Who Created Porn
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Who Created Porn
Stephanie Pappas
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By
Stephanie Pappas
published October 11, 2010
Pornography is often portrayed as one of the ills of today's society, evidence of modern moral decay brought to you by video cameras and broadband access.
As it turns out, modern times have got nothing on the past. Pornography existed long before video or even photography , and many researchers think evolution predisposed humans for visual arousal (It's a lot easier to pass on your genes if the sight of other naked humans turns you on, after all). Whichever way you slice it, the diversity of pornographic materials throughout history suggests that human beings have always been interested in images of sex. Lots and lots of sex.
"Sex has always played a super-important role for human beings and their relationships," said Seth Prosterman, a clinical sexologist and licensed therapist in San Francisco. "What people do sexually has always been a curiosity, and of interest." [RELATED: New Technologies Let Pornography Producers Stay On Top ]
The definition of " pornography " is famously subjective. After all, one man's Venus de Milo is another man's masturbation aid. But researchers generally define the genre as material designed solely for sexual arousal, without further artistic merit.
By that standard, the first known erotic representations of humans might not be porn, in the traditional sense, at all. As early as 30,000 years ago, Paleolithic people were carving large-breasted, thick-thighed figurines of pregnant women out of stone and wood. Archaeologists doubt these "Venus figurines" were intended for sexual arousal. More likely, the figurines were religious icons or fertility symbols.
Fast-forwarding through history, the ancient Greeks and Romans created public sculptures and frescos depicting homosexuality, threesomes, fellatio and cunnilingus. In India during the second century, the Kama Sutra was half sex-manual, half relationship-handbook. The Moche people of ancient Peru painted sexual scenes on ceramic pottery, while the aristocracy in 16th century Japan was fond of erotic woodblock prints.
In the West, many early explicit materials were political, rather than exclusively pornographic, said Joseph Slade, a professor of media arts at Ohio University. French revolutionaries, in particular, satirized the aristocracy with sexually charged pamphlets. Even the Marquis de Sade's famously brutal and erotic works were part philosophical.
"They were political invectives disguised as pornography," Slade said.
In the 1800s, the idea of porn for porn's sake began to spread. Erotic novels had been in print since at least the mid-1600s in France (though being identified as the author of one meant a sure trip to jail), but the first full-length English-language pornographic novel, "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," also known as "Fanny Hill" (Oxford University Press) wasn't published until 1748.
Despite the reserved public attitudes toward sex at the time, pornographic novels held little back. The author of "Fanny Hill" managed to cover bisexuality , voyeurism, group sex and masochism, among other topics. By 1888, the anonymous author of "My Secret Life" was writing about sex with words that would make a modern television censor squirm.
Technology drove innovation in the porn genre. In 1839, Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype, a primitive form of photography. Almost immediately, pornographers commandeered the new technology. The earliest surviving dirty daguerreotype — described by Slade in a 2006 paper as "depicting a rather solemn man gingerly inserting his penis into the vagina of an equally solemn and middle-aged woman" — is dated at 1846.
Video followed a similar path. By 1896, filmmakers in France were delving into the erotic with short, silent clips like "Le Coucher de la Marie," in which an actress performed a strip tease. Hard-core sex started showing up after 1900. These "stag films" were usually shown at all-male gatherings, and they were tame by today's standards, Slade said.
"They look like your grandparents having sex," he said. "They were quaint, but it was real intercourse."
For a long time, stag films remained stagnant, both in content and in quality. Then, in the 1970s, changing social mores opened the door for public showing of explicit films. The Internet and the invention of the digital camera lowered the barriers to porn-making so low that entire websites are now devoted solely to non-professional videos.
The shift from publically viewed stag films to privately viewed rentals and internet downloads drove changes in the types of acts shown on-screen. Privacy, Slade said, made men more willing to watch fetish films depicting specific, sometimes odd, sexual behavior. A 1994 Carnegie Mellon study of early porn on computer Bulletin Board Systems (a precursor to the World Wide Web), found that 48 percent of downloads were far outside the sexual mainstream, depicting bestiality, incest and pedophilia. Less than 5 percent of downloads depicted vaginal sex. This could have been because magazines and pornographic films had traditional sex covered, and people went to their computers for images they couldn't find elsewhere, Slade suggested.
Today, porn is all over the internet, but the actual size of the industry is a mystery. No one keeps official records, and few studies have made a stab at the economics of porn. Adult Video News, a trade industry journal, made annual estimates of porn sales and rentals, along with sales of magazines and sex toys. In 2007, according to an AVN senior editor Mark Kernes, retail sales reached $6 billion a year. However, AVN's figures have been widely disputed. And even if they were reliable, the numbers wouldn't take into account all of the free amateur videos uploaded to sites like XTube or the photography site Flickr.
Regardless of how much money is being made, porn is attracting eyes. A 2008 study of 813 American university students found that 87 percent of men and 31 percent of women reported using pornography. The study was published in the Journal of Adolescent Research. And in 2009, University of Montreal researcher Simon Louis Lajeunesse made headlines when he announced that he had attempted a study on the impact of pornography on young men's sexuality, but he couldn't find a control group. In other words, good luck finding a man in his twenties who hasn't seen porn.
So what is all that porn doing to us? The question is a hornet's nest of controversy. While most mainstream Internet porn today doesn't rise to the level of those early Bulletin Board images, critics argue that competition between pornographers has led to an upswing in dominance and verbal abuse of women depicted in films made for straight men.
"They need to always put out something new, something enticing, to attract people," Chyng Sun, a professor of media studies at New York University and director of the film "The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships," told LiveScience. "The degradation, the aggression levels, that is something you can create, something a little bit new to offer to the audience."
By analyzing best-selling pornography films, Sun has found that physical and verbal aggression are present in 90 percent of mainstream porn scenes. Films directed by women are no less likely to contain aggression than films directed by men, she reported in a 2008 paper in the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly.
Sun argues that these aggressive images are harmful to people's sex lives and that they help cement negative stereotypes about women. Others disagree. Prosterman, the San Francisco sexologist, points out that research has failed to draw a clear link between porn and criminal sexual behavior. And, he said, porn is one way for people to explore their own sexual desires.
Debates about pornography have been ongoing since at least the Victorian era (no word on whether stone-age people hid the fertility statues under the mattress), and they're not likely to cease anytime soon. Nor are people likely to stop looking at pictures of other naked people.
"Most people like to have sex," said the AVN's Kernes. "A not-too-much-smaller segment of them like to watch other people have sex, and that is what the adult industry delivers."
Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior. She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association. Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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“Almighty God, Lord of all life, we praise You for the advancements in computerized communications that we enjoy in our time. Sadly, however, there are those who are littering this information superhighway with obscene, indecent, and destructive pornography.”
It was June 14, 1995, inside the Senate chamber in Washington, D.C., and Jim Exon, a 74-year-old Democrat from Nebraska with silver hair and glasses, had begun his address to his colleagues with a prayer written for this occasion by the Senate chaplin. He was there to urge his fellow senators to pass his and Indiana senator Dan Coats’ amendment to the Communications Decency Act , or CDA, which would extend the existing indecency and anti-obscenity laws to the “interactive computer services” of the burgeoning internet age. “Now, guide the senators,” Exon continued his prayer, “when they consider ways of controlling the pollution of computer communications and how to preserve one of our greatest resources: The minds of our children and the future and moral strength of our Nation. Amen.”
As the stone-faced senators watched, Exon held up a blue binder that, he warned, was filled with the sort of “perverted pornography” that was “just a few clicks away” online. “I cannot and would not show these pictures to the Senate, I would not want our cameras to pick them up,” he said, but “I hope that all of my colleagues, if they are interested, will come by my desk and take a look at this disgusting material.”
One by one, they flipped through the pages of “grotesque stuff,” as Coats put it, that innovation fostered. He cited figures—albeit dubious—from a study that found more than 450,000 pornographic images online that had been accessed approximately 6.4 million times the previous year. The main source had been the free newsgroups—alt.sex, alt.bestiality—and so on, that remained a Wild West of flesh and filth. “With old Internet technology, retrieving and viewing any graphic image on a PC at home could be laborious,” Coats explained, forebodingly. “New Internet technology, like browsers for the Web, makes all this easier.”
As urgent as the situation seemed to the senators, however, such concerns over pornography and emerging technology were far from new. John Tierney, a fellow at Columbia University who studied the cultural impact of technology, traced what he called the “erotic technological impulse” back at least 27,000 years—among the first clay-fired figures uncovered from that time were women with large breasts and behinds. “Sometimes the erotic has been a force driving technological innovation,” Tierney wrote in The New York Times in 1994, “virtually always, from Stone Age sculpture to computer bulletin boards, it has been one of the first uses for a new medium.”
Excerpted from The Players Ball: A Genius,a Con Man, and the Secret History of the Internet’s Rise, by David Kushner. Buy on Amazon .
Such depictions emerged, predictably, with every new technological advent. With cave art, there came sketches of reclining female nudes on walls of the La Magdelaine caves from 15,000 BC. When Sumerians discovered how to write cuneiform on clay tablets, they filled them with sonnets to vulvas. Among the early books printed on a Gutenberg press was a 16th-century collection of sex positions based on the sonnets of the man considered the first pornographer, Aretino—a book banned by the pope. Each new medium followed a similar pattern of innovation, porn, and outrage. One of the first films shown commercially was The Kiss in 1900, distributed by Thomas Edison, which depicted 18 seconds of a couple nuzzling.
“The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting,” one critic wrote, while Edison celebrated how the film “brings down the house every time.” The first erotic film, a striptease called Le Coucher de la Mariée , released in 1896, was also heating up audiences.
By the late 1950s, the advent of 8-mm film put the power of porn in anyone’s hands—and launched the modern porn industry. When videocassette recorders entered homes 20 years later, more than 75 percent of the tapes sold were porn. It became widely accepted that Sony’s decision to ban porn from its competing Betamax format doomed it to oblivion. More recently, the breaking apart of the Bell phone system in 1984 spawned the explosion in 900 phone-sex numbers. And so it was no surprise that the dawn of the internet was giving rise to the same kind of innovation, demand, and outrage that had been going on for eons.
The furor over internet pornography had started with the publication of a study, “Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway,” in The Georgetown Law Journal . The authoritative-sounding study, written by a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate, Marty Rimm, claimed to be “a Survey of 917,410 Images, Description, Short Stories and Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2000 Cities in Forty Countries, Provinces and Territories.” Rimm asserted that 80 percent of images on newsgroups, the primary repository of pictures online, were porn.
That shocking figure caught the attention of Time magazine, which published a cover story on July 3, 1995, just in time for holiday readers, announcing the soon-to-be-released findings. The cover photo showed a young boy at a computer keyboard, bathed in blue light, eyes wide, mouth opened in horror. “CYBERPORN,” the cover line screamed, “a new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids—and free speech?” As the writer put it in the piece, “If you think things are crazy now, though, wait until the politicians get hold of a report coming out this week.”
He was right. Despite the outcry of civil libertarians and skeptics (“Rimm’s implication that he might be able to determine ‘the percentage of all images available on the Usenet that are pornographic on any given day’ was sheer fantasy,” as Mike Godwin wrote on HotWired), Rimm’s study became the basis of the Communications Decency Act proposal. And, as Exon put it during the Senate gathering, their responsibility was clear. Despite objections over the restrictions on free speech, the CDA would target the burgeoning purveyors of porn online, who would now face up to two years in prison for posting obscene material that could be accessed by anyone under age 18. When the vote was taken, the answer was overwhelming: The Senate, and later the House, approved the CDA.
By summer, however, the basis of the law had been resoundingly discredited. Rimm’s paper, savaged by critics, was found to have been published without peer review—feeding conspiracy theories that it was all the machinations of anti-porn activists. The New York Times dismissed the study as “a rip-snorter,” filled with “misleading analysis, ambiguous definitions and unsupported conclusions.” Attacked by internet trolls, Rimm went into hiding. But his work, and the senators,’ was done.
On February 8, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act into law. “Today,” he said, “with the stroke of a pen, our laws will catch up with the future.” For Exon and the others, it couldn’t have come soon enough. “If nothing is done now,” as he had urged his colleagues during the hearing, “the pornographers may become the primary beneficiary of the information revolution.”
One day in Boca Raton, Florida, in May 1996, Jordan Levinson, the owner of AIS Marketing, a startup that brokered ads for adult websites, received a call from a man who wanted to benefit from the burgeoning underworld of the information revolution: Stephen Cohen.
Levinson, who had worked with his father running a phone-sex company, had encountered plenty of wannabe pornographers in his day, and he sensed that, as he later put it, Cohen “didn’t seem too knowledgeable of the industry.” But Cohen had something more valuable: the one domain that anybody with a computer and a modem would type if they were looking for porn, www.sex.com. So he readily struck a deal to buy, sell, and collect
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