19 October 2020
Criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
—Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964
Justice Stewart was correct when he opined that exactly what constitutes pornography is difficult, if not impossible, to determine, but the etymology of the word is not. The word pornography comes from the Hellenistic Greek adjective πορνογράϕος (pornographos), literally meaning relating to writing about prostitutes. In modern use, pornographie appears in an 1800 French treatise on prostitution, and this French usage may be the basis for our use of it in English today.
The English word appears in the mid nineteenth century in reference to ancient Greek and Roman art. From William Smith’s 1842 Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, concerning the early Hellenistic period, i.e., after c.325 B.C.E.:
The consequence was, that the artists of those times were under the necessity of trying other fields of art; of attracting attention by novelty and variety: thus rhyparograph (ρυπαρογραφία), pornography, and all the lower classes of art, attained the ascendency and became characteristic styles of the period.
[...]
Pornography, or obscene painting, which, in the time of the Romans, was practised with the grossest licence, prevailed especially at no particular period in Greece, but was apparently tolerated to a considerable extent at all times.
A rhyparograph is an image of a base or sordid subject. Unfortunately, the early users of the word pornography do not cite specific examples, so like Justice Stewart, we are left wondering exactly what constituted the genre.
One relatively early use of the word is in a contemporary Chinese context, not that of ancient Greece or Rome, but it uses the term in reference to the Greco-Roman artistic tradition and the house in question blends European and Asian styles. From the Athenæum of 17 April 1858:
The house into which Dr. Yvan was originally introduced at Canton was of a composite disorder, mingling the European with the Oriental, with a roof of sparkling granite, stores of silk, tea, and musk, and hospitable ranges of apartments hung with silk, separated by ivory and ebony lattices, and, in the harem portions, decorated with a species of pornography that would have shocked Apuleius and given Parrhasius a hint.
The use of harem is also of note. It undoubtedly refers to the private, familial portions of the house, but uses a word Arabic-Turkish origin, showing the orientalist bent of the writer and further emphasizing the blending of cultures in the house.
And for the first several decades, use of pornography was restricted to the art of antiquity. But as the century drew to a close, the word began to be applied to contemporary works. From an 1889 open letter by Robert Buchanan on proposed British legislation to restrict the publication of salacious material:
I have never held (and I do not hold now) the opinion that drainage is a fit subject for Art, that men grow any better by the contemplation of what is bestial and unpleasant; indeed, I have always been puritan enough to think pornography a nuisance. It is one thing, however, to dislike the obtrusion of things unsavoury and abominable, and quite another to regard any allusion to them as positively criminal.
Illustrating Potter Stewart’s difficulty in defining pornography is this 1890 review of Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca, on which the Puccini opera is based:
If anything can be offered as an excuse for such a representation, it can only be the finished and artistic acting of its exponents. Mr. Forbes Robertson, as the Baron, deals with his unsavory part with studied care, but it is questionable whether even so refined a delineation of iniquity justifies the consideration of pornography as one of the fine arts.
It is hard to imagine a world where La Tosca and Deep Throat are both lumped into the same category, and there are those who have tried to distinguish erotic art from pornography. An example is this 1918 editorial that quotes French novelist and critic Andre Beaunier:
The Poilu writes from the front that he’ll be damned if he intends to have the pigwash credited to him. He admits that soldiers’ language is, like the language of the rest of the world, a bit thick at times; but he will have us to understand that prepared and polished Pornography is not what he wants.
“The confusing of Pornography and gaiety is one of the most foolish errors of our day. It has done much to hurt the good reputation of France. Besides, the strangers who came to Paris sought for it with an unhealthy curiosity and then despised us when they returned home. This hypocrisy is well-known. Real gaiety is never nasty; it is a sign of health; while pornography is a disease of the mind.”
Given the difficulty of determining exactly what falls under the rubric of pornography, it was perhaps inevitable that the word would begin to be used figuratively, relating to an appeal to the baser desires and instincts, but not necessarily sexual ones. By 1956 we have Abraham Kaplan referring to the pornography of violence:
The impulses of love and hate may become confused and intertwined and sex patterned into sado-masochistic perversion. In the expression of this content, psychic distance can no longer be maintained, but is submerged in emphatic identifications both with brutality and with its victims. A new category of the obscene emerges: the pornography of violence.
In this type of obscenity, sexual desire finds symbolic release only as transformed into acts of aggression. A phenomenally popular series of novels is constructed according to a rigid pattern of alternation of violence and sex, which coincide only at the climax when the virile hero is allowed to shoot the wicked beauty. More sophisticated in style and structure, but essentially the same in substance, is the work of the “realistic” school sometimes associated with the name of Hemingway. Death in the afternoon prepares for love at midnight. There is no question that writing of this genre is effective; the question is only whether the effect is esthetic—an abattoir can also provide a moving experience. Esthetic or not, the genre is enormously successful; taking into account the “detective” story and crime “comic,” the pornography of violence is more widespread in our culture than all the other categories of obscenity put together.
The clipped form porn appears by 1962, and within ten years we have figurative uses of that too. First horror-porn from 1973:
[S. Clay] Wilson is the creator of the most outrageous of all the New Comix. A real innovator in horror-porn, he was the first underground cartoonist to revel in atrocity, to pack his pages with entrails and a crew of frenzied characters who enjoy nothing so much as chewing on a bit of warm bowel.
And today we have weather-porn, war-porn, gastro-porn / food-porn, and all sorts of other ‑porns.
Sources:
Buchanan, Robert. On Descending into Hell: A Letter Addressed to the Right Hon. Henry Matthews, Q.C., Home Secretary, Concerning the Proposed Suppression of Literature. London: George Redway, 1889, 6. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Editorial Note.” The Mask: A Quarterly Illustrated Journal of the Art of the Theatre, vol. 8, no. 4, 1918, 13. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Inside Canton.” The Athenæum, no. 1590, 17 April 1858. 491. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Kaplan, Abraham. “Obscenity as an Esthetic Category.” American Philosophers at Work (1956). Sidney Hook, ed. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968, 414-415. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2006, s.v. pornography, n., porn, n.2.
Schechter, Harold. “Kali on Main Street: The Rise of the Terrible Mother in America.” Journal of Popular Culture, 7.2, Fall 1973, 257. ProQuest Scholarly Journals.
Smith, William, ed. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, vol. 2 of 2. London: Taylor and Walton, 1842, 694. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Through the Opera Glass.” Pick-Me-Up, 4 January 1890, 230. HathiTrust Digital Archive.