When I tell people that I have been working on six one-hour
documentaries recounting, for the first time, the history of pornography, they take this
in a number of different ways. One or two are genuinely interested, but few can resist
expressing varying degrees of distaste, from outright disapproval to a liberal yawn.
Almost everyone is too polite not to feign interest and for this they pay dearly as they
are pinned against the wall and harangued about the finer points of pornographic history
until they make a determined attempt to escape.
My interest in pornography dates back to when I was a student and co-editor of Isis,
the Oxford University magazine. In 1981, we decided to review the state of the porn
business in Britain. When our "Empire of the Senses" issue hit the stands, WH
Smith withdrew it from its shelves. Then the university faculty got involved. Then the
police. It was fun for about five minutes. Years later the person who had co-authored the
article read me a letter his mother had written to him, cautioning him to avoid me since I
was someone who apparently enjoyed masturbating in public.
Since then the hysteria pornography tends to provoke has dwindled. Somewhat. I
overestimated the sea change when, in 1988, Porn Gold by David Hebditch and Nick Anning
was published. This was the first book to look at the adult entertainment business without
having a moral axe to grind. Inspired by their books to try and make a history of
pornography for television, I got the authors on the phone. Good luck, they said. They
were in no doubt that a TV history of porn would never fly.
The first proposal went off to Channel 4 in 1989. It was flat-out rejected, as were
many subsequent approaches. In 1992 I pitched the idea to the BBC. They liked it, and a
tortuous three-year process began. Through 1994 the BBC edged closer to commissioning the
series. A few weeks later a newspaper article attacked the project as an outrageous use of
licence-payers' money. It was accompanied by a dismissal by the BBC: they had no plans to
pursue such a project.
After six years of trying, I was ready to call it a day. However, marching in step with
these failed efforts, pornography was edging its way from the margins into the mainstream.
The movement began in universities, where academics were studying pornography's rich
heritage. In 1987 Walter Kendrick published his seminal text, The Secret Museum. In 1989
Linda Williams published Hard Core: Pleasure and the "Frenzy of the Visible", in
1991 Bernard Arcand published The Jaguar and the Anteater and in 1993 Lynn Hunt edited a
collection of essays that was published under the collective title The Invention of
Pornography.
At the same time, porn studies were beginning to be taught on American campuses. In
1993 Constance Penley started teaching a course on pornographic film at the University of
California at Santa Barbara. The following year Linda Williams began teaching her course
Pornographies On/Scene at Berkeley.
Running parallel with this academic interest, pornography was even becoming chic in pop
culture. Today there is a sports leisure clothing line called Porn Star, which trades on
blazing the name across T-shirts and baseball caps. Calvin Klein appropriated the standard
trademarks of the mid-1970s porn flicks - such as wood veneer and shag-pile carpeting -
for his provocative ad campaigns, and music videos also adopted the look. Hollywood has
even joined in, sanitising the business of sleaze first in 1996 with The People Vs Larry
Flynt, a lionising biopic of the founder of Hustler magazine, and then with Burt Reynolds
playing a lovable porn director in Boogie Nights in 1997.
But perhaps there is no greater signifier of today's porn milieu than the Monica
Lewinsky scandal, which played out on the world stage like a talk-show episode. The New
York Times decided that "blow job" was fit to print, Penthouse published a
portrait of Bill Clinton collaged out of thousands of hardcore stills, and an enterprising
company released Scenes from the Oral Office, a hardcore parody of the Starr Report.
While hardcore pornography is still illegal in Britain, the media circumvented the ban
by creating pseudo-porn. Newsagents' shelves were bursting with magazines showing sex on
their covers. Sky, Loaded and FHM have all found circulation gold with cheery smut, while
the Erotic Review has enjoyed similar success by ploughing a higher brow. This riot of
pseudo-porn, however, conspicuously dances around the margins of pornography itself. In
this environment it seemed that the straightforward history of pornography, as distinct
from the moral brouhaha forever swirling around it, was a story yet to be told.
But the clarity of this approach almost immediately became bogged down as we agonised
over the title. Would this be a history of porn or erotica? The popular wisdom is that if
something is erotic, it can be sexual, even explicitly so, and that is OK, in contrast to
something that is pornographic, which is not OK. As art critic Edward Lucie-Smith points
out, parents have no problem looking at Bronzino's Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, which
depicts a naked woman being French-kissed by a naked boy who is not only underage but also
her son, while they are having kittens about their kids seeing things on the internet. The
difference, then, is not in the content but the context. All too often the
"erotic" is a veil used to aesthetically redeem the unacceptable raw expression
of sex.
For the wretched and phoney distinction between erotic and pornographic we have DH
Lawrence to thank. Lady Chatterley's Lover is organised around his dichotomy between
natural lovemaking (the erotic) and mechanical masturbation (the pornographic). It mirrors
a traditional way of separating the wheat of the erotic art from the chaff of pornographic
rubbish that is centuries old. In 1668 Samuel Pepys picked up a copy of an early erotic
novel L'Ecole des Filles. Having read it and pleasured himself, he threw the "idle
roguish book" on the fire.
In short, if you jerk off to it, it can have no other redeeming value. Three centuries
later the same crude arousal test persists, reinforced by the high-profile trial of Lady
Chatterley's Lover as a test case of the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 when it was
eventually published in the UK, some 30 years after Lawrence wrote it. The defence took
its cue from Lawrence's hysterical philosophy of the pornographic as some sort of
masturbatory grotesque and lined up a parade of scholars and authors to bear witness to
this, blinding the prosecution with their erudition and arguing that Lawrence's work, far
from being obscene and pornographic, was the opposite - erotic, artistic literature.
It was a brilliant legal scam, a perfect counter to the absurd wording of the Obscene
Publications Act, to which we owe the popular definition of pornography: "that which
has a tendency to deprave and corrupt". Canonising Lady Chatterley's Lover as a work
of art not only reinforced the notion of the pornographic as something likely to deprave
and corrupt, it also suggested the erotic was something finer minds could enjoy without
risk.
Once we had decided the series would be a history of pornography rather than erotica,
how would we define it? One definition appears in Webster's dictionary in 1864:
"licentious painting or literature, especially the painting anciently employed to
decorate walls of rooms devoted to bacchanalian orgies", referring to the shocking
discoveries at Pompeii in the 18th century.
In The Secret Museum, Walter Kendrick explores the shock that confronted the early
Victorians when they first learned of the finds from Pompeii. The question that faced them
was what to do with the abundance of lewd artefacts they found that were obviously part of
everyday life for the ancient Romans?
The solution was to place them in a "secret museum", where "gentlemen
with appropriate demeanour (and ready cash for the custodian), would be admitted to the
locked chamber where controversialities lurked; women, children and the poor of both sexes
and all ages were excluded". The idea of the secret museum caught on with museums all
over Europe setting up their own restricted collections, from l'Enfer in Paris to the
Private Case at the British Library in London.
Reading The Secret Museum was both enlightening and frustrating. Enlightening because I
realised that if pornography is a social construct, and a relatively recent one at that,
the attempt to define it is a trick question, since essentially no such thing exists. It
is only naming the thing that creates it. Instead of being a concretely, separately
defined entity, much so-called pornography belongs as a part of the history of
civilisation, merely representing the development of sexual representation, and is quite
undeserving of any secret shame.
In telling the history of pornography, the purpose of our series was suddenly clear: to
deconstruct the secret museum. But such a project was also doomed to failure. One of the
most abundant subjects of images and artefacts found among the ruins of Pompeii, and in
ancient sites generally, was that of the erect phallus. Today, in spite of our apparently
liberal attitude, the erect phallus is conspicuous by its absence from our culture. There
is a moment in the series when a drawer containing objects from another restricted
collection (the Witt Collection) was opened in the bowels of the British Museum.
It was full of penises - clay amulets, bronze sculptures and other ancient artefacts.
It was hard not to gasp with laughter. But then came the revulsion, because to see all
these little penises like this suggested something quite disturbing. Since then I have
wondered if the result of our documentaries might just perpetuate the bottom-drawer
mentality of the pornographic mindset, even though our motive - to rehabilitate these
images by exploring their history and social context - could hardly be more different.
Even more frustrating, our television history will inevitably serve as an electronic
version of a secret museum: airing on Channel 4, a network with primary appeal to social
groups A, B and C1 (the modern equivalent of "gentlemen with appropriate
demeanour"), it will be transmitted after the 9.30pm watershed, a time when more men
are watching, fewer women, and, theoretically, no children.
Of course, while less formal than a secret museum - ultimately anyone can watch
television - it is perhaps, at the same time, even more restrictive. To conform with
broadcast regulations, the series will, while containing full-frontal nudity, show little
or no penetration or male erect members. Nevertheless, it still seemed a valuable
exercise, because for every object preserved in a museum, secret or otherwise, countless
others have been destroyed.
Because pornography's heritage has been so relentlessly destroyed and mutilated through
the ages, what we are allowed to glimpse today are but fragments of a lost history of
civilisation. This lost heritage suggests that, far from being a smutty sideshow,
pornography has played a vital, central role in civilisation.
Once again the museum is the key to what that role might be. Typically, museum objects
are placed on view in glass cabinets. This effects a disconnection between us and the
object, sealing them off further from their past and their context. Many objects had
ceremonial use or were simply everyday items that were there to be used and touched. But
here, peering at these isolated objects in locked glass cases, we are rendered voyeurs,
able to engage only with a gaze the intensity of which is, in itself, potentially
pornographic.
From the glass case of the museum to the glass that frames the pictures, from the lens
of the camera to the movie-theatre projector, from the TV screen of video to the computer
screen of the digital era, the story of pornography as the story of peering at things
through glass is also the story of media. It is the story of our obsession with inventing
and using mediating technologies to help us view, probe and gaze into the very nature of
things.
Pornography is the critical factor in this process because so often it was the initial
application for those evolving media, helping them refine their gaze, easing them from the
margins into the mainstream. With photography, for example, audiences used to the
idealised figures in nude paintings were shocked by the lumpen ugliness and artless poses
of real bodies in photographs which also invited the label "pornographic".
Gradually, however, people learned how to act in front of the camera, and an instrument of
scientific observation became one of artistic and sexual expression. Today access to the
lens - either via home video or Webcam - has become fully democratised.
The story of pornography is, therefore, no less than the story of the evolution of
mediating technologies. Interwoven with this is the story of the struggle to control them.
From the printing press, through photography, film and video, to the computer age, each of
these media is a democratising force, giving increasing numbers of people the power of
representation. At the same time, each has largely been demonised as an agent of chaos.
Centuries ago it was the printing press, today it is the internet.
Countering this social and political repression, the new technologies have found
subversive power through their alliance with pornography. Pornography shrugs off every
kind of attire - literal and metaphorical - and this barefaced nakedness cannot but mock
the hypocrisies and pretensions of the status quo. In short, pornography loves to
masturbate in public.
I believe the outcome of the titanic struggle between pornography and the establishment
is a foregone conclusion. As each new medium delivers on its democratising promise,
passing the baton to another that continues the process, there will ultimately come a
point where pornography is so commonplace that it is rendered completely unsecret and
without taboo. The internet, more than any other medium before, has delivered this.
The internet has also dealt a severe blow to the establishment forces used to
regulating pornography. So long as it took a physical form - books, magazines, videos -
pornography could always be seized and destroyed. But recently pornography has shed its
physical form and gone digital. Moreover, the internet offers the consumer not just every
kind of imaginable sexual encounter but also, while offering the solitary private
masturbatory experience typical of all pornography, the opportunity to reach out and touch
someone with the same rarefied interests.
For example, one website lists all the parks, toilets and public places in the world
where those seeking sex with men can meet. More masturbating in public! If pornography is
no longer a solitary masturbatory experience, but a gateway to some other relationship or
intercourse; if pornography was invented as a regulatory category yet can no longer be
regulated, will it - at least in the form we know it - simply cease to exist? No, taboos
and prejudices can be eroded but are rarely erased. Nevertheless, the sense of pornography
as something shameful and transgressive seems to be fading.
I am not an evangelist for pornography, because that would imply a belief that porn
contains some moral force for good (or ill). Ultimately, it has no such force. These are
representations only. We invest them with voodoo powers like their ability to deprave and
corrupt at our peril. I doubt that anyone believes themselves to have been depraved or
corrupted by images that they have seen. People who do believe that such a thing can
happen generally assume it on behalf of the unknown others who are supposed to be weaker
or, in some way, less fortunate than themselves. Perhaps at the heart of all this lies a
profound discomfort with our sexuality and its impenetrable mystery. But, whether we
continue to demonise it as pornography or not, there is no doubt that we will continue to
employ all our arts to represent and express sexuality's essence, just as we always have.
