Marshall wrote, “In the prevailing moral climate at the time of the invention of photography, the only officially sanctioned photography of the body was for the production of artist’s studies.” However, Marshall went on, “many of the surviving examples of daguerreotypes are…clearly not in this genre but have a sensuality that clearly implies they were designed as erotic or pornographic images.” “This explains the demand—which lasted far into the twentieth century—for Artistic Photographs of Nudes,” conjectured Uwe Scheid and Hans-Michael Koetzle in
1000 Nudes: A History of Erotic Photography from 1839–1939.
April Alliston, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton who specializes in gender studies and has taught classes on the history of porn, points out that technological advances are often accompanied by a surge in the production and consumption of pornography. “Historically, a spike in interest in pornography is also associated with advancement in women’s rights,” Alliston says. “What happened at the time of the invention of the printing press was very similar to what’s happening now with the Internet. With the printing press you had porn suddenly made available through technology. At the same time you had women getting more rights; there was more literacy and freedom for women.” She goes on, “Historians talk about how pornography, as we understand it today, was invented in the era of the printing press in response to widespread cultural anxieties that women could gain more knowledge through reading. With the printing press, pornographic images and texts were circulated among men in a way that excluded women…Most early pornography was presented from the point of view of female prostitutes, whose foremost desire was to service men’s pleasure, and to profit from it for lack of other means of survival.
“I see the spread of porn in part as a backlash to women’s increased independence,” Alliston asserts. “I believe that porn has gone mainstream now because women have been gaining power…Rather than being about sexual liberation, I see in porn a form of control over sex and sexuality.”
The debate among feminists about pornography, also known as “the porn wars,” began in the late 1970s. There are anti-porn feminists who see porn as oppressive to women, a form of patriarchal control, and say that it should be banned. Anti-censorship feminists agree that porn is misogynistic but oppose a legal response. And pro-porn feminists regard porn as liberating for women’s sexuality, even a cause for celebration. Since online porn seeped into computers and smartphones in the 1990s and 2000s, it has been the latter view which has gained dominance in the mainstream. “4 Reasons Porn Is Actually Really, Really Good for Women,” said a post on MarieClaire.com in 2015. Liking porn has become a trait associated with girls and women who are seen as cool and fashionable. “I love porn,” Cameron Diaz said on
Jimmy Kimmel Live.
“I watch a lot of it,” said singer Lily Allen.
Today, the online porn industry is overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of men, some of them dubbed the “geek-kings of smut” by
New York
magazine for their background in tech. Many of the top online pornography sites, including Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, Tube8, and Extremetube, are owned by a single multibillion-dollar conglomerate, MindGeek, the number one producer and distributer of porn in the world. A spokesperson for the company has claimed that it is one of the top five in the world in bandwidth consumption. Three of its founding owners—Matt Keezer, Ouissam Youssef, and Stephane Manos—are tech guys in their thirties from Montreal who originally know one another from attending Concordia University and “the competitive Foosball circuit.” Their sleek website describes the company as a “global industry-leading information technology firm,” as if likening it to Google or Apple. Nowhere
1000 Nudes: A History of Erotic Photography from 1839–1939.
April Alliston, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton who specializes in gender studies and has taught classes on the history of porn, points out that technological advances are often accompanied by a surge in the production and consumption of pornography. “Historically, a spike in interest in pornography is also associated with advancement in women’s rights,” Alliston says. “What happened at the time of the invention of the printing press was very similar to what’s happening now with the Internet. With the printing press you had porn suddenly made available through technology. At the same time you had women getting more rights; there was more literacy and freedom for women.” She goes on, “Historians talk about how pornography, as we understand it today, was invented in the era of the printing press in response to widespread cultural anxieties that women could gain more knowledge through reading. With the printing press, pornographic images and texts were circulated among men in a way that excluded women…Most early pornography was presented from the point of view of female prostitutes, whose foremost desire was to service men’s pleasure, and to profit from it for lack of other means of survival.
“I see the spread of porn in part as a backlash to women’s increased independence,” Alliston asserts. “I believe that porn has gone mainstream now because women have been gaining power…Rather than being about sexual liberation, I see in porn a form of control over sex and sexuality.”
The debate among feminists about pornography, also known as “the porn wars,” began in the late 1970s. There are anti-porn feminists who see porn as oppressive to women, a form of patriarchal control, and say that it should be banned. Anti-censorship feminists agree that porn is misogynistic but oppose a legal response. And pro-porn feminists regard porn as liberating for women’s sexuality, even a cause for celebration. Since online porn seeped into computers and smartphones in the 1990s and 2000s, it has been the latter view which has gained dominance in the mainstream. “4 Reasons Porn Is Actually Really, Really Good for Women,” said a post on MarieClaire.com in 2015. Liking porn has become a trait associated with girls and women who are seen as cool and fashionable. “I love porn,” Cameron Diaz said on
Jimmy Kimmel Live.
“I watch a lot of it,” said singer Lily Allen.
Today, the online porn industry is overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of men, some of them dubbed the “geek-kings of smut” by
New York
magazine for their background in tech. Many of the top online pornography sites, including Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, Tube8, and Extremetube, are owned by a single multibillion-dollar conglomerate, MindGeek, the number one producer and distributer of porn in the world. A spokesperson for the company has claimed that it is one of the top five in the world in bandwidth consumption. Three of its founding owners—Matt Keezer, Ouissam Youssef, and Stephane Manos—are tech guys in their thirties from Montreal who originally know one another from attending Concordia University and “the competitive Foosball circuit.” Their sleek website describes the company as a “global industry-leading information technology firm,” as if likening it to Google or Apple. Nowhere
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