“I bid him come towards me and give me his letter, at the

same time throwing down, carelessly, a book I had in my

hands. He colour’d, and came within reach of delivering me
the letter which he held out, awkwardly enough, for me to
take, with his eyes riveted on my bosom, which was,
through the design’d disorder of my handkerchief,
sufficiently bare, and rather shaded than hid.”

Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

JOHN CLELAND (1749)
 25,000
YEARS

OF

EROTIC FREEDOM
25,000 YEARS OF EROTIC FREEDOM
 SOME THOUGHTS CONCERNING

PORNOGRAPHY

BY ALAN MOORE

WHETHER WE SPEAK PERSONALLY or palaeoanthropologically, it’s

fair to say that we humans start out fiddling with ourselves.
Our improved scan technology reveals that most of us
commence a life of self-pollution while in utero, and if we
trace our culture back to the first artifacts that showed we
had a culture, then we find ourselves confronted by a
hubcap-headed humming-top of tits and ass carved lovingly
from limestone, excavated from an Aurignacian settlement
discovered in a northeastern Austrian village known as
Willendorf.

The mighty Robert Crumb, back in his awesomely prolific

Weirdo days, depicted the creator of the first Venus of
Willendorf as Caveman Bob, a neurasthenic outcast with a
strong resemblance to Crumb himself—perpetually horny,
crouching in his cave, and whacking off over the big-butt
fetish woman he had just made. Homo erectus.

Crumb’s point, in all probability, was that while she may

well have functioned as a magic icon to induce fertility, and
while to modern eyes she stands as an example of the
prehistoric genesis of art, the Willendorf Venus was an
object of arousal in the eyes of her creator, a piece of
stone-age stroke material—primal pornography. He may
also have been saying that if we trace culture to its very
origins, we find its instigator to be an obsessive smut-hound
and compulsive masturbator much like Crumb himself—or
me, or you, or any of us if we are to be entirely candid.

Humans, whether individually while in the womb or as a

species newly climbed down from the treetops that we had
shared with kissing-cousin bonobos, discover early on that
sexual self-stimulation is a source of great gratification,
practically unique in our experience as mammals in that it
is easily achievable and, unlike almost every other primitive
activity, can be accomplished without risk of being maimed
or eaten. Also, it can be acquired completely free of charge,
which may well be a factor in society’s subsequent
attempts to regulate the sexual imagination—a point to
which we’ll return later.

This is not to say, of course, that all society is a direct result

of chronic onanism, although I can see how one might come
to that conclusion. Rather, it is to suggest that our impulse
toward pornography has been with us since thumbs were
first opposable, and that back at the outset of our bipedal
experiment we saw it as a natural part of life, one of the
nicer parts at that, and as a natural subject for our proto-
artists.

Lest this be seen as a reinforcement of the view that porn is

wholly a Neanderthal pursuit, we should perhaps consider
ancient Greece and the erotic friezes that adorned its civic
centers—the magnificently sculpted marble figure of the
god Pan violating many of our current barnyard statutes
and a really slutty nanny goat in the bargain. Images such
as these were clearly seen as eminently suitable Grecian
street furniture, depictions of an aspect of mammalian
existence that all mammals knew about already and were
comfortable regarding, and which no one from the youngest
child to the most pious priest needed protecting from. In
bygone Greece we see a culture plainly unperturbed by its
erotic inclinations, largely saturated by both sexual imagery
and sexual narratives.

We also see a culture where these attitudes would seem to

have worked out quite well, both for the ancient Greeks and
for humanity at large. They may well have been hollow-
eyed and hairy-palmed erotomaniacs, but on the plus side
they invented science, literature, philosophy, and, well,
civilization, as it turns out.

Sexual openness and cultural progress walked hand-in-hand

throughout the opening chapters of the human story in the
West, and it wasn’t until the advent of Christianity, or more
specifically of the apostle Paul, that anybody realized we
should all be thoroughly ashamed of both our bodies and
those processes relating to them. Not until the Emperor
Constantine had cut and pasted modern Christianity
together from loose scraps of Mithraism and the solar cult
of Sol Invictus, adopting the resultant theological collage as
the religion of the Roman Empire, did we get to witness the
effect of its ideas and doctrines when enacted on a whole
society.

If we take a traditional (and predominantly Christian) view

of the collapse of Rome, then conventional wisdom tells us
that Rome was destroyed by decadence, sunk beneath the
rising scumline of its orgies and of its own sexual
permissiveness. The merest skim through Gibbon, on the
other hand, will demonstrate that Rome had been a
heaving, decadent, and orgiastic fleshpot more or less since
its inception. It had fornicated its way quite successfully
through several centuries without showing any serious
signs of harm as a result. Once Constantine introduced
compulsory Christianity to the Empire, though, it barely
lasted another hundred years.

Largely, this was because Rome relied on foreign troops—on

cavalry from Egypt, for example—to defend the Empire
against the Teutonic hordes surrounding it. Foreign soldiers
were originally happy to enlist, since Rome at that point
took a pagan and syncretic standpoint that allowed recruits
to worship their own gods while they were off in northern
Europe holding back the Huns. Once the Empire had been
Christianized, however, that was not an option. Rome’s new
Christian leaders decided that it was their way or the
stairway, and so consequently, off in distant lands,
recruitment figures plummeted. The next thing anybody
knew, there were barbarians everywhere: the Huns, the
Franks, the Visigoths, and worst of all the Goths, with their
white contact lenses and Cradle of Filth collections. Rome,
effectively, was over, bar the shouting.

So, to recap what we have learned so far: Sexually open

and progressive cultures such as ancient Greece have given
the West almost all of its civilizing aspects, whereas
sexually repressive cultures such as late Rome have given
us the Dark Ages.

Let us fast-forward past almost a thousand years of Saxons,

Danes, and Vikings ripped on fly agaric pillaging and raping
their way through some sort of meteoric nuclear winter with
brains dripping from their axes, howling about Odin and
blood-eagling anybody who chose not to do the same.
When lights eventually started to come on again across the
Western world, we find a Christian church that’s
understandably concerned about attracting worshippers to
its rough-hewn pews—and that had hit upon the notion of
erotic art as one way of accomplishing this end. The spread-
legged figure with a splayed vagina found crouched in the
masonry of many medieval British churches, misidentified
as a Sheelagh-na-Gig, as a leftover mother-goddess from
some earlier religion, was in fact of purely Christian origin
and was originally intended as an image representing Lust.
If the folklorists had looked harder then they would have
almost certainly found similar depictions of Wrath, Gluttony,
Sloth, Avarice, and all the other deadly sins, although that
petrified and gaping pussy does tend to seize more than its
fair share of the attention, which is probably no accident. In
churches of that period, displays of pornographic imagery
were not at all uncommon, nor were they by any stretch of
the imagination unintentional. Pictures of people copulating
were a big draw when it came to pulling in the
congregations, after all, and were not sinful in themselves if
they could be explained away as warnings to the faithful:
stern moral instructions to describe the shameful acts that,
were they actually committed, would result in certain
hellfire and damnation.

What the church actually accomplished with this crowd-

pleasing maneuver was a subtle and yet massively
important change in the relationship between the
population and its sexual imagination. Implicitly, it was
acceptable to enjoy sexual imagery as long as you accepted
also that such acts were sinful and felt suitably ashamed
and guilty if you were in any way aroused by their
depiction. This established the immediate link between the
perusal of pornography and intense self-loathing or
embarrassment, which still exists today throughout most of
the Western world.
It wasn’t just the early church, of course, that enjoyed a
monopoly on images of naked flesh. Until the nineteenth
century, the only way an artist could portray the unclothed
body without risk of censure was to set the nudes within a
context that was either classical or biblical—Eve and the
serpent, Leda and the swan—so long as you can’t actually
see it going in. Mind you, that’s not to say that there
weren’t always artists who were unafraid of censure, or that
the church’s standpoint on the issue was at all times and in
all lands universally observed. The flow of English literature
since its Saxon beginnings would seem largely unconcerned
with sexual propriety. A few of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
are indistinguishable from the soft-core sex romps that
swamped English cinemas during the 1970s. Carry on up
the Fourteenth Century. Confessions of a Pardoner.
Shakespeare could work encrypted lavatorial filth into
descriptions of a lady’s handwriting: “Her Cs, her Us ’N’ her
Ts, whereby she maketh her great Ps.” That said, it wasn’t
until William Caxton devised his printing press—for younger
readers, just think fifteenth-century Internet—that a
tradition of pornography as we would understand the term
today was able to develop. Just as with the Internet, the
new technology was put almost immediately to the purpose
of disseminating dirty pictures.

Prior to this point, when mass production first became a

possibility, erotic culture had existed only in the private
realm of artists and collectors, which in public terms is
much the same as saying it did not exist at all. The church
had never previously adopted a position on pornography,
simply because there wasn’t any, and it was relatively slow
to recognize it when it finally showed up. By William Blake’s
day in the last half of the eighteenth century, contemporary
London was awash with fuck-books and salacious prints of
all varieties, including such essential publications as a best-
selling directory of whores that introduced the phrase “as
lewd as goats and monkeys” to the English language,
meant apparently as a recommendation, as a Regency
equivalent to Michelin’s four stars. It’s also worth
remembering the late 1700s as the era during which, in
France, the Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
began to use outrageous, violent, scatological, and
frequently intensely dull pornography for the first time as a
blunt instrument for social satire, finding in society’s great
squeamishness about its carnal impulses a vulnerable
underbelly open to attack.

Yet when the nineteenth century began to get seriously

under way, amid European worries with regard to all the
revolutions of the previous fifty years coupled with the
uncertainty and paranoia typifying the Napoleonic Wars, a
more repressive and authoritarian mood prevailed. While an
undeniably large number of licentious chapbooks circulated
throughout this period, these were already starting to adopt
the furtive underground associations and hunched posture
that would stigmatize and lame pornography for the next
hundred years or so.

As for open involvement in erotic work by writers, artists, or

any creators of proven ability, the ground appears to have
become a toxic wasteland, poisonous to the reputation and
alive with career pathogens. When William Blake expired in
1827, even though his willingness to embrace sexuality and
a broad range of sexually unorthodox ideas was central to
his whole philosophy, overprotective devotees persuaded
his wife, Catherine, to purge his work of any overtly erotic
art or writings. That Blake had a love and also a facility for
pornographic images can still be seen in his surviving
marginalia, with doodled youths gobbled by fleshy matrons,
but his acolytes had evidently made their minds up that the
poet-visionary they were in the process of constructing
would be more angelic without genitalia. We can but
imagine, wistfully, the masturbatory masterworks
incinerated in Blake’s bonfire of profanities—The Red
Dragon Does the Woman Clothed in the Sun—and it’s better
that we don’t torment ourselves with all the other glorious
artists whose posthumous conflagrations, real porno for
pyros, may have gone completely unrecorded.

With the guilty and embarrassed tone thus set for the
impending reign of Queen Victoria, we find pornography in
the condition that has by and large defined it ever since: a
wretched ghetto with which no respected artist would
desire to be associated, and which therefore rapidly
becomes the province of those with no literary or artistic
leanings whatsoever. The once rich erotic landscape was
effectively deserted by the genuinely talented. It turned
eventually into a genre that not only had no standards but
also appeared to think it had no need of them, although
during Victorian times this total desertification was still
some way off into the future, and the cultural libido was still
showing healthy spurts of life from time to time.

Indeed, the façade of abstemious morality that came as

part of the Victorian packaging appeared to reproduce hot-
house conditions in the prurient imagination of the day.
Pornography, exemplified by periodicals such as The Pearl,
could flourish, albeit only as an underground subculture.
This subterranean network, though, extended a
considerable way beneath surface society, so that the semi-
detached homesteads of Victorian suburbia were
dangerously undermined. In those times, long before the
advent of the adult video outlet, city businessmen returning
homeward for a weekend with their spouse or partner would
call in at some backstreet establishment and pick up a
gaslight equivalent: just as theater predates cinema, so too
did fully scored dramatic home pornography precede the
skin-flick. Pornographic playlets could be purchased,
ranging from two-person dramas through to full ensemble
pieces if the neighbors were agreeable. These publications
came with sheet music, so that if one of the participants
were musically inclined then he or she could sit at the piano
and provide a vigorous accompaniment to whatever activity
was taking place upon the hearth rug or the horsehair sofa.
(Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was told that by
Malcolm McLaren, and if you can’t trust Malcolm McLaren
then whom can you trust?)

The powerful erotic undercurrent that existed in society

behind closed doors, however, was in direct opposition to
the era’s outward stance on sexual matters, and
increasingly pornography was openly deplored as an
unpardonable affront to public virtue. One collector of
erotica, with many scurrilous unpublished manuscripts by
Swinburne, Wilde, and other notables, had been warned by
his lady wife that, on his death, she was intent upon
incinerating the entire obscene collection. Cunningly, the
gentleman in question got around this by persuading the
British Museum to accept a “private case” containing his
salacious valuables, a trick he only managed to pull off by
making the safekeeping of his titillating treasures a
condition of the museum also getting all his first editions of
Cervantes.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, of course,

photography became an option for pornographers, though
this was a development that introduced a new (and later
vastly controversial) element to the erotic, or at least to the
moral debate concerning it: These images were not the fruit
of an aroused imagination, but were actual people who had
lives beyond the photographic cropping of the dirty
postcard that contained them. Concern for the models’
moral well-being would come to equal or surpass concern
for the impressionable members of the public who might be
exposed to the material’s depraving influence. Back in
those early days, though, when a camera was a relatively
rare possession, at least in comparison with the notepad
and pencil that one needed for more low-tech smut, the
dominant mode of pornography was literary, and saucy
snapshots were at first a fairly rarefied minority concern.

The literary mainstream of under-the-counter reading

matter during the Victorian period varied widely in
palatability, as is to be expected in an outcast and despised
field without quality control of any kind. A Sadeian passion
for deflowering or else for uncritically depicted rape
intruded nastily into some narratives, possibly even into a
majority, but it’s important that we do not overlook the
socially benevolent material that found its only outlet in this
much-loathed form. Sexual etiquette, and even to a certain
extent sexual politics, could not be mentioned or discussed
within the confines of Victorian propriety, which meant that
only in a field already banished far beyond those confines
could such subjects safely be brought up. It’s by no means
unusual to find participants in some chapter-length orgy of
the period suddenly declaring half-time during which they
will discuss such issues as the gentleman’s responsibility to
make sure that his female partner has been fully satisfied
by their exchange, or the importance of always acceding to
the female partner’s wishes even when deranged by
passion. These were matters that could not be raised in
Home Hints and were certainly not taught at school or by
one’s parents. It would seem that the only sexual education
being circulated in the nineteenth century was within
publications that were by their very definition deemed
obscene.

To illustrate this practice we need look no further than the

riotous career of local nineteenth-century atheist and
member of Parliament Charles Bradlaugh, whose indignant
statue stands pointing accusingly upon a traffic island on
Abington Square here in Northampton, England. Amid the
stream of principled activities and often controversial
incidents that marked the life of this confirmed Old Labour
politician is a spell in which Bradlaugh was jailed, along with
noted Match-Girl agitator and Theosophist, Miss Annie
Besant, for the distribution of “obscene material.” This turns
out to have been advice on contraception, meant for
women of the working classes at a time when nearly a third
of them might reasonably expect to die in childbirth. Pretty
racy stuff, as you can probably imagine.

This intense and largely indiscriminate repression marking

the Victorian era, though it was not unopposed and though
in many ways it may have even made the period’s porno
more inventively subversive, could be seen as having
triumphed in the end. The victory was Pyrrhic and short-
lived, admittedly, with the excesses of the twentieth
century poised in the wings and just about to make their
lurid entrance, but for those artists caught dabbling in
erotic waters when the clampdown came, it must have still
seemed a decisive one. While there were obviously a wide
variety of complex incidents and issues influencing how
affairs progressed around this time, the one event that is
most emblematic of this sea-change in the public attitude
toward erotica must surely be the trial of Oscar Wilde.

What makes Wilde’s downfall so important is the way in

which this marvelously gifted aesthete and writer had
become a living symbol of the Decadence, the movement
that perfumed practically all the important art or literature
composed between the 1870s and 1890s. The aesthetics of
the movement, as defined by early decadent Theophile
Gautier, demand that artists should be unafraid to plunder
from the opulence of history or legend for their imagery,
and equally feel free to borrow from the latest offerings of
their culture—from its “technical vocabularies.” Given that
the remit of the Decadence was intentionally broad, it’s
hardly a surprise that the erotic should become a major
element informing the whole atmosphere that surrounded
the movement. For the first time in a century, genuine
artists were again engaging openly and meaningfully with
sexual expression in their work, and the exquisite peacock
display that resulted must have seemed, in sexually color-
blind Victorian eyes, like a red rag to a bull. Even the
decorative border lines characterizing Art Nouveau were
heavy with the curve and sag of breasts or testicles, even
upon those relatively rare occasions when there were no
breasts or testicles depicted in the actual illustration.

Literature witnessed a plethora of stellar talents more than

willing to apply themselves to the erotic, from the rich and
sensual undertones found in the work of J. K. Huysmans to
the full-blown pornographic writings of Guillaume
Apollinaire or Pierre Louÿs. Louÿs presents an interesting
case in that here was a writer blessed with independent
means whose work received tremendous critical acclaim
quite early on in his career, after The Love Song of Bilitis
had been published, and yet who found literary fame
repulsive and elected to write brilliantly demented hard-
core filth for the remainder of his life, safe in the knowledge
that it was unpublishable outside the small market in
privately printed chapbooks for the connoisseur.
Poetry too was graced during this period with many sublime
talents who possessed an ear for the erotic, notably the
tragic Ernest Dowson. Dowson, killing himself with his
fondness for the green destroyer, absinthe, and besotted
with a fifteen-year-old girl, died much too young in relative
obscurity after enriching English phraseology with such
well-known expressions as “I have been faithful to you, in
my fashion,” “days of wine and roses,” and “gone with the
wind.” Yes, that was Dowson.

Within visual media, however, and despite fierce

competition from the likes of Alphonse Mucha, it is fragile
Aubrey Beardsley who emerges as the poster child for
sexual expression in the arts during the Decadence. Dead
by the age of twenty-six from galloping tuberculosis,
Beardsley was, both in his artistry and personal
appearance, a rare orchid who would not survive the bitter,
disapproving moral blizzards of what William Blake had
once referred to as “the English Winter.” Although
Beardsley’s personal life appears, much like Beardsley
himself, to be asexual (and despite the fact that save for
scurrilous suggestions from Frank Harris of a sexual
relationship with his beloved sister Mabel Beardsley, there’s
no evidence that Aubrey ever physically had intercourse
with anyone) the artist’s drawings are alive with sexuality.
Perhaps, as with the virgin architect Antonio Gaudí,
Beardsley’s one real form of sexual expression is to be
found in his sensual and yearning line.

In a career that spanned no more than eight years,

Beardsley’s striking style impressed itself upon the public’s
consciousness through illustrated works such as Sir Thomas
Malory’s Morte D’Arthur or by means of Beardsley’s elegant
and sinister submissions to John Lane’s Yellow Book.
Although the artist’s name became a byword for peculiarity
—“Awfully Weirdsley,” as one wag rechristened him—the
impact of his work, with its tumescent dwarves and aching
sexuality, was such that it established Beardsley and his
swooping line as the defining spirit of the 1890s. The
handful of images that he supplied for Wilde’s Salomé are
among his very best work, although at the same time these
are the few illustrations that undoubtedly contributed the
most to Beardsley’s ruin.

When the Wilde trial finally erupted as a national scandal,

nobody and nothing ever touched by Oscar’s scented glove
was safe. While walking from his doorstep to the waiting
coach that would deliver him to court, reporters noticed
that Wilde held “a yellow book” tucked underneath his arm.
This was most likely J. K. Huysmans’s classic A Rebours, of
which the then-current edition sported a bright yellow
cover, but unfortunately, in the mounting lynch-mob
atmosphere, the difference between the indefinite and the
definite article was overlooked. “A yellow book” became
The Yellow Book, and in the backlash against Wilde, the
single most important literary and artistic publication of the
1890s was stamped brutally out of existence.

Beardsley, having illustrated Wilde’s Salomé, was

inextricably connected with the jailed and banished Wilde in
the public mind and was assumed to be a homosexual.
Ironically, the artist was not merely not a close friend or
associate of Wilde’s, but actively disliked him and would
take pains to avoid the portly dandy if he saw him coming.
From the viewpoint of the general public, though, this was
irrelevant: To have adorned a work by Oscar Wilde was
evidently just as bad as having been discovered in flagrante
with the poet. Beardsley, horrified by these insinuations,
ran into the home of an acquaintance one night, gaunt and
haggard and unshaven. Staring through his red-rimmed,
haunted eyes into a looking glass, the artist asked of no one
in particular if the face he was looking at could be that of a
sodomite. Blacklisted by all decent publishers and with The
Yellow Book now gone, Beardsley was suddenly deprived of
both an income and an outlet for his art, while in the midst
of emotional turmoil and declining health. He coughs into
his linen handkerchief and stares at the resultant scarlet
spatter, poppies standing in the snow.

It is at this point that the cavalry arrives, too late to save

the day but just in time for one last doomed, heroic rally:
Leonard Smithers, former lawyer turned smut-publisher,
one of the true unsung heroes of pornography. His valiant
efforts, following the Wilde trial, to find work for Beardsley,
Dowson, and the rest resulted in his publication of a new
decadent periodical called The Savoy, which succeeded and
in many ways surpassed the much-missed Yellow Book. For
Beardsley, though, while this reprieve from cultural exile
was a welcome one, the damage to his confidence and self-
esteem had already been done, and this would seem to
have had repercussions on the artist’s physical well-being,
or specifically, his lungs.

In 1898, with Beardsley on his deathbed, his last wishes

were that Mabs, his sister Mabel, should take pains to
destroy Lysistrata and “all obscene works.” Subsequent
publication of the Lysistrata illustrations and of Beardsley’s
uncompleted pornographic novel (a retelling of the legend
of Venus and Tannhäuser that he called Under the Hill)
suggest that Mabel Beardsley showed considerably more
reluctance to purge the erotic from her brother’s work than
Catherine Blake had shown regarding that of her late
husband, and for this we should be grateful to her. Thanks
to Mabel, several pieces of exquisite work survive that
would not have otherwise. It’s still disheartening, however,
to consider Aubrey Beardsley going to his grave
unnecessarily ashamed of anything in the slim body of
sublime and influential work he gave the world. Like Wilde’s
or Ernest Dowson’s, Beardsley’s work had only ever
enriched human culture with its grace and beauty. Where,
in that, was there anything to be ashamed of?

The incoming moral weather, though, dictated otherwise.

Around the juncture of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the British Empire was at its uneasy peak—the
largest empire that the world had ever known, with
subsequently massive cultural influence across the globe,
for better or, more usually, for worse. Despite the bloated
self-important arrogance that seemingly accompanies all
empires when they’re at the dizzy heights immediately
preceding their historically inevitable downfall, Britain was
approaching the new century with a whole nest of nagging
insecurities: The British Empire was itself falling apart and
would be done with by the time that India gained
independence in 1947. No one was entirely sure what
changes the new century would bring, and no doubt when it
came to decadence within the arts, numerous labored
parallels with Ancient Rome were drawn. For whatever
reason, the new liberalism in the art and writings of the
Decadents was seen as symptomatic of a moral blight—an
indicator of decline. Thus, with a fierceness born of fear, the
Empire struck back through the Wilde trial and its
frightened, cowering aftermath, imposing what amounted
to a new Puritanism that would have its impact right across
the Western world.

In Germany, as an example, the desire to curb and regulate

sexual expression took on trappings that, perhaps
predictably, were pseudo-scientific. As with K. M. Benkert,
who first minted the term ‘homosexuality’ as an expression
to be used by doctors or pathologists, so almost any form of
socially unseemly sexuality (which is to say practically all of
it) was seen as a disease that might one day be cured by
science. An ingenious array of “medical” devices was
produced, for instance, to protect the vulnerable youngster
from unwelcome incidents of bodily arousal such as those,
say, that occur to adolescent boys when they’re asleep.
While the boy’s hands would obviously be strapped securely
to the headboard to prevent deliberate acts of
masturbation, this did not prevent him from becoming
sexually aroused while sleeping, possibly while dreaming,
which was clearly a quite unacceptable state of affairs in
century’s-end Germany. To solve this problem somebody
devised a ring with sharp spikes set around the inside
surface, which could be placed comfortably around a
detumescent penis—but which would impale it if the organ
happened to expand for any reason. Very popular with
parents of small boys in early twentieth century Germany
and Austria, apparently, this form of Sadeian sexual torture
during childhood would produce the famously well-balanced
generation of young Übermenschen that counted noted
sexual deviant Adolf Hitler in its ranks.

Just to recap, then: Sexually progressive cultures gave us

mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization, and the
rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark
Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I’m trying to load my
argument, of course.

While this wave of repression had its victims, it could not

prevent the twentieth century from happening nor bringing
with it new technologies that would inevitably change all
aspects of our lives, including our pornography. Film had
arrived in the late 1800s, giving birth immediately to the
first pornographic stag reels, but as with the camera that
had come before, the sheer expense of the equipment
necessary to produce a halfway-competent blue movie
made such efforts a minority affair. It was instead from the
developments that had been made in William Caxton’s print
technology that the next surge of sexually explicit life would
come. Newer and cheaper modes of printing, such as the
mimeograph, were coming into play, which meant that
publishing would soon become a much more democratic
process and was no longer solely the province of the
wealthy and the cultured.

In the 1930s came the boom in what was known as

“mushroom” publishing in Britain, an equivalent to the
much larger pulp explosion that was happening in the
United States. Although both countries had their
rudimentary laws on obscenity in place by this time, in both
cases the laws were so ill-defined as to allow a great deal of
room for interpretation. Raciness was tolerated up to soft-
core levels, although in such foggily delineated territory it
was easy to cross over lines unwittingly and find yourself
the focus of a moral panic, such as happened with the
“spicy” pulps that came out in the United States, or with
the Hank Janssen novels. The public’s thirst for
pornographic fare was evidently undiminished, but by brute
overreaction and a zero-tolerance policy (such as the
prosecution that saw British saucy seaside postcard veteran
Donald McGill convicted for his smutty innuendoes), the
authorities could just about hold down the tin lid on their
quaking, seething pressure-cooker.

This is not to say there weren’t steamy escapes from time

to time. The subterranean world of hardcore pornographic
publishing had weathered all the ups and downs of the new
century, remaining more or less untouched by virtue of its
near-invisibility. Other than a smattering of reprints from the
previous century and intermittent bursts of low-grade new
material, however, there’s not much to recommend the
porno output of the 1930s save for the phenomenon of
eight-page pamphlets churned out in America during this
period and known as “Tijuana Bibles,” possibly because it
was assumed that sex and anything associated with it
started out in Tijuana, Mexico.

The eight-pagers, crude material crudely produced, are

nonetheless a fascinating way-stage in the evolution of both
comics and erotica. Though various apocryphal accounts
exist of how these books came into being, the most winning
and endearing version is the one in which three ladies
clandestinely form a partnership to supplement their
incomes, with one woman handling the writing, one the
drawing, and the third one handling the
business/distribution end of the arrangement. Whether this
is true or not, the fact remains that in the Tijuana Bibles we
can see a socially mischievous spark that would in time
provide the basis for a whole American tradition of first-rate
inflammatory satire told in comic form.

The best-remembered of the Tijuana Bibles were the ones

that featured well-known characters from daily comic strips,
shakily rendered in what were still fair approximations of
the styles used by the artists who had worked on the
originals. The great appeal of showing thoroughly non-
sexual figures such as Blondie, Jiggs, or Popeye taking part
in pornographic skits lies in the greater contrast, with the
sexual content seeming dirtier when in the context of some
previously spotless cultural icon. There is also the
subversive pleasure that is to be had in puncturing the
anodyne and sexless vision of society presented by the
Sunday funnies, and it seems entirely likely that when
Harvey Kurtzman drafted up the blueprint for his seminal
MAD comic in the 1950s, the eight-pagers were an
influential part of the satiric mix. Kurtzman’s attack on
Archie (which reputedly ensured punitive treatment of the
E. C. Comics line by a draconian comics code authority
presided over by the Archie Comics publishers) presented
the allegedly “typical teenager” as a high school protection
racketeer, with Betty and Veronica as reefer-smoking
jailbait; it was a portrayal that could quite easily have
stepped out of an eight-pager, albeit an eight-pager where
the flow of sexuality was now only an undercurrent and
where the immensely talented Bill Elder did a far superior
job of reproducing and subverting the whole Archie style
than had the gifted Tijuana amateurs preceding him.

Besides a cast of characters culled from newspaper comic

strips, the Tijuana Bible pamphlets also utilized
contemporary actresses and actors such as Mae West and
Laurel & Hardy as their featured players. Interestingly, the
1930s criminal celebrity such as Baby-Face Nelson or John
Dillinger had his own subgenre, playing to the public’s
obvious affection for a glamorous crook and also to the aura
of near-mythic sexual potency with which such figures were
surrounded in the popular imagination. In this combination
of a wildly antisocial hero figure with the visceral rush of
unbridled pornography, the Tijuana Bibles prefigured the
comics underground that would erupt, in San Francisco, in
another thirty years or so.

Back in the early to middle twentieth century, however, the

erotic urges in society were finding their most lively
manners of expression in burlesque theater and, a little
later, in the “nudie-cutie” movies that burlesque had played
its part in giving birth to. Through the 1950s and the 1960s,
maverick directors such as Russ Meyer almost managed to
provide a voice for the unconscious dream-life of America,
its libidinous impulses stirred into a demented slapstick of
violence and sex that was at once exuberant and infantile,
marked by a kind of innocence, at least compared with all
the joyless, dead-eyed fare served up for us today. Justly
described as a “rural Fellini,” Meyer seems to have had a
specific private goddess-image that was given generous
flesh in his iconic women like Tura Satana or Kitten
Natividad. Just as with Robert Crumb a decade later,
Meyer’s enshrining of one female body type appears to hark
back to the primal origins of the erotic, to Bog Venus with a
shiny leather makeover and captured not in stone but in
celluloid.

In 1950s culture, powerful sexual undertones were evident,

sprung up in opposition to the stifling and sexless
Eisenhower/McMillan ethos of the times. Writers such as
Hubert Selby, Jr., and Henry Miller, who’d produced work in
the 1930s and the 1940s that was banned on publication,
were beginning to find an appreciative new audience and
sometimes even foreign publishers, such as the Olympia
Press, founded by Maurice Girodias. Hugh Hefner’s Playboy
was attempting to establish soft-core porn as an upmarket
lifestyle statement, and a new wave of “sick” comedy was
coming into being that would find its apogee in the
uncensored and occasionally brilliant rants of Lenny Bruce.
Meanwhile, in Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD there was a sharp
new synthesis of hip and Jewish humor that took sexual
references as a standard part of its comedic repertoire, as
in the Kurtzman parody of Julius Caesar in which a centurion
crying “Someone’s comingeth!” is answered by a word
balloon from somewhere out of panel reading “Ooh, I’m
dyingeth!” Elsewhere, new and exciting music spilled out of
the radios—black-influenced and sexual with its label, “rock
‘n’ roll,” simply another euphemism for the sexual act, as
“jazz” itself had been. And most importantly of all, in San
Francisco in 1955, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti started
publishing as City Lights Books in North Beach, the city’s
famously bohemian Italian quarter that had previously been
inhabited by anti-Mussolini anarchists.

Having heard the young New York poet Allen Ginsberg’s first
public performance of his William Blake–inspired work Howl
at the Six Gallery in 1955, the impressed Ferlinghetti
published it through City Lights Books in November 1956.
Despite the minimal attention that the book at first received
—hardly surprising for a first work by an unknown author in
the pretty much neglected field of poetry—by June 1957 a
police raid carried out on City Lights Books and a
subsequent trial for obscenity pushed Howl and Other
Poems to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness. Judge
Clayton Horn, surprisingly, ruled that a work could not be
deemed obscene if it possessed “the slightest redeeming
social significance.”

Judge Horn’s decision meant that City Lights could put out
Howl and many other controversial pieces without fear of
damaging reprisals from those in authority. Although some
writings were still too extreme to publish for a year or two,
such as the first ten chapters of The Naked Lunch by
William S. Burroughs, which had been turned down by the
Chicago Literary Revue, the ruling meant that the Beat
writers could now crystallize around Ferlinghetti’s premises
at 261 Columbus Avenue and spark what is possibly the
most exciting literary movement of the twentieth century. It
also meant that an important legal precedent had been
established, granting sexual material immunity from
prosecution if it could be shown as socially significant or of
artistic merit.
This was the defense successfully adopted some years later
in the widely celebrated English court case over D. H.
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, during which the
prosecuting counsel summarized a still-prevailing attitude
toward pornography when he suggested that no decent
person would allow their “wives or servants” to read such a
work. This one remark, betraying as it did a ludicrously
antiquated and Victorian view of social matters, almost
certainly convinced the jury to vote on the side of the
defense. The point of view behind the prosecution’s
statement is that while “we,” being white males of a certain
age and social standing, are far too evolved to be depraved
by such material, its probable effects upon those morally
more feeble than ourselves (such as the young, the working
classes, foreigners, or women) would be ruinous.

While as a work of modern beatnik poetry Howl could be

safely overlooked by the majority of average citizens, the
Lady Chatterley trial meant that most homes in the Western
world would come to own a much-thumbed copy of what is
in fact a relatively minor work by D. H. Lawrence. Sexual
subject matter, in the public’s eye, had become normalized,
which would open the floodgates to the rush of sexually
suggestive or explicit television programs, movies, books,
and pop-song lyrics that would help define the 1960s,
although obviously such progress did not go entirely
unopposed. Books were still banned, films were still
censored, and at one of London’s practically unheard-of
exhibitions of erotic art during the sixties, doodles by John
Lennon were seized by police, along with several Lysistrata
prints by poor old Aubrey Beardsley, who had been dead
seventy years by then. Organizations such as the National
Viewers and Listeners Association headed by self-
publicizing, self-appointed moral guardian Mary Whitehouse
would put pressure on the BBC to tone down certain
television shows or to remove Scott Walker’s version of the
Jacques Brel classic Jackie from the radio playlists lest its
references to “authentic queers and phoney virgins” should
corrupt the young.

The running battle faced by sexual expression during the

“permissive sixties” is an indication of how deeply feelings
ran upon the issue. Evidently, the same social
squeamishness regarding sex that the Marquis de Sade had
made his target back in revolutionary France was still a soft
spot that those wishing to critique society could do far
worse than to attack. The hippie movement, welling up in
the mid-sixties around various reference points, including
Aubrey Beardsley’s art nouveau extravagances, William
Blake, and Allen Ginsberg’s howled response to Blake, was
quick to seize on sexual rebellion as a favorite mode of
confrontation.

This is not to imply that a font of functional hippie-porn did

not spring up. It did, although its manifestations were often
subterranean to a degree that caused nary a ripple on the
surface of public consciousness. Fuck You: A Magazine of
the Arts represented Ed Sander’s “total assault on culture,”
something he would later take musical with the Fugs, whose
calls for group gropes of every description were greeted
with jubilance. Leonore Kandel’s Love Book, a slim volume
of erotic poetry, inexplicably prosecuted in San Francisco,
seemed almost the last gasp of the new puritans, although
they continued to issue intermittent squeaks (before re-
emerging with a roar). By the time Essex House began to
issue true hippie porn—David Meltzer’s Agency trilogy,
Charles Bukowski’s Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Philip José
Farmer’s Image of the Beast—the entire concept of porn-as-
writing seemed to be a dead letter. This was largely due to
the efforts of Barney Rossett and Grove Press at redefining
the boundaries of acceptable literature. Grove Press went to
trial on Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch,
winning each case and pushing the frontiers a little further
each time. But, indeed, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Nowhere is this counter-cultural assault on sexual

conformity better exemplified than in the early comic strips
of the extraordinary Robert Crumb, whose pioneering
efforts in the underground press turned out work that would
prove seminal in every sense. Using a reassuringly familiar
and therefore highly subversive style, Crumb gleefully
submerged himself in the most flagged-off and restricted
waters of the mass unconscious, serving up a vision of
America as seen through sexually obsessive eyes, peopled
by Snoids and nubile Yetis, with its most forbidden Joe Blow
urges dragged out from behind suburbia’s concealing
drapes, set down in black and white for everyone to see.
That Crumb’s work was received enthusiastically across the
social spectrum would suggest that after the initial shock
had worn off, many people found it was a vision that they
recognized. They knew, in the contemporary phrase, where
Crumb was coming from.

While there were obvious precursors for the underground

cartoon explosion in MAD comics, Tijuana Bibles, and the
fanzine press that Crumb had been a part of, it was Crumb
who set the bar for the cartoonists who would follow him,
with the release of Zap #1, peddled from a baby carriage
by the artist up and down the freak-encrusted length of
Haight Street. Just as with the Sex Pistols almost a decade
later, Crumb’s work was the catalyst that launched the
equally extreme careers of those who followed him.
Crumb’s work in Zap, along with that of gifted cronies such
as S. Clay Wilson, Spain, or Robert Williams, plus the many
undergrounds that Zap inspired, would turn out to be a
high-tide line in pornography, created cheerfully with an
intent that was both social and artistic. (The brilliant
underground cartoonist Sharon Rudahl, using the nom de
plume Mary Sativa, wrote The Acid Temple Ball, a
remarkable novel—published as part of the Olympia Press’s
“Traveller’s Companion” series—that lovingly recounted a
woman’s sexual experiences while under different
combinations of illicit substances.) When the comics
undergrounds at last gave up the ghost in the late 1970s,
there would be nothing of real energy or spirit that would
rise to take their place. Crumb soldiered valiantly on in
Weirdo and in other publications, but although his work
remained as marvelous as ever (and, in fact, continued to
improve and to progress), there was the sense now of a
solitary maestro laboring in isolation, rather than that of a
figurehead with a whole socio-artistic movement surging up
behind him.

By and large, what happened in the 1970s was that the

hard-won sexual freedoms of the previous decades, fought
for on grounds of ideology, became—predictably—a
booming market ripe for exploitation. Obviously encouraged
by the growth of sexual expression in the arts during the
sixties, moviemakers in the seventies decided that the
lowly porn film could be wrapped in bigger budgets and
improved production values. It could be re-branded, dressed
up in a way that would suggest artistic merit, and by this
means could become for the first time mass-market
cinema. In offerings such as The Devil in Miss Jones, The
Opening of Misty Beethoven, Behind the Green Door, and a
scattering of others, porn directors tried with varying
degrees of success to transcend the trashy, dopey
limitations of their chosen genre. Smoother camera work
and more imaginative sets combined with vestiges of
genuine acting talent and at least some semblance of a
screenplay to create works that appeared artistic, although
only when compared with all the drooling halfwitted porn
films that had come before.

Even so, the public seemed to like the new availability of

porno in the mainstream and responded with enough
enthusiasm to allow such movies to proliferate—right up
until the point where the real age of Traci Lords came out.
Defenses of artistic or social significance were useless when
confronted by an actual statutory offense, and with this
chink in porno’s arty armor opened up by the authorities,
the industry seems to have beaten an immediate retreat,
with the big-budget porn flick rapidly consigned to history.

Of course, by then the 1980s were just around the corner,

and the porno movie would be rescued by the massive rise
of the home video market, but its emphasis and its agenda
would be changed accordingly. Whereas the improved
production values of the 1970s had been designed to draw
in a crossover mainstream audience to the cinemas, home
video viewers were identified, perhaps in part correctly, as
a captive and addicted market that was entirely
undiscriminating in its viewing habits. Subtly yet
importantly, the audience’s view of itself also changed.
While sitting in a crowded cinema watching pornography
amongst a hundred other normal individuals or couples
could conceivably be quite a liberating communal
experience and an indicator of one’s liberal tolerance and
sophistication, watching a porn movie all alone behind
closed shutters is a very different matter, and it invokes a
different mindset. The experience is generally furtive,
secretive, ashamed. While it might be acceptable to
mention at the office the next day that you had been to the
cinema the night before and watched Deep Throat, purely
to see what all the fuss was about, naturally, you might
think twice before regaling colleagues with the news that
you stayed home and masturbated over Anal Virgins IV.

Pornography, although more massively distributed than it

had ever previously been, was now reduced to a mass
market without any standards or criteria, rapidly
accumulating an attendant atmosphere of sordidness and
shame. Still, just so long as pornographic culture could be
kept indoors, a private, addictive, and increasingly
expensive vice, it remained a very lucrative commodity. As
noted earlier, sexual fantasy is something that is free to
anyone still in possession of a sexual imagination, but the
pornographic video or DVD sells us a lifeless and lackluster
substitute for something we could have created much more
satisfyingly ourselves. This, in the eyes of the authorities,
must be the perfect situation for pornography: make it
available, so that those massive revenues and taxes can
start rolling in, but keep it frowned upon and shameful so
that you don’t get an Allen Ginsberg turning up and
claiming that it’s art, it’s civil liberties, a movement, politics
—anything that sounds dangerous.

Of course, both sex and sexual expression are political and

always have been, but it wasn’t until the late 1960s and the
1970s that they were widely seen as such. Sprung up from
the same sixties counterculture that had given rise to
Robert Crumb came feminism to provide the artist with his
fiercest critics. Feminists took the position that pornography
exploited and degraded women, which was certainly an
argument that it was difficult to disagree with in light of
much of the material that was available around that time. If
it had remained just that—an argument put forward as an
element in a continuing debate—then it might not have
polarized the liberal community to the degree that it
unquestionably came to do. Instead of putting ideas forward
as a proposition, feminism at the time delivered them as
dictums from a moral high ground. And instead of properly
considering the issues raised by feminism, liberal men
perceived themselves as victims of an unprovoked attack
upon their sexuality, responding angrily. Feminist protestors
against porn would find themselves uneasy bedfellows with
right-wing Christian campaigners and would also find
themselves on the receiving end of an equivalent amount of
left-wing ire, some of it justified and some of it unfair.

For one thing, it’s important to distinguish between the

objections of the chanting feminists and those of placard-
waving Christians, even when they’re part of the same
picket line outside an adult video emporium. Feminist
arguments, even those one may not agree with, are at least
constructed on the principles of logic and therefore can be
debated, having precepts that are falsifiable—that can be
proved or disproved. Religious arguments against
pornography, alternately, are based upon the idea of a
disapproving super-being, proof of whose existence has
thus far eluded us. This is not to say that God does not
exist, nor that religious people aren’t entitled to their point
of view, but is simply intended to point out that ideas
predicated upon a specific deity’s existence are not rational
ideas, and therefore have no place in rational discussion.
I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules. That’s just the way it is,
and we would have to entirely change the meaning of the
English language before we could make it otherwise.

Despite the rational basis of the feminist agenda, though, it

had been served up, understandably, as confrontation, and
high feelings on both sides meant that a sensible debate
would never really be a possibility. The already-fragmented
Left became divided upon grounds of gender, with both
camps in their entrenched and stalemated positions—men
insisting that the issue was completely one of civil liberties,
women insisting it was one of sexual politics. Both sides
were right, of course, but by then were not speaking to
each other, so the debate remained in deadlock.

Attitudes toward pornography had not just brought about a

schism in the liberal ranks, though, but had pretty much
split feminism itself down the middle. Many women, and
some men, who still believed that women had a way to go
before social equality was reached became reluctant to
describe themselves as feminists because of the censorious
and illiberal connotations that the term had taken on.
Rejecting feminism’s dogma on pornography, some women
made an effort to reclaim the genre in pro-sexual
publications such as On Our Backs, its title borrowed
impishly from hardline feminist mag Off Our Backs.
Elsewhere were the first stirrings of the erstwhile network
that would later call itself Feminists Against Censorship.

Although it would eventually be these dissenting female

voices who would suggest a possible solution to the
unproductive stand-off on the issue of pornography, during
the mid-nineties the arrival of the Internet would mean that,
once more, any ethical debate of the subject would be
swept to one side, overtaken by events and by the socially
transforming onslaught of technology. Just as home video
had meant that porno could be privately enjoyed by a much
greater segment of the population, the arrival of the
Internet took all that one stage further. Whereas renting
videos or DVDs might still entail the risk of being caught by
an acquaintance scuttling furtively out of a rental outlet, or
of having one’s porn stash discovered by a disapproving
spouse, the Internet apparently removed that final hurdle. It
became clear that a large majority of people weren’t as
frightened of pornography as they were scared of being
found out.

England, in the 1970s, was racked by strikes that

culminated in a national three-day week while shops and
businesses were closed by power failures. If the blackouts
happened unexpectedly, then stores and supermarkets
found that there were sudden bursts of opportunist
shoplifting. Even at the upmarket retail chains such as
Marks & Spencer, managers discovered that their prim,
predominantly middle-class customers weren’t averse to
slipping some expensive item deep within their twinsets
when the lights were out. Public morality must obviously be
seen to be observed in order to retain one’s social standing,
but when no one can see anything at all, it’s a different
matter.

So it was with the arrival of the Internet: In cyberspace, no

one can hear you climax. Since reputedly the greater part
of all the traffic on this information superhighway is devoted
to the viewing or downloading of pornography, we must
assume that the demand for porn is almost universal.
Perusing smut would seem to be no longer an activity
confined to isolated sexual deviants, but more a pastime
human beings simply enjoy when left to their own devices.
Also it would seem as if commercial porno has become the
undiscussed wallpaper of contemporary society—it is so
ubiquitous that it is accepted without question as a fact of
life.

Pornography, or what would only recently have been

referred to as pornography, is now a part of mainstream
culture. Having sexual undertones or even overtones since
its inception, pop music during the 1980s first began to
consciously adopt overtly pornographic stances with a
repertoire of pornographic imagery and references
employed by artists such as Prince, Madonna, Frankie Goes
to Hollywood, and a parade of others. Where Chuck Berry
had been banned for serving up single-entendres on the
subject of his ding-a-ling, and Lou Reed got away with
Candy Darling giving head in his “Walk on the Wild Side”
solely because British censors didn’t understand the term,
the Spice Girls now convey their need to Zig-a-zig-ahh to an
audience of ten-year-old girls with complete impunity.

Properly packaged as a taxable commodity, erotic imagery

pervades our culture to an extent that would have been
previously unimaginable. While pornography employed by
individuals for their personal pleasure as an aid to
masturbation is still seen as something vaguely shameful,
its use in a corporate context, as a means of selling us
consumer goods, is smiled on. Advertisers fill our television
screens and billboards with it, trying to associate their
snack food, car, or line of sweaters with arousal so that they
can shift more units. Rock, pop, and rap promoters drape
their artists’ videos and lyrics in it without comment, so that
in a climate of increased concern and indeed mounting
panic over pedophilia it’s perfectly OK for Britney Spears to
posture in a fetishistic schoolgirl outfit of a type that cannot
actually have been worn by a schoolgirl any time this
century. The word “fuck,” once inflammatory when on the
lips of Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, or Kenneth Tynan, can
be cutely scrambled as the logo for the French Connection
clothing line’s United Kingdom franchise. The big difference
between our commercial porno-culture and traditional
pornography, however, is that while the former is more
limited and soft-core than the latter, it’s no longer
something sought out by an eager and consenting
individual but instead is a feature of society that there is no
avoiding—it’s there whether we like it or not. As a culture,
we are more intensely sexualized and stimulated than
we’ve ever been before, and from the rising rate of sex
crime it appears that we’re not dealing with it very well.

Is this because, as Christian moralists and even some

unreconstructed feminists might still suggest, pornography
corrupts the moral fiber of its victims to the point where
fantasies spill over into actual rape or sexual abuse?
Probably not, if one considers for a moment just how many
people are exposed to pornographic imagery at some point
in their lives, and just how tiny a percentage of those
people ever have recourse to rape or other sexual crimes.
While serial murderers and rapists such as Ted Bundy might
claim on the eve of execution that it was pornography that
gave them the idea for all their crimes and misdemeanours,
this ignores the fact that for each psychopath who makes
this claim there are a hundred thousand normal people who
appear to never have been pushed over the edge into
monstrosity by anything they watched or read. Besides, I’ve
personally yet to find a pornographic work that features
anyone removing all their car’s interior door handles or
dressing in a plaster cast to lull their prey into a false sense
of security. Perhaps it’s a niche market that I’ve yet to come
across, or possibly those ideas came out of the
perpetrator’s own psycho-pathology, not from pornography
at all.

Should we decide, then, that there’s no connection between

the eroticism saturating western culture and the rising tide
of sex crime in that culture? Probably, once more, we
shouldn’t, although the connection may not be as simple
and direct as we’re expecting. It’s instructive to consider
different countries in the light of their reaction to
pornography, where it appears that the problem might not
be in our pornography itself so much as in the way we view
pornography as a society. In Denmark, Spain, and Holland it
is possible to find hardcore pornography in almost every
family newsstand, such fare having become so
commonplace that it is barely noticed. With pornography
accepted as a fact of life, the attached sense of shame and
guilt we find in the United States and Britain is
conspicuously absent. Also notable in the porn-tolerant
cultures mentioned above is the low rate of sex crime,
relative to the United Kingdom and United States, that
these cultures enjoy, almost as if within such cultures porno
is able to function as a social safety valve in a way that
English/American society does not allow. Given that the
Internet is global, it’s not that these places have less or
more porn than we do, nor that they’re less sexualized by
general culture than ourselves. Could it be, simply, that like
Palaeolithic fetish-worshippers or Ancient Greeks, they treat
it differently and are affected by it differently in turn?

Consider how we treat pornography on either side of the

Atlantic: living in cultures that have been deliberately
sexualized for purposes of commerce, it is not unlikely that
some of the population will find themselves overstimulated
and will seek release from this condition, usually by
resorting to whatever form of porno is most readily
available. Unfortunately, in societies that have followed the
early church’s lead by letting people view pornography on
the sole understanding that to do so is a sin, such a release
will be accompanied almost immediately by a reflex
reaction of guilt, shame, embarrassment, and maybe even
actual self-disgust.

To understand how this conflicted situation could

conceivably affect an individual’s hard-wiring, let’s imagine
one of psychologist B. F. Skinner’s rat experiments, albeit
one that’s even more perverse than usual. In our new
experiment, the rat is given first his stimulus by means of,
say, that schoolgirl promo-piece by Britney Spears we
mentioned earlier. Stimulated thus, our rodent is
conditioned to respond by pressing on the porno-lever to
achieve the requisite reward of sexual release. Once this
reward has been acquired, however, our rat will receive a
strong electric shock of shame. Reward and punishment,
therefore, become perversely linked. The only route to
pleasure involves pain and humiliation. Would this
treatment, carried out millions of times across whole rodent
populations, have a beneficial or a deleterious effect upon
their mental health, do you suppose?

With human beings, in the socially constructed Skinner

boxes of our sexuality, it isn’t going too far to suggest that
certain individuals are thus deprived of the release they
seek, unable to accept the shame and loathing by which it
is accompanied. Extended over an entire society, this
means the pressure-cooker lid is kept securely on, while the
release-valve isn’t functioning the way it does in Holland,
Spain, or Denmark.

Subsequently we are subjected to more frequent and

disastrous explosions of the sex drive—ugly eruptions into
real life by what should have been a harmless fantasy. The
outcast status of pornography appears to drive some
people into shadowy and claustrophobic isolation where
their sexual daydreams can turn into something dark and
dangerous that is to nobody’s advantage, neither
themselves, their victims, nor society at large. Worse still, in
sexually restrictive cultures where pornography is seen as
causing sexual crime (rather than as providing an escape-
valve that might possibly prevent it) the instinctual
response is almost certainly a fresh attempt to bear down
on the pressure-cooker’s lid.
Where does this leave us, and where does it leave
pornography? With each new technological advance since
William Caxton it would seem pornography has both
proliferated and degraded in its quality. Today’s society,
thanks to the Internet and other factors, is entirely
saturated with erotica of the most basic, rudimentary kind:
convict pornography for convict populations shuffling
through life’s mess-hall, without any other options than the
slop they’re given. Porn is everywhere, just as it was in
ancient Greece, but where is it in art? Rarely is it an
affirmation of common humanity the way it was in classic
culture but instead affirms only our alienation and our
distance from each other. Despite its mass availability, it
does not appear to be making us any happier.

Rather than functioning as a release for our quite ordinary

sexual imaginings, porn functions as another social tether,
as control-leash, lure, and lash combined in one, a cattle-
prod that looks just like a carrot. Dangling temptingly before
us everywhere we look, it leads us on. Then, in the guilty
aftermath of our indulgences, it converts handily into a rod
of shame with which to flog ourselves.

This is especially true of the United States as it negotiates

the effects of its own “Georgian” era, although as with the
unreasonable influence Victorian England had upon the
world back in the nineteenth century, the repercussions of
former faith-based presidencies in America are felt across
the globe. They’re felt in terms of their effect on foreign
policy, on the sciences and arts, and on how we think about
our sexuality and its entitlements. Soaking in cyber-porn
and promo-porn, the sexual heat within society is higher
than it’s ever been—the needle on the boiler’s dial tipping
alarmingly into the red—yet at this point in history we’re
governed by a mindset that is programmed to respond by
clamping down on the escape valve, on pornography. Wipe
out pornography, the idea seems to be, and we’ll have also
somehow wiped out all the urges that first prompted us to
sculpt Bog Venus in the first place.

Clearly, the eradication of pornography is never going to

happen. Porn’s been with us since our Palaeolithic past and
will in every likelihood be with us until we succeed in tidying
our species from the planet. “No porn,” then, is not a
realistic option. I suggest that the only choice we genuinely
have is between good pornography and bad pornography.
This obviously begs a bunch of questions, the first being
how we differentiate between the two. Just for the purposes
of argument let us define “good” porn, like good Judge
Clayton Horn, as that which is of noticeable social benefit,
with “bad” porn as its opposite, that which is noticeably to
our social detriment. Of course, this raises a much bigger
question, namely, does “good” porn even exist? If not,
could it conceivably exist at some point in the future, and
what would it look like if it did?

To answer this, we could do far worse than refer back to

those few dissenting female voices that were raised, back
when the feminist debate upon pornography was at its
hottest and perhaps its most intelligent. Taking some
inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir’s influential essay
Must We Burn Sade?, the wonderful and greatly missed
Angela Carter muses on porn in her book The Sadeian
Women, finally suggesting that there might be some form of
pornography yet undiscovered, glorious and liberating,
unencumbered by the inequalities of sex and sexuality that
dogged it in the past. Even porn’s most uncompromising
and vociferous feminist critic, Andrea Dworkin, has
conceded that benign pornography might be conceivable,
even if she considered such a thing highly unlikely. Given
that we don’t want “bad” pornography and can’t have no
pornography, it’s in this mere suggestion of the possibility
of “good” pornography that the one ray of light in an
intractable debate resides.

The question still remains, however, how pornography

might have a beneficial influence upon society, exactly? If
we can’t imagine such a situation, then how would we
recognize it if it should arise? Even if we agree with Andrea
Dworkin, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, and Simone de
Beauvoir that our hypothetical “good” porn is possible, that
doesn’t help us much unless we have a clear idea of just
what good, what benefit, pornography of the right kind
might work within our culture.

We’ve observed already that in places such as Denmark,

Spain, or Holland porn appears to act to some extent as a
release valve, venting sexual pressures harmlessly before
they can explode in sex crime or abuse. We also noted that
this doesn’t seem to work in more restrictive cultures,
where reflexive guilt and shame seem to attend the very
notion of pornography. What if it were possible to bring such
a degree of artistry to our pornography that this immediate
link between erotica and dire social embarrassment was
severed? Might pornography in this way be allowed to
function as it does in more enlightened climes, reducing our
appalling score of actual men and women scarred and
violated, actual children raped and killed and dumped in a
canal? Isn’t such a thing at least worth the attempt?
Pornography, if it could be expressed artistically in such a
way, might welcome our sexual imagination in from the
cold, into the reassuring warmth of socio-political
acceptability. The power of art is that it lets us see, in
someone else’s work, an idea that we dimly formed but
lacked the skill to realize or convey, and in this way makes
us feel less alone. Pornography as we conceive of it today,
however, does the opposite. It isn’t art, cannot be openly
admired or discussed, and serves only to convince us of our
isolation, to increase our sense that we are in our secret
and most intimate desires alone save for the reeking
company of other sweaty, masturbating perverts and social
inadequates.

If we could redefine erotica, restore it to the venerated

place in art that it was once accustomed to, this might
defuse a number of our personal and social tensions with
regard to sex in much the way it seems to have done at the
dawn of western civilization. Realized properly, pornography
could offer us a safe arena in which to discuss or air ideas
that otherwise would go unspoken and could only fester in
our individual dark. Our sexual imagination is and always
has been central to our lives, as individuals or as a species,
and our culture might be much enriched, or at least more
relaxed, if it acknowledged this. There’d be no more divine
pornography by any future William Blake incinerated after
his demise, no future Aubrey Beardsley on his deathbed,
frightened, coughing for his finest work to be destroyed, no
frilly decadent or bearded Beat compelled either to cower
behind a pseudonym or add to the prolific oeuvre of
“Anonymous.”

Ennobled thus, pornography could take its place once more

as a revered and almost sacred totem in society—could be
brought full circle to its origins in the pneumatic pinhead
babe of Willendorf. It seems we only have two choices in the
way that we regard our own erotic dreams: either we can
accept them and restore Bog Venus to her natural and
proper place in culture, or we can reject them and attempt
to stigmatize them, attaching arousal to so much
conditioned shame and guilt and pain that in effect we have
contained our sexuality within a spiky nineteenth-century
German cockring.

In the end, it is in the hands of individual people—individual

artists, writers, filmmakers, or poets. If they have the nerve
to plant their flags in this despised and dangerous terrain
despite its uninviting nature, then in time the dismal
wilderness might be transformed into a scented garden of
enduring value. The erotic might be elevated from her
current status as a hooker everyone keeps chained up in
their cellar but nobody talks about, unmentionable but
available, back to her previous position as a goddess.

We might find she’s changed some since her chunky

limestone origins, might find she now resembles something
more along the lines depicted in Pornokrates by the
magnificent Félicien Rops. This superb work, begun by Rops
in the late 1870s, depicts the spirit of pornography herself,
a gorgeous woman seen in profile treading carefully from
right to left across the image, clad in only boots, gloves,
stockings, jewelry, and a drifting sash, topped by a
Gainsborough hat. Pale flowers are in her hair, and, similarly
pale, there is a blindfold tied across her eyes. Held on a
leash as though it were a well-clipped poodle is a lean
young pig that seems to lead the sightless beauty in the
manner of a guide dog. At a pace sedate and dignified, it
navigates for its blind mistress what may be only a
decorative lower border to the picture but which looks like
the embellished stonework of a wall or ledge, along the top
of which the elegant embodied spirit of Victorian
pornography is guided by a snuffling hog; a swine before
the pearl.

A frieze runs in relief along the wall or border’s topmost

edge, depicting effigies of the fine arts, seated with their
parchment, lute, or easel and yet hanging down their
heads, looking away embarrassed as the goddess of
pornography parades there brazenly above them. Similarly,
hovering in the air before her as she walks there are three
anguished cherubs, tearing at their hair as they regard her
lewd display. Behind her blindfold, unaware of how she
looks and rightly unconcerned by the controversy she’s
causing, utterly unworried by the precipice she steps along,
the voluptuous essence of pornography is calm, serene. She
trusts her safety to an animal conventionally seen as the
epitome of dirtiness and brutish instinct, this despite its
widely mentioned cleanliness and keen intelligence. The
goddess walks along her wall, proud and unmindful of the
drop to either side, secure in her conviction that she is a
thing of loveliness, safe in the knowledge that by following
her noble and yet much-despised animal urge she will be
led unerringly toward her rightful queenly destiny.

Shameless and blind to all the outraged posturings

occasioned by her presence, Venus promenades along the
moral tightrope of her path, walking the pig, sure-footed
and invulnerable in her glamour as she wanders, one step
at a time, toward the hoped-for glow of a more human and
enlightened future.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Dedicated to Melinda Gebbie.

With our appreciation for inspiration and support to: Arthur,

John Coulthart, Francis Coy, Esther de Hollander, Neil Egan,
Bernardo Guillermo, Eric Himmel, Michelle Ishay, Michael
Jacobs, Charlie Kochman, Thurston Moore, Jutta Pakenis,
Jacquie Poirier, Andrew Prinz, Barney Rosset, Kiki Sinclair,
and Anet Sirna-Bruder.
Editor: Eva Prinz
Project Manager: Esther de Hollander
Production Manager: Jacquie Poirier

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moore, Alan, 1953-

25,000 years of erotic freedom / by Alan Moore.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8109-4846-4 (Harry N. Abrams, Inc.)
1. Erotic art—History. 2. Pornography—History. I. Title. II.
Title:
Twenty-five thousand years of erotic freedom.

N8217.E6M66 2009
700′.453809—dc22

2009011821
Copyright © 2009 Alan Moore

Published in 2009 by Abrams, an imprint of ABRAMS. All

rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced,
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recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the
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