A History of Porn: From Pottery to Playboy

The good, the bad, the ugly… the history of pornography has it all. Porn may be a complex issue, with meaningful discussions around its impact on individuals, sex, women, and relationships continuing, but it’s not new.

Ancient pornography was around long before the internet, camcorders, and Pornhub. People say sex work is one of the oldest forms of work. Are they wrong?

This is impossible to say, but glimpsing at the history of pornography reveals that it has been around for thousands of years and that its style, form, and reception have hugely varied across cultures, countries, and civilisations.

These days, pornography is more accessible than ever and is watched regularly by many people, including women.

But when was porn invented, and how did it get to where it is today? Here is a brief introduction to porn in the past and the history of this not-so-modern phenomenon.

The Origins of Porn

The word pornography comes from Ancient Greek. Specifically, its roots are “porni” meaning prostitute, and “graphein”, meaning to write.

In other words, it refers to the documentation, in whatever form, of the work of sex workers.

Sex has always played a crucial role in human interaction and relationships. Many researchers believe we are designed to be aroused by things we see - reproduction is easy when the sight of other naked humans turns you on.

Today, pornography is generally considered to be an erotic depiction or erotic art that is designed to arouse the viewer and has no specific artistic purpose. However, according to Brittanica, pornography is any “representation of sexual behaviour in books, pictures, films, statues, and other forms of media”.

The question of what counts as pornography and if and how it should be censored has existed for centuries in the history of porn.

Prehistoric & Ancient Pornography

As early as 30,000 years ago, Paleolithic people were carving small wooden statues of pregnant women with large breasts and thick thighs.

Some of the oldest examples of prehistoric pornography were discovered in Paleolithic cave paintings and carvings of human genitalia and nude humans with exaggerated junk.

Fast forwarding through history, we find the ancient pornography of the Greeks and Romans, who created public frescoes and sculptures depicting various kinds of intercourse, like homosexual sex, threesomes, fellatio and cunnilingus.

Ancient Rome also produced sex manuals, which, though explicit, were designed to be instructive rather than titillating.

Second-century India famously produced the Kama Sutra (famous for its gymnastic sexual positions), a book that was half sex-manual, half-relationship advice.

The Moche people of ancient Peru were known to paint sexual scenes on pottery, while the 16th-century Japanese aristocracy was famously fond of erotic woodblock prints.

The Era of Print & Playboy

How did ancient porn become what it is now?

While pornographic novels had been in print and widely read since at least the mid-1600s in France, the invention of photography altered pornography’s course forever.

Photography became commercially viable in the 1860s, a few decades after its invention. Unsurprisingly, this development led to the conception of the erotic photo.

After the 1890s, high-quality mass-produced images were easier and cheaper to make, leading to the creation of porn magazines. By the 1920s, pornography had been further revolutionized by the creation of the motion picture.

By the 1970s, feature-length porn movies were widespread, and the 60s and 70s saw Playboy at its most popular.

Porn and The World Wide Web

Today, porn is everywhere.

With the rise of the internet, visual and audio equipment, and growing acceptance of sex work, amateur, professional, BDSM porn, and pornographic films depicting every kind of kink, sexual activity, or scenario we can imagine are available for free.

All you need is an internet connection.

While people still disagree on the ethics of watching porn, you’d be hard-pressed to find a young person today who hasn’t come across it.

For many people, watching ethical porn can be sensual and empowering and even a way for couples to reconnect.

Where humans are, so is porn. Each civilization has depicted it in different mediums and has been met with views ranging from adoration to condemnation.

This brief history of porn has proven one thing: it’s unlikely that we will ever not want to look at pictures of other naked people.

But what does porn in the past tell us about the future? Only time will tell.