The History of Porn in America

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, pornography in America has been subject to a great deal of scrutiny and opinion – both objective and subjective. It has been at the center of many public debates regarding morality and public safety, but most of all it challenged peoples’ fervent opinions on obscenity and censorship. This timeline shows porn’s bumpy ride throughout the last hundred years...

1900’s - The beginning of the twentieth century was a time in which sex was largely taboo. Due to the prominence of the British Empire, the values of the Victorian Era (which espoused sexual restraint and a strict social code of conduct – at least publicly) were prevalent in the US. Sexuality at the time is, in general, a forbidden topic - so much so that sexual education is not permitted, leaving people to acquire information about sex through hearsay and old wives’ tales. Sex was thought to be unclean and went un-discussed by those who considered themselves “decent” and “respectable”. Despite these social restrictions, with the recent invention of motion picture (in 1895), pornographic film begins production almost immediately afterward.

1901 - Queen Victoria dies marking the end of Victorian era, a period of British history characterized by morality, conservatism and refined sensibilities.

1910’s - The end of the First World War marked a time of great change in America. Social restrictions on sexual behavior relax and women gain a greater amount of independence in society. The opposite sexes mingle more freely and fashion becomes more risqué. At this time, pornography is available only by underground distribution, for projection at home, and also at night-cinemas.

1920’s - Because of a reluctance to depict anything too sexual in both film and print, the standards of pornography in America receive a great deal of scrutiny by moral citizens still subscribing to Victoria ideals. The pressure from certain interest groups to establish censorship of sex in the media sparks the battle over the definition and regulation of porn in America that spans the rest of the century.

After some risqué films and a series of off-screen scandals involving Hollywood stars, Hollywood studios enlist help to rehabilitate Hollywood's image and repair their moral questionability. Enough political pressure was built up that almost 100 movie censorship bills were introduced in 1921.

1930’s and 1940’s - Pornography continues to be subject to censorship and legal restraints regarding publication on grounds of obscenity. However, the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1930s led many studios to seek income by any means possible … continuing to show racy or violent films which result in high ticket sales despite the economic downturn. The brushing off of censorship guidelines becomes an open secret. .

1930 - The Hay’s Code is adopted. The Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), which later became the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), adopts a production code that spells out what is, and isn’t, acceptable content for motion pictures produced for a public audience in the United States. Many ridicule this form of censorship as being prudish and naive.

1940 - The word "pin-up" is coined to describe pictures torn from men's magazines and calendars and posted on the wall by U.S. soldiers in World War II.

1950’s - According to The Illustrated History of Girlie Magazines, the fifties saw the rise of the first mass-market pornographic magazines with the emphasis being on showing bare breasts. Many aspects of porn movies slowly lose their taboo and areas of the censorship code are re-written in 1956 to accept subjects like adultery, prostitution and abortion. By the late 1950s, increasingly explicit films began to appear and the MPAA, hesitantly, grants approval for these films … which inadvertently weakens the authority of the Hayes Code even further.

1953 - The beginning of the modern men's glossy (or ‘girlie’) magazine can be traced to the purchase by Hugh Hefner of a photograph of Marilyn Monroe to use as the centerfold of his new magazine Playboy, which would soon become the primary medium for the consumption of ‘soft’ pornography.

1960’s - More and more films with sexual content begin to resurface after nearly thirty years of not being seen in Hollywood films and the MPAA reluctantly begins to grant their seal of approval for these movies. The end of the sixties also signifies the beginning of the Golden Age of Porn, an era when magazines and film move into more explicit pornography and become more visible to the mainstream consumer.

1964 - The holocaust film, the Pawnbroker, was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval.

1965 - Bob Guccione starts Penthouse, the very first magazine to publish pictures that included pubic hair and full frontal nudity, both of which were considered beyond the bounds of the erotic and in the realm of pornography at the time.

1968 - The MPAA film rating system went into effect with four ratings: G, M, R and X.

1969 - The Supreme Court ruled that people could view whatever they wished in the privacy of their own homes, causing President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to appoint a commission to study pornography. The anti-pornography movement in the United States has existed ever since.

1970’s - The seventies is a time of sexual experimentation. People begin looking to break out of all the old molds and get away from the taboos surrounding sexuality. In the words of Al Goldstein, co-founder of the influential 1960s sex newspaper ‘Screw’, “the American public has grown tired of words like '’coitus’ and wants words like ''fuck'' and “suck.”

Pornographic magazines begin to focus on more explicit depictions of sexuality, e.g. pubic shots, and porn films become semi-legitimized. A significant amount of video starts being shot in the US, primarily in the San Fernando Valley, California - which later becomes a pioneering region for producing adult films and is now home to the many involved in the production and distribution of pornography.

1970 - The President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography concluded that, "There was insufficient evidence that exposure to explicit sexual materials played a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior", and recommended that legislation, "Should not seek to interfere with the right of adults who wish to do so to read, obtain, or view explicit sexual materials."

1972 - Gerald Damiano’s hard-core film ‘Deep Throat’ is released for public viewing at New York's World Theater. The unexpected success of Deep Throat signaled a turning point in the American sexual revolution, marking a new age of frank and uninhibited public awareness of sex (which was previously suppressed by Puritanism and prudery), where even ‘respectable’ middle class citizens ignored traditional decorum and went to movie theaters in their communities to see a woman give a blow job on the big screen. This was very novel for the time.

1974 - First publication of Hustler Magazine.

1976 - The first video cassette recorder (VCR) becomes available to the general public.

1980’s - Technology is on the rise during this decade. By the 1980s, pornography on home video becomes an instant success because consumers can view ‘skin-flicks’ from the comfort of their own homes. Despite directors’ reluctance to use a medium that produces lower quality images, those who capitalized on video rather than film enjoyed overwhelming profit. Erotic CD-ROMs become available in the late 1980s.

1984 - The first year of the AVN Awards. Also known as the Oscars of porn, these are movie awards that honor exceptional performance in various aspects of the creation and marketing of American porn movies.

1985 - President Ronald Reagan announces his intention to set up a commission to study the effects of viewing porn. Most of the appointed members of the Meese Commission had established records as anti-pornography crusaders, so it wasn’t a surprise that later the next year they reached the conclusion that pornography was in varying degrees harmful.

1990’s and 2000’s - By the 1990s, hard-core magazines such as ‘Hustler’ feature practically anything and everything, including sexual penetration, lesbianism/homosexuality, group sex, masturbation, and fetishes.

The rise of the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s forever changes the distribution of pornography, and complicates the legal prosecution of obscenity even further. Much of the pornography available is produced by amateurs; digital media revolutionizes porn in that it allows photographers and filmmakers to manipulate images in ways previously never possible.

1993 - The World Wide Web goes live.

1997 - DVD is introduced as a new viewing format, improving the physical quality of the medium and further increasing the availability of porn.

2000 - The Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network (AEBN) launches the first ‘Video on Demand’ site, which revolutionizes content delivery for the adult industry. Their pay-per-minute model becomes a standard for online pornography.

2003 - Arena magazine lists Larry Flynt as number one on the ‘50 Powerful People in Porn’ list. Flynt was known for fighting numerous legal battles involving the regulation of porn and free speech during the seventies.

2004 - Computer generated pornography becomes available for public consumption, gaining notoriety by showing fictional characters from movies (e.g. Lara Croft) and video games (e.g. the October 2004 issue of Playboy features a topless pictures of a character from the Blood Rayne video game).

2011 - The first case of pornographic movies in 3D occurs in Hong Kong, when a group of filmmakers created ‘3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy’.

Do you have any ideas of what porn might be like in the twenty first century? Share your thoughts here!