1700+ years before 1690 ...

The frontispiece to an edition of Aloisiae Sigaeae (The School of Women), an erotic dialogue by Nicolas Chorier, printed c1690. Courtesy the British Library

Porn's been around forever as seen by this woodcut circa 1690. In honor of that year, Aeon's excellent piece titled, The honesty of pornography, tells much about society if one has the curiosity to find out why this ignored fact regarding porn rings true.

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.

1700+ years before 1690, Pompeii rises to the occasion ...

Bronze tintinabulum; phallus in the form of a winged lion, with suspended chimes (1st C BC)