[Image is a fresco from the House of the Centurion, Pompeii, first century BCE]
This was previously published here, on Pornhub’s Sexual Wellness and Education site.

What is porn? This seems to be a silly question, because the answer seems so obvious—you ‘know it when you see it.’ But you’d be surprised about the amount of ink spilled and the amount of time wasted over this topic. In fact, the more you think about it, the less clear it becomes!

The first possible answer is that porn is just depictions of naked men or women, which would seem to make sense… until you consider that millions of people go to art museums every year where there are paintings of naked or scantily-clad men and women and those paintings aren’t considered pornography!

So then, is it videos or pictures of people having sex? That would exclude a lot of porno mags that just focus on women or men, but if we went down that route, it would seem to make even sex-ed videos that are surprisingly un-sexy into pornography, which is the exact opposite of what is trying to be done there.

Maybe the answer is in the dictionary! The Oxford English Dictionary defines pornography as “the explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings.” Going by that definition, then, means that if the creator’s intent was to turn somebody on, then it is thereby porn. Of course this definition has its own problems too—what about voyeur porn or other types that aren’t necessarily created to turn people on, like instructional videos?

What’s more, the word pornography itself was only invented about 150 years ago to talk about the prostitute-drawings (or in Greek porno-graphos) that they were digging up at Pompeii. But we’ve been making dirty pictures since the time we lived in caves – the earliest cave art in Chauvet, France is a vagina. And books that even modern readers would consider straight-up porn like Fanny Hill were written a hundred years before the word pornography was invented!

One of the earliest works that included dirty pictures alongside erotic poetry was I Modi, which was made in Italy In 1524, almost 500 years ago. To a modern eye, these pictures would definitely be considered porn, but the creator’s intent wasn’t to arouse the viewer. Instead, the creator, Pietro Aretino and Marcantonio Raimondi, wanted to make fun of the Catholic Church, which they thought was full of priests that didn’t live up to the Bible—there were a lot of priests having children and fighting in wars. Other poets, like Lord Rochester, wrote poems about the King of England spending all his money and time on prostitutes.

The Church and the King didn’t like this sort of work. It was personally insulting and they didn’t want people to laugh at them, so they started to go after this type of work, banning it, censoring it, and arresting the people that wrote it. It wasn’t the sex that was the problem to them, it was the mocking of the Church and the King. But the more it got banned, the more that the sexual content was seen as a problem that needed to be controlled.

Eventually, laws forbidding erotic pictures, books, and movies were created and the idea of pornography as a dirty or dangerous thing was established – an idea that is thankfully now evolving.