Brian M. Watson - Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad

Annals of Pornographie:

How Porn became Bad

By Brian Watson

for a.g. and s.m.

INTRODUCTION

Omnium rerum principia parva sunt . (The beginnings of all things are small.)

Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, V. 21.

Truth! stark naked truth, is the word, and I will not so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze-wrapper on it.

John Cleland, Fanny Hill

begin, v1 /bn/

Of common West Germanic or ? Germanic formation: Old English bi- , be-ginnan is identical with Old Saxon and Old High German bi-ginnan... . The latter (Old High German and Middle High German) had the senses 'to cut open, open up, begin, undertake'; hence it is inferred that the root sense of *ginnan was 'to open, open up,' [and] Old English gnan 'to gape, yawn,' from a stem *gi- , appearing also in Old Church Slavonic zij-ati , Latin hire 'to gape, open' (OED)

ONE REASON I begin, well, with 'begin,' is to draw attention to words. The history of words is called etymology, and the entries in an etymology dictionary look much like the description above for the word beginthey typically list the earlier formats of the word, such as biginnan or begouth, and their meanings (to 'undertake' or to 'open up'), and how those meanings changed and developed into the word we use today. These entries can be incredibly detailed and expansivethe entire entry for 'begin' is nearly 500 words longfar longer than this paragraph. However, even the most detailed etymology does not tell the full story of a word's origin, purpose, or intention. For example, here is the entry for pornography:

Pornography, Brit. /pnrfi/, U.S. /prnrfi/

Hellenistic Greek (adjective) that writes about prostitutes (ancient Greek - (see porno- comb. form) + - -graph comb. form) + -y suffix (compare -graphy comb. form), perhaps after French pornographie treatise on prostitution (1800), obscene painting (1842), description of obscene matters, obscene publication (1907 or earlier). (OED)

Do you see the difference? This entry, in its entirety, is not even 50 words. The usually verbose Oxford English Dictionary simply says that it is a Greek word literally meaning 'writers about prostitutes.' It doesn't tell you that this word is only found once in Ancient Greek, where Arthenaeus comments on an artist that painted portraits of courtesans (an educated and upper-class prostitute). Then the word fell out of use for 1500 years until it was used in 1842 to describe a proposal on howto regulate prostitutes and then the erotic wall murals depicting prostitutes uncovered at Pompeii. What happened? Why was a word resurrected after so long? Why was it needed? Why werent the murals at Pompeii just called the Pompeii Murals, or referred to as the Erotic Art in Pompeii and Herculaneum like Wikipedia does today?

Consider another episode: On January 20th, 1674, John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester, delivered a poem he had promised to King Charles II. In a rather unfortunate moment for the history of poetry, Rochester accidently delivered into the hands of the king The Island of Britain, also known as A Satyre on Charles II. Upon discovering his mistake (and hearing that the king wanted his head), he was forced to flee the court for his safety. By February, however, the king seemed to forgive him, granting him the title 'Ranger of Woodstock Park' and allowing him to return to court. Two centuries later, in October of 1869, Daniel Gabriel Rossetti published Jenny, in his Exhumation Proofs, a poem that had originally been buried with his wife in 1862. This poem also met with considerable controversy, but Rossetti was not as easily forgiven. Even years after the fact, he was accused by Robert Buchanan, a Scottish dramatist, of being "fleshy all over, from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes...snake-like in [his] eternal wriggling, lipping, munching, slavering and biting," and responsible for a host of offences, including decency outraged, history falsified, purity sacrificed, art prostituted, language perverted, religion outraged, among others.

When the texts of the two poems are compared, however, it is Rochester's poem that seems to outrage decency and religion, falsify history, prostitute art, and so on. The poem begins in earnest with "In th' isle of Britain, long since famous grown / For breeding the best cunts in Christendom, //[lives] the easiest King and best-bred man alive," and goes on to describe both the Kings whoring and 'tarse' (penis) in obscene detail, complaining that Charles is "starving his people, hazarding his crown. //...for he loves fucking much." The language of Rossetti's poem, by contrast, hardly perverts languageit begins with "Lazy laughing languid Jenny, / Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea, / Whose head upon my knee to-night / Rests for a while," which hardly seems obscene. The most 'suggestive' the poem gets is to speak of Jenny's "dainties through the dirt" and the only 'action' seen in it is "one kiss."

What changed in the two intervening centuries? Why did Rossetti's poem, so tame in comparison to Rochester's, inspire such a diatribe? Why do our modern eyes immediately peg Rochester as the 'libertine poet' or 'a profane wit,' as two 2004 books did?

This book is an attempt to answer these questions, an attempt to trace a history through the 'underside' of Western culture, its art, literature, philosophy, sexology, psychology and its changing laws. It is an attempt to explain the modern viewto explain exactly why, where, and how porn became 'bad.' The other reason I began this chapter with the word 'begin' is found in its older meanings of 'to gape' or 'to open up'sometimes history needs to be cut open, revealed, and stripped. Sometimes the past is not as clear as battle dates or body counts. Sometimes it is hidden in the shadows, buried beneath tons of rock and ash, or taking place behind a bedroom door.

Because, like it, love it, use it, or hate it, modern society has a tortured relationship with pornography. This relationship manifests in a number of ways, like 2013's anti-pornography proposal in the United Kingdom, which aimed to cut off both children and adults from internet pornography by default, or the 2015 ruling that adult eBooks could only be sold after ten pm in Germany. Books condemning the corrupting effects of pornography appear with regularity, with such titles as; Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, or Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain, which claims that "our culture has become pornified." Online communities like Reddit's NoFap have over 165,000 'Fapstronauts' who seek to "abstain from pornography and masturbation... as a test of self-control" or to 'quit' pornography all together if "excessive masturbation or pornography has become a problem" in their lives. The fapstronauts encourage and compete with each other by daily updating the community on their abstinence from PMO (Porn, Masturbation, Orgasm). Websites like yourbrainonporn.com claim that "Evolution has not prepared your brain for today's Internet porn," and that it causes PED, porn-induced erectile dysfunction.

On the other side of the debate, doctors such as David Ley have published books such as The Myth of Sex Addiction attacking the science and the pseudoscience offered up by these sources and arguing that: sex addiction is a a shell game, a game that is using smoke and mirrors to hide moral judgments and to deny personal responsibility. At the same time, pornography companies are increasingly profitableone example of this is the $14.5 million purchase of the old San Francisco Armory by Kink.com, a company specializing in BDSM pornography, or the wild proliferation of tube sites like YouPorn or RedTube that are increadingly getting into the porn business themselves. Pornography use and acceptance is also increasingly widespread; a 2013 Gallup poll found that nearly half of Americans 1834 years old found porn morally acceptable, compared to 19% among those 55 and older. Additionally, pornography is becoming increasingly legitimized2014 saw the first publication of the journal