Yuletide unofficial chat

It may seem odd that I'm following up a discussion of segregation on the basis of sex with one on pornography, but bear with me: they're not as unrelated as they seem.

Pornography is notoriously difficult to define. There's even a Wikipedia page for the phrase famously used by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward to describe hard-core material: "I know it when I see it." Subjective? Definitely. But then, what counts as obscene or purient material has always been subjective. In one society, the sight of a lady's ankles might be titillating; meanwhile, over in Moche Peru, potters were busy making ceramics depicting anal sex, fellatio, and other explicit acts.

What is licentious is closely linked with what is hidden from common view. I recall reading a mystery novel written by an author living in Saudi Arabia, where the male protagonist mentally chides himself for gazing too long at a woman's hands, the only part of her not covered by her burqa. He also overhears conservative imams on the radio railing against women "seducing" men with the mere sound of their voices. When almost everything is hidden away, the few scraps remaining become massively charged with sexual potential.

This means that, believe or not, what's considered pornographic or titillating is a place for worldbuilding! Holly Black made great use of this in her Curse Workers trilogy, a contemporary fantasy where magic requires contact between the bare skin of someone's hand and another person. Because this ability is widespread, gloves are a standard part of the dress code for everybody, a way of signaling that you're safe to be around . . . and at one point in the series, the teenaged protagonist, snooping on his older brother's computer, finds a stash of soft-core porn featuring women tugging their gloves off all sexy-like for the camera. We think nothing of seeing somebody's bare hands, but when they're normally concealed? You bet that would become an erotic sight.

By contrast, that which is routine will carry much less force. We tend to hide female breasts from view enough that even breastfeeding in public can be controversial, but in tropical regions where women traditionally wear nothing on top, it's not a non-stop pornographic show: that's simply normalized. Greece and Rome in antiquity were full of representational dicks -- worn as jewelry, carved on buildings, molded into lamps, used as wind chimes -- but those were to turn away evil, not to get people aroused.

In addition to shaping what is pornographic, your worldbuilding specifics will affect what kind of pornography is available to people. The Moche may have left behind a lot of sexually explicit ceramics, but those would have been elite objects; the average peasant toiling away in his field wouldn't be able to acquire elaborately molded works made by skilled artisans, regardless of their subject matter. For most of history, pornography has largely been the domain of the wealthy.

Some things are ubiquitous. We've had the ability to scratch simple depictions of genitalia into wood, stone, or clay for tens of thousands of years, and boy howdy have people done that! But how often was it done for the purpose of titillation? That, we don't know. It's easier to be certain when we find sexualized graffiti in appropriate contexts, like the walls of brothels in Pompeii. We also have examples of extremely phallic objects going back to the Upper Paleolithic, though the earliest we can be sure of any of these being put to sexual use is ancient Egypt (where we have artwork depicting it in action). Was that use purely recreational, or somehow ritual in nature? Again, we often don't know.

What really makes pornography take off, though, is printing technology. Prior to that, your smut had to be artisanally hand-crafted -- expensive in both labor and resources. The common person could really only afford dirty talk and maybe some crude pictures scratched into a wall. Once you have woodblocks, though, and later on, movable type, it becomes possible to mass-produce both images and text for all kinds of purposes. Of course, early printing was often highly regulated, with governmental censors eager to quash anything that might corrupt public morals. We don't have a great surge of obscene material from the late medieval and early modern periods. As printing became cheaper and more widespread, though, so was born an underground industry in pornography. Later on, audiovisual media did the same thing for sexual performances, allowing them to be enjoyed in privacy rather than only at live shows.

It isn't all about getting people off, though. Some sexual works are created with an eye toward education, e.g. for married couples who needed to learn how to do the deed, and maybe even how to enjoy themselves better along the way. The Kama Sutra is an extremely famous example of this, though it's much broader in focus than its pop-culture image presents; it's more like a forerunner of the entire relationship-advice genre. Meanwhile, Edo-period shunga (erotic pictures) in Japan kept getting regulated not because the shogunate disapproved of salacious art in general, but because the artists kept slipping political commentary into their works!

Regulations have run the gamut. In puritanical eras, the government usually tries to eliminate pornography entirely -- with limited success at best. Such things will still circulate via private networks, especially among the elite, who have the wealth and influence to buy both the material and escape from the consequences of having it. In other times and places, normative heterosexual pornography is fine, but anything considered "deviant," like homosexual acts, faces censorship. Or pornography is permitted, but it has to be packaged in a fashion that marks it out for what it is, e.g. with a plain paper cover in a certain color. Or it's high art if it takes certain forms, like sculpture, but low art and banned if it's available to the masses.

But again, bear in mind: what's considered licentious will be entirely defined by social norms. Thomas Edison made a film in which a man and a woman kissed; some people considered that obscene when it came out in 1896. In 1999, it was judged culturally significant enough to be preserved in the National Film Registry. And whether licentiousness is a priori bad will also be culturally relative: some Hindu temples not only depict sexual acts, but are intended to arouse the viewer, because sexual desire is entirely compatible with religious experience. So from the perspective of a fictional world, it's entirely up to the writer where they set their parameters . . . but how that's received by their real-world audience will be another matter entirely!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/dP9kgS)