Written by Linda
February 07, 2009
Let me just start out by saying, if you're looking for titilation, you're probably not going to find it in this 6-part series (about 5 hours total) made for British television Pornograhy: The Secret History of Civilisation.
For starters, the Brits get away with a lot more on TV that we do in the US, but you'll still have someone's head in the way of the most explicit bits and pieces. "Down in front!" you'll holler at the TV. Plus the narration is rather dry (no pun intended), as this history of porn is explained by a rather terse British woman (suddenly a branch of viewers perk up in excitement). But still, you'll never get to see a series like this on PBS, so thank goodness for DVD releases of such, er, "educational" material!
Actually, I learned quite a bit from this series, which explores the beginnings of what became called "pornography" up until modern porn at the fingertips of everyone with internet access. Most enlightening, porn didn't exist until Victorian times. How can that be? Let's just put it this way: Sexual imagery, for all of its commonality throughout history, wasn't considered naughty and secretive until the stodgy Brits decided it was so... specifically when the ruins of Pompeii were discovered, and the Brits were alarmed to find that all of the walls of the rooms were adorned with graphic sexual acts performed by happy people. Documentation of these pictures was carefully recorded, and hidden away in private libraries so that only "gentlemen" could browse through them—for strictly academic purposes, of course.
Most impressive of the discoveries was a statue of Pan getting very busy with a goat! The statue is detailed enough that there's no way to pretend that they might be doing something else like, oh I don't know, wrestling. It is very funny and clever, and is still locked away in a private room, deemed too controversial. You can see it in Italy by appointment only.
Revelations like these make the first half of the series most interesting. The invention of the printing press made the distribution of pornographic materials much easier, and then the advent of photography, needless to say, sparked a whole new type of smut for the masses. Mass printing plus photography naturally led to magazines, and moving pictures led to porn movies, etc.
The second half of the series explores more familiar ground, from the 1970s mass-market porn movie explosion (led by the huge success of the film Deep Throat), to VCRs making porn more comfortably accessible in the privacy of your own home. Finally, we are brought up to the present, with entrepeneurs with affordable video cameras making their own smut, and the internet making porn accessible to anyone who can turn on a computer. These episodes aren't quite as interesting, partially because they already seem a little dated (the series was filmed in 1998 during the dot-com boom), and in our jaded, over-informed world, we've already been there, done that. But if you pick up this series out of curiosity for all things smut, you may actually walk away having learned a little somethin-somethin. Plus, you'll have had the treat of looking at a lot of, er, "art" in the meantime!
