the uses of pornography . pornography - if for the moment we stick to the etymological implication of writing - is an aspect of literacy . to the best of my knowledge , there is no record of a society which has used literacy for profane and imaginative purposes and which has not produced books dealing with sexual topics ; of these books some have been considered unsuitable for general reading , their circulation has been more or less clandestine , and where laws have been concerned with private morals , have been interdicted by the law . as far as I know , there is no surviving pornography from Mesopotamia , Pharaonic Egypt or Crete ; but there is so little written matter surviving from these civilizations which is not concerned with religion , law or business transactions that no argument can be based on these omissions . further , we know nothing about the literatures of the high pre-Columbian civilizations of central and south America ; Peru had a copious industry of pots decorated with realistic portrayals of perverse and complex sexual activities . but all the literate societies of Europe and Asia from the time of the ancient Greeks have had pornography as one aspect of their literature . in very many cases the texts have not survived ; but references to them occur in more seemly authors , usually in a context of reprobation . since pornography is an aspect of literacy , it is confined to the higher civilizations ; it is not a human universal , found in societies of every stage of development , as is obscenity . all recorded societies , however simple their technology and unelaborated their social organization , have rules of seemliness ; certain actions must only be performed , certain words only be uttered , in defined contexts ; if the actions be performed , or the words uttered , in unsuitable contexts or before unsuitable audiences , then the rules of seemliness have been broken , and these infractions are obscenities . in the etymological meaning of the word actions have been performed , or words spoken , on the stage which should only have been performed or spoken off the stage ( that is in a suitable context ) ; and this metaphor is valid for all definitions of obscenity in all societies , if any situation where two or three are gathered together in one place is considered to have some of the components of a theatrical scene . obscenity is a human universal , and I do not think that one can imagine a society without rules of seemliness and obscenity . furthermore the responses to obscenity witnessed or recounted seem to vary very little from society to society . when witnessed , there is shocked silence and embarrassment on the part of the audience , confusion and shame on the part of the perpetrator , either openly manifested by such physical responses as blushing or giggling , or masked by bluster and defiance . when however obscenities are recounted in a suitable group , typically a one-sex group more or less of an age , the topic is enthralling and the climax of an anecdote is greeted with a peculiar , and easily recognizable , type of laughter . in different societies , laughter has a varying number of forms and functions ; and until one knows quite a lot about a society one can not interpret the significance that laughter has within it . but laughter at obscene jokes has ( it would appear ) the same sound the world over . you may know nothing at all about a society ; but you can not fail to recognize this specific type of hilarity . obscenity impinges on pornography because in many societies ( including of course our own ) some aspects or actions of sexuality are regarded as obscene . this is however not universal ; societies with phallic or fertility cults may place sexuality very literally on the stage , as part of a sacred mime . nor do I know of any society in which obscenity is exclusively sexual . defecation , by one or both sexes , is frequently treated as obscene ; at least in the Trobriands ( according to Malinowski ) the public eating of solid food is an obscenity . other societies surround death , either natural or violent or both , with the aura and circumspection of obscenity ; and in many societies the use of personal names , either in public or before specified kinfolk , has all the horror of an obscene utterance . in societies with elevated ideas of the sacred , obscenity and blasphemy shade off into one another . the misuse of sacred words , the abuse of sacred figures , have all the overtones and responses customary to obscenity , except that blasphemy is much more rarely a subject for hilarity . in swearing and abuse both the obscene and the blasphemous vocabularies are frequently combined as forms of aggression against God and man ; this is typically horrifying to the believer , amusing to the sceptic . these digressions have seemed necessary because , despite the title of the obscene publications bill , the connections between obscenity and pornography are both tenuous and intermittent . in Latin literature such writers as Juvenal and Martial used the complete obscene vocabulary without apparently being considered pornographic ; we do not know what vocabulary Elephantis and her colleagues employed , but for her contemporaries it was the subject matter , not the language , which made her books reprehensible . conversely , to the best of my recollection , the memoirs of Fanny Hill ( one of the few masterpieces of English pornography ) does not use a single obscene term . when obscene words are used in pornography , it is customarily due to the poverty of the writer &apos;s vocabulary ; occasionally , as in some of the Victorian works , it is to enhance the law-breaking , blasphemous aspects of the actions or conversations described . but pornography is in no way dependent on obscene language ; and , as it is customarily defined , it does not deal with more than a small portion of the subjects and situations considered obscene by the society at the time it was written . 2 . pornography is defined by its subject matter and its attitude thereto . the subject matter is sexual activity of any overt kind , which is depicted as inherently desirable and exciting . in its original meaning - writings of or about prostitutes - pornography consisted either in manuals of sexual technique ( the Ananga-Ranga , I Ragionamenti of Aretino ) or in the extolling of the charms and skills of identified prostitutes ( the ladies &apos; directory and its very numerous predecessors ) ; but in its most usual form it is a fiction , in prose or verse , narrative or dialogue , mainly or entirely concerned with the sexual activities of the imagined characters . as far as my knowledge goes , Asian pornography , from Arabia to China and Japan , has sexual interludes embedded in narratives of which they only form a small section . the Chinese , and those who were influenced by Chinese culture and ideas , apparently considered all fiction reprehensible , frivolous , and subject to censorship . a writer engaging in a work of fiction was already going beyond the bounds of seemliness ; once this step was taken , there were , it would seem , no conventions limiting the situations which could be depicted ; and as a consequence you have a masterpiece like Chin P&apos;ing Mei ( the golden lotus ) with numerous sections which , in 1939 , Colonel Egerton had to veil in the decent obscurity of dog-latin , and which , by themselves , would certainly be considered pornographic in any literate society . they however become valid as literature because they serve to illumine the characters who are also described in a great number of other situations . with very few exceptions European pornography does not have any characters . the drama and novel are respected literary forms in which characters can be portrayed in nearly all situations except the overtly sexual ; all that was left for pornography was genital activity . and even that has become more and more circumscribed . the manuals of sexual technique , as far as heterosexual coitus is concerned , have been taken away from the pornographers by high-minded writers of books on marriage guidance ; the existence of sexual perversions , whose naming fifty years ago would have made a book suspect , is now common currency , thanks to the diffusion of various diluted versions of psycho-analysis ; pornography is left with little but the description of the activities of various sets of genitals . as such it apparently commands a steady sale . the graphic equivalent of pornographic writing - the depiction of single figures ready for sexual activity or of pairs or groups of figures engaged in sexual activity - has likewise been an aspect of the painting , drawing or sculpture of every society in which these arts have been developed for aesthetic pleasure ; in Hinduism they have on occasion been incorporated into sacred architecture . when mechanical means of reproducing works of art have been developed - woodcuts , engravings , etchings , pottery moulds - they have reproduced these works as well as the more conventional . such pornographic art ranges all the way from masterpieces produced by the greatest artists of the period ( for example , many Japanese woodcuts ) to the most summary and feeble daubs . except for the medium , they do not seem to be different in intention or effect to the literature ; and I shall not further refer to them separately in this essay . during the last century mechanical means of reproducing pictures and sounds - photographs , films , gramophone records and the like - have also been put to pornographic ends , feelthy pictures , blue films and so on . some of those few I have had occasion to see have struck me as unintentionally fairly comic ; but their intention is serious enough . they are not able to achieve the idealization - perfect beauty , health , vigour - which is so general a feature of pornographic art and literature . otherwise , they do not seem to me different in intention or effect from pornography in other media ; and I have not heard of any which have non-pornographic merits . these too , it would appear , command a ready sale , probably today from a bigger public than the literature . the greatest amount of pornography in all media is produced by hacks with no pretension to aesthetic skill or competence . some however has been produced by writers and painters of repute ; and it is likely that , in such cases , the greater amount has been destroyed either immediately or after very limited circulation among friends . some however has survived . there have also been a few European artists and painters whose main talent or output has been pornographic : Giulio Romano , Fuseli , Rowlandson among painters , Andr&amp;eacute;a de Nerciat , John Cleland , Pierre Louys among writers . when pornography is produced by writers or artists of talent it is usually dubbed erotica ; but I see no value in maintaining that distinction when the aesthetic qualities are not the major consideration . I know of no study of the reasons which impel writers or artists to produce pornographic works ; it is obviously an extremely difficult genre , and the technical problems of maintaining interest or variety with such an extremely limited subject matter may have been an attraction for some . in the mid-nineteenth and earlier twentieth century realistic and lyrical writers almost certainly felt thwarted by the strict conventions ( to a great extent imposed by Mudie &apos;s lending library in Britain ) limiting the subjects and situations with which they were allowed to treat ; and the production of pornography may have been a sign of private revolt . some of the nineteenth century English works are ascribed to the most austere Victorian characters , though with what justice I would not be prepared to say . it is possible also that willing creators of pornography get much the same satisfaction out of their activity as do willing consumers of it . 3 . the object of pornography is hallucination . the reader is meant to identify either with the narrator ( the I character ) or with the general situation to a sufficient extent to produce at least the physical concomitants of sexual excitement ; if the work is successful , it should produce orgasm . the reader should have the emotional and physical sensations , at least in a diminished form , that he would have were he taking part in the activities described . the literature of hallucination is a vast one , perhaps particularly in English , and deals with a considerable number of emotions and situations besides the sexual . perhaps the nearest analogy is the literature of fear , the ghost story , the horror story , the thriller . 