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Pornography — if for the moment we stick to the etymological implication of writing — is an aspect of literacy. To the best of my knowledge, there is no record of a society which has used literacy for profane and imaginative purposes and which has not produced books dealing with sexual topics; of these books some have been considered unsuitable for general reading, their circulation has been more or less clandestine, and where laws have been concerned with private morals, have been interdicted by the law. As far as I know, there is no surviving pornography from Mesopotamia, Pharaonic Egypt or Crete; but there is so little written matter surviving from these civilizations which is not concerned with religion, law or business transactions that no argument can be based on these omissions. Further, we know nothing about the literatures of the high pre-Columbian civilizations of Central and South America; Peru had a copious industry of pots decorated with realistic portrayals of perverse and complex sexual activities. But all the literate societies of Europe and Asia from the time of the ancient Greeks have had pornography as one aspect of their literature. In very many cases the texts have not survived; but references to them occur in more seemly authors, usually in a context of reprobation.

     Since pornography is an aspect of literacy, it is confined to the higher civilizations; it is not a human universal, found in societies of every stage of development, as is obscenity. All recorded societies, however simple their technology and unelaborated their social organization, have rules of seemliness; certain actions must only be performed, certain words only be uttered, in defined contexts; if the actions be performed, or the words uttered, in unsuitable contexts or before unsuitable audiences, then the rules of seemliness have been broken, and these infractions are obscenities. In the etymological meaning of the word actions have been performed, or words spoken, on the stage which should only have been performed or spoken off the stage (that is in a suitable context); and this metaphor is valid for all definitions of obscenity in all societies, if any situation where two or three are gathered together in one place is considered to have some of the components of a theatrical scene.

     Obscenity is a human universal, and I do not think that one can imagine a society without rules of seemliness and obscenity. Furthermore the responses to obscenity witnessed or recounted seem to vary very little from society to society. When witnessed, there is shocked silence and embarrassment on the part of the audience, confusion and shame on the part of the perpetrator, either openly manifested by such physical responses as blushing or giggling, or masked by bluster and defiance. When however obscenities are recounted in a suitable group, typically a one-sex group more or less of an age, the topic is enthralling and the climax of an anecdote is greeted with a peculiar, and easily recognizable, type of laughter. In different societies, laughter has a varying number of forms and functions; and until one knows quite a lot about a society one cannot interpret the significance that laughter has within it. But laughter at obscene jokes has (it would appear) the same sound the world over. You may know nothing at all about a society; but you cannot fail to recognize this specific type of hilarity.

     Obscenity impinges on pornography because in many societies (including of course our own) some aspects or actions of sexuality are regarded as obscene. This is however not universal; societies with phallic or fertility cults may place sexuality very literally on the stage, as part of a sacred mime. Nor do I know of any society in which obscenity is exclusively sexual. Defecation, by one or both sexes, is frequently treated as obscene; at least in the Trobriands (according to Malinowski) the public eating of solid food is an obscenity. Other societies surround death, either natural or violent or both, with the aura and circumspection of obscenity; (1) and in many societies the use of personal names, either in public or before specified kinfolk, has all the horror of an obscene utterance.

     In societies with elevated ideas of the sacred, obscenity and blasphemy shade off into one another. The misuse of sacred words, the abuse of sacred figures, have all the overtones and responses customary to obscenity, except that blasphemy is much more rarely a subject for hilarity. In swearing and abuse both the obscene and the blasphemous vocabularies are frequently combined as forms of aggression against God and man; this is typically horrifying to the believer, amusing to the sceptic.

     These digressions have seemed necessary because, despite the title of the Obscene Publications Bill, the connections between obscenity and pornography are both tenuous and intermittent. In Latin literature such writers as Juvenal and Martial used the complete obscene vocabulary without apparently being considered pornographic; we do not know what vocabulary Elephantis and her colleagues employed, but for her contemporaries it was the subject matter, not the language, which made her books reprehensible. Conversely, to the best of my recollection, The Memoirs of Fanny Hill (one of the few masterpieces of English pornography) does not use a single obscene term. When obscene words are used in pornography, it is customarily due to the poverty of the writer’s vocabulary; occasionally, as in some of the Victorian works, it is to enhance the law-breaking, blasphemous aspects of the actions or conversations described. But pornography is in no way dependent on obscene language; and, as it is customarily defined, it does not deal with more than a small portion of the subjects and situations considered obscene by the society at the time it was written.

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     Pornography is defined by its subject matter and its attitude thereto. The subject matter is sexual activity of any overt kind, which is depicted as inherently desirable and exciting. In its original meaning — writings of or about prostitutes — pornography consisted either in manuals of sexual technique (The Ananga-Ranga, I Ragionamenti of Aretino) or in the extolling of the charms and skills of identified prostitutes (The Ladies’ Directory and its very numerous predecessors); but in its most usual form it is a fiction, in prose or verse, narrative or dialogue, mainly or entirely concerned with the sexual activities of the imagined characters. As far as my knowledge goes, Asian pornography, from Arabia to China and Japan, has sexual interludes embedded in narratives of which they only form a small section. The Chinese, and those who were influenced by Chinese culture and ideas, apparently considered all fiction reprehensible, frivolous, and subject to censorship. A writer engaging in a work of fiction was already going beyond the bounds of seemliness; once this step was taken, there were, it would seem, no conventions limiting the situations which could be depicted; and as a consequence you have a masterpiece like Chin P’ing Mei (The Golden Lotus) with numerous sections which, in 1939, Colonel Egerton had to veil in the decent obscurity of dog-latin, and which, by themselves, would certainly be considered pornographic in any literate society. They however become valid as literature because they serve to illumine the characters who are also described in a great number of other situations.

     With very few exceptions European pornography does not have any characters. The drama and novel are respected literary forms in which characters can be portrayed in nearly all situations except the overtly sexual; all that was left for pornography was genital activity. And even that has become more and more circumscribed. The manuals of sexual technique, as far as heterosexual coitus is concerned, have been taken away from the pornographers by high-minded writers of books on marriage guidance; the existence of sexual perversions, whose naming fifty years ago would have made a book suspect, is now common currency, thanks to the diffusion of various diluted versions of psycho-analysis; pornography is left with little but the description of the activities of various sets of genitals. As such it apparently commands a steady sale.

     The graphic equivalent of pornographic writing — the depiction of single figures ready for sexual activity or of pairs or groups of figures engaged in sexual activity — has likewise been an aspect of the painting, drawing or sculpture of every society in which these arts have been developed for aesthetic pleasure; in Hinduism they have on occasion been incorporated into sacred architecture. When mechanical means of reproducing works of art have been developed — woodcuts, engravings, etchings, pottery moulds — they have reproduced these works as well as the more conventional. Such pornographic art ranges all the way from masterpieces produced by the greatest artists of the period (for example, many Japanese woodcuts) to the most summary and feeble daubs. Except for the medium, they do not seem to be different in intention or effect to the literature; and I shall not further refer to them separately in this essay.

     During the last century mechanical means of reproducing pictures and sounds — photographs, films, gramophone records and the like — have also been put to pornographic ends, ‘feelthy’ pictures, ‘blue’ films and so on. Some of those few I have had occasion to see have struck me as unintentionally fairly comic; but their intention is serious enough. They are not able to achieve the idealization — perfect beauty, health, vigour — which is so general a feature of pornographic art and literature. Otherwise, they do not seem to me different in intention or effect from pornography in other media; and I have not heard of any which have non-pornographic merits. These too, it would appear, command a ready sale, probably today from a bigger public than the literature.

     The greatest amount of pornography in all media is produced by hacks with no pretension to aesthetic skill or competence. Some however has been produced by writers and painters of repute; and it is likely that, in such cases, the greater amount has been destroyed either immediately or after very limited circulation among friends. Some however has survived. There have also been a few European artists and writers whose main talent or output has been pornographic: Giulio Romano, Fuseli, Rowlandson among painters, Andréa de Nerciat, John Cleland, Pierre Louys among writers. When pornography is produced by writers or artists of talent it is usually dubbed ‘erotica’; but I see no value in maintaining that distinction when the aesthetic qualities are not the major consideration.

     I know of no study of the reasons which impel writers or artists to produce pornographic works; it is obviously an extremely difficult genre, and the technical problems of maintaining interest or variety with such an extremely limited subject matter may have been an attraction for some. In the mid-nineteenth and earlier twentieth century realistic and lyrical writers almost certainly felt thwarted by the strict conventions (to a great extent imposed by Mudie’s lending library in Britain) limiting the subjects and situations with which they were allowed to treat; and the production of pornography may have been a sign of private revolt. Some of the nineteenth century English works are ascribed to the most austere Victorian characters, though with what justice I would not be prepared to say. It is possible also that willing creators of pornography get much the same satisfaction out of their activity as do willing consumers of it.

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     The object of pornography is hallucination. The reader is meant to identify either with the narrator (the ‘I’ character) or with the general situation to a sufficient extent to produce at least the physical concomitants of sexual excitement; if the work is successful, it should produce orgasm. The reader should have the emotional and physical sensations, at least in a diminished form, that he would have were he taking part in the activities described.

     The literature of hallucination is a vast one, perhaps particularly in English, and deals with a considerable number of emotions and situations besides the sexual. Perhaps the nearest analogy is the literature of fear, the ghost story, the horror story, the thriller. In these the reader is meant to identify either with the narrator (the ‘I’ character) or with the general situation to a sufficient extent to produce at least the physical concomitants of panic, increased heart-beat, clammy hands, stirring hair and the rest; if the work is successful, the reader should feel some anxiety about looking behind him, or of turning out the light. Why people should want to scare themselves with imaginary dangers is obscure on any rational level; but from Catherine Morland to the choir-school audiences of Dr M. R. James there have been fervent addicts of this particular type of hallucinatory literature.

     The pleasures of eating food and perhaps particularly of tasting wine are evoked in another type of literature which would again appear to depend on producing at least some of the concomitants of eating and drinking, such as salivation, in their readers; indeed books of wine connoisseurship, attempting to evoke the bouquet of vintages one is never likely to have the opportunity of tasting, would seem to have no other function. (2)

     The exercise of the larger striped muscles is another physical sensation which has a large hallucinatory literature devoted to it. Most of the novels about fox-hunting make little sense to those readers who do not know the pleasures of a good run; but hunters can get from them, at least in a diminished form, the physical and emotional sensations that they would have, were they taking part in the activities described. Books devoted to other field sports and games have similar aims; but since to the best of my knowledge they have not produced a writer with even the distinction of Surtees (Izaac Walton is questionably in the same category) the literature is little known except to specialists.

     War novels which, judging by the displays in bookstalls, are today very popular reading in England, obviously depend on hallucination for their effectiveness, for the reader’s identification either with the narrator or with the general situation; but I would not like to hazard whether it is fear or exercise of the larger striped muscles which is the pleasure invoked by these books. Quite possibly, it is a combination of the two.

     There would appear to be two main motives for reading the literature of hallucination: as a substitute for experience, or to satisfy an insatiable craving. Young men, for example, might read warbooks in an endeavour to anticipate what the thrills and perils of war might be like; older men who had enjoyed war (in comparison with their later civilian life) might try to recapture and recreate these experiences through hallucinatory literature. There are physiological limits to the amount one can actually eat or drink; but if gourmandise or wine connoisseurship are sufficiently strong passions, one can get at least some of the same satisfactions from reading of dishes one has enjoyed in the past or not yet tasted, trying to learn from the ecstatic author what can have been the bouquet of pre-phylloxera claret. As far as I can see, pornography, as literature, is parallel with the other literatures of hallucination. In all of them, the qualities of style, characterization, insight, wit, plot and so on which grace the main body of literature are, as it were, irrelevant; an Edgar Allan Poe may write horror stories, a Surtees may write hunting stories, a John Cleland or Andréa de Nerciat may write pornographic stories, a Saintsbury may write on wine, but these are happy accidents. The vast majority of all hallucinatory books have no qualities beyond those necessary to produce their effects. If they fail in this, they have no qualities at all.

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     In all literate societies, pornography has been both legally forbidden (save for a few years in revolutionary France) and obtainable through certain channels. This apparent paradox is explicable by a number of hypotheses. First, the complete control of the dissemination of printed or otherwise mechanically reproduced matter was technically impossible before the twentieth century; and even today it can only be attempted by very highly policed states where there are no printing presses or supplies of paper outside government control, where all mail, whether internal or external, is liable to inspection and censorship, when homes and luggage can be visited by the police without warning or explanation.

     Secondly, until the twentieth century, the only potential purchasers of pornography were the literate minority, the educated classes. Even if the poor could read, and most of them couldn’t, they lacked spare money for literature of any sort. Most authorities are more indulgent towards the peccadilloes of people ‘of our own sort’ than towards the crimes of the public at large. This is illustrated today in Great Britain (and other countries) by the lenience usually displayed towards the crimes committed by motorists.

     Thirdly, the actual, in contrast to the proclaimed, aim of most enforcers of morality legislation has been to channel counter-mores behaviour into circumscribed areas, rather than to attempt the impossible task of stamping out counter-mores behaviour completely. The exceptions to this generalization have been theocratic puritan communities — such as Calvin’s Geneva — where continuous supervision of each inhabitant was possible, and practised; and secondly those religious communities which have believed that counter-mores behaviour on the part of individuals would call down on the whole of the community supernatural punishment. Incest is the most common cause of supernatural anger; sodomy is much more uncommon. When these acts are thought to be supernaturally dangerous the whole population will collaborate with the police or other law-enforcement officials in seeing that they are not exposed to risk.

     Fourthly, all the historical literate societies have placed an exceedingly high valuation on the virginity of well-born girls. The preservation of this virginity (and in most societies of the chastity of the wives) has been the typical excuse for the toleration of brothels and prostitutes; and, it should be recalled, pornography is literarily, writing about prostitutes. It has been tolerated in the same way, and very often procurable in the same quarters; or else the area dealing in such literature — as for example Holywell Street in nineteenth century London — has had much the same seclusion and protection as the brothel areas. From the point of view of the police, a confined nuisance is a controllable nuisance.

     It seems probable too that from the point of view of the consumer the illegality of pornography is part of its attraction. The great majority of literate societies have had strict rules of sexual decorum; any sexual activity (with the possible exception of that subsequent to properly arranged marriages) has entailed the breaking of formal rules, of laws; and this technical law-breaking is not only inevitable, but part of the ‘thrill’ of extra-marital sexuality. In so far as the enjoyment of pornography is one form of extra-marital sexual activity the infraction of the laws in obtaining the material is part of the inherent pleasure.

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     Apart from aesthetic arguments of taste and style, the reasons behind the legal prohibitions of pornography appear to be based on two apparently contradictory fears: that the readers (or consumers) will be excited to proceed to execute in real life the activities they have been reading about or viewing; and, alternatively, that they will not do so, finding sufficient pleasure in their fantasy stimulation. The second fear seems to me to be the more realistic.

     The connection between any sort of fantasy in any medium of communication on any material and the subsequent activities of individuals who have been exposed to these fantasies is of the greatest obscurity. The evidence that anybody has carried out in real life activities which would previously have been repellent or forbidden or dangerous, because they have seen, heard or read of them in some work of fantasy or imagination is exceedingly tenuous. Magistrates or reformers with bees in their bonnets can frequently get juvenile delinquents to admit exposure to whatever form of mass communications they themselves hold in abhorrence (older readers may remember the period when juvenile delinquency in England was blamed on the pernicious influence of the BBC radio serial Dick Barton); but the evidence of corruption is unclear. It is at least as likely that the youngsters listened to Dick Barton (or watched ‘violence’ on television or read horror comics) because these were congruent with their existing and conscious interests and preferences, as that the fantasies suddenly evoked wishes which had been unconscious before, and led to conduct at complete variance with their conduct before exposure. In The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde described this as taking place (the corrupting book being apparently a reminiscence of Huysmans’s A Rebours); but this can hardly be regarded as evidence, though I think the implications of Wilde’s fantasy have been influential.

     It is curious to speculate why pornography is considered especially likely to stimulate its readers into performing the activities described. The literature of murder is a vast one, particularly in the English language; enormous ingenuity is expended by writers in devising techniques for killing people, and these techniques are described with the greatest possible realism. The motives which would make murder desirable or profitable are so elaborated that they could easily persuade a reader into whose hands these books would be likely to fall that their case was parallel with that described in the book so that their problems could be solved in the same way. But I have never seen it seriously suggested that the literature of murder — detective stories or crime stories — tended to deprave and corrupt, or would incite weak-minded or immature readers into carrying out in reality the activities described in the fantasies. On the contrary, the literature of murder is considered particularly ‘healthy’ and desirable; and in England representatives of all the most respected professions have stated that detective stories are among their favourite reading. Musing about murder is apparently ‘healthy’; musing about sexual enjoyment is not. No one, it is apparently assumed, will commit a murder because he spends his leisure reading about other people committing murder; but there is a grave danger that anybody will commit illegal sexual acts because they read pornography. A considerable number of thrillers have no more literary merit than the better-written type of pornography.

     This belief in the inciting effect of pornography tells us something about the minds of legislators and the respectable people who support them; for them, apparently, illicit sexual indulgence is a temptation so near the surface that it will erupt into action if the possibility is ever put into people’s minds. There seems to be no evidence to support this hypothesis that I know of.

     I have already written that one of the reasons for reading any of the literatures of hallucination is insatiability; and it seems probable that one of the markets for pornography are the insatiable letchers, those people whose enjoyment of sex is limited by their physiological capacity, but whose interest in the subject is not satisfied by the physiological limits. It is possible that such people may derive suggestions of novel sexual techniques, positions or combinations from pornography, though I do not think this can happen often or importantly. The practical variations are so limited that anybody with a mildly licentious imagination can work them all out for him- or herself. A lot of pornography, perhaps particularly the Asian, describes positions or combinations which demand trained acrobats for sex-partners if they are to be successfully executed.

     What is perhaps rather more important is the likelihood that some seducers have used pornography as one of their techniques of seduction. Casanova somewhere describes employing an illustrated edition of the Sonnets of Aretino for this purpose. But he also successfully accomplished a great number of seductions without this adventitious aid. One would suspect that the impact of pornography was marginal, compared with the other techniques available to the seducer; but this would seem to be the only documented situation in which pornography has had an inciting effect.

     It seems probable that the real (though unexpressed) fears of legislators is that pornography will be used as a substitute for action, rather than as an incitement to action, that the readers will find sufficient stimulation in the ‘impure and lustful’ thoughts and images evoked by pornography for complete gratification. In other words, it is feared that the consumers will find so much satisfaction from masturbation that they will fail in their heterosexual duties.

     Since masturbation is predominantly a private and unwitnessed activity, our knowledge of its incidence and effects is very patchy. The evidence suggests that it is prevalent among young males in all human societies that forbid or put difficulties in the way of sexual intercourse in the first years after physiological puberty. It is also general among young primates. It is, apparently, much less common among females; the greatest incidence is reported among the co-wives of polygynous men, women of the harem and the like.

     Once the age has been reached at which the society permits heterosexual intercourse, it seems likely that masturbation no longer plays a major rôle in the sexual life of most men under normal circumstances; it is always available, and apparently generally employed, in situations in which adult men are temporarily or permanently separated from women, in armies, prisons and the like. In simple societies which make marriage difficult and have no prostitutes or other easily available women, such as the Tikopia, it is apparently resorted to without much shame or anxiety; similarly in age-grade societies which demand that the young warriors be chaste.

     In all complex societies, including our own, masturbation is considered unsuitable and shameful for adults, and there is an elaborate mythology concerning its evidential value as a symptom and its probable effects if persisted in. If masturbation remains the preferred mode of gratification when sex with a partner is available, this can almost certainly be interpreted as neurotic, as a failure to achieve the degree of psycho-sexual development general within the society. As such, the masturbator probably suffers from deep feelings of inadequacy; but I know of no evidence that he does himself more harm by indulging his wishes than he would by resisting them. To society at large, he would seem today to do no harm at all. In the past it could be argued that all forms of sexuality which did not potentially result in producing children were harmful to society. But today, when one of the dominating problems of the world is over-population, this argument has no longer any validity; indeed if any society were to take seriously this serious problem, it would encourage by all legal and fiscal means celibacy and childlessness. The only sexual misdemeanours which would be reprobated would be those which resulted in children or caused bodily harm to the partner.

     If masturbators prefer to derive their exciting fantasies from pornography rather than developing their own, this would seem to be exclusively their business. I cannot think of a logical argument which would justify the state interfering; though there are clear theological ones which should be applicable to practising Christians.

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     There does however remain the danger that through pornography the immature will be precociously excited into sexuality. The development of complex literate civilizations does depend on prolonging social childhood for several years beyond physiological childhood; the more complex the contents of necessary education, the longer this social prolongation has to be. Social childhood is not necessarily defined by complete sexual abstinence, though it is noteworthy that in every society that is approaching or has achieved universal education the ‘age of consent’ has been continuously and progressively raised. But sex should not (in the opinion of all complex societies) be a preoccupation of the young of either sex while they are still in the process of formal education. (3)

     Nobody I think can say what effect exposure to pornography might have on the socially or physiologically immature; but it is feared lest its effects might be over-stimulating. No one knows whether naïve youngsters would be more stimulated by complete pornography (‘pure filth’) than by the suggestive semi-pornography which is so widely available; but I do not think any responsible person would countenance putting the two forms of literature in the hands of a properly selected sample of youngsters to test their reactions. This is however the only way in which the issue could be scientifically decided. Since the experiment is inadmissible, we have to fall back on hunch and preference; and both prudence and tradition suggest that it should be made (at the very least) extremely difficult for youngsters to acquire pornography.

     In my view, this is the sole area which makes pornography a proper matter of public concern. As a matter of public policy, its circulation should be restricted, its acquisition demand a certain amount of ‘knowing the ropes’. The pattern of nineteenth-century England or France is probably a perfectly satisfactory one. We may think it a pity that some people are dependent on this fairly shoddy type of stimulation, as most people think it a pity that some people drink to excess, and can only find bliss in an alcoholic stupor. But total prohibition does not seem the appropriate answer in either case; and moreover it has never worked.