing robes and flags are mistrusted … it’s equally silly. The human body hasn’t changed a jot but these two civilisations drastically differ in their response to it. For the Pompeiians, a big stone willy was beautiful or funny or lucky. For British Victorians it was PORNOGRAPHIC.
Porne is a Greek word referring to a female slave, literally meaning a woman purchased for the purpose of prostitution; the poor bastards. I hate history so much. I’m not being antisex work by the way, I’m being anti-sexual slavery. Fun fact about me, I hate sexual slavery. There you go.
Porneion was an ancient Greek brothel. The graphy bit simply means ‘to write’. Now you know where the word ‘pornography’ came from and why my script for Sesame Street was rejected. Today’s episode was brought to you by the letter P and the systematic abuse of women by the patriarchy.
This new word, ‘pornography’, began to be used around the mid-nineteenth century. In 1857 it appeared in a medical dictionary as ‘a description of prostitutes or of prostitution’. A slightly more modern definition was introduced by Webster’s dictionary in 1864: ‘licentious painting employed to decorate the walls of rooms sacred to bacchanalian orgies, examples of which exist in Pompeii’.
Today we use the word ‘pornography’ to describe explicit imagery or writing in general. The word can be used negatively. People say something is ‘pornographic’ when it’s rude, dirty, crude. When people talk about using pornography, they mean something sexy, something that arouses them. Crucially, when we label something as ‘pornography’, we mean that its intention is to turn people on. That’s why it was created. There’s a level of explicitness implied by the word. My friend Tom* once gave up porn and started wanking to his female friends’ holiday photos on Facebook. I don’t know if you find that problematic, but you couldn’t say beach bikini shots were porn, even though they were being used as a masturbatory aid.
The Roman artworks hidden away during Victoria’s reign had been used for domestic decoration during Emperor Vespasian’s. The frescos had been shame-free and visible to all, the paintings hung as proudly as the Priapus they depicted. They were not created as pornography, but seen centuries later they became it. So here is something to remember: for all of us – each individual and every cultural group – some of what we consider to be pornography is subjective.
* In case you’re wondering, Tom is his real name. Careful what you tell me, friends, I’m writing a book.
One Man’s Porn Is a Young Woman’s Bottom
Whatever the dictionaries of our times may contain, we all define what is licentious differently. A Hollywood blockbuster considered by censors to be suitable for twelve-year-olds may be simultaneously objectionable to an American Muslim. If I saw a poster of a naked woman in the street, legs apart, pulling at her bum cheeks to display her genitals – I’m sorry to tell you I’d be affronted. I’d consider it hugely inappropriate for a public place. But that same reaction might be triggered by someone wearing a two-piece swimsuit in parts of India, or a mini-skirt in an Italian cathedral. I was once shouted at by nuns on bikes in Milan because of a whorish, arm-revealing vest.
We discussed the constant sexual signalling of the post-pubescent female body in previous pages, and this is compounded by the fact that we all sometimes interpret certain things as sexual signals, regardless of whether or not they were intended that way. This makes life complicated.
A few years ago I was queuing up with a boyfriend to see a show. He was getting tetchy, because of the waiting, I thought, but then I realised the focus of his mood was in front of us.
He gestured with his eyes to a child’s bottom.
I say ‘child’ but she was about thirteen or fourteen, so maybe that’s not fair. Sorry if you were imagining a bum in a nappy. Ahead of us in the queue was a young woman. My boyfriend shook his head and asked, ‘How can people let their kids go out like that?’ in a way that implied that they shouldn’t.
The ‘kid’ was wearing denim shorts, the very skimpy type that Topshop sold circa 2013. They only covered between half and three quarters of the wearer’s bum cheeks, depending on your age and the pull of gravity where you were standing. For slim women under twenty-two, these shorts displayed the sweet smile of the lower buttock edge. They were fashionable. I’d been at the Reading, Leeds and Latitude festivals that year and seen clouds of teens in crop tops and tiny denim. I hadn’t thought to judge any parents. But then teenage girls’ bodies don’t give me a hard-on.
‘Someone should tell her.’ My boyfriend was angry. I got angry too. My Feminist Issue Alarm was going off. This alarm is easily activated and will ruin adverts, politics and trips to the cinema. The soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend and I were now arguing. My point of view: why should this young woman consider HIM when putting clothes on her body? She wasn’t dressing for men twice her age, but for herself. His point of view, fiercely supplied: ‘She should know the effect her body has on men.’
Should she?
Boys with heterosexual feelings know how female bodies affect them, because they feel the effects. They understand as soon as the feelings start. At some point during their adolescence they learn that female attractiveness = an engorgement in their penis. Cause and effect.
The owners of female bodies can’t feel what they’re provoking. They get told. This may be through the sophisticated flirting techniques of men shouting on the street, a touchy-feely friend of their mum, teachers complimenting their development and boys groping them during PE at school. Or they might be educated in a more explicit way. My friend Justin has a thirteen-year-old daughter, and he was telling me she’s allowed to wear lipstick inside the house, but not when going out. His daughter loves a bright red shade borrowed from her mum and doesn’t understand why she can’t keep it on to go to the shops. Her mum asked her if she knew what ‘sexualisation’ meant and then explained it. She told her that with lipstick on, she looked like she wanted to be considered as sexy, even though she was only wearing it to have fun or be pretty. I have a problem with this definition, and
BRRING BRRRING
I have an even BIGGER problem with a world where male reactions restrict female behaviour. Should teenage girls have their lives shaped by a hypothetical male response?
Another friend, Mark, praised his daughters’ school for contacting parents before the disco. They sent a letter saying, ‘We all know boys’ hormones are going crazy,’ and asked that parents ‘ensure girls have shoulders and midriffs covered to avoid unfortunate incidents’. Why stop at a midriff, why not pop them all in burkas and ban dance music like the Taliban?
Because that would ruin the disco.
Why should a twelve-year-old getting dressed for a school party endure an argument with he
r mum about what she’s allowed to wear? Why are boys’ feelings a girl’s responsibility? This is treating the male response as unavoidable: the problem is schoolgirls’ hemlines. Why aren’t they checking that the boys aren’t dressing too provocatively for girls, or for their gay classmates?
You’re being silly.
I’m not. Boys with homosexual feelings go through the same process as their heterosexual peers except the bodies that excite theirs are male. But lads don’t learn, either implicitly or explicitly, ‘my body is attractive to gay men’. I can’t imagine a young man being told not to dress a certain way because a homosexual person might find them sexy. In those instances, the target of the attraction would never be blamed. Responsibility would rest with the feeler of feelings. You’d never get a letter telling teenage boys to wear baggy trousers because some of the sixth-formers liked fresh-faced lads with cute bottoms.
There are fewer gay boys than straight ones but I don’t think that’s why schools don’t write warnings about turning them on. I think it’s because only heterosexual men’s urges are consistently upheld as red-blooded, healthy, ‘what can you do about it?’ This entitlement has not been nurtured in gay men, not in the same way. So no male urges are unavoidable, are they? If homosexual boys are expected to control themselves then so should straight boys, schools and parents should be teaching them. Not that there is anything wrong with their feelings, but that they are not anybody else’s fault. To quote a wise and much shared meme, ‘we teach our daughters to avoid the men we allow our sons to become’ *brain exploding emoji*.
In Istanbul in 2016 a woman on a bus was kicked in the head for wearing shorts. Her assailant, Abdullah Çakıroğlu, told police he would have been ‘less aroused’ if she’d worn trousers. A year later a Turkish student was slapped around the head by a man telling her she should be ‘ashamed’ of wearing shorts during Ramadan. There are no Turkish news stories of gay men attacking others for looking too enticing during religious holidays, I’ve checked.
What’s happening is that someone doesn’t enjoy what they’re feeling, whether it’s an erection during Ramadan or arousal provoked by a much younger person. The feelings make him feel ashamed and the focus of those feelings is blamed. Like how when a Victorian man spotted a tantalising fresco on public transport, he’d go over to kick it in the head, teach that fresco a lesson.
I’ve never experienced lust leading to aggression. That is not how my body works, I have never wanted to thump someone for turning me on. Does that mean my arousal is less powerful than a man’s? Is it because the female body is so discreet about its engorgement? We are going to be exploring gender differences in visual arousal a bit later. I wonder if I do ever get aroused by what I see? I can appreciate the aesthetics of a toned body, but it doesn’t do anything for me. Not speaking for all women here, I am sure it does for many. Otherwise they wouldn’t sell all those porno mags to women – oh, wait.
Of course I have felt unwanted arousal. Embarrassing, shameful, sickening. I know what it is to hate yourself because of something you’ve thought. An unbidden evil mind-spider. We don’t control our thoughts; whatever our sexual preferences, proclivities and relationship status, we will have to keep accepting this and forgiving ourselves. We’re apes, that’s not our fault.
It seems that arousal obfuscates sense. Victorians had sexy feelings when they saw the artworks from Pompeii and it disgusted them. They didn’t see nudity, depictions of intercourse or even history but obscenity and pornography. It didn’t matter what was intended by the creators – it mattered what was felt. The response ruled.
People’s responses to pornography vary. With an instinct to be secretive about sex, the male’s visible arousal can be humiliating and shameful. If I was to live that moment in the queue again with my ex, having had all this time to think about it, I would tell him about the Coolidge effect. How humans’ sexuality evolved over time but that our genitals remain trip-wired to notice sexual signals. The male response to females, especially young females, is culturally difficult for us now. When we think about equal rights and mutual respect, we have to navigate between a young woman’s right to dress as she wants and be left alone, and a man’s freedom to notice his body’s reactions without anger and hatred. You see delicious food, you get hungry; you don’t punch the burger. You understand why that instinct exists. It’s about survival. Rampant, unbridled sex was also our survival. Our species’ varied, around-the-clock mating kept ourselves in babies even when the landscape was bleak and desolate, even while temperatures were too high or too low. Next time you get an unwanted boner you can think, ‘Thanks for trying, evolutionary tactic, but the world is different now,’ and go happily on your way.
Dirty Stories and Jazz Mags
Pompeii may have been flattened by Vesuvius, but human creativity continued to find inspiration in sexual intercourse. You’ll have heard the argument that every new technology was advanced by demand for porn, and there’s much truth to that. Around AD 1040 movable-type printing was invented in China, during the Song dynasty. Woodblock printing had been around for about eight hundred years, but now technology was improving and people could reconfigure all the words and letters and use them to write saucy stories about the adventures of boobies.
Then around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg revolutionised printing with his metal movable type. The Gutenberg printing press was used to make copies of a special religious book called the Bible. Between 150 and 180 copies of the Gutenberg Bible were printed in the first mass publication ever.* The Bible is not considered erotica even though it has loads of fornication in it. Mostly it’s referred to as ‘begetting’ but there’s some proper nasty stuff too. Top of my head – Lot’s daughters all trying to get off with him, and two entire cities wanking and bumming so much they had to be destroyed. Some later non-religious books were even sexier and that’s why all the perverts learned to read. Some notable pornographic literature includes poetry by the Earl of Rochester, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill and E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. Now you know why libraries have those ‘Please masturbate quietly’ signs.
The next exciting stage in human creativity was photography. This advanced incrementally through the late 1700s into the early 1800s. The images captured began as blurry, smudgy shadows, but by 1838 Louis Daguerre took the first ever photograph with a ‘recognisably human image’ in it. The photo is mainly of houses, but down on the pavement you can see a tiny man having his tiny shoes shined by another tiny man, and everyone in that photo is currently dead.
As soon as cameras could take pictures of recognisably human people, the photographers started recognising that people should take their clothes off. At first, daguerreotypes of nude women were considered art rather than erotica, they were collector’s items or painter’s studies, but the realism meant that nudie photographs were a lot more sexually exciting than oil paintings. A painting of sex is imaginary; these photographs depicted real sex that people were actually having. Photos were super expensive at first because they were so difficult to produce, but as cameras improved a whole genre exploded like Vesuvius, spraying red-hot life-like images all over the world.
During the 1880s Jack the Ripper was killing women but that’s not relevant to mass-produced photography. Halftone printing was created and soon afterwards the world’s first porn magazines were published in France. They were black and white and depicted softcore nudes and sex scenes. Then a chap called William Lazenby launched a series of erotic periodicals in the UK. His first was The Pearl, which you can find online – very exciting if you’re into poems about girls using carrots as dildos. It’s hard to imagine someone masturbating to a limerick – but I’m imagining it anyway. Into the twentieth century and Vanity Fair was a far racier publication than its modern incarnation. By the 1930s porn consumers were enjoying Tijuana Bibles, which were cartoony sex booklets featuring celebrities and famous characters getting up to filthy stuff they normally wouldn’t. Jump ahead to the 1950s and you land in Pl
ayboy magazine, founded by a man called Hugh Hefner who I presume you know about already, though I always got him confused with Howard Hughes or Jimmy Savile’s mother’s corpse.† Hefner rebranded pornography as a shameless, healthy part of masculinity. Just a bit of masturbatory fun for a ‘boy’ who wants to ‘play’ and likes his women to be hutch-based pets. This shift in how pornography was promoted successfully changed how it was perceived, and Hefner created a massive mainstream market. Over the next few decades that market grew as more and more publications competed for the sticky buck. While Playboy began with pictures of topless icons and pin-ups in their underwear, over the years magazines stripped people further:
1960s Penthouse magazine was the first to show models displaying their genitals.
1972 Playboy began to use completely nude models in its centrefolds.
1974 Larry Flynt launched Hustler magazine, which pushed the genre further – genitals were now photographed CLOSE UP!
1982 Hustler did a scratch-and-sniff centrefold, which must have been technologically edgy at the time but now seems like the kind of thing Fred Flintstone might enjoy. Throughout the 1990s Hustler continued to become more explicit, publishing shots of penetration, lesbianism, group sex and fetishes.
As Playboy and Penthouse et al. grew increasingly likely to get you fired if found on your work desk, a new form of porn-lite became popular. A genre referred to as ‘lads’ mags’ sprinkled articles about banter and alcoholism-as-a-lifestyle-choice between oily booby beauties’ boobs. Magazines such as Nuts, Loaded and FHM have all gone bust now,‡ which they must have hated because ‘bust’ is a relatively polite way of referring to breasts. They’d have preferred to go ‘jugs’ or ‘knockers’ or ‘TITS UP’ – yes, that works. The market for photographs of semi-dressed or completely nude women has now diminished because feminists’ arguments were so persuasive wizards worked out how to make photographs move and how to send them through the telephone wires. But did you know, before phone lines were used for the internet, they were used for phoning people …
