Pornography
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- "One person's erotica is another person's pornography."
- [I can't define what is pornography.] "But I know it when I see it." --Potter Stewart, 1964
Pornography sometimes shortened to porn or porno, is the explicit representation of the human body or sexual activity with the goal of sexual arousal. It is similar to, but arguably distinct from erotica, which is the use of sexually arousing imagery used for artistic purposes only. Over the past few decades, an immense industry for the production and consumption of pornography has grown, due to emergence of VHS, DVD and the Internet.
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As opposed to erotica
In general, "erotica" refers to portrayals of sexually arousing material that hold or aspire to artistic or historical merit, whereas "pornography" often connotes the prurient depiction of sexual acts, with little or no artistic value. The line between "erotica" and the term "pornography" (which is frequently considered a pejorative term) is often highly subjective. In practice, pornography can be defined merely as erotica that certain people perceive as "obscene." The definition of what one considers obscene can differ between persons, cultures and eras. This leaves legal actions by those who oppose pornography open to wide interpretation. It also provides lucrative employment for armies of lawyers, on several "sides."
Media
Pornography may use any of a variety of media — printed literature, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video, or video game. However, when sexual acts are performed for a live audience, by definition it is not pornography, as the term applies to the depiction or reproduction of the act, rather than the act itself.
New media adoption
Cultural historians have suggested that every art medium and publishing medium first was used for pornography: handwriting, painting, sculpture, the printing press, printed sheet music, motion pictures, videotapes, DVDs and the Internet.This may not be true throughout history, but it does seem to be true for recent history. The videotape and DVD media might have flourished without porn, but they have certainly flourished very well with it: the porn industry produces more titles per year than Hollywood; it even compares to Bollywood. Curiously, porn plays in few theaters, and in many countries it is difficult to rent porn videos, because movie rental stores such as Blockbuster and other large video-rental firms avoid porn; most distribution is by sale.
Etymology
The word derives from the Greek pornographia, which derives from the Greek words porne ("prostitute"), grapho ("to write or record"), and the suffix ia (meaning "state of", "property of", or "place of"), thus meaning "a place to record prostitutes". See also: whore dialogues
The terms pornographer, pornography and porn were not attested before the 1850s in the English language. We will therefore distinguish between avant la lettre and apres la lettre pornography.
Pompeii
A defining moment in the history of pornography was the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii and the subsequent hiding of the erotic art of Antiquity in the 1740s.
See also
