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- Hello, and welcome to this next lecture in the series on sex.
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I just want to start by saying how sad I am that I can't be there with you physically like I was for the last Gresham lecture of the series.
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We all know the reason.
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COVID is rampant and it's not safe for any of us really to mingle in large numbers.
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Many apologies.
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Let's just hope that in the future we will be able to do this again face-to-face.
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Welcome though to this lecture.
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As you know, I am the Gresham Professor of Rhetoric and also Professor of History at Birkbeck, part of the University of London.
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And this is the third in a series of six talks, really around the area of"Sex: A Modern History." You can also check out other lecture series of mine on the Gresham website.
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I did a series on the body, for example, and another series on evil women, which if you're interested in this lecture, you might be interested in them as well.
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And of course, this lecture as well will eventually go up on their website, so you can watch it again, if you so wish.
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Another little introductory message, and that is to say that obviously all of my lectures involve us thinking together about sensitive and rather difficult issues relating to sex, relating to violence, relating to what are often disruptive desires.
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Please exercise caution when reading or listening to my research.
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I don't include any graphic descriptions, but I do discuss genitals and of course, sexual pleasure and pain.
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I also engage with arguments around sexually explicit literature and images, obscenity and misogyny.
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I mean, knowing our history, I believe helps unmake harmful and traumatic practices.
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But let's start this lecture, which as you know, is on pornography.
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I want to start with three quotes.
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1972, Linda Lovelace, she's of course, a pornographic actress, said, "Pornographers treated me as if I were a piece of meat." 1977, Robin Morgan, a feminist,"Pornography is the theory, rape the practice." 2021, Billie Eilish, singer-songwriter,"I think pornography really destroyed my brain." Well, we all know pornography is divisive.
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It's guaranteed to incite heated debates between people inhabiting different subject positions based on our shifting intersections of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, age, generation, disability, and so on and so on.
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You can all add your descriptors there.
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Is pornography objectifying, or is it liberating?
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Will pornographic experimentation drive couples apart, or would it reignite passionless relationships?
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Does it bolster misogynist values and practices, or destabilize hegemonic masculinity, creating spaces for critiques of the oppression of women?
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Can it provide creative ways of re-imagining the self in relation to others?
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Does it have a potential to generate safe and sustaining communities for LGBTQI people and other minorities?
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Well, these are all urgent questions.
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And today's talk, I want to explore just a few of those issues from a historical perspective.
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My fundamental premise, I think, is that of course, pornography is a cultural category that varies over historical time and place.
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What this does is it requires us to reject any universal characterization of the genre.
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It's wrong to speak about pornography as a homogenous entity, easily recognizable, despite variations across time and geographical space.
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Recent feminist debates about pornography continue to revolve around the polarized positions established during the so-called porn wars of the 1970s and 1980s, in which what we have is we have these anti-pornography feminists being pitted against pru pornography, now commonly referred to as sex-positive ones.
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This assumes that had historically, specific form of pornography that arose in the 1970s is the standard by which all pornography across the ages should be judged.
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It assumes that pornography as it was produced and consumed in largely white middle class, heterosexual America in the 1970s and the 1980s with its profoundly misogynist outlook, is the universal model of the genre.
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On the contrary, what I want to do in this talk is to draw attention to periods of history and minority genres of smart that are receptive to a more subversive and therefore, emancipatory imaginaries.
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Now, before I'm addressing the chief arguments of this talk, I want to briefly just ask three questions.
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We'll look at three questions.
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First, what is pornography?
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Second, how does class and race figure in dominant forms of pornography as they emerge in 19th and 20th century Britain and America?
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And just apologies here, I talk of this length, I can't engage with non Western traditions of the genre, but that's something that I think we all ought to be doing.
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And third, do pornographic depictions put any relation to real sexual practices?
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The final half of this talk wants to explore two periods of history in which explicitly political forms of pornography dominated the field.
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Of course, all cultural constructions are inherently political, but I think what distinguishes these two genres of pornography that I want to look at in the second half is their unequivocal focus on systemic injustices sustained by crown, church, and state.
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So, first, what are people doing when they label something pornographic?
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Definitions tend to coalesce around the view that pornography is the explicit description or depiction of sexual organs or practices with the intention of arousing sexual feelings.
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Now, there are numerous reasons to be wary, in fact, to reject such a definition.
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For example, was Franois Boucher intending, was he intending to arouse his audiences when he painted "Leda and the Swan" around 1740?
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The painting, which you can see on the image here, depicts the so-called seduction of a young woman by a Swan.
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The woman's vulva and breasts are clearly on display and Swan's long phallic neck is poised to penetrate her.
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Would the painting be art when viewed in a gallery or pornography when tacked to the wall of a Brotham?
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I mean, clearly context matters.
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Another difficulty faced by anyone trying to define pornography arises from its inherent diversity.
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Commentators tend typically to focus on commercially produced artifacts.
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Amateur creations, such as sexually explicit love letters exchanged and private between lovers have tended to be bracketed separately, even though, of course, every day, this kind of every-day erotica is clearly designed to be sexually arousing.
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As with its more commercially equivalents, homemade pornography illuminates political as well as sexual tensions.
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This is one of the themes of Lisa Sigel's book,
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A History of Handmade Pornography in America," which came out just last year.
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And what this book does, really interesting book, is that it traces the way early Americans transformed commonplace objects into sexually charged ones.
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For example, in the US during the first half of the 19th century, the eagles that are engraved on coins were changed into flying phalluses and the 1-cent coins were scratched so that the e in cent becomes a u.
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The creative labor that went into such transformations, I think reveals the pleasures of public vulgarity.
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Transformations of coinage into pornographic objects that can be exchanged between people in the note bears of course, little resemblance to more commercial forms of pornography, a further indication of the excesses, as well as the instability of the genre.
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Prominent 19th century forms of pornography included such diverse items as books, wood-cut prints, lithographs, engravings, stereoscopes, mutual scopes, transparencies, and postcards.
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Although prior to the 1880s, written forms of pornography were more prominent than visual ones.
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Now, these early forms of pornography were highly class-specific.
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They were addressed to white wealthy men.
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They often required readers to understand Latin, Greek, French.
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They assumed a sophisticated knowledge of ancient literatures, if readers were to grasp the illusions being made.
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This erotica was expensive.
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For example, the 1882 pornographic magazine,"The Cremorne," cost one shilling.
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That is more than a week's wages for respectable worker.
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While "My Secret Life," which over seven volumes documented the sexual escapades of Walter, a Victorian gentlemen cost an exorbitant 100 pounds or two years' wages.
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Even middle-class readers probably couldn't afford such luxuries, let alone working class men, a third of whom were illiterate anyway.
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The spread of pornography then to all classes only occurred with the introduction of cheap postcards selling for about three pens each, which regularly sported raunchy images of women in semi on dress.
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The class-based nature of early pornography meant that it could masquerade as anthropological investigations or medical texts.
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The prolific pornographic publisher, Charles Carrington published his smart in scholarly disguise.
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A typical example would be his puriant and extremely racist book called "Untrodden Fields of Anthropology-1896." Carrington marketed his books as medical, folklore, and scientific works.
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Other code words that's kind of popular amongst 19th century pornographers where esoteric customs, unusual practices, and exotic stories.
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Such framings point to the close relationship between pornography and the expansion of the empire with its so-called civilizing mission.
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Imperial civil servants joined with academically minded scholars or the London Anthropological Society to discuss native customs in a kind of seemingly respectful manner while privately circulating pornography depicting the whipping of female slaves and the young boys.
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The members of the Cannibal Club positioned pornography as part of the imperial enterprise of discovery, by which, of course, they meant invasion.
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Xenophobia then was at the very heart of this pornography.
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Photographs of topless native women could escape the sensor in ways that identical photographs of white women could not.
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Black and brown people of all sexes could be objectified in so-called traveled postcards without the sensor becoming very agitated.
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These images contained explicit depictions of genitalia and pubic hair, which was literally unthinkable in other contexts.
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Censorship was particularly unlikely if the so-called models were pictured in their native habitats, as opposed to sort of staged studios.
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It enabled a multitude of racist sins to be marketed under the guise of exploration or tourism.
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As a historian, Lisa Sigel observed the exoticized others were always characterized as types, no words, as opposed to individuals.
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They were for example, Arab types, Haitian types, Geisha types, offering up that passive and receptive bodies to the white imperial male gaze.
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The most notorious of these pornographers was Sir Richard Burton, writer, linguist, explorer, orientalist, who memorably had himself circumcised in preparation for covert pilgrimage to Mecca.
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In 1880s, Burton was responsible for the translation or uncensored translation of "The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night" and "Supplementary Nights" there, commonly referred to as"The Arabian Nights." His viciously racist translation lingered on so-called Arab sexual practices, including sodomy, bestiality, clitoridectomy.
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Although the volume sold for the extraordinary price of 10 guineas, they incited the first public literary debate about pornography, a word that in fact had only entered the English language in 1850.
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As liberal MP, John Morley, using the pseudonym Sigma complained this oriental McKeep was pornography masked as scholarship and culture.
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Only by such deception could the book be found on the unsullied British breakfast table.
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Orientalist racism remains really strong in British pornography.
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Black and Asian women feticized more, while male Asian pornographic stars are feminized.
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This consumption of the bodies of others a part of their exclusion from citizenship or even full humanity.
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In the words of Mona Sicam in her essay,"Stripping While Brown," she said, she wrote, "In the spaces of commercial intimacy, it is never just a body that has bought or sold." Even more common than the promotion of pornography as anthropology, as exploration or travel, was it's marketing as a manual for doctors, surgeons, and other health professionals.
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For example, the medical textbook by John Robertson entitled "On Diseases of the Generative System" published in 1811, it was reissued 1824 by John Joseph Stockdale using the pseudonym, Thomas Little, as a pornographic text under the title,"The Generative System by John Robertson." This lewd version included amongst others, seven images that were not present in the original medical manual.
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One of these plates, just to give you one example, is a closeup obscene image of a vulva without any of the usual distancing mechanisms typical of medical journals.
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Similarly, the 17th century classic Aristotle's masterpiece.
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And for those of you who came to my talk at the Gresham on pleasure, I discussed it then.
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So, Aristotle's masterpiece also underwent numerous pornographic make-overs as the anonymous author of an article in the Pall Mall Gazette admitted in 1867.
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Many medical works and many law books contain matter which is grossly obscene as do many classical books.
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He agreed that such publications were legitimate because the interest of medicine, law, and classical literature require it.
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However, he continued, circulating texts containing indecencies within professional circles was one thing.
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It was quite different for pornographers to select every foul passage in the authors we have named, translate them into broad English, and sell them in a penny pamphlet to boys in the street.
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Such publications, he said were revolting and licentious.
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Wealthy collectors along with medical, legal, and academic professionals were positioned as impervious to the ill effects of obscene publications, unlike the uneducated masses.
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Now, these highly classed debates continue.
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But of course, most pornography consumed today is freely or cheaply available online.
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20th and 21st century pornography is often generated using everyday computers, video recorders, and phones with sophisticated digital cameras.
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The proliferation and increasing accessibility of digital technologies have not only enabled amateur pornography to expand exponentially, but it's also resulted in new criminal behaviors, such as producing and distributing unauthorized images.
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My final introductory remarks concern the relationship between pornography and prevailing sexual norms and practices.
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At a very basic level, the disjuncture between what appears in pornography and real life sex is vast.
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This is Billie Eilish's critique, which I cited at the beginning of this talk when she complained that her frequent viewing of pornography from the age of 12 ruined her sex life.
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Pornography not only boosts unrealistic expectations, for example, what does the sex body actually look like, or the truth of orgasm, but it also encourages harmful assumptions about what acts a sexy person has no right to decline.
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And there's a vast literature documenting these two problems in contemporary pornography.
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I think, however, there is more interesting point to be made for historians.
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Historians often attempt to extrapolate from pornographic texts and images to prevailing sexual mores.
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For example, one of the most influential historians of pornography, Steven Marcus, based his analysis of Victorian sexuality on reading obscene texts.
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(coughs) Excuse me.
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His foundational book,"The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England," which came out in 1966, established the canon of Victorian pornography.
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These were, let's see if I can remember them, the bibliographic collections or Henry Spencer Ashbee,"My Secret Life," "The Lustful Turk,""Rosa Fielding," or "A Victim of Lust,""The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon,""Randiana," and "The Romance of Lust." From these texts, Marcus concluded that Victorian pornography exposed the unresolved psychosexual fantasies of a culture still in adolescents.
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But there's a problem here.
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As historian Colette Colligan has explained, this use of Victorian pornographic sources is problematic.
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It exudes that Victorian pornography was a highly responsive, consumer-driven industry, as it is today.
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In contrast with today, a larger portion of pornographic texts consumed in the 19th century had been produced decades earlier.
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The classic pornographic orientalist text,"The Lustful Turk" was first published in 1828, but it kept being reprinted for another 80 years.
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Colligan found that even less popular pornographic texts had an average shelf life of one quarter of a century.
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And this means that we should be extremely cautious about drawing conclusions about a society sexual lives from the pornography they are masturbating to.
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Okay.
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So, in the second half of this talk, I want to return to a point I made at the very start.
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And that is, that I think it's wrong to assume that a historically specific form of pornography, one that arose in the 1970s is the standard by which all pornography should be judged.
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I'm going to turn to two periods of British history.
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What pornography looks actually very, very different to what it is today.
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These are firstly, the late 18th and early 19th century.
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And secondly, the 1960s and early 1970s.
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In these periods, the dominant genre of pornography was a radical one that challenged as opposed to bolstering regimes of power.
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So, 18th and early 19th century, British pornographers were politically committed to using bawdiness and obscenity to convey explicitly political messages against authoritarian power.
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Their purpose was to mock the crown, the church, and the state.
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I'm just going to give three examples here of many dozens I could give.
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First example is the example of William Dugdale.
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He was one of the greatest pornographers of the 19th century.
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And he published work of political agitation alongside pornography.
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Indeed, he viewed the two genres as mutually reinforcing.
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Similarly, George Cannon was an anti-religious radical polemicist for the rationalism of the enlightenment.
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And he combined his attack on upper-class of vice and old corruption with pornography.
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Robert Wedderburn was a leading spency in revolutionary, who argued for violent revolution while running a brothel and working as an agent for pornographic publishers.
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Now, these explicitly political agendas, co-existed alongside radical views about female sexuality.
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Much of this early pornography validated, even celebrated female sexual autonomy.
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And in these books, women can be heard loudly seeking out their own pleasure.
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The authorities.
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Well, the authorities vigorously sought to suppress such pornography less because of the way pornography corrupted individual sexual morals, and more with detrimental impact on the established political order.
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So, pornography in this period was not only, or even primarily about titillation or arousing sexual feelings, as the definition generally used in the 20th century has assumed, but was also explicitly radical critiquing power structures in society.
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So, this change from bawdiness as political, to bawdiness as primarily concerned with titillation was in fact, a very gradual one.
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Historians as different as Iain McCalman, Lynn Hunt, Lisa Sigel, generally date to the decline from the 1830s, crucially, although not decisively, killed off by the chartists who sought a more respectable image.
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As Sigel argues, by the Victorian period, the fluidity and the versatility, those are her words, of 18th century pornography, which kind of merged descriptions of genitals and sexual practices with brood of questions of beauty, sentiment, and religion had faded away.
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It's no coincidence that this move towards a less politicized pornography also saw the disappearance of female narrators.
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So, Hunt, I'm going to quote hunter Lynn Hunt.
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She laments the fact that when the female narrator is faced, so too, is the ambiguity about the function of the present representation of women.
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She notes that in novels without a female narrator, female bodies become objects to be read about, viewed, and enjoyed by men as opposed to being active subjects in their own lives.
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I think a really particularly insightful way to track these shifts can be seen if we look at different additions or different versions of the anonymously authored"The History of The Human Heart." And this book was republished in 1849.
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Sorry, 1749, 1844, and 1968.
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And it's really significant that the original title,"The History of The Human Heart," which emphasize the gender-free human heart was changed in later additions to the much more sexualized and gendered male "Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure." Historian Kathleen Lubrey's analysis of these texts make the point I alluded to earlier when discussing, well, how are we going to define pornography.
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"When exploded historically," she notes,"Pornography isn't consistently erotic and does not contain an unwavering imperative to arousal.
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Indeed, let me point out that early pornography does not privilege sexual stimulation over other perceptive possibilities.
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It insists, in fact, on the coexistence of multiple responses at once drawing on humor, intellectual debate, and cultural critique to emphasize the associative function of sex acts in narrative.
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So, what changes can we see in the different editions of "The History of The Human Heart," crucially.
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The texts increasingly horns in genitals.
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Dialogues, lengthy dialogues between lovers were extensively caught.
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Feelings trivialized.
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Female sexual pleasure was also progressively curtailed.
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So, in other words, gone descriptions of the female protagonists language eyes that heavily punting bosom, that glowing blush, which all proclaim the God of love triumphant.
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Women became objects rather than subjects of pornographic narratives.
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Male sexual pleasure trumped all other forms progressively.
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The 1968 edition of the now retitled"Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure," jettisoned gender dividends.
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The male hero becomes more self-possessed and his seductive efforts are no longer broken up by bouts of uncertainty, as in earlier additions.
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Female heroines, they become quieter, flatter, less condemning all of his scheming and duplicity.
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The main thrust of the book increasingly becomes the assertion of a potent masculine heterosexuality.
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And for Lubey, this meant that by 1968, the pleasure or pornographic reading was not only narrow compared to the miscellaneous pleasures enjoyed by the 18th century reader, but also that it requires a proud and unfailing hero.
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The hero, so unlike his 18th century forebear, falls short of ever admitting subjection to his beloved.
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Well, unlike 18th and early 19th century pornography, pornography increasingly insisted on upholding an unassailable male sexual agency.
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Now, this is not to say that a subversive tradition disappeared entirely.
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She, Sigel, reminds her readers that self-consciously, political, or more propped correctly, satirical pornography limped along in the genre of sexually comic postcards, which reveled in copra fagus male aristocrats, and flatulent upper class women.
00:33:20.809 --> 00:33:39.519
These astute caricatures of social elites, however, were undercut by the fact that these comic cards also displayed working people as possessing, similarly, ridiculous and rambunctious sexual bodies.
00:33:39.650 --> 00:33:52.849
The small radical tradition of pornography was only revived or be it with significant differences, 130 years later in the 1960s.
00:33:52.849 --> 00:34:16.632
Now, unlike the politically progressive pornographies of the earlier period who used sexual wit and obscenity to critique oppressive political institutions, in the 1960s, a new group of pornographers turned their attention to the damaging impact of moral ideologies more directly.
00:34:17.480 --> 00:34:35.849
To show you what I mean by this, even when they targeted the church, this was not the established church as an ally to the aristocracy, but religion as propagating an individually sexually repressive moral code.
00:34:35.980 --> 00:34:48.099
This new generation of pornographers set themselves in opposition to what historian, Marcus Collins, has called the pre-permissive pornography of alibis.
00:34:48.929 --> 00:35:02.409
And by that, he means pinups, artists, and naturalists, who, his words, acted as fronts behind which the erotic might hide.
00:35:02.409 --> 00:35:12.869
In contrast, the new pornographers, both tapped into and helped to create the so-called permissive society.
00:35:12.869 --> 00:35:24.599
So, what we've got here is we've got sex radicals, pornographers and feminists who were, if you like, encouraged to believe that they were engaged in adjacent projects.
00:35:24.599 --> 00:35:37.469
Women as well as men had an interest in freeing up sexual desires, repudiating the nuclear family and encouraging social freedoms.
00:35:37.469 --> 00:35:44.760
In the 1960s, the birth control pill, legalization of abortion benefited both sexes.
00:35:44.760 --> 00:35:49.760
Pornographers and feminists welcomed the new freedoms.
00:35:49.929 --> 00:35:57.539
Both insisted that women were desiring sexual subjects, similar to men.
00:35:57.539 --> 00:36:12.690
So, in Collins' words, the producers of these early soft-core magazines, such as "Penthouse and Playboy" made every effort to present female desire as normal and natural.
00:36:12.690 --> 00:36:19.050
In contrast to that, pin-up predecessors, the models looked as though they actually wanted sex.
00:36:19.050 --> 00:36:23.469
They were desiring as they were desirable.
00:36:23.469 --> 00:36:38.190
These new pornographers also avoided the objectification and violence that anti-pornography feminists claimed to be characteristic of or pornographic images of women.
00:36:38.769 --> 00:36:50.719
After all, Collins observed any hint of coercion would have clashed with the view by the new pornographers, that women wanted sex as much as men.
00:36:50.719 --> 00:37:10.699
So, instead of depersonalizing sexual images of women, obstructing them from sexualized from other aspects of their lives, they could publish detailed profiles of the models, including asking them their views on politics and culture more generally.
00:37:10.699 --> 00:37:15.230
These models denounced the double standard of sexual behavior.
00:37:15.230 --> 00:37:21.170
They spoke positively about birth control, abortion, divorce, women's rights.
00:37:21.170 --> 00:37:31.963
The first cover story of "Mayfair" even referred to the rise of sexually liberated women as sexual suffragettes.
00:37:34.010 --> 00:37:40.650
Well, this was unfortunately, an even shorter lived revolution than its predecessor.
00:37:40.650 --> 00:37:55.860
From the early 1970s, the positive message that had been propagated by the new pornographers was being increasingly undercut by a revived misogynous rhetoric.
00:37:55.860 --> 00:38:07.927
And the tipping point, well, we don't really know, but it's no coincidence, I think, that the first women's liberation conference was held at Ruskin college in 1970.
00:38:07.927 --> 00:38:12.927
The sexually radical new pornographers felt threatened.
00:38:14.599 --> 00:38:16.449
Was the feminist movement going too far?
00:38:16.449 --> 00:38:20.010
Were women becoming a little bit too much like men?
00:38:20.010 --> 00:38:33.489
Many of the same models who in the 1960s had been vocal about their support for women's rights to equal pay and sexual freedom were now quoted as having changed their mind.
00:38:33.489 --> 00:38:37.239
They began hoarding male shivery.
00:38:37.239 --> 00:38:42.090
Passive femininity was reframed as somehow empowering.
00:38:42.090 --> 00:38:45.110
Demands for equal pay were judged unrealistic.
00:38:45.110 --> 00:38:47.867
And anyway, it would hurt men.
00:38:47.867 --> 00:39:10.610
One quote, you would you hear nothing about equal pensions or two-way alimony porn stars such as Amber Dean Smith and Paula Francis who had earlier declared that, "We have as much interest in sex as men do," by the 1970s, began insisting that they desired strong men.
00:39:11.179 --> 00:39:25.530
In the words of Bambi Lynn Davis, Davies, sorry, a girl naturally hasn't the rights that a man has and wouldn't be happy if she did.
00:39:25.530 --> 00:39:32.980
Explicitly anti-feminist men's magazines began replacing female friendly feminist literature.
00:39:32.980 --> 00:39:41.670
I think the most notorious of this was the relaunch of "Men Only," the bestselling men's magazine in the UK.
00:39:41.670 --> 00:39:55.719
March, 1971, Paul Raymond rebranded the magazine, promising to store male dominance and start a gentleman's liberation movement.
00:39:55.719 --> 00:40:07.893
Raymond claimed that as women's public sensuality blooms and spreads, so man's correspondingly with his and shrivels.
00:40:08.840 --> 00:40:32.300
The pill-chewing dolly bird, it's his words, of course, the pill-chewing dolly bird along with female sexual autonomy is represented, for example, by the use of dildos or artificial insemination were accused of castrating men as neatly as a vet castrating a sheep.
00:40:32.300 --> 00:40:36.750
This was a dramatic turnaround from the 1960s.
00:40:36.750 --> 00:40:47.659
After all in 1964, when Raymond first launched "King," he'd spoken really positively about progress between the sexes.
00:40:47.659 --> 00:40:54.699
By 1971, however, Raymond's theme had become the neutering of men by feminists.
00:40:54.699 --> 00:41:05.070
Sexual permissiveness had birthed women's liberation and the new pornographers were not pleased.
00:41:05.250 --> 00:41:11.789
For feminists, the sexual revolution obviously turned sour.
00:41:11.789 --> 00:41:28.932
While birth control, the acceptability of sex outside of the institution of marriage had offered women liberating ways of thinking about their own sexual desires, it had not translated into more equitable treatment.
00:41:29.780 --> 00:41:36.960
As media studies scholar, Carolyn Bronstein, noted in a really wonderful book
00:41:39.949 --> 00:41:53.170
The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement" She writes that by the 1970s, feminists who had been keen advocates of the sexual revolution of the 1960s were disillusioned.
00:41:53.170 --> 00:42:02.713
Perhaps the whole movement had been a male revolution all along, leaving sexism intact.
00:42:03.577 --> 00:42:05.561
"Where?" They asked.
00:42:05.561 --> 00:42:11.039
Where had men learned to treat female sexual desires so dismissively?
00:42:11.039 --> 00:42:11.873
Hmm.
00:42:11.873 --> 00:42:32.789
Well, one answer they came to was through the consumption of the massively expanded commercialized pornography industry, which included private clubs, sex theaters, dirty magazines on every new stand, and sexualized television programs.
00:42:32.789 --> 00:42:44.103
Feminists observed how the commercial sex industry had expanded dramatically and in ways that were not empowering for women.
00:42:45.250 --> 00:42:57.780
For many feminists, the 1972 release of the pornographic and wildly popular film, "Deep Throat," was symptomatic of the anti-womenist shift.
00:42:57.780 --> 00:43:11.380
This hardcore film, which starred Linda Boreman, otherwise known as Linda Lovelace, followed the sexual exploits of a women whose clitoris was inside her throat.
00:43:11.380 --> 00:43:17.112
To achieve orgasm, she needed to learn the art of deep throat facial.
00:43:18.030 --> 00:43:31.570
The film attracted these massive crowds of middle-class women and men who would normally have regarded the public consumption of pornography as dashi.
00:43:31.570 --> 00:43:34.869
Almost overnight, pornography became chic.
00:43:34.869 --> 00:43:45.559
For feminist, however, it was a moment when they realized what men in the liberation movement actually thought about women.
00:43:45.559 --> 00:44:00.469
They recognize the new pornographers as enemies of feminism, something that Collins argued the new pornographers themselves had already concluded about feminism.
00:44:00.469 --> 00:44:08.780
And this was the moment in which feminism split between the anti-porn warriors and the sex-positive amazons.
00:44:12.280 --> 00:44:16.960
The division remains a powerful one within 21st century feminism.
00:44:16.960 --> 00:44:28.130
And as I've tried to suggest, it is a historically specific split, which does not do justice to the full range of thinking about pornography.
00:44:28.130 --> 00:44:39.760
In this talk, I have explored some of the diverse definitions and expositions of pornography in Britain and America from the late 18th century to the present.
00:44:39.760 --> 00:44:56.139
And I've looked at very briefly, at two points of history where pornography explicitly attack depressive institutions identified as the crown, the state, and the church, along with their repressive sexual ideologies.
00:44:56.139 --> 00:45:04.250
My chief argument has been that pornography has not always objectified or silenced women.
00:45:04.460 --> 00:45:30.539
To assume that the essence of pornography is sexism is to adopt a historically specific, geographically located, and very modern definition of pornography as critiqued by white educated American anti-porn feminists, such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.
00:45:31.039 --> 00:45:34.530
My focus has been on dominant modes of pornography.
00:45:34.530 --> 00:45:45.059
However, I really at this stage need to acknowledge other underground traditions of pornography in which political questions have been foregrounded.
00:45:45.059 --> 00:45:59.494
Most notably sexual and gender minorities have employed pornography to experiment with their identities and ultimately forge communities with other like-minded people.
00:45:59.494 --> 00:46:01.320
This was again, not new.
00:46:01.320 --> 00:46:05.889
After all, lesbian porn flourished in the 19th century.
00:46:05.889 --> 00:46:19.119
And my favorite, it's a classic feminist text of that period, is the "Romance of Violet" translated from the French into English in 1891.
00:46:19.119 --> 00:46:29.650
And what it does is it chronicles sexually explicit lesbian sex acts, including between Countess and an actress called Florence.
00:46:29.650 --> 00:46:47.059
Just a little footnote here, incidentally, although the English translation is sexually very explicit, it excludes in length the passage in the original French text in which the two women use a ripe peach in genital play.
00:46:47.230 --> 00:46:51.969
Perhaps there are certain practices beyond the pale for British lesbians.
00:46:51.969 --> 00:47:08.969
But from the 1970s, pro-sex, lesbian pornography started to be produced by feminists such as Pat Califia, Honey Lee Cottrell, Susie Bright, and Debbie Sundell.
00:47:10.539 --> 00:47:20.550
By reading or watching lesbian pornography, women who love other women learn to recognize their own desires and self-sufficiency.
00:47:20.550 --> 00:47:30.190
Similarly, underground pornography produced during the gay male sex revolution included powerful critiques of the authorities.
00:47:30.190 --> 00:47:32.730
It spread knowledge about homosexuality.
00:47:32.730 --> 00:47:43.099
It counted pervasive homophobia and it provided community-enhancing templates for personal flourishing.
00:47:43.099 --> 00:47:47.699
For them, free speech was love speech.
00:47:47.699 --> 00:48:00.170
As John Champagne writes in the Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Histories pornography, he argues was really important to gay men's lives.
00:48:00.170 --> 00:48:13.400
He writes, "In a culture that denigrates homoeroticism, pornography provides some of the only positive representations of gay sexuality.
00:48:13.400 --> 00:48:25.070
Even as late as the 1990s homosexual pornography was one of the only sources of knowledge and representation of gay men.
00:48:25.070 --> 00:48:31.523
Gay porn was an important way men explored their own desires for other men.
00:48:32.610 --> 00:48:34.599
I don't want to take this argument too far.
00:48:34.599 --> 00:48:36.204
I don't.
00:48:36.204 --> 00:48:42.769
it's not to celebrate and critically minoritized cultures of pornography.
00:48:42.769 --> 00:48:55.389
After all, like most modern pornography, mainstream gay and lesbian porn has been biased in terms of skin color, body size, age, except for a handful of stars.
00:48:55.389 --> 00:49:00.389
And here I'm thinking, oh, Bobby Blake, Brandon Lee.
00:49:00.690 --> 00:49:07.440
Except for a few exceptions, it does tend to exoticization and orientalism.
00:49:07.440 --> 00:49:10.940
Pornography for heterosexual women also has limits.
00:49:10.940 --> 00:49:25.429
The feminist sex industry has grown immeasurably since the 1970s as represented by shops, such as Toybox, which opened in 1977 and the 1990s magazine for women.
00:49:28.539 --> 00:49:38.969
But I think there are questions that we should ask about the strong link between feminist pornography and mordern capitalism.
00:49:38.969 --> 00:49:40.929
Who is co-opting?
00:49:40.929 --> 00:49:42.119
Whom?
00:49:42.119 --> 00:49:49.702
Where is the radical punch in individualistic, capitalist orientated power feminism?
00:49:50.579 --> 00:49:55.539
I think this question of corruption is a important one.
00:49:55.539 --> 00:49:57.619
Pornography loves boundaries.
00:49:57.619 --> 00:50:01.889
To be sexually arousing, it requires transgression.
00:50:01.889 --> 00:50:05.579
This is why those early revolutionaries are here.
00:50:05.579 --> 00:50:11.550
The 18th century and early 19th century ones were so dangerous for the authorities.
00:50:11.550 --> 00:50:25.179
They transgressed borders, separating politics and criminality, respectability and public incitement, radicalism, and boldness.
00:50:25.179 --> 00:50:36.869
They moved in and out of politics and criminality, depending on need for money, extent of state repression, and the existence of a market.
00:50:36.869 --> 00:50:49.280
As McKeldin booted, they kept alive a tradition of PBN unrespectability and irreverence in the face of powerful countervailing forces.
00:50:49.280 --> 00:51:01.659
These obscure artistan or true radicals and grubbed streak acts carried into Victorian society a ribelled, satanalian anti-establishment culture.
00:51:01.800 --> 00:51:13.039
They sought to change society and would cheeky enough to you sex sassiness and organistic reverie to do so.
00:51:14.170 --> 00:51:20.400
Finally, this should not lead us to invest too much power in pornography.
00:51:20.400 --> 00:51:25.800
So any one site for the construction and maintenance of gender and sexual identities.
00:51:25.800 --> 00:51:45.099
The three commentators with whom I began this talk pornographic actress, Linda Lovelace, feminist Robin Morgan, singer-songwriter, Billie Eilish, all have good reasons to rail against pornography for harming themselves and their loved ones.
00:51:45.099 --> 00:51:50.909
Lovelace was coerced into working for a violent pornographer from the late 1960s.
00:51:50.909 --> 00:51:58.360
Morgan saw the perversion of the sex revolution by misogynist pornographies in the 1970s.
00:51:58.360 --> 00:52:07.340
Eilish is a 21st century musician in an industry dominated by sexually abusive producers and directors.
00:52:07.340 --> 00:52:11.849
But their experiences did not have to be inevitable.
00:52:11.849 --> 00:52:19.070
The oppressive forms that pornography took in their lives could be contested.
00:52:19.070 --> 00:52:24.809
And in certain periods of history and certain genres have been contested.
00:52:24.809 --> 00:52:48.632
If we look beyond a historically and culturally specific mode of pornography, it is possible to identify pornography that resists the male gaze, includes the voices of women and minoritized peoples and makes pornography an empowering genre.
00:52:50.590 --> 00:52:59.072
In my first lecture, in the series on sex, I concluded by quoting bell hooks.
00:53:00.730 --> 00:53:05.139
She died on the 15th of December, 2021.
00:53:05.139 --> 00:53:06.840
And I mourn her.
00:53:06.840 --> 00:53:11.023
This is why I want to cite her words again today.
00:53:12.199 --> 00:53:17.199
Like me, she believed that pleasure is political.
00:53:18.489 --> 00:53:23.969
And I just want to read out one sentence of some of her writings.
00:53:23.969 --> 00:53:52.882
She wrote, "Our desire for radical social change is ultimately linked with the desire to experience pleasure, erotic fulfillment, and a host of other passions." Pornography can involve the political, social and erotic labor or ecstatic bodies in forging more equitable worlds.
00:53:53.780 --> 00:53:56.092
Thanks very much for listening to me today.
00:53:57.389 --> 00:54:00.574
My next in the series is not until the 17th of February.
00:54:00.574 --> 00:54:03.289
I'm going to be talking about sex work.
00:54:03.289 --> 00:54:11.280
Just to remind you though, previous lectures on the body, on evil women and on sex and modern history can be found on the Gresham website.
00:54:11.280 --> 00:54:16.690
And indeed this talk as well will be uploaded to that website later.
00:54:16.690 --> 00:54:19.682
Thanks very much and hope to see you on the 17th of February.
00:00:00.100 --> 00:00:06.150
- Hello, and welcome to this next lecture in the series on sex.
00:00:06.150 --> 00:00:13.619
I just want to start by saying how sad I am that I can't be there with you physically like I was for the last Gresham lecture of the series.
00:00:13.619 --> 00:00:14.939
We all know the reason.
00:00:14.939 --> 00:00:21.019
COVID is rampant and it's not safe for any of us really to mingle in large numbers.
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Many apologies.
00:00:21.879 --> 00:00:26.452
Let's just hope that in the future we will be able to do this again face-to-face.
00:00:28.820 --> 00:00:30.789
Welcome though to this lecture.
00:00:30.789 --> 00:00:37.969
As you know, I am the Gresham Professor of Rhetoric and also Professor of History at Birkbeck, part of the University of London.
00:00:37.969 --> 00:00:50.729
And this is the third in a series of six talks, really around the area of"Sex: A Modern History." You can also check out other lecture series of mine on the Gresham website.
00:00:50.729 --> 00:00:59.439
I did a series on the body, for example, and another series on evil women, which if you're interested in this lecture, you might be interested in them as well.
00:00:59.439 --> 00:01:05.849
And of course, this lecture as well will eventually go up on their website, so you can watch it again, if you so wish.
00:01:05.849 --> 00:01:23.680
Another little introductory message, and that is to say that obviously all of my lectures involve us thinking together about sensitive and rather difficult issues relating to sex, relating to violence, relating to what are often disruptive desires.
00:01:23.680 --> 00:01:27.540
Please exercise caution when reading or listening to my research.
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I don't include any graphic descriptions, but I do discuss genitals and of course, sexual pleasure and pain.
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I also engage with arguments around sexually explicit literature and images, obscenity and misogyny.
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I mean, knowing our history, I believe helps unmake harmful and traumatic practices.
00:01:52.879 --> 00:01:58.780
But let's start this lecture, which as you know, is on pornography.
00:01:58.780 --> 00:02:00.340
I want to start with three quotes.
00:02:00.340 --> 00:02:33.629
1972, Linda Lovelace, she's of course, a pornographic actress, said, "Pornographers treated me as if I were a piece of meat." 1977, Robin Morgan, a feminist,"Pornography is the theory, rape the practice." 2021, Billie Eilish, singer-songwriter,"I think pornography really destroyed my brain." Well, we all know pornography is divisive.
00:02:33.629 --> 00:02:49.360
It's guaranteed to incite heated debates between people inhabiting different subject positions based on our shifting intersections of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, age, generation, disability, and so on and so on.
00:02:49.360 --> 00:02:52.139
You can all add your descriptors there.
00:02:52.139 --> 00:02:57.139
Is pornography objectifying, or is it liberating?
00:02:57.979 --> 00:03:06.409
Will pornographic experimentation drive couples apart, or would it reignite passionless relationships?
00:03:06.409 --> 00:03:19.310
Does it bolster misogynist values and practices, or destabilize hegemonic masculinity, creating spaces for critiques of the oppression of women?
00:03:19.310 --> 00:03:26.030
Can it provide creative ways of re-imagining the self in relation to others?
00:03:26.030 --> 00:03:35.370
Does it have a potential to generate safe and sustaining communities for LGBTQI people and other minorities?
00:03:35.370 --> 00:03:38.610
Well, these are all urgent questions.
00:03:38.610 --> 00:03:45.199
And today's talk, I want to explore just a few of those issues from a historical perspective.
00:03:45.199 --> 00:03:55.939
My fundamental premise, I think, is that of course, pornography is a cultural category that varies over historical time and place.
00:03:55.939 --> 00:04:02.960
What this does is it requires us to reject any universal characterization of the genre.
00:04:02.960 --> 00:04:15.080
It's wrong to speak about pornography as a homogenous entity, easily recognizable, despite variations across time and geographical space.
00:04:15.080 --> 00:04:40.740
Recent feminist debates about pornography continue to revolve around the polarized positions established during the so-called porn wars of the 1970s and 1980s, in which what we have is we have these anti-pornography feminists being pitted against pru pornography, now commonly referred to as sex-positive ones.
00:04:40.740 --> 00:04:54.639
This assumes that had historically, specific form of pornography that arose in the 1970s is the standard by which all pornography across the ages should be judged.
00:04:54.639 --> 00:05:14.730
It assumes that pornography as it was produced and consumed in largely white middle class, heterosexual America in the 1970s and the 1980s with its profoundly misogynist outlook, is the universal model of the genre.
00:05:14.730 --> 00:05:29.163
On the contrary, what I want to do in this talk is to draw attention to periods of history and minority genres of smart that are receptive to a more subversive and therefore, emancipatory imaginaries.
00:05:30.060 --> 00:05:37.459
Now, before I'm addressing the chief arguments of this talk, I want to briefly just ask three questions.
00:05:37.459 --> 00:05:38.639
We'll look at three questions.
00:05:38.639 --> 00:05:40.653
First, what is pornography?
00:05:41.550 --> 00:05:51.889
Second, how does class and race figure in dominant forms of pornography as they emerge in 19th and 20th century Britain and America?
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And just apologies here, I talk of this length, I can't engage with non Western traditions of the genre, but that's something that I think we all ought to be doing.
00:06:00.680 --> 00:06:07.759
And third, do pornographic depictions put any relation to real sexual practices?
00:06:07.759 --> 00:06:18.079
The final half of this talk wants to explore two periods of history in which explicitly political forms of pornography dominated the field.
00:06:18.079 --> 00:06:39.639
Of course, all cultural constructions are inherently political, but I think what distinguishes these two genres of pornography that I want to look at in the second half is their unequivocal focus on systemic injustices sustained by crown, church, and state.
00:06:39.879 --> 00:06:45.699
So, first, what are people doing when they label something pornographic?
00:06:45.699 --> 00:07:01.759
Definitions tend to coalesce around the view that pornography is the explicit description or depiction of sexual organs or practices with the intention of arousing sexual feelings.
00:07:01.759 --> 00:07:08.959
Now, there are numerous reasons to be wary, in fact, to reject such a definition.
00:07:08.959 --> 00:07:20.870
For example, was Franois Boucher intending, was he intending to arouse his audiences when he painted "Leda and the Swan" around 1740?
00:07:20.870 --> 00:07:28.250
The painting, which you can see on the image here, depicts the so-called seduction of a young woman by a Swan.
00:07:28.300 --> 00:07:37.009
The woman's vulva and breasts are clearly on display and Swan's long phallic neck is poised to penetrate her.
00:07:37.399 --> 00:07:46.160
Would the painting be art when viewed in a gallery or pornography when tacked to the wall of a Brotham?
00:07:46.160 --> 00:07:48.343
I mean, clearly context matters.
00:07:49.509 --> 00:07:57.470
Another difficulty faced by anyone trying to define pornography arises from its inherent diversity.
00:07:57.470 --> 00:08:04.040
Commentators tend typically to focus on commercially produced artifacts.
00:08:04.040 --> 00:08:20.973
Amateur creations, such as sexually explicit love letters exchanged and private between lovers have tended to be bracketed separately, even though, of course, every day, this kind of every-day erotica is clearly designed to be sexually arousing.
00:08:21.879 --> 00:08:31.410
As with its more commercially equivalents, homemade pornography illuminates political as well as sexual tensions.
00:08:31.410 --> 00:08:34.147
This is one of the themes of Lisa Sigel's book,
00:08:36.210 --> 00:08:40.320
A History of Handmade Pornography in America," which came out just last year.
00:08:40.320 --> 00:08:50.590
And what this book does, really interesting book, is that it traces the way early Americans transformed commonplace objects into sexually charged ones.
00:08:51.200 --> 00:09:10.539
For example, in the US during the first half of the 19th century, the eagles that are engraved on coins were changed into flying phalluses and the 1-cent coins were scratched so that the e in cent becomes a u.
00:09:10.710 --> 00:09:20.100
The creative labor that went into such transformations, I think reveals the pleasures of public vulgarity.
00:09:20.230 --> 00:09:42.350
Transformations of coinage into pornographic objects that can be exchanged between people in the note bears of course, little resemblance to more commercial forms of pornography, a further indication of the excesses, as well as the instability of the genre.
00:09:42.350 --> 00:09:58.309
Prominent 19th century forms of pornography included such diverse items as books, wood-cut prints, lithographs, engravings, stereoscopes, mutual scopes, transparencies, and postcards.
00:09:58.309 --> 00:10:07.100
Although prior to the 1880s, written forms of pornography were more prominent than visual ones.
00:10:07.100 --> 00:10:12.629
Now, these early forms of pornography were highly class-specific.
00:10:12.629 --> 00:10:15.399
They were addressed to white wealthy men.
00:10:15.399 --> 00:10:19.490
They often required readers to understand Latin, Greek, French.
00:10:19.490 --> 00:10:28.360
They assumed a sophisticated knowledge of ancient literatures, if readers were to grasp the illusions being made.
00:10:28.360 --> 00:10:30.620
This erotica was expensive.
00:10:30.620 --> 00:10:38.039
For example, the 1882 pornographic magazine,"The Cremorne," cost one shilling.
00:10:38.039 --> 00:10:42.299
That is more than a week's wages for respectable worker.
00:10:42.299 --> 00:10:59.159
While "My Secret Life," which over seven volumes documented the sexual escapades of Walter, a Victorian gentlemen cost an exorbitant 100 pounds or two years' wages.
00:10:59.159 --> 00:11:08.759
Even middle-class readers probably couldn't afford such luxuries, let alone working class men, a third of whom were illiterate anyway.
00:11:08.759 --> 00:11:24.493
The spread of pornography then to all classes only occurred with the introduction of cheap postcards selling for about three pens each, which regularly sported raunchy images of women in semi on dress.
00:11:25.730 --> 00:11:36.480
The class-based nature of early pornography meant that it could masquerade as anthropological investigations or medical texts.
00:11:37.009 --> 00:11:45.960
The prolific pornographic publisher, Charles Carrington published his smart in scholarly disguise.
00:11:45.960 --> 00:12:06.129
A typical example would be his puriant and extremely racist book called "Untrodden Fields of Anthropology-1896." Carrington marketed his books as medical, folklore, and scientific works.
00:12:06.129 --> 00:12:19.059
Other code words that's kind of popular amongst 19th century pornographers where esoteric customs, unusual practices, and exotic stories.
00:12:19.059 --> 00:12:33.350
Such framings point to the close relationship between pornography and the expansion of the empire with its so-called civilizing mission.
00:12:33.350 --> 00:12:56.190
Imperial civil servants joined with academically minded scholars or the London Anthropological Society to discuss native customs in a kind of seemingly respectful manner while privately circulating pornography depicting the whipping of female slaves and the young boys.
00:12:56.190 --> 00:13:10.100
The members of the Cannibal Club positioned pornography as part of the imperial enterprise of discovery, by which, of course, they meant invasion.
00:13:10.100 --> 00:13:15.100
Xenophobia then was at the very heart of this pornography.
00:13:15.159 --> 00:13:24.750
Photographs of topless native women could escape the sensor in ways that identical photographs of white women could not.
00:13:24.750 --> 00:13:34.700
Black and brown people of all sexes could be objectified in so-called traveled postcards without the sensor becoming very agitated.
00:13:34.700 --> 00:13:46.639
These images contained explicit depictions of genitalia and pubic hair, which was literally unthinkable in other contexts.
00:13:46.659 --> 00:13:58.629
Censorship was particularly unlikely if the so-called models were pictured in their native habitats, as opposed to sort of staged studios.
00:13:58.629 --> 00:14:08.029
It enabled a multitude of racist sins to be marketed under the guise of exploration or tourism.
00:14:08.080 --> 00:14:21.259
As a historian, Lisa Sigel observed the exoticized others were always characterized as types, no words, as opposed to individuals.
00:14:21.259 --> 00:14:35.620
They were for example, Arab types, Haitian types, Geisha types, offering up that passive and receptive bodies to the white imperial male gaze.
00:14:35.620 --> 00:14:52.863
The most notorious of these pornographers was Sir Richard Burton, writer, linguist, explorer, orientalist, who memorably had himself circumcised in preparation for covert pilgrimage to Mecca.
00:14:53.841 --> 00:15:25.269
In 1880s, Burton was responsible for the translation or uncensored translation of "The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night" and "Supplementary Nights" there, commonly referred to as"The Arabian Nights." His viciously racist translation lingered on so-called Arab sexual practices, including sodomy, bestiality, clitoridectomy.
00:15:25.269 --> 00:15:42.779
Although the volume sold for the extraordinary price of 10 guineas, they incited the first public literary debate about pornography, a word that in fact had only entered the English language in 1850.
00:15:42.779 --> 00:15:57.019
As liberal MP, John Morley, using the pseudonym Sigma complained this oriental McKeep was pornography masked as scholarship and culture.
00:15:57.610 --> 00:16:06.450
Only by such deception could the book be found on the unsullied British breakfast table.
00:16:06.450 --> 00:16:10.970
Orientalist racism remains really strong in British pornography.
00:16:10.970 --> 00:16:17.779
Black and Asian women feticized more, while male Asian pornographic stars are feminized.
00:16:17.779 --> 00:16:27.860
This consumption of the bodies of others a part of their exclusion from citizenship or even full humanity.
00:16:27.860 --> 00:16:58.744
In the words of Mona Sicam in her essay,"Stripping While Brown," she said, she wrote, "In the spaces of commercial intimacy, it is never just a body that has bought or sold." Even more common than the promotion of pornography as anthropology, as exploration or travel, was it's marketing as a manual for doctors, surgeons, and other health professionals.
00:16:58.744 --> 00:17:38.450
For example, the medical textbook by John Robertson entitled "On Diseases of the Generative System" published in 1811, it was reissued 1824 by John Joseph Stockdale using the pseudonym, Thomas Little, as a pornographic text under the title,"The Generative System by John Robertson." This lewd version included amongst others, seven images that were not present in the original medical manual.
00:17:38.450 --> 00:17:53.470
One of these plates, just to give you one example, is a closeup obscene image of a vulva without any of the usual distancing mechanisms typical of medical journals.
00:17:53.470 --> 00:17:58.470
Similarly, the 17th century classic Aristotle's masterpiece.
00:17:59.500 --> 00:18:05.460
And for those of you who came to my talk at the Gresham on pleasure, I discussed it then.
00:18:05.460 --> 00:18:20.482
So, Aristotle's masterpiece also underwent numerous pornographic make-overs as the anonymous author of an article in the Pall Mall Gazette admitted in 1867.
00:18:21.509 --> 00:18:28.868
Many medical works and many law books contain matter which is grossly obscene as do many classical books.
00:18:28.868 --> 00:18:39.359
He agreed that such publications were legitimate because the interest of medicine, law, and classical literature require it.
00:18:39.359 --> 00:18:48.450
However, he continued, circulating texts containing indecencies within professional circles was one thing.
00:18:48.450 --> 00:19:05.630
It was quite different for pornographers to select every foul passage in the authors we have named, translate them into broad English, and sell them in a penny pamphlet to boys in the street.
00:19:05.630 --> 00:19:10.563
Such publications, he said were revolting and licentious.
00:19:11.730 --> 00:19:28.093
Wealthy collectors along with medical, legal, and academic professionals were positioned as impervious to the ill effects of obscene publications, unlike the uneducated masses.
00:19:28.980 --> 00:19:32.160
Now, these highly classed debates continue.
00:19:32.160 --> 00:19:37.710
But of course, most pornography consumed today is freely or cheaply available online.
00:19:37.710 --> 00:19:48.660
20th and 21st century pornography is often generated using everyday computers, video recorders, and phones with sophisticated digital cameras.
00:19:48.660 --> 00:20:09.982
The proliferation and increasing accessibility of digital technologies have not only enabled amateur pornography to expand exponentially, but it's also resulted in new criminal behaviors, such as producing and distributing unauthorized images.
00:20:11.000 --> 00:20:21.599
My final introductory remarks concern the relationship between pornography and prevailing sexual norms and practices.
00:20:21.599 --> 00:20:32.279
At a very basic level, the disjuncture between what appears in pornography and real life sex is vast.
00:20:32.279 --> 00:20:43.230
This is Billie Eilish's critique, which I cited at the beginning of this talk when she complained that her frequent viewing of pornography from the age of 12 ruined her sex life.
00:20:43.230 --> 00:21:03.640
Pornography not only boosts unrealistic expectations, for example, what does the sex body actually look like, or the truth of orgasm, but it also encourages harmful assumptions about what acts a sexy person has no right to decline.
00:21:06.650 --> 00:21:11.660
And there's a vast literature documenting these two problems in contemporary pornography.
00:21:11.660 --> 00:21:16.804
I think, however, there is more interesting point to be made for historians.
00:21:16.804 --> 00:21:27.109
Historians often attempt to extrapolate from pornographic texts and images to prevailing sexual mores.
00:21:27.109 --> 00:21:38.602
For example, one of the most influential historians of pornography, Steven Marcus, based his analysis of Victorian sexuality on reading obscene texts.
00:21:38.602 --> 00:21:40.750
(coughs) Excuse me.
00:21:40.750 --> 00:21:55.289
His foundational book,"The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England," which came out in 1966, established the canon of Victorian pornography.
00:21:55.289 --> 00:22:35.393
These were, let's see if I can remember them, the bibliographic collections or Henry Spencer Ashbee,"My Secret Life," "The Lustful Turk,""Rosa Fielding," or "A Victim of Lust,""The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon,""Randiana," and "The Romance of Lust." From these texts, Marcus concluded that Victorian pornography exposed the unresolved psychosexual fantasies of a culture still in adolescents.
00:22:36.400 --> 00:22:38.099
But there's a problem here.
00:22:38.099 --> 00:22:45.930
As historian Colette Colligan has explained, this use of Victorian pornographic sources is problematic.
00:22:45.930 --> 00:22:56.849
It exudes that Victorian pornography was a highly responsive, consumer-driven industry, as it is today.
00:22:56.849 --> 00:23:08.670
In contrast with today, a larger portion of pornographic texts consumed in the 19th century had been produced decades earlier.
00:23:08.670 --> 00:23:23.442
The classic pornographic orientalist text,"The Lustful Turk" was first published in 1828, but it kept being reprinted for another 80 years.
00:23:24.490 --> 00:23:33.039
Colligan found that even less popular pornographic texts had an average shelf life of one quarter of a century.
00:23:33.039 --> 00:23:44.053
And this means that we should be extremely cautious about drawing conclusions about a society sexual lives from the pornography they are masturbating to.
00:23:45.240 --> 00:23:46.073
Okay.
00:23:46.073 --> 00:23:51.230
So, in the second half of this talk, I want to return to a point I made at the very start.
00:23:51.230 --> 00:24:04.670
And that is, that I think it's wrong to assume that a historically specific form of pornography, one that arose in the 1970s is the standard by which all pornography should be judged.
00:24:04.670 --> 00:24:08.170
I'm going to turn to two periods of British history.
00:24:08.170 --> 00:24:12.130
What pornography looks actually very, very different to what it is today.
00:24:12.130 --> 00:24:16.819
These are firstly, the late 18th and early 19th century.
00:24:16.819 --> 00:24:21.450
And secondly, the 1960s and early 1970s.
00:24:21.450 --> 00:24:33.039
In these periods, the dominant genre of pornography was a radical one that challenged as opposed to bolstering regimes of power.
00:24:33.039 --> 00:24:48.470
So, 18th and early 19th century, British pornographers were politically committed to using bawdiness and obscenity to convey explicitly political messages against authoritarian power.
00:24:48.470 --> 00:24:54.599
Their purpose was to mock the crown, the church, and the state.
00:24:54.599 --> 00:24:57.478
I'm just going to give three examples here of many dozens I could give.
00:24:57.478 --> 00:25:02.478
First example is the example of William Dugdale.
00:25:04.549 --> 00:25:07.640
He was one of the greatest pornographers of the 19th century.
00:25:07.640 --> 00:25:13.269
And he published work of political agitation alongside pornography.
00:25:13.269 --> 00:25:17.829
Indeed, he viewed the two genres as mutually reinforcing.
00:25:17.829 --> 00:25:27.210
Similarly, George Cannon was an anti-religious radical polemicist for the rationalism of the enlightenment.
00:25:27.529 --> 00:25:34.429
And he combined his attack on upper-class of vice and old corruption with pornography.
00:25:34.429 --> 00:25:49.240
Robert Wedderburn was a leading spency in revolutionary, who argued for violent revolution while running a brothel and working as an agent for pornographic publishers.
00:25:49.240 --> 00:25:57.925
Now, these explicitly political agendas, co-existed alongside radical views about female sexuality.
00:25:59.299 --> 00:26:05.829
Much of this early pornography validated, even celebrated female sexual autonomy.
00:26:05.829 --> 00:26:12.529
And in these books, women can be heard loudly seeking out their own pleasure.
00:26:13.220 --> 00:26:14.180
The authorities.
00:26:14.180 --> 00:26:31.759
Well, the authorities vigorously sought to suppress such pornography less because of the way pornography corrupted individual sexual morals, and more with detrimental impact on the established political order.
00:26:31.759 --> 00:26:52.660
So, pornography in this period was not only, or even primarily about titillation or arousing sexual feelings, as the definition generally used in the 20th century has assumed, but was also explicitly radical critiquing power structures in society.
00:26:52.660 --> 00:27:05.599
So, this change from bawdiness as political, to bawdiness as primarily concerned with titillation was in fact, a very gradual one.
00:27:05.599 --> 00:27:25.369
Historians as different as Iain McCalman, Lynn Hunt, Lisa Sigel, generally date to the decline from the 1830s, crucially, although not decisively, killed off by the chartists who sought a more respectable image.
00:27:25.369 --> 00:27:48.500
As Sigel argues, by the Victorian period, the fluidity and the versatility, those are her words, of 18th century pornography, which kind of merged descriptions of genitals and sexual practices with brood of questions of beauty, sentiment, and religion had faded away.
00:27:48.579 --> 00:28:01.339
It's no coincidence that this move towards a less politicized pornography also saw the disappearance of female narrators.
00:28:01.339 --> 00:28:03.890
So, Hunt, I'm going to quote hunter Lynn Hunt.
00:28:03.890 --> 00:28:19.000
She laments the fact that when the female narrator is faced, so too, is the ambiguity about the function of the present representation of women.
00:28:19.000 --> 00:28:36.309
She notes that in novels without a female narrator, female bodies become objects to be read about, viewed, and enjoyed by men as opposed to being active subjects in their own lives.
00:28:36.309 --> 00:28:53.880
I think a really particularly insightful way to track these shifts can be seen if we look at different additions or different versions of the anonymously authored"The History of The Human Heart." And this book was republished in 1849.
00:28:57.819 --> 00:29:02.819
Sorry, 1749, 1844, and 1968.
00:29:04.619 --> 00:29:36.896
And it's really significant that the original title,"The History of The Human Heart," which emphasize the gender-free human heart was changed in later additions to the much more sexualized and gendered male "Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure." Historian Kathleen Lubrey's analysis of these texts make the point I alluded to earlier when discussing, well, how are we going to define pornography.
00:29:36.896 --> 00:29:49.700
"When exploded historically," she notes,"Pornography isn't consistently erotic and does not contain an unwavering imperative to arousal.
00:29:51.670 --> 00:30:02.869
Indeed, let me point out that early pornography does not privilege sexual stimulation over other perceptive possibilities.
00:30:02.869 --> 00:30:20.803
It insists, in fact, on the coexistence of multiple responses at once drawing on humor, intellectual debate, and cultural critique to emphasize the associative function of sex acts in narrative.
00:30:21.680 --> 00:30:30.173
So, what changes can we see in the different editions of "The History of The Human Heart," crucially.
00:30:31.109 --> 00:30:36.049
The texts increasingly horns in genitals.
00:30:36.049 --> 00:30:41.289
Dialogues, lengthy dialogues between lovers were extensively caught.
00:30:41.289 --> 00:30:43.960
Feelings trivialized.
00:30:43.960 --> 00:30:48.960
Female sexual pleasure was also progressively curtailed.
00:30:49.650 --> 00:31:06.819
So, in other words, gone descriptions of the female protagonists language eyes that heavily punting bosom, that glowing blush, which all proclaim the God of love triumphant.
00:31:07.720 --> 00:31:14.359
Women became objects rather than subjects of pornographic narratives.
00:31:14.359 --> 00:31:19.359
Male sexual pleasure trumped all other forms progressively.
00:31:20.140 --> 00:31:28.576
The 1968 edition of the now retitled"Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure," jettisoned gender dividends.
00:31:29.480 --> 00:31:42.240
The male hero becomes more self-possessed and his seductive efforts are no longer broken up by bouts of uncertainty, as in earlier additions.
00:31:42.569 --> 00:31:52.049
Female heroines, they become quieter, flatter, less condemning all of his scheming and duplicity.
00:31:52.049 --> 00:32:01.289
The main thrust of the book increasingly becomes the assertion of a potent masculine heterosexuality.
00:32:01.289 --> 00:32:23.920
And for Lubey, this meant that by 1968, the pleasure or pornographic reading was not only narrow compared to the miscellaneous pleasures enjoyed by the 18th century reader, but also that it requires a proud and unfailing hero.
00:32:25.579 --> 00:32:35.240
The hero, so unlike his 18th century forebear, falls short of ever admitting subjection to his beloved.
00:32:37.950 --> 00:32:50.109
Well, unlike 18th and early 19th century pornography, pornography increasingly insisted on upholding an unassailable male sexual agency.
00:32:50.109 --> 00:32:56.059
Now, this is not to say that a subversive tradition disappeared entirely.
00:32:56.059 --> 00:33:20.809
She, Sigel, reminds her readers that self-consciously, political, or more propped correctly, satirical pornography limped along in the genre of sexually comic postcards, which reveled in copra fagus male aristocrats, and flatulent upper class women.
00:33:20.809 --> 00:33:39.519
These astute caricatures of social elites, however, were undercut by the fact that these comic cards also displayed working people as possessing, similarly, ridiculous and rambunctious sexual bodies.
00:33:39.650 --> 00:33:52.849
The small radical tradition of pornography was only revived or be it with significant differences, 130 years later in the 1960s.
00:33:52.849 --> 00:34:16.632
Now, unlike the politically progressive pornographies of the earlier period who used sexual wit and obscenity to critique oppressive political institutions, in the 1960s, a new group of pornographers turned their attention to the damaging impact of moral ideologies more directly.
00:34:17.480 --> 00:34:35.849
To show you what I mean by this, even when they targeted the church, this was not the established church as an ally to the aristocracy, but religion as propagating an individually sexually repressive moral code.
00:34:35.980 --> 00:34:48.099
This new generation of pornographers set themselves in opposition to what historian, Marcus Collins, has called the pre-permissive pornography of alibis.
00:34:48.929 --> 00:35:02.409
And by that, he means pinups, artists, and naturalists, who, his words, acted as fronts behind which the erotic might hide.
00:35:02.409 --> 00:35:12.869
In contrast, the new pornographers, both tapped into and helped to create the so-called permissive society.
00:35:12.869 --> 00:35:24.599
So, what we've got here is we've got sex radicals, pornographers and feminists who were, if you like, encouraged to believe that they were engaged in adjacent projects.
00:35:24.599 --> 00:35:37.469
Women as well as men had an interest in freeing up sexual desires, repudiating the nuclear family and encouraging social freedoms.
00:35:37.469 --> 00:35:44.760
In the 1960s, the birth control pill, legalization of abortion benefited both sexes.
00:35:44.760 --> 00:35:49.760
Pornographers and feminists welcomed the new freedoms.
00:35:49.929 --> 00:35:57.539
Both insisted that women were desiring sexual subjects, similar to men.
00:35:57.539 --> 00:36:12.690
So, in Collins' words, the producers of these early soft-core magazines, such as "Penthouse and Playboy" made every effort to present female desire as normal and natural.
00:36:12.690 --> 00:36:19.050
In contrast to that, pin-up predecessors, the models looked as though they actually wanted sex.
00:36:19.050 --> 00:36:23.469
They were desiring as they were desirable.
00:36:23.469 --> 00:36:38.190
These new pornographers also avoided the objectification and violence that anti-pornography feminists claimed to be characteristic of or pornographic images of women.
00:36:38.769 --> 00:36:50.719
After all, Collins observed any hint of coercion would have clashed with the view by the new pornographers, that women wanted sex as much as men.
00:36:50.719 --> 00:37:10.699
So, instead of depersonalizing sexual images of women, obstructing them from sexualized from other aspects of their lives, they could publish detailed profiles of the models, including asking them their views on politics and culture more generally.
00:37:10.699 --> 00:37:15.230
These models denounced the double standard of sexual behavior.
00:37:15.230 --> 00:37:21.170
They spoke positively about birth control, abortion, divorce, women's rights.
00:37:21.170 --> 00:37:31.963
The first cover story of "Mayfair" even referred to the rise of sexually liberated women as sexual suffragettes.
00:37:34.010 --> 00:37:40.650
Well, this was unfortunately, an even shorter lived revolution than its predecessor.
00:37:40.650 --> 00:37:55.860
From the early 1970s, the positive message that had been propagated by the new pornographers was being increasingly undercut by a revived misogynous rhetoric.
00:37:55.860 --> 00:38:07.927
And the tipping point, well, we don't really know, but it's no coincidence, I think, that the first women's liberation conference was held at Ruskin college in 1970.
00:38:07.927 --> 00:38:12.927
The sexually radical new pornographers felt threatened.
00:38:14.599 --> 00:38:16.449
Was the feminist movement going too far?
00:38:16.449 --> 00:38:20.010
Were women becoming a little bit too much like men?
00:38:20.010 --> 00:38:33.489
Many of the same models who in the 1960s had been vocal about their support for women's rights to equal pay and sexual freedom were now quoted as having changed their mind.
00:38:33.489 --> 00:38:37.239
They began hoarding male shivery.
00:38:37.239 --> 00:38:42.090
Passive femininity was reframed as somehow empowering.
00:38:42.090 --> 00:38:45.110
Demands for equal pay were judged unrealistic.
00:38:45.110 --> 00:38:47.867
And anyway, it would hurt men.
00:38:47.867 --> 00:39:10.610
One quote, you would you hear nothing about equal pensions or two-way alimony porn stars such as Amber Dean Smith and Paula Francis who had earlier declared that, "We have as much interest in sex as men do," by the 1970s, began insisting that they desired strong men.
00:39:11.179 --> 00:39:25.530
In the words of Bambi Lynn Davis, Davies, sorry, a girl naturally hasn't the rights that a man has and wouldn't be happy if she did.
00:39:25.530 --> 00:39:32.980
Explicitly anti-feminist men's magazines began replacing female friendly feminist literature.
00:39:32.980 --> 00:39:41.670
I think the most notorious of this was the relaunch of "Men Only," the bestselling men's magazine in the UK.
00:39:41.670 --> 00:39:55.719
March, 1971, Paul Raymond rebranded the magazine, promising to store male dominance and start a gentleman's liberation movement.
00:39:55.719 --> 00:40:07.893
Raymond claimed that as women's public sensuality blooms and spreads, so man's correspondingly with his and shrivels.
00:40:08.840 --> 00:40:32.300
The pill-chewing dolly bird, it's his words, of course, the pill-chewing dolly bird along with female sexual autonomy is represented, for example, by the use of dildos or artificial insemination were accused of castrating men as neatly as a vet castrating a sheep.
00:40:32.300 --> 00:40:36.750
This was a dramatic turnaround from the 1960s.
00:40:36.750 --> 00:40:47.659
After all in 1964, when Raymond first launched "King," he'd spoken really positively about progress between the sexes.
00:40:47.659 --> 00:40:54.699
By 1971, however, Raymond's theme had become the neutering of men by feminists.
00:40:54.699 --> 00:41:05.070
Sexual permissiveness had birthed women's liberation and the new pornographers were not pleased.
00:41:05.250 --> 00:41:11.789
For feminists, the sexual revolution obviously turned sour.
00:41:11.789 --> 00:41:28.932
While birth control, the acceptability of sex outside of the institution of marriage had offered women liberating ways of thinking about their own sexual desires, it had not translated into more equitable treatment.
00:41:29.780 --> 00:41:36.960
As media studies scholar, Carolyn Bronstein, noted in a really wonderful book
00:41:39.949 --> 00:41:53.170
The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement" She writes that by the 1970s, feminists who had been keen advocates of the sexual revolution of the 1960s were disillusioned.
00:41:53.170 --> 00:42:02.713
Perhaps the whole movement had been a male revolution all along, leaving sexism intact.
00:42:03.577 --> 00:42:05.561
"Where?" They asked.
00:42:05.561 --> 00:42:11.039
Where had men learned to treat female sexual desires so dismissively?
00:42:11.039 --> 00:42:11.873
Hmm.
00:42:11.873 --> 00:42:32.789
Well, one answer they came to was through the consumption of the massively expanded commercialized pornography industry, which included private clubs, sex theaters, dirty magazines on every new stand, and sexualized television programs.
00:42:32.789 --> 00:42:44.103
Feminists observed how the commercial sex industry had expanded dramatically and in ways that were not empowering for women.
00:42:45.250 --> 00:42:57.780
For many feminists, the 1972 release of the pornographic and wildly popular film, "Deep Throat," was symptomatic of the anti-womenist shift.
00:42:57.780 --> 00:43:11.380
This hardcore film, which starred Linda Boreman, otherwise known as Linda Lovelace, followed the sexual exploits of a women whose clitoris was inside her throat.
00:43:11.380 --> 00:43:17.112
To achieve orgasm, she needed to learn the art of deep throat facial.
00:43:18.030 --> 00:43:31.570
The film attracted these massive crowds of middle-class women and men who would normally have regarded the public consumption of pornography as dashi.
00:43:31.570 --> 00:43:34.869
Almost overnight, pornography became chic.
00:43:34.869 --> 00:43:45.559
For feminist, however, it was a moment when they realized what men in the liberation movement actually thought about women.
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They recognize the new pornographers as enemies of feminism, something that Collins argued the new pornographers themselves had already concluded about feminism.
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And this was the moment in which feminism split between the anti-porn warriors and the sex-positive amazons.
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The division remains a powerful one within 21st century feminism.
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And as I've tried to suggest, it is a historically specific split, which does not do justice to the full range of thinking about pornography.
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In this talk, I have explored some of the diverse definitions and expositions of pornography in Britain and America from the late 18th century to the present.
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And I've looked at very briefly, at two points of history where pornography explicitly attack depressive institutions identified as the crown, the state, and the church, along with their repressive sexual ideologies.
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My chief argument has been that pornography has not always objectified or silenced women.
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To assume that the essence of pornography is sexism is to adopt a historically specific, geographically located, and very modern definition of pornography as critiqued by white educated American anti-porn feminists, such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.
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My focus has been on dominant modes of pornography.
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However, I really at this stage need to acknowledge other underground traditions of pornography in which political questions have been foregrounded.
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Most notably sexual and gender minorities have employed pornography to experiment with their identities and ultimately forge communities with other like-minded people.
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This was again, not new.
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After all, lesbian porn flourished in the 19th century.
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And my favorite, it's a classic feminist text of that period, is the "Romance of Violet" translated from the French into English in 1891.
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And what it does is it chronicles sexually explicit lesbian sex acts, including between Countess and an actress called Florence.
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Just a little footnote here, incidentally, although the English translation is sexually very explicit, it excludes in length the passage in the original French text in which the two women use a ripe peach in genital play.
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Perhaps there are certain practices beyond the pale for British lesbians.
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But from the 1970s, pro-sex, lesbian pornography started to be produced by feminists such as Pat Califia, Honey Lee Cottrell, Susie Bright, and Debbie Sundell.
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By reading or watching lesbian pornography, women who love other women learn to recognize their own desires and self-sufficiency.
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Similarly, underground pornography produced during the gay male sex revolution included powerful critiques of the authorities.
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It spread knowledge about homosexuality.
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It counted pervasive homophobia and it provided community-enhancing templates for personal flourishing.
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For them, free speech was love speech.
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As John Champagne writes in the Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Histories pornography, he argues was really important to gay men's lives.
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He writes, "In a culture that denigrates homoeroticism, pornography provides some of the only positive representations of gay sexuality.
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Even as late as the 1990s homosexual pornography was one of the only sources of knowledge and representation of gay men.
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Gay porn was an important way men explored their own desires for other men.
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I don't want to take this argument too far.
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I don't.
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it's not to celebrate and critically minoritized cultures of pornography.
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After all, like most modern pornography, mainstream gay and lesbian porn has been biased in terms of skin color, body size, age, except for a handful of stars.
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And here I'm thinking, oh, Bobby Blake, Brandon Lee.
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Except for a few exceptions, it does tend to exoticization and orientalism.
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Pornography for heterosexual women also has limits.
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The feminist sex industry has grown immeasurably since the 1970s as represented by shops, such as Toybox, which opened in 1977 and the 1990s magazine for women.
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But I think there are questions that we should ask about the strong link between feminist pornography and mordern capitalism.
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Who is co-opting?
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Whom?
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Where is the radical punch in individualistic, capitalist orientated power feminism?
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I think this question of corruption is a important one.
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Pornography loves boundaries.
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To be sexually arousing, it requires transgression.
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This is why those early revolutionaries are here.
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The 18th century and early 19th century ones were so dangerous for the authorities.
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They transgressed borders, separating politics and criminality, respectability and public incitement, radicalism, and boldness.
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They moved in and out of politics and criminality, depending on need for money, extent of state repression, and the existence of a market.
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As McKeldin booted, they kept alive a tradition of PBN unrespectability and irreverence in the face of powerful countervailing forces.
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These obscure artistan or true radicals and grubbed streak acts carried into Victorian society a ribelled, satanalian anti-establishment culture.
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They sought to change society and would cheeky enough to you sex sassiness and organistic reverie to do so.
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Finally, this should not lead us to invest too much power in pornography.
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So any one site for the construction and maintenance of gender and sexual identities.
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The three commentators with whom I began this talk pornographic actress, Linda Lovelace, feminist Robin Morgan, singer-songwriter, Billie Eilish, all have good reasons to rail against pornography for harming themselves and their loved ones.
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Lovelace was coerced into working for a violent pornographer from the late 1960s.
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Morgan saw the perversion of the sex revolution by misogynist pornographies in the 1970s.
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Eilish is a 21st century musician in an industry dominated by sexually abusive producers and directors.
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But their experiences did not have to be inevitable.
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The oppressive forms that pornography took in their lives could be contested.
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And in certain periods of history and certain genres have been contested.
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If we look beyond a historically and culturally specific mode of pornography, it is possible to identify pornography that resists the male gaze, includes the voices of women and minoritized peoples and makes pornography an empowering genre.
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In my first lecture, in the series on sex, I concluded by quoting bell hooks.
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She died on the 15th of December, 2021.
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And I mourn her.
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This is why I want to cite her words again today.
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Like me, she believed that pleasure is political.
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And I just want to read out one sentence of some of her writings.
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She wrote, "Our desire for radical social change is ultimately linked with the desire to experience pleasure, erotic fulfillment, and a host of other passions." Pornography can involve the political, social and erotic labor or ecstatic bodies in forging more equitable worlds.
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Thanks very much for listening to me today.
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My next in the series is not until the 17th of February.
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I'm going to be talking about sex work.
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Just to remind you though, previous lectures on the body, on evil women and on sex and modern history can be found on the Gresham website.
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And indeed this talk as well will be uploaded to that website later.
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Thanks very much and hope to see you on the 17th of February.
