Pornography and History
The recent stories about the discovery of an outbreak of H.I.V. in the Los Angeles pornographic movie industry and the reasonably responsible response (no word that I've seen on whether pornographic still photography is similarly affected) led me to think. Not quite at the level of Hugo Schwyzer's musings about personal responsibility and the avoidance of culpability ("Porn, HIV, Freedom, Responsibility"), but a more confused musing on sex, culture and economics.
Most discussions of pornography in the West start with the rise of photography, but there was a long history of written erotica, and visual erotica that was either hand-drawn or printed. In Japan, from the 17th century on, the woodblock print was a popular medium for erotic/pornographic imagery, as well as mixed text and image pornography and a quite extensive unillustrated erotic literature. Greek and Roman theater and art and literature were suffused with sex.
Part of the problem with discussions of this sort is the problem of classification. We think of pornography as a mechanically produced visual form -- still and moving pictures -- ignoring the narrative, explicit or implied, which goes along with most of it. Pornographic images and narratives may or may not be part of that genre called"erotica"; I've never been sure of the difference, if there is one, particularly between soft-core and erotica, and then there is the literature and art and movies and TV that is sexual, even bawdy, but not graphic. We distinguish between reproduced images and live action -- peep shows and strip clubs -- though their distributors are often the same. There is supposed to be a difference between sex for hire -- prostitution -- and sex for show (and a difference between non-sexual contact for hire and sexual contact for hire). Depending on where we draw the line in our investigation of sexual industries very much determines how the history is shaped.
But there is something about examining the literature of sex separate from the practice of prostitution and sexual performance, or separate from less explicit but nonetheless sexualized culture, which seems artificial to me. I guess I'm just not sure that pornography is a thing in itself, which we can wall ourselves off from in the present or which we can separate from our historical discussions of culture and society and literature and economics in our past. I'm not saying that it isn't problematic, but it is not a discreet problem.