Sometimes it's directly spoken, and sometimes it floats unsaid in the background — the idea that visual hardcore pornography is something unique to our decadent, modern society. Only in the past few decades have graphic representations of sex sprung into existence, according to this naïve belief. These things would send our innocent forebears into cardiac arrest. Whether you dig porn or whether you think it's filth that's rotting our sick society (or both), there's a tendency to view it in an ahistorical vacuum. Visuals depicting full-penetration sex acts, engorged penises, and/or spread-open labia made their appearance in the mists of prehistory and have never gone away.
Cave and rock drawings around the world limn the real or imagined doings of our ancestors. The famous rock art at Fezzan in the Sahara Desert, dated to about 5000 BC, shows manimal hybrids with enormous schlongs, some almost as big as the rest of their bodies. In some scenes, they're penetrating spread women. Caves in Italy, Spain, Russia, India, and Mesopotamia also portray Neandertals boffing. A drawing of doggie-style sex in a French cave has been dated to 40,000 BC.
China has contributed a considerable amount of sex imagery to the world, including coins showing gods and goddesses screwing, minted during the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), and the illustrated “pillow books” from the nineteenth century.
The ancient Greeks drenched their vases, plates, goblets, and other objects with a litany of anal, oral, and vaginal sex — two men doing a woman or a third guy from both ends, young mixed-sex couples, old men and young boys, men with animals, women loving women, satyrs fucking nubile flesh.
When the ruins of Pompeii were excavated, Victorian archaeologists must've gone white when confronted with frescos showing the same things that fascinated the Greeks, only these were rendered in a realistic style using full color. When the relics were put on display in Naples National Museum, not all of them made the cut. The dildos, fornicating frescoes, some statues (like the one of a satyr humping a goat), and other explicit works were kept in a secret room that was sealed off from the public for around 200 years.
The Egyptians were no prudes, either. Pharaohs were sometimes rendered with rock-hard stiffies, and the Ani Papyrus shows us how they got that way: A woman kneels before the pharaoh, giving him a blowjob in a ritual known as the animation of the phallus (in the porn industry, she'd be called a fluffer). Other artwork shows women, bent at the waist, being penetrated by guys with impossibly long, thin dicks.
Engravings for bawdy Medieval literary masterpieces such as The Decameron and Gargantua and Pantagruel could still make people blush. The same can be said of the hardcore etchings and engravings that flourished during the Renaissance and into the 1700s. A series of etchings accompanying a Dutch edition of de Sade's Juliette may still be unrivaled for the sheer inventiveness and scope of the clusterfucks they depict.
If you thought that sexual photography started with Playboy and cheesecake in the 1950s, you're off by a full century. Daguerreotypes of naked women started showing up in the late 1840s in France, not long after the process was unveiled in 1839. At first, the images were the exclusive playthings of the rich, but the photographers quickly realized that a huge market existed for their work, triggering a tsunami of mass-produced images starting in the 1850s.
Though many of the women in these shots appear demure and adopt poses from classical art, the nudity is fully frontal. Some of these old photos dispense with coyness altogether — what we would today call a split-beaver shot appeared in 1851. That same time period saw photos of women giving each other enemas. Pictures of ladies flagellating each other arrived only a few years later, as did images of women being penetrated by stiff cocks. Although rare at first, these pictures of sex and genitals became more common as the decades progressed. One of the most popular of the erotic photos carried by soldiers during the US Civil War was a shot of a woman whole-heartedly spreading her legs right at the camera.
History professor Jonathan Coopersmith writes: “The scale of production of photographs, postcards and slides was enormous: an 1874 police raid on London pornographer Henry Haylor found 130,248 obscene photos and 5,000 obscene slides.”
Photos of nekkid dudes took longer to reach the masses. Shutterbugs were snapping pics of nude men in the 1850s for painters to use as reference, but it wasn't until close to 1900 that these photos “for the use of artists” (nudge, wink) were sold on a much wider basis.
The first porn film was created in 1896, not long after the invention of motion picture technology as we know it. “Stag films” soon became an underground sensation, with informal gatherings of men watching these hardcore sex flicks that had been shot on 8 mm or 16 mm film. The Kinsey Institute's collection holds 1,697 of these nuggets going all the way back to 1913.
Still photography and film continued to be used for the creation of one-handed material during the entire twentieth century, finally going mainstream with Playboy, Penthouse, I Am Curious (Yellow), Deep Throat, the VCR, and the Internet.
A menace to society? Hardcore sex imagery has been around continuously since some troglodyte first scribbled on a cave wall, yet somehow the human race survives. 