How Has Porn Changed Through History?

With Christmas around the corner and everything being oh-so wholesome, we thought we would offer an episode from the archives of something not-so wholesome: a history of porn. What did porn look like before the internet? Who was it for? And how has it changed since? In this episode, Kate chats to Kathleen Lubey, a professor at St. John’s University and specialist in eighteenth-century literature. Kathleen talks us through the history of pornography… that is, the type of history that can’t be deleted. Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Anisha Deva. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 1:11Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Batwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, and you're listening to Batwixter Sheets. Hello, thank you for choosing us above, what, billions of other podcasts you could be listening to right now, and some of them rather good. So thank you for joining us again. But before we can go any further, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, and we'll cover a range of adult subjects that you should be an adult too. Are you suitably warned? I think we are. Right, let's get on with it.

• 1:46Kate Lister?

  Porn, hmm. It's kind of ubiquitous in our modern society, isn't it? There's people worrying about it, there's people watching it, there's people doing it. It's just everywhere, and no one can seem to come up with a reasonable answer to any of this that keeps everybody happy. Who should be watching it? Who should not be watching it? Where should you be watching it? Who should be doing it? What should be paying for it? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But what? Is porn? And what was porn before the internet? I'm sure that we're recalling grubby magazines and porn found in hedges strewn around the countryside, but what about before magazines? What about before people could read widely? What did porn look like then? Has it always been with us? Well, today on Betwixt the Sheets, we're damn well gonna find out.

• 2:57Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. One of the things that we love to do here on Betwixt is talk about perversions. I mean, we do, really. That's why you're here too. And what is more perverted than pornography? Well, quite a lot of things, actually, but porn is pretty twisted. And did you know that any time a new type of technology is invented, the internet, augmented reality, cameras, porn is always at the forefront? If a piece of tech can be put to pornographic use, it would be developed and released quicker. But as has always been the case throughout history, was it always intended only for arousal? Or is there more to porn than just getting your rocks off?

• 3:40Kate Lister?

  Has porn ever been used as a form of protest, for example? Today, we're going back to an episode from 2023 on the history of porn with Professor Kathleen Luby of St John's University. And she is a specialist in 18th century literature, and she spoke brilliantly about what porn meant then and now. So without further ado, let's do this.

• 4:10Kate Lister?

  So hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Kathleen Looby. How are you?

• 4:16Speaker 04

  I'm doing wonderfully. How are you?

• 4:18Kate Lister?

  I'm very thrilled to be talking to you is how I am because now we're going to be talking about one of my favourite historical subjects: porn.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Who doesn't like to talk about porn?

• 4:28Kate Lister?

  Who doesn't like to talk about porn? And you have spoken a lot about porn in your new book, which I'm holding up right now and nobody can see, but it's a gorgeous book and I loved it. And it's called What Pornography Knows: Sex Social Protest Since the 18th Century. And it's fascinating.

• 4:45Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 4:46Kate Lister?

  You really go beyond the like porn is just there to get our rocks off. I mean, it does that.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 4:52Kate Lister?

  But then sort of once we've got past the, oh, look, there's nudie bits and people are pushing things into each other.

• 4:58Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 4:58Kate Lister?

  There's like a whole load of stuff that you pull out of this.

• 5:01Speaker 04

  Loads. And it's not just fun. It's fun, but it's complicated. What turns people on is never straightforward.

• 5:10Kate Lister?

  No.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  Right? And what turns one person on might be experienced as an imposition by the other person or other people. So part of what was so exciting about this project was reading sort of rollicking, salacious, tilting things beside really staunch kind of feminist queer discoveries. And this isn't something I expected to find necessarily going into the material, but once I found it, I couldn't stop finding it.

• 5:37Kate Lister?

  Do you think that in like another 200 years, there'll be a pair of sex historians sat talking to one another, talking about like the subtext of a Pornhub film? The representation of the window cleaner is actually a social protest of duh duh duh.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  So it's amazing that you ask this question because I feel like that's where my book ends and that's like the next thing I'll need to. Think about how can we do that? Because I think the answer is yes. And I actually think if we, and I mean, we scholars, but also we, you know, as a culture, can sort of take porn seriously, we can read Pornhub that way now. Right? Like, where is it shot? Why is it in a, you know, central Florida hotel room so much of the time? Why do the women look like teenagers so much of the time? Why are certain bodies, you know, fetishized? Why are some rendered comic? Like, these are things we actually, if we're brave enough and if we have language and sensitivity enough, I think can do, you know.

• 6:33Kate Lister?

  It is telling us something.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  Absolutely is. Absolutely is. And some black feminist writers in America, scholars on black pornography have already started doing this. Jennifer Nash, Mary L. Miller Young. I would never claim to be the first, but I think it takes a fair amount of seriousness and it's quite hard to bridge the gap, I think, there between scholarly conversations and more mainstream ones. But that's what porn scholars are trying to do.

• 6:57Kate Lister?

  One of the most fascinating things that gets released every year is the data sets from Pornhub. And that's just like a goldmine because obviously the biggest porn site in the world, it's all over the place. And like, when they release it, it's like the stuff that comes out of it, like, oh, the most popular type of porn in the Netherlands was gay porn. How interesting.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 7:15Kate Lister?

  We've never had data sets like that before.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. And trans porn is, you know, porn that features trans women, as I understand it. And I don't study those data sets, but in reading I've done of scholars who do, that's perhaps surprising when you think about all of the violence toward trans people, that I think, yeah, there's what people search for and want to see and want to read about. And this kind of leads a little bit more into what I look at in the book. It's not just, you know, I'm not sure how much I can be vulgar on this podcast, but it's.

• 7:44Kate Lister?

  You can be as vulgar as you like.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  Wonderful. So it's not just tits, ass and pussies, right? In any straightforward way. It's an amalgamation of sort of bodies and organs and settings and people. And I think those sort of more incisively and thoughtfully, we can think about those encounters and those kind of messes of things, the more we can learn, you know, about the world that we're in that's producing this kind of material.

• 8:09Kate Lister?

  Can I start with a really basic question?

• 8:12Speaker 04

  Please.

• 8:13Kate Lister?

  I say it's basic, but there've been like PhD theses written on this. What is porn? Strokey beard with a glass of brandy and a smoking jacket and we'll just sit there and go, ooh, what is pornography?

• 8:23Speaker 04

  What is pornography? Absolutely. So, you know, I would sort of say there's mainstream, obvious answer, and then there's like my answer. So I think the general answer that no one can really disagree with is that it's material generated to titillate, eroticize, and lead to a viewer or reader's sexual arousal, in an extreme case, maybe to masturbation.

• 8:43Kate Lister?

  Fair.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  And there's like, the Oxford English Dictionary defines it more or less this way. But what they do, that is the OED, that I disagree with, is that they differentiate the erotic from the aesthetic. So in other words, pornography can't have aesthetic or like philosophical value.

• 9:00Kate Lister?

  Ooh.

• 9:00Speaker 04

  And that's where I disagree.

• 9:02Kate Lister?

  I think I disagree with that.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  Of course, right? I think that's where printed pornography, narrative pornography, is so helpful because it has to tell stories, right? It has to sort of go on between sex scenes. Back to what I sort of think pornography is, how I would define it, is that it's sort of literature, or representation, or art, or video, or whatever, that takes sex as a central, indispensable experience for people. It insists that sex is a way that people can know things and feel things that is unique, distinct, and unlike any other kind of encounter or kind of experience, right? Pornography takes for granted that there's a meaning in sex, that people want to have sex of some kind, or want to watch it, or think about it, right?

• 9:48Speaker 04

  So yeah, so I define it more inclusively than just saying it seeks to arouse. Like, my whole book is inspired by this notion that like, that might be true, but that's utterly incomplete if you look at the historical archive of pornography.

• 10:02Kate Lister?

  I think that is a very good definition, and has now just given free license to anyone listening, saying, actually, I'm just watching this for the aesthetics.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:09Kate Lister?

  That's what...

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Totally. Like, I need to know how to have better nails, and so I'm watching porn.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  You know.

• 10:17Kate Lister?

  I need to be here for the moral, social messages that are coming through.

• 10:20Speaker 04

  A hundred percent, a hundred percent. I have, I've given, yeah, you know, many, many alibis to people looking to watch more porn.

• 10:27Kate Lister?

  You certainly have. How far back does your research go? Because this is one of the things like, if you're looking at like ancient Rome and ancient Greece, I mean, there's images of sex and sexual behaviour all over the place. And there's endless discussions about what was its function? Was that porn or was that arts to them? But when you're talking about porn, like, what's your sort of startish date? How far back do you go with this?

• 10:50Speaker 04

  That's a great question. So my research really gets going in the 1740s in Britain specifically. One of the things that are, it's important to realise is how sort of culturally and regionally specific pornography is, right? So what I can claim about British pornography would be very different from pornography of the Chinese Empire or even France, right across the channel, because the fomenting revolution made sex sort of different than in Britain. But anyhow, back to your question. So I start mainly in the 1740s when there was just, and I can't really explain why, a real flourishing of pornographic writing. Fanny Hill by John Cleland is the novel that most people know that came out in 1749. But prior to that novel, in that decade, there's just loads of writing about sex.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  And the second chapter of my book is full of it. One of the reason that I begin there is both because I'm an 18th century literary historian, most centrally, but a better answer than that is that historians for generations have noted that there was a rise of print culture in the 18th century, right? Print existed before the 18th century, but became cheaper and easier to purchase. Paper became cheaper and the technology was sophisticated that more texts could be produced at a cheaper price. So more people are reading, more people are writing, and that means the importance of writing to pornography is what's so unique in the 18th century. That is that it's not just etchings on a wall, right? Or engravings that are like there's-

• 12:14Kate Lister?

  Like a comic strip.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  Correct. Or engravings that are very expensive and reproduced only for, you know, aristocrats, as was the case in Renaissance Italy. Rather, here you have language, you have prose writing, you have poetry that's putting sex into words. For many people to read. And that's where I think stories start to kind of proliferate and get complicated.

• 12:37Kate Lister?

  I've always wondered this as well, because when you read the erotic literature at the time, there's lots of questions that come up. Like, first, the reading rates weren't great, so that people must have been reading it to other people, or it was the preserve of the rich. But the other thing is that because it's written in the 18th century, to my modern brain, it sounds like it's written by Jane Austen, because it uses that inflection and that turn of phrase and that kind. This at the time must have been so trashy and so shit, but like, here, several hundred years later, I'm sitting here thinking, this sounds really sophisticated pornography.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, that's a great point, and I think both things are true. I think on the one hand, it strikes our ear as overly formal, and that simply is because of how language changes over time. But at the same time, John Cleland wrote in 1749, the author of Fanny Hill, he wrote in defense of himself legally, that he avoided all vulgarity. And if you read that novel, knowing this, you realize it's all in metaphor.

• 13:34Kate Lister?

  There's no swear words.

• 13:35Speaker 04

  There's none.

• 13:36Kate Lister?

  Mm-mm.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  The metaphors are so stark as to be funny and extremely sexual and straightforward, but the intention of the authors was often to be using sort of somewhat euphemistic language. And that's true of most of the pornography that I write about.

• 13:51Kate Lister?

  Do you think people were reading it to each other? Because it must have been quite expensive as well, this stuff. Like, it wasn't cheap to buy.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  It wasn't cheap, it was like relatively cheap.

• 14:00Kate Lister?

  Yeah, cheap-ish.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Ish, exactly. I think, yes, there certainly would have been cases where people were reading to each other, and there's some evidence that there's a Scottish gentleman's club called the Beggers Benison Society, and many historians have mentioned that group as one that would get together and read pornography and masturbate together. I think even maybe more commonly, people would pass books off to one another, right? So this would be the kind of book, yeah, that would be... Expensive, but not so expensive that you'd have to keep it leather bound. You might not want to keep it leather bound in your own library, right? So you might pass it around. One thing I noticed, or I discovered in my research, is that sometimes pornographic novels would be

• 14:43Speaker 04

  bound together, like bought separately and then-

• 14:47Kate Lister?

  Like stuck together, like the, you know-

• 14:48Speaker 04

  A collector, exactly, would have them bound and would give them a sort of euphemistic title on the spine.

• 14:53Kate Lister?

  Oh, nice.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Gallant poetry, or, you know, something like that. And then you'd open it and lo and behold, there would be something more, much more sort of explicit than that title would suggest. So it would get hidden a little bit in libraries as well.

• 15:06Kate Lister?

  Do you ever like think about how much porn has just been destroyed for obvious reasons? Like, no one thinks to save their porn, do they? And there's a thing doing the rounds on social media at the moment that I love, which is like your sex toy buddy, which is that if either one of you dies, the other one has to get to the house before anyone else does to get all of the sex toys and throw them out.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  Throw them out or like anonymously donate them to an archive is what I would say.

• 15:31Kate Lister?

  Turn up to the British Museum with a plastic bag.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Or better yet, the Kinsey Institute in Indiana, Indiana University in the US. They collect all kinds of that stuff.

• 15:41Kate Lister?

  Oh, don't do that. But the stuff that must have been lost in the culture that we don't know because people destroyed this stuff. It didn't survive. We just don't know what's been lost.

• 15:52Speaker 04

  We don't. I mean, to be honest, I don't usually speak overly emotionally about my research, but it's heartbreaking to see gaps in the archive. To give a really specific example of that, an aristocrat in the late 19th century, Henry Spencer Ashby, donated his immense collection of pornography and other things to the British Museum. And there is evidence, and I'm not the only one to have noticed this, that the pornography that he collected from the time he was alive, so let's say the sort of early and middle 19th century onward, the museum appears to have destroyed.

• 16:26Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  Because there's just none of it in the collection. So there's 18th century material and then there's kind of like early 20th century material. But yeah, and these were like- Fairly beautifully illustrated books.

• 16:38Kate Lister?

  It's just gutting, isn't it? Henry Ashby writes about a dominatrix called Teresa Barclay. And in his account of her, and it's one of the only accounts that we've got, is it says that there were loads of letters that were preserved, but then they were destroyed after she died. And you're just there going, haha.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  Please don't.

• 16:54Kate Lister?

  Bring it back, bring it back.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  And what's problematic about this in so many ways, from censorship to destroying women's and queer history, because so much of that pornography had queer content in it. In addition to all of that, what the British Library appears to have preserved are materials and reprintings that have to do with famous antique pornographers, like John Cleland, like the Earl of Rochester. So it creates this impression that men wrote pornography, you know, at the expense of women. Yeah, and it actually takes away all of the anonymously written obscure material that can give us a bigger picture of the history of sexuality. So that, to me, is gutting that that happens.

• 17:39Kate Lister?

  It really is, isn't it? It's just like every sex historian just carries this within them of just like, oh, God, what's been lost? You've just reminded me, one of the most fascinating things to come out of your book is that there was more queer pornography than heterosexual pornography. I thought that was fascinating. What do you mean by that?

• 17:55Speaker 04

  I mean, many things by that. But there's a queer element to most pornography that I study from the 18th and 19th century. And that's in part because one of the conceits of narrative pornography is that women are talking to one another about sex. Right? And then sometimes, you know, doing things to one another or being intimate with one another as they're saying, and then on my wedding night, you're not going to believe what happened. You know, so sort of talking about what we'd call straight sex, but in what we would call maybe a homoerotic space. So that's one way that women's history converges with pornography to create a queer circumstance or environment.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  In the 19th century, there doesn't seem to be a niche for queer pornography. It seems to. Coexist alongside, beside and within other kinds of pornography that do narrate straight experience.

• 18:49Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  In the late 19th century, a novel like Sins of the Cities of the Plain, which is fairly-

• 18:54Kate Lister?

  Oh, yeah, he loved a betcock, didn't he?

• 18:56Speaker 04

  Oh, he, did he ever? Or she, or they. There's a lesser known sequel to Sins called Letters Between Laura and Evelyn. And that novel, which is held at the British Library, and there's now a modern reprint of it. In that novel, the two narrators are both, I think now call them trans women, or at the very least, non-binary people-

• 19:17Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  -who are people with penises having sex with people gendered as men, but describing their own bodies as having a penis that turns into a clitoris, or an arse that turns into a cunt. You know, so even in the moment of narration, yeah, bodies, the gender that's sort of attached to the genital body can morph and switch. That book is remarkable for a history, I think, of trans identity and eroticism, for sure.

• 19:44Kate Lister?

  There's a long history, not even in porn, but in medical texts, which often actually kind of, there's a sort of a weird crossover in some 18th century medical quote-unquote texts, but a long history of being panicked that the clitoris is going to turn into a mini penis, and that we'll all turn up and then demand equal wage, because behold, my mighty clitoris.

• 20:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, and there are historians who have argued that the story of gender difference arose because the medical theory was that the clitoris was a small penis.

• 20:14Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that women's genitals were an inverted version of extroverted male genitals. So the difference between men and women was not one of essence, but one of sort of degree of bodily exposure.

• 20:28Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  And so the cultural practices of gender arose to sort of like, make sure that women knew, you know, that they were different, or that their clitoris wasn't a penis.

• 20:38Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  But also on that, on the connection between medical writing and pornography and queer history- There's a really interesting example from the earlier 18th century. I think it's 1718, a treatise on hermaphroditism. That's the language of the text, not my language. But that's a text that treats non-binary genital identity. It treats it very violently. That is to say that sort of aberrant bodies are castrated or mutilated in ways that kind of bring them into line, yeah, with straight culture. So

• 21:08Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 21:09Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's violent and hard to read and hard to study. At the same time, prior to people in that text being harmed, their sexual dalliances are described in this like rollicking, comic, arousing way. So pornography sort of morphs into this violent medical regulation.

• 21:29Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  So it's another example sort of of how pornography is sort of mixed in with these other discourses and how queer identity seems to be like central to the story that pornography's trying to tell.

• 21:39Kate Lister?

  I think that that carries on for a very long time. So I was just thinking then about right up to like the 50s and 60s is closeted gay men buying Sports Illustrated magazines, which was clearly homoerotic, soft images, but masquerading as these are about gym and getting fit and physique and

• 21:58Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 21:58Kate Lister?

  So I just wonder how long that history is.

• 22:00Speaker 04

  Well, I don't know as much about the magazine culture, but I know that sort of stag magazines, I think they're called, were sort of like the erotic counterpart to the Sports Illustrated phenomenon, which I would say from early to mid 20th century is certainly part of queer culture and the kind of ultra athletic, ultra beautiful, plucked, shiny, muscular body absolutely is part of that.

• 22:28Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Kathleen after a short break.

• 22:43Speaker 05

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• 23:41Kate Lister?

  Let's talk a bit about porn as a form of like social protest in the 18th century. Because that, I thought, was fascinating. Because you'd think that porn by its nature is kind of secretive. People aren't supposed to see it. And it's supposed to be like hidden away. But you make a really compelling case that it is a form of social protest.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  Thank you. I think porn wasn't as hidden away in the 18th century because it wasn't yet called porn.

• 24:05Kate Lister?

  What did they call it? Do you know what they called it?

• 24:07Speaker 04

  Well, novels.

• 24:10Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  You know, right? The word novels in a lot of work in the 18th century, it included a lot of things.

• 24:16Kate Lister?

  Lewd, probably. Everything was called lewd, wasn't it?

• 24:18Speaker 04

  Yes, lewd. And then in the titles of books, things like adventures, or the history of, or...

• 24:26Kate Lister?

  Nice.

• 24:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, the life and surprising narrative of. And those kinds of titles were also given to like travel narratives and slave narratives and things like that in the 18th century. So, you know, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is one. But in a pornographic novel I write about in my book, the main title is The Progress of Nature, and the second title is The Adventures of Roger Lovejoy, right?

• 24:54Kate Lister?

  Good name.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. So anyhow, I don't think they masked pornography. I think that writers really thought that talking about a boy who rollicks around the Yorkshire countryside and has sex with whoever he encounters is not that unlike Robinson Crusoe, jumping on a ship and shipwrecking and seeing what happens, right? Like, it's an experiment in human experience. So pornography had more, I would say, like crossover and more boldness and less apology about what it was doing. A hundred years later, in the 1850s, the term pornography will start to arise as a differentiation. And I think that's when you get more secrecy around the genre. So because in the 18th century pornography was less circumscribed and less defined,

• 25:37Speaker 04

  it had the latitude to diverge from sex and talk about other things. And that's very much what my book is about. And I think that the conviction of so much writing about sex in the 18th century was generally heterosexual, even though there are these queer affiliations that I just spoke about. It was mainly heterosexual. And in being heterosexual, it examined women's experience more than other kinds of writing did. So in a Robinson Crusoe, like, you don't even see a female character for most of the novel, right? But in novels about marriage or seduction or little boys being 13 and meeting their cousin for the first time, their girl cousin, and being curious about their bodies, there is a way that gender difference needs to be recognized and discussed.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  There are ways that men's and boys' desire for and claims to women's bodies are protested in language, right? So if a man tries to access a woman's body, whether through rape or seduction or while she's sleeping, the woman typically speaks in the novel and says, "Don't," or "No," or "I'm engaged to somebody else," or "Yes, please do," right? But language needs to sort of provide a transition between the beginning of sex and then what's talked about before sex is had, right? And it's in that space that we get all kinds of... Protesting or questioning or like plain old non-consent that's overridden.

• 27:05Kate Lister?

  Unfortunately, that is quite a popular theme in 18th and 19th century erotica, quite alarmingly so. It features very heavily, doesn't it?

• 27:13Speaker 04

  Very much so. And even more alarmingly, especially as we go toward the 19th century, I generally think, and I don't think I'm unique here, that as pornography moves into the 19th century, it gets a bit more misogynistic and it simplifies women more than in the 18th century. And what we see in the 19th century is often, and I write about this as well, once a woman is sort of coerced or sometimes raped, she then enters a sphere of sexual pleasure. Like, what was she ever resisting? And now she wants, you know, to have sex all the time. And that stuff, I will say, is hard to read, hard to write about. The 18th century is more experimental with what it, quote, unquote, lets women say.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  So women there sometimes explain really with great conviction why they don't want to have sex at all. One of the pivotal scenes I write about in the book is in a novel called History of the Human Heart, which is sort of the centerpiece of my book. There is a sex performance by erotic dancers in that novel that a bunch of men sort of go to a banyo and watch it. And after it's over, one of them wants to have sex with one of the women. And she says, no, no, no, no, we'll call sex workers for you. But I'm a dancer and my dancing will be impeded by the physical labor of penetrative sex. And so she keeps her body at a distance. And the men are like, okay. And then they have, you know, a good time for the rest of the night with other women who come in for a

• 28:35Speaker 04

  different kind of sexual performance and a different form of sex work. So in that interval, that dancer gives her life story and explains how she came in to sex work. So there are ways that space like that is created for 18th century women to articulate a stance against penetrative sex. And that sometime extended to not wanting to be pregnant or not wanting to have to marry or wanting to stay marriageable and therefore having to decline sex. But yeah, unfortunately, it's often overridden. And that's not just in the pornography of the period. That's also in the moral fiction of the period.

• 29:07Kate Lister?

  One of the things that I think that this kind of pornography, historical pornography, works really well to do is, I don't think it meant to do it as a form of protest, but it's such a powerful counter narrative to how we like to read. History, you know, like, we often look back at history and think there was sort of like, one voice, one viewpoint, one this and if you're looking at the Victorians, which is sort of my wheelhouse, I suppose, it's very easy to think that they didn't like sex. Like, it's very easy to find moralists and doctors and various clergymen who will write endlessly about how sex is terrible and no one enjoys it, women don't enjoy it, no one likes it. But if you look at the porn, it's full of people enjoying sex and enjoying pleasure. It's not free from horrendous misogyny and abuse, as you point out, but it puts pain

• 29:50Kate Lister?

  to the idea that they weren't enjoying sex, or that people feared it.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Or that they weren't willing to talk about it. I mean, that's what's really remarkable to me. And, I mean, I wonder often if it isn't sort of the rise of the humanities and the academy in the mid 20th century, which was deeply invested in heterosexuality, women's chastity, domesticity, I think more than the Victorian period, that those, frankly, men in the 50s and 60s were writing the first histories of sexuality. And I wonder if it wasn't their investment in quieting sex down and quieting desire down as the domain of only certain privileged men that handed us that history. And I think, you know, generations

• 30:36Speaker 04

  later now, many of us are working to kind of complicate and open up the historical record to something more contested, conflicted, and rich with pleasure, rich with skepticism.

• 30:48Kate Lister?

  And orgasms, orgasms are plenty.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  Everywhere. And public sex. I mean, when I, when I teach this material and I'll teach a text like Auntie Pamela, or even Clarissa, where Clarissa is, not that I teach Clarissa very much, it's very long, but she's, you know, sort of kidnapped by a libertine who's stores are in a brothel. And they're like, what? A brothel? And it's like, yeah, there were brothels everywhere. Like, and everyone knew where they were. And in a novel like Auntie Pamela, which is by Eliza Haywood in the 1740s, the heroine loses her virginity in a tavern. You know, she's had a little too much wine, she says no, she's overridden by the man pursuing her. And anyhow, writers were constantly referring to Sort of taverns, bridges, parks as places they were having sex.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  And we can't possibly believe that this wasn't seen by other people. So I think bodies were much more accessible in many ways. I mean, we, you know, people like to moralize about access to online pornography now. And it's like, come on, you know, 300 years ago, you would have people next to you having sex potentially in a public place.

• 31:53Kate Lister?

  I'm always explaining that to my students of like, the one of the things that we can't quite comprehend, because we're so used to having our own space or privacy today, that we can't really comprehend that that was such an exclusive, rich person's thing. Even middle class people would be sharing rooms. And if you were poor, then you might have grown up in a room full of your entire family. So where are your parents going to be having sex? You'll all be in the same bed together. And if you are an exploring teenager, you don't have a bedroom to go back to.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 32:20Kate Lister?

  You're a maid in a household or wherever it is, you're sharing space again. So you would have seen people having sex. You'd have seen people nude in ways that would have quite appalled us today. We'd just be like, oh, my God, why are you fucking someone right next to me? I'm right here. But that would have been pretty par for the course, wouldn't it?

• 32:40Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. And I think that goes a long way toward explaining why sex was written about with such candor and frequency and explicitness is because it was so much more accessible and tangible. And I think for many people, as you just said, especially in the laboring classes, for young people, they would have sort of understood on some level the mechanics of sex. And then even aristocratic and wealthy people would have been subject to servants coming in their rooms. Right? Or, yeah, having, you know, their own sex lives sort of available for other people to see. So, yeah, the whole notion of privacy around sex, again, I think is a very modern invention, built largely on the assumption of historians that sex is private.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  And I don't think it was for the people in the 18th century.

• 33:29Kate Lister?

  Well, there are about four people surviving, wouldn't there? Like, we wouldn't have got to where we were if the only people having sex were people who had the space to do it in privacy.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  That's right, that's right.

• 33:38Kate Lister?

  The really interesting claims that you make in the book, just explain this one a little bit to me, I really like it. You say that all porn can be viewed as being transgender.

• 33:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 33:47Kate Lister?

  When I read that, I was like, oh, hello, right, we're gonna buckle up for this one.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:50Kate Lister?

  Because when I first got your book, I was like, woo, history of porn, here we go. And now I'm into this, good, whoa, right, okay. So go, tell me about that. How can all porn be viewed as transgender?

• 34:01Speaker 04

  This is a hard and exciting question, and I'm glad that you asked it. And I am not a trans person, so I say this with humility and sort of speculation. But one of the things that I think pornography gives us in terms of a kind of overarching trans account of the body is that whether you're watching visual pornography today or reading narrative pornography of the 18th century, at some point in that narrative or in that text or in those images, you're going to see genitals detached from the people that have them, right? You're going to see a close up of something, or you're going to read a sentence or a paragraph that has only to do with like the organs that are involved in the sex act.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  And that shift in perspective takes organs away from gendered people and sets them sort of into play with one another.

• 34:52Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  And one of the things I noticed in the 18th century is that sometimes possessive pronouns fall away. So her bushy spot becomes the bushy spot, or his finger becomes a finger. And like the genitals, it's like they're all playing together without people directing them. And so the kind of what I call in the book, like the mobility and detachability of genitals suggests to me, and this is quite a scholarly claim, I'm not saying that there are trans people in all pornography, but there's like a potential for sort of trans analysis, or to put it differently, a real deconstruction of heterosexuality if we recognize that pornography makes genitals do things out of the sort of agency of people.

• 35:36Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  So that's sort of what I mean by that, and it's a little bit conceptual, but it seems really, really important to me that pornography has that potential. Like, no other genre can do that, to my knowledge. Medical writing could potentially, but usually it's invested in.

• 35:53Speaker 04

  Attaching bodies to like people to treat them or diagnose them, right? And pornography doesn't care about that. Pornography is like, look at this shit. Like, this is amazing. And is willing to experiment with like the erotic potential of those sort of close ups.

• 36:07Kate Lister?

  I mean, in modern porn today, you don't tend to get just like disembodied genitals having sex with each other. You might get like a close up money shot, but it's still very much attached to a person. Whereas early porn, like you do kind of get these sort of ambulant genitals just doing things to one another, one doing around.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. And again, language makes that very evident. But I actually think in a sort of friendly disagreement, potentially if we take the lesson of the narrative pornography, that things are ambulant. And say, what if we applied that to read one shot of a video that's a close up of genitals?

• 36:43Kate Lister?

  Ooh, OK.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  Right? Like, if you're writing a book or a term paper and you freeze frame that, is there a way that the perspective of the shot experiments with gender?

• 36:54Kate Lister?

  I am thinking of videos, but if you're thinking about still images, I think that that's still applicable, isn't it? That it's just a big close up of genitals.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  Potentially. And then if you take that close up and attach it to the larger occasion of the video, is it in a magazine? Is it a still in a story? Is it a five minute clip on YouTube? Or, sorry, not YouTube, hopefully, on Pornhub.

• 37:16Kate Lister?

  Yeah, you'll get closed down really quick.

• 37:18Speaker 04

  That's right. If you can attach that still to a larger narrative, and again, this is a fairly scholarly endeavor, can it tell us something more experimental about gender or something less binary about gender?

• 37:35Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Kathleen after the short break.

• 37:49Speaker 05

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• 38:47Kate Lister?

  So just as a practical question, I wanted to ask, where did you get your sources from? Like, where do you access this stuff? Because we started saying a little bit earlier is the amount of stuff that's been lost or it's been kept behind closed doors. Where did you find your materials?

• 38:59Speaker 04

  So the bulk of it at the British Library. Some of it in a collection there called "The Private Case," which designates sexual materials. Though some of the material has evaded the Private Case and is in the general collection and appears not to have been sort of recognized as pornographic material.

• 39:17Kate Lister?

  Snuck through.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  Totally, which is one of the huge discoveries of the book, is that like, oh, there's pornography beyond what sort of the librarians know or would identify as pornography. So the bulk of it is there largely because so much of it has been lost and some big bequests of the library have allowed it to, you know, collect and grant access. So that's the majority. But a few archives in America have copies of those books or the Walpole Library at Yale has a wonderful collection of print satires, of visual material that I write about also. And then there are a handful of modern reprints of Victorian and 18th century pornography that I was able to collect. But the most interesting and felicitous source

• 40:00Speaker 04

  was a 1968 pulp reprint of "The History of the Human Heart," which is a 1749 novel that I really build the book around. Its title got changed somewhere in the 19th century to Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure.

• 40:14Kate Lister?

  Ah, yes, I've heard of that one. Yep.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  Yep. And at some point, I Googled, I mean, you know, like, I'm such an advanced researcher, I Googled.

• 40:23Kate Lister?

  We all Google. We all Google. Don't let any scholars tell you that they don't start off with a good Google.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  One hundred percent. When I Googled the, you know, 19th century title of the book Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure, a 1968 copy popped up at a used bookseller for $5.

• 40:40Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 40:41Speaker 04

  I thought this couldn't possibly be the same book. I bought it.

• 40:45Kate Lister?

  God, I love those moments in research.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  It's amazing. And that book, that single title, which I bought probably eight years ago, broke open the whole book project for me because I was like, wait a minute, somebody reprinted this 18th century novel based on a 19th century reprint in 1968 and sold it for, I don't know, 75 cents.

• 41:04Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 41:05Speaker 04

  So that made me realize how enduring 18th century pornography was to a whole, you know, sort of multimedia history of the genre.

• 41:14Kate Lister?

  Wow. Oh, my God. You must have just like, I mean, your head must have just exploded when that thing turned up.

• 41:20Speaker 04

  It did. And then, you know, then the hard work began of like, you know, this work is so unglamorous, as you well know, sometimes, of having three copies of the book in front of me. One was a Xeroxed copy of the 18th century text. One were pictures I had taken of the 19th century text. No, no, not pictures, microfilm, microfilm printouts, and then having the 1968 version and reading them.

• 41:45Kate Lister?

  Side by side.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, to see what had changed and really important things had changed across those editions.

• 41:51Kate Lister?

  Speaking of porn changing, one of the big debates that comes out of it is it's a very fraught ground for feminism, I suppose. It's one of the subjects that's incredibly polarizing in feminist subjects from people that will view it only as the ultimate expression of misogyny and it's inherently violent, through to people that view it as, I hate to use that word empowering because I think that gets bandied around a bit too much, but I've definitely heard people say that before, and all varied opinions in the middle. What is your take on that?

• 42:23Speaker 04

  I agree with you completely about the polarizing way feminism responds to pornography. And it's the language I give to it is sort of it's either pro or anti, right? You either have to say pornography is pro sex or it is, you know, violence against women. I think it's unusual that a genre has to break down in quite that way. And I think feminists would do well and feminist discourse would do well to adopt something more like a middle ground. I think anti porn feminists need to be more open to the fact that there's a huge diversity of pornography, that pornography can mean different things to different people and that not everyone is going to imitate or value what they see in pornography. And then to pro sex feminists or, you know, sexually radical feminists, I would say we ought to certainly be more skeptical

• 43:08Speaker 04

  that sex is always empowering. There are many women and non women who don't have a really open or radical approach to sex based on culture or religion or embodiment or preference or what have you, right? So there's no reason to think that sex is inherently liberating or that candor about sex is inherently liberating. I teach at a very culturally diverse university in Queens, which is the most diverse borough in, you know, the city of New York. And I've learned over my career to take real care with being flip about sex.

• 43:41Kate Lister?

  Me too.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  Right?

• 43:42Kate Lister?

  Like you'll bump into that one, like you sort of start off by going, I'm so sexually liberated. I can talk about anything. And then you realize pretty quick that actually not everybody is like that. And it can be upsetting for a lot of people that your worldview isn't their worldview. And yeah, you'll learn that one real quick.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:58Kate Lister?

  Real quick.

• 43:59Speaker 04

  And it's the really the job of the instructor and the professor to make sure that, you know, you're qualifying your own attitudes and recognizing others. Again, not for purposes of censorship or, you know, misogyny, but because we're teaching usually young people and they have their own path to sort of explore on their way to figuring out what they want to do with like their own bodies and all of that. Yeah. So back to feminists, I feel like, you know, in some ways, without again, sounding flip, we need both more of a sense of humor about pornography. We need to honor the sex workers who are in pornography and trust that they are often making choices that work for them. We also need to take care that people are not being exploited in pornography to the best of our ability.

• 44:41Kate Lister?

  Pay for your porn.

• 44:42Speaker 04

  Hashtag pay for your porn.

• 44:44Kate Lister?

  Pay for your porn.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. And, you know, straight men out there who think you love pornography, try looking at like Lustzine, right? Try looking at some pornography produced by women. So I would say that exploring the diversity of pornography is an important sort of qualification to any one thing we want to say about it. Whether you're a feminist or not, if you are saying one thing that is true of all pornography, you have to be wrong because pornography is as diverse as any other genre, if not more so.

• 45:13Kate Lister?

  Okay, so my final question to you. What's with all the corks?

• 45:18Speaker 04

  Now, are you saying C O R K S or C O C K S?

• 45:23Kate Lister?

  Your book's got so many gorgeous pictures in it. And then I just hit up on this bit, it's quite early on, of just like this suddenly just this little collection of erotic drawings with corks.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 45:32Kate Lister?

  There's women sitting on corks. There's what long corks or bottle companions is a fabulous one. And there's floating corks. And I was just, I have to ask her, was the cork an erotic suggestive item in the 18th century?

• 45:47Speaker 04

  Yes, and first I'm just going to say that all of your American listeners are delighting right now and how the way you pronounce corks sounds to us very much like.

• 45:56Kate Lister?

  I'll say bottle of water as well for all the American listeners.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  Yes, thank you.

• 46:01Kate Lister?

  Bottle of water.

• 46:04Speaker 04

  So corks were not themselves erotic, but their usage in the 18th century gave them erotic associations. So corks were often used, as fashion historians have noted, to bustle a woman's skirts. They'd basically give her a big booty to hold her petticoat out on, right? They would give shape to her dress. So women wore them under their dresses. And they also were, of course, used to stop up bottles. So some artists had fun with those two things. That is, that corks existed under women's skirts and that they were used to plug up holes.

• 46:41Kate Lister?

  Oh, I see what you've done there.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  See? Isn't that funny? So talking about it doesn't sound very funny, but as you know, the visual renderings of these are hilarious, like a woman running away from a bunch of bottles that are looking for their corks and the cork is under her skirt, right? And the bottle is chasing her across the fields, or women, yeah, sort of perched atop corks as they quaff their drinks. And it's like, well, where is the other end of the cork going under that skirt?

• 47:08Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 47:09Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. And the point that I make there is, you know, less to be cheeky and more to say, as we already spoke about, that the 18th century understood genital life to kind of be available to commentary in all of these different ways. And it wasn't just siphoned off as an explicitly sort of sexual or genital conversation all the time, but that something like fashion or drinking wine could lend itself to attention to women's bodies.

• 47:37Kate Lister?

  See, who knew? Who knew?

• 47:39Speaker 04

  You know?

• 47:40Kate Lister?

  Horny cocks.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  You spend some time in a library archive and you find out all kinds of things.

• 47:44Kate Lister?

  Oh, Kathleen, you've been so much fun to talk to. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 47:51Speaker 04

  They can find me at KathleenLuby.com and they can find my book for sale at the Stanford University Press website or an independent online bookseller near you. That is my encouragement. And at the St. John's University English Department website as well.

• 48:08Kate Lister?

  And are you on social media or are you one of the sensible people that will have nothing to do with it?

• 48:12Speaker 04

  I am very much not sensible and I am on social media at Cathy Luby on both Twitter and Instagram.

• 48:20Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much for joining me today. You've been an absolute treat.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  Thank you so much. This is a delight.

• 48:25Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Kathleen for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got a special episode that was recorded at our first ever live show earlier this year, where Eleanor Yaniger and I played Shag Mary Kill with historical kings and with the audience. We had a right laugh. And then we'll have another one about the truth about William Shakespeare and they are all coming your way. If you would like us to explore a subject or if you just fancied saying hello, then you can email us at [email protected].

• 49:01Kate Lister?

  This podcast was edited by Anisha Deva and produced by Sophie G and Charlotte Long. The senior producer was Charlotte Long, who is currently off on maternity leave. Hello, Charlotte. We hope that everything is going swimmingly. Join me again betwixt the sheets for the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

• 49:29Speaker 01

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