Porn for the Masses

Over the weekend I had a chance to listen to creative people talk about their ideas. There were two proposals for smartphone apps that were so good that you could palm slap your forehead and ask "why didn't I think of this first?" There was also an outline for a webcast pilot script that has real potential.

One feature of the creative mind is an inclination to be a tail twister. For a long time the Internet has been operating with just a handful of top-level domains (TDL's) such as .com, .org, .net or .edu. These top level domains act like area codes for phones and because of the explosive growth in the communications field every three digit combination except maybe 666 is being snapped up for new area codes.

There's a company called VeriSign. They administer all the top-level domains and have been trying make the internet ready for .art, .law and an hundred other TDL's. One of the more controversial ones will be .XXX. 

Many people in the porn business don't want to be corralled into cyber red light district. To prevent people from squatting on prime domain names and to maintain "domain integrity" in these categories the content provider will have to prove they belong in the domain. So if you get an .XXX website as part of your terms of agreement you must provide pornography. For example you can not have a site called pussy.XXX and show only pictures of cute kittens.

As one person in Saturday's group asked -"whatever happened to freedom of speech?" But another asked -"really what is pornography?"  If the US Supreme Court can't say what pornography is, then can VeriSign make that call?

Let's go back to pussy.XXX and use the most general idea that pornography is anything that's sexually arousing, then I produce at least one affidavit that somebody masturbates over images of cute kittens -at that point is pussy.XXX porn?  On the opposite side of this logic -could VeriSign deem some subjects or at least website names as too depraved? Claim that they go beyond pornography into perversion?  Will this be another example of private industry ready to charge in where government regulations have been restricted from going? Even though CD and DVD sales are now close to irrelevant, keep in mind that 20 years ago Wal-Mart was able to force movie and record producers to re-master cleaned up versions of their products for sale in Wal-Mart stores.

There has always been erotic images throughout the ages though many collect dust in the basement of museums and except in a few academic circles  almost never see the light of day. An old associate and book collector, Ron, had a pretty sizeable stash of colonial era erotica. This is the kind of stuff George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have seen and maybe even owned. Actually up to the 1800's most of what we would think of as pornography was practically handmade, relatively expensive and strictly for the ruling class. Books on erotic subjects were not that difficult to find but only the elite and educated could read and afford them.

 

Erotica became pornography (which literally means dirty pictures) with Louis Daguerre invention of daguerreotype photography in 1839. The photographs were on thin sheets of tin and could not be copied. The first known daguerreotype with a couple in the act of having sex is dated 1846. By the 1850 both Britain and several of the states in America enact laws against the production of such pictures.

The next break though was halftone printing in 1885 developed by Fredrick Ives of Philadelphia. It made it possible to have photographs printed in books, magazines and newspapers. The tones and shadows of the photograph were reduces to dots on a metal plate that could go into a printing press.

A few years later in 1889 Henry Reichenback created cellulose base film photography. By the 1890's what we would recognize as the men's magazine was readily available though sold quietly under the counter along with "French Postcards" and "French Envelopes" otherwise known as condoms.

Pornography and technology in graphic images have always driven each other. The very first stag movies go back to 1896 with a French production called Le Coucher De La Marie. Which is seven years earlier than Thomas Edison's The Great Train Robbery -credited as the first movie with a real plot.

One of my college associates was Shultz. He was part of a dying profession working as a part time film projectionist. Shultz also had a full time job as a stage manager at the Resorts Casino and Hotel in Atlantic City. Through Shultz I met Half Price Ron, the collector of books that I mentioned earlier in this blog. Shultz was a collector too, his area of interest was silent era stag films. With the widespread use of 16mm movie film, hundreds of small studios and independent film makers got their start in the 1920's. Many of these small producers made stag films as a side business and it wasn't uncommon that the stag films made far more money than their legitimate productions. In some cases the legitimate productions were really a front to hide where the real money was coming from.

One thing that surprised me about silent era stage films were how "modern" they look. I mean that the actors in the films were not trained actors so they were very natural without the exaggerated body language of other silent movies. Also when it comes to sex, nothing has really changed. The other thing that surprised me, without the lame dialogue and cheesy music that later stag films had, the silent ones were better -or maybe just not as sleazy.    

One of those twists fates as mainstream silent movies were seen as ephemeral and eventually worthless, the majority of commercial silent movies have been destroyed. The film was recycled for its silver content, or reels of the stuff were tossed in a barn or attic until the film decayed away to dust. Some of the great classics of early film are forever lost. The stag films on the other hand seem to have a more longevity. No one knows how many were originally made but back in the 1970's and fifty years or more after they were produced, market in silent era stag films was pretty robust.

One of the thoughts that Half Price Ron brought up was how sexually morality became an issue in the United States after the America Civil War. There was a fear after the carnage the white race would slowly dwindle away. Some of the "intellectuals" of that time talked about "racial suicide" as birth rates began to decline. The first laws against abortion are enacted as pornography and birth control are restricted. It seems that for people with means and money these things remained available but the rest of the public had to be "protected" from their harmful effects. That you can't have pornography for the masses otherwise that might only have sex for pleasure and stop having children. For some reason, now many years later, all I can think of is a Shemekia Copeland song Lemon Pie.