History[editar]See also: History of erotic representations
Pornography and erotic representations date back to ancient civilization times, as old and primitive as the Paleolithic era.1 The modern concept of pornography, prevailing today, is defined from the massive commercialization of erotic material in the 19th century during the Victorian Era, abandoning its erotic-artistic character and increasing distribution from mass production that defined the Second Industrial Revolution.2 3 Modern pornography achieves its greatest presence starting from the Sexual Revolution (Golden Age of porn) during the 1970s until today.3 4
Antecedents[/editar][editar][editar]Venus of Willendorf (c. 25,000 B.C.). In the primitive society of the nomadic Homo sapiens, belonging to the Paleolithic period, magical thinking and empirical bases develop as fundamental principles of primitive religions, basing human creationism on what was observed from animal reproductive capacities.1 5 In primitive tribes, the totemic cult is established towards anatomical structures dedicated to procreation; the cult towards the uterus (object of worship due to its ability to retain the fetus and childbirth) and the phallic cult (considered as depository of life).6 7 Based on ancient cults, it is assumed that Paleoitic Venus figurines, such as the Venus of Willendorf, evoke human admiration for genitals, maternity, fertility, and eroticism, through exaggerated breast and buttock proportions, with a possible intention to represent pornography.1 8 In classical Indian cultures, the virtues of sexuality were understood in various forms such as marriage, masturbation, group sex, polygamy, and homosexuality.9 10 It was believed that sex, especially in philosophies like Tantra, was part of natural human divinity and, on occasion, represented a path to spiritual illumination.9 11 According to religious visions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, most religious practices and philosophical magnified the importance of sexual activity through practices and erotic stories; such as the Ashvamedha Yajna of the Rigveda.12 13 The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (c. 400-200 B.C.E.) is the epitome of ancient Indian sexuality, a book that describes ideal sexual practices for a heterosexual couple in marriage.9 14 The society of ancient India was accustomed to sexuality and nudity, to the extent of enshrining it in much of the sacred art that adorned ceremonial centers.9 12 Exterior reliefs that adorn Khajuraho are possible to observe different sexual representations that represent human sexuality and the sexuality between deities.15 The epic poems of Ramayana and Mahabharata (c. 1500 A.C.) contained various erotic allusions and both were determinants in the construction of the sexually societies of ancient Orient, directly influencing the sexual policies and morals of Japanese culture, Chinese culture, and Tibetan cultures.9 16 In China, the first sex manuals and erotic poems date back to 200 A.C., based on theological visions about gender complementarity and strongly influenced by Indian culture texts, as well as graphic representations of sex in traditional popular art such as painting and ceramics.17 18 Detail about Greek ceramic of a prostitute and a client (c. 480 A.C.). Classic societies in Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire adopted human sexuality as the basis of artistic expression. In Classical Art, there is a strong aesthetic fixation on representing mythical beings and the human body, where the female body represented attributes of beauty and fertility, and the male body represented attributes of strength and virility.19 Within Greek mythology, deities and stories were introduced to divine sexuality and recurring themes included polygamy, homosexuality, pederasty, sexual abuse, master-slave relationships, group sex, transgenderism, intersexuality, and bestiality.19 20 Classical art was frequently phallocentric, positioning genitals as the central form of plastic arts (painting, sculpture, ceramics, and mosaic) in a probable pornographic intention.21 The representation of sexual scenes was common in popular Roman Empire, whose visions on sexuality approached morally to the visions of Classical Greece. One of the clearest examples of the sexual morality of ancient Roman Empire are the details of the frescoes in the Suburban Baths in Pompeii, where scenes with sexual acts can be appreciated that include forms of group sex, female-female sex, cunnilingus, and male anal sex. Other clear examples are the homoerotic details of the Warren Cup (c. 1st century) and the Roman tradition of fascinus.22 23 In classical erotic literature, notable works stand out such as Erothikos by Plutarch, Thesmophoriazusae by Aristophanes, and Satyrikon by Petronius; besides authors like: Stratón of Sardis, Safo of Lesbos, Automedón, Philodemus of Gadara, Marcus Argentarius, Gaius Valerius Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Martial, Juvenal, and Priapeos.22 [citation required]
In the Middle Ages, with the dominance of Christianity, pornography was understood as a form of lust and therefore as a mortal sin; masturbation, fornication, sodomy, adultery, and prostitution were considered criminal or unnatural offenses that were corrected with religious punishments, even torture and death in the Inquisition.24 The art of the Middle Ages defined itself in the teocentric style, through religious allusions to biblical passages and offerings that exalted divine perfection, so nudity and sex were incompatible with religious images.25 Erotic literature appears, under controversy, in the last centuries of the Middle Ages in works such as Decameron (1353) by Giovanni Boccaccio, introducing erotic fiction into post-classical periods, besides Facetiae (15th century) by Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini and Historia de Duobus Amantibus (1444) by Pius II.
16th century[/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar]Jupiter and Juno (16th century) by Agostino Carracci.
Pornography, in a form similar to the current one (mass-produced pornography), appears in the 16th century during the early years of the Italian Renaissance printing culture, a period when the reproduction of literature and engravings increases significantly due to the improvement of medieval printing developed by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century. The birth of pornography in the printing culture period is defined with the appearance of pornographic engravings I Modi (1524) by Giulio Romano, engravings that were published under the direction of Marcantonio Raimondi, illustrating 16 scenes from Greek-Roman mythology showing nudity and explicit sex. The engravings were seized and destroyed according to Pope Clement VIII's orders, who also ordered Raimondi's imprisonment, accusing him of immorality. The original versions disappeared, but were copied by Agostino Carracci in the mid-16th century, surviving until today.
Sonetti lussuriosi (1527) and Ragionamenti (1534-1536) by Pietro Aretino were important works that defined pornographic literature of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Sonetti lussuriosi was a politically incorrect pornographic prose that incorporated Giulio Romano's I Modi art, which was popular among the aristocracy in the 16th century. In 1558, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptamerón is published, another significant work of the printing culture in the history of pornography. In the plastic arts, influenced by Renaissance humanism, nudity and admiration for the human body reappear, although pornographic art begins to distinguish itself from simply erotic art. Artists like Michelangelo Buonarroti incorporated notable homoerotic characteristics into scenes that are not erotic in religious tradition, such as He appreciates in the Crucifix of the Santo Spirito (1492) that shows the image of Jesus Christ totally naked and in a neotenic body of an adolescent; or the tomb of Pope Julius II, a religious monument adorned by several male figures completely nude; this peculiar artistic current marked the transition from the puritanism of the medieval age to the aesthetic admiration of the Renaissance.24 On the other hand, artists like Hans Baldung, Giacomo Caraglio, and Agostino Carracci produced more explicit and less stylized engravings that included nudity and sexual scenes.24 Charon Ferrying the Shades (c. 1735) by Pierre Subleyras. 17th Century[/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]The works of Pietro Aretino continued with great popularity throughout the 17th century, being translated into different languages and distributed secretly among European aristocrats. During the 16th century, erotic literature was hindered by various moral visions on obscenity, which motivated authors to publish works under anonymous names and with certain limitations in distribution. In the 17th century, works such as L’Ecole des Filles (1655) by an anonymous author, The London Jilt (1683) by an anonymous author, and Erotopolis: The Present State of Bettyland (1684) by an anonymous author, but attributed to Charles Cotton, appeared; the work is known for being the first work in the Merryland genre, which describes the female body with topographical analogies and became very popular in erotic literature throughout the 18th century.[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]In the 18th century, erotic art became popular with the appearance of Rococó and the last years of Baroque art, whose eroticism was mainly subtle and moderate, resorting to nudity and over-stylized scenes that marked feelings such as love, passion, happiness, and anger. While the plastic arts redefined themselves with subtle and stylized eroticism, literature became more explicit and sexual due to growing socio-political currents that challenged traditional religious morality through philosophies like anti-clericalism, atheism, and ideas of the Enlightenment.
Some 18th-century erotic novels include: Les bijoux Indiscrets (1747) by Denis Diderot, Thérèse Philosophe (1748) by Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, La Souriciere. The Mousetrap. A Facetious and Sentimental Excursion through part of Austrian Flanders and France (1794) by Timothy Touchit. John Cleland's novel Fanny Hill (1748) is one of the most important erotic novels in history; the novel tells the story of a young prostitute who falls in love with a client.
Philosophers such as the Marqués de Sade were important for the development of erotic literature, whose literary works like Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu (1787) and Les 120 Journées de Sodome (1785), are characterized by presenting highly erotic scenarios, normally accompanied by other social situations such as sexual crimes (rape, pedophilia, sadism, mutilation, and sexual abduction), as well as socially unacceptable themes for the time like homosexuality, domination, bondage, urolagnia, and coprophagia.
In the French Revolution, Queen Maria Antonieta was a product of social ridicule and her image was represented as a prostitute in erotic pamphlets such as Le Godmiché Royal and L’Autrichienne en Goguettes. Similarly, different aristocrats and clergymen were represented to challenge the Political regime and benefit the movement of the revolution. 19th century[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]The concept of pornography that is held to this day is defined in the Victorian Era of the 19th century, a concept that will take on a new definition with the invention and popularity of photography to replace literary and plastic arts works that dominated previous centuries.30 Pornography, from the Victorian Era, was defined by its mass production, which motivated governments to establish laws prohibiting and regulating its production and distribution based on religious traditions to promote prudence and curb vice and obscenity in society.31 The moral standards of Victorian society motivated authors of pornography to distribute their works illegally among a select clientele; at other times, visual pornographic works containing nudity (especially female nudity), were commercialized according to the parameters of art, a model that will prevail until public wars at the end of the 1960s. Image of De Figuris Veneris (19th century) by Édouard-Henri Avril. Although Victorian society defined itself by modesty and prudence, parallel morals developed that contradicted this socially understood principle, such as the underground culture of brothels and entertainment houses.32 33 Brothels, cabarets, and prostitution were one of the main economic sources in 19th century Europe; these establishments brought together socially unacceptable clientele for the time like prostitutes, gamblers, drinkers, transvestites, homosexuals, and Afro-descendants, creating a small social concentration that formed parallel to Victorian morality.34 35 The distribution of pornography was mainly commercialized in specialized stores in the 19th century, when the costs of photographic printing significantly decreased to produce pornography on a large scale With methods of massive production like Halftone Printing, also at the point where photography achieves great popularity (around 1845, when daguerreotype becomes popular); the main consumers of pornography in this type of establishment were high-class men.3 31
Before this growing popularity of pornographic material consumption and frequent visits to sexual commerce locations, different political laws began to be applied that pursued any kind of immoral behavior. In 1857, the UK Crown publishes the Obscene Publications Act as part of the reforms and legal petitions obtained by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, resulting in the criminalization of all pornographic material and propaganda promoting immoral acts (anticontraception, free love, and homosexuality) and the detention of its distributors under charges of immorality.3 31
Similarly, in 1873, the Comstock laws are published in the United States, aiming to regulate pornography and immoral acts, as well as being fundamental in the birth of radical feminism by criminalizing birth control as a women's right.36
Photography by Auguste Belloc (c. 1855).
The fact that pornography was criminalized led to its irregular distribution through smuggling, and pornographic works began to appear on the market under anonymous authors. Works like My Secret Life (1888) and The Pearl (1879-1880) were subject to legal controversies for being obscene literature.37
In pornographic photography, authors such as: Jean Marie Canellas, Jean Louis Marie Eugène Durieu, Wilhelm von Plueschow, Auguste Belloc, Charles Gilhousen, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Louis Jean-Baptiste Igout, Max Koch, Pierre Louÿs, Gaudenzio Marconi, Félix-Jacques Moulin and Louis-Camille d'Olivier appear in related fields, Illustrators such as Martin van Maële and Édouard-Henri Avril created completely pornographic illustrations to illustrate erotic novels and political-social satires in independent publications. The naked body was one of the natural characteristics of artistic Impressionism, dedicating itself to portraying simple and everyday scenes that expressed the author's vision. That same natural nudity formed a new standard of beauty in Victorian society during the second half of the 19th century, modifying the morality that society perceived in nudity and incorporating it into a new commercial art criterion. This new artistic perspective facilitated the distribution of pornography, removing its original objective and reclassifying it as an artistic work. Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863) is one of the most significant works of Victorian erotic art due to the negative reception and legal controversies it generated in artistic society, as it depicts a courtesan completely naked. Impressionist painters such as Edgar Degas, Max Liebermann, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Henry Scott Tuke stood out in the Impressionist artistic current by portraying everyday scenes like bathing and children's games on the beach, which necessarily contained nude scenes in their images. Wilhelm von Gloeden's Nude with a Flute (c. 1895). Another popular foundation for the legal distribution of pornography were illustrative purposes. Pornography and nudity were common in scientific studies and illustrated encyclopedias, such as those that studied tribal societies during European occupation in Asia and Africa in the 19th century, showing regional traditions and beauty standards among ethnic groups. In this current, notable photographers and illustrators include J. Garrigues, Jean Geiser, Rodolphe Neuer, and P. Madeleine and Lehnert & Landrock, who dedicated themselves to the exploration of ethnic societies in southern Asia for the description of their customs, taking photographs of women from the area with their traditional attire in an erotic form; said photographs were a great social stir due to the differences between the heavy Victorian clothing and the light clothing and topless practice among women from ethnic groups in tropical zones.
The great epidemic of pornography, French illustration of the 19th century.
By 1890, pornographic photography takes great popularity among men of middle and upper classes, consisting mainly of photographs of women completely naked or semi-naked alone with softcore quality, it is from 1890 that more hardcore photographs with penetrative sex or oral sex between a man and a woman begin to appear. Pornography continued to be distributed illegally, mainly for gay men, which consisted of images of thin men aged 20-25 years old completely naked in most cases. Gay pornography, due to the illegal nature of homosexuality in countries like England and the United States in the 19th century, was primarily commercialized as art, so its authors sought to represent scenes from Greek-Roman mythology to give it a more artistic character and highlight the Greek-Roman beauty that formed the sophisticated aesthetic of the emerging gay culture.
The Lumière brothers' cinematograph appears commercially in 1895. It is a year after the commercial publication when the first pornographic film appears. The first stag film (an old term used for pornography before its legalization in 1968) was the French film Le Coucher de la Mariée (1896), directed by Léar and produced by Eugène Pirou, a film that starizes Louise Willy, a cabaret actress, performing a striptease and having sexual relations with a man.40 The stag films were a great leap towards contemporary pornography, introducing a new voyeuristic character for the spectator to feel as if they are physically present in the scene, besides popularizing video as the main medium for publishing commercial pornography that we have until today.[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]See also: Sexual Revolution
In the 20th century, pornography faced different legal and social confrontations that defined the contemporary concept that exists today. During the first half of the 20th century, pornography was totally prohibited by laws in the United States and England (main producers and consumers of pornography in the 20th and 21st centuries) that regulated its distribution. Starting from the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s, it begins to take a greater divulgation due to the weakening and annulment of the laws that regulated it at the end of the 1960s, influenced by the current seeking sexual rights that motivated the Sexual Revolution movement.
From 1970 on, society began to get used to various forms of sexual expression, including pornography, so pornography begins to distribute massively in different media such as video, characterized by short or medium duration and very low production costs. The evolution of video has been fundamental in the development of pornography in the 20th century.
Pre-code era (1900-1929)[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]The commercial cinema begins to flourish in the early years of the 20th century starting from simple short films that were presented in cinemas and nickelodeons (low-cost traveling cinemas with limited capacity) that were popular in the United States and England between 1900 and 1920. A Free Ride (1915) directed by A Wise Guy is one of the first pornographic films that have survived to date, introducing and popularizing themes that still survive in current pornography such as simple arguments connecting sexual scenes, as well as positions and practices like voyeurism and threesome.
In photography, between 1900 and 1929, artists like Edward Streichen, Fred Holland Day, Heinrich Zille, Anne W. Brigman, Julian Mandel, Stanislaus Walery, and Jean Agélou appear.
Alice Prin by Julian Mandel (c. 1920).
The Pre-code period was the period before the Hays Code (1934-1966) in which the regulation of audiovisual media and film was not regulated by any government law in the United States, so films began to exploit lascivious themes such as explicit sex, nudity, crime, violence, and drugs. This unregulated period allowed for the wide and primitive development of pornographic cinema towards the mid-1920s, a period that ends with the institution of the Hays Code in the 1930s and the economic crisis of 1929.
Other aspects that permitted the development of pornography between 1910 and 1920 was the sexualized culture of the flapper woman, the birth of the American cabaret, and the commercial institution of sex in advertising for the sale of mainly masculine consumer products such as alcohol and tobacco.
Bernard Natan is one of the first known directors of pornography, abandoning anonymity and achieving a wide variety of titles, in which he himself acted on occasion, introducing themes like bisexuality, homosexuality, and masochism to pornographic cinema. Le ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly (1920) is considered the first pornographic film to depict sexual activity between homosexuals (male-male and female-female), a film that was starred by Bernard Natan himself and other discredited actors.3 43 Some pornographic films (some considered historical or classified as lost films) between 1905 and 1930 include: La Coiffeuse (1905), Mousquetaire au Restaurant (c. 1920), L'Atelier Faiminette (1921), Agenor Fait un Levage (1925), L'Heure du Thé (1925), La Voyeuse (c. 1924), La Fessée à l'École (c. 1925), Mr. Abbot Bitt at Convent (c. 1925) and Massages (1930).
In the 1920s, in the jazz scene, irregularly distributed publications called Tijuana bibles appeared, popular among 1920 to 1940 that were characterized by presenting fictional sexual scenes involving characters with personalities from political life, film celebrities, and copyrighted characters such as Fleischer Studios' characters, Walt Disney Animation's characters, and comic strips in early-century newspapers.44 Betty Boop, created by the Fleischer brothers of Fleischer Studios, is a clear example of the sexually liberal culture of the Pre-code period and the direct basis for erotic comics, representing a sexualized woman from the Jazz Era (known as flappers), which had to be redesigned in a less provocative way upon entering the Hays Code.45
Nudity and eroticism in art, between 1900 and 1930, were completely introduced and normalized as an artistic technique and frequent element in the plastic arts, appreciable in Henri Matisse's fauvist paintings of group dances and Charles Demuth's precisionist paintings of sailors urinating or masturbating. The nakedness in art left to represent great controversy as it was about artistic works that aimed to emphasize the natural beauty and aesthetic perfection of the human body. It was a bombshell (1930-1959)[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]The Hays Code comes into effect in the year 1934 as a measure to reduce immoral representations in audiovisual media that had prevailed in the first decades of cinema life. Pornography, when it stops being a pastime for a very limited group, becomes a controversial and negative theme in American society during the first half of the 20th century due to religious affection for cum with vice and sin philosophies such as Evangelical Christianity and the Movement of the Saints of the Last Days, as well as government intervention and post-war culture that understood masturbation as a destructive method that harmed men's physical health, developing methods and alternative cures ranging from consuming miraculous breaths (Graham Crackers and Corn Flakes, both commercial successes) to electroshock therapy (used for treating mental illnesses considered diseases at the time, such as transsexuality and homosexuality).46 47 48
Cover of Weird Tales (March 1938).
Cinematic pornography becomes practically non-existent until the last years of the 1950s, when the Hays Code begins to weaken. Instead, eroticism became present in softer artistic versions like sensationalist stories from pulp, endomorphic superhero design during the Golden Age of comics, and pin-up art. Works considered obscene would be seized or closed, with a prison sentence for the author, converting sexually explicit works into anonymous and irregularly distributed ones or simply subject to general censorship rules.4 31 In the 1930s and 1940s, an exploitative form of cinema was popularized that was marketed as cautionary (precautorio) film, showing sensational stories with explicit sex, consumption of drugs, prostitution, homosexuality, fornication, miscegenation, and abortion, as a measure to alert parents to the dangers to which their adolescent children were exposed; the films had great commercial success.49
Pulp literature gains great popularity from the 1930s, characterized by its simple binding, cheap distribution, attention-grabbing covers with erotic or violent scenes, and stories focused on exploitation fiction such as sex, drug use, occultism, and violence. Comic books are consecrated in the 30's with the massive publication of supernatural characters that fight criminals, characters with muscular bodies and fitted clothing that generated several controversies in later years with Fredric Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), which claimed that comic book design contained references to nudity, fascism, communism, and homosexuality (theories that go hand in hand with the political oppositions of Nuclear Terror and adjust to the policies of McCarthyism).50
In pulp literature, genres like Spicy and Saucy become popular, dedicated to a heterosexual male audience that retold fantastic stories featuring a masculine protagonist who is adventurous, brave, and violent, fighting dangers to rescue a female character in peril, giving rise to periodicals dedicated to gentlemen (Gentlemen's Magazine).51 52
In 1947, the magazine Bizarre appears under the direction of John Willie, specializing in fetish photography that launched the fame of model Bettie Page, but disappeared a few years later due to economic and legal controversies. magazines that years later will dedicate their pages to the publication of erotic photography to attract a male heterosexual audience. 'Men's magazines' with erotic content are born in the United States during World War II, emerging as a moral booster distributed by government organizations for male soldiers on the front lines and as a publicity stunt to attract masculine attention in enlistment and combat volunteering. 53 The distribution of pin-up art magazines among members of the US Navy and Marine Corps begins with the Army Weekly magazine, Yank, aimed at representing an incentive for soldiers not to contract sexual services with prostitutes and not to acquire a sexually transmitted disease such as syphilis, which heavily affected global troops during World War II and was halted with the successful incorporation of penicillin as treatment in mid-1940s. 52 53
The pin-up or cheesecake style of painting and photography that dominated the period of censorship against pornography between 1890 and 1950, had its highest production between 1940 and 1950; pin-up art was characterized by presenting provocative images of women in a way not considered obscene or pornographic, emphasizing glamour, beauty, coquettishness, and innocence, with notable works by Gil Elvgren. 52
The term 'bombshell' was popular between 1940 and 1950, used to define what is now known as the female sexual symbol (English: sex symbol), defining actresses from show business who made a name for themselves due to their beauty such as Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, and Bette Davis, as well as pin-up artists like Frances Rafferty and Jane Greer. 54
After World War II and with the arrival of the Baby Boom, American culture and the American Way of Life emerge, and with it, sus ambitions to strengthen the country for the impending war with the Soviet Bloc, so the government begins to promote campaigns to introduce the culture of sports and physical activity in order to strengthen the soldiers. 55 As this growing culture of health emerges, some new catalogs, treatments, and products appear for burning calories and improving muscle mass, as well as specialized fitness and bodybuilding magazines that assumed these practices as part of masculinity. In this scenario, the masculine counterpart of the pin-up, the beefcake, a style of photography and publications related to it, depicting muscular men in athletic poses with the superficial intention of distributing those pamphlets as a fitness magazine, but with the ocultly homosexual vision of its author designed for open consumption by gay and bisexual men. In art beefcake stand out artists like Bob Mizer, George Quaintance, and Danny Fitzgerald, as well as publications such as Physique Pictorial and The Male Figure that presented themselves in a similar format to a modeling catalog where the photos of young bodybuilders appeared, with a list of their abilities and measurements, and frequently posing in thong or suspenders to evade censorship rules and allegations of homosexuality and sodomy. 4 56 In 1952, the Supreme Court of the United States determines that cinema is protected by the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (case Joseph Burstyn, Inc v Wilson), emphasizing freedom of expression as an element of production in audiovisual media, which will give rise to the birth of exploitation cinema in future years. 3 In 1953, the Playboy magazine appears, founded by Hugh Hefner with the intention of reclaiming the sexual lifestyle of the middle-class man, a magazine that became the first pornographic distribution on a massive scale in the same year with Marilyn Monroe's centerfold, although the magazine was involved in several controversies over obscenity until 1957. Cover of The Third Sex (1959). After World War II, youth groups opposed to government philosophies and military policies crystallized into subcultures such as greasers and hipsters in the 1940s, whose identity included musical appreciation, consumption, and relaxed sexuality, giving rise to the Beat Generation.57 At the end of the 40's and early 50's, Alfred Kinsey published a series of demographic studies on masturbation and homosexual attraction, which revolutionized American thought and detonated the gay movement by reflecting that masturbation and homosexuality were much more frequent than believed.58 59 The Beat Generation was characterized by extensive criticism of American government policies and conservative society, introducing themes such as agnosticism, alternative spirituality, drug consumption, and a general idea of tolerance towards segregated races and LGBT, with notable authors like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs.60 In the 1950's, more explicit genres of pulp fiction appeared, such as Men's Adventure, dedicated to the male audience that contained unreal stories claiming to be true, starring a surviving man in death stories attacked by animals, women eager for sex, communist armies, etc.61 62 63 Thus, at the end of the 1950's, other more explicit approaches also appeared, such as those from Greenleaf Publications, an anonymous authors' editorial that was involved in various controversies throughout its history for publishing pornographic stories and frequently featuring explicit sexual content, group sex, casual sex, adultery, Mestizaje, murder, BDSM and homosexuality.64
In the year of 1957, the Supreme Court of the United States determines that the Hicklin Test (parameters for considering a work as obscene) was invalid and that it would be considered in the case that the material was cataloged as obscene by a majoritarian standard and lacked artistic value (Roth v United States).3 This case allowed the commercial sale of pornography with artistic quality, which would cease to be art when showing exposed female genitals (the jurisdiction over male nudity as obscene continued until 1962), giving rise to the semi-legal period of pornography for heterosexual men known as Public Wars and allowing magazines like Playboy to continue in the market in the 1960s as a magazine of artistic photography and respectable journalism.
It was sexploitation (1960-1969)[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]At the beginning of the 1960's decade, the Hays Code begins to weaken due to artistic protection demands under the First Amendment and new obscenity parameters (sex is different from obscene) that appear after legal modifications in US laws, giving rise to the Golden Age of Sexploitation, a film exploitation genre that emphasizes sexual details and nudity, with B-movie production and screenings at special theaters called grindhouse (direct antecedents of the porn cinemas that emerged in the 1970's, dedicated to presenting exploitation films and forced to follow admission rules that limited entry to adults over 18).
Promotional poster for Promises! Promises! (1963).
The Sexploitation genre was highly popular in the 60's, relying on erotic advertising that barely met official censorship requirements and warning of restricted entry to adults; despite its legal ties, sexploitation cinema frequently found itself embroiled in obscenity controversies. Some films in the genre include: The Twilight Girls (1961), Nude on the Moon (1961), Daughter of the Sun (1962), House of Women (1962), Satan in High Heels (1962), Scum of the Earth! (1963), Lorna (1964), Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), Orgy of the Dead (1965), Mudhoney (1965), I Am Curious (1967), Space-Thing (1968), The Smashing Bird I Used to Know (1969), Language of Love (1969) and The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet (1969). Sexploitation reaches its peak production in the 1970's with the arrival of Porno Chic, relying on new genres such as Nunsploitation, Women in Prison and Nazisploitation.
In 1962, the US Supreme Court determines that male nudity must conform to the same parameters of obscenity that applied to female nudity since 1957 (MANual Enterprises v. Day).4 In this new current of homoerotic male photography, artists such as Jim French (founder of COLT Studio Group, producer of gay pornography that will have great importance in the period of chic porn and the AIDS crisis), appear under the pseudonym Rip Colt and experimental filmmakers like Kenneth Anger with Scorpio Rising (1964) and Andy Warhol with films like Blow Job (1964), Vinyl (1965) and Flesh (1968). By mid-60's a formal version of the LGBT liberation movement appears, which will intensify from 1969 onwards in the Stonewall riots, characterized by defending the idea that the effectiveness of the movement is based on sexual visibility.59 In gay culture, the leather subculture emerges, a sexual underground subculture characterized by greaser influence and hypermasculinity, which will flourish until the 1970s.4 The hippie subculture is fundamental in the development of the sexual revolution and the transition to postmodern cultural ideals, as they impose a philosophy of relaxed sexuality that was inclusive and tolerant regarding socially condemned topics such as fornication (changing marital ideals towards women who tied them to chastity and modesty), interraciality (changing social views on race mixing and favoring the civil rights movement in the United States), homosexuality (favoring the political emergence of LGBT identity and subsequent social movements) and alternative sex (popularizing ideas that redefined sexual practices such as tantric sex, spiritual sex, group sex, casual sex and heteroflexibility).67 68 69 The second wave of feminism emerges in the second half of the 20th century with the international publication of Le Second Sex (The Second Sex; 1949) by Simone de Beauvoir in 1953.70 The movement is influenced by the free sale of oral contraceptives and the appearance of literature that critically analyzed sexism, procreative freedom, and traditional gender roles for women, such as Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl (1961) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963).71 72
In 1965, the English magazine Penthouse was published under Bob Guccione's direction, but it gained international reach with its publication in the United States in 1969, aiming to compete with Playboy's content. It characterized itself by showing more daring photography of female genitals and pubic hair, targeting a male audience seeking riskier scenes. In subsequent years, Penthouse redefined pornography by including hardcore sex photography and being the first magazine to graphically show women's vulvas and anus.73
In 1969, the Supreme Court of the United States removed charges against a man who possessed pornographic videos for personal use (Stanley v Georgia).3 The same year, Denmark became the first country to legalize pornography, leading to high production of pornographic films between 1970 and 1974.74
Porno chic (1970-1989)[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]See also: Golden Age of Porn. The recent legalization of pornography in Denmark allowed for the production of two fundamental documentaries in the history of pornography: Censorship in Denmark: A New Approach (1970) and Sexual Freedom in Denmark (1970), which were publicly exhibited in the United States. Censorship in Denmark: A New Approach (1970) contained different forms of pornography and real sex, initiating the category of real sex (English: unsimulated sex) in mainstream cinema that challenged concepts such as simulated sex, although this category already had some precedents in European films like Un Chant d'Amour (1950), Gift (1966) and the documentary series They Call Us Misfits (1967).74 The documentaries evaded US censorship policies due to their educational content since they formalized a topic of social importance, redefining American morals on the open exhibition of pornography. In the early 70's, a massive production of erotic or pornographic films began in Denmark, with notable series such as Bedside-films (1970-1976) and Zodiac-films (1973-1978). Promotional for Deep Throat (1972). Mona the Virgin Nymph (1970) was the first pornographic film to achieve a wide distribution and economic revenue. The film is about a woman named Mona who promises her mother to remain a virgin until marriage; due to legal controversies, the original film had to be exhibited without credits, under an anonymous production (later revealed to be produced by Bill Osco and directed by Michael Benveniste and Howard Ziehm) that distributed it in various porn cinemas and grindhouse theaters in major US cities. A year later, Boys in the Sand (1971) became the first openly distributed gay pornographic film with significant revenue. Economic, besides being the first pornographic film to exhibit actor credits and the first pornographic film to parody the title of a movie (parody of the title of the movie The Boys in the Band).76 Deep Throat (1972) is consecrated as the most distributed and highest-grossing pornographic film of the 1970s, consecrated as an icon of sexual revolution and an icon of porno chic (Golden Age of Pornography), a period when watching pornography became something stylish, classy, popular.3 Deepthroat included an absurd plot that connected the sexual scenes, plus a chillout soundtrack with various tracks from genres like funk and lounge. The film had a wide reach in the United States and other countries, although it was subject to jurisdictions on pornography, so its exhibition was prohibited in some locations of the United States. The film contained credits with pseudonyms such as Lou Perry for producer Louis Peraino and Linda Lovelace for main actress Linda Susan Boreman, plus occasional humor and humorous sound effects like bells and pyrotechnics to emphasize Lovelace's orgasms.77 After the Stonewall Inn riots in 1969, the LGBT community obtained greater social visibility, and a new culture of gay men emerged in California known as Castro clone, a culture that adopted characteristics of the working-class homosexual man.78 Similarly, the leather subculture, which had remained secret for several decades since World War II, emerged into popular culture, fundamental to the homosexual perspective on pornography and the sex industry. Tom of Finland is the maximum icon of leather, responsible for positioning leather and other fetishes (mariners, workers, bikers, and cowboys) within the imagination of gay pornography with his comics and hyper-masculine art that exalted the size of the genitals and buttocks of his characters and emphasized hypersexualized scenes of rough sex, BDSM and cruising.79
In 1973 the Supreme Court of Justice of the United States of America determines that to consider a work as obscene should follow the Miller Test parameters: (1) if a person considers the work, in its entirety, as a lascivious work considering community standards; (2) if the work offensively represents acts whose representation is clearly prohibited by law; and (3) if the work, taken as a whole, lacks literary, artistic, political or scientific value (Miller v California). The work would only be considered obscene when these three parameters were present, which finally allowed for the legality of pornography, since most cinematic and printed works did not meet these three parameters.3 This legal modification and the popularity of VHS as a domestic device, permitted the massive distribution of pornography in this format until the end of the 1990s, when Internet began to gain popularity and the DVD format was industrialized.
Promotional Farmer's Daughters (1976).
Some significant pornographic films, including Deepthroat, are: Behind the Green Door (1972), The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), Resurrection of Eve (1973), The Cheerleaders (1973), Memories Within Miss Aggie (1974), The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (1974), Flesh Gordon (1974), Sensations (1975), The Story of Joanna (1975), A Dirty Western (1975), Alice in Wonderland (1976), Through the Looking Glass (1976), The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), Spirit of Seventy Sex (1976), Inside Jennifer Welles (1977), Debbie Does Dallas (1978), Pretty Peaches (1978), Inside Désirée Cousteau (1979), Taboo (1980), Talk Dirty to Me (1980), Insatiable (1980), Nightdreams (1981), Café Flesh (1982) and Reel People (1984). Some producers of the porno chic era include Bill Osco, Alex de Renzy, and Radley Metzger; some actors include: Linda Lovelace, Marilyn Chambers, Annette Haven, Georgina Spelvin, John Holmes, Johnnie Keyes, Kay Parker, Robert Kerman, Annie Sprinkle, Candida Royalle, Juliet Anderson, Harry Reems, John Leslie, Ron Jeremy, Paul Thomas, Desireé Cousteau, Jennifer Welles, Gloria Leonard, Billy Dee, Lisa De Leeuw, Jacqueline Lorains, Colleen Brennan, Nina Hartley, Seka, Traci Lords, Taija Rae, and Vanessa del Rio.
Some gay pornography films in the porno chic era include: Nights in Black Leather (1973), That Boy (1974), Kansas City Trucking Co. (1976), El Paso Wrecking Corp. (1978), A Night at the Adonis (1978), L.A. Tool & Die (1979), and The Bigger the Better (1984). Jean-Daniel Cadinot is one of the most famous gay pornography producers of the porno chic era. Some actors in the porno chic era include: Zebedy Colt, Jamie Gillis, Peter Berlin, and Jack Wrangler.
In the exploitation and gore film era of the 1970s, a film emerged that defined feminist positions on pornography, Snuff (1976). The film portrayed the story of a woman involved in an occult sect in Argentina, who was murdered after being sexually abused by unknown men. Despite having real sex scenes, the film was not categorized as a pornographic film and was promoted as a snuff film (months later it was discovered that the murder seen in the film was staged, although it popularized urban legends of real murder in film and, of course, the term snuff in popular culture). The film sparked feminist criticism for portraying the senseless murder of an innocent woman who is subjected to sexual abuse, fueling criticisms towards sexism in pornography and the subjugation of women for the pleasure of men in the sex industry and prostitution. This philosophy intensified the feminist wars over sex (feminist debates between 1970 and 1980 that addressed positions on topics such as pornography, the sex industry, prostitution, homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, and BDSM) and divided feminism into two ideologies: anti-pornography feminism which considers pornography a sexist symbol of repression and subjugation of women, and pro-sex feminism which considers pornography a representation of empowerment and autonomous sexual freedom for women.3
Before the new feminist scenes and diversity of opinions on pornography, Playgirl appears in 1973, consecrating itself as the first pornographic magazine with a feminist approach (defining what is now known as feminist pornography or female-friendly). Playgirl focuses on heterosexual women as a counter-sexist response to Playboy, since it was characterized by beefcake-style photographs of physically attractive men (a considerable percentage of its consumers are gay) and occasionally hardcore scene photographs that were more sensitive to feminine taste, emphasizing eroticism and other sensual elements that contrasted with the coarse pornography of publications like Playboy, Hustler, and Penthouse. Contemporary Pornography[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]Cover of My First Sex Teacher Vol. 18.
By the mid-90's, pornography appears in DVD format, allowing for a greater distribution of erotic material. Between 1995 and 2000, various adult film producers join Internet and open their official sites, such as Playboy magazine in 1994 and Hustler magazine in 1995. That same year, the video conferencing service that made live cams and cyber sex services possible is incorporated into Internet's reach. Anonymity, accessibility, and affordability turned Internet into an unparalleled repository of pornography starting from the years 2000, allowing users to access content, videos, photographs, games, and services like sex cams and hookups, although it also allowed for anonymous access to illegal pornography.
By the end of the 90's, actress Jenna Jameson is consecrated as The Queen of Porn. Jameson became the image of the adult film industry with a fifteen-year career (1993-2008) that placed her as the most famous adult film actress with over 100 films including: Up and Cummers 11 (1994), Flashpoint (1998), Virtual Sex with Jenna Jameson (1999), and Brianna Loves Jenna (2001). The best-selling adult film in history is Pamela Anderson's sex tape with Tommy Lee.
Public video hosting sites Pornhub, Redtube, and YouPorn appear in the second half of the 2000s, currently managed by Manwin Media (MindGeek) intelligence company. Manwin Media is the largest online pornography company in the world with adult film studios like Brazzers, Men.com, Digital Playground, Reality Kings, Mofos, JuicyBoys, and Tranny Surprise, as well as video sharing pages like Pornhub, Redtube, YouPorn, Tube8, XTube, Spankwire, Keezmovies, Extremetube, Sextube, and GayTube. Online adult film studios currently register their sales. In subscriptions and memberships with guaranteed access, most of them incorporate online stores that offer the company's own productions in DVD or Blu-ray format, as well as sexual toys, clothing, memorabilia, etc. Most adult film studios incorporate HD technology for filming their productions, besides being advertised on video hosting sites and online dating services and hookups. Sites like Vimeo and Tumblr, with less strict content terms, allow the circulation of pornography on their sites, despite not being pornographic sites, which denotes a new culture (Generation XXX) accustomed to pornography.[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]Although various classifications can be made according to the participants, theme or positions, one very widespread way to group pornographic genres is from less to more explicit (whether they are pose positions or actions represented). In this way, they would be: Softcore[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]Main article: Softcore pornography
It is the pornographic genre in which sex scenes are not shown explicitly. In film and television, particularly, it does not include close-ups of genitals (male or female) and neither shows penetrations and fellatio in detail. Actors or models usually cover a part of their bodies. This genre has been practiced by many women and men, more or less famous, such as Demi Moore in the movie Striptease. It is also used in advertising, although this use has been criticized by feminist organizations.
Mediumcore or conventional pornography[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]It's that where models teach the entire body in more or less provocative positions. Famous magazines like Playboy or Penthouse are perhaps the most well-known examples of this type of pornography. Despite existing classifications that place them in the previous category. Hardcore.[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]Main article: Hardcore Porno
It is the most extreme pornographic genre, as it explicitly shows sexual acts, whether vaginal, anal, or oral, or with appliances or any other type of utensils.
This type of pornography is subdivided according to sexual orientation: heterosexual, homosexual (male or female) and bisexual. The first pornographic films and the majority of current films are heterosexual; gay films are the second most sold and produced. There is also a variant of the genre transexual (men transformed into women through hormone consumption and clothing use) and zoophilia (sexual acts with animals).
Postporno[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]The post-porn seeks deliberately to subvert the rules of traditional pornography (and, with it, the models of sexuality that sustain them) for political purposes (serving as a means to articulate other possible sexualities, alien to hegemonic standards).81 The concept 'post-porno' was introduced by erotic photographer Wink van Kempen and popularized by activist, sex worker, and artist Annie Sprinkle. It developed in the 1990's in the US and Canada connected with queer activism and post-feminism.82 It emerged as a new status of sexual representation: through a deconstruction of heteronormativity and naturalization, Sprinkle made us think of sex as an open category for use and appropriation of pleasure beyond the framework of victimization by censorship and taboo. The movement is currently active and corresponds to a creative and revolutionary environment that calls for reflection on what is a pornographic image, what is gender, and everything that ultimately poses the so-called transfeminism83 84 It is the task of post-pornography to make other sexualities and new forms of fuck emerge in public and political space; its critical discourse revises the history of pornography from post-feminism and gay struggles to gain a space for representation and consumption of sexuality and allow the visibility of what was previously absent in pornography. Post-porno, understood as self-representation of the queer movement, harbors at its center dynamic empowerment strategies closely related to appropriation; it is taking power itself, but also representation of possible appropriations and creator therefore of disident realities within normative discourse.85[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar]
Pornography and erotic representations date back to ancient civilization times, as old and primitive as the Paleolithic era.1 The modern concept of pornography, prevailing today, is defined from the massive commercialization of erotic material in the 19th century during the Victorian Era, abandoning its erotic-artistic character and increasing distribution from mass production that defined the Second Industrial Revolution.2 3 Modern pornography achieves its greatest presence starting from the Sexual Revolution (Golden Age of porn) during the 1970s until today.3 4
Antecedents[/editar][editar][editar]Venus of Willendorf (c. 25,000 B.C.). In the primitive society of the nomadic Homo sapiens, belonging to the Paleolithic period, magical thinking and empirical bases develop as fundamental principles of primitive religions, basing human creationism on what was observed from animal reproductive capacities.1 5 In primitive tribes, the totemic cult is established towards anatomical structures dedicated to procreation; the cult towards the uterus (object of worship due to its ability to retain the fetus and childbirth) and the phallic cult (considered as depository of life).6 7 Based on ancient cults, it is assumed that Paleoitic Venus figurines, such as the Venus of Willendorf, evoke human admiration for genitals, maternity, fertility, and eroticism, through exaggerated breast and buttock proportions, with a possible intention to represent pornography.1 8 In classical Indian cultures, the virtues of sexuality were understood in various forms such as marriage, masturbation, group sex, polygamy, and homosexuality.9 10 It was believed that sex, especially in philosophies like Tantra, was part of natural human divinity and, on occasion, represented a path to spiritual illumination.9 11 According to religious visions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, most religious practices and philosophical magnified the importance of sexual activity through practices and erotic stories; such as the Ashvamedha Yajna of the Rigveda.12 13 The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (c. 400-200 B.C.E.) is the epitome of ancient Indian sexuality, a book that describes ideal sexual practices for a heterosexual couple in marriage.9 14 The society of ancient India was accustomed to sexuality and nudity, to the extent of enshrining it in much of the sacred art that adorned ceremonial centers.9 12 Exterior reliefs that adorn Khajuraho are possible to observe different sexual representations that represent human sexuality and the sexuality between deities.15 The epic poems of Ramayana and Mahabharata (c. 1500 A.C.) contained various erotic allusions and both were determinants in the construction of the sexually societies of ancient Orient, directly influencing the sexual policies and morals of Japanese culture, Chinese culture, and Tibetan cultures.9 16 In China, the first sex manuals and erotic poems date back to 200 A.C., based on theological visions about gender complementarity and strongly influenced by Indian culture texts, as well as graphic representations of sex in traditional popular art such as painting and ceramics.17 18 Detail about Greek ceramic of a prostitute and a client (c. 480 A.C.). Classic societies in Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire adopted human sexuality as the basis of artistic expression. In Classical Art, there is a strong aesthetic fixation on representing mythical beings and the human body, where the female body represented attributes of beauty and fertility, and the male body represented attributes of strength and virility.19 Within Greek mythology, deities and stories were introduced to divine sexuality and recurring themes included polygamy, homosexuality, pederasty, sexual abuse, master-slave relationships, group sex, transgenderism, intersexuality, and bestiality.19 20 Classical art was frequently phallocentric, positioning genitals as the central form of plastic arts (painting, sculpture, ceramics, and mosaic) in a probable pornographic intention.21 The representation of sexual scenes was common in popular Roman Empire, whose visions on sexuality approached morally to the visions of Classical Greece. One of the clearest examples of the sexual morality of ancient Roman Empire are the details of the frescoes in the Suburban Baths in Pompeii, where scenes with sexual acts can be appreciated that include forms of group sex, female-female sex, cunnilingus, and male anal sex. Other clear examples are the homoerotic details of the Warren Cup (c. 1st century) and the Roman tradition of fascinus.22 23 In classical erotic literature, notable works stand out such as Erothikos by Plutarch, Thesmophoriazusae by Aristophanes, and Satyrikon by Petronius; besides authors like: Stratón of Sardis, Safo of Lesbos, Automedón, Philodemus of Gadara, Marcus Argentarius, Gaius Valerius Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Martial, Juvenal, and Priapeos.22 [citation required]
In the Middle Ages, with the dominance of Christianity, pornography was understood as a form of lust and therefore as a mortal sin; masturbation, fornication, sodomy, adultery, and prostitution were considered criminal or unnatural offenses that were corrected with religious punishments, even torture and death in the Inquisition.24 The art of the Middle Ages defined itself in the teocentric style, through religious allusions to biblical passages and offerings that exalted divine perfection, so nudity and sex were incompatible with religious images.25 Erotic literature appears, under controversy, in the last centuries of the Middle Ages in works such as Decameron (1353) by Giovanni Boccaccio, introducing erotic fiction into post-classical periods, besides Facetiae (15th century) by Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini and Historia de Duobus Amantibus (1444) by Pius II.
16th century[/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar]Jupiter and Juno (16th century) by Agostino Carracci.
Pornography, in a form similar to the current one (mass-produced pornography), appears in the 16th century during the early years of the Italian Renaissance printing culture, a period when the reproduction of literature and engravings increases significantly due to the improvement of medieval printing developed by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century. The birth of pornography in the printing culture period is defined with the appearance of pornographic engravings I Modi (1524) by Giulio Romano, engravings that were published under the direction of Marcantonio Raimondi, illustrating 16 scenes from Greek-Roman mythology showing nudity and explicit sex. The engravings were seized and destroyed according to Pope Clement VIII's orders, who also ordered Raimondi's imprisonment, accusing him of immorality. The original versions disappeared, but were copied by Agostino Carracci in the mid-16th century, surviving until today.
Sonetti lussuriosi (1527) and Ragionamenti (1534-1536) by Pietro Aretino were important works that defined pornographic literature of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Sonetti lussuriosi was a politically incorrect pornographic prose that incorporated Giulio Romano's I Modi art, which was popular among the aristocracy in the 16th century. In 1558, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptamerón is published, another significant work of the printing culture in the history of pornography. In the plastic arts, influenced by Renaissance humanism, nudity and admiration for the human body reappear, although pornographic art begins to distinguish itself from simply erotic art. Artists like Michelangelo Buonarroti incorporated notable homoerotic characteristics into scenes that are not erotic in religious tradition, such as He appreciates in the Crucifix of the Santo Spirito (1492) that shows the image of Jesus Christ totally naked and in a neotenic body of an adolescent; or the tomb of Pope Julius II, a religious monument adorned by several male figures completely nude; this peculiar artistic current marked the transition from the puritanism of the medieval age to the aesthetic admiration of the Renaissance.24 On the other hand, artists like Hans Baldung, Giacomo Caraglio, and Agostino Carracci produced more explicit and less stylized engravings that included nudity and sexual scenes.24 Charon Ferrying the Shades (c. 1735) by Pierre Subleyras. 17th Century[/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]The works of Pietro Aretino continued with great popularity throughout the 17th century, being translated into different languages and distributed secretly among European aristocrats. During the 16th century, erotic literature was hindered by various moral visions on obscenity, which motivated authors to publish works under anonymous names and with certain limitations in distribution. In the 17th century, works such as L’Ecole des Filles (1655) by an anonymous author, The London Jilt (1683) by an anonymous author, and Erotopolis: The Present State of Bettyland (1684) by an anonymous author, but attributed to Charles Cotton, appeared; the work is known for being the first work in the Merryland genre, which describes the female body with topographical analogies and became very popular in erotic literature throughout the 18th century.[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]In the 18th century, erotic art became popular with the appearance of Rococó and the last years of Baroque art, whose eroticism was mainly subtle and moderate, resorting to nudity and over-stylized scenes that marked feelings such as love, passion, happiness, and anger. While the plastic arts redefined themselves with subtle and stylized eroticism, literature became more explicit and sexual due to growing socio-political currents that challenged traditional religious morality through philosophies like anti-clericalism, atheism, and ideas of the Enlightenment.
Some 18th-century erotic novels include: Les bijoux Indiscrets (1747) by Denis Diderot, Thérèse Philosophe (1748) by Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, La Souriciere. The Mousetrap. A Facetious and Sentimental Excursion through part of Austrian Flanders and France (1794) by Timothy Touchit. John Cleland's novel Fanny Hill (1748) is one of the most important erotic novels in history; the novel tells the story of a young prostitute who falls in love with a client.
Philosophers such as the Marqués de Sade were important for the development of erotic literature, whose literary works like Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu (1787) and Les 120 Journées de Sodome (1785), are characterized by presenting highly erotic scenarios, normally accompanied by other social situations such as sexual crimes (rape, pedophilia, sadism, mutilation, and sexual abduction), as well as socially unacceptable themes for the time like homosexuality, domination, bondage, urolagnia, and coprophagia.
In the French Revolution, Queen Maria Antonieta was a product of social ridicule and her image was represented as a prostitute in erotic pamphlets such as Le Godmiché Royal and L’Autrichienne en Goguettes. Similarly, different aristocrats and clergymen were represented to challenge the Political regime and benefit the movement of the revolution. 19th century[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]The concept of pornography that is held to this day is defined in the Victorian Era of the 19th century, a concept that will take on a new definition with the invention and popularity of photography to replace literary and plastic arts works that dominated previous centuries.30 Pornography, from the Victorian Era, was defined by its mass production, which motivated governments to establish laws prohibiting and regulating its production and distribution based on religious traditions to promote prudence and curb vice and obscenity in society.31 The moral standards of Victorian society motivated authors of pornography to distribute their works illegally among a select clientele; at other times, visual pornographic works containing nudity (especially female nudity), were commercialized according to the parameters of art, a model that will prevail until public wars at the end of the 1960s. Image of De Figuris Veneris (19th century) by Édouard-Henri Avril. Although Victorian society defined itself by modesty and prudence, parallel morals developed that contradicted this socially understood principle, such as the underground culture of brothels and entertainment houses.32 33 Brothels, cabarets, and prostitution were one of the main economic sources in 19th century Europe; these establishments brought together socially unacceptable clientele for the time like prostitutes, gamblers, drinkers, transvestites, homosexuals, and Afro-descendants, creating a small social concentration that formed parallel to Victorian morality.34 35 The distribution of pornography was mainly commercialized in specialized stores in the 19th century, when the costs of photographic printing significantly decreased to produce pornography on a large scale With methods of massive production like Halftone Printing, also at the point where photography achieves great popularity (around 1845, when daguerreotype becomes popular); the main consumers of pornography in this type of establishment were high-class men.3 31
Before this growing popularity of pornographic material consumption and frequent visits to sexual commerce locations, different political laws began to be applied that pursued any kind of immoral behavior. In 1857, the UK Crown publishes the Obscene Publications Act as part of the reforms and legal petitions obtained by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, resulting in the criminalization of all pornographic material and propaganda promoting immoral acts (anticontraception, free love, and homosexuality) and the detention of its distributors under charges of immorality.3 31
Similarly, in 1873, the Comstock laws are published in the United States, aiming to regulate pornography and immoral acts, as well as being fundamental in the birth of radical feminism by criminalizing birth control as a women's right.36
Photography by Auguste Belloc (c. 1855).
The fact that pornography was criminalized led to its irregular distribution through smuggling, and pornographic works began to appear on the market under anonymous authors. Works like My Secret Life (1888) and The Pearl (1879-1880) were subject to legal controversies for being obscene literature.37
In pornographic photography, authors such as: Jean Marie Canellas, Jean Louis Marie Eugène Durieu, Wilhelm von Plueschow, Auguste Belloc, Charles Gilhousen, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Louis Jean-Baptiste Igout, Max Koch, Pierre Louÿs, Gaudenzio Marconi, Félix-Jacques Moulin and Louis-Camille d'Olivier appear in related fields, Illustrators such as Martin van Maële and Édouard-Henri Avril created completely pornographic illustrations to illustrate erotic novels and political-social satires in independent publications. The naked body was one of the natural characteristics of artistic Impressionism, dedicating itself to portraying simple and everyday scenes that expressed the author's vision. That same natural nudity formed a new standard of beauty in Victorian society during the second half of the 19th century, modifying the morality that society perceived in nudity and incorporating it into a new commercial art criterion. This new artistic perspective facilitated the distribution of pornography, removing its original objective and reclassifying it as an artistic work. Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863) is one of the most significant works of Victorian erotic art due to the negative reception and legal controversies it generated in artistic society, as it depicts a courtesan completely naked. Impressionist painters such as Edgar Degas, Max Liebermann, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Henry Scott Tuke stood out in the Impressionist artistic current by portraying everyday scenes like bathing and children's games on the beach, which necessarily contained nude scenes in their images. Wilhelm von Gloeden's Nude with a Flute (c. 1895). Another popular foundation for the legal distribution of pornography were illustrative purposes. Pornography and nudity were common in scientific studies and illustrated encyclopedias, such as those that studied tribal societies during European occupation in Asia and Africa in the 19th century, showing regional traditions and beauty standards among ethnic groups. In this current, notable photographers and illustrators include J. Garrigues, Jean Geiser, Rodolphe Neuer, and P. Madeleine and Lehnert & Landrock, who dedicated themselves to the exploration of ethnic societies in southern Asia for the description of their customs, taking photographs of women from the area with their traditional attire in an erotic form; said photographs were a great social stir due to the differences between the heavy Victorian clothing and the light clothing and topless practice among women from ethnic groups in tropical zones.
The great epidemic of pornography, French illustration of the 19th century.
By 1890, pornographic photography takes great popularity among men of middle and upper classes, consisting mainly of photographs of women completely naked or semi-naked alone with softcore quality, it is from 1890 that more hardcore photographs with penetrative sex or oral sex between a man and a woman begin to appear. Pornography continued to be distributed illegally, mainly for gay men, which consisted of images of thin men aged 20-25 years old completely naked in most cases. Gay pornography, due to the illegal nature of homosexuality in countries like England and the United States in the 19th century, was primarily commercialized as art, so its authors sought to represent scenes from Greek-Roman mythology to give it a more artistic character and highlight the Greek-Roman beauty that formed the sophisticated aesthetic of the emerging gay culture.
The Lumière brothers' cinematograph appears commercially in 1895. It is a year after the commercial publication when the first pornographic film appears. The first stag film (an old term used for pornography before its legalization in 1968) was the French film Le Coucher de la Mariée (1896), directed by Léar and produced by Eugène Pirou, a film that starizes Louise Willy, a cabaret actress, performing a striptease and having sexual relations with a man.40 The stag films were a great leap towards contemporary pornography, introducing a new voyeuristic character for the spectator to feel as if they are physically present in the scene, besides popularizing video as the main medium for publishing commercial pornography that we have until today.[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]See also: Sexual Revolution
In the 20th century, pornography faced different legal and social confrontations that defined the contemporary concept that exists today. During the first half of the 20th century, pornography was totally prohibited by laws in the United States and England (main producers and consumers of pornography in the 20th and 21st centuries) that regulated its distribution. Starting from the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s, it begins to take a greater divulgation due to the weakening and annulment of the laws that regulated it at the end of the 1960s, influenced by the current seeking sexual rights that motivated the Sexual Revolution movement.
From 1970 on, society began to get used to various forms of sexual expression, including pornography, so pornography begins to distribute massively in different media such as video, characterized by short or medium duration and very low production costs. The evolution of video has been fundamental in the development of pornography in the 20th century.
Pre-code era (1900-1929)[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]The commercial cinema begins to flourish in the early years of the 20th century starting from simple short films that were presented in cinemas and nickelodeons (low-cost traveling cinemas with limited capacity) that were popular in the United States and England between 1900 and 1920. A Free Ride (1915) directed by A Wise Guy is one of the first pornographic films that have survived to date, introducing and popularizing themes that still survive in current pornography such as simple arguments connecting sexual scenes, as well as positions and practices like voyeurism and threesome.
In photography, between 1900 and 1929, artists like Edward Streichen, Fred Holland Day, Heinrich Zille, Anne W. Brigman, Julian Mandel, Stanislaus Walery, and Jean Agélou appear.
Alice Prin by Julian Mandel (c. 1920).
The Pre-code period was the period before the Hays Code (1934-1966) in which the regulation of audiovisual media and film was not regulated by any government law in the United States, so films began to exploit lascivious themes such as explicit sex, nudity, crime, violence, and drugs. This unregulated period allowed for the wide and primitive development of pornographic cinema towards the mid-1920s, a period that ends with the institution of the Hays Code in the 1930s and the economic crisis of 1929.
Other aspects that permitted the development of pornography between 1910 and 1920 was the sexualized culture of the flapper woman, the birth of the American cabaret, and the commercial institution of sex in advertising for the sale of mainly masculine consumer products such as alcohol and tobacco.
Bernard Natan is one of the first known directors of pornography, abandoning anonymity and achieving a wide variety of titles, in which he himself acted on occasion, introducing themes like bisexuality, homosexuality, and masochism to pornographic cinema. Le ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly (1920) is considered the first pornographic film to depict sexual activity between homosexuals (male-male and female-female), a film that was starred by Bernard Natan himself and other discredited actors.3 43 Some pornographic films (some considered historical or classified as lost films) between 1905 and 1930 include: La Coiffeuse (1905), Mousquetaire au Restaurant (c. 1920), L'Atelier Faiminette (1921), Agenor Fait un Levage (1925), L'Heure du Thé (1925), La Voyeuse (c. 1924), La Fessée à l'École (c. 1925), Mr. Abbot Bitt at Convent (c. 1925) and Massages (1930).
In the 1920s, in the jazz scene, irregularly distributed publications called Tijuana bibles appeared, popular among 1920 to 1940 that were characterized by presenting fictional sexual scenes involving characters with personalities from political life, film celebrities, and copyrighted characters such as Fleischer Studios' characters, Walt Disney Animation's characters, and comic strips in early-century newspapers.44 Betty Boop, created by the Fleischer brothers of Fleischer Studios, is a clear example of the sexually liberal culture of the Pre-code period and the direct basis for erotic comics, representing a sexualized woman from the Jazz Era (known as flappers), which had to be redesigned in a less provocative way upon entering the Hays Code.45
Nudity and eroticism in art, between 1900 and 1930, were completely introduced and normalized as an artistic technique and frequent element in the plastic arts, appreciable in Henri Matisse's fauvist paintings of group dances and Charles Demuth's precisionist paintings of sailors urinating or masturbating. The nakedness in art left to represent great controversy as it was about artistic works that aimed to emphasize the natural beauty and aesthetic perfection of the human body. It was a bombshell (1930-1959)[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]The Hays Code comes into effect in the year 1934 as a measure to reduce immoral representations in audiovisual media that had prevailed in the first decades of cinema life. Pornography, when it stops being a pastime for a very limited group, becomes a controversial and negative theme in American society during the first half of the 20th century due to religious affection for cum with vice and sin philosophies such as Evangelical Christianity and the Movement of the Saints of the Last Days, as well as government intervention and post-war culture that understood masturbation as a destructive method that harmed men's physical health, developing methods and alternative cures ranging from consuming miraculous breaths (Graham Crackers and Corn Flakes, both commercial successes) to electroshock therapy (used for treating mental illnesses considered diseases at the time, such as transsexuality and homosexuality).46 47 48
Cover of Weird Tales (March 1938).
Cinematic pornography becomes practically non-existent until the last years of the 1950s, when the Hays Code begins to weaken. Instead, eroticism became present in softer artistic versions like sensationalist stories from pulp, endomorphic superhero design during the Golden Age of comics, and pin-up art. Works considered obscene would be seized or closed, with a prison sentence for the author, converting sexually explicit works into anonymous and irregularly distributed ones or simply subject to general censorship rules.4 31 In the 1930s and 1940s, an exploitative form of cinema was popularized that was marketed as cautionary (precautorio) film, showing sensational stories with explicit sex, consumption of drugs, prostitution, homosexuality, fornication, miscegenation, and abortion, as a measure to alert parents to the dangers to which their adolescent children were exposed; the films had great commercial success.49
Pulp literature gains great popularity from the 1930s, characterized by its simple binding, cheap distribution, attention-grabbing covers with erotic or violent scenes, and stories focused on exploitation fiction such as sex, drug use, occultism, and violence. Comic books are consecrated in the 30's with the massive publication of supernatural characters that fight criminals, characters with muscular bodies and fitted clothing that generated several controversies in later years with Fredric Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), which claimed that comic book design contained references to nudity, fascism, communism, and homosexuality (theories that go hand in hand with the political oppositions of Nuclear Terror and adjust to the policies of McCarthyism).50
In pulp literature, genres like Spicy and Saucy become popular, dedicated to a heterosexual male audience that retold fantastic stories featuring a masculine protagonist who is adventurous, brave, and violent, fighting dangers to rescue a female character in peril, giving rise to periodicals dedicated to gentlemen (Gentlemen's Magazine).51 52
In 1947, the magazine Bizarre appears under the direction of John Willie, specializing in fetish photography that launched the fame of model Bettie Page, but disappeared a few years later due to economic and legal controversies. magazines that years later will dedicate their pages to the publication of erotic photography to attract a male heterosexual audience. 'Men's magazines' with erotic content are born in the United States during World War II, emerging as a moral booster distributed by government organizations for male soldiers on the front lines and as a publicity stunt to attract masculine attention in enlistment and combat volunteering. 53 The distribution of pin-up art magazines among members of the US Navy and Marine Corps begins with the Army Weekly magazine, Yank, aimed at representing an incentive for soldiers not to contract sexual services with prostitutes and not to acquire a sexually transmitted disease such as syphilis, which heavily affected global troops during World War II and was halted with the successful incorporation of penicillin as treatment in mid-1940s. 52 53
The pin-up or cheesecake style of painting and photography that dominated the period of censorship against pornography between 1890 and 1950, had its highest production between 1940 and 1950; pin-up art was characterized by presenting provocative images of women in a way not considered obscene or pornographic, emphasizing glamour, beauty, coquettishness, and innocence, with notable works by Gil Elvgren. 52
The term 'bombshell' was popular between 1940 and 1950, used to define what is now known as the female sexual symbol (English: sex symbol), defining actresses from show business who made a name for themselves due to their beauty such as Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, and Bette Davis, as well as pin-up artists like Frances Rafferty and Jane Greer. 54
After World War II and with the arrival of the Baby Boom, American culture and the American Way of Life emerge, and with it, sus ambitions to strengthen the country for the impending war with the Soviet Bloc, so the government begins to promote campaigns to introduce the culture of sports and physical activity in order to strengthen the soldiers. 55 As this growing culture of health emerges, some new catalogs, treatments, and products appear for burning calories and improving muscle mass, as well as specialized fitness and bodybuilding magazines that assumed these practices as part of masculinity. In this scenario, the masculine counterpart of the pin-up, the beefcake, a style of photography and publications related to it, depicting muscular men in athletic poses with the superficial intention of distributing those pamphlets as a fitness magazine, but with the ocultly homosexual vision of its author designed for open consumption by gay and bisexual men. In art beefcake stand out artists like Bob Mizer, George Quaintance, and Danny Fitzgerald, as well as publications such as Physique Pictorial and The Male Figure that presented themselves in a similar format to a modeling catalog where the photos of young bodybuilders appeared, with a list of their abilities and measurements, and frequently posing in thong or suspenders to evade censorship rules and allegations of homosexuality and sodomy. 4 56 In 1952, the Supreme Court of the United States determines that cinema is protected by the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (case Joseph Burstyn, Inc v Wilson), emphasizing freedom of expression as an element of production in audiovisual media, which will give rise to the birth of exploitation cinema in future years. 3 In 1953, the Playboy magazine appears, founded by Hugh Hefner with the intention of reclaiming the sexual lifestyle of the middle-class man, a magazine that became the first pornographic distribution on a massive scale in the same year with Marilyn Monroe's centerfold, although the magazine was involved in several controversies over obscenity until 1957. Cover of The Third Sex (1959). After World War II, youth groups opposed to government philosophies and military policies crystallized into subcultures such as greasers and hipsters in the 1940s, whose identity included musical appreciation, consumption, and relaxed sexuality, giving rise to the Beat Generation.57 At the end of the 40's and early 50's, Alfred Kinsey published a series of demographic studies on masturbation and homosexual attraction, which revolutionized American thought and detonated the gay movement by reflecting that masturbation and homosexuality were much more frequent than believed.58 59 The Beat Generation was characterized by extensive criticism of American government policies and conservative society, introducing themes such as agnosticism, alternative spirituality, drug consumption, and a general idea of tolerance towards segregated races and LGBT, with notable authors like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs.60 In the 1950's, more explicit genres of pulp fiction appeared, such as Men's Adventure, dedicated to the male audience that contained unreal stories claiming to be true, starring a surviving man in death stories attacked by animals, women eager for sex, communist armies, etc.61 62 63 Thus, at the end of the 1950's, other more explicit approaches also appeared, such as those from Greenleaf Publications, an anonymous authors' editorial that was involved in various controversies throughout its history for publishing pornographic stories and frequently featuring explicit sexual content, group sex, casual sex, adultery, Mestizaje, murder, BDSM and homosexuality.64
In the year of 1957, the Supreme Court of the United States determines that the Hicklin Test (parameters for considering a work as obscene) was invalid and that it would be considered in the case that the material was cataloged as obscene by a majoritarian standard and lacked artistic value (Roth v United States).3 This case allowed the commercial sale of pornography with artistic quality, which would cease to be art when showing exposed female genitals (the jurisdiction over male nudity as obscene continued until 1962), giving rise to the semi-legal period of pornography for heterosexual men known as Public Wars and allowing magazines like Playboy to continue in the market in the 1960s as a magazine of artistic photography and respectable journalism.
It was sexploitation (1960-1969)[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]At the beginning of the 1960's decade, the Hays Code begins to weaken due to artistic protection demands under the First Amendment and new obscenity parameters (sex is different from obscene) that appear after legal modifications in US laws, giving rise to the Golden Age of Sexploitation, a film exploitation genre that emphasizes sexual details and nudity, with B-movie production and screenings at special theaters called grindhouse (direct antecedents of the porn cinemas that emerged in the 1970's, dedicated to presenting exploitation films and forced to follow admission rules that limited entry to adults over 18).
Promotional poster for Promises! Promises! (1963).
The Sexploitation genre was highly popular in the 60's, relying on erotic advertising that barely met official censorship requirements and warning of restricted entry to adults; despite its legal ties, sexploitation cinema frequently found itself embroiled in obscenity controversies. Some films in the genre include: The Twilight Girls (1961), Nude on the Moon (1961), Daughter of the Sun (1962), House of Women (1962), Satan in High Heels (1962), Scum of the Earth! (1963), Lorna (1964), Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), Orgy of the Dead (1965), Mudhoney (1965), I Am Curious (1967), Space-Thing (1968), The Smashing Bird I Used to Know (1969), Language of Love (1969) and The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet (1969). Sexploitation reaches its peak production in the 1970's with the arrival of Porno Chic, relying on new genres such as Nunsploitation, Women in Prison and Nazisploitation.
In 1962, the US Supreme Court determines that male nudity must conform to the same parameters of obscenity that applied to female nudity since 1957 (MANual Enterprises v. Day).4 In this new current of homoerotic male photography, artists such as Jim French (founder of COLT Studio Group, producer of gay pornography that will have great importance in the period of chic porn and the AIDS crisis), appear under the pseudonym Rip Colt and experimental filmmakers like Kenneth Anger with Scorpio Rising (1964) and Andy Warhol with films like Blow Job (1964), Vinyl (1965) and Flesh (1968). By mid-60's a formal version of the LGBT liberation movement appears, which will intensify from 1969 onwards in the Stonewall riots, characterized by defending the idea that the effectiveness of the movement is based on sexual visibility.59 In gay culture, the leather subculture emerges, a sexual underground subculture characterized by greaser influence and hypermasculinity, which will flourish until the 1970s.4 The hippie subculture is fundamental in the development of the sexual revolution and the transition to postmodern cultural ideals, as they impose a philosophy of relaxed sexuality that was inclusive and tolerant regarding socially condemned topics such as fornication (changing marital ideals towards women who tied them to chastity and modesty), interraciality (changing social views on race mixing and favoring the civil rights movement in the United States), homosexuality (favoring the political emergence of LGBT identity and subsequent social movements) and alternative sex (popularizing ideas that redefined sexual practices such as tantric sex, spiritual sex, group sex, casual sex and heteroflexibility).67 68 69 The second wave of feminism emerges in the second half of the 20th century with the international publication of Le Second Sex (The Second Sex; 1949) by Simone de Beauvoir in 1953.70 The movement is influenced by the free sale of oral contraceptives and the appearance of literature that critically analyzed sexism, procreative freedom, and traditional gender roles for women, such as Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl (1961) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963).71 72
In 1965, the English magazine Penthouse was published under Bob Guccione's direction, but it gained international reach with its publication in the United States in 1969, aiming to compete with Playboy's content. It characterized itself by showing more daring photography of female genitals and pubic hair, targeting a male audience seeking riskier scenes. In subsequent years, Penthouse redefined pornography by including hardcore sex photography and being the first magazine to graphically show women's vulvas and anus.73
In 1969, the Supreme Court of the United States removed charges against a man who possessed pornographic videos for personal use (Stanley v Georgia).3 The same year, Denmark became the first country to legalize pornography, leading to high production of pornographic films between 1970 and 1974.74
Porno chic (1970-1989)[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]See also: Golden Age of Porn. The recent legalization of pornography in Denmark allowed for the production of two fundamental documentaries in the history of pornography: Censorship in Denmark: A New Approach (1970) and Sexual Freedom in Denmark (1970), which were publicly exhibited in the United States. Censorship in Denmark: A New Approach (1970) contained different forms of pornography and real sex, initiating the category of real sex (English: unsimulated sex) in mainstream cinema that challenged concepts such as simulated sex, although this category already had some precedents in European films like Un Chant d'Amour (1950), Gift (1966) and the documentary series They Call Us Misfits (1967).74 The documentaries evaded US censorship policies due to their educational content since they formalized a topic of social importance, redefining American morals on the open exhibition of pornography. In the early 70's, a massive production of erotic or pornographic films began in Denmark, with notable series such as Bedside-films (1970-1976) and Zodiac-films (1973-1978). Promotional for Deep Throat (1972). Mona the Virgin Nymph (1970) was the first pornographic film to achieve a wide distribution and economic revenue. The film is about a woman named Mona who promises her mother to remain a virgin until marriage; due to legal controversies, the original film had to be exhibited without credits, under an anonymous production (later revealed to be produced by Bill Osco and directed by Michael Benveniste and Howard Ziehm) that distributed it in various porn cinemas and grindhouse theaters in major US cities. A year later, Boys in the Sand (1971) became the first openly distributed gay pornographic film with significant revenue. Economic, besides being the first pornographic film to exhibit actor credits and the first pornographic film to parody the title of a movie (parody of the title of the movie The Boys in the Band).76 Deep Throat (1972) is consecrated as the most distributed and highest-grossing pornographic film of the 1970s, consecrated as an icon of sexual revolution and an icon of porno chic (Golden Age of Pornography), a period when watching pornography became something stylish, classy, popular.3 Deepthroat included an absurd plot that connected the sexual scenes, plus a chillout soundtrack with various tracks from genres like funk and lounge. The film had a wide reach in the United States and other countries, although it was subject to jurisdictions on pornography, so its exhibition was prohibited in some locations of the United States. The film contained credits with pseudonyms such as Lou Perry for producer Louis Peraino and Linda Lovelace for main actress Linda Susan Boreman, plus occasional humor and humorous sound effects like bells and pyrotechnics to emphasize Lovelace's orgasms.77 After the Stonewall Inn riots in 1969, the LGBT community obtained greater social visibility, and a new culture of gay men emerged in California known as Castro clone, a culture that adopted characteristics of the working-class homosexual man.78 Similarly, the leather subculture, which had remained secret for several decades since World War II, emerged into popular culture, fundamental to the homosexual perspective on pornography and the sex industry. Tom of Finland is the maximum icon of leather, responsible for positioning leather and other fetishes (mariners, workers, bikers, and cowboys) within the imagination of gay pornography with his comics and hyper-masculine art that exalted the size of the genitals and buttocks of his characters and emphasized hypersexualized scenes of rough sex, BDSM and cruising.79
In 1973 the Supreme Court of Justice of the United States of America determines that to consider a work as obscene should follow the Miller Test parameters: (1) if a person considers the work, in its entirety, as a lascivious work considering community standards; (2) if the work offensively represents acts whose representation is clearly prohibited by law; and (3) if the work, taken as a whole, lacks literary, artistic, political or scientific value (Miller v California). The work would only be considered obscene when these three parameters were present, which finally allowed for the legality of pornography, since most cinematic and printed works did not meet these three parameters.3 This legal modification and the popularity of VHS as a domestic device, permitted the massive distribution of pornography in this format until the end of the 1990s, when Internet began to gain popularity and the DVD format was industrialized.
Promotional Farmer's Daughters (1976).
Some significant pornographic films, including Deepthroat, are: Behind the Green Door (1972), The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), Resurrection of Eve (1973), The Cheerleaders (1973), Memories Within Miss Aggie (1974), The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (1974), Flesh Gordon (1974), Sensations (1975), The Story of Joanna (1975), A Dirty Western (1975), Alice in Wonderland (1976), Through the Looking Glass (1976), The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), Spirit of Seventy Sex (1976), Inside Jennifer Welles (1977), Debbie Does Dallas (1978), Pretty Peaches (1978), Inside Désirée Cousteau (1979), Taboo (1980), Talk Dirty to Me (1980), Insatiable (1980), Nightdreams (1981), Café Flesh (1982) and Reel People (1984). Some producers of the porno chic era include Bill Osco, Alex de Renzy, and Radley Metzger; some actors include: Linda Lovelace, Marilyn Chambers, Annette Haven, Georgina Spelvin, John Holmes, Johnnie Keyes, Kay Parker, Robert Kerman, Annie Sprinkle, Candida Royalle, Juliet Anderson, Harry Reems, John Leslie, Ron Jeremy, Paul Thomas, Desireé Cousteau, Jennifer Welles, Gloria Leonard, Billy Dee, Lisa De Leeuw, Jacqueline Lorains, Colleen Brennan, Nina Hartley, Seka, Traci Lords, Taija Rae, and Vanessa del Rio.
Some gay pornography films in the porno chic era include: Nights in Black Leather (1973), That Boy (1974), Kansas City Trucking Co. (1976), El Paso Wrecking Corp. (1978), A Night at the Adonis (1978), L.A. Tool & Die (1979), and The Bigger the Better (1984). Jean-Daniel Cadinot is one of the most famous gay pornography producers of the porno chic era. Some actors in the porno chic era include: Zebedy Colt, Jamie Gillis, Peter Berlin, and Jack Wrangler.
In the exploitation and gore film era of the 1970s, a film emerged that defined feminist positions on pornography, Snuff (1976). The film portrayed the story of a woman involved in an occult sect in Argentina, who was murdered after being sexually abused by unknown men. Despite having real sex scenes, the film was not categorized as a pornographic film and was promoted as a snuff film (months later it was discovered that the murder seen in the film was staged, although it popularized urban legends of real murder in film and, of course, the term snuff in popular culture). The film sparked feminist criticism for portraying the senseless murder of an innocent woman who is subjected to sexual abuse, fueling criticisms towards sexism in pornography and the subjugation of women for the pleasure of men in the sex industry and prostitution. This philosophy intensified the feminist wars over sex (feminist debates between 1970 and 1980 that addressed positions on topics such as pornography, the sex industry, prostitution, homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, and BDSM) and divided feminism into two ideologies: anti-pornography feminism which considers pornography a sexist symbol of repression and subjugation of women, and pro-sex feminism which considers pornography a representation of empowerment and autonomous sexual freedom for women.3
Before the new feminist scenes and diversity of opinions on pornography, Playgirl appears in 1973, consecrating itself as the first pornographic magazine with a feminist approach (defining what is now known as feminist pornography or female-friendly). Playgirl focuses on heterosexual women as a counter-sexist response to Playboy, since it was characterized by beefcake-style photographs of physically attractive men (a considerable percentage of its consumers are gay) and occasionally hardcore scene photographs that were more sensitive to feminine taste, emphasizing eroticism and other sensual elements that contrasted with the coarse pornography of publications like Playboy, Hustler, and Penthouse. Contemporary Pornography[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]Cover of My First Sex Teacher Vol. 18.
By the mid-90's, pornography appears in DVD format, allowing for a greater distribution of erotic material. Between 1995 and 2000, various adult film producers join Internet and open their official sites, such as Playboy magazine in 1994 and Hustler magazine in 1995. That same year, the video conferencing service that made live cams and cyber sex services possible is incorporated into Internet's reach. Anonymity, accessibility, and affordability turned Internet into an unparalleled repository of pornography starting from the years 2000, allowing users to access content, videos, photographs, games, and services like sex cams and hookups, although it also allowed for anonymous access to illegal pornography.
By the end of the 90's, actress Jenna Jameson is consecrated as The Queen of Porn. Jameson became the image of the adult film industry with a fifteen-year career (1993-2008) that placed her as the most famous adult film actress with over 100 films including: Up and Cummers 11 (1994), Flashpoint (1998), Virtual Sex with Jenna Jameson (1999), and Brianna Loves Jenna (2001). The best-selling adult film in history is Pamela Anderson's sex tape with Tommy Lee.
Public video hosting sites Pornhub, Redtube, and YouPorn appear in the second half of the 2000s, currently managed by Manwin Media (MindGeek) intelligence company. Manwin Media is the largest online pornography company in the world with adult film studios like Brazzers, Men.com, Digital Playground, Reality Kings, Mofos, JuicyBoys, and Tranny Surprise, as well as video sharing pages like Pornhub, Redtube, YouPorn, Tube8, XTube, Spankwire, Keezmovies, Extremetube, Sextube, and GayTube. Online adult film studios currently register their sales. In subscriptions and memberships with guaranteed access, most of them incorporate online stores that offer the company's own productions in DVD or Blu-ray format, as well as sexual toys, clothing, memorabilia, etc. Most adult film studios incorporate HD technology for filming their productions, besides being advertised on video hosting sites and online dating services and hookups. Sites like Vimeo and Tumblr, with less strict content terms, allow the circulation of pornography on their sites, despite not being pornographic sites, which denotes a new culture (Generation XXX) accustomed to pornography.[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]Although various classifications can be made according to the participants, theme or positions, one very widespread way to group pornographic genres is from less to more explicit (whether they are pose positions or actions represented). In this way, they would be: Softcore[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]Main article: Softcore pornography
It is the pornographic genre in which sex scenes are not shown explicitly. In film and television, particularly, it does not include close-ups of genitals (male or female) and neither shows penetrations and fellatio in detail. Actors or models usually cover a part of their bodies. This genre has been practiced by many women and men, more or less famous, such as Demi Moore in the movie Striptease. It is also used in advertising, although this use has been criticized by feminist organizations.
Mediumcore or conventional pornography[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]It's that where models teach the entire body in more or less provocative positions. Famous magazines like Playboy or Penthouse are perhaps the most well-known examples of this type of pornography. Despite existing classifications that place them in the previous category. Hardcore.[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]Main article: Hardcore Porno
It is the most extreme pornographic genre, as it explicitly shows sexual acts, whether vaginal, anal, or oral, or with appliances or any other type of utensils.
This type of pornography is subdivided according to sexual orientation: heterosexual, homosexual (male or female) and bisexual. The first pornographic films and the majority of current films are heterosexual; gay films are the second most sold and produced. There is also a variant of the genre transexual (men transformed into women through hormone consumption and clothing use) and zoophilia (sexual acts with animals).
Postporno[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar][editar]The post-porn seeks deliberately to subvert the rules of traditional pornography (and, with it, the models of sexuality that sustain them) for political purposes (serving as a means to articulate other possible sexualities, alien to hegemonic standards).81 The concept 'post-porno' was introduced by erotic photographer Wink van Kempen and popularized by activist, sex worker, and artist Annie Sprinkle. It developed in the 1990's in the US and Canada connected with queer activism and post-feminism.82 It emerged as a new status of sexual representation: through a deconstruction of heteronormativity and naturalization, Sprinkle made us think of sex as an open category for use and appropriation of pleasure beyond the framework of victimization by censorship and taboo. The movement is currently active and corresponds to a creative and revolutionary environment that calls for reflection on what is a pornographic image, what is gender, and everything that ultimately poses the so-called transfeminism83 84 It is the task of post-pornography to make other sexualities and new forms of fuck emerge in public and political space; its critical discourse revises the history of pornography from post-feminism and gay struggles to gain a space for representation and consumption of sexuality and allow the visibility of what was previously absent in pornography. Post-porno, understood as self-representation of the queer movement, harbors at its center dynamic empowerment strategies closely related to appropriation; it is taking power itself, but also representation of possible appropriations and creator therefore of disident realities within normative discourse.85[/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar][/editar]
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