by B.J. on 8/30/2003 10:58:00 AM 0 comments Print this post

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History of Porno

Yup. Finding the history of porno with just a google search can be annoying as most of the useful information is found in books that cost $340, but I did my best.

There was erotica in Greek and Roman times. Before pornography, apparently there was plenty of build-up, manifested in erotic writing, challenging the perils of censorship. A lot of the writers at the time from Shakespeare to Chaucer implicitly tapped on eroticism. And writers kept pushing the bounds of censorship until the Victorian times.

Then all hell finally busted loose.

Explicit artifacts were discovered at Pompeii during the Victorian period, more than 2 centuries ago. This random guy online, Fenton Bailey tells the audience, "The question that faced them was what to do with the abundance of lewd artefacts they found that were obviously part of everyday life for the ancient Romans?"

"The solution was to place them in a "secret museum", where "gentlemen with appropriate demeanour (and ready cash for the custodian), would be admitted to the locked chamber where controversialities lurked; women, children and the poor of both sexes and all ages were excluded". The idea of the secret museum caught on with museums all over Europe setting up their own restricted collections, from l'Enfer in Paris to the Private Case at the British Library in London."

So began the institution of porn. According to Bailey, the difference between the erotica of the Greek and Roman times and this porn is that erotica is natural lovemaking, whilst porn is mechanical masturbation. "In short, if you jerk off to it, it [pornography] can have no other redeeming value."

This label of mechanical masturbation on porn is why I can't see porn as some type of art, unlike these girls (it's another drab article, not a pic) who consider themselves artists.

Nowadays, the porn industry has encountered plenty of exposure via the internet and has done battle in the court system. For any of that drab crap, you can look it up on google.

But the porn itself looks the same, only with differing styles in accordance with the time and place some material was concocted. You can find stuff from that time if you look up "vintage" on a google search. Same old sleaze.

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