By Joanna Danias 

Pornography is a modern invention. In 1858 the word pornography was taken from Greek origin of the word for ‘writing about prostitutes’ and defined as any “movies, pictures, magazines, etc., that show or describe naked people or sex in a very open and direct way in order to cause sexual excitement”¹ Ever since that moment, the modern world has sought to categorize and hide away this form of communication despite the proliferation of it across the ancient world. What was once considered the most egalitarian act a person could participate in, was removed from democratized consumption and relegated to only a special few who had both the wealth and standing. How has our relationship with this form of communication come full circle in just over 200 years, from being the art of human nature to the dangerous temptation of mankind and returning to the pornographic saturation of the internet age? 

Throughout the ancient world and across cultures, depictions of sex are seen everywhere. In Asia, the Japanese made woodblock Shunga to depict themselves in sexual congress while the Hindu cultures of the Indian subcontinent produced the Kamasutra, literally translating into ‘the human goal of desire as a thread in which is weaved through a healthy life’. In South America the Andean culture of the Moche depicted sexual acts in their ceramics, often times in homosexual positions, as a offering for the afterlife world to increase fertility. The Moche believed that the afterlife was the opposite of life, therefore offerings of acts of homosexuality would be seen by those who have passed on as ‘fertile’ and rewarded with acts of sex that would then produce a child.² In Greece, pottery has been found showing sexual acts in a multitude of varieties, all with very little regard for what the modern world would call ‘decency’. However, it wasn’t until the uncovering of the city at Pompeii that we see sex depicted in daily life, frozen in time under the ash of the volcano Vesuvius.³ 

In 1748, almost by accident, a city was discovered under several feet of volcanic ash. It would end up being an amazing archeological discovery of life in the Roman era, frozen as it stood one fateful day in A.D. 79 when the local volcano, Vesuvius, erupted and buried the entire city. As it was being excavated, archaeologists found art showing sex nearly in all corners of the city. From main rooms and slave quarters to bath houses, their walls were decorated in frescos showing Roman sexuality. Moreover, the ancient Pompeii people also had many vessels and figurines that displayed erect penises and gods in compromising positions. Sexuality, to their culture, was as public as eating or washing. Despite their apparent openness of erotica, the people of the Roman culture also had sexual taboos. Oral sex was considered base and unappealing to the Romans because the mouth is where one communicated from and to defile that would lead to bad breath, poor oral health, and even questionable thoughts.⁴ While homosexuality was not considered taboo, citizen males would never allow themselves to be penetrated, instead they would be free to only penetrate other men to avoid having their ‘virtue’ or masculinity questioned.  

What Pompeii reveals to us about the sexual imagery of the ancient world is that the self, and the control of desires, was the responsibility of the individual. Moral turpitude was not a regulated idea, but instead an act which the individual contributed to daily through self control and reinforced by cultural norms. It is our behavior in the public world that provide us with virtue, not a public rule of law that should be obeyed. A person of high moral standing is balanced in his appetites for food, wine and sex. In Rome, no law truly could regulate it’s citizenry into morality.  

The Victorian Era archaeologists excavating the ruins of Pompeii, 1700 years after it’s terrible fate, came from a completely different mindset than the culture they were studying. In the modern era, morality and virtue was thought to be something that could be regulated beyond the reinforcement of social pressures to conform. Christian doctrine mixed with a belief in the refinement of our animalistic urges changed the way society in the west regulated it’s citizens. Governmental repression was used to replace the ancient world’s idea of self control; decorum rules, both de jure and de facto, were created. The newly coined term, “pornography”, was used to describe the artifacts and frescoes that were everywhere in the ruins of Pompeii and with that came a concerted effort to make sure that these images were not widely distributed to the public. Instead, they were locked away in Naples and only through a screening process were men of high moral character with intentions of academic study allowed to view the collection. ⁵⁶ 

The stratification of pornography began when those in the power elite of European Victorian society decided not to share freely the collection of artifacts from Pompeii, but to instead maintain a system of controls. In regards to the spoils of Pompeii, only men were allowed to view it and of those men, only those in the top tier of society. However, that did not stop men of the day from collecting drawings of erotica from the ancient world and erotic art pieces. Within a few decades, the invention of the camera would revolutionize the way we distributed images across the globe and so would begin the dispersal of salacious photos that would come to define pornography in the modern era.  

By the time Reuben Sturman invented the peep show booth, film was making a turn to overtake picture pornography. What Sturman did was take old stag films that were watched, mostly illegally, in dark, smoke filled rooms crowded with men and put them into a machine that could be viewed alone. For a dime a person could get a sample of sex on film and with the addition of walls and a box of tissues, privacy returned to pornography.⁷ With his invention, there became a direct revenue stream for film. Suddenly, in California and countries like Denmark, a new industry was born. It was in this era that the idea of creating a full length feature film with sexual content was being dreamed up. In a time where the old Hollywood Hays codes were being relaxed, filmmakers were pushing the limits of what the public would tolerate and what would be profitable.  

It was in this era that most men in who are currently in their 50’s started to realize the entertainment of pornography. For Jack⁸, a man born in the United States in 1960, the movie Deep Throat came out when he was 12 years old and he reminisced about the mix of Watergate and scandalous coverage of the movie’s premier in New York City on the evening’s news. That, however, was not his first porn movie, it was instead ‘Rocking with Seka’ in 1980 down in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. The reality that he could remember the movie 36 years later pays homage to the idea that most men have a rite of passage in regards to porn. For John⁹, a fresh immigrant from Greece, his first major introduction to pornography was in 1970’s New York City Time’s Square, with all it’s adult stores and peep show booths. Before that, all he had ever seen of pornography was pictures and magazines passed around between soldiers in the army or at trade school in Stockholm. However, Time’s Square stands firmly in his mind as the epicenter of adult entertainment and his foray into his clandestine collection of magazines. 

Despite nearly 20 years between the two, Jack and John share the same memories of the 1970’s as being the moment where pornography became more mainstream. Playboy magazine began publishing in 1953 and Penthouse in 1965, but their complete saturation into the market coincided with a push to release the moral shackles of censorship and the release of Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door and the Devil in Miss Jones. Jack, as we spoke, recalled fondly Marilyn Chambers, “with her crooked smile when she came” as if he knew her intimately. It is this kind of connection to film with people that separates it from still photos. In an interview, Marilyn Chambers remarked on that phenomenon. She explained that the male depiction of satisfaction is overt, the cumming of semen, and can be captured easily in a photo. However, she continues, the orgasm of a woman is “internal and subtle”¹⁰ and not easily captured in a frame but requires time to develop and movies provide that. In a sense, movies are not framed for men, but instead for women to show their satisfaction and in turn, satisfy the male viewer who enjoys, in some small way, the satisfaction of the woman he is interacting with, despite it being on screen. This symbolic transfer from screen to reality makes a better connection for male viewers who are seeking to be aroused and also seeking to reinforce their masculinity by witnessing the satisfaction of a woman.  

This internal satisfaction feedback seems to be revealed in a survey¹¹ I conducted online. With nearly 85 respondents from every race, religion, and a sampling of countries from all over the globe the resounding opinion was that viewers want to see sex in action and they want the actors to look much like the people around them. A majority of respondents were influenced by both their culture and their religion and their responses showed that those influences also filtered down into their pornographic tastes. Viewers sought realism over fantasy, amateurs over polished actors, and culturally normative sex over fetish sex. In a quick study of porn searches by country, both PornHub.com and PornMD.com, both show anal sex as being incredibly popular in both highly Catholic and highly Islamic countries and study revealed that in both cases, anal sex was a cultural norm for cultures that defined virginity as a virtue.¹² When virginity is protected, the act of anal and oral sex becomes more popular and thus influences the pornography habits of it’s population, creating a norm.  

In the previous charts, from my survey, you can see a negative correlation between what is considered fetish and odd and what is being viewed. For example, anal sex overall is not considered widely as fetish, however the act known as pegging (female to male anal sex) is rated as outside the norm and in correlation, it is viewed much less frequently. Taboo acts of sex, like forced sex, are seen as not arousing by my group and is rarely watched. Despite the multitude of fetish sites on the internet that just provide content that simulates rape (or doesn’t even simulate it), a strong majority does not seek it out or if they do, seek it out only as an oddity.  

In Jack’s case, fetish porn is seen as another flavor of entertainment. While his sexual predilections have grown since his youth to include many things our survey group considered odd or fetish, he admits that pornography is more entertainment than an act of sexual release. When asked, both Jack and John admitted to having phases of pornography in their lives where they sought it out more or less, sought out different types, or just didn’t view it at all. John admitted to using pornography more during the times in his life where his wife was apart from him for months at a time and much less when his sex life was more plentiful. Jack, on the other hand, believes that the quantity of consumption only wavered slightly, but the content during times of celibacy were much more varied and fetish oriented. In his mind, when the consumption was frequent, his boredom of ‘vanilla’ sex led him to seek out different scenes to flood his head. “It’s like a movie, you can love it and it can be your favorite movie…but really, you get bored of watching it everyday.” Jack says to explain his varied sexual tastes in pornography. 

For Jack, he views porn frequently. The survey respondents and insight statistics from the internet show that pornography consumption is much less frequent, more weekly than daily. But how does culture define our tastes in regards to the actors within the pornography that we are viewing. When looking through the top searches from each region and country, you can find that while famous pornography actors are searched frequently, far more people are looking for amateur scenes filmed by regular people performing sex. In Arab nations, the women are larger than the stereotypical ‘Archetype’ of the porn queen. Georgina Spelvin, the actress in the landmark film The Devil in Miss Jones, spoke to the idea of the realism versus a polished Hollywood scene.¹³ “There is an archetype of sexuality that changes from generation to generation” an idea of perfect female sexuality that defines breast size, waist size, height, hair and the physicalities of beauty. On the other hand there is The Goddess, the reality of beauty that sits within each individual that is defined by the people, culture, and happening around them. As pornography consumers, we peek at the ‘Archetypes’ as we peek at a work of art, but we seek to make love to the Goddess, a real and living being that has the biological and kinetic attributes of the females or males around us. This plays out in the statistics of what American’s view in our pornography. Despite living in a country where most of the pornography is created from an industry that rivals that of Hollywood, with it’s polished scenes and plastic surgery manufactured beauty, we consume more amateur and realistic pornography that puts on display all the imperfections of body and person.¹⁴  

In the survey, the questions that pitted either actors or sexual acts that resemble your own life versus actors that look foreign or acts that were more fantasy were answered with responses that more closely related their own lives. That means that our cultural ideas, in both form and function, dictate what we enjoy in our pornography. If you are from a culture that enjoys oral sex, unlike the Ancient Romans, than oral sex will be a term you would use to search for pornography. That does not dismiss the fact that fetishism exists, but the majority of consumers of porn seek reality over fantasy.  

Pornography has saturated the internet and our modern lives to the point that it is nearly impossible to find somebody that hasn’t had contact with it. In fact, recently a professor attempted to study the differences between young men who watch pornography and those who do not.  The study had to be scrapped because nobody could be found who had not viewed pornography. ¹⁵¹⁶ In this saturated landscape, our world starts to look more and more like the ancient world of Pompeii, where sexuality is displayed in every aspect of our lives. No longer can the power structure of any country or culture regulate it’s disbursement, as the Victorians had attempted. In truth, countries that do, like China, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia all fail at completely removing this content from it’s population because adaptive techniques maintain a steady flow into their cultures. Insight statistics can be found for each one of those countries online and while it hampers the consumption, it doesn’t stop it. Once again we return to the egalitarian system of sexuality in modern times. No longer is gender or class a barrier to consuming the art of arousal and sexuality. John, talking of his youth, “It wasn’t like it didn’t exist. We were poor and our country was poor. To buy a magazine was the same money as buying meat for a week. So we never saw them unless somebody gave it to us like a hand me down.” This stratification is being erased as the internet finds its way further and further into all the corners of the world. Free pornography is the preference in the computer age and free is egalitarian. Even the Roman’s appreciated the egalitarian nature of pornography; In Pompeii, pictures of sexual acts were often found in the quarters of the families slaves or domestic workers.¹⁷ Through my interviews and survey there is a common theme to pornography consumption and to quote a surveyor, “Porn exists and will exist because we like to have sex.” 

In the end, culture and all it’s trappings seems to influence our tastes in sex and that is inferred in our tastes in pornography. Each culture brings their own taboos and defines the normative sexual behaviors of it’s citizens, however what it doesn’t do is repress it to extinction. In modern times, our social controls on how we both appreciate our shared sexuality and share our sexual tastes have nearly been erased from the Victorian era returning us to the ancient worlds internalization of a moral code through self control. The survey respondents realize this internal control because a majority of them do not consume porn daily and internet insights also bring out this reality. In the end I think pornography star, Dylan Ryan put it best, “Porn has proliferated and taken so many hits. It prevails and continues to be one of the many pop culture meters that is both affected by what people want and determines what people want. It is the ultimate representation of human sexuality and is the biggest way we incorrectly interpret human sexuality. Porn is us.” ¹⁸  

¹ “Pornography Defined.” Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster. Web. 31 May 2016. 

² Holloway, April. “Sex Pottery of Peru: Moche Ceramics Shed Light on Ancient Sexuality: Page 2 of 2.” Ancient Origins. 15 May 2015. Web. 31 May 2016. 

³ Frost, Stuart. “Secret Museums: Hidden Histories of Sex and Sexuality.”Museums & Social Issues 3.1 (2008): 29-40. Web. <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/msi.2008.3.1.29&gt;. 

⁴ Montague, Holly W. Journal of the History of Sexuality 4.3 (1994): 449-52. Web 

⁵ Morton, Ella. “The Secret Cabinet of Banned Erotic Art From Pompeii.” Slate Magazine. 2014. Web. 31 May 2016. 

⁶ Pornography: The Secret History of Civilization. Perf. Marilyn Milgrim. New World Entertainment, 1999. Http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/pornography-secret-history-civilisation/. 

⁷ “Cleveland Magazine – Your Guide to the Best of Cleveland.” Cleveland Magazine – Your Guide to the Best of Cleveland. 12 Dec. 2012. Web. 01 June 2016. 

⁸ “Anonymous Interview with Jack, Age 56.” Interview by Joanna K. Danias. Print 

⁹ “Anonymous Interview with John, Age 74.” Interview by Joanna K. Danias. Print 

¹⁰ Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation. Perf. Marilyn Milgrim. New World Entertainment, 1999. Http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/pornography-secret-history-civilisation/. 

¹¹ Danias, Joanna K. Survey on Ethnic and Cultural Influence on Pornography Taste. 20 May 2016. Survey. Surveymonkey.com. 

¹² DeYoung, Miller. “11 Things You Learn From Watching Porn From Around The World.” Thought Catalog. 23 June 2014. Web. 

¹³ Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation. Perf. Marilyn Milgrim. New World Entertainment, 1999. Http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/pornography-secret-history-civilisation/. 

¹⁴ “Pornhub Insights :: Digging Deep into the Data.” Pornhub Insights :: Digging Deep into the Data. Web. 01 June 2016. 

¹⁵ “All Men Watch Porn, Scientists Find.” The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group. Web. 01 June 2016. 

¹⁶ Lajeunesse, S.-L., and J.-M. Deslauriers. “Point De Vue Masculin Sur La Pornographie : Des Fantasmes à La Réalité.” Sexologies 22.1 (2013): 32-41. Web. 

¹⁷ “Ancient Digger Archaeology.” : Pompeii: Erotic Art and Roman Sexuality. 21 May 2012. Web. 01 June 2016. 

¹⁸ “The Rumpus Interview with Dylan Ryan.” The Rumpusnet The Rumpus Interview with Dylan Ryan Comments. 2013. Web. 01 June 2016.