The History of Pornography: From The Paleolithic to Pornhub
From Beginning to End, the History of Erotic Entertainment
Update: since the writing of this article, much more evidence has come out and porn is not addictive, especially not in the sense that drugs and alcohol are. Follow the amazing work of Dr. Nicole Prause of UCLA for more. Here’s her Twitter.
I had Dr. Prause on my podcast on The Science of Sex. You can watch my interview with her here.
Pornography is defined as the depiction of titillating and sexually-charged imagery which is used in different mediums such as photographs, literature, film, statues, and so forth to evoke emotion and sexual desire on the behalf of the consumer. The concept of pornography itself is an extremely subjective notion. What one person or culture regards as sexualized or erotic, other people or cultures may see something much more innocent. In a way, everything that’s sexual but isn’t sex is porn, and even sex itself is also porn.
Not all sex is porn, but all porn is sex…
Throughout different historical periods, pornography has manifested in many different forms for many different people and has been expressed through radically different mediums.
From the enlarged breasts of tiny fertility statues to the quick flashes of images one might see on an advertisement while browsing a pornographic website, the goal of pornographic material has always been the same: to invoke sentiments and sensations that live deep within our psyche and our most inner carnal being, ideas which resonate with our base instincts which scream at us to seek mates and procreate. Pornography affects us somewhere within our innermost human parts, the parts of us that want to survive and carry on our genes — and pornography always solicits a response when we see it, whether we like it or not.
The Venus of Willendorf
The massive technological world of digital pornography that surrounds us today had to begin somewhere, and the Venus of Willendorf is believed to be near that beginning. The prehistoric sculpture of a rather voluptuous woman is the earliest surviving erotic depiction we have. It’s 26,000 years old.
The Venus is an incredible piece of prehistoric porn, one that stands only 4.4 inches tall. This figure was likely used for fertility rites or possibly as an erotic form of recreation for the people of the day. We don’t have much in the way of works of art from this era and before, though human art is believed to be up to 700,000 years old.
It is thought that fertility rites and perhaps even massive prehistoric orgies took place during sex festivals, around the time when the Venus of Willendorf and alike pieces of art were made. These statues are theorized to have been used by prehistoric people amidst massive, orgiastic sex festivals as a way to celebrate their sexuality.
Some argue they’re nothing more than humanity’s reverence for the process of life, birth, and death. Others argue they’re ancient porn and meant to arouse in order to promote sexual behavior (including orgies).
It’s also very possible they served both purposes at the same time.
Before the rise of monotheistic religions, sex and spirituality were deeply intertwined.
These festivals would have been carried out, of course, in the hopes that they may help to increase fertility. From what we know, it is from these prehistoric statues that pornography was born, and people would see to it that the concept of porn would come about in a near-infinity of different varieties, as unending as the vast and expansive human imagination itself.
The Kangjiashimenji Petroglyphs
At a first glance, the image above looks like something out of a work of abstract or surrealist art, resembling a modern painting or drawing, rather than the piece of sexually charged pornography that it is. There are ten figures standing with their arms positioned in rather unusual ways as if to wave to one another. But these waves are anything but ordinary, and when we look closer, we see that they all are pointing towards one figure on the left. When we look still a bit closer, we see that this figure is a man with an erect penis.
The hourglass shape of the other figures hints at the fact that they are women, and the man waves back at the women with both hands, waiting for them to entertain him sexually. Yes, not much has changed about the male imagination in 4,000 years.
When the Kangjiashimenji Petroglyphs were discovered and reported on, they were hailed as the “world’s first pornography,” by websites all over, but this simply isn’t true — that title belongs to The Venus of Willendorf. These depictions, of which only some are shown here, do date back to at least 4,000 years ago in Northern China, and they were discovered in the 1980s.
These are strange, mysterious, unusual, and even remote works of sexually charged art, yet the hidden sexual message may have been easily recognized by the culture that lived during the time of their creation. As of now, the sheer age of this piece of proto-porn earns its place in the linear progression of the history of porn.
Anal Sex in Babylon
The Babylonians were like the free love and free sex proponents of the ancient world, so much so that Greek historian Herodotus tells us of their sexually promiscuous, shameless, and uninhibited practices, things as having sex in public, on a roof of a structure, depicting how the men completely appreciated being peed on, and the sex markets which were known overall at that point, saw with both hatred and interest.
The Babylonians even shocked the sexual and lusty ancient Greeks.
Fortunately for us, they also left behind some porn.
One fragment of a sculpture is at least 4,000 years old. It depicts a woman bent but sliding backward into the genital area of a man who’s grabbing her by the hair and hip with his hands. It is a plaque made of earthenware that’s survived the centuries. It can be found at The Israel Museum today.
The Babylonians revered sex and considered it a highly religious practice, something through which they attained a communication with their gods, not even stopping short of having temple prostitutes who had sex for the various gods and goddesses of their religion, and they especially enjoyed annual sex festivals where almost nothing was off-limits and everyone celebrated with fire and lusty sex, the Babylonian Fire Festival being one example.
While the piece of porn doesn’t actually show penetration, scholars believe this is the first known depiction of anal sex, which is widely believed to have been one of many forms of birth control at the time.
This actually shows how far advanced the people of Babylon were for their time, while many other cultures on Earth hadn’t yet learned that vaginal penetration is what causes pregnancy, and still many cultures today don’t know this around the globe, believe it or not. Some cultures still have yet to make the connection that sex itself is what causes pregnancy. But the Babylonians knew what they were doing and they practiced anal sex regularly, which is likely what’s being depicted in this scene, making it the first known anal scene in the history of pornography.
The Greek Mastery
Not limited to their stunning ideas and powerful abstractions of nature, with their exceptional talents in philosophy, poetry, art, and other human sciences, the ancient Greeks were world-famous for their ceramics. Their masters created beautiful illustrations of everything from play to sex.
The number and quality of detailed erotic acts they left us are exceptional.
The ancient Greeks loved to show a little skin. They traded their world-famous pots with just how much they loved sex. This practice would serve as a foundation for erotic material throughout the western world.
The ancient Greeks maintained a massive trade with surrounding cultures and much of that trade was built up around their abundance of olive oil. To transport the oil, of course, they needed pots, and this is where the master artisans came in, creating some of the sexiest and patently Greek scenes of all time.
And just as the ideas traced down through the lineage of erotic material survive until today, just as their ideas of mathematics and philosophy have, so too do their surviving works, and of those that survive today, most depict racy, naughty scenes which are nothing shy of completely pornographic, complete with group-sex, homosexual sex, and positions that only the ancient Greeks could have dreamed up, such as heaving a sexual companion in the air like a Greco-Roman demigod, carrying the lusty recipient to be slain by the male javelin as soldiers would carry off a wounded soldier from the battlefield who’d been slain by an enemy arrow.
The scenes are clearly Greek and have that awe-inspiring style of Greek virtues that seemed to permeate everything they did, regardless of the era or historical events.
The Walls of Pompeii
The Greeks would eventually see themselves subjected and augmented into a newer, bigger empire, beautifully reminiscent of Greek culture — that country was Latium, which was under the control of its capital city Rome, which would eventually conquer most of the known world and become what we know today as The Roman Empire.
But it would be a coastal city to the south of Rome where we would discover something miraculous, the city of Pompeii extremely well-preserved after the volcano eruption of 79 C.E. which encapsulated the city in volcanic ash and encased it in stone. Pompeii was like the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Roman Empire, where bathhouses and free sex were everywhere, the walls of most of the commercial establishments painted with pornography, with scenes depicting people bent over and enjoying a delicious bout of carnal sex.
When it comes to the first detailed depictions of sex, three-dimensional images with depth-perception accounted for, rather than flat, symbolic, two-dimensional works of art, Pompeii was likely the birthplace of such art.
Marvelously detailed and painfully graphic, these scenes were presumably designed to inspire a little erotic swell in their viewers.
They’re so precise, that you can see women straddling men and even make out the nipples and pubic hair, the individual strands of hair were painted onto the heads of the figures, and muscles were shadowed and etched into the fleshy bodies of those depicted.
These miraculous works of wonder have survived not only a volcano that destroyed the city, but have remained largely intact for thousands of years for us to view today, and we’re still finding more racy material. Penises are carved into the walls and the streets of the remains of the city.
In its day, Pompeii was the porn-lover’s paradise, enjoying legal prostitution, but also, sadly, sex slaves. Pompeii was like the hypersexual Las Vegas of the Roman Empire and it will forever be remembered as such, encapsulated in time.
The Hot Pots of The Moche Culture
Hundreds of years later and about halfway across the world, in the Americas, while the Roman Empire was steep in decline after suffering from a catastrophic series of plagues, another culture would break onto the scene with a seemingly unending desire to create porn in the form of clay pots — the Moche of Peru.
We actually know very little about the Moche people, their way of life, and their language and history have been lost to time. This makes it especially curious that the one thing that survives and survives en masse, is their porn. Much like the Greek potters of old, the Moche also made statuesque pots depicting racy scenes of all types of sex that we today would consider bizarre, sex scenes with infants in the room while a woman performs oral sex on a man, sex scenes where men simply masturbate themselves, and most of all, anal sex.
There is actually so much surviving anal sex depicted on Moche pots that for the longest time, scholars didn’t even think they made pots depicting vaginal sex. Some believe this is because the Moche hadn’t yet made the connection between vaginal sex and childbirth, and thus they presumed that all types of sex could induce pregnancy.
The Moche culture was predominant in South America from about 1 C.E. until 800 C.E., and 800-year-span of a culture that left us lots of pots covered with sex.
Erotic Literature in Early Modern France
Contrary to popular belief, in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Early Modern Period of Europe, pornography didn’t just exist but was rampant far beyond a sexy line in a work of Shakespeare. This was complete with images and literature which provided purely sexual satisfaction to their consumers. In the Middle Ages, especially in Germany and Portugal, the Church had a stranglehold on sex for a very long time, but monks, nuns and other religious persons regularly consumed materials considered pornographic. Corresponding with the nearly-unchallenged rule of the Church in the Middle Ages of Europe, the porn became increasingly dark and even sadistic.
This is the basis of the very popular French work of the 18th century, written by the Marquis de Sade, 120 days after Sodom, which was the 50 Shades of Grey of the Middle Ages, if only we spliced certain portions of it with the life story of R. Kelly, according to his accusers. Strong objectification and even abuse of women was rife throughout Marquis’ works, and as it would turn out, BDSM would be a major hit in Medieval Times.
Marquis was much more than just a writer dreaming up fantasies, however, he was an active practitioner of the often horrible sexual crimes he espoused, and it became strangely popular, with his delight in abuse, depravity, and sadism, which were sexual practices that he actually lived rather than just wrote about.
He also discussed extremely controversial sex habits for the day, like homosexuality between men, sodomizing women, as well as choking and whipping his sexual servants, the things he was actually doing, and France in the 18th century didn’t take too kindly to Marquis and his deviant ways. He would have charges lobbed against him of sexual harassment and would ultimately be placed in a sanitarium where he would stay until he died.
120 Days of Sodom may have very well been a protest to his captivity, having been written during his incarceration, and the story tells of four members of the French noble class practicing wild, brutal, uninhibited sex, as well as outright orgies, sometimes including sexual slavery, something which challenged even the most liberal sensitivities of the day, and obviously still do in our world today.
Yet, still, it remains, 120 Days of Sodom is a paramount in pornographic literature, something that even the sexually liberated minds of today would have an extreme difficulty coming up with, and much more difficulty popularizing, something that becomes more warped of an idea when we consider that Marquis wasn’t wholly writing works of fiction.
The Beginning of Motion Picture Pornography
The Industrial Revolution in the United States would usher in a new era of pornographic material, and that era would be the era of film. Certainly all of the items mentioned thus far were sexually charged and pornographic, designed specifically for the consumers who viewed them to arouse and pleasure themselves, but when we say the word ‘pornography’ today, most of us don’t mean a 4,000-year-old plaque from ancient Babylon.
Some of the very first films dating back to the 1880s were pornographic in nature, and one of the first things someone ever recorded in a motion picture that survive were naked people doing ordinary things, no doubt racy for the time. One film survives in part from 1880 and shows a woman walking up and down steps fully nude, then returning to strut as if on a catwalk. But this would still be another 40 years before the wild 1920s when people finally started using films to record things that would make many people blush today, threesomes, orgies, and girl-on-girl pornography. The recipe seems simple enough: people had bodies, people had cameras, and people had sex, so it’s no surprise that all of these elements eventually came together to make the pornographic movie.
Much of this was done in clandestine, however, short videos for people’s own enjoyment and to perhaps add a dash of novelty to their sex lives as they had sex while watching themselves have sex, something that would have been extremely enticing in the day.
The 1970s and the Big Bang
From the 1920s, the world would enter into another great war, and pornographic material would largely fall by the wayside and lie dormant for many decades until the 1960s began to see a resurgence in the popularity of porn. Until then, the softcore teases of famed movie actresses appearing on-screen scantily clad was likely the best hint of pornography one could hope for unless, of course, you were a GI and saw the flashy USO shows in the U.S. Military.
But the 1960s brought with it the sexual revolution and with that, people started to do porn again. This facilitated a massive outbreak in the world of porn in the 1970s and 1980s which only saw the practice of producing porn gain steam and, thanks to technological advances, a broader audience.
In 1971 the first gay porno film was made, titled Boys in the Sand, and it starred Casey Donovan, and the impact on LGBTQ rights that this film had simply cannot be understated. Until then, homosexual activities were still tragically frowned upon, and then comes this movie that featured homosexual scenes and was designed for a homosexual or bisexual audience… thus, homosexual pornography finally hit the big screen.
The 1970s were pornography’s Big Bang and they brought a once very hidden practice into the light for everyday consumers. Both homosexuality and porn had been largely marginalized in the western world since the decline of the Roman Empire and the Christian Middle Ages, and now it was back with a vengeance, complete with full-fledged stars like Ron Jeremy, color film capable of portraying the reddish blush of the face of the actors and actresses who’d just had a fresh orgasm, and Debbie Does Dallas was a brand new movie. Novelty became the name of the game and porn films sought to outdo one another to see who could find the star with the biggest member.
Most importantly, the 1970s communicated the message that being gay was here to stay, and even if not widely viewed at first, it nudged over the exclusively heterosexual pornography to make way for the LGBTQ community with its own full-length film, and the conditional free love for some of the 1960s was on its way to becoming an indiscriminate free love for all.
Internet Pornography: Digital Delight — Or Downright Decadence?
Note: this section has been disproven by further research. I wanted to leave it here, so readers could see it as it was.
From the dawn of pornographic material, the world changed, cultures lived and died, and empires rose and fell, but in the end, the human urge to communicate sexually charged art remained. After the big bang, more stars would arrive on the scene, from John Holmes to Nina Hartley, and porn would begin to make people’s sexual habits into household names.
This caused porn to have an impactful influence on the real world, especially up through the 1980s and 1990s, and what was once considered novel or unusual sex practices began to become the staples in the everyday diets of sex practitioners.
Things got a bit weirder, at first fusing occasionally with the normal sex scene, but then the consumerist tendencies driven by sales revenue took over, and porn production became a race to find the “biggest” star and have the actors and actresses portray the most extreme sex scenes. Anal sex was no longer an occasional outlier — it became the main course in many porns. Double penetration eventually became a staple when anal sex wasn’t enough to sate the market demand for originality.
…and that’s when the major breakthrough would come with the advent of digital technology, which brought about the expansive rise of the Internet, and the world of porn would be changed forever. As it became easier and easier for anyone to make porn, with cameras becoming household items and dial-up connections making file sharing a breeze, porn went digital with a fury, and internet chat rooms became fertile breeding grounds for photo exchanges.
This would be limited by the speed of connections, for a while, and for many years, a brief video clip or animated GIF was about all that people could send one another without making the download time a thing of nightmares.
Then came the video boom of the 2000s, as dial-up was passed up for broadband connections, DSL, and other technologies which fostered a new era of pornography. By the mid-2000s, sites like Pornhub and YouPorn were in their infancy and getting ready to take over the world and our respective cultures.
But, as usual, the tremendous growth of the porn industry that had been revolutionized, commercialized, industrialized, and mechanized, soon began to come with an unprecedented social cost, as consumers soon began having very real biological problems stemming from the consumption of pornography.
Entire generations got used to instant gratification and a shot of dopamine to the brain, all from a few easy clicks of a button, and like rats who’d been caged with a self-operating lever that dispenses cocaine for a science experiment, so too were humans addictively clicking and fapping away, not knowing the potential harm that would come.
Porn combined with technology removed the imaginative elements found in the mediums of old, and soon, the digital decadence was just too easy, too passive, and too real — and some users began to experience extreme sexual, physical, and emotional complications. Porn addicts often develop problems with erectile dysfunction, as the reality of actual sex doesn’t match up with the porn that’s so freely available online. It was then that people began to see an increase in anxiety, depression, and other illnesses related to pornography enter the mix.
It has been observed using the fMRI scans of modern science, that our very human brains react differently when we watch pornography frequently, indicating that our brains have actually been literally trained like Pavlov’s dog to function differently…and just like that, porn addiction was born.
But, if porn is so harmful, why has it been around for at least 30,000 years and not caused anyone problems until today? Glad you asked. I believe the answer lies in the medium, and just as food also has been around since the dawn of humanity, yet highly compounded sugars have not, the medium of delivery and composition of the porn makes all the difference in the world.
The difference between pornography as featured on websites versus the clay pots of the Moche is in the availability, the speed, and rapidity with which it can be consumed, as well as the lack of imagination required to consume it. Porn as now become a potentially dangerous product, because unlike the pornography of old, porn is now actually a sexual activity which is wholly devoid of imagination — like television is to the collected works of Chaucer, so too is digital porn to its predecessors, because porn in video form requires minimal use of the reasoning portions of the brain and the imagination. Digital pornography flashes an inhuman amount of naked bodies before our eyes per minute, overwhelming the brain with things that resemble humans and human mating opportunities, which can present some particular challenges to a brain that wasn’t quite ready for the digital world.
© 2019; Joe Duncan. All Rights Reserved
