Kathleen Lubey on 18th Century Pornography And What It Tells Us

 

 

Pornography Without Sex

In the 1749 bawdy novel The History of the Human Heart, a young Englishman tumbles into a London bagnio with his rambunctious friends. They are entertained by a troupe of female erotic performers who masturbate and ejaculate in spectacular unison:

Having resumed a proper Posture, with wanton Fingers they entered the mysterious Cave, and heaved, and thrust, and riggled, till they opened the teeming Springs, which shot their volatile Liquids into a Wine Glass, each held in the other Hand.——But here the Reader will hardly believe me . . . that what the Glasses received, was mingled with their Wine, and drank off without the least Shock to the Nature of any one present.

A long footnote nearly runs this action off the page, and as I discuss in Chapter 2, it disputes, in inflated philosophical style, the common belief that feminine virtue is part of a natural social order.

This novel was reprinted many times. In 1757, the female ejaculation is deleted from the scene. It reappears in 1844. In 1885, it’s gone again and remains omitted in a 1967 anthologized excerpt. But it returns in a 1968 pulp edition. This detail’s disappearance and reappearance work as evidence of pornography’s uneven relationship to women’s bodies, particularly their autonomous and active genitalia. These dancers withhold their bodies from penetrative contact and yet dazzlingly display and arouse their genital parts. At some points in history, it appears, the minute details of women’s self-administered sexuality can be countenanced, even enjoyed by pornography’s readers. At others, their extreme autoeroticism is incompatible with the genre’s sexual representations. Toggling back and forth between exposure and occlusion, the spectacle of the performers’ genitalia is not consistent across time, and neither is pornography’s attitude toward women’s self-governance—the discursive footnote also comes and goes across editions. At times in pornography’s history, vaginal and clitoral anatomy is shown to be owned by women; at times it is accompanied by feminist commentary; and at times these elements are absent entirely. In this example from the original Human Heart, women’s ritualized ejaculation is situated narratively among episodes, discourse, and paratext that qualify, analyze, or delay the penetrative ambitions of men, the very content so often believed to be pornography’s raison d’être. My research disproves pornography’s alleged certainty that heteropenetration is common and pleasurable. Following the three-century timeline of Human Heart’s publication history, What Pornography Knows looks cumulatively at the contents of narrative pornography from the mid-eighteenth century forward. I argue that Human Heart’s complex hybridity—situating dissenting statements beside genital description—makes it uniquely capable of analyzing how genitals and sex acts accrue cultural meaning.

The passage above encapsulates what I mean by “pornography” throughout this study: accounts of genital activity that are embedded within narrative and that connect to a social world beyond the immediate action being described. These episodes are highly specific about genitals, considering, and not always confirming, their capacity to penetrate or be penetrated, their conduciveness to pleasure, and their tenuous attachment to the people in and on whose bodies they reside. I build this study on evidence from several eighteenth-century works virtually unknown to scholars, and use Human Heart as a framing case study, given its long publication life. I argue that it and its contemporaries contain a blueprint of pornography long forgotten in modern culture. Human Heart’s wayward structure makes it typical of eighteenth-century comic fiction but, it would seem, atypical of pornography. As a specialist in both fields, I’m attuned to the significance of its convergences between sex (pornography’s hallmark) and excursus (a habit of eighteenth-century fiction) and find that this one text, perpetually joining sex to discourse, can tell us much about how pornography works as a narrative form—how it wields content beyond (“without”) sex.

Human Heart and its contemporaries show genital sexuality to overlap with philosophy, ideology, and culture, and they exemplify pornography as a textual expression of this energetic, frenetic discursive inquiry. They represent what was once pornography’s meandering and associative form, a form adept at connecting sex to culture and admitting the infelicities, even violence, of those connections. Penetration sometimes happens, to be sure, but sometimes it does not; and when it does, it is not without questions, refusals, and qualifications. When these narratives do settle into genital detail, they regularly dispute that sexual union is pleasurable, interrupting sex scenes with feminist claims. Genital sexuality fuses with speculation, implying the insoluble bond between a culture’s capacity for justice and the ethics of its sexual practices. Such pornographies, representative and consistently present across my three-century chronology, call for a miscellaneous model of reading in which readers balance libidinal curiosity with ethical, social, and philosophical concerns. Not yet pigeonholed as pornography and usually cheaply printed, they invited a wide audience to witness that sex is a significant aspect of social experience.

Combining archival book history with theoretical inquiry, I propose that by reading sex scenes across time, we can grasp their opposition to social hierarchies. Pornography recognizes, I believe, the difference between a body’s genital parts and the person believed to be in possession of those parts. The genre remarks upon cultural conditions that designate certain kinds of genitals as receptive and that operationalize their penetration in social institutions like heterosexuality, marriage, and capitalism, and it often registers the injustice of these processes. I locate this pattern of genital criticism across a wide swath of eighteenth-century print (Chapter 1) and track its social concerns into pornographic works of prose fiction, which knit genital action into picaresque coming-of-age narratives (Chapter 2); then I show the long lives of these texts in re-publication across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where they help us understand how pornography continues to circulate skepticism and protest against the way social hierarchies operationalize genital life (Chapters 3 and 4).

This long chain of texts is linked concretely to Human Heart, but its discursivity also emanates outward, illuminating the multiple conversations conducted within pornography more broadly. It is this textual ecosystem I invoke through the term “pornography.” Rather than attempt an excavation of extant pornographic works—a task that would fly in the face of my sense that pornography is a dispersal of conversations rather than a fixed genre with a definable archive—I have devised a method of focused selection, following the long life of Human Heart and the texts with which it was bound, selected, and published in order to highlight its textual complexity and the significance of editorial changes over time. The advantage of this selective method is the focus it affords on patterns of narrative and abridgement across works’ publication history, a methodology of close reading not available to studies of pornography with more of a bird’s-eye view. My sources contain within themselves a torrent of evidence and self-conscious performance, rewarding close reading and differing from archival projects that contend with absences and gaps. Studying the archive of slavery, for example, requires what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation” to create history out of elisions and silences. By contrast, my selection of texts abundant with commentary reveals the genre’s capacity to relentlessly discuss and prove sexuality’s imbrication with social and public life.

 

Pornography’s particular capacity for social insight derives from its insistent foregrounding of genital action. Refusing to occlude genitals, it argues their interactions have social relevance—that the desire for genital access is shaped by a social order and that genitals, subject to social evaluation, confer meaning on the people wearing them. This genital centering, and especially its unsimulated forms in the visual and digital ages, has had a polarizing effect, prompting many feminists to fault it for subjugating women, even as practitioners of pornography declaim its enfranchising potential. I attempt a history of the genre that highlights its political consciousness without taking a pro- or anti-pornography stance. In so doing, I join critics like Frances Ferguson, Jennifer Nash, and Linda Williams, who argue the genre can analyze (respectively) relationality, racial identity, and gender. They converge in the view that pornography articulates social relations beyond the normative and oppressive. (I refer readers to their excellent explanations of anti-pornography feminism’s limitations.) I take for granted, as these critics and creators of early pornographic narrative did, that sex thoroughly intersects with social relations, that no account of culture is entire without an acknowledgement of where and how sex happens, and that genital description is a laboratory for studying hierarchies.

Eighteenth-century pornography built in cues that heightened readers’ consciousness of what we might call sexual politics—of establishing relationality to another person through penetrative sex that, in the case of both heterosexuality and male homosexuality in the eighteenth century, often entailed hierarchy. Beginning with pornographies that contain social criticism allows me to conjecture that all pornography might contain skeptical attitudes toward the very relations it dramatizes, even, as I suggest in Chapter 4 and the Coda, its modern visual forms that feature real people. If pornography contains this awareness, which I believe it does, the job of the critic needn’t be limited to rehearsing what the genre already knew about itself—that sex acts are embroiled with power relations. Instead, I revivify pornography’s statements against the hierarchical violence that plays out in sex acts (seductions, rapes, orgies) and cultural institutions (marriage, courtship, family) as well as its speculative reformulations of social structures. Without disregarding the labor of sex workers who appear in modern forms and without assuming they are in every case harmed, I illuminate pornography’s three-century capacity to generate resistant social commentary across media shifts, and particularly to clarify how cultures imagine, revise, and normalize their attitudes toward gender through pornography. This analysis aligns with Williams’s in Hard Core, which finds in pornographic film cultural anxieties about gender, capital, and consumption. Where she turned to film “to ask just what the genre is and why it has been so popular,” I turn to pornography’s prose-fiction past, tracing how the discourse embedded in and tied to sex acts dissents from the status quo of heterosexuality and heteronormativity, and how we can see that dissent change and condense over time. By focusing on the insights that arise from penetrative action, I take up Williams’s provocation that porn-studies scholars confront what they often overlook, “the mainstream heterosexual hard core,” that most unredeemable of pornographies. I offer an early history of hard core that highlights penetrative action not as sensationalism but as social contact.

Accounts of pornography that begin in the eighteenth century tend to trace backward to the strict sexual sequencing of the best-known eighteenth-century pornographers, John Cleland and the Marquis de Sade. Contrary to how Fanny Hill has long signified—as “the begetter of the twentieth-century genre,” writes Randolph Trumbach, in its tightly sequenced, phallocentric scenes—other eighteenth-century pornographies can be read as both hard core in their genital description and multiple in the topics they engage. Featuring speculation as a primary content around sexual description, the texts that gather around Human Heart’s publication history bring into focus an alternate pornographic lineage. To a much higher degree and in a much less organized manner, my examples embed sexuality within a wide array of proximate legal, domestic, and social settings and imagine reform of the inequities they produce, in contrast to the enclosed, doctrinaire libertine spaces of French works. The backward projection of pornography’s unceasing imperative to arousal is anachronism, a misreading that has caused scholars to overvalue the genre’s sexual content and to submerge the ideas joined to sex acts. This retrospective formation causes Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure to look like it has only “a certain blinkered relation to the larger social world,” whereas reading this novel alongside its picaresque contemporaries illuminates its worldly engagement. If we approach the genre “without” the imperative to ejaculate, we see that it entertains social possibilities that are shut down by heterosexual mandate.

Reaching this insight requires that we examine pornographic texts with a certain wide-eyed receptiveness, such that we might under-read the content we assume is ubiquitous (penetration, heteronormativity, misogyny) and over-read the content we assume is absent (queerness, feminism, social perceptiveness). Sharon Marcus argues that such an approach reveals queer histories, alternate “social formations [that] swim into focus” when scholars “abandon the preconception of strict divisions” that seem to govern modern sexuality and gender. Approaching eighteenth-century pornography with this attitude, I’ve discovered social criticism voiced by and around women in patterns that correspond to Susan Lanser’s powerful argument that literature “evaded or exploited heteronormative economies” and promised “certain kinds of change” by foregrounding women’s attachments to one another.  Pornography protests binaries, divisions, and hierarchies, circulating skeptical, anti-heteronormative discourse that we only can perceive if we entertain the possibility that pornography does not endorse the actions it displays. I take pornography at its word, dispensing with what we often assume it will do—arouse, degrade, harm—and listen to what it says about, through, and around genital action. The genre’s critical consciousness persists, I argue, through the distilled pornographic fictions of Victorian England; the countercultural era and its cheap pulp fiction; and the digital media of our own time.

Introduction  by Kathleen Lubey

Excerpted from What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century by Kathleen Lubey, Stanford University Press, 2022.

Stanford University Press

A single binding at the British Library generated the thinking behind my book, What Pornography Knows. An unassuming duodecimo in brown calf, Cup.702.t.14 holds two titles, The History of the Human Heart (1749) and The Progress of Nature (1744), anonymous picaresques that narrate the sexual discoveries of adolescent characters.

The wide-eyed awe of young people is often pornography’s alibi for describing sex in gratuitous detail. In Human Heart, a young Englishman is profusely tutored in female anatomy when he tumbles into a London bagnio with his rambunctious friends. They are entertained by a troupe of erotic performers who masturbate and ejaculate in spectacular unison:

“Having resumed a proper posture, with wanton fingers they entered the mysterious cave, and heaved, and thrust, and riggled, till they opened the teeming springs, which shot their volatile liquids into a wine glass, each held in the other hand. But here the reader will hardly believe me…that what the glasses received was mingled with their wine, and drank off without the least shock to the nature of anyone present.”

A long footnote nearly runs this action off the page. This note, rather than augmenting genital detail, takes a philosophical turn, disputing the common belief that feminine virtue is part of a natural social order.

The novel was first printed in 1749 in London by J. Freeman, publisher of many anonymous texts promising intrigue and topicality to the midcentury reader. It is exactly contemporary with John Cleland’s Fanny Hill but is less constant in its genital focus. It was reprinted many times. In 1757 the female ejaculation is deleted from the scene. It reappears in 1844. In 1885 it is gone again and remains omitted in a 1967 anthologized excerpt. But it returns in a 1968 pulp edition. This detail’s disappearance and reappearance work as evidence of pornography’s uneven relationship to women’s bodies, particularly their autonomous and active genitalia. These dancers withhold their bodies from penetrative contact and yet dazzlingly display and arouse their genital parts. At some points in history, it appears, the minute details of women’s self-administered sexuality can be countenanced, even enjoyed by pornography’s readers. At others, their extreme autoeroticism is incompatible with the genre’s sexual representations. Toggling back and forth between exposure and occlusion, the spectacle of the performers’ genitalia is not consistent across time, and neither is pornography’s attitude toward women’s self-governance—the discursive footnote also comes and goes across editions.

Human Heart’s long textual life suggests that its method of featuring sex acts—weaving spectacular genital episodes into a meandering and miscellaneous comic plot—was recognizable to generations of collectors and publishers as pornography. Yet the novel embodies a model of pornography that I believe has been effaced by historians seeking familiar pornographic conventions in works of the past.

Human Heart is held in several rare book archives, but its British Library binding affiliates it with other titles, providing key insights into pornography’s diffuse and pervasive history. Human Heart and Progress of Nature were bound sometime in the eighteenth century with other “Pamphlets and Poems Gallant,” as the binding still reads. It once held five works having to do with sex and marriage, as a manuscript table of contents tells us; two were by Eliza Haywood, known in the eighteenth century for her writings on love and passion. Today this volume holds only Human Heart and Progress. At some point, genital content distinguished these two works from the other three, which were removed by a collector who left the original “gallant” designation on the binding. The British Library, probably acquiring the volume in 1982, did not qualify it as pornography. It was therefore never put in the Private Case, a restricted collection of obscene literature established in the mid-nineteenth century. Instead, it was given a “cupboard” shelf mark, designating the texts as more loosely sexological.

Because of the contingencies of archiving, bibliography, and shelfmarking, Human Heart never was counted as pornography, never was held in the Private Case, and therefore it has sat largely unstudied, its highly associative, discursively various structure missed by scholars. Had its acquisition date been earlier, or had it been illustrated, or had its title page alluded to known pornographers, it might have landed in the Private Case or in the rubbish. What we learn from this binding is that in the mid-eighteenth century a pattern of candid sexual description across a work of prose fiction did not categorically distinguish it from a wider body of literature considering intimate life, nor was such a work expected to deliver sex scenes exclusively. Readers found Human Heart meaningful for centuries, as its republication history shows. It elicited various attitudes and usages, and its hybrid character made it marginal to bibliographers, malleable to editors, and invisible as pornography to librarians and researchers.

This example shows us that there is, in a sense, no archive of pornography. Ephemeral materials have been destroyed, false imprints defy attribution, digital media and print ephemera evade collection, and changing cataloguing procedures select and deselect material as pornography differently across time. The search terms useful to a researcher of pornography aren’t keyed into catalogues, and many materials haven’t been read closely enough by archivists to be classified as pornography in the first place. Rather than as an identifiable set of works, “archive” needs to be conceived as a set of practices through which we approach materials relevant to a pornographic history of sexuality. The Private Case, as rich a repository as it is, can obscure the reach and diversity of pornography, implying hard boundaries where there are none. Some researchers limit their pornography research to this collection, reproducing its exclusions; others believe pornography was once sequestered in libraries, then became more accessible and abundant under increasingly liberal collecting procedures. To the contrary, Human Heart—the narrative and the binding—exemplifies pornography as a renegade form, integrated and mobile among a heterogeneous textual culture. It suggests that the genre never was closed, sealed, or secret. Pornography defies parameters—it’s what the genre was designed to do.

This kinetic quality makes pornography much like any other object of study—surprising, varied, unpredictable, and defamiliarizing—and it disconfirms Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s oft-cited quip about knowing pornography when he sees it. Pornography is often not immediately perceptible as such; and, conversely, its genital spectacles regularly contain discourse and conversations that are easily lost if we dismiss them as mere obscenity or sensationalism. Close reading of rare texts—a slow, decidedly unsexy method—leads us to decadent sexual description but also to all the prose that intervenes: discourse and narrative and paratext that pose questions about social justice, elaborate on gender inequity, and concede that sexual violence is a common form of reining in women’s autonomy.

 These discoveries refute assumptions that we know what we’ll find in pornography. For years, colleagues and friends have joked with me about my research—about suffering the judgment of prudish librarians, or keeping my hands on the table while I read, or asking if what I’m doing with those books really counts as (wink wink) “research.” These jokes express some hesitation about taking pornography seriously, but that is precisely what I think we should do. Careful and dedicated librarians have curated these materials and created conditions hospitable for consulting them with sufficient care that I was able to read, reread, and consider what they actually say, and what they actually say has made me understand pornography as a genre with a unique capacity to envision sexual justice. They contain theories of feminism, statements against sexual violence, and nonbinary alternatives to heteronormativity.

I’ve been able to arrive at these insights about pornography because libraries make working with pornography feel safe, professional, and serious. Some scholars perpetuate the misconception that such work makes them targets of oppressive regimes of surveillance, such as at the British Library, where readers must sit at designated tables in close proximity to library staff as they consult Private Case holdings. Allegations circulate that this restriction is a form of policing, an imposition of shame or self-consciousness. What these stories leave out is that a pornography researcher is likely to share a restricted table with a historian studying medieval music manuscripts; or an early modernist working with a Shakespeare quarto; or a specialist examining tiny eighteenth-century children’s books; or readers consulting unique letters, maps, contracts, or journals signed, annotated, or written by any number of historical figures—Jacob Tonson, Elizabeth I, James Cook, Samuel Coleridge, or Queen Victoria’s amanuensis, to name only a few possibilities. These days, Private Case holdings are restricted not because of a unique obscenity but because they are, like these other varied materials, extraordinarily rare. The librarian supposedly upholding a disciplinary regime is often at work cataloguing, consulting with researchers, or granting photography permissions, of which I’ve requested many, invariably to have them granted. In the nearly two decades I’ve been researching pornography in libraries, I’ve been asked only once—at the Kinsey Institute—to pause a VHS tape of an adult film as a campus tour made its way through the reading room (a reasonable enough request).

Libraries also can’t exact surveillance because they don’t always know which materials are pornographic. The researcher might just as likely encounter pornography in the unrestricted general area of the rare book room while reading what appears to be a run-of-the-mill comic novel, as I was when I first read Human Heart more than a decade ago. Little did I know it would immerse me in lavish sexual description and incisive social criticism.

Excerpted from What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century by Kathleen Lubey, Stanford University Press, 2022.

Between Exposure and Occlusion. By Kathleen Lubey. Lapham’s Quarterly, September 14, 2022. 

Kathleen Lubey is Professor of English at St. John's University. She is the author of Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760 (2012).

Lubey applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century, and reported the following:

On page 99, I’m unpacking a description of erotic dancers from a 1749 pornographic novel called The History of the Human Heart. The passage contains sexual action in the main text, plus a lengthy footnote supposedly added by an erudite “editor”:

The pornographic description is complete without reference to men’s bodies or their capacity to penetrate.

In this original edition, the posture-girl episode is textually overrun by a footnote offering feminist speculations on the action in the main text. In the note, the editor questions a passing remark made by the author that the posture girls possess a natural feminine attribute, defining the concept instead as a longstanding cultural invention. Disputing common consensus, the editor claims that social fictions are devised to impose strict codes of conduct on English women, curbing their knowledge and ambition. He goes on to imagine the chaos of a culture without modesty in which the sexes encounter each other without cultural interference—that is, without clothing.

I was gobsmacked to see that on page 99, I’m discussing the passage that quite literally launched this entire book project. The point I’m making there is that in the midst of a sexual spectacle that titillates its reader by objectifying women, this little-known text turns our attention primarily to a feminist analysis of moral categories that are oppressive to women in eighteenth-century Britain. This philosophical move flies in the face of what we typically think pornography does—encourages masturbation, shuts down its users’ intellect, stokes misogyny. That pornography advances a far more complex, feminist project is the central argument of my book—so the Page 99 Test is apt indeed, bringing the reader straight to my most persuasive evidence.

When I first closely read Human Heart in the British Library over a decade ago, I was amazed to find that a description of women dancers masturbating is reduced to two lines per page, edged out by a massive footnote that tells the reader modesty is an invention of moral philosophers designed to reduce women’s autonomy. The collision of genital action with philosophical argumentation was an absolute revelation, and I thereafter undertook years of a research seeking feminist content in early pornography. I found loads of it, resulting in this book. My research took me into later periods as well—the Victorian period and countercultural era—where, amazingly, I discovered that pornographic editors reprinted these eighteenth-century texts and edited out, as though with a scalpel, its feminist content. In addition to proving a feminist past to pornography, What Pornography Knows also shows how pornographers actively and intentionally purged the genre of its social conscience, and I conclude by asking how we might approach pornography today with an openness to its critical insights.

The Page 99 Test. September 12, 2022. 

Across at least five decades, from Susan Brownmiller to Gail Dines, some feminists have denounced pornography for enacting and inciting violence against women, making its viewers into psychologically inert consumers or, worse, sexual aggressors. Andrea Dworkin put forth this view in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), where she defined the genre as ‘the blueprint of male supremacy … the fundamentalism of male dominance … the essential sexuality of male power’. On such grounds, Dworkin, together with Catharine MacKinnon, objected to pornography’s constitutional protection as free speech, and proposed legislation to ban it, alleging it did not say or represent the degradation of women, but concretised and performed it, made it real.

Dworkin’s contributions to feminist thinking about pornography are radical and profound. She insisted that we examine and take seriously what pornography shows us: its documenting of the sexual use of women’s bodies, as well as men’s consolidation of their ‘social power’. Displaying genital action, hardcore pornography – especially the visual kind that became popular during feminism’s second wave – shows to an unusual degree the ways that sexed bodies collide. Social dynamics like misogyny, heteronormativity, xenophobia and racism shape these collisions. With such conditions informing pornography and its consumers, sex becomes a stage for the mingling of persons. Often – but, crucially, not always and not uniformly – this interplay entails hierarchy: demands are issued, often by men; actions are coerced, often by men; body parts are pushed or positioned or operationalised, often by men. The recognition of these patterns led many feminists to deduce that pornography promotes – that it desires and celebrates – the denigration of women.

Having spent years in library archives reading obscene works, I’ve found that pornography says many things at once. It can make us think. It can urge people to consider sex from multiple perspectives and think about how it shapes our regard for other people. The actions captured in pornography convey more than they seem to – as all cultural works do. Dworkin’s indictment is so sweeping that she claims pornography, from Greek antiquity to her present, levelled all women to the same status, making them into the ‘lowest class of whore’, the ‘brothel slut available to all male citizens’. There is much to challenge in this thinking, not least its denigration of sex work, but also its lack of precision, its unsubstantiated view that all pornography celebrates the extreme subjugation of women. My objection is to Dworkin’s recommendation that we dispense with considering what an individual work of pornography says about the actions happening within it. It is tendentious to collapse millennia of sexual representation into a single function, an overgeneralisation that prevents us from approaching millions of works of pornography with a curious, even critical eye.

Those of us who want to think in a more sophisticated way about pornography won’t get there simply by adopting a pro-pornography position, an argument that, say, sex is inherently good, that everyone has a right to it, that we should rid sex of shame. Such a position advances its own kind of dogma, imposing the view that sexual pleasure is essential to full human potential, and thus potentially alienates those who – for any variety of religious, cultural, gendered or physical reasons – have a more reserved or alienated relationship to sexual activity. Moreover, pornography proliferates tenaciously and resiliently across media forms and doesn’t suffer existential crises. It doesn’t worry about people who don’t like it.

 

A more open and ecumenical approach, invested in neither condemning nor defending pornography, encourages us to tolerate looking at pornography without knowing in advance what we’ll find. Literary critics like me recognise this as close reading: a methodical examination of pornography’s contents. All of its contents, and not just the juicy bits. Encountering examples from the pornography of the past can also attune us to what is actually happening in pornographic works, then and now. What we find in historical examples of pornography sometimes resembles what Dworkin thinks is in all pornography: sometimes brothel workers are the main characters, and sometimes they do suffer coercion and debasement by men. But sometimes sex workers decline sex, sometimes they seek it out and enjoy it; sometimes young women object to toxic masculinity even as they applaud a penis for creating erotic sensation. Sometimes cross-dressed, heterosexually identified men find themselves desiring a penis more than a vagina.

If we refuse to recognise the vast diversity within pornography, we miss its complex accounts of sex and desire as different people in various social positions experience it. When we refuse to apprehend the full contents of pornography, we inadvertently overlook that it is frequently aware of how regimes of gender, misogyny and heteronormativity shape sexual contact. Dworkin and other anti-pornography feminists are right that pornography contains violence. But they are wrong that pornography contains only violence, that pornographic violence is inherently harmful, and that the genre does only one thing to women, over and over, and therefore deprives them of humanity and dignity. To imagine history as an undifferentiated state of violent sexism, and to imagine pornography as its primary form of propaganda, deactivates the capacity to see it for its breadth and scope across history, for its content beyond dominant, masculinist narratives.

I’ve spent more than a decade reading pornography from the 18th and 19th centuries. Far from silencing women and eroticising their subjugation, pornography sometimes minutely considers the personhood of sexual participants, often giving voice to women who know – expertly – that penetrative sex will transform their identity, and that they have little power over what comes of their bodies under patriarchal culture. At key intervals, pornography envisions alternative realities in which sex might be had under conditions of equity and freedom, even as it provokes erotic feelings. Pornographers fuse these ideas into sentences and paragraphs of genital description. Or they use footnotes and digressions to make sex share the page with social criticism, especially as spoken by women or gender-bending men. Granted, radical ideas are quickly sidelined when, after a moment of deliberation, a pornographic plot resumes its sexual path. Readers might therefore ignore, override or forget the social criticism. But pornographers did not allow readers to see sex without also seeing the social hierarchies occupied by sexual actors.

Sex, pornography tells us, is an encounter that is shaped and informed by its social world. The entropic, experimental fiction of 18th-century Britain braided pornographic description with explicitly feminist principles. Consider this passage, which examines how moral customs make disproportionate demands of women. This meditation on femininity comes from the little-known novel The History of the Human Heart; or, the Adventures of a Young Gentleman (1749), which follows the sexual pursuits of a young man through his rural adolescence, his London coming of age, and his European grand tour. The anonymous writer disputes the dominant cultural belief that women are innately modest. He calls modesty ‘the greatest Ornament’ of women, but he doesn’t believe it is a natural condition. Rather, it is a learned behaviour reinforced by a sexually conservative culture, ‘a meer Habit, founded on Convenience, and nourished by Custom’, mistaken for a natural attribute because it is so common among women in a culture that requires their virginity for respectable marriage. The pornographer, a keen observer of human behaviour, knows that modesty is socialised rather than inborn because every little girl ‘is inclined to do every thing her Brother does, and if the Bottom of her Belly itches, she would scratch it if twenty were in Company.’ Far from being naturally modest, girls will masturbate before company – ‘bottom of the belly’ is the top of the vulva – and would call her clitoris ‘by its proper Name, if she knew it’. Left to their own devices, girls and women will have an exhibitionist, plain-spoken relationship to their own bodies.

This passage is a fraction of a long footnote in the Human Heart. It challenges the notion that women naturally possess a trait that inclines them to blush at the mention of sex, and it runs across several pages that, simultaneously, describe an erotic dance by women sex workers. The pornographer expects the reader to indulge genital display and erotic arousal concurrently. As they receive details about women’s masturbation on the top of the page, they read below that modesty imposes on women’s natural openness and candour about their bodies. The concept was invented, the note speculates, by moral philosophers who, ‘foreseeing these Inconveniences, feigned a supposititious Virtue, which they called Modesty, and recommended it to the Fair Sex.’ The effect of this psychological shaping is to restrain women from independence and ambition, ‘keep[ing them] within Limits they would be naturally prone enough to leap over, if not guarded by this imaginary Fence.’ Such a discussion should surprise anyone presuming that pornography is interested only in the lurid presentation of sexualised bodies.

The footnote claims modesty is a good thing that preserves sexual order but disputes it is innate to women. Questioning the naturalness of human characteristics, this pornographic work joins philosophical debates of its time. In the late 17th century, John Locke disputed the innateness of ideas and character, prompting decades of debate about the degree to which we possess certain forms of knowledge at birth. The Human Heart author adopts a Lockean position on women’s chastity – that it is not inborn – but also squares with moral philosophers who, nonetheless, promoted sexual continence for contributing to social order and stability. Women were the targets of this enforced chastity, an inequity fortified by 18th-century natural philosophy (what we now call science). Medical discourse fostered the belief that women and men are fundamentally different at the level of anatomy and of psychology. Indeed, the modern gender binary ossified in this period. But here, in a pornographic novel, we find an assertion that liberty and autonomy are craved by all people, all genders. The passage discusses women not to eroticise or subjugate, but to animate and enfranchise, and to do so on a philosophical basis. What would Dworkin say to this, convinced as she is that pornography from any and every moment in history diminishes women, violates them, reduces them to their sexual function?

When genitals were laid bare by pornographic narrative in the 18th century, they did not only or always serve men’s pleasure. As works tantalised with genital detail, they tended to talk also about the social aspects of sex, making readers think about how sexual freedom is curbed for some people but not others. Such analysis is easily overlooked when we’re inured to the notion that pornography not only documents but produces misogyny. Theories about pornography’s injustice are alive and well in anti-pornography writing. A recent book by Bernadette Barton, which mourns that ‘raunch culture’ unconsciously suffuses the sex lives of young people in our own time, echoes Dworkin’s argument that all pornography renders women as sex workers, and that to be rendered a sex worker is a debasement. However, 18th-century pornography often featured sex workers as psychologically complex human actors not reducible to a genital function – indeed, the erotic dancers in the Human Heart end up declining penetrative sex work. Anglo pornography of the 18th century was sometimes equally committed to challenging a sexist culture as to titillating readers with lewd images. It experimented with the kinds of things we can know or surmise from sexual contact.

Pornographers found penetrative sex especially relevant for critical speculation because vaginal sex was a tool for organising society in this time. It consummated marriages, made single women unmarriageable, led to pregnancy, and otherwise caused permanent changes in women’s social identity. Men, of course, enjoyed large degrees of sexual licence, both within and without marriage. The weight attached to chastity was a topic of great cultural concern for young women and the male relatives responsible for overseeing their marriages. Pornography, candidly examining the conditions under which penetrative sex happens, regularly showed women objecting to sex, claiming the importance of their virginity, and expressing aversion to the men pursuing them – often to no avail, being forced to have sex anyway. These works are forthright about a central cultural hypocrisy: that in a culture that fetishised their chastity, women were largely ignored when they said no to sex, as when the hero in the Human Heart ‘stifled’ and ‘overwhelmed’ a resistant virgin before raping her. The 18th-century reader was not simply asked to find this dynamic arousing, but was educated about its inequity. Contrary to perpetuating patriarchal dominance, these works show the fraudulence of gender hierarchies that trace men’s primacy to their sexual power.

Dildos sometimes lead to feminist discovery in 18th-century pornography. In one work, The Progress of Nature: Exemplified in the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Roger Lovejoy (1744), adolescent girls find a dildo in an aunt’s bedchamber and spend pages deliberating its purpose. Drawing on a centuries-old European tradition of prostitute dialogues, in which an experienced bawd trains an initiate in the arts of sexual commerce, the more experienced Miss Forward explains genitals and sex toys to her innocent friend Polly. They acknowledge the penis as a source of power and ambition, and observe that the dildo – strong, erect and durable – in some ways resembles it. The penis ‘is that arbitrary he that enters his Dominions, and ravages far and wide … in the Gratification of his Pleasures. He plunges Headlong into all the Recesses, demanding every thing, denied of nothing, enjoying and bestowing every Rapture.’ Patriarchal right, so far, originates in men’s sexual power.

But the women soon qualify the potency of the penis. Miss Forward finds it to be, in crucial ways, unlike the dildo: whereas the dildo remains constantly erect, the penis ‘contracts himself like a Snail’, becomes ‘mean and pitiful, sneaking and supple’ in the absence of feminine beauty. Men, the young women realise, do not in their essence possess strength and power. Rather, they require an object of desire to beckon them to action. Men’s claim to uncontested social dominance, therefore, is premised on a faulty anatomical analogy. Long before Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler, this pornographer saw the phallus as illusory, an attribute that becomes associated with masculinity through a series of unstable connections. The penis, the girls agree, is ‘only something he has about him, that may be equivalent to, tho’ different from what we have about us.’ These girls obviously recognise their own genitals as valuable and advantageous. And other scenes describe the vaginal and clitoral pleasures of masturbation and penetration. Anatomical sexual difference is accepted, even celebrated, but gender hierarchy is not – equivalence is the relationship posited between men and women.

The dildo’s perpetual erectness made waves throughout pornographic writing. It raised existential questions for men. In A Spy on Mother Midnight (1748), a cross-dressed male narrator convinces a woman of his penis’s superiority so fully that she incinerates her dildo. Truly a fantasy, since ivory – like glass, a common material for dildos – would be unlikely to burn in a bedchamber fireplace. In the hubris that leads this narrator to boast of his penis’s triumph over this ‘inanimate Rival’, the narrator contemplates becoming a dildo. He finds himself wishing ‘that it might be the Fate of my Spirit to inform, in its next Transmigration, the Body of one of these Implements. What a delicious Thought … how many Cuckolds should I make in that Figure, more than I’m able to do in my own Proper Person!’

A dildo – always erect, never flagging – can penetrate more often, seduce more women, humiliate more husbands. Women also might show greater sexual enthusiasm to a dildo, a state of joy they are usually shamed from sharing with men: ‘Oh! to be hugg’d, handled, fondled, caress’d, and put ------- with their own fair Hands, and to find them yield to the Dictates of glowing Blood and stimulating Nature, without that Reserve and Coyness they sometimes assume … when a Man’s in the Case!’ The dashes playfully redact a key detail – that women ‘put [dildos into their vaginas] with their own fair Hands’, and it is exactly this extreme, disinhibited intimacy the man craves. The very object of sexual desire shifts: he wants not to dominate a woman through penetrative sex, but to become an object directed by a woman into her own body – an object, ultimately, that disappears.

British pornographers experimented with philosophy piecemeal, floating potentially transformative ideas, then retreating. By contrast, 18th-century French pornography, written in the decades leading to the Revolution, produced politically disciplined theories of personal liberty. While French pornography’s libertines promoted the unabashed fulfilment desire in enclosures like convents and chateaus, British pornography experimented with sex as it befell unremarkable characters (often inexperienced adolescents) in quotidian environments – gardens, parks, brothels, bedchambers, drawing rooms, taverns. In these proximate contexts, sex acts took on significance as everyday encounters available for consideration by an increasingly wide swath of readers, as print and literacy became more accessible. And as readers developed tighter affiliations with books, pornographers pulled together, in a slapdash manner, various threads of philosophy that could be tested against sexual experience, reimagining pornography’s lessons.

Stories of heterosex, seduction, rape, erotic performance and masturbation served as thought experiments about how people experience sex, but also how they experience the world. Pornography always understood that perception and aesthetics do not occur in a vacuum. Sexual encounters between persons provoke questions like: where does desire originate, and what is its object? What do genitals look like, and should we see them? Is seeing them at all like feeling them? Is modesty a social good, and at whose expense does it operate? Can sex be refused? Does sex cause harm? Pornographic narrative in the 18th century brought sex to bear on philosophical postulations, asking if there are epistemological limits, even risks, to the kinds of generalisations philosophers made. Social orthodoxies about two sexes are discovered to be not descriptions of simple reality but a superficial overlay on top of wildly different social practices. Pornography shows us that women are as inclined to ambition and freedom as are men. It shows us that men’s power is, like their erections, temporary, contingent, and it shows us contestable men who want to be objectified and sexually passive. Pornographers knew that life in an outwardly rigid heterosexual and patriarchal society was complicated and unjust. They resisted norms that intellectuals and revolutionaries would later attack.

Philosophers, especially empiricists, aesthetic theorists and moral philosophers worked toward a universal model of how individuals acquire knowledge, taste and virtue. Amid the clashes of modernity, philosophers wanted to understand minds operating in predictable ways. Eighteenth-century pornography runs against the grain of contemporary philosophers, often describing its characters, especially men, in states of perceptual distortion. Men’s lustful ‘Imagination’ can cause them to see firmness in a breast that is in fact ‘flabby as a Piece of Tripe’ (The Progress of Nature), or to feel ‘Extasy and unspeakable Rapture’ with a repugnant partner by holding the ‘Idea’ of their beloved foremost in their minds (the Human Heart). British empiricist philosophy tried hard to rationalise the components of human knowledge, merging individuals’ ‘ideas’ and ‘imagination’ with an observable, objective world. But sex, pornography asserts, disrupts this communal sense, leading us to see what is not there or to fantasise erotic ideals. Conceding individuals’ particularised perceptions, pornography foregrounds the potential incoherence of theories of civil society, asking how social cohesion can happen if individuals perceive their reality differently, a conundrum Enlightenment-era philosophy itself often failed to admit. How are we to believe men relished their autonomy when, as pornography showed us, they also wished to be absorbed into women’s genitals?

Pornography shamelessly foregrounds private experience, and it says we can learn things from sex we can’t learn any other way. Or, learn not from sex itself, but from reading about it, seeing people have it, and recognising the social contexts that surround it. If we acknowledge that pornography says many things at once – like, that the same sex act can gratify one person and violate another, or that gratification and debasement can be the same thing, or that heterosexuality can feel good but also oppress – we can allow it to activate our knowledge about the world and about other people. It can teach us that there is no one way to see an objective reality, that other people possess their own perspectives, and that our minuscule desires might set us at odds with a larger common good.

All of this is to say that pornography is remarkably honest, and not simply because, as anti-pornography feminists allege, it documents patriarchy’s debasement of women. Rather, it is honest because it showcases the hard, often confusing work of reconciling private desire with public life, of admitting that sex with others can be unethical, of distinguishing between fantasy and reality. Antique pornography makes these contradictions obvious, circulating knowledge that we think, today, is at odds with eroticism. But perhaps it isn’t – perhaps there’s a utility to pornography’s mixed messages. Perhaps it was designed to confuse us, the better to underscore the clarity with which we should enter into the messy endeavour of sex with other people.

 

The honesty of pornography.  By Kathleen Lubey.  Aeon, November 29, 2022

Like lots of my Millennial generation who grew up with internet at home, I’ve had an active relationship with the medium, and, by the time I reached the age of eighteen – the age at which viewing pornographic material becomes legal in the UK – I’d seen plenty of sex online, all of which fell into the broad category of mainstream free (or ‘tube’ site) porn. As a teen, I’d also surreptitiously pick up porno magazine from top shelf magazine racks in newsagents and flick through, out of general curiosity. I never go so far as to watch a porno on DVD, but knew that they existed.

By the time I reached my twenties, I reckon that I’d seen every conceivable sex act either depicted in a magazine or performed online. However, I began to feel like my own varied, and constantly evolving, fantasies, desires and preferences were very, very different from the often harmful sexual dynamics depicted in the porn I’d seen.

Then, due to my work within the sexuality education sector, which began with the launch of my very own sexual health and erotica project, ‘Kayleigh Daniels Dated’ in 2018, I’d come across a whole wealth of explicit material through engaging with educational content created by and for this new professional peer group I now found myself part of.

Lots of this newly discovered explicit material didn’t look like the arguably pretty harmful porn I’d gotten used to and become desensitised by. Instead, many of these videos had a decidedly art house vibe, with a focus on aesthetics and cinematography. Since the pandemic, OnlyFans, the internet content subscription service has seen a massive boom and really opened up the market because anyone over the age of 18 can create an account to sell explicit content, which can be made from home.

All of these development are really fascinating and I’ve have attended many events, film festivals and workshops which aim to critically engage with the medium of pornography in nuanced terms on a mainstream cultural level. Along the way I’ve made connected with creatives, healthcare professionals and sex workers and scholars who are all working to open up the dialogue.



One such connection is Professor Kathleen Lubey at St John’s University, New York. Professor Lubey teaches and researches in the fields of the British eighteenth century and the history of pornography. She is also currently Interim Director of the University Writing Center and her forthcoming book What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest Since the Eighteenth Century will be published by Stanford University Press in September 2022.

I chatted to Professor Lubey about the history of pornography.

Almaz Ohene: What do you think is the oldest example of pornography?

Professor Katheen Lubey: What I would count as the first example of pornography would be some early 16th century poems in sonnet form that were written by Pietro Aretino in Rome. I would call them pornography because they involve poetic descriptions that accompanies a series of erotic drawings of postures. There are 16 of them and most of them are in the form of a dialogue between a courtesan and her client. Some of them are about things that feel good. And some of them are like, complaining about the logistics of like changing positions or not.

 

And then in 1749 English novelist John Cleland published a booked called Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (popularly known as Fanny Hill) which is about a sex worker describing all of the men – and some women – she has sex with.

‘The Swing’ (also known as ‘The Happy Accidents of the Swing’) is a 1767 oil painting by French Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard. It features a young woman lavishly dressed in, beautiful silk dresses and petticoats. And there’s a young man looking up her skirt as she swings in a garden. So, it isn’t pornographic in the sense that it shows penetrative sex, but it’s very suggestive and fun.

And then once the camera had been invented, in the nineteen-century people started photographing things that they thought might arouse. There’s an archive here in Indiana in the US, called the Kinsey Institute, that I've worked with, they have a large collection of Victorian-era pornographic photographs of men, women, and sometimes children. And what that collection also shows is that there weren’t child protection laws yet. So many of the subjects are actually children, right alongside adults, just because those distinctions and protection that we have in place today didn’t exist back them. These are more studies of the body in terms of style but they’re still a bit uncomfortable to look at.

The first pornographic film to reach a mainstream audience was Deep Throat in 1972, written and direction by Gerard Damiano and starring Linda Lovelace. It was premiered a movie theatre in Times Square New York.

Almaz Ohene: At which point in history did pornography become professionalised and why?

Professor Katheen Lubey: Political satire was a major reason for pornography being circulated. In the 17th century in England, Charles the second was lampooned by pornographic poems being written about his mistress and things like that. And for the French in eighteenth century, it was a way to make fun of priests, and the Church as a whole. But we first can identify a market for something called pornography in the middle of the 19th century in London, England. The printers that were collecting in the Charing Cross area and also had bookstores that were known for selling radical literature and pornographic literature.

And then in the Golden Age of Porn ear from the 1970s to the mid- 1980s in the US, that’s when studios were giving contracts to performers, so that’s when sex workers became professionalised.

 But I think the real golden age of professionalisation is right now with sex worker radicalism and all of the collective politics around trying to decriminalise sex work. This is so important.

Almaz Ohene: So, do you feel that the concept of consuming pornography has become more acceptable to society over the centuries?

Professor Katheen Lubey: I think it’s become increasingly identified as a particular ‘thing’ that’s wrong. In earlier historical eras, it was much more like other things people did so right. To give an example; Fanny Hill, that pornographic novel from the 1700s, that wasn’t sold in a separate section of a bookshop, right? That was beside moral novels, written by Samuel Richardson and it would have been considered reading, like other reading matter. So, it’s a real distortion of history to assume pornography has always been vilified because that just simple wasn’t the case.

The History of Pornography. By Almaz Ohene. Erika Lust, April 27, 2022.