[A paper wot I gave recently, some of which is new stuff, but not all, sorry about that]

This paper makes several related claims. It does this by tracing the origins of certain contemporary forms of pornography through a part of its early cinematic history. The archive here consists of short, silent black-and-white films from around the 1910s to the 1950s. They are overwhelmingly French, because of advances in French cinematography and relatively lax censorship laws compared to Britain and Germany at the time. These films were generally screened privately or in the waiting-rooms of brothels, in order to excite the client and make the prostitute's job a little quicker.



Seen in the contemporary context, these films reveal much about the prehistory of contemporary pornography, and about the continuities and differences between porn in 1907 and 2007. The overarching claim of the paper is, in some ways, a simple one, though it is often ignored: that pornography has a history means we can analyse it not only in terms of its immediate effects on its viewers (as if these are easily discernible anyway) but in terns of the ways it organises the senses differently over time. By returning to the origins of cinematic pornography we can learn much about the way we understand porn tropes today, and precisely, despite all the 'choice', what we're missing.



The main historical claim I want to make about the archive is that there is a break in cinematic pornography that happens in the post-World War II period, and that the rapid raise in consumerism is reflected in the changed relation to sexuality through commodities. At the same time, as you can see from the example of the American stag film (one such example is found here), there is a switch from the viewer as voyeur on a private scene to the viewer as explicitly addressed by the participants in the film – it is no surprise that this break coincides with the reduction in sexual participants on camera. In the pre 1950s films, there is a tendency for many characters to enter the stage, in various combinations (combinations that would be broken up these days into gay porn/straight porn/real lesbian porn/lesbian porn for men, etc, etc.) – hence the ‘polymorphous’ claim of the title. It is as if John Berger’s claim in The Ways of Seeing with regard to painting, namely that ‘almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it’ is recapitulated in cinematic pornography – speeded up, we might say, in a matter of decades rather than centuries.



However, one should be wary of presenting an overly cumulative story about the development (and decline) of pornography. It is not simply the case that we move from a open to a closed, albeit multiple model. Rather the history of pornography should be understood diachronically – the murals at Pompeii depicting the atomisation of sex acts (one room for fellatio, one room for men together, one room for women together, one for men and women, etc.) has more in common with the current segregation of fetishes/kinks than the rather more bacchanalian free-for-all of some of the early porn films. Similarly, the taxonomy of de Sade, as many have pointed out, tells us much about the utilitarian tendency of modern society and the shaping of the combinatorial contemporary mind, yet he is writing two-hundred years before Reich’s attempt to liberate repressed sexuality. Even within this small section of cinematic history in discussion here, there are odd continuities amidst the breaks.

For example, one of the most interesting things about so-called ‘vintage erotica’, for all its technological and narrative indifference to the well-timed cut, its wasteful expenditure in the pursuit of female pleasure, and so on, is the presence of the ‘money shot’. It seems surprising, perhaps - the money shot seems like it should have been a recent device, but there it is, all over the 1920s, as if the logic of the tension between make-believe and authenticity has already been encoded for the big porn other.



The money shot has always been about different kinds of ‘money’, however. Etymologically, it’s not clear which came first - the mainstream ‘money shot’ (in contemporary parlance, the most expensive scene in the film – the climax, indeed) or the porn version. The money shot these days is just as likely to be the hero’s virile escape from a 'terrorist'-induced explosion as a guy trying his best to 'put out'. But the porn meaning is complex: is it the point at which the guy completes his 'product' and thus makes the thing he gets paid for, in a basic capitalist form? But where, then, is the alienation here? (And we should bear in mind that porn is one of the only industries in which men usually get paid less than women – these days). Or is it, instead, the point at which the audience ‘get their money’s worth?’ in the sense that what has been delivered to them has finally, irrevocably been proved to be 'real': 'oh my God, honey, they really did it!'...



This passion for authenticity, which unsurprisingly works even better as the only-ever-hinted-at 'real' sex-scene of the mainstream film (cf. Don’t Look Now), is curious: is it not enough that we see and hear ‘pleasure’ on the face of the participants? Of course not, due to a curious combination of biology and sociality, we know full well that the porn actress could be faking it (and we could surely reformulate Freud on this point, not ‘what do women want?’ but ‘why can’t they demonstrate more clearly what it is they wanted when they have it?’). But there is no way of measuring her pleasure, of course, even though vintage porn does its best to assure us that female jouissance has its own place, which is one of the many reasons for its superiority vis-à-vis contemporary porn.



But what if, in the culture of the time, the primary source of pleasure comes from elsewhere, and the body is another kind of add-on? The consumerism of the 1950s is precisely reflected in the European and US porn from that decade – and the central role of objects – TVs in the background, increasingly intricate sex-toys, comes to the fore. Post 1950s, there is a real sense of social atomisation and the compartmentalisation of desire, also of a distinct lack of real pleasure – whether this is closer to a ‘true’ picture of desire, as a Lacanian analysis might have, is a moot point (I personally think not). Recent literature, such as Ariel Levy’s book on ‘raunch culture’ has pointed to the complete commodification of the body – such that any pleasure it might experience is always a secondary question in comparison to its ‘worth’ on the scopophiliac market, and she discusses US shows such as ‘Girls Gone Wild’, in which young women on Spring Break or at parties flash their private parts on camera in return for a ‘Girls Gone Wild’ hat or t-shirt (more coming up on this devastatingly horrible programme in another post).



The 1950s set the scene for contemporary pornography in more ways than one. Current pornographic product is arguably characterised by the following key features:

1. Despite the overwhelming ‘choice’ of contemporary pornography, certain aspects present in earlier porn are generally forbidden in the mainstream (though they may appear separately as a ‘kink’). These include body hair for women and increasingly for men; physical unfitness (especially for women), and physical ineptitude of any kind. Even those forms of porn that attempt to naturalise its expression, and I’m thinking here of sites like Abby Winters, which shoots in natural light girls without make-up in a particularly intimate way stress the physical superiority of their subjects – it’s all jumping up and down and turning cartwheels. One of the crucial differences between vintage and contemporary porn is the repeated presence of physical failure in the former, and particularly the inability of men to keep it up or to regain their virility fast enough. These physical factors are woven into the plots, such as they are, of some early porn films, lending an air of Beckettian comedy to proceedings. As the appropriately-named Gertrud Koch puts it: ‘we cannot assume that these comic aspects of old porn movies are merely an effect of historical distance.’ Though our retrospective gaze will perhaps add a layer of nostalgia, not least for the poor quality of the footage, we should not imagine that due to some sort of spurious contemporary wisdom about what porn ‘really is’, we are in any position to feel fondly about earlier kinds of erotic material.


If dinosaurs had had porn, it would eventually be divided up like this

2. Contemporary porn is infinitely segregated. The atomisation of the 1950s filters through to a kind of obsession with taxonomy. The sheer hard work of contemporary porn, and its obsession with taxonomy, informs you that, without delusion, sex is just like everything else – grinding, relentless, boring (albeit multiply boring). Clearly part of the reason for this explosion of taxonomy is the mode of its transport – the internet is capable of infinite segregation and rapid delivery. And I am reliably informed that it is not uncommon for the internet porn user to set up say, thirty free looped porn clips from the net, put them side-by-side on the desktop, and focus in on whichever one suits them at any particular moment...let a thousand tiny sex-acts bloom…clearly the age of the porn cinema and the vhs age in which you might have to sit through a lot of footage that doesn’t turn you on before you get to a scene that might. The model of the collective, albeit furtive porn watching in cinemas or with groups of friends has no been completely obliterated. An interesting point here, however, is the recapitulation of form – in many ways, the early porn films are oddly reminiscent of the short clips of internet sex, only the content varies in some regards.



So much for contemporary porn. But what would an alternative pornography look like? Chances are that even the most adamant defender of the charms of adult material would struggle to find much evidence of compassion or affection in today’s relentlessly lurid output. Contemporary pornography informs us of one thing above all else: sex is a type of work, just like any other. What matters most is quantity – the bigger the better. It is not for nothing that one of the most successful sex videos of all time, starring Annabel Chong, features 251 sex acts performed with approximately 70 men during a ten hour period. Contemporary pornography is realistic only in the sense that it sells back to us the very worst of our aspirations: domination, competition, greed and brutality. Aggression is certainly the key to contemporary porn: the unthinkable would be the sweet smile, a pure form of affection that believes in nothing - not work, not competition, but only in a momentary secret complicity with the other. But of course, it is much easier, the signs are clearer if sex is reduced to a form of literally hard labour.

The pornography industry itself is a veritable juggernaut, generating an estimated $57 billion in annual revenue worldwide. It makes more money than Hollywood and all major league sports put together. 300,000 internet sites are currently devoted to its propagation, and 200 new films are estimated to be made every week. Almost any genre and type of sexual taste is catered for, just so long as you aren't looking for anything as recherché as sweetness or wit.



On one level, we might say, so what? Pornography serves a certain practical purpose, why expect anything more from it? If you want romance, go and read Mills and Boon! Alternatively, we might side with anti-pornography feminists and argue that the genre is so irredeemably associated with violence and misogyny that we should steer well clear of it, and perhaps even campaign for its abolition.

But what if there was another history of porn, one that was filled less with pneumatic shaven bodies pummelling each other into submission than with sweetness, silliness and bodies that didn't always function and purr like a well-oiled machine? The early origins of cinematic pornography tell a very different story about the representation of sex, one that suggests a way both out of the rubberised inhumanity of today's hardcore obsession but also out of the claim that pornography is inherently exploitative. What if porn stopped being such a brute and actually started to deal with the question of pleasure?

Silent pornographic films astonish and appeal for several reasons. The first thing you notice is the sheer level of silliness on show: sex isn't just a succession of grim orgasms and the parading of physical prowess, but something closer to slapstick and vaudeville. Men pretend to be statues of fauns for curious women to tickle; two seamstresses fall into a fit of giggles as their over-excited boss falls off the bed; a bawdy waitress serves a series of sexually-inspired meals to a man dressed as a musketeer before joining him for 'dessert'. This kind of theatrical role-play pre-empts many of the clichés of contemporary pornography, of course: nuns, school-mistresses, the 'peeping tom' motif, and so on. But the beauty of these early short films lies in the details, the laughter of its participants and the sheer variety of the bodies on parade: the unconventionally attractive mingle with the genuinely pretty; large posteriors squish overjoyed little men. The fact that the rules of pornographic film-making haven’t yet been formally established, as well as the rudimentary nature of the film equipment, means that often the filming cuts off before any sort of climax, which only adds to the amateurish, unstructured, anarchic charm of it all.



Due to the lack of money available, many of the vintage porn films were made using the costumes and sets of mainstream films, forming a kind of counter-history of cinema within cinema. The attitude towards sex in these early pornographic efforts is closer to the mordant humour of a Samuel Beckett than the action-film over-kill of Suck It Dry 3 and its ilk. As the narrator of Malone Dies recounts: 'And though both were completely impotent they finally succeeded, summoning to their aid all the resources of the skin, the mucus and the imagination, in striking from their dry and feeble clips a kind of sombre gratification.' Try asking for that sort of porn from your local sex shop.



One should not imagine, though, that all that vintage porn presents is the odd dirty kiss or flash of thigh. In fact, some of the footage of The Good Old Naughty Days is so explicit that it received a R18 rating (a classification for films deemed even more explicit than those that would usually fall under the 18 category). Usually such films are consigned to the DVD racks of sex shop, rather than screened in cinemas. The Good Old Naughty Days was briefly released, however, as it was deemed to be 'of historical interest'. The implication perhaps being that no one these days could find black-and-white footage of sex arousing.

What shocks the contemporary audience more than any of the specific acts on display, however, is the fact that the participants genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves, and that they might even be quite keen on sleeping with each other. Furthermore, for all the shouting and screaming of contemporary porn, it's rare to see a woman smile, or laugh: vintage pornography abounds in sweet expressions and moments of shared affection. The polymorphous perversity of the actors reminds us that sex can be both witty, but also that it's not a competition – many of the short films from the early twentieth century involve the inability of men to achieve erection and the increasingly comical attempts of their remarkably understanding lovers to try to amend the situation. What we might call the humanist promise of early cinema seems to have been betrayed by a combination of artificial and destructive antagonisms between men and women and unnecessary anxieties about 'performance' and desirability. A further point would perhaps be something like this: If contemporary porn doesn't give men what they want, perhaps there's no reason why it should: contemporary porn might be exactly as alienated and alienating as the people who use it. If there is no coherent context in which desire and sexual relationships can be established (I hear the Lacanian howl...could there ever be?), then porn with utopian pretensions would be altogether too painful to watch, unless one's libido operates by virtue of a melancholy political historicising (heh).



One of the single most depressing things about most mainstream porn is the idea that sex is something to be treated outside of other human and social relations, unlike porn at other points in history, such as during the French Revolution, where it was used as a way of attacking the monarchy and the established order. Similarly the prostitute of 17th century novels is often a materialist philosopher as well as a debunker of the hypocrisy of conventional society – for it is she who know the truth about how things really work. Arguably both the contemporary defenders of pornography as a free speech claim, and the anti-pornography claims of Dworkin and MacKinnon take as their model a debased, one-sided representation of desire and treat porn as if it were a historical invariant, with the same kind of content – the ahistoricism of the anti-pornography movement in its older or more recent forms takes as its presupposition the idea that men will always nurture a violent desire towards women and that porn is merely a reflection of this. As Dworkin puts it ‘The insult pornography offers, invariably, to sex is accomplished in the active subordination of women: the creation of a sexual dynamic in which the putting-down of women, and ultimately the brutalization of women, is what sex is taken to be.’ - Andrea Dworkin, ‘Against the Male Flood: Censorship, Pornography and Equality’ (1985, p. 25). The problem with this ahistoricist approach to pornography is it neglects to think about the various social and economic conditions surrounding the form and content of pornography.



There is no doubt that the porn uppermost in Dworkin’s mind is the often extremely nasty, violent porn of the 1970s, and the exploitation of women in a porn industry that was as brutal and any other in the increasingly neo-liberal and unjust society of American capitalism – but this is precisely the point. Violence, and the violence specific to certain kinds of pornography cannot be completely removed from a complete analysis of the society that produces it. As Wendy Brown puts it with reference to MacKinnon’s work: ‘MacKinnon’s move to read gender off of pornography, her construction of a social theory of gender that mirrors heterosexual male pornography, not only convenes a pervasively, totally, and singly determined genered subject, it encodes the pornographic age as the truth rather than the hyperbole of gender production’ (‘The Mirror of Pornography’, p. 208).



If we take instead a historical approach, one might even say a dialectical approach, towards pornography, then we might want to look to a different kind of archive, that of vintage porn, as a way out of the ‘porn good’/’porn bad’ opposition. I’ll finish with a quote from Angela Carter on this point:

‘Pornographers are the enemies of women only because of our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers, as if sexual relations were not necessarily an expression of social relations, as if sex itself were an external fact, one as immutable as the weather, creating human practice but never a part of it’ – (from ‘Pornography in the Service of Women’).